> I think there's a good reminder about monopolies in there. There's nothing inherently wrong with a monopoly that comes into power simply by being the favorite choice of customers.
You mean, like type of government? Electricity? Water? Cable?
Just pointing out that "essential services" tend to be monopolies, not about the quality of service they provide...
> Owing to the fact that it's impossible to test all combinations of devices and planes, under all circumstances and actually know what might/could happen -- they've chosen to ban the whole thing.
LOL. So basically the engineers, government, airline manufactors, and control towers DON'T KNOW how the airplane will handle when devices in a certain frequency operate -- great to know that they just ignore the problem. Way to go! Increased vote of confidence for all the passengers. Yah, right.
That's a fucking cop-out if I ever heard one. I can just see the engineeers going...
"OOPS! We didn't know that a cell phone would generate that much signal interference in the ##-## GHz band and our control system uses the same GHz range!"
Part of an engineer's _job_ is to _verify_ and _confirm_ the safety of the devices they build. Ignorance is no excuse FOR SAFETY. It is their job to know what will cause system (and device) instability. If they don't know, it is there job TO KNOW.
Maybe you're an idiot electronics engineer who doesn't understand the noise and what part of the spectrum that consumer devices operate or generate in. Do you even understand what UL certification is? Here's a big word for you: spectrum analyzer.
This ban on electronics while in-flight is bullshit. I've "forgotten" to turn off my cell phone, and numerous other electronics and nothing has happened. I'm real sure an $300 electronic device is somehow goig to "magically" disable a $30,000,000 plane... right... like the airplane engineers have never heard of a faraday cage for the cockpit...
Seriously?! I think that's the first time I've ever seen someone saw C was too "big."
What would you remove/redo in C if you could? (Inconsistent syntax not withstanding.)
Re:LISP a bad choice as a starter language.
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
> and closing parenthesis is as trivial to any modern editor or IDE as managing any other aspect of syntax.
That's a hinderance, not an advantage. I should be able to easily enter in blocks of code without having to rely on crutches like IDEs to make sure I have the correct number of parenthesis. While I admire LISP for its simplicity, elegance, and consistency, back in the Real World (TM) it has a lot of unncessary and redudant parenthesis that do nothing except clutter up code, making that crap near un-readable -- at least in C/C++ you can remove the braces for one-liners. Algol-like languages have a better mapping to mathematical functions. foo(x) vs (foo x)
i.e.
void foo( int x ) {
if (true-expresion)
{
then-expression ;
} }
vs. the leading '(' is complely redundant but needed because of the syntax.
(defun bar (x)
(if (true-expression)
(then-expression)
) )
1. Just because you [legally] CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD do it, and
2. There is a big difference legality and morality. Sometimes the two coincide, other times they are out of touch of reality. i.e. Prohibition, victim-less crimes such as smoking tobacco vs. other drugs, using synthetic DMT vs. the DMT that your brain naturally produces, etc.
> This makes me uncomfortable, because it makes attacking someone outside of a mosque because you have a problem with their religion somehow worse than attacking someone outside a sci-fi convention because you have a problem with geeks./tongue in cheek Everyone knows it’s those fucking LARPers wrecking it for the Ren Faire folks, of course nothing beats a good 'ol fight going then "Star Wars vs. Star Trek"...;-)
This is why I find Go to be infinitely more interesting then Chess. There are no hundreds of standard openings to memorize like in Chess -- every game is pretty much guaranteed to be unique. The golden era of Chess was the early 1900s with famous players like Alexander Alekhine, Jose Capablanca, etc, as everyone was still exploring opening moves -- the commentaries of the games are amazing, interesting and very fun to read. This is Chess's weakness -- games become too predictable and boring.
I found Chess to be pretty boring for the most part once you get to a certain [skill] level.
Go is a completely differetn world.
Go is infinitely more interesting then Chess. There are no hundreds of standard openings to memorize like in Chess -- every game is pretty much guaranteed to be unique. The golden era of Chess was the early 1900s with famous players like Alexander Alekhine, Jose Capablanca, etc, as everyone was still exploring opening moves -- the commentaries of the games are amazing, interesting and very fun to read. This is Chess's weakness -- games become too predictable and boring.
