I shouldn't be this pedantic, but rolling 2D6 against INT is Warhammer. Or used to be, at least. I admit I haven't played WFB since the third edition, but there, rolling 2D6 against INT, LD, CL or WP was pretty normal. D&D uses d20, however.
Have a look at Galactic Civilizations, I and II - Granted, on the higher levels the computer does cheat (production etc bonuses), but many people still cannot beat them on the non-cheating levels. I'm far from saying the AI is unbeatable, but it is pretty good. I personally can win on non-cheating levels most of the time, but I get my arse handed to me quite often too.
I've played GalCiv I (not II, though), and while the AI was much better than anything I'd ever seen before, I don't think it was as good as a competent human player. The AI is great at economy, and it wasn't uncommon for me to miss the first couple Wonders/Trade Goods while struggling to catch up with the AI's lightning start, but eventually I would catch up and build all remaining wonders and trade goods.
But I could win wars even against a much stronger opponent; they lack the real killer mentality that distinguished a good human player from a decent AI. I know how to pick my fights, how to raid, how to defend my transports, how to concentrate my force, when to withdraw, when to attack, etc. Because of the way invasions work, the biggest fleet of dreadnoughts is completely useless if you don't have any transports with you. I make sure I have the speed advantage, and whenever I'm fighting a bigger opponent, I simply resort to sniping at his transports and keep my ships out of his reach. He can surround a planet, but he can't take it. When I attack, I make sure I attack with a decisive strike force consisting of sufficient warships to kill all his defenses in the area, and enough transports to take the planet. I defend my transports, and when I lose them, I call off the attack (although I might resort to raids or attrition if I'm strong enough. I just know that taking a planet won't happen without transports).
So while GalCiv is great, and has much better AI than anything else, it's still not smart enough. It's no walk over, but I still don't actually lose.
First, the goal of "AI" isn't always to be as smart as possible. Often, the goal is to make something believable and/or of the appropriate difficulty level.
This depends a lot on the kind of game you're talking about. For FPS, you're right, but that's not nearly the most demanding kind of game for AI. So far, no company has been able to write a turn-based strategy game where the AI comes even close to being a challenge for a good player. There, the goal is still to make AI as strong as possible, and will remain so for quite some time to come.
I can write "AI" that will kick your ass every time, even without cheating.
But only in games that don't really revolve around intelligence and strategy in the first place.
Another had a custom listening room built as an annex to his house....the acoustics of which were instantly deformed as soon as he would actually *enter* the room to listen to some music in there.
Ah, but that is easily solved! Instead of sitting in that room yourself, you should put a microphone in there, and transmit that sound to your the headphones you wear in a different room. That way you can truly enjoy the perfect, undistorted sound of your listening room.
There's quite a lot of demand for good programmers at the moment. If you have trouble finding a good job with decent hours, you're not searching hard enough or you're simply not a good programmer. (And even bad programmers should be able to get a job these days.)
The problem with the EA Spouse story is bad management and bad planning, and the programmer nevertheless obeying these bad managers. Don't. Quit. Get another job, start your own company, form a union, whatever. Working 13 hours a day every single day for no extra pay to fix the fuck-ups of better paid people is simply insane. I'd rather work at Starbucks.
YMMV. If any of the packages do not include some sort of a learning curve, they are either lacking in function or more geared to making you conform to the way the designer wants you to do your job. That is NOT an acceptable state, in my not so humble opinion.
I'm not sure I agree here. Sometimes there really is something to the way the designer wants to do the job. Java, for example, clearly advocates a certain way of programming, and that's a very good and effective way. But if you want to hack with pointers and bytes, then Java is not the tool you want.
More in general, there's this "convention of configuration" phrase going around in the programming world since Ruby, and the idea behind it is that you can be productive straight out of the box without worrying about fiddly details. But (when done right) you can still reconfigure those details if you really want. I'm not sure how exactly that relates to 3D modeling, but if it were possible to start with a really simple and intuitive system and add more and more detail once I've got a decent understanding of what I'm doing, that would have my preference.
