> All I can tell you is it's not about how often you fall, but how good you are at getting up, picking up the pieces and going on. Successful people don't get that way because they never make mistakes, they are just better at minimizing them from happening, minimizing impact and most importantly, making sure that once they happen, they are back on their feet as quickly as possible.
I also 100% concur! That is one of the secrets to being successful!
There is are 2 old cliches that paraphrase this philosophy:
You are only a failure when you quit trying.
Quitters never win. Winners never quit.
For me one of the biggest surprises was learning that success was not only about planning + execution, but also included the necessary philosophy / attitude / mind-set.
It is a hell of a lot of work, because you are constantly (re)training your mind, but the destination is completely worth the journey.
> My mouse already has two buttons on each side of the mouse (although the two on your non-mouse hand are hard to press so I don't usually map anything to them).
I highly would recommend customizing your settings; it is well worth it.
I use my thumb buttons for voice communication. Having to type is so archaic. ThumbForward - Push-To-Talk ThumbMiddle - Use key ThumbBack - Teamspeak / Ventrilo
> Valve games already do weapon switching via the mouse wheel. Having played FPS for year, using the mouse wheel to select weapons is incredibly slow compared to keyboard since you need to cycle through them to get to the right weapon. It is significantly faster to just press a single key to select the correct weapon.
This frees up the mouse wheel for other uses WheelUp - toggle flashlight (L4D/L4D2) WheelDn - spray logo
or use the mouse wheel as the traditional sniper zoom.
But hey, whatever floats your boat. Just saying there are options that may be more efficient.;-)
> but motivation and discipline are a bit hard to come by While that may be true, success like anything else is learned. It starts the first thing you wake up, and ends when you go to sleep. In order to get good at it you have to keep practicing. They say a person becomes proficient at a skill when they have done it for at 1,000 hours. In order to have discipline you must reprogram your mind. With time + effort you can achieve it.
WRT motivation no one can give you motivation. The trouble with companies that often times they should of focus on NOT DEMOTIVATING people. Being self-employed you need to find your own motivation. i.e. There has to be at least _one_ thing you enjoy doing, what is it? You say you are a web developer. Do any programming languages interest you? Any kind of computer science problems? The reason I ask is because:
There are 2 hard things in life - finding your passion - finding how to make money at it
Take care of the first one, and the second one will follow.
You say you require clear communication. That's true in all relationships. Your relationship with your computer (i.e the compiler / interpretor requires clear syntax), relationships with your co-workers (miscommunication is the cause of many problems), relationships with friends and family. The point of all this is that there are courses you can take to help with this. Dale Carnegie is a popular one. Shelf-Help books are another.
One of the secrets to happiness is to remove false expectations. You have to match you ideal world with the reality of your situation. Let's play a game for a moment. I have a magic wand; with it you can do anything you want. What would it be? Forget about all the impracticalities for a moment. If you could do anything in the world what would it be? The secret recipe is to now make a game plan on how you could achieve that big goal, but one small sub-goal at a time.
Heroes are for a group of people (i.e. fans) that are unable to unify themselves so they use an artificial means. i.e. sports fans, etc. Not that there is anything wrong with that, the problem is people like to stroke their ego by saying "I'm in this club, and you're not."
You got flamed because the group think doesn't want to hear the truth about themselves.
I most likely will definitely get modded down for being abrasive but if you are able to suspend your rejection for
> I'm an atheist and I believe everything that is proven. First, methinks you need to go back to college and study Godel's Incompleteness Theorems because you clearly don't understand Truth nor Proof. There are things that are True that are IMPOSSIBLE to prove. Ask your wife to _prove_ that she loves you or your children. If she doesn't "rhetorically" slap you for your disrespect she will quickly point out your stupidity in your incomplete Logic.
Second, you are under the delusion that *only* Logic is able to provide truth. It would also behoove you to ask your wife to teach you about intuition. Intuition is entirely non-logical BUT the fallacy of Logic is to assume that there is no other way to understand truth and thus reject anything else. Let me guess, you probably dismiss your "gut feeling" as inconsequential too.
Third, you wouldn't even have your beliefs unless you had faith in them in the first place. Next are you going to try to tell me you have *personally* proved and verified all your beliefs? Have you personally weighed an electron let alone _seen_ one? Have you verified the speed of light in a vacuum? You DO realize that ALL "objective" truth is built upon other people's subjective experiences, right?
