One of my all-time favorite strategy games, VGA Planets Version 4 (some of you may remember the older versions from the BBS days), is written in PowerBASIC, I believe. I'm actually playing in two games right now. PowerBASIC seems to be a powerful enough tool - the GUI for this game is quite functional, game design & preference issues aside.
Give it a spin if incredibly complicated turn-based sci-fi wargames are your thing:)
When I was younger I tried just about everything to get my little brothers into coding. I tried teaching them BASIC, setting them up with Turbo C++ and my old C programming books, and getting them into graphics.
Neither of them seemed to be very interested.
The object that finally got one of my brothers interested in programming was his TI graphing calculator, with its built-in pseudo programming language.
I think he started off just wanting to learn how to write games on it, as an escape from boring high school lectures. But as time passed and he got a little better at it, he also began writing programs to help him with his math & science homework. Some might say that's small potatoes compared to "real" programming - but I think it was an extremely valuable learning experience for him. He understand the school material better because he was programming it into his calculator, and it got him genuinely interested in what he was doing. The transition from doing busywork to being fully engaged in learning should be the ultimate goal of any teacher.
The little handheld that he could take with him to school and play around with at his leisure was the catalyst.
One is evil and was born at Microsoft, the other is evil and was born in Germany (mostly)...
Having just spent about three hours listening to trance while coding in C#, I can personally vouch for the safety of using the two together. Over-enthusiatic listeners may want to invest in an extra-sturdy keyboard, however.
EXCEPTION: Under no circumstances should you mix Trance music,.NET, and a large array of multicolored strobe lights. If you think the headache you got from the 60 Hz monitor refresh rate was bad, you ain't felt nothin' yet.
There lie the true hypocrites. I am convinced they will use ANY argument to justify not having to pay for music, while trying to maintain some sence of moral propriety.
I agree somewhat with your argument (some people just aren't ever going to pay for music), but there are still important features missing from these online music services (Real, Apple).
The issue is that everyone has extremely different music-listening habits. People listen to music in different locations and on different types of devices. Personally I listen to music at home, at work, and in my car. When I buy a new CD, I'll make Vorbis OGGs at work and at home and then keep the CD in the car, so I can listen to all of my music at any location.
And lots of people also have portable MP3 devices.
In order for these online music services to be truly appealing, they must allow customers to listen to music in the way they're used to. I need to be able to have copy of files at work and at home. I need to be able to burn a CD for my car. Why should I pay for anything less? I'm not going to buy I song that I can only listen to at home; I spend 2/3rds of my listening time elsewhere!
Similarly, streaming is not acceptable... many people are behind firewalls at work.
Apple's service has been successful so far because it does a pretty good job of catering to the listening habits of its users. Listen to it on your machine. Share it with another machine. Burn it to a CD for your car. Put it on your portable iPod.
On the PC side, most consumers aren't going to buy into a solution that keeps them from listening to their music in all the locations and on all the devices that they use.
This process isn't going to be free in terms of energy cost. At the very least they're heating a whole bunch of stuff up, pressurizing it, and then separating what's left. I'm curious... what's the energy cost of this method compared to the energy cost of the old way of refining oil?
"I suspect the more rebellious ones will be running an assortment of proxies and redirections to get around the restrictions."
I suspect that the majority of the people with that kind of know-how weren't the users causing the bandwidth problems in the first place. At my school, the heaviest abusers were usually people that didn't have a clue what they were doing. For example, one girl left a file sharing program running overnight... which was set to share her whole collection by default. She was completely surprised when the IT staff called her the next day to scold her for using over 50 GB of bandwidth in a 24 hour period.
Of course, with that in mind... I'm not sure how much the bandwidth charges will help initially given that many of the students don't know they're abusing anything. Just a little file sharing program running in the background...
The network congestion during my last year at Georgia Tech was abysmal. In previous years it had actually been possible to, you know, occasionally play a game or something. Not any more... P2P file sharing sucked up every last bit of bandwidth on our network. The admins did have a system where they called the top 10 abusers every week to fuss at them, but that didn't seem to do much. I remember one week the top abuser used over 50 gigs of bandwidth within a 24 hour period running a file sharing program.
