> Secondly the cost of living in India is much lower than in America, so while the Indians are poorer than Americans, imagining someone here living on $1 a day doesn't tell you how an Indian living on $1 a day is doing.
You're right. The statement of "living on $1 a day" doesn't tell you how an Indian living on $1 a day is doing. Brilliant. Major insight. Care to actually contribute tho? I'm not interested in how $1 a day in India isn't $1 a day in the US.. thats kind of like the most obvious thing anybody reading this post would point out. Really really insightful, contributory information, that really needs to be raised before anybody actually starts caring about other people.
I'm interested in what $1 a day in India gets you. I'm still going to assume it isn't a lot tho, unless you want to suggest otherwise?
I used to do tech support, and I know your pain regarding word macro viruses.
Two thoughts:
- its Word, an MS program. Kinda amusing to see people assert that Macs are as bad as Windows because an MS app is rediculously un-sandboxed.
- these people HAVE to trade doc files. Its business. Still, its business folks who continue to insist that they must use Word. Its not the OSes problem, its a complete social engineering problem. They're practically sharing.exes through email, hundreds, on a daily basis. No OS can withstand that.
Word macro viruses are not a fault of the OS, they're a fault of the application. A Microsoft Application.
I use Windows, I'm not a Mac zealot or anything, but cmon.. this is a problem that mostly affects business users, using a Microsoft application.
Historically, even tho I spent two years of my life reformatting Macs because of word macro trojans, I never saw it as a flaw in the OS but rather a flaw in Word. Most techs I knew saw it that way too.
Nobody is arguing that OSes can get fucked up. They're arguing that surfing the internet in the more 'sandboxy' environment of the web is safer on a Mac than a PC. Even THEN, nobody would argue right now that its safer on a Mac, they're just arguing about the reason. Thats why the parent got a Troll. He wasn't really contributing to the dicussion about *why*, he was just pointing out that Macs can get infected. Thats a pretty trollish thing to say, because it seems to hint at an agenda based on personal experience. Like I said, I fought with that shit for 2 years, on the worse laptops ever created (the 5300s) and I still never felt that it was an OS issue.
Its very simple to me.. Windows provides so many OS hooks for application integration, for better or for worse, that malware writers can capitalize on that. Combine it with the most popular browser being fairly insecure, liberal user rights management thats been patched over and over till kingdom come, and you have a pretty annoying OS in the hands of the right person. That API sprawl is gunna keep killing MS until they do what they never had the balls to do; kill backwards compat. I never understood that one - if anybody can absorb that kind of thing, its MS's bank account.
Hey, one other thing; malware isn't a virus, and its important to distinguish between them when discussing exploitability. Lots of malware don't do anything more special than what major corperate software does in order to 'integrate' with the OS. Microsoft just bends over backwards to provide that integration.. or should I say uninstallability.
We're using this at work at the moment, just as we start up a 10 month project development cycle. I'm skeptical, because for the same reason 30 days of development estimted, might really be 60, 2 days of development might really be 4.
From what I've seen so far, they just wanna know how far along we are, not how long we think it might take.
> It appears this 419 scammer has just learnt a lesson that he should already well know, that unchecked greed will make people do the stupidist things.
Thats a pretty blanket statement, which dosn't take into account the level of weath greedy people have in the first place, nor any kind of assesment of whether greedy people often do the 'right' thing, which increases their wealth.
This is obviously one complex story in a gazillion, but its hard to condone anti-scamming, for these reasons:
a) the people who actually do get ripped off by scams dont benifit from anti-scamming, unless you believe anti-scamming cuts down on the amount of scams in the first place
b) that anti-scamming isn't basically being a better scammer.. how can you condone scamming somebody, just because 'they tried to scam first'.. its awfully grade 3, throwing stones from glass houses, to me
If you ask me, anti-scammers are into the scamming business for worse reasons than nigerian scammers are.
Have you ever actually worked at a company in your life?
If I invented something tonight which was faster than whatever you were using today, and yet you were running into memory leaks that required restarting or rebooting servers you run 24/7, and losing thousands of dollars by the minute, but were within reach of serving your current load if you could identify the leaks, would you turn off your servers until you finished rewriting your application in my language?