I have spent months dealing with a "web designer" who uses Dreamscape. She has tried NVU and believes it is too hard. This same designer has all pages hard coded to use an 800x600 window. She also has no concept of what the HTML created by either package actually does. However, she has made a pretty good income using the tools that take all of the hard decisions out of the equation.
Could be, but as a webdeveloper, I'd hate working with a webdesigner who doesn't know what she's doing. But I don't criticise my cousin who designed the family website in dreamweaver (or whatever) and knows little about HTML, because she's not doing it professionally. If she does want to do it professionally, then a tool like that might help you develop some understanding of what html code looks like, but eventually you simply have to learn to understand the html/css itself. Give a newbie a text editor and an HTML reference guide, and a lot of people will have no idea where to start, or lose themselves in unimportant details.
I want to prevent myself from losing myself in such details when I start to dabble with 3D modeling. And I won't be doing it professionally, so I won't be annoying anyone with the ugly underlying source for a while.
But one thing you should do is shut the fuck up discouraging other people from using it like there is a chosen way.
I have no experience with 3D modeling at all, but I'm interested in it. If Blender really is that hard to use, I want to be discouraged from using it, because I don't want to waste months trying to learn it.
I don't mind an unintuitive interface. Vi took be about 10 minutes to get the hang of, but it was the standard editor at my university at that time, so we got a list of all the important commands and it was easy to ask someone for help. GIMP, on the other hand, I never got the hang of. Perhaps because I just started it and didn't have a good tutorial or tutor. I'm looking at thousands of buttons and have no idea what any of them do.
So for Blender, what I'm really interested in is: is there a good tutorial that shows me the ropes? If I don't know what a button or option does, is there documentation that tells me what it does, and what that means because I don't understand the jargon at all. And if I want to do something and don't know how, is there some sort of help that explains how to do it?
That is what I'm interested in: is Blender good for a newbie like me?
And also: once I've learned it, am I more or less productive than with the alternatives? Because with the months-long learning curves that the article mentions, $800 for a more productive system is a pretty smart investment once you're out of college. I can afford $800, but I can't afford too waste months struggling with something that turns out to be too painful to use.
I would guess it will trend toward 99.999% male. What geek-girl that you know of would go through the hassle of letting some anonymous geek-admin see her real face just to have the honor of logging in with a female avatar, then becoming the target of cyber-sexual harassment because the perps _know_ you're female? They'd be better off just removing female avatars.
You're forgetting the 20% of the male gamers that know how to send a girl's webcam footage to the admins.
Seeing a 50:50 gender mix on the screen seems to make the brain (subconsciously perhaps) revert into normal navigation mode for real life social topography, which puts all the stereotypes about men and women into play and affects actual game play decisions.
That still doesn't explain why people give stuff to women they don't know. Or make rude remarks and just stare. That is only explained by the anonymity that the virtual environment provides the remarker/starer, and the giver realising the stuff he gives away isn't real anyway.
Because I have no clue what Opera does under the hood.
I have no clue what Firefox does under the hood. Now I'm sure the Mozilla folk are all great people, but I think the same is true of the Opera people. Were everything else the same, I'd choose open source over closed source every time, but in the end, I want good software most of all, and Opera seems to be nowhere near as leaky as Firefox.
Now I still use Firefox for most of my browsing, and especially for testing and debugging websites, there's simply no allternative (although firefox still doesn't render XML properly), but I really should be using Opera for all my regular browsing. But I hope Firefox succeeds in bringing its memory footprint down to more reasonable levels. Because I really do want to support it if at all possible.
If you're trying to shoehorn memory management back into something that didn't support it before, you're going to have issues- and this applies whether you're doing c/c++ style management, reference counting, or garbage collecting.
But memory management should be transparent, and not interfere with your application code at all. And as far as I can see, that means garbage collection. Reference counting is leaky, explicitly allocating and deallocating infringes on application code.
