Without boost, you don't get stuff like bind, lambda, phoenix, enable_if, any, graph, GIL, xpressive, spirit, fusion,....
I've heard the "massive amounts of code" gibberish several times. You *don't* have to import boost into your own project. Keep it an external dependency. Since a substantial portion is header-only, all that is necessary is another include path.
Oh yes, you may try to write all this code on your own, but unlike your homemade stuff, this has already been tested and is mature, thanks to the peer review in boost. This is especially true with boost.threads; any threading library must be very thoroughly tested. Do you have the time to do that?
Among the only libraries where I partially agree are signals and program options. Note though that signals has been superseded by signals2.
Germany, where you can watch two people shit in eachothers mouths while doing backflips, and where you'll get arrested for doing "the gun" with your hand.
Funny thing is, in the US it is exactly the other way round. Dozens of firearms in the house, even automatic ones? Hey, no problem! Dare to show a female nipple on TV? This goes straight to the Supreme Court.
These points are relevant, but the problem no.1 simply is the user. The user is accustomed to Windows, plain and simple. For many people, Windows equals "the PC". Anything else than a Windows GUI feels unfamiliar, and broken.
This cannot be fixed with technology. This is the area of salesmen, of PR, marketing. OSX is wildly different from Windows, yet it sells. Why? Not because of the tech (which is partially very good), but because Jobs knows how to sell.
I know some artists who tried this out, only to find themselves in a failing project.
The way to go is to create some prototype with placeholders as game art. Something that can be demonstrated to artists. This attracts a lot more people than a paper with fancy ideas. However, guess what - most of the time, the paper with fancy ideas is presented. No wonder the experienced artists stay away (unless they get paid).
Also, most projects don't have something resembling a lead designer; instead, one of the programmers is the lead. This is a bad idea, since the designer is the one who cares most about the "big picture", the overall design. The lead designer is the one who takes care of keeping things together and coherent. This is a full-time job, and often underestimated, especially by open-source game projects.
I have seen impressive screenshots of the XreaL shadow-mapping capabilities. However, other engine projects seem to have more/better artists. It is not easy to show off all the latest tech using modified Q3A maps.
In fact, I am uncertain if using the Q3A code as a base for something like XreaL is wise. It might be better to start the graphics part from scratch, since the Q3A graphics stuff is from another era.
Since 4.2, KDE4 has become quite usable. I already prefer it over KDE 3.5.
The real edge of KDE over Gnome has always been the tech, though. kioslaves vs. gnomevfs is one example, KParts another. Add Qt 4.5 to this, and it becomes obvious that KDE is vastly superior under the hood. But, this is not what users are interested in. I do think that KDE4 learned a lesson or two from Gnome about this. I just hope they don't start removing all options because they think the "user may be confused" (just like with the infamous printing dialog Linus Torvalds was so frustrated about).
Note that this study isn't undisputed. Also, it was made with today's population, which is not a good sample (thats one of the reasons for the dispute). Basically, people who are in their 20s today often learned much longer and much more than older generations, which had this attitude of learning one job ONCE and then never anything else again. I wouldn't be surprised to see vastly different results of such a study in, say, 20 years.
Other studies also showed that while younger minds are faster, they also make more errors than older ones. This is likely to go hand in hand with experience.
I'm not denying the decline, but I am arguing its actual impact. It certainly is NOT a good discrimination for IT. IT has several fundamental patterns, mechanisms, etc. learn them well, and you will recognize them almost everywhere. Once you managed to do that, learning new technologies and understanding them becomes significantly easier. Learning the patterns should be done at a young age, but recognizing and applying them, well, this is something anybody at any age could do, and this is the really important bit in operative IT.
"So these people are survivors of a holocaust that came out of their technology."
This is wrong. It came out of their decadence and arrogance. They treated cylons like lowly slaves, and not as equals. This is the very reason why all these genocidal wars happened in the past. In the finale, they finally DID see cylons as equals. This would have been a much better ending: for the first time in history, humans and cylons rebuild a civilization *together*.
Matrix Revolutions wasn't posthuman. To be honest, I'm not sure what Matrix Revolution was supposed to be.
A civilization where there are all sorts of mixes between baseline human, cyborgs, and purely artificial intelligences is a transhuman one. A civilization where baseline humans are a minority would be a posthuman one.
Dismantle the entire fleet, and build a small colony with the parts. Concentrate on building essential infrastructure like mines, farms, canals and eventually irrigation, and create electricity as soon as possible.