He's not asking about 'performance', hes asking about how to chase memory leaks via a profiler. He's not concerned about performance, hes concerned about RAM usage due to memory leaks due to programming bugs. Please tell me people like you are not actually employed as programmers or programming project leads. You're advise is as useful as the lowest of the low tech support, "Oh, thats your problem? Well, you should just probably quit everything you're doing, and re-invest from the ground up in some other product or technology."
Its useless advice because thats not the question being asked. And just like low tech support, he probably knows more about the alternatives than you do.
The problem with people like you is that you honestly believe if you could just be totally free of governance, you wouldn't be living in a 3rd world country.
I think it takes more than a day to determine whether or not other countries are more based in your personal politics and priorities. Keep looking. May I suggest Canada, where our high rates of taxation only make you sad if you honestly believe that your before-tax earnings are a real indication of what your salary is.
If you made more money than you needed before you died, you're guilty of earning too much. By the time you die, your kids should be on solid financial and social footing, and they shouldn't need your help.
You just believe in private property to an extreme that most societies don't (well, except for the middle ages, but in those days you pretty much had to protect your own property, so you'd have to not be capitalist to assert your views.)
Your ideals were proven to be against the interest of the greater good centuries ago.
> I find it really interesting that the former excludes the latter.
God is not a distaster when it comes to science. Many influencial scientists and mathematicians were spiritual. Interestingly enough, many become spiritual when they get closer and closer to a 'oh shit I cant answer THIS' part of their contribution. I agree with you that science and faith are not mutually exclusive.
> Because atheism a priori denies the existence of an intelligence far greater than man's and therefore denies the possibility of design in nature.
This is flat out wrong. Atheism says things came about because who the fuck gives a shit. I think the biggest stumbling block in debates between religious people and athiests comes from bringing the matter of intelligence into the whole situation altogether. I am not religious because I am comfortable existing without believing in a higher power. The religious members of my family, and my religious friends, I absolutely support in their belief of a higher power. But I really do draw the line when somebody suggests that athiesm, in and of itself, is a faith which comes down to "Either we're the smartest, or aliens are." Me, I don't care.. who really cares? Its like discovering how to predict how planets orbit, and then going, "Aw crap, its predestined and somebody already knows how it works, so why bother learning more." There might be design in nature, but it doesn't help me in knowing that, and I'm waiting for science to prove it. As soon as its as irrifutable as me dropping a brick and seeing it hit the ground, well then, I guess I'll just have to conclude God was a complete asshole for making the human race work their asses off instead of him just dropping off the blueprints. To me God is a moot point; I will admit he might exist like I will admit he might also be a small piece of burnt toast that was zapped up by alients 6,000,000 years ago, surgically implanted with a super-advanced bio-mecanical brain, and installed as the janitor of the Milky Way. It just seems that humans have more of a tendancy to be wrong than right, and thats what I love about science rather than faith. It embraces proving the wrongs, where faith almost always dictates never testing it.
I will repeat; who the fuck cares.
> I'll go so far as to argue that denying the existence of God is actually hindering science.
You'd also go so far as to be dumb, because at that point, you cross the line in your argument. Many ultra-spiratual people 3000 years ago were advancing knowledge and science, and God was yet to be documented. I think, what you mean, is that denying the existence of spirituality is hindering science, and you might be right. I will make this very clear. These people, from 3000 years ago, and today, are smarter than me, and better than me, in my opinion. And some of them do favour a faith in a higher power in order to achieve their endevours of advancing human knowledge.
I really wish you realized that your argument is the easy way out, and I also wished that you understood that those who have achieved great things did so because they did not put their faith first. They put the science first, and balanced it out with some healthy faith.
I just threw up in my mouth. The purpose of the universe is to try and get as close to passing the Turing test as possible, but mathematically, nothing in the universe ever can. We're in a fishbowl.. you can't quantify intelligence because intelligence isn't and will never be measured in units.
The point of science is not to quantify intelligence, the point of science is to predict things. You can't quantify intelligence, you can only ballpark it in the short-term in your neighbourhood, and change the definition of it as the universe changes around us.
> Chance or God. Are there any other choices?
That depends on whether or not you enjoy false dichotomies. Of course there are other choices. A fucking shitload of them. I love how people so incredibly dependant on believing that they are living at the apex of human knowledge, or believing that our species will even be around at some point to learn the answer. Who the fuck cares? Random chance? An all powerful being not created by anything else that was more powerful? Could you pick two even more unlikely edge-cases?
