In highschool I often read the cliff notes versions of books, only to later go on to read the entire thing. A lot of it came down to the fact that, while some of the books that we read I had an interest in, between taking calc II and III, physics I and II, and Computer Science and C++ through at the local university through a program offered by my school, as well as a full standard schedule of non-fluff classes I found it easier to simply use cliff notes to get through the in-class discussions and tests, and then later read the book that actually interested me at my leisure.
Granted, there were some books that I never bothered reading (our english classes were heavy on shakespear for instance, who I've always personally felt was over rated and never particularly cared for and so never really read much of shakespear outside of the cliff notes.)
Granted I may be a corner case, but I'm sure that there are probably a few other people who will be in the same situation.
It's quite true that this will not do the book justice, but what you have to remember is that the aim of these this is to help kids who don't give a damn to pass tests. /remembers reading Animal Farm in 9th grade//remembers the teacher saying it was BS and for me to STFU when I said the the book was an allegory for communism///gave up on public school then and there
I was thinking much along the same lines. How long until people use tags so that searching for books about homosexuality or atheism returns a list of very conservative christian propaganda. What about tagging all the books about creationism with the "evolution" tag?.
What I really fear is that groups are going to use this system to censor information or entertainment they don't agree with by polluting the tag system so that every signle search returns 110 versions of the king james bible.
I agree that this would probably work. I personally would not really complain to much about it. Almost all of the TV shows I currently own on DVD I own because I started downloading the shows via bittorrent and decided that I liked the show enough to actually go buy the DVD set. The only two exceptions to this have been the first season of Dead Like Me, which I haven't gotten around to buying yet (thought I bought the second season rather than downloading it because I enjoyed the first season) and MASH- which I never downloaded because I had already seen enough of the show on regular TV years ago to know that I liked it enough to want to own the DVDs.
The majority of shows on DVD seem to be reasonably priced ($50 for 20 episodes on average which I can watch several times comes out to about the same entertainment/dollar ratio as video games for me)
I think that the biggest difficulty that a lot of users have when transitioning from working with the GUI to working with the command line is the fundamental difference in the way that the two operate. The biggest difference as I see it is that the GUI is good at performing 1 operation at a time on an arbitrary set of files. The command line on the other hand seems to be most useful when you want to perform many tasks on a single file, or a group of files like *.txt or foo*. For many things on the command line there is no real anlagous way to perform the task with a GUI.
The problem is that many people who first start out with the command line seem to view it as more of them having to simply type in obscure commands to correspond to the same steps they would take were they using a GUI. I've seen many people type:
cd/home/myusername/foo ls cp foo.txt/home/myusername cd/home/myusername/ mv foo.txt bar.txt cd foo rm foo.txt
instead of simply typing mv ~/foo/foo.txt ~/bar.txt Of course this is a simple example, but I think that it illustrates my point that people are often locked into the GUI mindset. As such, even if they understand in the abstrace the use of piping and output redirection, etc, the difficulty is in understanding how to use those tools efficiently.
I always find it a bit funny every time I read an article promoting the programming paradigm d'jour. The reason is that nearly every programming paradigm that I've run across seems to take some fundamentally good idea that I and most of the programmers I know use regularly anyway, and try to create a complete programming methodology around it. A lot of the concepts in agile programming and eXtreme programming are things that I think most developers realize very early on.
OO always seemed like the best example of this to me. Before I'd really learned much about OO proper I used a lot of the ideas behind it when developing software. Of course the problem is that people seem to have a tendancy to take these concepts and run too far with them. A couple of semesters ago I was helping to tutor a student in his first Object Oriented Development class. The program the student has been asigned was supposed to allow the user to enter a series of names and birthdates and then print the list back onto the screen. The program wasn't working so I asked him to give me a printout of the source code. He had used 11 classes to write the program.
Anyway, I know berating OOP is a little off topic, but my point is that I really have a hard time understanding companies deciding to implement a specific programming paradigm when doing so in general seems to often lead to absurdist levels of whatever the particular paradim espouses, and when it would often be much more efficient to simply allow teams to program in a way that feels most natural to them.
This can be particularly important it seems the more people that you have working on a project, simply because different developers are comfortable using different styles of programming. A friend and ex-coworker of mine and I for example found ourselves much more productive when using a variant of the buddy method of programming. This seemed to be largely because we both are about the same skill level but have different background when it comes to coding (his first lanuage was Java and he works mainly with Java and PHP, whereas I started with C and work mainly with C++) so we tend to counter-balance eachother well (he tends to be better at noticing when the general design of the program is going astray, whereas I tend to be better with catching more local problems like buffer overflows. He also has a good eye for catching random syntax errors that I often overlook, while I tend to be better at knowing various CS algorithms off hand- or at least knowing of them and knowing when they'd be useful to look up. He tends to have a good mind for what constitutes readable code, whereas I tend to be good at knowing good shortcuts and optimizations to save memory or cycles (we were both CIS majors at the same school incidentally, but while he really got into the CIS side of things I tend to spend a lot of my time reading about pure computer science and doing things to learn more about CS via MITs Open Courseware, having realized too late into my education that CS was really what I wanted to do,as opposed to CIS)). Other developers at the place I used to work however hated having anyone else around while they worked. Similarly, some developers were very much into doing all of the design work, then writing all the code, then doing all the testing. I on the other hand always found myself more efficient when I could work on a small chunk of the program, test it well, and then move onto the next one.
Granted, I never worked on a project team larger than a half-dozen developers, so my experience may be skewed. I realize that it can be difficult if a group of programmers is working together and half want to develop the program in small chunks, while others want to do all the design, then all of the coding, etc. I think that there is still room for individual preference and compromize from within the group, rather than a mandate for a specific development method coming down from management who rarely understand the methods they are implementing, and even more rarely the code they are mandating the method be used on (not that this is necessarily bad, managers need to be good managers, not necessarily good developers).