Ok, as an Opera user, I've got to know: which poor design decisions are you referring to? Is it lack of extensions or the GUI or something else?
Opera has its limitations, but so does Firefox. I tend to have dozens of webpages open at a time, and leave my browser on for days or weeks. Firefox can't handle that, so for that reason, I just installed Opera on my work PC. From now on, I'll be using Firefox for the sites I build and need to test (Firefox has some excellent extensions that help debugging sites), and Opera for sites that contain information I need, so I can leave those open for as long as I like.
No professional computer programmer should be incapable of programming without automatic garbage collection,
No professional computer programmer should have to worry about garbage collection. This can be automated, which means it should. Not doing so means that sooner or later, you'll end up with memory leaks.
just as no aeroplane pilot should be incapable of flying without an autopilot. You shouldn't be doing it very often, but you absolutely should have the ability.
You should understand what it's about, but that doesn't mean you have to do it all by hand. Programming without some smart garbage collection system is like flying an aeroplane and refusing to use the autopilot. It's asking for trouble.
Um... at the risk of hijacking a perfectly good discussion of antitrust into a "liberals vs conservatives" argument, the sentence I quoted gave me pause. Are you suggesting that a traditionally liberal argument is for powerless government? Because I don't know anyone of any political stripe who perceives "small, powerless government" as a "liberal" value.
You're probably American. In Europe, liberals tend to be of the "freedom for the rich", conservative, laissez-faire variety. It's not liberals versus conservatives, it's liberals versus socialists. That said, free competition is also an economic liberal value, and EU commissioner Kroes who is trying to take down Microsoft here is a member of the Dutch conservative liberal party.
Ofcourse there are also parties with liberal values on the left side of the political spectrum, but they tend to lean towards the "freedom for the poor"-type libertarian socialism. It's the conservatives that get all the media and pretty much own the word 'liberal', though.
Java gaming? maybe, sure it is cross platform, but your app is horribly VM limited and performance will sucky no matter how you tweak.
Depends on what you want. The very excellent game Puzzle Pirates uses Java Webstart. But if you want the most advanced pixel shading stuff in your game, Java is not for you. Although in that case, perhaps Open Source development isn't for you either.
Python 2.5, especially with Psyco, is roughly comparable to Java.
Really? Then Python is almost as fast as C++. Java 1.5 isn't anywhere near as slow as it was in the 1.1 days. A well-written Java 1.5 program is only about 10% slower than a well-written C++ program.
linking Java code up to C or C++ code is a bit more... involved.
No argument there. If you choose Java, you basically have to do everything in Java or Java-interpreted script languages. Python with C/C++ libraries looks like a natural fit for games. Java is all-round, and a decent choice if you want to do everything in the same high-level language. Python + C/C++ means you use high-level Python for the high-level programming, and high-performance code for those places where performance matters. Because appart from that 10%, there's also the fact that not every JVM speaks equally well to every 3D graphics card. If you want to get the most out of your 3D hardware accelleration, using your own (or optimized by others) C/C++ libraries mean you get every last bit out of it in your favourite OS. Trusting the abstraction of a JVM means it works everywhere, but you have no control over how well it works with your graphics card.
Well me and the other 15,000 students at my university don't like the hundreds of parking meters outside it. They don't conform to our "vision" of the place and we want them gone too.
Have you tried offering $35,000,000 to the university (or whoever owns the parking meters) as reimbursement?
I also have a family of 5 and every week we fill the trunk of a hatchback Renault Clio. But I live in bike-unfriendly Brazil and I also live 18 km from the nearest decent supermarket.
I was just about to say that you could do groceries more than once a week, but if you live in the middle of nowhere, yeah, you've got a problem. But I don't think the issue here is banning cars from rural supermarkets, it's banning cars from crowded city centers that probably have two supermarkets on every corner. I live about 18 meters from a supermarket, there are two more within a kilometer, and I pass a couple of others on the very short bicycle ride to work. Even if cars were banned from the city center completely, there must be approximately a million others that would be reachable by car if the roads weren't permanently jammed.