Why would you seek out an explaination of why something has value when you see no value in it to begin with. Chances are you, you just don't like it, and thats OK. Lets hope its not coupled with a *desire* to avoid things because they're popular.. but don't feel bad for not liking something. Each and every one of us can't see the value in something that other people do see a value in, what is important is just to respect that if other people see a value in it, then there must something to it. You don't need to understand it to give credit to it.
"best places to have sex with young girls" succeeds.
"find sex with young kids" doesn't succeed.
"find sex with children" doesn't succeed.
"find sex with boys" succeeds.
"find sex with young girls" succeeds.
"sex kids" doesn't succeed.
"copulation kids" does succeed.
I think its the combination of words in a list 'sex' included in, and maybe some list, including 'kids' that fails.
Also, any search with the word "pedophilia" fails. Probably self-defense; search technology cannot make the distinction between linking to bad 'pedophilia is good' results and the far more common 'pedophilia is bad' results.
Not to take anything away from nethack, which is cool and fun and was groundbreaking, but are really comparing creating 'collision' in the form of a 2d small-res grid with creating fully 3d worlds with collision including jump, crouch, object interaction, varying other mechanics that may include riding horses, swimming, climbing, etc?
What do expect me to say? Oh shit, nethack! I guess we might as well go home and wait for BF2, Quake, Oblivion, etc to stop selling because clearly customers dont recognize that nethack made them all obsolete 20 years ago?
And before you tell me that those games didn't produce procedural content, spawning any objects with any physics programmatically can count as 'prodedural'... I was pointing out that producing procedural level data using todays physics engines is a FAR more complicated task. I think nethack's creator would find your assertion overly simplistic.
Its not a simplified version, but web coding in Java, python, PHP, etc requires you to actually know MORE rather than less. That is, you have to know how the language is allocating and releasing memory, how its actually running the code, how its dealing with I/O.. my point is that the lower level languages teach you to at least have a hint or an idea about how your interprative parser or byte-time compiler actually optimises what you code. Any experience with lower level programming helps you understand how your code is ultimately going to affect performance.
I will readily admit that I've never coded in assembler, and I think its a fact of life that this damages my ability to understand how my C code will affect performance. If you're writing in most 'web' languages (I do use that term loosely, bcause they are very useful for non web applications as well), you have yet another layer between you and knowing what idiosyncratic assumptions lie between you and the CPU.
I coded in PHP and some Java for 4 years, along with C++, so don't get me wrong. I don't say 'web programmers' and assume bad programmers. I'm just stressing the value of programming in languages that arn't as easy to program in; they tend to teach you more about the layers your code goes through until its executed.
No, but eve definately has some of the highest penalties...
Basically (and I'm sure there are some corrections here, I only have about 4 months playing experience) if your ship is destroyed, its destroyed. You need to buy another one. You can buy insurance, but that only pays for slightly less than a new ship; all the cargo, weapons, hardware, ammo that you had is gone.
Better yet, once your ship is destroyed, you end up in a pod. You can be 'podded' (ie, the pod is destroyed, and your character dies) and your character is restored to the skill level you had when you last cloned your character. I've had my ship destroyed twice, and both times it takes minimum a few days to get 'back up and running', and its a HUGE pain in the ass.
WoW has nothing on Eve in terms of the true pvp experience, and guildwars is what many seasoned Eve players would call a 'Carebear' party. A carebear is somebody that sticks to high security space (where pirates generally can't operate because they get hounded by powerful NPC police) and plays the game to avoid as much combat as possible.
Eve is freaking cool... it really does create that sense of danger, fear, and paranoia that should be a part of most mmorpgs, if you choose to participate and live life on the edge. Reprocussions for getting your ship destroyed or being podded make keeping your eye on your radar, warp-in message list, etc... I don't play mmorpgs much, but Eve has easily been the 'coolest' experience because it feels the most real in terms of risk/reward and giving the player real options to progress quickly based on skill and cunning or keep it safe and easy if they're just there for the social side.