Now if they could just crack the algorithm the music industry uses to generate music, all of the geeks of the world could create free music that sounds just like Britny Spears/P Dilldy dooldy whatever/Pop or Rap Group D'jour....
No wait, on second thought I'd rather keep my sanity.
Joking aside, this sort of research might be interesting from a psychological point of view. If they've developed an algorith that can tell what music is "good" it seems like with some proper research it might provide some insite into the way the brain process music, which could help scientists to better understand the way the brain interprets patterns, etc. If such an algorithm could be used to generate "good" music, it might be useful for things like games, where the game could provide parameters based on what's going on, and algorithmically generate appropriate music.
While I'm sure that there will probably be a lot of obnoxious games for the Revolution (there are a lot of obnoxious games for EVERY console) I think that a lot of the games that he may have been referring to are not just obnoxious games, but instead the type of games that Nindendo hopes to have created to draw the casual gamers.
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the games that appeal to casual gamers are obnoxious to hard core gamers. A lot of this is that games that appeal to casual or non-gamers may, to hardcore gamers seem dull, repetitive, shallow, or gimmiky. That is not to say that no revolution games can appeal to both casual and hard-core gamers, just that I think the revolution might see a lot of games in the $20-$30 price range that resemble a lot of the rather obnoxious free java and flashgames that abound on the net.
Disclaimer: I've always been a fan of Nintendo, and will probably buy a Revolution along with one of either the PS3 or XBOX360 depending on what types of games seem to go to which console. (Where Capcom, Konami, Namco and Square-Enix go, so goes my $$$)
at least, it was until the US "liberated" it, from what I understand the new iraqi government is basically being set up to be like many other middle eastern countries, with the government existing to back up the laws of islam with political power.
Also, I could very easily be wrong, but I was under the impression that the UAE was the most secular and generally "westernized" arab country. I am by no means an expert on the middle east. Just get what I know from a couple of friends who grew up in the area (one who was born and lived in Saudi Arabia until he was 12 or 13 and now lives in the US, and the other born and still living in the UAE).
If you want a cross-platform GUI, then I think Java/Swing is the way to go a lot of the time.
I program mainly in Java and C++, and if you are looking just at desktop machines (which is what I work with) then it's really not a big deal either way since you are mainly looking at *nix, Windows and maybe OS X. Swing is pretty much write-once for all three platforms- though you have to do some funkyness to get mac programs to look like mac programs under OS X. Qt is available for all three platforms as well. Athough I've never developed with it, AFAIK GTK+ is also available on OS X, as well as *nix and Windows.
The thing is, it's no longer unreasonable to expect to write an application and have it run on a desktop system, a cell phone, and a PDA. Since most cellphones support at least a subset of Java, whereas I do not know of any that support Qt or GTK+, it seems that in these instances Java is the way to go.
Re:Would gaming companies target this platform?
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Cedega 5.0 Released
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· Score: 1
The problem is that DirectX > Direct3D. While I've had only limited experience with DirectX, as I understand it, DirectX provides a lot more than just Direct3D. DirectX also provides DirectSound, DirectInput, etc. Plus there are a lot of things that are standard in the newer versions of DirectX that are unsupported by OpenGL 1.5 or only available through extensions provided by Video Card Drivers, and therefor may not be on every users machine.
The thing of it is, at this point in time it seems to me that it would be reasonable for a game company to at least test on Cedega. If they are using some weird code that is an easy enough fix, or some undocumented or weird API behavior that could be corrected then why not go for it? If on the other hand Cedegas buggyness or incompleteness means the app won't work, then why not at least pass a note on to the Cedega developers saying "Hey, we tested our game with Cedega and it didn't work quite right/at all. We don't have the resources to fix this, but if it looks like something your users want then you might look into fixing X,Y and Z- hopefully that will help our game run." Granted it would take extra time, but I would imagine that there are some instances where the miniscule additional cost compared to the development of the game may be offset by the still miniscule but slightly larger amount of sales they could generate from people who would buy the game knowing it would run on Cedega who wouldn't have done so otherwise.
Re:Would gaming companies target this platform?
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Cedega 5.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Allow me to rephrase your question:
Assuming the game company in question gives a damn about Linux users, what do you think is easier: Designing a whole new engine around OpenGL and training the developers to become accustomed to it, Or using a pre-existing engine written in DirectX and ensuring compatibility in the areas where Cedgea has trouble and/or continuing to use an API that their developers are already familiar with and have an existing codebase for.
I'm not saying that a full-blown port to Linux of games isn't something that would be nice, nor would it necessarily be easier to test against cedega if the game is already written with cross-platform capabilities in mind. The fact is though that a lot of companies re-use engines and code from older games, and a lot of games are written in DirectX.
I'm not saying that Cedega is an optimal solution, but if I have to choose between being able to play a game because it's written with DirectX, or being able to play the game through Cedega I would choose the latter. The only real complaint I have is that when people use Cedega to play a game when a Linux port is planned, then it makes the already small Linux gamer install base look even smaller.
#2 is not just dumb, it's also really common. I worked on a site a couple of weeks ago that I was asked to update that had been in production for a while where the guy who wrote it had actually used
for all of the navigation. Apparently he had been using forms for navigation and had each button holding the value of the file he wanted, and a hidden field holding the full URL to the section of the site. So the code ended up looking like
On top of all this they were storing sensitive customer information in plaintext files. I STRONGLY recommended that my boss send out letters to all their customers informing them of the vunrability so that they could take steps to ensure that they got their credit card numbers, etc. changed.