Fourth, ALL Atheists are JUST as ignorant as ALL Theists; Oh, the Theists love to pretend they have knowledge about "god" but they don't understand her at all -- all they have is belief (and faith.) -- the honest ones will admit that. Likewise, Atheists have no belief in god (by definition) and thus have NO knowledge. At least the Agnostics are honest enough to admit they don't know! The only ones who *actually* has knowledge is the Gnostic by personal _experience(s)_. But until you first admit your ignorance you will never learn who/what the fuck "god" is because you are under the delusion that you think you "know" while you are still ignorant of your True Self let alone "god". The _beginning_ of wisdom is to acknowledge "I don't know."
Lastly, trusting an Atheist as an "expert" in religion is like trusting a man to be an expert in pregnancy; they lack the proper frame of reference to even understand the problem/solution of Spirituality that they are blinded by the Ignorance of the Theists.
> I also tend to recommend single graphics cards for most folks, rather than two lesser cards, Same. Driver support has definitely improved too. About 1 to 2 years ago it wasn't uncommon to get crashes trying to game with SLI / Crossfire aside from a few titles; plus it is cheaper to buy a mobo that doesn't have to support dual PCI Express x8. These days it is becoming common for more games + drivers to perfectly support multiple GPUs.
> Strategy games with tons of AI controlled units can really bring things to a crawl I agree; it definitely depends on the game. Interestingly enough BF3 multi-player doesn't have (artificial) AI; they opted for the option of using real AI:-) so maybe BF3 is more of the exception then the rule. Need more data to answer that question.
Regardless whatever the current core usage is currently, looking ahead with Intel's Knights Corner supposedly using around 50 - 64 cores and games typically targeting the 2 cores on the XBOX360 and 5+1 SPU cores on the PS3, multi-core is the future; I think we are probably seeing the last of games that are dual core (aside from indie ones)
That is indeed true. Some people like to criticize an idea [simply] because it is "old." Yet these same people ignore that the concept of the "wheel" has been around for at least a few *thousand* years. Old does not imply obsolete. If it works, why break it?;-)
> I'd like to know why the medical profession isn't embracing technology. I'd love to know that too. The only thing that seems to make sense is that probably because they dislike change and/or don't see the benefit in adapting to the customer to give them what they want / need.
> The doctors could determine from the email Sometimes face-to-face conversation is more efficient for the *doctor* in terms of time for *conveying* information, but yeah, from a scheduling point of view it is terribly inefficient about the customer's usage of time.
Digressing: I honestly don't see how this aversion to technology will change until people start demanding "Open-Source Medicine" -- the Medical Profession and Big Pharma are one the last bastions of institutionalized control by NOT making it easy for people to get to all the medical facts without somebody getting their cut of the piece of the pie. i.e. The same way money has corrupted Politics it has corrupted the Medical field.
Interestingly enough Max Planck said the same thing back in 1948 about the dogma and institution of Science:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Or para-phrased:
"Science advanced one funeral at a time"
The old want things to remain the way they always have been. The youth want things that will be. Society is a balance of these two diametrically opposed ideologies.
Excellent point. I 100% completely agree with this! This is one of the best ways of doing Real-Life usability studies.
One of the hardest things to admit as a programmer is to put our ego aside and acknowledge, no, our intended UI is probably not the most intuitive for someone not familiar with all the UI idioms we "expect". I would wager this is one of the reasons the iPhone was so successful -- it distilled the UI down to something simple and efficient for non-computer users.
The classic paper every programmer (IMHO) should read is one by Danny Cohen who introduced the terms big-endian and little-endian is:
ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/ien/ien137.txt
Here is a "abridged" summary:
Like most things, there are 2 (diametrically opposing) way of doing things. You can do it either A xor B; that is A, or B but not both. Neither is right; they are just (competing) standards. Oblg. http://xkcd.com/927/
Agin, neither is technically "right" - they both are; we may chose one or the other *simply* for convenience. As long as we pick one standard, and are consistent in our use, everything works. The problem arises when somebody picks a different "standard" and we need to interface with them. (i.e. share data.):-)
Here is practical example that shows up all the time in computer graphics. Let's say we wish to define the world coordinate system. To the right we can call that positive X, we can call up positive Y, and for stuff off in the distance we have a choice: a) call positive Z for things further away from us, (DirectX uses this) OR b) call negative Zfor things further away from us (OpenGL uses this.)