To answer your original post, no, you can't lose your account for playing poorly, but you can essentially fail to progress at all and in some cases lose ALOT of time if you risk too much. Thats a cool concept, and one other games really havn't created a suitable game system to explore in a satisfying manner.
believe it or not most consoles even conpensate for over-scan.. really on most consoles you're seeing 640 by 440 or something.. hehe our engine apis return the actual number in code so I dont have them memorized
Thats it. Know how to program in C/C++ and you will find a job.
What it really comes down to is knowing your data structures, knowing how much memory you're using, knowing how brutal your algorithms are, knowing the time to add/remove/find elements in your structures, and once you know C/C++, everything is a cakewalk. Seriously. Jesus I still wish I was doing web programming, where wasting massive cpu was okay. Learn C/C++ and find a job where you need to keep things speedy like games or web servers that need to deliver massive amounts of requests per second. Spend 2 years doing that, and you'll need and know everything you need to know for a career in programming.
Under 100kb of code creates a fairly rich, neat demonstration of procedural game content.
Procedural is definately one way the industry is leaning, but its not the end all be all. Testing collision related bugs in games that has procedurally created collision requires some concessions to be made in terms of the game design. Its tough to create a game where content is created dynamically, but doesn't create situations where the player can get stuck, or produce other similar 'progression stopper' kind of bugs.
SpeedTree works in wide open environments, but indoors, in tight quarters, procedural content is a whole different bag. I think the biggest potential is in creating procedural textures that ensure no two places look exactly alike. But as with any new approach, procedurally generated content provides a whole new set of challenges and cons.
Slashdot Mirror
> Secondly the cost of living in India is much lower than in America, so while the Indians are poorer than Americans, imagining someone here living on $1 a day doesn't tell you how an Indian living on $1 a day is doing.
.. thats kind of like the most obvious thing anybody reading this post would point out. Really really insightful, contributory information, that really needs to be raised before anybody actually starts caring about other people.
You're right. The statement of "living on $1 a day" doesn't tell you how an Indian living on $1 a day is doing. Brilliant. Major insight. Care to actually contribute tho? I'm not interested in how $1 a day in India isn't $1 a day in the US
I'm interested in what $1 a day in India gets you. I'm still going to assume it isn't a lot tho, unless you want to suggest otherwise?
Hehe, funny stuff .. I'll bet you're pissed with the Insightful, I think you were going for the funny but I've got no mod points. :P
I used to do tech support, and I know your pain regarding word macro viruses.
.exes through email, hundreds, on a daily basis. No OS can withstand that.
.. this is a problem that mostly affects business users, using a Microsoft application.
.. Windows provides so many OS hooks for application integration, for better or for worse, that malware writers can capitalize on that. Combine it with the most popular browser being fairly insecure, liberal user rights management thats been patched over and over till kingdom come, and you have a pretty annoying OS in the hands of the right person. That API sprawl is gunna keep killing MS until they do what they never had the balls to do; kill backwards compat. I never understood that one - if anybody can absorb that kind of thing, its MS's bank account.
.. or should I say uninstallability.
Two thoughts:
- its Word, an MS program. Kinda amusing to see people assert that Macs are as bad as Windows because an MS app is rediculously un-sandboxed.
- these people HAVE to trade doc files. Its business. Still, its business folks who continue to insist that they must use Word. Its not the OSes problem, its a complete social engineering problem. They're practically sharing
Word macro viruses are not a fault of the OS, they're a fault of the application. A Microsoft Application.
I use Windows, I'm not a Mac zealot or anything, but cmon
Historically, even tho I spent two years of my life reformatting Macs because of word macro trojans, I never saw it as a flaw in the OS but rather a flaw in Word. Most techs I knew saw it that way too.
Nobody is arguing that OSes can get fucked up. They're arguing that surfing the internet in the more 'sandboxy' environment of the web is safer on a Mac than a PC. Even THEN, nobody would argue right now that its safer on a Mac, they're just arguing about the reason. Thats why the parent got a Troll. He wasn't really contributing to the dicussion about *why*, he was just pointing out that Macs can get infected. Thats a pretty trollish thing to say, because it seems to hint at an agenda based on personal experience. Like I said, I fought with that shit for 2 years, on the worse laptops ever created (the 5300s) and I still never felt that it was an OS issue.