I think that the big problem is businesses that higher highschool students who have no idea of how to write good code doing websites for 6 bucks an hour. When the finally decided to higher someone who had some idea of how to do decent code (I don't claim to be an expert in PHP, but I certainly have more experience with it than a 16 year old, and I do at least try to keep security in mind when I write code). I ended up leaving after I'd fixed the security vulrnabilities (since I didn't see it as being ethical to just leave a business running where it was so that customers could unknowingly have their info stolen) because my boss was constantly on my ass (He didn't understand why I needed to spend time designing a database when flat text files has worked on their site for so long, for example) and basically told me to take shortcuts to get the code done ASAP.
In the end I think that this is is one of the biggest problems with software vulrnabilities. People are more concerned with getting it done than getting it done correctly. I think that one of the advantages that F/OSS has is that, while some coders will still perhaps be more concerned with time than correctness, there is less of management glaring over your shoulder and telling you to take shortcuts to meet deadlines.
A couple of years ago I was at a concert with my cousin and a friend of hers (male). The concert itself was in a pretty out of the way location, surrounded for a few miles by wooods and fields and whatnot. When we arrived at the concert the line to get in was pretty long, and he had to pee. Near the parking area there were some woods, so he went into the woods to releive himself. Apparently a police officer followed him for some reason (The cop said he thought he had gone back there to do drugs before the concert), but anyway he went in far enough that standing at the car right at the edge of the woods, and having seen the general direction that he walked, I couldn't see him. A few minutes later the police officer was leading him out in handcuffs. He was charged with and conviced for a sex crime. He was forced to sell his house and move because he could not live within so many feet of a school, and is also now for the rest of his life a registered sex offender. Has to register with any county he moves into, alert the neighbors, etc. This was his first conviction for anything too btw (never even had a parking ticket AFAIK), so it's not like he was a habitual offender.
So yes, I know someone who was caught peeing and is now branded a sex offender and had his life ruined because of it.
Re:beware of the "understanding friend" method.
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Best Way to Manage Geeks?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There is a flip side to this. At the job I was recently layed off from we were constantly given very insufficient specifications for what our boss wanted. Generally assignments were along the line of "Hey, we need a program for X that does A, B, and C". At first this seemed really cool to me, being given a fair ammount of lattitude in the development of an application. What ended up happening though was that often someone would add a feature that was very nice or necessary to the application (One example was a web based replacement for some accounting spreadsheets the execs were using written in PHP, the coder who was writing it added the ability for someone with administrative rights to add or edit formulas used in some of the calculations.) only to be chastised by our boss for adding things not explicitly stated in the specifications. Keeping in mind that the projects always came in on or before the deadline, and these were internal projects, not code that we were going to sell to clients.
After a few times this happened to me, I stopped seeing the point in doing anything not explicitly stated in the very meager specifications. The programs were, by my standard, not usually very good as they lacked obvious features that would have been trivial to implement, but the boss was happier.
This isn't meant as a troll, but honestly what's the point of the google toolbar on Firefox?
I could understand wanting to have integrated google search and pop-up blocking for IE, but Firefox has google search built right in (along with several other searches), and I can find thing on a given page easy enough with ^F. If I find a term on a page I want to google for it's as easy as highlighting it, ^T, middle click into the google search window.
Given that, what's the point of having a google toobar for Firefox?
I think that, while it may be an interesting intellectual exercise to demonstrate the problems with laws today, a fundamental problem with imagining what the web would be like if it were created in the current social, economic and political climate is that many of the things we look at think might change the way the Internet was rolled out have come about because of the mass use of the Internet. In other words, if the Internet were invented today I think that it would happen in much the same way because we would not have had a chance to see the effects of the Internet and react to it.
To go further with this however, I think that this can be extended to future communcation technologies as well. The laywers and businesses that hold a stake in keeping control of media, and the law makers who have a stake in limiting communication among the masses have a tendancy to be reactionary. Because of this I think that as technologies are developed they are nutured by a community which I think overall strives to keep the technology unencombered by corporate or political interests. By the time any technology has gained enough momentum to become the target of the governments and lawyers it will have, in general, reached a critical mass such that it becomes very difficult to stop.
I think that can be seen in things like Voice over IP. By the time Governments got around to trying to figgure out how to regulate it and the traditional TelCos began to try to stop it in favor of their own intererests it had developed to the point where it would no longer have been realistically possible for those organizations to step in and bastardize the technology into something that fit in with their previous ideas.
While many complain of the slowness of buisnesses to adopt new technologies as they are developed (for example, the movie industry's reluctance to accept movie download services) I think that in the end it is a benefit in that it allows the technology to be developed outside of the interests of those groups.
Of course that is not to say that these organizations have no hand in shaping the technology as it matures. The Web for example has, in it's maturity, grown from a largely cooperative network of webpages hosted by individuals to a more passive link to corporate advertising and shopping. However, as existing technologies become mainstream and grow to fit the agendas of large organizations the developers of new technologies are new, more "pure" sources of information and communication- and with each iteration of technology and corporate and government attempts to shape it to their will these groups also begin to bend to the possibilities and design of the technologies that have been developed. Even as the Web becomes more like Television, Television becomes more like the Web with Movies on Demand, live TV schedules, targetted ads, and things like Myth TV.
Corporations and Governments are not static and immortal beings unto themselves, their policies are created by people and as the newer generations grow into a culture based around these new and developing technologies the next generation of policies will be built to adhere to this generations technological ideals- even as the next generation of technology is built to subvert or assist the agendas of these groups.
No, personally I want to work at a job that allows me to be creative and perform challening work that really makes me push my talents to the edge. I'm also willing to accept a lower paying position so that I can work in a fulfilling environment. Some people however would rather make good money doing a boring job at a large company so that they can support a family/start a savings/pay off debt/have more money to spend during their free time.
