Awww, I RTFA after all... and they're right... it's not that there's "no open source community" - it's that there shouldn't be one (OSS should be a standard corporate term) if OSS is to thrive.
I'm sorry for sounding like flamebait, but no one who's worked on the heavy open-source projects would agree with that! Look at who started the GPL! Look at who started GNU/Linux! Look at the front-runners! You can literally POINT at certain individuals and say, "THERE'S an individual that pushed the OSS initiative!" The communities develop as they share information! They develop as programmers work together! Most end users don't see that, and I can tell you that you'll also only see that if you work as part of a major opensource contributer - you're talking about this as if it were some kind of epiphany but it's just common sense! Places like sourceforge will only give you space for a project - they won't give you HQ or secret hideout or decoder rings, bub. This is real life - mincing of words doesn't change the bottom line.
So the add-on questions would have to be: how much methane is released by these plants, which plants are they, and how much could be cut down by removing them and planting others?
Oh and don't let those other slashdotters scare you - yeah, it's a big area of research, and there's a lot more info to cover, but she's gotten this far give her some credit!... after reading the class description, I'm honestly impressed. Good luck!
Ask 'em about Elliptic curves and probability-related algorithms - those are both pretty hot in the academic world atm, iirc. Btw, you may need to search through a few before you find a researcher willing to talk - or willing to fill in the blanks (which might take a few months) - but if you find a good one, the problem won't be getting 'em to talk, it'll be getting 'em to shut up about the topic;-)
Most solid-state memory is pretty darn slow, and the stuff that's fast costs major $$$...
I'll buy it when it gets faster & cheaper - but then, flash *is* much faster than the ol' floppy - I was glad to see that go...
Um. It's easy to make fun of a game like this if you're expected to pay for it, but the fact of the matter is that you can play the game free of charge without any hindrances - the only reason to pay is to own land and get a larger weekly in-game allowance (land ownership is overrated unless you're using it to sell something or are renting it out like Anshe Chung does,;-D - there's even a two-way exchange rate of currency. Evil? Probably. )
Besides, rules are rules in any game; if you break 'em, you suffer the consequences, right? In this one, the Linden Corporation could just limit the power they've given users, but instead they still offer enough control to allow a user to potentially bring a server to its knees (and quite easily at that) - for that, their "purgatory" is pretty nice.
Yeah, MS seems to realize that, too. Wtf are their legal and PR people thinking ?! They should be sacked. Sergio Amadeu shouldn't be the one under fire, here. Microsoft, please fire the idiots who decided that they needed to exercise the ability to limit a credable individual's voiced opinion because he badmouthed the company. What better way to shout out "YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!" than to go "cut-throat" and attack this man in a legal battle for his statements. That's really petty. I like MS products, especially visual studio, but with fools within running amok, I'm certainly glad that opensource is growing so rapidly, because the company is going to choke on itself if it continues down the current path.
A smarter man/team with some tech background would strike up a correspondance with the individual, and transform the relationship into something useable (or *gasp* even marketable) by the company.
And there are so many different ports from the community... skulltag, zdaemon, jdoom, zdoom, DoomGL, zdoomGL, Zdaemon has CTF and even UT-style sounds... they're still being constantly upgraded by members of the community all the time.
Doom will never die.
Well, for our own small company, one of our ideas was to create systems filled with all opensource products, such as OpenOffice.org, Image Magick, etc... (and Tribes:-D), and say it's pre-bundled with loads of great software for business solutions, games, music, composition, etc. One thing that Linux GUI's have that Windows doesn't is that they're free.:-)
That's all well and good, but regardless, can someone at least give the name of the sonatas in question ? Even if the report is to be believed, (and heck, if one reads the linked article, it makes sense, especially the part about mouse toys) there are a lot of compositions by Mozart... to say they do better than other music in general, is, in and of itself, too vague and unscientific. I'd like titles, please ?