The scientific portion of the colonists could start writing their mathematical knowledge into sturdy tomes that last for generations, since mathematics is absolutely essential for eventual rediscovery of how their stuff worked. Also, mention the basics of the jump drives, material science, power generation, engineering in general. Don't necessarily go into details. It is not important to explain all of it completely, but it IS important to mention that these things really work, because then its no longer a question of "if" this is possible, but only "how".
All of this is doable in a generation. They did it alredy on New Caprica, a planet with significantly less resources. There is no reason why they couldn't do it on Earth. Of course they wouldn't be able to pull off a Caprica city from scratch.
Ultimately, I think their pre-fall civilization made a colossal mistake by sticking to these 12 planets. Spreading out is how species can increase their odds of surviving. Then again, apparently their civilization was utterly decadent, lazy, corrupt. Still, it is a bit odd that they never spread out more.
And this is very hard to buy. We mostly saw the Colonial military, not the civilians. These may want to continue their old life as much as possible. Over 40000 people agreeing 100% on an idea as radical as reverting to the stone age is implausible. At least a few of them should have a different opinion. The only logical conclusion would have been a split; pro-tech and anti-tech. Both go their separate ways. There is room for both. Its a big planet, after all.
One of my favourite scenes in the first 90 minutes was when Galactica jumped right in front of the colony. The Cylon batteries gave that ship one hell of a beating, and it brushed that off easily. Talk about a tough ship.
And then they RAM Galactica into the colony, easily punching a hole through the colony's hull. On top of that, this ship is still operational and capable of jumping afterwards! Add Galactica's age to that and one cannot help but be amazed at how brilliant this ship is constructed.
The idea is hardly new; its the whole luddite principle.
But as you said, its SciFi, so lets float another idea. Create a combineed Human/Cylon civilization (something which never happened before, not in Kobol, not on the old Earth, not on the Colonies), and let the two merge, to become a post-human civilization.
Indeed. In fact, this is the single biggest problem with luddite attitude. After reverting to a hunter-gatherer existence, the romantic view of a simple life with mother nature dissipates, and gives way to the utter horrors of this lifestyle. No medicine, no energy, no tools, no houses, high mortality rate etc.
They may have been weary of high-tech after being surrounded by it for five years, but now they are stuck with NO tech at all, for the rest of their lives.
Well, dismantle the ships then. That would have been a very good idea anyway, since they surely contain tons of refined material. (Tylium!) They could have prepared themselves, reinforced their new colony, and arm it to the teeth in case Cavil wants to say Hi. The new earth was far away from the cylon colony, so it would have taken them a good while to comb through all the habitable planets.
And, if Lee wants a simpler life, then *he* should have chosen it for *himself*, not for everybody.
Lee's conclusion made no sense. The situation was already good for another try. I mean, Cylons and Humans were at peace, so rebuilding a Human-Cylon civilization was a possibility. The rebel cylons and the humans were truly allied, and even the Centurions weren't enemies anymore. They had first-hand knowledge of what happens when they don't treat artificial lifeforms as equals AND a chance at rebuilding a hybrid civilization from scratch, therefore breaking the cycle of death. (Honestly, with this shiny advanced Cylon tech and the sturdy, tough Colonial tech, that would have been one hell of a civilization.)
Instead, they threw it all away, and opted to become cavemen. This is the equivalent of running away from the problem. The final minutes demonstrated this. With all Colonial and Cylon knowledge lost, WE are now doomed to repeat these mistakes, since the problem still is unresolved. The only true way of breaking the cycle is for society to acknowledge that artificial lifeforms are not of lesser status.
Unlike animals, we are not necessarily bound to our instincts. We do not have to slavishly follow the "survival of the fittest" path. A "survival of the fittest" society is a dystopia.
There is no R&D involved in patenting a damn progress bar, tabs, RLE + VLC etc. These are weaponized trivial patents, used to crush competitors and/or for extortion.
Non-trivial patents are another matter. But, say hello to submarine patents. Lets use the Creative Labs example: Carmack figured out the ZFail Stencil Shadow method on his own for Doom 3. Little did he know that a guy at Creative Labs figured it out years before. One cannot blame Carmack, there are bazillion patents, it is impossible to examine all of them. But, after sitting on that patent for YEARS (and doing nothing with it), Creative decides all of a sudden that they have to enforce it, and extort id into including their EAX stuff in Doom3. Yes, this helps innovation.
I didn't say software patents are bad in general. I listed examples for inexcusable abuses that warrant a patent reform. Today it is completely impossible to write software without infringing some trivial patent. This must change.
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Without boost, you don't get stuff like bind, lambda, phoenix, enable_if, any, graph, GIL, xpressive, spirit, fusion, ....
I've heard the "massive amounts of code" gibberish several times. You *don't* have to import boost into your own project. Keep it an external dependency. Since a substantial portion is header-only, all that is necessary is another include path.