It takes all kinds, and while I could never work at a job that I did not find fulfilling, a lot of people could. I was merely pointing out how people with such aspirations may be limited by the lack of socialization in dealing with such environments.
Am I the only one who liked both Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil?
I thought both movies did a good job of taking the basic concept of the game and turning them into halfway decent movies. The only thing that really irked me about Resident Evil was that George A. Romero wrote a script for Resident Evil that, while perhaps even less true to the game than the movie we got, was a much better script. If you ever get a chance, google for Romero's script for Resident Evil. /huge George A. Romero fan.
While I admit that a lot of game reviewers tend to be perhaps more forgiving than the average player when it comes to rating games, I've found that in general if you stick to the same sources for reviews it is possible to glean somewhat relevant information from them.
I think the most important thing is to learn to understand "reviewer math". That is to say, it becomes nessecary to understand what the numbers on the ratings really mean. While some people might see an "8/10" and think that a game is pretty good, what that tells me is that there are probably some major problems with it. A "7/10" generally means that the game is pretty much worthless unless you are a diehard fan of the series or genre. Of course it's also important to actually read the reviews instead of just looking at the numbers. Reviewers tend to be much more critical in their actual review than they are with the final scores. It's also useful for reviews that say why certain categories were rated as they were. This can help reveal the bias in the review.
Of course, reviews only constitute a part of getting an overall picture of how a game is. Information leading up to the game can be helpful. If a couple of weeks before there is a preview of the game saying that it's shaping up nicely but still needs some bugs worked out, or the gameplay needs to be refined, then a week later there is a glowing review it's an indicator that the game might not be as good as the review scores indicate. Likewise if there is a lot of preview articles that talk about innovations and refinements to the game and how well it plays, then it's a good indication that the game may actually be worth the price of admission.
There are also a lot of blogs that give more accurate information about the game than a review might, but it's important to keep in mind that if someone is blogging about a game then they probably either really like it or really hate it anyway.
I have run into this on occassion. Although I rarely play games online with people I don't know, I find often that on IRC, for example, if I mention that I'm female in a room that I don't frequent I will often see people who seem suprised that I'm female. I find this happens most often if I stop into a Linux or programming room to ask for help on something.
Of course, most people never take it beyond some sort of exclamation of suprise. I've found that people who message asking for pics, etc, are generally trolling for cybersex anyway.
I do find this behavior strange because of all my friends IRL the majority of the my female friends at least occasionally visit IRC or some other type of chat room, while I only have 2 male friends who ever use IRC, one of whom only visits clan channels to talk strategy, etc. before matches in whatever FPS they play now, and the other only visits Linux help channels occasionally when something it's working right.
I'm not entirely sure that's true. Perhaps this will encourage open source developers who have not looked at XUL to give it a shot- thereby adding experienced developers to the Firefox Community. Plus there are others who might not have a hope of winning but how might try to submit something all the same.
I have only played around with coding for Firefox personally, but I'm considering entering the contest because I don't have anything to lose, and even if I don't win the community gets some benefits.
And in the spirit of openness- my idea is a plug-in to make the back and forward buttons act a little more sensibly to new users. I'm constantly aggrevated by clicking back, then clicking on a link, and then I click back twice trying to find the page that has now been lost to my history- so my idea is to make it so that if you go from page a to b, then b to c, then click back to get to b, go from b to d, click back you get to b, click back again and you get to c instead of a.
It's simple enough that it's not likely to win- there are probably already things that do this. Someone else might write a better version of it than me, but still the idea and code could benefit the community, and I can learn a bit more about writing code for firefox.
The school I go to has been really pushing online classes lately. I was having a discussion with one of my professors about this and I found his views on it really interesting. He said that even though a skilled and dedicated instructor can use the tools available to make a really good online class, and that in general he thought that online classes got through "more" course material, that online classes were largely useless when it came to finding a Job. His explanation was that there are a lot of people technically skilled enough to do the job- and that the ones that weren't- regardless of their grades and degrees were filtered out pretty quickly. In the end, he said, our classes weren't really there to teach us calculus or C++. Your Grades, and your Degree, he said, are really measurements of how well you can put up with all of the dredgery, bullshit, buracracy and idocy that you run into in the average workplace. After all, the average workplace has much more of those things than it does difficult work that really needs a clever and highly educated person to solve. The thing about online classes is that they may do an adequate job of teaching you the information relevant to the class, but they do much less of socializing you to deal with corporate higherarchies and corporate bullshit. I would tend to say that this is a good thing in general, however as soon as the HR people realize this (maybe they realize this already), it's going to make a degree with online classes much less appealing to the people highering you.
I think that technologies like this being refined are really where the future of gaming graphics is going to be for a while. While there is still a ways to go in terms of polygon count, texture and bump mapping, etc, a lot of progress has been made in these areas. I think what we will see (or hope to see anyway) offered in newer games is more support for technologies that simulate real time lighting, shadows, translucance, refraction, etc. A large part of this I think is that there are only so many resources that can be dedicated to artists now to create higher polygon count models and higher resolution more diverse textures, so things that can be done to increase the visuals of a game without having to dedicate significantly more resources to artists can vastly improve the visual quality of a game without such a significant increase in cost associated with actually crafting those visuals. With technologies such as this allowing a more realistic rendering of ourdoor scenes combined with improving algorithms for creating outdoor environments and the ability to create fractal plantlife I think that we will see a new generation of games that take the player more and more often into the less confined feeling outdoor world.
