In Monkey Island, you could never die either. But it was still a lot of fun to play!
Monkey Island was all about the puzzles, and dying just distracted from that. Even the combat was a hilarious puzzle game, nothing to do with arcade skills.
PoP has arcade-style fighting and platforming, and the thrill there comes at least in part from avoiding death. I agree with earlier posters: where is the sense of achievement without that threat?
What should be important is that maybe next gen games should be released on Linux as a platform equal to Windows.
You are delusional if you think technology makes any kind of difference at this point. It is all about market share, and Linux simply doesn't have any in the games market.
Well, there is Deja Vu, which was a WIMP-style game that was out in 1985... It, and its stable mates Uninvited and Shadow Gate were lots of fun, and were a good middle ground between using a full text parser and a simple point and click interface, mostly because the number of objects in the game was enormous, making it hard to try everything on everything.
Admittedly they suffered from instant-death syndrome, but I still had great fun with all three.
I think the OP meant, "If they could finally get around to ratifying an openGL 3.1 specification in 6 months (instead of being 2 or 3 years late as GL3.0 was); turn it into a useful standard that people actually want to use (which GL3.0 is not); and finally make good on all the things we were promised for 3.0, which they ended up ditching at the last minute. If that happens linux/mac openGL developers around the world will feel less dirty than they do right now"....
He wasn't implying anything about windows + GL as such, more making the observation that openGL is vital to Mac/linux - and as such those OS's are very much at the mercy of the Khronos group's actions (or more accurately - no action at all as was the case with GL3).
Thank you sir. That is indeed exactly what I meant, except that you phrased my frustrations a lot better than I did.
Now, if only they could do the same for OpenGL... Which is needed by a lot more people, and is in my opinion a lot more important for anyone who wishes to be free of Windows.
They are effectively stating that "it is a common procedure in restaurants to split the bill, but no one claimed it yet. We are hereby putting down a flag."
So what is the actual invention? Where is the method or apparatus for splitting a bill? Is anything described in the patent that allows us to do this in a novel way? Or is it just a codification of a practice that is as old as the country of the Netherlands? (I'm Dutch, I can make the joke...;-) ).
It goes without saying that, if it is just a codification of something that is hundreds, and potentially thousands of years old, it should not be meriting special protection...
This Physicist should probably be executed or imprisoned for life if there is any way to get such a sentence. In a more honest time, what he did would be considered treason in spirit, if not exactly the letter of the law.
I'm curious: do you think the same also true for all those american companies that moved their production facilities to China, and in doing so gave China the necessary foot in the door; the money and the knowledge to actually become a major player to begin with?
So what precisely is it about this game that makes it so much more worthy of attention than other games? Is it something genuinely new? Or is this just a subtle advertising campaign? (haha, as if I even need to ask...)
From what I know, it seems like it is an evolution of the platforming mechanics from Sands of Time and more recently Assassins Creed; is that about correct? If so, I'm all in favor; I like the freedom of exploration (in AC) and the idea that a wall is merely a directionally-challenged surface instead of an impassable barrier.
Most certainly. I just don't understand why don't the same is true of bioshock.
Because they are all just backdrops to the combat, and the combat does not vary much (if at all) over the course of the game.
Art meets madness in Fort Frolic
That was an outstanding level, in my opinion, and certainly the most memorable part of the entire game.
It's not often a game leaves me feeling genuinely angry at in-game characters, but Bioshock managed it twice there. Once with Point Promethius, and earlier when I realised how Sander Cohen was making his statues. But that's beside the point. The point is that the tone of the levels is different from SS2, certainty, but I wouldn't have said it was in any way inferior.
Obviously it had a deeper emotional impact with you than it did with me. Some things that would have improved it for me:
- fewer resources. Basically you have too much of everything. I never went back to earlier levels to scrounge for resources, I could always find enough of everything in my current location.
- more variation in the threat level. The experience would be more memorable if you had a few safe areas, some very dangerous areas, and maybe a friend here or there.
- an inventory. Don't let me carry everything at once, make me choose what I need.