Oddly enough, we have data on thousands of satellites, but a handful of satellites aren't on the list. Funny, that.
So to keep your spy satelite really secret, it's important to make sure it is on that list. Just not as a spy satelite. A weather or other scientific satelite sounds like a good cover.
You're talking about realtime process controllers and expert systems. Known technology, nothing special and not what anyone hereabouts would term a true artificial intelligence. Really, to call them such is misleading: they have no free will, no awareness of human beings, no power to decide to harm us.
That's pretty much the difference between Real Life AI and fantasy AI, yes.
On the other hand, those "science fictiony" AIs are exactly what we're discussing in this thread: the kind of technology that would be in the head of a C-3PO or a Cyberdyne Systems Model 101. You can't say that "real AI doesn't work like that" because we're a long way from actually achieving it, and nobody knows what it would be like, what it could do, or whether it would be friend, foe or simply disinterested.
I was actually replying to someone who pointed out the difference between Asimov and the real world. You may not care about the real world, but he seems to. And so do I. If you don't like it, go ahead and ignore it. You certainly won't be the only one. But should you actually be interested in real AI, then know that real AI researchers are not trying to create HAL 9000. They're not trying to create AI that competes with human intelligence, but AI that complements it.
In the real world, programs are a hell of a lot easier to control than they are in, say, Asimov. There are no "three laws", you simply don't put an AI physically in charge of anything that can harm a human.
But AI systems already are in charge of things that can harm humans: fly-by-wire fighter jets, lots of missiles and other weapon systems, and no doubt tons of other equally life-threatening (or life-saving) systems. Ofcourse these aren't the science fictiony "aware" AIs that think exactly like humans (except better), but that's fiction for you. Real AI doesn't work like that.
Slashdot Mirror
They should also sue all those people who keep using that image in financial transactions.
I shouldn't be this pedantic, but rolling 2D6 against INT is Warhammer. Or used to be, at least. I admit I haven't played WFB since the third edition, but there, rolling 2D6 against INT, LD, CL or WP was pretty normal. D&D uses d20, however.
I've played GalCiv I (not II, though), and while the AI was much better than anything I'd ever seen before, I don't think it was as good as a competent human player. The AI is great at economy, and it wasn't uncommon for me to miss the first couple Wonders/Trade Goods while struggling to catch up with the AI's lightning start, but eventually I would catch up and build all remaining wonders and trade goods.
But I could win wars even against a much stronger opponent; they lack the real killer mentality that distinguished a good human player from a decent AI. I know how to pick my fights, how to raid, how to defend my transports, how to concentrate my force, when to withdraw, when to attack, etc. Because of the way invasions work, the biggest fleet of dreadnoughts is completely useless if you don't have any transports with you. I make sure I have the speed advantage, and whenever I'm fighting a bigger opponent, I simply resort to sniping at his transports and keep my ships out of his reach. He can surround a planet, but he can't take it. When I attack, I make sure I attack with a decisive strike force consisting of sufficient warships to kill all his defenses in the area, and enough transports to take the planet. I defend my transports, and when I lose them, I call off the attack (although I might resort to raids or attrition if I'm strong enough. I just know that taking a planet won't happen without transports).
So while GalCiv is great, and has much better AI than anything else, it's still not smart enough. It's no walk over, but I still don't actually lose.
This depends a lot on the kind of game you're talking about. For FPS, you're right, but that's not nearly the most demanding kind of game for AI. So far, no company has been able to write a turn-based strategy game where the AI comes even close to being a challenge for a good player. There, the goal is still to make AI as strong as possible, and will remain so for quite some time to come.
But only in games that don't really revolve around intelligence and strategy in the first place.
Ah, but that is easily solved! Instead of sitting in that room yourself, you should put a microphone in there, and transmit that sound to your the headphones you wear in a different room. That way you can truly enjoy the perfect, undistorted sound of your listening room.