Oh yes, you may try to write all this code on your own, but unlike your homemade stuff, this has already been tested and is mature, thanks to the peer review in boost. This is especially true with boost.threads; any threading library must be very thoroughly tested. Do you have the time to do that?
Among the only libraries where I partially agree are signals and program options. Note though that signals has been superseded by signals2.
Germany, where you can watch two people shit in eachothers mouths while doing backflips, and where you'll get arrested for doing "the gun" with your hand.
Funny thing is, in the US it is exactly the other way round. Dozens of firearms in the house, even automatic ones? Hey, no problem! Dare to show a female nipple on TV? This goes straight to the Supreme Court.
These points are relevant, but the problem no.1 simply is the user. The user is accustomed to Windows, plain and simple. For many people, Windows equals "the PC". Anything else than a Windows GUI feels unfamiliar, and broken.
This cannot be fixed with technology. This is the area of salesmen, of PR, marketing. OSX is wildly different from Windows, yet it sells. Why? Not because of the tech (which is partially very good), but because Jobs knows how to sell.
I know some artists who tried this out, only to find themselves in a failing project.
The way to go is to create some prototype with placeholders as game art. Something that can be demonstrated to artists. This attracts a lot more people than a paper with fancy ideas. However, guess what - most of the time, the paper with fancy ideas is presented. No wonder the experienced artists stay away (unless they get paid).
Also, most projects don't have something resembling a lead designer; instead, one of the programmers is the lead. This is a bad idea, since the designer is the one who cares most about the "big picture", the overall design. The lead designer is the one who takes care of keeping things together and coherent. This is a full-time job, and often underestimated, especially by open-source game projects.
The topic is the XreaL engine. Not games.
I have seen impressive screenshots of the XreaL shadow-mapping capabilities. However, other engine projects seem to have more/better artists. It is not easy to show off all the latest tech using modified Q3A maps.
In fact, I am uncertain if using the Q3A code as a base for something like XreaL is wise. It might be better to start the graphics part from scratch, since the Q3A graphics stuff is from another era.
Or, it is to *become* the superior intelligences, aka. the transhumanism idea.
Qt 3 vs. Qt 4 is a HUGE jump. Why did you port your app in the first place?
Since 4.2, KDE4 has become quite usable. I already prefer it over KDE 3.5.
The real edge of KDE over Gnome has always been the tech, though. kioslaves vs. gnomevfs is one example, KParts another. Add Qt 4.5 to this, and it becomes obvious that KDE is vastly superior under the hood. But, this is not what users are interested in. I do think that KDE4 learned a lesson or two from Gnome about this. I just hope they don't start removing all options because they think the "user may be confused" (just like with the infamous printing dialog Linus Torvalds was so frustrated about).
REINS?
Oh my.
How about .... holding the kid's hand?
Or, get yourself some skills that aren't common. Like a finished CS degree. A PhD in CS is worth something.
Note that this study isn't undisputed. Also, it was made with today's population, which is not a good sample (thats one of the reasons for the dispute). Basically, people who are in their 20s today often learned much longer and much more than older generations, which had this attitude of learning one job ONCE and then never anything else again. I wouldn't be surprised to see vastly different results of such a study in, say, 20 years.
Other studies also showed that while younger minds are faster, they also make more errors than older ones. This is likely to go hand in hand with experience.
I'm not denying the decline, but I am arguing its actual impact. It certainly is NOT a good discrimination for IT. IT has several fundamental patterns, mechanisms, etc. learn them well, and you will recognize them almost everywhere. Once you managed to do that, learning new technologies and understanding them becomes significantly easier. Learning the patterns should be done at a young age, but recognizing and applying them, well, this is something anybody at any age could do, and this is the really important bit in operative IT.
"So these people are survivors of a holocaust that came out of their technology."
This is wrong. It came out of their decadence and arrogance. They treated cylons like lowly slaves, and not as equals. This is the very reason why all these genocidal wars happened in the past. In the finale, they finally DID see cylons as equals. This would have been a much better ending: for the first time in history, humans and cylons rebuild a civilization *together*.
Matrix Revolutions wasn't posthuman. To be honest, I'm not sure what Matrix Revolution was supposed to be.
A civilization where there are all sorts of mixes between baseline human, cyborgs, and purely artificial intelligences is a transhuman one. A civilization where baseline humans are a minority would be a posthuman one.
Dismantle the entire fleet, and build a small colony with the parts. Concentrate on building essential infrastructure like mines, farms, canals and eventually irrigation, and create electricity as soon as possible.