Yeah. Like when I returned to the Medical Pavilion to make some safe case and stock up on first aid kits after running dry in Arcadia. Later I returned to Arcadia to get components for anti-personnel pistol rounds and electric gel, becuase it was safer there. I've also returned to Neptune's Bounty to take photo's of Rosies, and Arciadia to research Houdini Splicers.
Did you really run out of things? It seemed to me there was really no end to the amount of stuff the game showered you with.
I'm beginning to think you never game this game a proper chance.
Believe me, I did. I loved the beginning, and the first few levels. I thought Fort Frolic was utterly brilliant, as was the scene where you finally meet Ryan.
And the rest? It just blurred out, more of the same, uninspired run and gun gameplay. I was never gripped by the story of the battle between Fontaine / Atlas and Ryan, and the fate of the city never really touched me.
Pfft. Yes, there was a high initial cost to open a line of skills. That stopped you from developing all of them on any one run through. Certainly, I'd have welcomed something similar in Bioshock, but I can't say its absence ruined the game for me. As for places to go - how many places in SS2 where they that presented you with an either/or choice? As far as I can recall, you could roam the entire ship, as far as you'd unlocked up, up until just before the end in the Body of the Many.
Maybe you're remembering SS2 as better than it was?
I play it once every two years or so, so I think I'm entitled to my opinion here;-)
Furthermore, it's no more or less linear that SS2, which you clearly admire. Would Bioshock have been less linear if, in order to unlock an area in Hepaestus, you needed to go back to Neptune's Bounty and retrieve a previously inaccessible key? I think not. Any game that tells a story is necessarily going to have a degree of linearity
That is true. But in creating the game this way, every area essentially becomes a throw-away experience: you come in, kill everything, and leave, never to return again. That makes it very, very hard to attach a certain emotion or experience to an area.
If you come back to an area, either through choice or because the game asks this of you, you have an idea of what to expect from it, and feel an appropriate emotion to go with it. In that sense the respawning of enemies in SS2 is a vital comp
I'd be interested to know what you thought was good about SS2 that bioshock didn't accomplish. I mean the gameplay is linear in the same way as is Bioshock's (work hard to open up a level, and then you can roam at will),
Each place in SS2 had its own distinct feel: some places you had to (re)visit to get upgrades, to buy certain things, to heal, whatever. Some places were creepy, some were dangerous, some were fairly safe.
Moreover, the rather brilliant level design meant that shortcuts opened as the game progressed, so you weren't backtracking long distances but simply revisiting earlier levels that were now easily reachable from almost anywhere.
Contrast this to Bioshock: you visit each location exactly once, and despite the beautiful graphics, there is no difference in *experience* between them: the level of threat is identical everywhere.
In SS2 you make choices: which skills, which weapons, where to go and what to do. Bioshock is a series of levers you need to pull in order, and then you reach the end.
You are right that Bioshock allows you to roam at will. There is just no reason for doing so.
the Bioshock monsters are pretty much a 1:1 mapping from SS2 with the splicers showing IMHO a bit more visual and auditory variety than the Many from SS2. Even the big daddies have a SS2 counterpart in the rumblers.
The enemies in SS2 are *creepy*: the cyborg midwives with their "must protect eggs", the protocol droids who were apologizing as they came up to kill you, etc.
It is not so much about the number or the variety, it is about character. SS2 had plenty of that, and Bioshock not so much. The big daddy / little sister thing was really overrated by the game designers, in my opinion. Certainly the dynamic never really worked for me, but maybe that's just me.
The splicing is about the same as the cybernetic modules from SS2, the weapons upgrade mechanism is about the same.
No it is not. In SS2 you made real choices, you couldn't change your mind five times without any consequence. In Bioshock you pretty much can.
It also kept details like the audio dairies and the ghosts, a rich cast of characters (most of whose corpses you eventually find).
You do? How would you know? I only recall a very small number of recognizable corpses. Not that it matters, I never recognized anybody in SS2 either.
There's also the motif of a cental all-controlling intelligence. Really - what was it about SS2 that you liked that wasn't in Bioshock?
In Bioshock you are on rails, moving from one end to the other. I never went into a bar just to drink a beer, only to shoot the place up and remove any splicers that might be present. Same with every other place I visited. What is the purpose of the tram system (you know, with the submarines) if you never go back to an earlier level anyway?