Getting back to the function originally mentioned:
When we have the integer number 0x12345678 in a CPU register how the bytes are stored in memory / disk / "network" can be done either in: a) Little Endian format: i.e.
unsigned char LE[] = { 0x78, 0x56, 0x34, 0x12 }; or b) Big Endian format: i.e.
unsigned char BE[] = { 0x12, 0x34, 0x56, 0x78 };
How did this come about? Notice that we write bits from right-to-left
bit31 bit30... bit 3 bit2 bit1 bit0 the same as we write the Aramaic numbers. Now which bit should we send first over a wire? bit31 or bit0? The hardware guys wanted it one way (because they could use a simple barrel shifter/latch), the software guys wanted it the opposite way.
Let's say you have this number stored on disk that was generated by a program running on a little endian CPU. If you have a big endian CPU try to naively read this data it will interpret it as the wrong value. i.e.
Little endian 0x12345678 (305,419,896) on disk is: 0x78563412
Big endian will interpret it as: 0x78563412 (2,018,915,346)
Hence you need to "fix up" the bytes, that is byte swap them. The CPU instructions of shift-and-mask is the standard way to shuffle bits around.
It helps to label all 32 bits with unique names:
ABCDEFGH IJKLMNOP QRSTUVWY abcdefgh
We want a function that, given the above, will generate this:
abcdefgh QRSTUVWY IJKLMNOP ABCDEFGH
Or expressed in bytes:
b3 b2 b1 b0 We want:
b0 b1 b2 b3
Notice that the hex mask 0xFF (called a "byte mask") is a way to treat 8 consecutive bits (one byte) as one "logical number".
By inspection:
b0 should be shifted Left 24 bits
b1 should be shifted Left 8 bits
b2 should be shifted Right 8 bits
b3 should be shifted Right 24 bits
When you are talking about numbers in base 16, the idiom << 8 of shifting the bits by one byte, or multiplying by 256, is equivalent to a multiplying a decimal number by 10 because we want to shift all the digits over to make room for another "tens" unit place. i.e.
0x12 8 = 12 times 2^8 = 12 times 256 = 0x1200
12 * 10 = 120
> Valve pointed out when they sold L4D 2 at some crazy low price like $10 their profits for that game went up something like 1700%
Actually L4D1 was 3000% more sales;-)
You're probably thinking of the 1600% new steam customers. i.e. "Newell also mentioned that new Steam customers jumped 1600% over the same weekend, according to G4TV. Retail sales remained constant."
They also revealed gamers are extremely sensitive to pricing. (Digressing slightly, Hell most of my steam friends don't buy new games until they go one sale for $10. We already got a big backlog of great games to play, we'll get all the patches, plus we'll have better hardware to run a 2-year old game on.)
"The massive Steam holiday sale was also a big win for Valve and its partners. The following holiday sales data was released, showing the sales breakdown organized by price reduction:"
10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
25% sale = 245% increase in sales
50% sale = 320% increase in sales
75% sale = 1470% increase in sales
> Writing software is not "art". Sorry, you're wrong. Yes, there is a lot of science in Computer Science, but since this topic is about UI -- as soon as you start interacting with users, there are times when it is OK to break the UI rules. The *hard* part is knowing when to be consistent, and when not to. People, nor how they interact with computers does NOT always fit in a nice little black-n-white box that naive programmers love to think.
And just to be pedantic, here is real-world example: (Since/. is a POS for code formatting, replace the _ with spaces...)
The most important thing for writing code is: proper variable names, whitespace to align common idioms function SwapInt32( x ) {
var n _= (x >> 24) & _____ 0xFF;
n |= (x >>_ 8) & ___ 0xFF00;
n |= (x <<_ 8) & __0xFF0000;
n |= (x << 24) & 0xFF000000;
return n; }
Proper alignment makes it easier to read code. There are no hard and fast rules for whitespace.
> It's not there to be appealing. Methinks a) you missed the joy of optimizing code and coming up with a smaller and faster algorithm, nor b) even grok the purpose of whitespace in the first place. Hint: Whitespace is NOT for the compiler's / interpreter's benefit but _humans_.
> the first step is convincing the customer that they don't know what they need, Yes we understand your point that "No, the customer is not always right".
But riiiiight, like the customer is always some clueless schmoe. News flash, sometimes, they have been using software *longer* then your little code monkey shop has been in business for. While they may not know exactly what they want, it pays attention to try to understand their perspective and what are they *really* getting at. One of the best ways to learn how bad your UI is, is to give it to someone who does not have the same preconceived ideas that you automatically *assume* all your clients and other programmers have.
In the *real* world, *sometimes* client ARE knowledgable -- AND sometimes they are completely clueless. Your job as a programmer is to bridge that gap, and learn to get at what they are *really* wanting.