The scientific portion of the colonists could start writing their mathematical knowledge into sturdy tomes that last for generations, since mathematics is absolutely essential for eventual rediscovery of how their stuff worked. Also, mention the basics of the jump drives, material science, power generation, engineering in general. Don't necessarily go into details. It is not important to explain all of it completely, but it IS important to mention that these things really work, because then its no longer a question of "if" this is possible, but only "how".
All of this is doable in a generation. They did it alredy on New Caprica, a planet with significantly less resources. There is no reason why they couldn't do it on Earth. Of course they wouldn't be able to pull off a Caprica city from scratch.
Ultimately, I think their pre-fall civilization made a colossal mistake by sticking to these 12 planets. Spreading out is how species can increase their odds of surviving. Then again, apparently their civilization was utterly decadent, lazy, corrupt. Still, it is a bit odd that they never spread out more.
And this is very hard to buy. We mostly saw the Colonial military, not the civilians. These may want to continue their old life as much as possible. Over 40000 people agreeing 100% on an idea as radical as reverting to the stone age is implausible. At least a few of them should have a different opinion. The only logical conclusion would have been a split; pro-tech and anti-tech. Both go their separate ways. There is room for both. Its a big planet, after all.
One of my favourite scenes in the first 90 minutes was when Galactica jumped right in front of the colony. The Cylon batteries gave that ship one hell of a beating, and it brushed that off easily. Talk about a tough ship.
And then they RAM Galactica into the colony, easily punching a hole through the colony's hull. On top of that, this ship is still operational and capable of jumping afterwards! Add Galactica's age to that and one cannot help but be amazed at how brilliant this ship is constructed.
The idea is hardly new; its the whole luddite principle.
But as you said, its SciFi, so lets float another idea. Create a combineed Human/Cylon civilization (something which never happened before, not in Kobol, not on the old Earth, not on the Colonies), and let the two merge, to become a post-human civilization.
Indeed. In fact, this is the single biggest problem with luddite attitude. After reverting to a hunter-gatherer existence, the romantic view of a simple life with mother nature dissipates, and gives way to the utter horrors of this lifestyle. No medicine, no energy, no tools, no houses, high mortality rate etc.
They may have been weary of high-tech after being surrounded by it for five years, but now they are stuck with NO tech at all, for the rest of their lives.
Well, dismantle the ships then. That would have been a very good idea anyway, since they surely contain tons of refined material. (Tylium!) They could have prepared themselves, reinforced their new colony, and arm it to the teeth in case Cavil wants to say Hi. The new earth was far away from the cylon colony, so it would have taken them a good while to comb through all the habitable planets.
And, if Lee wants a simpler life, then *he* should have chosen it for *himself*, not for everybody.
Lee's conclusion made no sense. The situation was already good for another try. I mean, Cylons and Humans were at peace, so rebuilding a Human-Cylon civilization was a possibility. The rebel cylons and the humans were truly allied, and even the Centurions weren't enemies anymore. They had first-hand knowledge of what happens when they don't treat artificial lifeforms as equals AND a chance at rebuilding a hybrid civilization from scratch, therefore breaking the cycle of death. (Honestly, with this shiny advanced Cylon tech and the sturdy, tough Colonial tech, that would have been one hell of a civilization.)
Instead, they threw it all away, and opted to become cavemen. This is the equivalent of running away from the problem. The final minutes demonstrated this. With all Colonial and Cylon knowledge lost, WE are now doomed to repeat these mistakes, since the problem still is unresolved. The only true way of breaking the cycle is for society to acknowledge that artificial lifeforms are not of lesser status.
Easy: replace the entire arm.
Though it would look weird when your arm has "made in china" written on it.
Unlike animals, we are not necessarily bound to our instincts. We do not have to slavishly follow the "survival of the fittest" path. A "survival of the fittest" society is a dystopia.
How can a *Variable Bit Rate* MP3 be encoded with a *fixed* kbps number?
There is no R&D involved in patenting a damn progress bar, tabs, RLE + VLC etc. These are weaponized trivial patents, used to crush competitors and/or for extortion.
Non-trivial patents are another matter. But, say hello to submarine patents. Lets use the Creative Labs example: Carmack figured out the ZFail Stencil Shadow method on his own for Doom 3. Little did he know that a guy at Creative Labs figured it out years before. One cannot blame Carmack, there are bazillion patents, it is impossible to examine all of them. But, after sitting on that patent for YEARS (and doing nothing with it), Creative decides all of a sudden that they have to enforce it, and extort id into including their EAX stuff in Doom3. Yes, this helps innovation.
I didn't say software patents are bad in general. I listed examples for inexcusable abuses that warrant a patent reform. Today it is completely impossible to write software without infringing some trivial patent. This must change.