The other very nice thing with Go is that it is _much_ more scalable when players have different skill sets. The handicap system is Chess is lame -- it is not granular enough due to every piece having a high importance (I did _not_ say value) via controlling the board by proximity of location. The Go handicap system is much nicer -- finer granularity, so you can easily hone in on the right handicap to have an 'even' match.
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/05/gcc-opensslc-fno-random-seed.html People in the Linux community love to talk about how Linux is all cooperation and programmer love-making. But just take a look. These people don't cooperate. There are hundreds of slightly different distributions. Distributions don't talk to upstream. Upstream doesn't talk to distributions. Ten different programs are written to do the same thing in ten different shitty ways. When I ask two people to work together to solve my problem, I don't mean, "please independently come up with ten solutions each, none of which solve my problem. Thanks."
-- "When I was 20, 'wasting' time to get Linux/BSD work was an investment in learning; at 40 I'd rather waste time gaming / movies, then trying to dick around with all the package dependencies"
- UnknownSoldier
Sorry for sounding like a jerk, but your exposition on rods and cones is all nice and good, but it is _completely_ missing the point, and tells you have never actually shipped a game.
1. You provide "head room" or "breathing room" so when the level designers and artists go crazy, you don't blow you frame rate budget, 2. If you can't hit 60 Hz when you ship, you can still EASILY hit 30 Hz. It is MUCH harder when you are already barely pushing 30 Hz at alpha/beta and you need to guarantee every playable area needs to hit 30 Hz without having to drastically redo levels / models, and/or optimize code 3. 60 Hz is smoother then 30 Hz, (yes there are people that can tell)
> So why is Carmack talking about 60 fps on a graphics engine designed for phones? Is he actually clueless about the issue, As he practically _invented_ 3d first person shooters on PC, I _seriously_ doubt that.
I'm still ticked that Produs 8 was phased out for Prodos 16. I believe one of the Ultimas used a custom version of Produs 8.
Sad that (Apple) Dos 3.3 had 30 character filenames in 1979, (Prodos 8 had 15 character filenames AND sub-directories in 1983), yet MS-DOS was stuck in asinine 8.3 mode for 12 years from 1983.
> Try getting through Left4Dead on Expert Realism. It's a whole different style of gameplay from even the Advanced setting. I can see why people these days might not have the patience for that sort of thing.
While I mostly agree with you, I do have to object the difficulty. Expert difficulty is not THAT difficult. It's more important to have a good team that:
a) communicates, and b) works together
I play a lot of PUGS (pick-up groups) and play with a lot of noobs playing on Expert that really should go back to Advanced. Most people don't even understand the basics of:
a) crouching in front b) choke points c) situational awareness d) melee spam (less of a necessity since Valve put in melee stamina.)
On non expert, you can afford to be "sloppy". On expert each of your mistakes will stick out like a sore thumb. Trouble is most aren't interested in learning _why_ they fucked up in the first place. (I'm looking at you mr/miss mic spam so I can't hear the specials.)
> A good leader can actually talk a novice player to success even against a modestly competent opponent. True. Done that many, many times, and pulled off some amazing saves.
The main problem with a game ramping up the difficulty is that the risk/reward ratio is completely out of whack. I got better things to do then wasting my time trying to complete a game that some narcissistic sadist designer thinks is "fun", and I suspect many people feel the same way. A challenge is one thing -- a difficult challenge with nothing / little to show for success is pointless.
> Actually the losses suffered by the copyright owner through people using illegal copies are quite real.
Not to belittle your point, but show me _one_ company that actually _lists_ these loses due to piracy on its balance sheet. Until then, they are just that, fictitious losses.
> Are we talking console(OpenGL ES)? Pretty much all of them.
Try again.
XBox 360 - no. Wii - no. (I wrote an in-house OpenGL implementation using the native GX calls and shipped 2 games that used it.) DS - no. PS2 - no. (I fixed a few bugs in the existing in-house OpenGL implementation.)
> Windows Vista sucked horribly. Windows 7 fixed some suckage with Windows Vista.
Care to give some examples please?