The admins wouldn't do any more to alleviate the congestion because they didn't want to "infringe" on the rights of the students to do what they want with their connections. I found it most annoying that the rights of others, though, basically took away my ability to do anything on the network that required a low latency connection.
Some people whine and moan whenever bandwidth caps are mentioned, but I think it's the best way to deal with a situation like this... I'd rather have a good connection with bandwidth capped ( I've little chance of exceeding a cap anyway) than the freedom to do whatever I want with a clogged network in perpetual rush hour.
The reason that computer chess fascinates so many people is exactly because brute force doesn't work. The possibilities are so enormous that you can't even begin to look at them all.
In the most recent Man vs. Machine match, the computer was actually slower than Deep Blue. Yet it played amazingly good chess. Unfortunately Deep Blue isn't still around, so we can only speculate that Deep Junior is the superior program.
Humans are slower still; MUCH slower. And yet we can, in many cases, play better chess than computers. The difference is that chess masters know instinctively which moves to consider while machines are stuck looking at a huge number of moves. The holy grail of chess AI would be to finally come up with program that can cut down the number of moves to consider just like the human brain can. Such a breakthrough would be a landmark achievement in AI and would have tons of practical applications outside of playing chess.
I can agree with you on one point, though... chess "technology" probably puts too much effort into the game tree searching aspect of the problem.
Most of the effort is being put towards better position evaluation algorithms, etc... In this way, chess programs are being improved by basically tweaking algorithms we already have and hard-coding in the programmer's own knowledge about the strategic value of certain positions. Things like "doubled pawns are bad" and "in a locked pawn structure a knight is worth more than a bishop".
If we're going to make real progress we definitely need to move away from those approaches and start trying to get at the previously mentioned "holy grail" of chess. Brute-forcing human players to death shouldn't be the goal. We should instead focus on how the human mind approaches such an impossibly huge problem, and still manages to kick the computer's ass.
1) I just opened a page in a new tab (tabbed browsing rules). I closed the original tab. Crap! I want to get back there! Yet the back button in the new tab has no idea what the previous page was... Is this still a problem in other browsers that support tabbed browsing? (I'm using Mozilla)
2) The redirect problem (mentioned somewhere above). A page redirects me so fast that if I go back then I simply get redirected to where I just was. There's not enough time to go back twice.
3) Ambiguous behavior of back links. Let's say I'm viewing page 5, and I just came from page 6. There's a back link at the bottom. Is this going to tell my browser to go "back" to page 6, or is it going to take me to the page 4 (the page that comes before 5) ? I guess this is more an issue of standardizing the behavior of links named "back"... but it's still obnoxious.
4) More of a "forward" problem, but still a problem... I visit a site. I follow three or four links, decide I don't like them, and go back to where I started. I then follow a different link. Crap! The first set of link WAS where I wanted to go after all! Unfortunately there's no way to get back there without digging through the history - your "forward" history gets overwritten once you go back and then follow a different link. In some cases you might remember which links you clicked on to get there... but not always.
The history tree mentioned above might be decent solution to that problem... or maybe not.
There must be such a force if everything keeps expanding forever. Imagine that Earth is the only object in the universe, and someone throws an apple straight up so that it does not fall into orbit. Eventually, no matter how far away that apple gets, it will come back to Earth. That's because there is nothing accelorating it away from Earth, and gravity pulls it towards Earth. In order for the apple to keep increasing it's distance from Earth, something must keep pushing on it.
That is not quite correct. If you throw the apple fast enough (faster than escape velocity) then it will never fall back to Earth, although it will always be slowing down.
The potential energy of an object in a gravitational field is traditionally represented as a finite, negative number (at infinite distance the potential energy is greatest - zero). The "escape velocity" is defined as having just enough kinetic energy to counter that negative potential energy.
On Earth's surface, escape velocity is about 25000 MPH.
Frankly, though, performance isn't the reason this card caught my eye in the first place. I'd very much like to see a review that takes visual quality (or potential) into account.