If you think programming is black-n-white you obviously haven't been doing it very long, or you suck at it.
> Presumably there is the back catalog; but most games don't hold their value that well over time
Uh, do you know about an effect called "the Long Tail" ?
Did you also miss all the sales Valve has on Steam or GOG has?? While old games (5+ years) may only sell for $2.99 - $9.99, there are getting to be a lot of older games that don't mind spending $4.99 to buy a legal copy of that "oldie" -- I know I certainly do as many of my steam friends. A $2.99 or $4.99 to own a classic Bullfrog game (Populous, Magic Carpet, etc.) is well worth it. Hell, sell *all* the original Ultima series.
Don't understand estimate the worth of nostalgia... IF old games are cheap enough there will be a long trickle of "loose change" for us old geezers.
> There's absolutely no reason any child today has to be born with Huntingtons,
1. What gives you the right to decide that someone's else life is not important?? Because you assume that they "don't want to exist [in suffering]??" You want to tell that to all the creative people who are mentally unstable?
2. The height of arrogance and ignorance is to ASSUME that because _you_ are personally unable to see at least one positive reason that there are NO good reasons.
To emphasize my point: If you are unable to see at least one positive thing in ALL events, even the ones that humans love to label and judge atrocities or evil, you are being blinded by your emotions and unable to think rationally and separate the long term and short term consequences.
Of course, while I certainly don't wish suffering upon anyone, you are spiritually blind to why such things happen in the *first* place. After you die you will be literally be shown how all things work for the greater good over the long run even if the short term is unbearable. You are completely and totally ignorant of the fact that: People joyfully CHOSE the afflictions BEFORE they were born. It would behoove you to learn WHY instead of your incomplete and flawed human logic instead of dismissing a person's entire life before you have even seen the outcome and results of it.
Of course, knowledge doesn't take the suffering away, but avoiding negative situations will never give other people the chance to be inspired from it. Focus on what we want, not what we don't want.
> below the threshold that the eye can see which is 30fps?
Gamers most certainly can tell the difference between 30 Hz and 60 Hz. On the PC, gamers want to run at 1080p at the highest quality while still guaranteeing the framerate will stay above 60 Hz with 16 - 32 players.
To do 3D *properly* you want to run at 120 Hz MINIMUM, to guarantee each eye gets 60 Hz.
This nonsense of "high frames don't do anything" is based on ignorance.
> On the PS3 this is PSGL Technically the PS3 supports _2_ graphics API: CGM and PSGL. I don't know of any games that have actually shipped with PSGL. (Almost?) Everyone uses the lower level CGM for performance reasons, even though it is more work.
> On the Wii this is another proprietary API that is similar to fixed function OpenGL but is again not OpenGL. Correct. The native API on the Wii is GX.
I implemented OpenGL on the Wii a years back and shipped a couple of games with it. (We also had a shipping OpenGL implementation on the PS2!) The design of the GX is very, very, similar to OpenGL.
The biggest PITA is that the Wii only has 1/2 pixel shaders. You have multi-texture support via TEVs and can do some pixel math but it is very tedious, say for shadow mapping.
On the plus side the biggest hack is you can get 32-bit palettized (8-bit) textures if you burn through 2 TEVs;-)
Slashdot Mirror
> All I can tell you is it's not about how often you fall, but how good you are at getting up, picking up the pieces and going on. Successful people don't get that way because they never make mistakes, they are just better at minimizing them from happening, minimizing impact and most importantly, making sure that once they happen, they are back on their feet as quickly as possible.
I also 100% concur! That is one of the secrets to being successful!
There is are 2 old cliches that paraphrase this philosophy:
You are only a failure when you quit trying.
Quitters never win.
Winners never quit.
For me one of the biggest surprises was learning that success was not only about planning + execution, but also included the necessary philosophy / attitude / mind-set.
It is a hell of a lot of work, because you are constantly (re)training your mind, but the destination is completely worth the journey.
> My mouse already has two buttons on each side of the mouse (although the two on your non-mouse hand are hard to press so I don't usually map anything to them).
I highly would recommend customizing your settings; it is well worth it.
I use my thumb buttons for voice communication. Having to type is so archaic.
ThumbForward - Push-To-Talk
ThumbMiddle - Use key
ThumbBack - Teamspeak / Ventrilo
> Valve games already do weapon switching via the mouse wheel.
Having played FPS for year, using the mouse wheel to select weapons is incredibly slow compared to keyboard since you need to cycle through them to get to the right weapon. It is significantly faster to just press a single key to select the correct weapon.