And while we're at it, shouldn't we examine what makes them so powerful ? We certainly have no shortage of great minds: every University and College *I know of* has an incredibly grueling music theory degree, and after taking a simple piano appreciation class, this CS student knows better than to take any more music courses regarding song analysis!
PS - (I'm actually *shocked* no one has said it yet, but... this story reminds me of Neal Stephen's book, Snowcrash !)
John Woo and Samus Aran ? I can only hope. Re: Storytelling in games: I agree, but a lot of the fun of Deus Ex comes from the reading material and Shadowrun-like environment/atmosphere: there's so much, and it gives you an insight into the game's world.
After reading an IGN article that interviewed the screenwriter about the Deus Ex Movie, I'm not so certain that it will become a good movie, because they don't specify even half of what made the game truly memorable. My fingers are crossed, however.
Of all the 13 or so games that were turned into movies, each broke away and added to the original plots/stories, and none of the base games had much of a serious plot to begin with -- this allowed for much more of an open canvas, I imagine, but it also hurt the audience reception slightly... another issue is picking a game that has a complex story rather than one with more built-in artistic license... i.e. Chronotrigger vs. Dungeon Siege. We have YET to see a movie that sticks to the original story at least marginially (Mortal Kombat being the closest) AND with a complex plot... Name ONE. Resident Evil doesn't count:-p.
IMHO, the things that make a movie good are plot/ story/ acting/ environment-atmosphere/ music/ scope/ replayability.
For a game, they are handling/ environment-atmosphere/ music/ features/ replayability/ plot/ story. Any one of those things can make either type stand out as "good", but a combination of at least three of each makes for memorability -- if you want a classic, you need more, and if you want a good conversion, the high marks can be in different areas, but if you want a classic (not yet seen) then my theory is that the high marks in the cateogires must also stay in tact along with anything else during translation from console to cinema, which makes for twice as many problems -- like attempting to roll several dice to get the same group of numbers twice in a row. It doesn't seem that hard, with ready-made music and great game storylines already out there, but have we seen it yet ? I'm not saying that Tomb Raider wasn't good, but I am saying (like everyone else) Chronotrigger would be better, (even in terms of $$ made... after all, even if the ratings say it sucks, I'm still going to see the Chronotrigger movie... and this truth, in and of itself, sucks).
Another issue is fan ideas... there are so many differing notions and ideas that you can play with for games2movies because so much of the discussion has been left for imagination and debate (think "The Matrix" and compare with its sequels.)
Unreal Tournament 2004 is a prime example: it's far better than both 2003 and Quake3 due to more features/replayability/plot/atmosphere/music/handl ing, especially with the sports theme/atmosphere/environment which really lends itself to the other categories/dimensions listed. It could make a great movie, but because there is a lack of story, the need for artistic license to fill in the blanks could potentially destroy it. In other words, I, for one, think that both game and movie could be good, if you add more rpg elements and the game's engine to the team management (think Pokemon meets Shadowrun), or explain the respawning like the Matrix, where unlimited energy, wireless connections, cloning vats, replicators, and other planets take the place of a computer-generated universe -- hey, it'd give an in-game excuse for network lag, okay ? Players jack in, and the connections to their respective "tournament" bodies are only as good as the network:-) But I doubt everyone else feels the same way I do.
All in all, John Woo or not, I've not seen anyone with the balls, cash
The OEM sample price is about $1,092 USD...but don't ask me what that means for consumers...
It means that five years from now, it'll cost $10.92 or less.
We all win. With the increasing # of sites, content, web services, spam, popup attacks, and "please allow us to rape your computer" certificates to download, (that's the main reason I use Firefox when on Windows now: because you can't tell I.E. to not accept those damned installation certificates, nor block requests to change the homepage.) it becomes equally more difficult to find what you're looking for, especially when it's not something that everyone else looks for, via Google's site ranking technology. Because they fight to be the best, we get cool things like ftp searches, grep and regexp searching of dmoz.org , video, image, and music searches, even linux and bsd search-specific pages. gMail, Microsoft's entry, and now Gigablast are all rewards we get to reap from each company attempting to set its roots deeper into the Internet like weeds vying for the same piece of dirt.