I'm not asserting that LaVay was a great religious philosopher, nor am I denying it (I try to stay out of debates about which religions are "good" or "bad"). He did however found the organization known as "The Church of Satan" which followed what he called Satanism with the people who follwed it called Satanists.
Now it is certainly reasonable to debate whether or not he has any claim to use the name Satanism, but at least in my everyday venacular I generally take Satanism to refer to what could be called LaVay/Satanism.
I think that as the founder of LaVay/Satanism, LaVay would certainly be an authority to refer to for arguments based on that system (however much or little value you find within the system itself).
Slashdot Mirror
In highschool I often read the cliff notes versions of books, only to later go on to read the entire thing. A lot of it came down to the fact that, while some of the books that we read I had an interest in, between taking calc II and III, physics I and II, and Computer Science and C++ through at the local university through a program offered by my school, as well as a full standard schedule of non-fluff classes I found it easier to simply use cliff notes to get through the in-class discussions and tests, and then later read the book that actually interested me at my leisure.
Granted, there were some books that I never bothered reading (our english classes were heavy on shakespear for instance, who I've always personally felt was over rated and never particularly cared for and so never really read much of shakespear outside of the cliff notes.)
Granted I may be a corner case, but I'm sure that there are probably a few other people who will be in the same situation.
It's quite true that this will not do the book justice, but what you have to remember is that the aim of these this is to help kids who don't give a damn to pass tests.
/remembers reading Animal Farm in 9th grade //remembers the teacher saying it was BS and for me to STFU when I said the the book was an allegory for communism ///gave up on public school then and there
I was thinking much along the same lines. How long until people use tags so that searching for books about homosexuality or atheism returns a list of very conservative christian propaganda. What about tagging all the books about creationism with the "evolution" tag?.
What I really fear is that groups are going to use this system to censor information or entertainment they don't agree with by polluting the tag system so that every signle search returns 110 versions of the king james bible.
I agree that this would probably work. I personally would not really complain to much about it. Almost all of the TV shows I currently own on DVD I own because I started downloading the shows via bittorrent and decided that I liked the show enough to actually go buy the DVD set. The only two exceptions to this have been the first season of Dead Like Me, which I haven't gotten around to buying yet (thought I bought the second season rather than downloading it because I enjoyed the first season) and MASH- which I never downloaded because I had already seen enough of the show on regular TV years ago to know that I liked it enough to want to own the DVDs.
The majority of shows on DVD seem to be reasonably priced ($50 for 20 episodes on average which I can watch several times comes out to about the same entertainment/dollar ratio as video games for me)
The problem is that many people who first start out with the command line seem to view it as more of them having to simply type in obscure commands to correspond to the same steps they would take were they using a GUI. I've seen many people type: instead of simply typing mv ~/foo/foo.txt ~/bar.txt Of course this is a simple example, but I think that it illustrates my point that people are often locked into the GUI mindset. As such, even if they understand in the abstrace the use of piping and output redirection, etc, the difficulty is in understanding how to use those tools efficiently.
I always find it a bit funny every time I read an article promoting the programming paradigm d'jour. The reason is that nearly every programming paradigm that I've run across seems to take some fundamentally good idea that I and most of the programmers I know use regularly anyway, and try to create a complete programming methodology around it. A lot of the concepts in agile programming and eXtreme programming are things that I think most developers realize very early on.
OO always seemed like the best example of this to me. Before I'd really learned much about OO proper I used a lot of the ideas behind it when developing software. Of course the problem is that people seem to have a tendancy to take these concepts and run too far with them. A couple of semesters ago I was helping to tutor a student in his first Object Oriented Development class. The program the student has been asigned was supposed to allow the user to enter a series of names and birthdates and then print the list back onto the screen. The program wasn't working so I asked him to give me a printout of the source code. He had used 11 classes to write the program.
Anyway, I know berating OOP is a little off topic, but my point is that I really have a hard time understanding companies deciding to implement a specific programming paradigm when doing so in general seems to often lead to absurdist levels of whatever the particular paradim espouses, and when it would often be much more efficient to simply allow teams to program in a way that feels most natural to them.
This can be particularly important it seems the more people that you have working on a project, simply because different developers are comfortable using different styles of programming. A friend and ex-coworker of mine and I for example found ourselves much more productive when using a variant of the buddy method of programming. This seemed to be largely because we both are about the same skill level but have different background when it comes to coding (his first lanuage was Java and he works mainly with Java and PHP, whereas I started with C and work mainly with C++) so we tend to counter-balance eachother well (he tends to be better at noticing when the general design of the program is going astray, whereas I tend to be better with catching more local problems like buffer overflows. He also has a good eye for catching random syntax errors that I often overlook, while I tend to be better at knowing various CS algorithms off hand- or at least knowing of them and knowing when they'd be useful to look up. He tends to have a good mind for what constitutes readable code, whereas I tend to be good at knowing good shortcuts and optimizations to save memory or cycles (we were both CIS majors at the same school incidentally, but while he really got into the CIS side of things I tend to spend a lot of my time reading about pure computer science and doing things to learn more about CS via MITs Open Courseware, having realized too late into my education that CS was really what I wanted to do,as opposed to CIS)). Other developers at the place I used to work however hated having anyone else around while they worked. Similarly, some developers were very much into doing all of the design work, then writing all the code, then doing all the testing. I on the other hand always found myself more efficient when I could work on a small chunk of the program, test it well, and then move onto the next one.
Granted, I never worked on a project team larger than a half-dozen developers, so my experience may be skewed. I realize that it can be difficult if a group of programmers is working together and half want to develop the program in small chunks, while others want to do all the design, then all of the coding, etc. I think that there is still room for individual preference and compromize from within the group, rather than a mandate for a specific development method coming down from management who rarely understand the methods they are implementing, and even more rarely the code they are mandating the method be used on (not that this is necessarily bad, managers need to be good managers, not necessarily good developers).