And once you start seeing it that way, the illusion drops away and the game is revealed to be "House of the Dead" with better graphics and a pretentious storyline.
[...] the thing that raised it from "OK" to "great" in my opinion, was the brain candy involved. The examination of Objectivism, its strengths and failings. And at the end of the day, you're left to draw your own conclusions, Did rapture fail because Ryan found an adversary of equal talent in the person of Fontaine? Or was the flaw inherent in the economic system he established? Or was it in Ryan himself when he abandoned his principles rather than yeild control?
I would add the question "why would you care about this while you are following the rails?"
Oh, and for the record: I did like it, but it felt like it could it could have been so much more. And in the end, it didn't really leave a lasting impression.
One main purpose of consoles is to eliminate the sluggishness of the PC world.
The _ONLY_ purpose of consoles is to make money for the manufacturer of said console. They do that by providing a platform on which you can play games and watch movies and stuff.
The uniformity of the machines happens to facilitate tighter programming and higher quality testing, but that's secondary to what the actual purpose is.
This is one of the classic things one can do wrong in language design, and which tend to have to be fixed in later versions, painfully. Some other classic boners are leaving out a "bool" type (C and Python), not providing generics in a statically typed object-oriented language (C++ and Java), and not designing in separate compilation (ISO Pascal).
C++ most definitely has generics (templates!). Feel free to hate the syntax, but they are there.
As for the other poster who #defines TRUE as !FALSE, that of course does not work - or at least, not as he seems to intend it:
const int a = 3;
if (a == TRUE)...
This will still fail, because it expands to
if (a == !FALSE)...
which itself expands to
if (a == 1)...
which gives a result that I would rate as incorrect. And if by some miracle the author did intend for this to be correct, he is really overdue for a good beating...
People who come up with "l33t" ideas like this need to be put on maintenance programming of code written by others for six months or so.
Can someone please exlplain how it is that a bunch of irregulars with poorly maintained AK-47 rifles and surplus Katyusha rockets that date back to the cold war can keep us on our toes in Afghanistan when we have all of this high tech and expensive army gear?
Does a bullet from an AK-47 kill any less than a bullet from a hi-tech rifle? Does a Katyusha rocket demolish vehicles and buildings less effectively than modern explosives? Both weapons are basically good enough, especially since the enemy is hardly interested in prolonged battles and control over territory. Their war is mostly one of symbols; have a little bombing here, kill a few people there. It means little in the grand scheme of things, but it locks their respective countries in a state of fear, something from which they ultimately hope to profit as the US inevitably will have to withdraw at some point.
How would you win such a war? The only way, I think, is to increase the wealth of that country: give them something to lose. Maybe if all the money invested so far had instead been used to buy agricultural products from them, they would be preparing for the next crop now instead of deciding where to put the next roadside bomb. Of course, there is little profit in that for the very large industry that rides on the back of those wars...
Yeah, it was quite unexpected: after his highly successful second term, during which he finally managed to get rid of the national debt and negotiated some pretty decent peace terms with Australia, everybody thought he would take the position of ambassador to the Chino-Russian Mars colony. Instead he is opening a chocolate shop in Belgium, together with his wife.
A better choice, perhaps, would be Rolling Madness 3D which is a complete remake of Marble Madness. But I was not aiming for remakes of old games, but rather for the spirit of experimentation and the level of abstraction needed to make such games a reality. And I don't see much of that these days, not as much as in the old 8 and 16-bit times.
And don't get me wrong, 90% of that stuff was utter crap. But occasionally you would find a gem as well...
And the space-term of the day is "weight". Given that you need to bring your one-time pad with you to the moon, and taking into account that it will need to last for the duration of the mission, just how many terabytes of storage do you think you will need on the spacecraft just for this?
Transmitting terabytes of data is much harder than bringing it with you. Think about it. First of all, you aren't going to need to send more than a few gigabytes, most likely;
They are talking about hi-definition television signals. Good luck compressing that into "just a few gigabytes most likely".