But surely that effect can be reproduced with solid-state amps, should you wish to?
There's quite a lot of demand for good programmers at the moment. If you have trouble finding a good job with decent hours, you're not searching hard enough or you're simply not a good programmer. (And even bad programmers should be able to get a job these days.)
The problem with the EA Spouse story is bad management and bad planning, and the programmer nevertheless obeying these bad managers. Don't. Quit. Get another job, start your own company, form a union, whatever. Working 13 hours a day every single day for no extra pay to fix the fuck-ups of better paid people is simply insane. I'd rather work at Starbucks.
I'm not sure I agree here. Sometimes there really is something to the way the designer wants to do the job. Java, for example, clearly advocates a certain way of programming, and that's a very good and effective way. But if you want to hack with pointers and bytes, then Java is not the tool you want.
More in general, there's this "convention of configuration" phrase going around in the programming world since Ruby, and the idea behind it is that you can be productive straight out of the box without worrying about fiddly details. But (when done right) you can still reconfigure those details if you really want. I'm not sure how exactly that relates to 3D modeling, but if it were possible to start with a really simple and intuitive system and add more and more detail once I've got a decent understanding of what I'm doing, that would have my preference.
Could be, but as a webdeveloper, I'd hate working with a webdesigner who doesn't know what she's doing. But I don't criticise my cousin who designed the family website in dreamweaver (or whatever) and knows little about HTML, because she's not doing it professionally. If she does want to do it professionally, then a tool like that might help you develop some understanding of what html code looks like, but eventually you simply have to learn to understand the html/css itself. Give a newbie a text editor and an HTML reference guide, and a lot of people will have no idea where to start, or lose themselves in unimportant details.
I want to prevent myself from losing myself in such details when I start to dabble with 3D modeling. And I won't be doing it professionally, so I won't be annoying anyone with the ugly underlying source for a while.
I have no experience with 3D modeling at all, but I'm interested in it. If Blender really is that hard to use, I want to be discouraged from using it, because I don't want to waste months trying to learn it.
I don't mind an unintuitive interface. Vi took be about 10 minutes to get the hang of, but it was the standard editor at my university at that time, so we got a list of all the important commands and it was easy to ask someone for help. GIMP, on the other hand, I never got the hang of. Perhaps because I just started it and didn't have a good tutorial or tutor. I'm looking at thousands of buttons and have no idea what any of them do.
So for Blender, what I'm really interested in is: is there a good tutorial that shows me the ropes? If I don't know what a button or option does, is there documentation that tells me what it does, and what that means because I don't understand the jargon at all. And if I want to do something and don't know how, is there some sort of help that explains how to do it? That is what I'm interested in: is Blender good for a newbie like me?
And also: once I've learned it, am I more or less productive than with the alternatives? Because with the months-long learning curves that the article mentions, $800 for a more productive system is a pretty smart investment once you're out of college. I can afford $800, but I can't afford too waste months struggling with something that turns out to be too painful to use.
You're forgetting the 20% of the male gamers that know how to send a girl's webcam footage to the admins.
That still doesn't explain why people give stuff to women they don't know. Or make rude remarks and just stare. That is only explained by the anonymity that the virtual environment provides the remarker/starer, and the giver realising the stuff he gives away isn't real anyway.
Like the article says:
I have no clue what Firefox does under the hood. Now I'm sure the Mozilla folk are all great people, but I think the same is true of the Opera people. Were everything else the same, I'd choose open source over closed source every time, but in the end, I want good software most of all, and Opera seems to be nowhere near as leaky as Firefox.
Now I still use Firefox for most of my browsing, and especially for testing and debugging websites, there's simply no allternative (although firefox still doesn't render XML properly), but I really should be using Opera for all my regular browsing. But I hope Firefox succeeds in bringing its memory footprint down to more reasonable levels. Because I really do want to support it if at all possible.