We are extremely lucky, but then I doubt more than a handful search engines will ever hold top ranks at one time, due to the fact that they are so specialized in what they do. Just hope Gigablast and Google don't decide to create new IM service, too.
As sick and hateful as we all find it, legit spamming (in large numbers) does seem to produce income, although it also produces dire hatred by all. It's disgusting, because the real truth here is that spamming actually targets the demigraphic of people who are truly most likely to spend their large quantities of hard-earned, overvalued, stamped, signed paper & plastic: old people in retirement, impressionable people, and young people with access to $.
I wouldn't have much of a problem with it if it were not for the malicious nature that is ingrained within those who use it. (And in fact I analyzed what I would need to do to start it, until realizing that the services would be abused to take advantage of those who can't help themselves.) If it were more reliable and better structured, I'd feel okay with it. After all, there are hands down, enough ways to efficiently deal with it and cut down on it. A legal protocol for a spam-newsgroup system where people can filter them to various folders would be of interest to me... hmmm... (imagine Gameworks spamming people with deals to take to the nearest arcade ? Or I remember for awhile that the Toyota dealer in my area had an insane family deal, buy one actual car, get the next for a dollar -- truth ! I wanted to split the cost with a friend, but neither of us had enough to pay.) Initially, I thought, "hey, this is great... if they're just going after spammers who scam, I'll have to read more on it," but if you spam, then you're either ignoring the demigraphic, or don't care about it.
I hate spam, not for the fact that it hounds many of my emails with 3-10 messages per day, but because of the people who are literally preyed upon by it for their money. That is reason enough for spammers to spend jail-time, and lots of it. The government didn't go far enough.
Here's but a tiny fraction: Bitwise arithmetic, polymorphism, virtual functions, template templates, operator-overloading, cast-overloading, low-level memory pointer casting tricks, optimizations, prime fields, and of course the STL... these things alone take quite a bit of time to learn. If your boss believes that even this chunk of concepts can be digested into a form in such a way that could possibly give equal footing to people with experience levels differing by as much as 1/6th, then he's got some explaining to do.
Still, maybe a person with a background in C with C# and/or Java could theoretically master C++ in a short period of time.
But, let's just ignore the semantics and tricks, for a second, and simply assume it IS easy to pick up in two years, since not all people learn at the same speed, so there should be at least a small-medium-sized amount of 2year-experienced brilliance... then we must focus on style and habit:
Nutshell: The differences are familiarity, code modularity, and time/energy efficiency.
Verbose: By 12 years, it's like reading and writing. You debug your code before you write it. You know every possible mistake your code could come up with, across various compilers, and how to deal with one when it arises -- since you know that no matter how good you are, errors will crop up. On the other hand, two years of experience can still have you wracking your brain for a hideously irritating and trite error that you've somehow overlooked.
Your ever-growing library of re-useable code snippets can, by now, create at least a working framework for anything under the sun within any requested period of time.
Speaking of time, you can save lots, since you're not trying out ideas which are new to you (and old to everyone else)... you're doing what works. You're not still practicing "binge" programming where you work 11 hours at a time or more (20+ at a time for those in late teens/early twenties who want to destroy themselves) -- instead, you work smartly, with breaks, and in a more reasonable fashion. You have a planned structure even before you start to code. You're so familiar with the language enough that if there is something new, you assimilate it quite easily into your own ADT<tools> of tricks.
That is what experience means, and it is attainable by anyone... all in good, respected time.
PS - C++ ain't goin' nowhere. And if you java/C++ programmers want somethin' really interesting to chew on, go to s-mail.org and look at this guy's minimalAPI src2src conversion code.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Begin flame war, 70 lines of ranting views, and two lines of bash.
Aw. Don't we all just looooove Loki's Day?
Awww, I RTFA after all ... and they're right ... it's not that there's "no open source community" - it's that there shouldn't be one (OSS should be a standard corporate term) if OSS is to thrive.