In reality, you'd probably be just as safe if you were to use the same 1 MB key over and over, because you're sending high-entropy compressed data anyway.
Ah, the famous reuseable one-time pad! You, sir, should consider a carreer in encryption, you are obviously able to revolutionize the field!
The cryptographic term of the day is "One-Time Pad," boys and girls. Can you say "One-Time Pad?"
And the space-term of the day is "weight". Given that you need to bring your one-time pad with you to the moon, and taking into account that it will need to last for the duration of the mission, just how many terabytes of storage do you think you will need on the spacecraft just for this? And all that storage will have to be radiation-hardened as well, so the weight will be significant. Plus, it introduces another point of failure on a communication link that is already suffering from long distances and low power transmission.
But hey, maybe you are planning to ask the Chinese to install a new one-time pad while they are out there demonstrating their new lunar lander?
Haha, well summarized. However, I would propose that we really did lose entire genres during the shift to 3D. Things like Marble Madness were lots of fun, but who is making that kind of thing now? There are not that many weirdo's experimenting with weird games these days. And scrolling shooters and platformers really were better before they were given a semi-3D makeover; that sort of thing just worked better in two dimensions.
And don't even get me started on puzzle games. These days people think that means "bejeweled clones". Well, go play Kings Valley and Eggerland Mystery, and then you will know what a puzzle game really is...
2. Instead of voting for people every four years, you can vote for people every day, or even for issues directly.
The second case is still a matter of voting, and I still prefer a hand-count over a machine count any day. And the first case is certainly true, but I'm not sure how using a computer to do the vote counting would improve that sad state of affairs.
I'm sort of curious: I have this creepy feeling that some people in the US (like yourself) are actively pursuing a campaign to do away with democracy altogether (because it is unreliable, inefficient, or whatever). I didn't realize we were this close already to fulfilling the goal of having one people, one empire, and one leader, but given the developments of the last eight years I cannot say that I'm surprised...
Not sure it undermines democracy. If by democracy you mean "get the counts right".
Democracy is based on trust: trust that my vote is actually counted. Without that trust I might as well not vote. Without voting, we don't live in a democracy.
An electronic voting machine is a black box, it could be doing _anything_ it damn well pleases in there with my vote. The number of people that need to be corrupted to take control over the votes in an entire country is very, very small; maybe just one. Testing cannot reveal that (the tampering could be date-specific), and neither does opening the source (different sources could be loaded where I cannot see it). And such a subversion would, if done well, go completely unnoticed.
Compare that with people doing the counting: to subvert the process you need to corrupt _all_ people in enough counting stations to actually make a difference. A single counting station is manned by representative of all parties, as well as interested citizens, so there is virtually no chance of such a subversion going unnoticed on a nation-wide scale.
Paper ballots have to be counted by people. Lots of people. People are error-prone. And people could have agendas. Even if the risk that 1 person is making a mistake is 0.005% the risk is increased a if you have 5000 people counting votes. (It's not linear, but I can't remember enough of the statistics course to tell). This is the reason you want machines to do the counting. It's what computers do best. At least properly configured.
You are offsetting the occasional mistake in hand-counting against the possibility of completely corrupting the entire vote. I would suggest that that is the wrong priority.
Using e-voting has nothing to do with "instant results", except that it's a bonus. It's to remove the uncertain, and boring, task of vote counting. I.e. people.
And hand-counting has nothing to do with improving uncertainty, it is to remove a single point of failure from the system.
And is e-voting that expensive? Really? Compared to having thousands of workers and supervisors spend hours upon hours counting and recounting paper votes? I doubt that.
Is democracy worth so little to you, that you don't even want to pay for that handful of people to do the counting?
Slashdot Mirror
In Monkey Island, you could never die either. But it was still a lot of fun to play!
Monkey Island was all about the puzzles, and dying just distracted from that. Even the combat was a hilarious puzzle game, nothing to do with arcade skills.
PoP has arcade-style fighting and platforming, and the thrill there comes at least in part from avoiding death. I agree with earlier posters: where is the sense of achievement without that threat?
What should be important is that maybe next gen games should be released on Linux as a platform equal to Windows.