Its very simple to me
Hey, one other thing; malware isn't a virus, and its important to distinguish between them when discussing exploitability. Lots of malware don't do anything more special than what major corperate software does in order to 'integrate' with the OS. Microsoft just bends over backwards to provide that integration
I wasn't feeding the trolls, the trolls were feeding me. See moderation of my post.
We're using this at work at the moment, just as we start up a 10 month project development cycle. I'm skeptical, because for the same reason 30 days of development estimted, might really be 60, 2 days of development might really be 4.
From what I've seen so far, they just wanna know how far along we are, not how long we think it might take.
> It appears this 419 scammer has just learnt a lesson that he should already well know, that unchecked greed will make people do the stupidist things.
.. how can you condone scamming somebody, just because 'they tried to scam first' .. its awfully grade 3, throwing stones from glass houses, to me
Thats a pretty blanket statement, which dosn't take into account the level of weath greedy people have in the first place, nor any kind of assesment of whether greedy people often do the 'right' thing, which increases their wealth.
This is obviously one complex story in a gazillion, but its hard to condone anti-scamming, for these reasons:
a) the people who actually do get ripped off by scams dont benifit from anti-scamming, unless you believe anti-scamming cuts down on the amount of scams in the first place
b) that anti-scamming isn't basically being a better scammer
If you ask me, anti-scammers are into the scamming business for worse reasons than nigerian scammers are.
Have you ever actually worked at a company in your life?
If I invented something tonight which was faster than whatever you were using today, and yet you were running into memory leaks that required restarting or rebooting servers you run 24/7, and losing thousands of dollars by the minute, but were within reach of serving your current load if you could identify the leaks, would you turn off your servers until you finished rewriting your application in my language?
He's not asking about 'performance', hes asking about how to chase memory leaks via a profiler. He's not concerned about performance, hes concerned about RAM usage due to memory leaks due to programming bugs. Please tell me people like you are not actually employed as programmers or programming project leads. You're advise is as useful as the lowest of the low tech support, "Oh, thats your problem? Well, you should just probably quit everything you're doing, and re-invest from the ground up in some other product or technology."
Its useless advice because thats not the question being asked. And just like low tech support, he probably knows more about the alternatives than you do.
You HAVE freedom.
You're free to move to the jungle.
You want freedom, with **benifits**.
The problem with people like you is that you honestly believe if you could just be totally free of governance, you wouldn't be living in a 3rd world country.
I think it takes more than a day to determine whether or not other countries are more based in your personal politics and priorities. Keep looking. May I suggest Canada, where our high rates of taxation only make you sad if you honestly believe that your before-tax earnings are a real indication of what your salary is.
If you made more money than you needed before you died, you're guilty of earning too much. By the time you die, your kids should be on solid financial and social footing, and they shouldn't need your help.
You just believe in private property to an extreme that most societies don't (well, except for the middle ages, but in those days you pretty much had to protect your own property, so you'd have to not be capitalist to assert your views.)
Your ideals were proven to be against the interest of the greater good centuries ago.
> I find it really interesting that the former excludes the latter.
.. who really cares? Its like discovering how to predict how planets orbit, and then going, "Aw crap, its predestined and somebody already knows how it works, so why bother learning more." There might be design in nature, but it doesn't help me in knowing that, and I'm waiting for science to prove it. As soon as its as irrifutable as me dropping a brick and seeing it hit the ground, well then, I guess I'll just have to conclude God was a complete asshole for making the human race work their asses off instead of him just dropping off the blueprints. To me God is a moot point; I will admit he might exist like I will admit he might also be a small piece of burnt toast that was zapped up by alients 6,000,000 years ago, surgically implanted with a super-advanced bio-mecanical brain, and installed as the janitor of the Milky Way. It just seems that humans have more of a tendancy to be wrong than right, and thats what I love about science rather than faith. It embraces proving the wrongs, where faith almost always dictates never testing it.
God is not a distaster when it comes to science. Many influencial scientists and mathematicians were spiritual. Interestingly enough, many become spiritual when they get closer and closer to a 'oh shit I cant answer THIS' part of their contribution. I agree with you that science and faith are not mutually exclusive.
> Because atheism a priori denies the existence of an intelligence far greater than man's and therefore denies the possibility of design in nature.