This frees up the mouse wheel for other uses
WheelUp - toggle flashlight (L4D/L4D2)
WheelDn - spray logo
or use the mouse wheel as the traditional sniper zoom.
But hey, whatever floats your boat. Just saying there are options that may be more efficient. ;-)
Sorry to hear about your conditions.
> but motivation and discipline are a bit hard to come by
While that may be true, success like anything else is learned. It starts the first thing you wake up, and ends when you go to sleep. In order to get good at it you have to keep practicing. They say a person becomes proficient at a skill when they have done it for at 1,000 hours. In order to have discipline you must reprogram your mind. With time + effort you can achieve it.
WRT motivation no one can give you motivation. The trouble with companies that often times they should of focus on NOT DEMOTIVATING people. Being self-employed you need to find your own motivation. i.e. There has to be at least _one_ thing you enjoy doing, what is it? You say you are a web developer. Do any programming languages interest you? Any kind of computer science problems? The reason I ask is because:
There are 2 hard things in life
- finding your passion
- finding how to make money at it
Take care of the first one, and the second one will follow.
You say you require clear communication. That's true in all relationships. Your relationship with your computer (i.e the compiler / interpretor requires clear syntax), relationships with your co-workers (miscommunication is the cause of many problems), relationships with friends and family. The point of all this is that there are courses you can take to help with this. Dale Carnegie is a popular one. Shelf-Help books are another.
One of the secrets to happiness is to remove false expectations. You have to match you ideal world with the reality of your situation. Let's play a game for a moment. I have a magic wand; with it you can do anything you want. What would it be? Forget about all the impracticalities for a moment. If you could do anything in the world what would it be? The secret recipe is to now make a game plan on how you could achieve that big goal, but one small sub-goal at a time.
Good luck!
> People need Kool-Aid TM.
FTFY.
Heroes are for a group of people (i.e. fans) that are unable to unify themselves so they use an artificial means. i.e. sports fans, etc. Not that there is anything wrong with that, the problem is people like to stroke their ego by saying "I'm in this club, and you're not."
You got flamed because the group think doesn't want to hear the truth about themselves.
> NT started at 3.1 which is bizarre.
That was because of Novell Licensing - Microsoft was piggybacking under the "Windows 3.1" licensing clauses.
>> Dumb fucking neckbeards.
> Ah! Smart abstinent prepubescents!
Nah, he's just bitter he can't grow a beard like all the important computer scientists can ;-)
http://www.codethinked.com/the-programmer-dress-code
http://www.codethinked.com/The-Programmer-Dress-Code---Part-Deux
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/04/29/181249/facial-hair-and-computer-languages
Agreed humor is definitely the way to go.
i.e. cRPG
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/5020-The-Elder-Scrolls-V-Skyrim
and
DnD in the movies / history
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/escape-to-the-movies/2002-Dungeons-Dragons
I most likely will definitely get modded down for being abrasive but if you are able to suspend your rejection for
> I'm an atheist and I believe everything that is proven.
First, methinks you need to go back to college and study Godel's Incompleteness Theorems because you clearly don't understand Truth nor Proof. There are things that are True that are IMPOSSIBLE to prove. Ask your wife to _prove_ that she loves you or your children. If she doesn't "rhetorically" slap you for your disrespect she will quickly point out your stupidity in your incomplete Logic.
Second, you are under the delusion that *only* Logic is able to provide truth. It would also behoove you to ask your wife to teach you about intuition. Intuition is entirely non-logical BUT the fallacy of Logic is to assume that there is no other way to understand truth and thus reject anything else. Let me guess, you probably dismiss your "gut feeling" as inconsequential too.
Third, you wouldn't even have your beliefs unless you had faith in them in the first place. Next are you going to try to tell me you have *personally* proved and verified all your beliefs? Have you personally weighed an electron let alone _seen_ one? Have you verified the speed of light in a vacuum? You DO realize that ALL "objective" truth is built upon other people's subjective experiences, right?
Fourth, ALL Atheists are JUST as ignorant as ALL Theists; Oh, the Theists love to pretend they have knowledge about "god" but they don't understand her at all -- all they have is belief (and faith.) -- the honest ones will admit that. Likewise, Atheists have no belief in god (by definition) and thus have NO knowledge. At least the Agnostics are honest enough to admit they don't know! The only ones who *actually* has knowledge is the Gnostic by personal _experience(s)_. But until you first admit your ignorance you will never learn who/what the fuck "god" is because you are under the delusion that you think you "know" while you are still ignorant of your True Self let alone "god". The _beginning_ of wisdom is to acknowledge "I don't know."