You are delusional if you think technology makes any kind of difference at this point. It is all about market share, and Linux simply doesn't have any in the games market.
Well, there is Deja Vu, which was a WIMP-style game that was out in 1985... It, and its stable mates Uninvited and Shadow Gate were lots of fun, and were a good middle ground between using a full text parser and a simple point and click interface, mostly because the number of objects in the game was enormous, making it hard to try everything on everything.
Admittedly they suffered from instant-death syndrome, but I still had great fun with all three.
I think the OP meant, "If they could finally get around to ratifying an openGL 3.1 specification in 6 months (instead of being 2 or 3 years late as GL3.0 was); turn it into a useful standard that people actually want to use (which GL3.0 is not); and finally make good on all the things we were promised for 3.0, which they ended up ditching at the last minute. If that happens linux/mac openGL developers around the world will feel less dirty than they do right now"....
He wasn't implying anything about windows + GL as such, more making the observation that openGL is vital to Mac/linux - and as such those OS's are very much at the mercy of the Khronos group's actions (or more accurately - no action at all as was the case with GL3).
Thank you sir. That is indeed exactly what I meant, except that you phrased my frustrations a lot better than I did.
Now, if only they could do the same for OpenGL... Which is needed by a lot more people, and is in my opinion a lot more important for anyone who wishes to be free of Windows.
They are effectively stating that "it is a common procedure in restaurants to split the bill, but no one claimed it yet. We are hereby putting down a flag."
So what is the actual invention? Where is the method or apparatus for splitting a bill? Is anything described in the patent that allows us to do this in a novel way? Or is it just a codification of a practice that is as old as the country of the Netherlands? (I'm Dutch, I can make the joke... ;-) ).
It goes without saying that, if it is just a codification of something that is hundreds, and potentially thousands of years old, it should not be meriting special protection...
This Physicist should probably be executed or imprisoned for life if there is any way to get such a sentence. In a more honest time, what he did would be considered treason in spirit, if not exactly the letter of the law.
I'm curious: do you think the same also true for all those american companies that moved their production facilities to China, and in doing so gave China the necessary foot in the door; the money and the knowledge to actually become a major player to begin with?
Only 261Mpixel? That's not particularly impressive, compared to GAIA (1.5 Gpixel!)...
"My name is johannesg, and I'm here to ask you a question: is a man entitled to the sweat of his brow?"
Sure, it would be hard to seal all the buildings, but think how cool it would be!
So what precisely is it about this game that makes it so much more worthy of attention than other games? Is it something genuinely new? Or is this just a subtle advertising campaign? (haha, as if I even need to ask...)
From what I know, it seems like it is an evolution of the platforming mechanics from Sands of Time and more recently Assassins Creed; is that about correct? If so, I'm all in favor; I like the freedom of exploration (in AC) and the idea that a wall is merely a directionally-challenged surface instead of an impassable barrier.
Each place in SS2 had its own distinct feel
Most certainly. I just don't understand why don't the same is true of bioshock.
Because they are all just backdrops to the combat, and the combat does not vary much (if at all) over the course of the game.
Art meets madness in Fort Frolic
That was an outstanding level, in my opinion, and certainly the most memorable part of the entire game.
It's not often a game leaves me feeling genuinely angry at in-game characters,
but Bioshock managed it twice there. Once with Point Promethius, and earlier when
I realised how Sander Cohen was making his statues. But that's beside the point. The point is that the tone of the levels is different from SS2, certainty, but I wouldn't have said it was in any way inferior.
Obviously it had a deeper emotional impact with you than it did with me. Some things that would have improved it for me:
- fewer resources. Basically you have too much of everything. I never went back to earlier levels to scrounge for resources, I could always find enough of everything in my current location.
- more variation in the threat level. The experience would be more memorable if you had a few safe areas, some very dangerous areas, and maybe a friend here or there.
- an inventory. Don't let me carry everything at once, make me choose what I need.
Yeah. Like when I returned to the Medical Pavilion to make some safe case and stock up on first aid kits after running dry in Arcadia. Later I returned to Arcadia to get components for anti-personnel pistol rounds and electric gel, becuase it was safer there. I've also returned to Neptune's Bounty to take photo's of Rosies, and Arciadia to research Houdini Splicers.