I was excited to hear that the card supports 128-bit floating point color and can handle its own high-level(ish) shader languange. Both of these are features Carmack seemed to be pushing for the last time I heard him speak at QuakeCon. Surely these features add some great visual possibilities that should be taken into account in reviews? Granted, current games may not use them... but that doesn't mean the features should be overlooked.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my all-time favorite strategy games, VGA Planets Version 4 (some of you may remember the older versions from the BBS days), is written in PowerBASIC, I believe. I'm actually playing in two games right now. PowerBASIC seems to be a powerful enough tool - the GUI for this game is quite functional, game design & preference issues aside.
Give it a spin if incredibly complicated turn-based sci-fi wargames are your thing :)
When you buy a CD, you should feel free to copy it for your own use.
- Matt Oppenheim, RIAA
I'd love to, except that some nefarious individual seems to have "copy protected" some of my CDs.
On the bright side, modifications aren't always a decrease in quality.
What might otherwise be boring and pointless dialog in Japan can turn into an uproarious web phenomenon in the US :)
You may be on to something with the Palm.
When I was younger I tried just about everything to get my little brothers into coding. I tried teaching them BASIC, setting them up with Turbo C++ and my old C programming books, and getting them into graphics.
Neither of them seemed to be very interested.
The object that finally got one of my brothers interested in programming was his TI graphing calculator, with its built-in pseudo programming language.
I think he started off just wanting to learn how to write games on it, as an escape from boring high school lectures. But as time passed and he got a little better at it, he also began writing programs to help him with his math & science homework. Some might say that's small potatoes compared to "real" programming - but I think it was an extremely valuable learning experience for him. He understand the school material better because he was programming it into his calculator, and it got him genuinely interested in what he was doing. The transition from doing busywork to being fully engaged in learning should be the ultimate goal of any teacher.
The little handheld that he could take with him to school and play around with at his leisure was the catalyst.
My Beowulf cluster IS in Soviet Russia, you insensitive clod!
Ditto.
Good thing they didn't check the handwriting, too. I had my mom write it out for me on the registration form since I couldn't write in cursive :)
Having just spent about three hours listening to trance while coding in C#, I can personally vouch for the safety of using the two together. Over-enthusiatic listeners may want to invest in an extra-sturdy keyboard, however.
EXCEPTION: Under no circumstances should you mix Trance music, .NET, and a large array of multicolored strobe lights. If you think the headache you got from the 60 Hz monitor refresh rate was bad, you ain't felt nothin' yet.
There lie the true hypocrites. I am convinced they will use ANY argument to justify not having to pay for music, while trying to maintain some sence of moral propriety.
I agree somewhat with your argument (some people just aren't ever going to pay for music), but there are still important features missing from these online music services (Real, Apple).
The issue is that everyone has extremely different music-listening habits. People listen to music in different locations and on different types of devices. Personally I listen to music at home, at work, and in my car. When I buy a new CD, I'll make Vorbis OGGs at work and at home and then keep the CD in the car, so I can listen to all of my music at any location.
And lots of people also have portable MP3 devices.
In order for these online music services to be truly appealing, they must allow customers to listen to music in the way they're used to. I need to be able to have copy of files at work and at home. I need to be able to burn a CD for my car. Why should I pay for anything less? I'm not going to buy I song that I can only listen to at home; I spend 2/3rds of my listening time elsewhere!
Similarly, streaming is not acceptable... many people are behind firewalls at work.
Apple's service has been successful so far because it does a pretty good job of catering to the listening habits of its users. Listen to it on your machine. Share it with another machine. Burn it to a CD for your car. Put it on your portable iPod.
On the PC side, most consumers aren't going to buy into a solution that keeps them from listening to their music in all the locations and on all the devices that they use.
This process isn't going to be free in terms of energy cost. At the very least they're heating a whole bunch of stuff up, pressurizing it, and then separating what's left. I'm curious... what's the energy cost of this method compared to the energy cost of the old way of refining oil?
"I suspect the more rebellious ones will be running an assortment of proxies and redirections to get around the restrictions."
I suspect that the majority of the people with that kind of know-how weren't the users causing the bandwidth problems in the first place. At my school, the heaviest abusers were usually people that didn't have a clue what they were doing. For example, one girl left a file sharing program running overnight... which was set to share her whole collection by default. She was completely surprised when the IT staff called her the next day to scold her for using over 50 GB of bandwidth in a 24 hour period.