Now if they could just crack the algorithm the music industry uses to generate music, all of the geeks of the world could create free music that sounds just like Britny Spears/P Dilldy dooldy whatever/Pop or Rap Group D'jour....
No wait, on second thought I'd rather keep my sanity.
Joking aside, this sort of research might be interesting from a psychological point of view. If they've developed an algorith that can tell what music is "good" it seems like with some proper research it might provide some insite into the way the brain process music, which could help scientists to better understand the way the brain interprets patterns, etc. If such an algorithm could be used to generate "good" music, it might be useful for things like games, where the game could provide parameters based on what's going on, and algorithmically generate appropriate music.
While I'm sure that there will probably be a lot of obnoxious games for the Revolution (there are a lot of obnoxious games for EVERY console) I think that a lot of the games that he may have been referring to are not just obnoxious games, but instead the type of games that Nindendo hopes to have created to draw the casual gamers.
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the games that appeal to casual gamers are obnoxious to hard core gamers. A lot of this is that games that appeal to casual or non-gamers may, to hardcore gamers seem dull, repetitive, shallow, or gimmiky. That is not to say that no revolution games can appeal to both casual and hard-core gamers, just that I think the revolution might see a lot of games in the $20-$30 price range that resemble a lot of the rather obnoxious free java and flashgames that abound on the net.
Disclaimer: I've always been a fan of Nintendo, and will probably buy a Revolution along with one of either the PS3 or XBOX360 depending on what types of games seem to go to which console. (Where Capcom, Konami, Namco and Square-Enix go, so goes my $$$)
at least, it was until the US "liberated" it, from what I understand the new iraqi government is basically being set up to be like many other middle eastern countries, with the government existing to back up the laws of islam with political power.
Also, I could very easily be wrong, but I was under the impression that the UAE was the most secular and generally "westernized" arab country. I am by no means an expert on the middle east. Just get what I know from a couple of friends who grew up in the area (one who was born and lived in Saudi Arabia until he was 12 or 13 and now lives in the US, and the other born and still living in the UAE).
If you want a cross-platform GUI, then I think Java/Swing is the way to go a lot of the time.
I program mainly in Java and C++, and if you are looking just at desktop machines (which is what I work with) then it's really not a big deal either way since you are mainly looking at *nix, Windows and maybe OS X. Swing is pretty much write-once for all three platforms- though you have to do some funkyness to get mac programs to look like mac programs under OS X. Qt is available for all three platforms as well. Athough I've never developed with it, AFAIK GTK+ is also available on OS X, as well as *nix and Windows.
The thing is, it's no longer unreasonable to expect to write an application and have it run on a desktop system, a cell phone, and a PDA. Since most cellphones support at least a subset of Java, whereas I do not know of any that support Qt or GTK+, it seems that in these instances Java is the way to go.
The problem is that DirectX > Direct3D. While I've had only limited experience with DirectX, as I understand it, DirectX provides a lot more than just Direct3D. DirectX also provides DirectSound, DirectInput, etc. Plus there are a lot of things that are standard in the newer versions of DirectX that are unsupported by OpenGL 1.5 or only available through extensions provided by Video Card Drivers, and therefor may not be on every users machine.
The thing of it is, at this point in time it seems to me that it would be reasonable for a game company to at least test on Cedega. If they are using some weird code that is an easy enough fix, or some undocumented or weird API behavior that could be corrected then why not go for it? If on the other hand Cedegas buggyness or incompleteness means the app won't work, then why not at least pass a note on to the Cedega developers saying "Hey, we tested our game with Cedega and it didn't work quite right/at all. We don't have the resources to fix this, but if it looks like something your users want then you might look into fixing X,Y and Z- hopefully that will help our game run." Granted it would take extra time, but I would imagine that there are some instances where the miniscule additional cost compared to the development of the game may be offset by the still miniscule but slightly larger amount of sales they could generate from people who would buy the game knowing it would run on Cedega who wouldn't have done so otherwise.
Allow me to rephrase your question:
Assuming the game company in question gives a damn about Linux users, what do you think is easier: Designing a whole new engine around OpenGL and training the developers to become accustomed to it, Or using a pre-existing engine written in DirectX and ensuring compatibility in the areas where Cedgea has trouble and/or continuing to use an API that their developers are already familiar with and have an existing codebase for.
I'm not saying that a full-blown port to Linux of games isn't something that would be nice, nor would it necessarily be easier to test against cedega if the game is already written with cross-platform capabilities in mind. The fact is though that a lot of companies re-use engines and code from older games, and a lot of games are written in DirectX.
I'm not saying that Cedega is an optimal solution, but if I have to choose between being able to play a game because it's written with DirectX, or being able to play the game through Cedega I would choose the latter. The only real complaint I have is that when people use Cedega to play a game when a Linux port is planned, then it makes the already small Linux gamer install base look even smaller.
for all of the navigation. Apparently he had been using forms for navigation and had each button holding the value of the file he wanted, and a hidden field holding the full URL to the section of the site. So the code ended up looking like
On top of all this they were storing sensitive customer information in plaintext files. I STRONGLY recommended that my boss send out letters to all their customers informing them of the vunrability so that they could take steps to ensure that they got their credit card numbers, etc. changed.
I think that the big problem is businesses that higher highschool students who have no idea of how to write good code doing websites for 6 bucks an hour. When the finally decided to higher someone who had some idea of how to do decent code (I don't claim to be an expert in PHP, but I certainly have more experience with it than a 16 year old, and I do at least try to keep security in mind when I write code). I ended up leaving after I'd fixed the security vulrnabilities (since I didn't see it as being ethical to just leave a business running where it was so that customers could unknowingly have their info stolen) because my boss was constantly on my ass (He didn't understand why I needed to spend time designing a database when flat text files has worked on their site for so long, for example) and basically told me to take shortcuts to get the code done ASAP.