Did you really run out of things? It seemed to me there was really no end to the amount of stuff the game showered you with.
I'm beginning to think you never game this game a proper chance.
Believe me, I did. I loved the beginning, and the first few levels. I thought Fort Frolic was utterly brilliant, as was the scene where you finally meet Ryan.
And the rest? It just blurred out, more of the same, uninspired run and gun gameplay. I was never gripped by the story of the battle between Fontaine / Atlas and Ryan, and the fate of the city never really touched me.
Pfft. Yes, there was a high initial cost to open a line of skills. That stopped you from developing all of them on any one run through. Certainly, I'd have welcomed something similar in Bioshock, but I can't say its absence ruined the game for me. As for places to go - how many places in SS2 where they that presented you with an either/or choice? As far as I can recall, you could roam the entire ship, as far as you'd unlocked up, up until just before the end in the Body of the Many.
Maybe you're remembering SS2 as better than it was?
I play it once every two years or so, so I think I'm entitled to my opinion here ;-)
Furthermore, it's no more or less linear that SS2, which you clearly admire. Would Bioshock have been less linear if,
in order to unlock an area in Hepaestus, you needed to go back to Neptune's Bounty and retrieve a previously
inaccessible key? I think not. Any game that tells a story is necessarily going to have a degree of linearity
That is true. But in creating the game this way, every area essentially becomes a throw-away experience: you come in, kill everything, and leave, never to return again. That makes it very, very hard to attach a certain emotion or experience to an area.
If you come back to an area, either through choice or because the game asks this of you, you have an idea of what to expect from it, and feel an appropriate emotion to go with it. In that sense the respawning of enemies in SS2 is a vital comp
I'd be interested to know what you thought was good about SS2 that bioshock didn't accomplish. I mean the gameplay is
linear in the same way as is Bioshock's (work hard to open up a level, and then you can roam at will),
Each place in SS2 had its own distinct feel: some places you had to (re)visit to get upgrades, to buy certain things, to heal, whatever. Some places were creepy, some were dangerous, some were fairly safe.
Moreover, the rather brilliant level design meant that shortcuts opened as the game progressed, so you weren't backtracking long distances but simply revisiting earlier levels that were now easily reachable from almost anywhere.
Contrast this to Bioshock: you visit each location exactly once, and despite the beautiful graphics, there is no difference in *experience* between them: the level of threat is identical everywhere.
In SS2 you make choices: which skills, which weapons, where to go and what to do. Bioshock is a series of levers you need to pull in order, and then you reach the end.
You are right that Bioshock allows you to roam at will. There is just no reason for doing so.
the Bioshock monsters are pretty much a 1:1 mapping from SS2 with the splicers showing IMHO a bit more visual and auditory variety
than the Many from SS2. Even the big daddies have a SS2 counterpart in the rumblers.
The enemies in SS2 are *creepy*: the cyborg midwives with their "must protect eggs", the protocol droids who were apologizing as they came up to kill you, etc.
It is not so much about the number or the variety, it is about character. SS2 had plenty of that, and Bioshock not so much. The big daddy / little sister thing was really overrated by the game designers, in my opinion. Certainly the dynamic never really worked for me, but maybe that's just me.
The splicing is about the same
as the cybernetic modules from SS2, the weapons upgrade mechanism is about the same.
No it is not. In SS2 you made real choices, you couldn't change your mind five times without any consequence. In Bioshock you pretty much can.
It also kept details like the audio dairies and the ghosts, a rich cast of characters (most of whose corpses you
eventually find).
You do? How would you know? I only recall a very small number of recognizable corpses. Not that it matters, I never recognized anybody in SS2 either.
There's also the motif of a cental all-controlling intelligence. Really - what was it about SS2
that you liked that wasn't in Bioshock?
In Bioshock you are on rails, moving from one end to the other. I never went into a bar just to drink a beer, only to shoot the place up and remove any splicers that might be present. Same with every other place I visited. What is the purpose of the tram system (you know, with the submarines) if you never go back to an earlier level anyway?