Of course, with that in mind... I'm not sure how much the bandwidth charges will help initially given that many of the students don't know they're abusing anything. Just a little file sharing program running in the background...
The admins wouldn't do any more to alleviate the congestion because they didn't want to "infringe" on the rights of the students to do what they want with their connections. I found it most annoying that the rights of others, though, basically took away my ability to do anything on the network that required a low latency connection.
Some people whine and moan whenever bandwidth caps are mentioned, but I think it's the best way to deal with a situation like this... I'd rather have a good connection with bandwidth capped ( I've little chance of exceeding a cap anyway) than the freedom to do whatever I want with a clogged network in perpetual rush hour.
The reason that computer chess fascinates so many people is exactly because brute force doesn't work. The possibilities are so enormous that you can't even begin to look at them all.
In the most recent Man vs. Machine match, the computer was actually slower than Deep Blue. Yet it played amazingly good chess. Unfortunately Deep Blue isn't still around, so we can only speculate that Deep Junior is the superior program.
Humans are slower still; MUCH slower. And yet we can, in many cases, play better chess than computers. The difference is that chess masters know instinctively which moves to consider while machines are stuck looking at a huge number of moves. The holy grail of chess AI would be to finally come up with program that can cut down the number of moves to consider just like the human brain can. Such a breakthrough would be a landmark achievement in AI and would have tons of practical applications outside of playing chess.
I can agree with you on one point, though... chess "technology" probably puts too much effort into the game tree searching aspect of the problem.
Most of the effort is being put towards better position evaluation algorithms, etc... In this way, chess programs are being improved by basically tweaking algorithms we already have and hard-coding in the programmer's own knowledge about the strategic value of certain positions. Things like "doubled pawns are bad" and "in a locked pawn structure a knight is worth more than a bishop".
If we're going to make real progress we definitely need to move away from those approaches and start trying to get at the previously mentioned "holy grail" of chess. Brute-forcing human players to death shouldn't be the goal. We should instead focus on how the human mind approaches such an impossibly huge problem, and still manages to kick the computer's ass.
The most annoying things about the back button:
1) I just opened a page in a new tab (tabbed browsing rules). I closed the original tab. Crap! I want to get back there! Yet the back button in the new tab has no idea what the previous page was... Is this still a problem in other browsers that support tabbed browsing? (I'm using Mozilla)
2) The redirect problem (mentioned somewhere above). A page redirects me so fast that if I go back then I simply get redirected to where I just was. There's not enough time to go back twice.
3) Ambiguous behavior of back links. Let's say I'm viewing page 5, and I just came from page 6. There's a back link at the bottom. Is this going to tell my browser to go "back" to page 6, or is it going to take me to the page 4 (the page that comes before 5) ? I guess this is more an issue of standardizing the behavior of links named "back"... but it's still obnoxious.
4) More of a "forward" problem, but still a problem... I visit a site. I follow three or four links, decide I don't like them, and go back to where I started. I then follow a different link. Crap! The first set of link WAS where I wanted to go after all! Unfortunately there's no way to get back there without digging through the history - your "forward" history gets overwritten once you go back and then follow a different link. In some cases you might remember which links you clicked on to get there... but not always.
The history tree mentioned above might be decent solution to that problem... or maybe not.
That is not quite correct. If you throw the apple fast enough (faster than escape velocity) then it will never fall back to Earth, although it will always be slowing down.
The potential energy of an object in a gravitational field is traditionally represented as a finite, negative number (at infinite distance the potential energy is greatest - zero). The "escape velocity" is defined as having just enough kinetic energy to counter that negative potential energy.
On Earth's surface, escape velocity is about 25000 MPH.
Okay, so the performance isn't amazing.
Frankly, though, performance isn't the reason this card caught my eye in the first place. I'd very much like to see a review that takes visual quality (or potential) into account.
I was excited to hear that the card supports 128-bit floating point color and can handle its own high-level(ish) shader languange. Both of these are features Carmack seemed to be pushing for the last time I heard him speak at QuakeCon. Surely these features add some great visual possibilities that should be taken into account in reviews? Granted, current games may not use them... but that doesn't mean the features should be overlooked.