In the end I think that this is is one of the biggest problems with software vulrnabilities. People are more concerned with getting it done than getting it done correctly. I think that one of the advantages that F/OSS has is that, while some coders will still perhaps be more concerned with time than correctness, there is less of management glaring over your shoulder and telling you to take shortcuts to meet deadlines.
A couple of years ago I was at a concert with my cousin and a friend of hers (male). The concert itself was in a pretty out of the way location, surrounded for a few miles by wooods and fields and whatnot. When we arrived at the concert the line to get in was pretty long, and he had to pee. Near the parking area there were some woods, so he went into the woods to releive himself. Apparently a police officer followed him for some reason (The cop said he thought he had gone back there to do drugs before the concert), but anyway he went in far enough that standing at the car right at the edge of the woods, and having seen the general direction that he walked, I couldn't see him. A few minutes later the police officer was leading him out in handcuffs. He was charged with and conviced for a sex crime. He was forced to sell his house and move because he could not live within so many feet of a school, and is also now for the rest of his life a registered sex offender. Has to register with any county he moves into, alert the neighbors, etc. This was his first conviction for anything too btw (never even had a parking ticket AFAIK), so it's not like he was a habitual offender.
So yes, I know someone who was caught peeing and is now branded a sex offender and had his life ruined because of it.
There is a flip side to this. At the job I was recently layed off from we were constantly given very insufficient specifications for what our boss wanted. Generally assignments were along the line of "Hey, we need a program for X that does A, B, and C". At first this seemed really cool to me, being given a fair ammount of lattitude in the development of an application. What ended up happening though was that often someone would add a feature that was very nice or necessary to the application (One example was a web based replacement for some accounting spreadsheets the execs were using written in PHP, the coder who was writing it added the ability for someone with administrative rights to add or edit formulas used in some of the calculations.) only to be chastised by our boss for adding things not explicitly stated in the specifications. Keeping in mind that the projects always came in on or before the deadline, and these were internal projects, not code that we were going to sell to clients.
After a few times this happened to me, I stopped seeing the point in doing anything not explicitly stated in the very meager specifications. The programs were, by my standard, not usually very good as they lacked obvious features that would have been trivial to implement, but the boss was happier.
This isn't meant as a troll, but honestly what's the point of the google toolbar on Firefox?
I could understand wanting to have integrated google search and pop-up blocking for IE, but Firefox has google search built right in (along with several other searches), and I can find thing on a given page easy enough with ^F. If I find a term on a page I want to google for it's as easy as highlighting it, ^T, middle click into the google search window.
Given that, what's the point of having a google toobar for Firefox?
I think that, while it may be an interesting intellectual exercise to demonstrate the problems with laws today, a fundamental problem with imagining what the web would be like if it were created in the current social, economic and political climate is that many of the things we look at think might change the way the Internet was rolled out have come about because of the mass use of the Internet. In other words, if the Internet were invented today I think that it would happen in much the same way because we would not have had a chance to see the effects of the Internet and react to it.
To go further with this however, I think that this can be extended to future communcation technologies as well. The laywers and businesses that hold a stake in keeping control of media, and the law makers who have a stake in limiting communication among the masses have a tendancy to be reactionary. Because of this I think that as technologies are developed they are nutured by a community which I think overall strives to keep the technology unencombered by corporate or political interests. By the time any technology has gained enough momentum to become the target of the governments and lawyers it will have, in general, reached a critical mass such that it becomes very difficult to stop.
I think that can be seen in things like Voice over IP. By the time Governments got around to trying to figgure out how to regulate it and the traditional TelCos began to try to stop it in favor of their own intererests it had developed to the point where it would no longer have been realistically possible for those organizations to step in and bastardize the technology into something that fit in with their previous ideas.
While many complain of the slowness of buisnesses to adopt new technologies as they are developed (for example, the movie industry's reluctance to accept movie download services) I think that in the end it is a benefit in that it allows the technology to be developed outside of the interests of those groups.
Of course that is not to say that these organizations have no hand in shaping the technology as it matures. The Web for example has, in it's maturity, grown from a largely cooperative network of webpages hosted by individuals to a more passive link to corporate advertising and shopping. However, as existing technologies become mainstream and grow to fit the agendas of large organizations the developers of new technologies are new, more "pure" sources of information and communication- and with each iteration of technology and corporate and government attempts to shape it to their will these groups also begin to bend to the possibilities and design of the technologies that have been developed. Even as the Web becomes more like Television, Television becomes more like the Web with Movies on Demand, live TV schedules, targetted ads, and things like Myth TV.
Corporations and Governments are not static and immortal beings unto themselves, their policies are created by people and as the newer generations grow into a culture based around these new and developing technologies the next generation of policies will be built to adhere to this generations technological ideals- even as the next generation of technology is built to subvert or assist the agendas of these groups.
No, personally I want to work at a job that allows me to be creative and perform challening work that really makes me push my talents to the edge. I'm also willing to accept a lower paying position so that I can work in a fulfilling environment. Some people however would rather make good money doing a boring job at a large company so that they can support a family/start a savings/pay off debt/have more money to spend during their free time.
It takes all kinds, and while I could never work at a job that I did not find fulfilling, a lot of people could. I was merely pointing out how people with such aspirations may be limited by the lack of socialization in dealing with such environments.
Am I the only one who liked both Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil?
/huge George A. Romero fan.