And once you start seeing it that way, the illusion drops away and the game is revealed to be "House of the Dead" with better graphics and a pretentious storyline.
[...] the thing that raised it from "OK" to "great" in my
opinion, was the brain candy involved. The examination of Objectivism, its strengths and failings.
And at the end of the day, you're left to draw your own conclusions, Did rapture fail because Ryan
found an adversary of equal talent in the person of Fontaine?
Or was the flaw inherent in the economic system he established? Or was it in Ryan himself
when he abandoned his principles rather than yeild control?
I would add the question "why would you care about this while you are following the rails?"
Oh, and for the record: I did like it, but it felt like it could it could have been so much more. And in the end, it didn't really leave a lasting impression.
One main purpose of consoles is to eliminate the sluggishness of the PC world.
The _ONLY_ purpose of consoles is to make money for the manufacturer of said console. They do that by providing a platform on which you can play games and watch movies and stuff.
The uniformity of the machines happens to facilitate tighter programming and higher quality testing, but that's secondary to what the actual purpose is.
Not one single soul in the world who was ever going to make a language, is now not going to, because of that rant.
I don't know. I was going to invent a language this morning, but after reading this I'm having second thoughts.
What should I do?
This is one of the classic things one can do wrong in language design, and which tend to have to be fixed in later versions, painfully. Some other classic boners are leaving out a "bool" type (C and Python), not providing generics in a statically typed object-oriented language (C++ and Java), and not designing in separate compilation (ISO Pascal).
C++ most definitely has generics (templates!). Feel free to hate the syntax, but they are there.
As for the other poster who #defines TRUE as !FALSE, that of course does not work - or at least, not as he seems to intend it:
const int a = 3;
if (a == TRUE) ...
This will still fail, because it expands to
if (a == !FALSE) ...
which itself expands to
if (a == 1) ...
which gives a result that I would rate as incorrect. And if by some miracle the author did intend for this to be correct, he is really overdue for a good beating...
People who come up with "l33t" ideas like this need to be put on maintenance programming of code written by others for six months or so.
So true...
Can someone please exlplain how it is that a bunch of irregulars with poorly maintained AK-47 rifles and surplus Katyusha rockets that date back to the cold war can keep us on our toes in Afghanistan when we have all of this high tech and expensive army gear?
Does a bullet from an AK-47 kill any less than a bullet from a hi-tech rifle? Does a Katyusha rocket demolish vehicles and buildings less effectively than modern explosives? Both weapons are basically good enough, especially since the enemy is hardly interested in prolonged battles and control over territory. Their war is mostly one of symbols; have a little bombing here, kill a few people there. It means little in the grand scheme of things, but it locks their respective countries in a state of fear, something from which they ultimately hope to profit as the US inevitably will have to withdraw at some point.
How would you win such a war? The only way, I think, is to increase the wealth of that country: give them something to lose. Maybe if all the money invested so far had instead been used to buy agricultural products from them, they would be preparing for the next crop now instead of deciding where to put the next roadside bomb. Of course, there is little profit in that for the very large industry that rides on the back of those wars...
Instead he is opening a chocolate shop in Belgium, together with his wife.
Watch your language!
Oh yeah? Well, Belgium you too! ;-)
Then why are there over 200 comments, more than usual? Good programming practice is an interesting topic for many of us.
Maybe it is just a boring day? Nothing of interest happening in the world?
Wait... what obama story? Did something happen?
Yeah, it was quite unexpected: after his highly successful second term, during which he finally managed to get rid of the national debt and negotiated some pretty decent peace terms with Australia, everybody thought he would take the position of ambassador to the Chino-Russian Mars colony. Instead he is opening a chocolate shop in Belgium, together with his wife.
Gee, were you in a coma the last 8 years?
A better choice, perhaps, would be Rolling Madness 3D which is a complete remake of Marble Madness. But I was not aiming for remakes of old games, but rather for the spirit of experimentation and the level of abstraction needed to make such games a reality. And I don't see much of that these days, not as much as in the old 8 and 16-bit times.
And don't get me wrong, 90% of that stuff was utter crap. But occasionally you would find a gem as well...