Neo: "There is no spoon..."
I'm sorry for sounding like flamebait, but no one who's worked on the heavy open-source projects would agree with that! Look at who started the GPL! Look at who started GNU/Linux! Look at the front-runners! You can literally POINT at certain individuals and say, "THERE'S an individual that pushed the OSS initiative!" The communities develop as they share information! They develop as programmers work together! Most end users don't see that, and I can tell you that you'll also only see that if you work as part of a major opensource contributer - you're talking about this as if it were some kind of epiphany but it's just common sense! Places like sourceforge will only give you space for a project - they won't give you HQ or secret hideout or decoder rings, bub. This is real life - mincing of words doesn't change the bottom line.
So the add-on questions would have to be: how much methane is released by these plants, which plants are they, and how much could be cut down by removing them and planting others?
Oh and don't let those other slashdotters scare you - yeah, it's a big area of research, and there's a lot more info to cover, but she's gotten this far give her some credit! ... after reading the class description, I'm honestly impressed. Good luck!
Ask 'em about Elliptic curves and probability-related algorithms - those are both pretty hot in the academic world atm, iirc. Btw, you may need to search through a few before you find a researcher willing to talk - or willing to fill in the blanks (which might take a few months) - but if you find a good one, the problem won't be getting 'em to talk, it'll be getting 'em to shut up about the topic ;-)
Riiiiight. LMAO! Show me the exact spot on the bill, please! Show me the link! No one is that stupid... well...maybe they are, but I'm still laughing.
Most solid-state memory is pretty darn slow, and the stuff that's fast costs major $$$ ...
I'll buy it when it gets faster & cheaper - but then, flash *is* much faster than the ol' floppy - I was glad to see that go ...
She needs to visit the math department of her local university.
Um. It's easy to make fun of a game like this if you're expected to pay for it, but the fact of the matter is that you can play the game free of charge without any hindrances - the only reason to pay is to own land and get a larger weekly in-game allowance (land ownership is overrated unless you're using it to sell something or are renting it out like Anshe Chung does, ;-D - there's even a two-way exchange rate of currency. Evil? Probably. )
Besides, rules are rules in any game; if you break 'em, you suffer the consequences, right? In this one, the Linden Corporation could just limit the power they've given users, but instead they still offer enough control to allow a user to potentially bring a server to its knees (and quite easily at that) - for that, their "purgatory" is pretty nice.
Yeah, MS seems to realize that, too. Wtf are their legal and PR people thinking ?! They should be sacked. Sergio Amadeu shouldn't be the one under fire, here. Microsoft, please fire the idiots who decided that they needed to exercise the ability to limit a credable individual's voiced opinion because he badmouthed the company. What better way to shout out "YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!" than to go "cut-throat" and attack this man in a legal battle for his statements. That's really petty. I like MS products, especially visual studio, but with fools within running amok, I'm certainly glad that opensource is growing so rapidly, because the company is going to choke on itself if it continues down the current path. A smarter man/team with some tech background would strike up a correspondance with the individual, and transform the relationship into something useable (or *gasp* even marketable) by the company.
And there are so many different ports from the community ... skulltag, zdaemon, jdoom, zdoom, DoomGL, zdoomGL, Zdaemon has CTF and even UT-style sounds ... they're still being constantly upgraded by members of the community all the time.
Doom will never die.
Well, for our own small company, one of our ideas was to create systems filled with all opensource products, such as OpenOffice.org, Image Magick, etc... (and Tribes :-D), and say it's pre-bundled with loads of great software for business solutions, games, music, composition, etc. One thing that Linux GUI's have that Windows doesn't is that they're free. :-)
That's all well and good, but regardless, can someone at least give the name of the sonatas in question ? Even if the report is to be believed, (and heck, if one reads the linked article, it makes sense, especially the part about mouse toys) there are a lot of compositions by Mozart ... to say they do better than other music in general, is, in and of itself, too vague and unscientific. I'd like titles, please ?