Lastly, trusting an Atheist as an "expert" in religion is like trusting a man to be an expert in pregnancy; they lack the proper frame of reference to even understand the problem/solution of Spirituality that they are blinded by the Ignorance of the Theists.
> I also tend to recommend single graphics cards for most folks, rather than two lesser cards,
Same. Driver support has definitely improved too. About 1 to 2 years ago it wasn't uncommon to get crashes trying to game with SLI / Crossfire aside from a few titles; plus it is cheaper to buy a mobo that doesn't have to support dual PCI Express x8. These days it is becoming common for more games + drivers to perfectly support multiple GPUs.
> Strategy games with tons of AI controlled units can really bring things to a crawl :-) so maybe BF3 is more of the exception then the rule. Need more data to answer that question.
I agree; it definitely depends on the game. Interestingly enough BF3 multi-player doesn't have (artificial) AI; they opted for the option of using real AI
Regardless whatever the current core usage is currently, looking ahead with Intel's Knights Corner supposedly using around 50 - 64 cores and games typically targeting the 2 cores on the XBOX360 and 5+1 SPU cores on the PS3, multi-core is the future; I think we are probably seeing the last of games that are dual core (aside from indie ones)
That is indeed true. Some people like to criticize an idea [simply] because it is "old." Yet these same people ignore that the concept of the "wheel" has been around for at least a few *thousand* years. Old does not imply obsolete. If it works, why break it? ;-)
> I'd like to know why the medical profession isn't embracing technology.
I'd love to know that too. The only thing that seems to make sense is that probably because they dislike change and/or don't see the benefit in adapting to the customer to give them what they want / need.
> The doctors could determine from the email
Sometimes face-to-face conversation is more efficient for the *doctor* in terms of time for *conveying* information, but yeah, from a scheduling point of view it is terribly inefficient about the customer's usage of time.
Digressing: I honestly don't see how this aversion to technology will change until people start demanding "Open-Source Medicine" -- the Medical Profession and Big Pharma are one the last bastions of institutionalized control by NOT making it easy for people to get to all the medical facts without somebody getting their cut of the piece of the pie. i.e. The same way money has corrupted Politics it has corrupted the Medical field.
Interestingly enough Max Planck said the same thing back in 1948 about the dogma and institution of Science:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Or para-phrased:
"Science advanced one funeral at a time"
The old want things to remain the way they always have been.
The youth want things that will be.
Society is a balance of these two diametrically opposed ideologies.
Reference:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck
Sorry, forgot a link:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-13.html
i7-2600K
4 cores: 80.57 fps
3 cores: 81.07 fps
2 cores: 80.76 fps
1 core: doesn't start
> The research into frame-rate latencies is really interesting,
Indeed. There was a VERY interesting article last year on Micro-Stuttering And GPU Scaling In CrossFire And SLI
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995.html
> but the whole idea that *anyone* knowledgeable about PC gaming would have *ever* denied that the CPU was an important factor in performance is ridiculous.
Not exactly. Battlefield 3 doesn't use more then 2 cores.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/11/10/battlefield-3-technical-analysis/7
http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page7.html
If you have a high profile AAA title with that level of quality of graphics it kind of makes you wonder why other games "need" 4-cores?
This guy would agree with you ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2sPl_Z7ZU
How to paint the MONA LISA with MS PAINT
The artist also "draws" with Cheetos ... no joke. He is *good*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IoqpXQ_dpA
Excellent point. I 100% completely agree with this! This is one of the best ways of doing Real-Life usability studies.
One of the hardest things to admit as a programmer is to put our ego aside and acknowledge, no, our intended UI is probably not the most intuitive for someone not familiar with all the UI idioms we "expect". I would wager this is one of the reasons the iPhone was so successful -- it distilled the UI down to something simple and efficient for non-computer users.
> I'd like to point out that such conventions do exist even if they're complicated or unpopular.
Yes, this quickly turns into coding styles or indent styles:
i.e.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indent_style
Sure.
The classic paper every programmer (IMHO) should read is one by Danny Cohen who introduced the terms big-endian and little-endian is:
ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE
http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/ien/ien137.txt
Here is a "abridged" summary:
Like most things, there are 2 (diametrically opposing) way of doing things. You can do it either A xor B; that is A, or B but not both. Neither is right; they are just (competing) standards. Oblg. http://xkcd.com/927/
Agin, neither is technically "right" - they both are; we may chose one or the other *simply* for convenience. As long as we pick one standard, and are consistent in our use, everything works. The problem arises when somebody picks a different "standard" and we need to interface with them. (i.e. share data.) :-)
Here is practical example that shows up all the time in computer graphics. Let's say we wish to define the world coordinate system. To the right we can call that positive X, we can call up positive Y, and for stuff off in the distance we have a choice:
a) call positive Z for things further away from us, (DirectX uses this) OR
b) call negative Zfor things further away from us (OpenGL uses this.)