I thought both movies did a good job of taking the basic concept of the game and turning them into halfway decent movies. The only thing that really irked me about Resident Evil was that George A. Romero wrote a script for Resident Evil that, while perhaps even less true to the game than the movie we got, was a much better script. If you ever get a chance, google for Romero's script for Resident Evil.
While I admit that a lot of game reviewers tend to be perhaps more forgiving than the average player when it comes to rating games, I've found that in general if you stick to the same sources for reviews it is possible to glean somewhat relevant information from them.
I think the most important thing is to learn to understand "reviewer math". That is to say, it becomes nessecary to understand what the numbers on the ratings really mean. While some people might see an "8/10" and think that a game is pretty good, what that tells me is that there are probably some major problems with it. A "7/10" generally means that the game is pretty much worthless unless you are a diehard fan of the series or genre. Of course it's also important to actually read the reviews instead of just looking at the numbers. Reviewers tend to be much more critical in their actual review than they are with the final scores. It's also useful for reviews that say why certain categories were rated as they were. This can help reveal the bias in the review.
Of course, reviews only constitute a part of getting an overall picture of how a game is. Information leading up to the game can be helpful. If a couple of weeks before there is a preview of the game saying that it's shaping up nicely but still needs some bugs worked out, or the gameplay needs to be refined, then a week later there is a glowing review it's an indicator that the game might not be as good as the review scores indicate. Likewise if there is a lot of preview articles that talk about innovations and refinements to the game and how well it plays, then it's a good indication that the game may actually be worth the price of admission.
There are also a lot of blogs that give more accurate information about the game than a review might, but it's important to keep in mind that if someone is blogging about a game then they probably either really like it or really hate it anyway.
I have run into this on occassion. Although I rarely play games online with people I don't know, I find often that on IRC, for example, if I mention that I'm female in a room that I don't frequent I will often see people who seem suprised that I'm female. I find this happens most often if I stop into a Linux or programming room to ask for help on something.
Of course, most people never take it beyond some sort of exclamation of suprise. I've found that people who message asking for pics, etc, are generally trolling for cybersex anyway.
I do find this behavior strange because of all my friends IRL the majority of the my female friends at least occasionally visit IRC or some other type of chat room, while I only have 2 male friends who ever use IRC, one of whom only visits clan channels to talk strategy, etc. before matches in whatever FPS they play now, and the other only visits Linux help channels occasionally when something it's working right.
I'm not entirely sure that's true. Perhaps this will encourage open source developers who have not looked at XUL to give it a shot- thereby adding experienced developers to the Firefox Community. Plus there are others who might not have a hope of winning but how might try to submit something all the same.
I have only played around with coding for Firefox personally, but I'm considering entering the contest because I don't have anything to lose, and even if I don't win the community gets some benefits.
And in the spirit of openness- my idea is a plug-in to make the back and forward buttons act a little more sensibly to new users. I'm constantly aggrevated by clicking back, then clicking on a link, and then I click back twice trying to find the page that has now been lost to my history- so my idea is to make it so that if you go from page a to b, then b to c, then click back to get to b, go from b to d, click back you get to b, click back again and you get to c instead of a.
It's simple enough that it's not likely to win- there are probably already things that do this. Someone else might write a better version of it than me, but still the idea and code could benefit the community, and I can learn a bit more about writing code for firefox.
The school I go to has been really pushing online classes lately. I was having a discussion with one of my professors about this and I found his views on it really interesting. He said that even though a skilled and dedicated instructor can use the tools available to make a really good online class, and that in general he thought that online classes got through "more" course material, that online classes were largely useless when it came to finding a Job. His explanation was that there are a lot of people technically skilled enough to do the job- and that the ones that weren't- regardless of their grades and degrees were filtered out pretty quickly. In the end, he said, our classes weren't really there to teach us calculus or C++. Your Grades, and your Degree, he said, are really measurements of how well you can put up with all of the dredgery, bullshit, buracracy and idocy that you run into in the average workplace. After all, the average workplace has much more of those things than it does difficult work that really needs a clever and highly educated person to solve. The thing about online classes is that they may do an adequate job of teaching you the information relevant to the class, but they do much less of socializing you to deal with corporate higherarchies and corporate bullshit. I would tend to say that this is a good thing in general, however as soon as the HR people realize this (maybe they realize this already), it's going to make a degree with online classes much less appealing to the people highering you.
I think that technologies like this being refined are really where the future of gaming graphics is going to be for a while. While there is still a ways to go in terms of polygon count, texture and bump mapping, etc, a lot of progress has been made in these areas. I think what we will see (or hope to see anyway) offered in newer games is more support for technologies that simulate real time lighting, shadows, translucance, refraction, etc. A large part of this I think is that there are only so many resources that can be dedicated to artists now to create higher polygon count models and higher resolution more diverse textures, so things that can be done to increase the visuals of a game without having to dedicate significantly more resources to artists can vastly improve the visual quality of a game without such a significant increase in cost associated with actually crafting those visuals. With technologies such as this allowing a more realistic rendering of ourdoor scenes combined with improving algorithms for creating outdoor environments and the ability to create fractal plantlife I think that we will see a new generation of games that take the player more and more often into the less confined feeling outdoor world.
I'm not asserting that LaVay was a great religious philosopher, nor am I denying it (I try to stay out of debates about which religions are "good" or "bad"). He did however found the organization known as "The Church of Satan" which followed what he called Satanism with the people who follwed it called Satanists.
Now it is certainly reasonable to debate whether or not he has any claim to use the name Satanism, but at least in my everyday venacular I generally take Satanism to refer to what could be called LaVay/Satanism.
I think that as the founder of LaVay/Satanism, LaVay would certainly be an authority to refer to for arguments based on that system (however much or little value you find within the system itself).