And while we're at it, shouldn't we examine what makes them so powerful ? We certainly have no shortage of great minds: every University and College *I know of* has an incredibly grueling music theory degree, and after taking a simple piano appreciation class, this CS student knows better than to take any more music courses regarding song analysis!
PS - (I'm actually *shocked* no one has said it yet, but... this story reminds me of Neal Stephen's book, Snowcrash !)
John Woo and Samus Aran ? I can only hope.
... another issue is picking a game that has a complex story rather than one with more built-in artistic license ... i.e. Chronotrigger vs. Dungeon Siege. We have YET to see a movie that sticks to the original story at least marginially (Mortal Kombat being the closest) AND with a complex plot ... Name ONE. Resident Evil doesn't count :-p .
. ... after all, even if the ratings say it sucks, I'm still going to see the Chronotrigger movie ... and this truth, in and of itself, sucks) .
... there are so many differing notions and ideas that you can play with for games2movies because so much of the discussion has been left for imagination and debate (think "The Matrix" and compare with its sequels.) :-) But I doubt everyone else feels the same way I do.
Re: Storytelling in games: I agree, but a lot of the fun of Deus Ex comes from the reading material and Shadowrun-like environment/atmosphere: there's so much, and it gives you an insight into the game's world.
After reading an IGN article that interviewed the screenwriter about the Deus Ex Movie, I'm not so certain that it will become a good movie, because they don't specify even half of what made the game truly memorable. My fingers are crossed, however.
Of all the 13 or so games that were turned into movies, each broke away and added to the original plots/stories, and none of the base games had much of a serious plot to begin with -- this allowed for much more of an open canvas, I imagine, but it also hurt the audience reception slightly
IMHO, the things that make a movie good are plot/ story/ acting/ environment-atmosphere/ music/ scope/ replayability
For a game, they are handling/ environment-atmosphere/ music/ features/ replayability/ plot/ story.
Any one of those things can make either type stand out as "good", but a combination of at least three of each makes for memorability -- if you want a classic, you need more, and if you want a good conversion, the high marks can be in different areas, but if you want a classic (not yet seen) then my theory is that the high marks in the cateogires must also stay in tact along with anything else during translation from console to cinema, which makes for twice as many problems -- like attempting to roll several dice to get the same group of numbers twice in a row. It doesn't seem that hard, with ready-made music and great game storylines already out there, but have we seen it yet ? I'm not saying that Tomb Raider wasn't good, but I am saying (like everyone else) Chronotrigger would be better, (even in terms of $$ made
Another issue is fan ideas
Unreal Tournament 2004 is a prime example:
it's far better than both 2003 and Quake3 due to more features/replayability/plot/atmosphere/music/handl ing, especially with the sports theme/atmosphere/environment which really lends itself to the other categories/dimensions listed. It could make a great movie, but because there is a lack of story, the need for artistic license to fill in the blanks could potentially destroy it. In other words, I, for one, think that both game and movie could be good, if you add more rpg elements and the game's engine to the team management (think Pokemon meets Shadowrun), or explain the respawning like the Matrix, where unlimited energy, wireless connections, cloning vats, replicators, and other planets take the place of a computer-generated universe -- hey, it'd give an in-game excuse for network lag, okay ? Players jack in, and the connections to their respective "tournament" bodies are only as good as the network
All in all, John Woo or not, I've not seen anyone with the balls, cash
The OEM sample price is about $1,092 USD...but don't ask me what that means for consumers... It means that five years from now, it'll cost $10.92 or less.
Finally ! A man with balls, who is not afraid to show he's a nerd on National TV !
The truth is: Good human beings are few and far in between, (unless you count slashdot) but playstations are backed by warranty.