Getting back to the function originally mentioned:
When we have the integer number 0x12345678 in a CPU register how the bytes are stored in memory / disk / "network" can be done either in:
a) Little Endian format:
i.e.
unsigned char LE[] = { 0x78, 0x56, 0x34, 0x12 };
or
b) Big Endian format:
i.e.
unsigned char BE[] = { 0x12, 0x34, 0x56, 0x78 };
How did this come about? Notice that we write bits from right-to-left ... bit 3 bit2 bit1 bit0
bit31 bit30
the same as we write the Aramaic numbers. Now which bit should we send first over a wire? bit31 or bit0? The hardware guys wanted it one way (because they could use a simple barrel shifter/latch), the software guys wanted it the opposite way.
Let's say you have this number stored on disk that was generated by a program running on a little endian CPU. If you have a big endian CPU try to naively read this data it will interpret it as the wrong value.
i.e.
Little endian 0x12345678 (305,419,896) on disk is: 0x78563412
Big endian will interpret it as: 0x78563412 (2,018,915,346)
Hence you need to "fix up" the bytes, that is byte swap them. The CPU instructions of shift-and-mask is the standard way to shuffle bits around.
It helps to label all 32 bits with unique names:
ABCDEFGH IJKLMNOP QRSTUVWY abcdefgh
We want a function that, given the above, will generate this:
abcdefgh QRSTUVWY IJKLMNOP ABCDEFGH
Or expressed in bytes:
b3 b2 b1 b0
We want:
b0 b1 b2 b3
Notice that the hex mask 0xFF (called a "byte mask") is a way to treat 8 consecutive bits (one byte) as one "logical number".
By inspection:
b0 should be shifted Left 24 bits
b1 should be shifted Left 8 bits
b2 should be shifted Right 8 bits
b3 should be shifted Right 24 bits
When you are talking about numbers in base 16, the idiom << 8 of shifting the bits by one byte, or multiplying by 256, is equivalent to a multiplying a decimal number by 10 because we want to shift all the digits over to make room for another "tens" unit place.
i.e.
0x12 8 = 12 times 2^8 = 12 times 256 = 0x1200
12 * 10 = 120
Does that answer your question sufficiently?
> Valve pointed out when they sold L4D 2 at some crazy low price like $10 their profits for that game went up something like 1700%
Actually L4D1 was 3000% more sales ;-)
You're probably thinking of the 1600% new steam customers.
i.e.
"Newell also mentioned that new Steam customers jumped 1600% over the same weekend, according to G4TV. Retail sales remained constant."
They also revealed gamers are extremely sensitive to pricing. (Digressing slightly, Hell most of my steam friends don't buy new games until they go one sale for $10. We already got a big backlog of great games to play, we'll get all the patches, plus we'll have better hardware to run a 2-year old game on.)
"The massive Steam holiday sale was also a big win for Valve and its partners. The following holiday sales data was released, showing the sales breakdown organized by price reduction:"
10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
25% sale = 245% increase in sales
50% sale = 320% increase in sales
75% sale = 1470% increase in sales
References:
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/02/20/steams-left-4-dead-sale-increased-purchase-infection-by-3000/
http://www.shacknews.com/article/57308/valve-left-4-dead-half
> Writing software is not "art".
Sorry, you're wrong. Yes, there is a lot of science in Computer Science, but since this topic is about UI -- as soon as you start interacting with users, there are times when it is OK to break the UI rules. The *hard* part is knowing when to be consistent, and when not to. People, nor how they interact with computers does NOT always fit in a nice little black-n-white box that naive programmers love to think.
And just to be pedantic, here is real-world example: (Since /. is a POS for code formatting, replace the _ with spaces...)
The most important thing for writing code is: proper variable names, whitespace to align common idioms
function SwapInt32( x )
{
var n _= (x >> 24) & _____ 0xFF;
n |= (x >>_ 8) & ___ 0xFF00;
n |= (x <<_ 8) & __0xFF0000;
n |= (x << 24) & 0xFF000000;
return n;
}
Proper alignment makes it easier to read code. There are no hard and fast rules for whitespace.
> It's not there to be appealing.