This is flat out wrong. Atheism says things came about because who the fuck gives a shit. I think the biggest stumbling block in debates between religious people and athiests comes from bringing the matter of intelligence into the whole situation altogether. I am not religious because I am comfortable existing without believing in a higher power. The religious members of my family, and my religious friends, I absolutely support in their belief of a higher power. But I really do draw the line when somebody suggests that athiesm, in and of itself, is a faith which comes down to "Either we're the smartest, or aliens are." Me, I don't care
I will repeat; who the fuck cares.
> I'll go so far as to argue that denying the existence of God is actually hindering science.
You'd also go so far as to be dumb, because at that point, you cross the line in your argument. Many ultra-spiratual people 3000 years ago were advancing knowledge and science, and God was yet to be documented. I think, what you mean, is that denying the existence of spirituality is hindering science, and you might be right. I will make this very clear. These people, from 3000 years ago, and today, are smarter than me, and better than me, in my opinion. And some of them do favour a faith in a higher power in order to achieve their endevours of advancing human knowledge.
I really wish you realized that your argument is the easy way out, and I also wished that you understood that those who have achieved great things did so because they did not put their faith first. They put the science first, and balanced it out with some healthy faith.
> quantify intelligence
.. you can't quantify intelligence because intelligence isn't and will never be measured in units.
I just threw up in my mouth. The purpose of the universe is to try and get as close to passing the Turing test as possible, but mathematically, nothing in the universe ever can. We're in a fishbowl
The point of science is not to quantify intelligence, the point of science is to predict things. You can't quantify intelligence, you can only ballpark it in the short-term in your neighbourhood, and change the definition of it as the universe changes around us.
> Chance or God. Are there any other choices?
That depends on whether or not you enjoy false dichotomies. Of course there are other choices. A fucking shitload of them. I love how people so incredibly dependant on believing that they are living at the apex of human knowledge, or believing that our species will even be around at some point to learn the answer. Who the fuck cares? Random chance? An all powerful being not created by anything else that was more powerful? Could you pick two even more unlikely edge-cases?
you wrote complex svg drawings in a simple xml editor? got a screen shot of this masterpiece?
you link to an MS app that can't output to SVG in an article about an application that is for greating SVG graphics?
I've been on slashdot for 8 years, and I never truely believed in astroturfing until your post.
Isn't it about time you go rile up the WoW nerds on blizzards forum?
Why would you seek out an explaination of why something has value when you see no value in it to begin with. Chances are you, you just don't like it, and thats OK. Lets hope its not coupled with a *desire* to avoid things because they're popular .. but don't feel bad for not liking something. Each and every one of us can't see the value in something that other people do see a value in, what is important is just to respect that if other people see a value in it, then there must something to it. You don't need to understand it to give credit to it.
"how to have sex with underage girls" succeeds.
"best places to have sex with young girls" succeeds.
"find sex with young kids" doesn't succeed.
"find sex with children" doesn't succeed.
"find sex with boys" succeeds.
"find sex with young girls" succeeds.
"sex kids" doesn't succeed.
"copulation kids" does succeed.
I think its the combination of words in a list 'sex' included in, and maybe some list, including 'kids' that fails.
Also, any search with the word "pedophilia" fails. Probably self-defense; search technology cannot make the distinction between linking to bad 'pedophilia is good' results and the far more common 'pedophilia is bad' results.
I was thinking the same thing the other day as I was driving my SUV ...
"Jesus, what the hell am I driving? What if I collided with a building?"
Suffice to say, my new car is 6 stories high and covered in concrete.
Jesus, you have to be kidding me.
... I was pointing out that producing procedural level data using todays physics engines is a FAR more complicated task. I think nethack's creator would find your assertion overly simplistic.
Not to take anything away from nethack, which is cool and fun and was groundbreaking, but are really comparing creating 'collision' in the form of a 2d small-res grid with creating fully 3d worlds with collision including jump, crouch, object interaction, varying other mechanics that may include riding horses, swimming, climbing, etc?
What do expect me to say? Oh shit, nethack! I guess we might as well go home and wait for BF2, Quake, Oblivion, etc to stop selling because clearly customers dont recognize that nethack made them all obsolete 20 years ago?