We all win. With the increasing # of sites, content, web services, spam, popup attacks, and "please allow us to rape your computer" certificates to download, (that's the main reason I use Firefox when on Windows now: because you can't tell I.E. to not accept those damned installation certificates, nor block requests to change the homepage.) it becomes equally more difficult to find what you're looking for, especially when it's not something that everyone else looks for, via Google's site ranking technology. Because they fight to be the best, we get cool things like ftp searches, grep and regexp searching of dmoz.org , video, image, and music searches, even linux and bsd search-specific pages. gMail, Microsoft's entry, and now Gigablast are all rewards we get to reap from each company attempting to set its roots deeper into the Internet like weeds vying for the same piece of dirt. We are extremely lucky, but then I doubt more than a handful search engines will ever hold top ranks at one time, due to the fact that they are so specialized in what they do. Just hope Gigablast and Google don't decide to create new IM service, too.
As sick and hateful as we all find it, legit spamming (in large numbers) does seem to produce income, although it also produces dire hatred by all. It's disgusting, because the real truth here is that spamming actually targets the demigraphic of people who are truly most likely to spend their large quantities of hard-earned, overvalued, stamped, signed paper & plastic: old people in retirement, impressionable people, and young people with access to $. ... hmmm ... (imagine Gameworks spamming people with deals to take to the nearest arcade ? Or I remember for awhile that the Toyota dealer in my area had an insane family deal, buy one actual car, get the next for a dollar -- truth ! I wanted to split the cost with a friend, but neither of us had enough to pay.) Initially, I thought, "hey, this is great ... if they're just going after spammers who scam, I'll have to read more on it," but if you spam, then you're either ignoring the demigraphic, or don't care about it.
I wouldn't have much of a problem with it if it were not for the malicious nature that is ingrained within those who use it. (And in fact I analyzed what I would need to do to start it, until realizing that the services would be abused to take advantage of those who can't help themselves.) If it were more reliable and better structured, I'd feel okay with it. After all, there are hands down, enough ways to efficiently deal with it and cut down on it. A legal protocol for a spam-newsgroup system where people can filter them to various folders would be of interest to me
I hate spam, not for the fact that it hounds many of my emails with 3-10 messages per day, but because of the people who are literally preyed upon by it for their money. That is reason enough for spammers to spend jail-time, and lots of it. The government didn't go far enough.
Here's but a tiny fraction: Bitwise arithmetic, polymorphism, virtual functions, template templates, operator-overloading, cast-overloading, low-level memory pointer casting tricks, optimizations, prime fields, and of course the STL ... these things alone take quite a bit of time to learn. If your boss believes that even this chunk of concepts can be digested into a form in such a way that could possibly give equal footing to people with experience levels differing by as much as 1/6th, then he's got some explaining to do.
... then we must focus on style and habit:
... you're doing what works. You're not still practicing "binge" programming where you work 11 hours at a time or more (20+ at a time for those in late teens/early twenties who want to destroy themselves) -- instead, you work smartly, with breaks, and in a more reasonable fashion. You have a planned structure even before you start to code. You're so familiar with the language enough that if there is something new, you assimilate it quite easily into your own ADT<tools> of tricks.
... all in good, respected time.
:-)
Still, maybe a person with a background in C with C# and/or Java could theoretically master C++ in a short period of time.
But, let's just ignore the semantics and tricks, for a second, and simply assume it IS easy to pick up in two years, since not all people learn at the same speed, so there should be at least a small-medium-sized amount of 2year-experienced brilliance
Nutshell: The differences are familiarity, code modularity, and time/energy efficiency.
Verbose: By 12 years, it's like reading and writing. You debug your code before you write it. You know every possible mistake your code could come up with, across various compilers, and how to deal with one when it arises -- since you know that no matter how good you are, errors will crop up. On the other hand, two years of experience can still have you wracking your brain for a hideously irritating and trite error that you've somehow overlooked.
Your ever-growing library of re-useable code snippets can, by now, create at least a working framework for anything under the sun within any requested period of time.
Speaking of time, you can save lots, since you're not trying out ideas which are new to you (and old to everyone else)
That is what experience means, and it is attainable by anyone
PS - C++ ain't goin' nowhere. And if you java/C++ programmers want somethin' really interesting to chew on, go to s-mail.org and look at this guy's minimalAPI src2src conversion code.