But memory management should be transparent, and not interfere with your application code at all. And as far as I can see, that means garbage collection. Reference counting is leaky, explicitly allocating and deallocating infringes on application code.
Opera has its limitations, but so does Firefox. I tend to have dozens of webpages open at a time, and leave my browser on for days or weeks. Firefox can't handle that, so for that reason, I just installed Opera on my work PC. From now on, I'll be using Firefox for the sites I build and need to test (Firefox has some excellent extensions that help debugging sites), and Opera for sites that contain information I need, so I can leave those open for as long as I like.
No professional computer programmer should have to worry about garbage collection. This can be automated, which means it should. Not doing so means that sooner or later, you'll end up with memory leaks.
You should understand what it's about, but that doesn't mean you have to do it all by hand. Programming without some smart garbage collection system is like flying an aeroplane and refusing to use the autopilot. It's asking for trouble.
You're probably American. In Europe, liberals tend to be of the "freedom for the rich", conservative, laissez-faire variety. It's not liberals versus conservatives, it's liberals versus socialists. That said, free competition is also an economic liberal value, and EU commissioner Kroes who is trying to take down Microsoft here is a member of the Dutch conservative liberal party.
Ofcourse there are also parties with liberal values on the left side of the political spectrum, but they tend to lean towards the "freedom for the poor"-type libertarian socialism. It's the conservatives that get all the media and pretty much own the word 'liberal', though.
Depends on what you want. The very excellent game Puzzle Pirates uses Java Webstart. But if you want the most advanced pixel shading stuff in your game, Java is not for you. Although in that case, perhaps Open Source development isn't for you either.
Really? Then Python is almost as fast as C++. Java 1.5 isn't anywhere near as slow as it was in the 1.1 days. A well-written Java 1.5 program is only about 10% slower than a well-written C++ program.
No argument there. If you choose Java, you basically have to do everything in Java or Java-interpreted script languages. Python with C/C++ libraries looks like a natural fit for games. Java is all-round, and a decent choice if you want to do everything in the same high-level language. Python + C/C++ means you use high-level Python for the high-level programming, and high-performance code for those places where performance matters. Because appart from that 10%, there's also the fact that not every JVM speaks equally well to every 3D graphics card. If you want to get the most out of your 3D hardware accelleration, using your own (or optimized by others) C/C++ libraries mean you get every last bit out of it in your favourite OS. Trusting the abstraction of a JVM means it works everywhere, but you have no control over how well it works with your graphics card.
That's an excellent trap! Just persuade the other guy to use it, and he'll dismember himself without any further help from you.
Have you tried offering $35,000,000 to the university (or whoever owns the parking meters) as reimbursement?
I was just about to say that you could do groceries more than once a week, but if you live in the middle of nowhere, yeah, you've got a problem. But I don't think the issue here is banning cars from rural supermarkets, it's banning cars from crowded city centers that probably have two supermarkets on every corner. I live about 18 meters from a supermarket, there are two more within a kilometer, and I pass a couple of others on the very short bicycle ride to work. Even if cars were banned from the city center completely, there must be approximately a million others that would be reachable by car if the roads weren't permanently jammed.
So to keep your spy satelite really secret, it's important to make sure it is on that list. Just not as a spy satelite. A weather or other scientific satelite sounds like a good cover.
That's pretty much the difference between Real Life AI and fantasy AI, yes.
I was actually replying to someone who pointed out the difference between Asimov and the real world. You may not care about the real world, but he seems to. And so do I. If you don't like it, go ahead and ignore it. You certainly won't be the only one. But should you actually be interested in real AI, then know that real AI researchers are not trying to create HAL 9000. They're not trying to create AI that competes with human intelligence, but AI that complements it.
But AI systems already are in charge of things that can harm humans: fly-by-wire fighter jets, lots of missiles and other weapon systems, and no doubt tons of other equally life-threatening (or life-saving) systems. Ofcourse these aren't the science fictiony "aware" AIs that think exactly like humans (except better), but that's fiction for you. Real AI doesn't work like that.