Methinks
a) you missed the joy of optimizing code and coming up with a smaller and faster algorithm, nor
b) even grok the purpose of whitespace in the first place. Hint: Whitespace is NOT for the compiler's / interpreter's benefit but _humans_.
> the first step is convincing the customer that they don't know what they need,
Yes we understand your point that "No, the customer is not always right".
But riiiiight, like the customer is always some clueless schmoe. News flash, sometimes, they have been using software *longer* then your little code monkey shop has been in business for. While they may not know exactly what they want, it pays attention to try to understand their perspective and what are they *really* getting at. One of the best ways to learn how bad your UI is, is to give it to someone who does not have the same preconceived ideas that you automatically *assume* all your clients and other programmers have.
In the *real* world, *sometimes* client ARE knowledgable -- AND sometimes they are completely clueless. Your job as a programmer is to bridge that gap, and learn to get at what they are *really* wanting.
If you think programming is black-n-white you obviously haven't been doing it very long, or you suck at it.
> Presumably there is the back catalog; but most games don't hold their value that well over time
Uh, do you know about an effect called "the Long Tail" ?
Did you also miss all the sales Valve has on Steam or GOG has?? While old games (5+ years) may only sell for $2.99 - $9.99, there are getting to be a lot of older games that don't mind spending $4.99 to buy a legal copy of that "oldie" -- I know I certainly do as many of my steam friends. A $2.99 or $4.99 to own a classic Bullfrog game (Populous, Magic Carpet, etc.) is well worth it. Hell, sell *all* the original Ultima series.
Don't understand estimate the worth of nostalgia ... IF old games are cheap enough there will be a long trickle of "loose change" for us old geezers.
> There's absolutely no reason any child today has to be born with Huntingtons,
1. What gives you the right to decide that someone's else life is not important?? Because you assume that they "don't want to exist [in suffering]??" You want to tell that to all the creative people who are mentally unstable?
2. The height of arrogance and ignorance is to ASSUME that because _you_ are personally unable to see at least one positive reason that there are NO good reasons.
To emphasize my point: If you are unable to see at least one positive thing in ALL events, even the ones that humans love to label and judge atrocities or evil, you are being blinded by your emotions and unable to think rationally and separate the long term and short term consequences.
Of course, while I certainly don't wish suffering upon anyone, you are spiritually blind to why such things happen in the *first* place. After you die you will be literally be shown how all things work for the greater good over the long run even if the short term is unbearable. You are completely and totally ignorant of the fact that: People joyfully CHOSE the afflictions BEFORE they were born. It would behoove you to learn WHY instead of your incomplete and flawed human logic instead of dismissing a person's entire life before you have even seen the outcome and results of it.
Of course, knowledge doesn't take the suffering away, but avoiding negative situations will never give other people the chance to be inspired from it. Focus on what we want, not what we don't want.
> below the threshold that the eye can see which is 30fps?
Gamers most certainly can tell the difference between 30 Hz and 60 Hz. On the PC, gamers want to run at 1080p at the highest quality while still guaranteeing the framerate will stay above 60 Hz with 16 - 32 players.
To do 3D *properly* you want to run at 120 Hz MINIMUM, to guarantee each eye gets 60 Hz.
This nonsense of "high frames don't do anything" is based on ignorance.
> On the PS3 this is PSGL
Technically the PS3 supports _2_ graphics API: CGM and PSGL. I don't know of any games that have actually shipped with PSGL. (Almost?) Everyone uses the lower level CGM for performance reasons, even though it is more work.
> On the Wii this is another proprietary API that is similar to fixed function OpenGL but is again not OpenGL.
Correct. The native API on the Wii is GX.
I implemented OpenGL on the Wii a years back and shipped a couple of games with it. (We also had a shipping OpenGL implementation on the PS2!) The design of the GX is very, very, similar to OpenGL.
The biggest PITA is that the Wii only has 1/2 pixel shaders. You have multi-texture support via TEVs and can do some pixel math but it is very tedious, say for shadow mapping.
On the plus side the biggest hack is you can get 32-bit palettized (8-bit) textures if you burn through 2 TEVs ;-)
> One game every 5+ years doesn't make you a game developer IMHO.
And your developer studio is where again with what shipping games??
Oh, you're the THAT guy that complains Quantity is better then Quality. Guess what Gabe said this this philosophy:
"No one will remember if a bad game shipped on time,
No one will remember if a good game shipped late."
Valve has the money (and time) to favor quality over quantity. You can bitch all you want but it won't change their core philosophy.