And before you tell me that those games didn't produce procedural content, spawning any objects with any physics programmatically can count as 'prodedural'
Its not a simplified version, but web coding in Java, python, PHP, etc requires you to actually know MORE rather than less. That is, you have to know how the language is allocating and releasing memory, how its actually running the code, how its dealing with I/O .. my point is that the lower level languages teach you to at least have a hint or an idea about how your interprative parser or byte-time compiler actually optimises what you code. Any experience with lower level programming helps you understand how your code is ultimately going to affect performance.
I will readily admit that I've never coded in assembler, and I think its a fact of life that this damages my ability to understand how my C code will affect performance. If you're writing in most 'web' languages (I do use that term loosely, bcause they are very useful for non web applications as well), you have yet another layer between you and knowing what idiosyncratic assumptions lie between you and the CPU.
I coded in PHP and some Java for 4 years, along with C++, so don't get me wrong. I don't say 'web programmers' and assume bad programmers. I'm just stressing the value of programming in languages that arn't as easy to program in; they tend to teach you more about the layers your code goes through until its executed.
Amusing, sure, but it should be noted before it gets out of hand that all forms of human propulsion were against the rules.
:)
That makes the inevitable fart jokes less witty too, just to be a pedantic hard-ass.
Not unusual ... trick jumping/weapon maps have been around as long as quake 1.
No, but eve definately has some of the highest penalties ...
... it really does create that sense of danger, fear, and paranoia that should be a part of most mmorpgs, if you choose to participate and live life on the edge. Reprocussions for getting your ship destroyed or being podded make keeping your eye on your radar, warp-in message list, etc ... I don't play mmorpgs much, but Eve has easily been the 'coolest' experience because it feels the most real in terms of risk/reward and giving the player real options to progress quickly based on skill and cunning or keep it safe and easy if they're just there for the social side.
Basically (and I'm sure there are some corrections here, I only have about 4 months playing experience) if your ship is destroyed, its destroyed. You need to buy another one. You can buy insurance, but that only pays for slightly less than a new ship; all the cargo, weapons, hardware, ammo that you had is gone.
Better yet, once your ship is destroyed, you end up in a pod. You can be 'podded' (ie, the pod is destroyed, and your character dies) and your character is restored to the skill level you had when you last cloned your character. I've had my ship destroyed twice, and both times it takes minimum a few days to get 'back up and running', and its a HUGE pain in the ass.
WoW has nothing on Eve in terms of the true pvp experience, and guildwars is what many seasoned Eve players would call a 'Carebear' party. A carebear is somebody that sticks to high security space (where pirates generally can't operate because they get hounded by powerful NPC police) and plays the game to avoid as much combat as possible.
Eve is freaking cool
To answer your original post, no, you can't lose your account for playing poorly, but you can essentially fail to progress at all and in some cases lose ALOT of time if you risk too much. Thats a cool concept, and one other games really havn't created a suitable game system to explore in a satisfying manner.
believe it or not most consoles even conpensate for over-scan .. really on most consoles you're seeing 640 by 440 or something .. hehe our engine apis return the actual number in code so I dont have them memorized
Thats it. Know how to program in C/C++ and you will find a job.
What it really comes down to is knowing your data structures, knowing how much memory you're using, knowing how brutal your algorithms are, knowing the time to add/remove/find elements in your structures, and once you know C/C++, everything is a cakewalk. Seriously. Jesus I still wish I was doing web programming, where wasting massive cpu was okay. Learn C/C++ and find a job where you need to keep things speedy like games or web servers that need to deliver massive amounts of requests per second. Spend 2 years doing that, and you'll need and know everything you need to know for a career in programming.
http://games.slashdot.org/games/04/04/15/1239203.s html?tid=127&tid=186&tid=204
Under 100kb of code creates a fairly rich, neat demonstration of procedural game content.
Procedural is definately one way the industry is leaning, but its not the end all be all. Testing collision related bugs in games that has procedurally created collision requires some concessions to be made in terms of the game design. Its tough to create a game where content is created dynamically, but doesn't create situations where the player can get stuck, or produce other similar 'progression stopper' kind of bugs.
SpeedTree works in wide open environments, but indoors, in tight quarters, procedural content is a whole different bag. I think the biggest potential is in creating procedural textures that ensure no two places look exactly alike. But as with any new approach, procedurally generated content provides a whole new set of challenges and cons.