And the space-term of the day is "weight". Given that you need to bring your one-time pad with you to the moon, and taking into account that it will need to last for the duration of the mission, just how many terabytes of storage do you think you will need on the spacecraft just for this?
Transmitting terabytes of data is much harder than bringing it with you. Think about it. First of all, you aren't going to need to send more than a few gigabytes, most likely;
They are talking about hi-definition television signals. Good luck compressing that into "just a few gigabytes most likely".
In reality, you'd probably be just as safe if you were to use the same 1 MB key over and over, because you're sending high-entropy compressed data anyway.
Ah, the famous reuseable one-time pad! You, sir, should consider a carreer in encryption, you are obviously able to revolutionize the field!
The cryptographic term of the day is "One-Time Pad," boys and girls. Can you say "One-Time Pad?"
And the space-term of the day is "weight". Given that you need to bring your one-time pad with you to the moon, and taking into account that it will need to last for the duration of the mission, just how many terabytes of storage do you think you will need on the spacecraft just for this? And all that storage will have to be radiation-hardened as well, so the weight will be significant. Plus, it introduces another point of failure on a communication link that is already suffering from long distances and low power transmission.
But hey, maybe you are planning to ask the Chinese to install a new one-time pad while they are out there demonstrating their new lunar lander?
Haha, well summarized. However, I would propose that we really did lose entire genres during the shift to 3D. Things like Marble Madness were lots of fun, but who is making that kind of thing now? There are not that many weirdo's experimenting with weird games these days. And scrolling shooters and platformers really were better before they were given a semi-3D makeover; that sort of thing just worked better in two dimensions.
And don't even get me started on puzzle games. These days people think that means "bejeweled clones". Well, go play Kings Valley and Eggerland Mystery, and then you will know what a puzzle game really is...
So your argument boils down to:
1. Elections don't always guarantee democracy
and
2. Instead of voting for people every four years, you can vote for people every day, or even for issues directly.
The second case is still a matter of voting, and I still prefer a hand-count over a machine count any day. And the first case is certainly true, but I'm not sure how using a computer to do the vote counting would improve that sad state of affairs.
I'm sort of curious: I have this creepy feeling that some people in the US (like yourself) are actively pursuing a campaign to do away with democracy altogether (because it is unreliable, inefficient, or whatever). I didn't realize we were this close already to fulfilling the goal of having one people, one empire, and one leader, but given the developments of the last eight years I cannot say that I'm surprised...
Not sure it undermines democracy. If by democracy you mean "get the counts right".
Democracy is based on trust: trust that my vote is actually counted. Without that trust I might as well not vote. Without voting, we don't live in a democracy.
An electronic voting machine is a black box, it could be doing _anything_ it damn well pleases in there with my vote. The number of people that need to be corrupted to take control over the votes in an entire country is very, very small; maybe just one. Testing cannot reveal that (the tampering could be date-specific), and neither does opening the source (different sources could be loaded where I cannot see it). And such a subversion would, if done well, go completely unnoticed.
Compare that with people doing the counting: to subvert the process you need to corrupt _all_ people in enough counting stations to actually make a difference. A single counting station is manned by representative of all parties, as well as interested citizens, so there is virtually no chance of such a subversion going unnoticed on a nation-wide scale.
Paper ballots have to be counted by people. Lots of people. People are error-prone. And people could have agendas. Even if the risk that 1 person is making a mistake is 0.005% the risk is increased a if you have 5000 people counting votes. (It's not linear, but I can't remember enough of the statistics course to tell). This is the reason you want machines to do the counting. It's what computers do best. At least properly configured.
You are offsetting the occasional mistake in hand-counting against the possibility of completely corrupting the entire vote. I would suggest that that is the wrong priority.
Using e-voting has nothing to do with "instant results", except that it's a bonus. It's to remove the uncertain, and boring, task of vote counting. I.e. people.
And hand-counting has nothing to do with improving uncertainty, it is to remove a single point of failure from the system.
And is e-voting that expensive? Really? Compared to having thousands of workers and supervisors spend hours upon hours counting and recounting paper votes? I doubt that.
Is democracy worth so little to you, that you don't even want to pay for that handful of people to do the counting?