Running XP + Win7 at home and haven't noticed any problems. Running XP + Vista at work, and only running into 3 real issues..
a) Vista: Robocopy (or xcopy) will sometimes report "Error 5" - and refuse to copy files b) Vista: WTH did they do to the network stack in Vista? I'm [tried] using a VPN, and there are Virtual Network Adapters listed that I just can't remove. c) XP: Explorer allways crashing on my XP box. Browsing a LOT of.zip files using the built-in.zip browser. Vista & Win7 seem solid with this. It has gotten so bad I've switched over to the open-source Explorer++ http://www.explorerplusplus.com/
Windows has ALWAYS had shitty IO. Slow networking browsing, copying files off a bad CD stalls the _whole_ system. Have never found a decent work around with any version of Windows. Now if only MS would stop moving the fucking user's home directory every other version of Windows. (At least Vista / Win 7 it seems to be finally consistent.)
Slashdot Mirror
> I think there's a good reminder about monopolies in there. There's nothing inherently wrong with a monopoly that comes into power simply by being the favorite choice of customers.
You mean, like type of government? Electricity? Water? Cable?
Just pointing out that "essential services" tend to be monopolies, not about the quality of service they provide ...
> People should really be taught about scams in school.
Sorry, the government hates competition, otherwise we'd learn about all the variations of the Ponzi schemes: Insurance, Usury, and Taxes.
So you can't plan ahead when you buy your mobo and PSU to get something that supports SLI ??
I bought a 5770 this year, and will pick up another 5770 either in Dec, or next year.
It isn't rocket science to predict what parts you are going to upgrade over the 2-5 year life cycle of your rig man.
DFTT - Don't Feed The Trolls
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
> Owing to the fact that it's impossible to test all combinations of devices and planes, under all circumstances and actually know what might/could happen -- they've chosen to ban the whole thing.
LOL. So basically the engineers, government, airline manufactors, and control towers DON'T KNOW how the airplane will handle when devices in a certain frequency operate -- great to know that they just ignore the problem. Way to go! Increased vote of confidence for all the passengers. Yah, right.
That's a fucking cop-out if I ever heard one. I can just see the engineeers going ...
"OOPS! We didn't know that a cell phone would generate that much signal interference in the ##-## GHz band and our control system uses the same GHz range!"
Part of an engineer's _job_ is to _verify_ and _confirm_ the safety of the devices they build. Ignorance is no excuse FOR SAFETY. It is their job to know what will cause system (and device) instability. If they don't know, it is there job TO KNOW.
Maybe you're an idiot electronics engineer who doesn't understand the noise and what part of the spectrum that consumer devices operate or generate in. Do you even understand what UL certification is? Here's a big word for you: spectrum analyzer.
Buddy, get a fucking clue stick... here are two ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX#WiMAX_and_the_IEEE_802.16_Standard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
This ban on electronics while in-flight is bullshit. I've "forgotten" to turn off my cell phone, and numerous other electronics and nothing has happened. I'm real sure an $300 electronic device is somehow goig to "magically" disable a $30,000,000 plane ... right... like the airplane engineers have never heard of a faraday cage for the cockpit ...
Correct.
Also, computer rendered images typically lack temporal aliasing, and depth-of-field.
Using the term "motion blurring" is a nice way to summarize the differences/problem.
Cheers
Oblg: You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.
Dam, the imagery / creative descriptions alone in this post deserves a +5. :-)
Nice summary, btw.
> C has too much syntax for my liking.
Seriously?! I think that's the first time I've ever seen someone saw C was too "big."
What would you remove/redo in C if you could? (Inconsistent syntax not withstanding.)
> and closing parenthesis is as trivial to any modern editor or IDE as managing any other aspect of syntax.
That's a hinderance, not an advantage. I should be able to easily enter in blocks of code without having to rely on crutches like IDEs to make sure I have the correct number of parenthesis. While I admire LISP for its simplicity, elegance, and consistency, back in the Real World (TM) it has a lot of unncessary and redudant parenthesis that do nothing except clutter up code, making that crap near un-readable -- at least in C/C++ you can remove the braces for one-liners. Algol-like languages have a better mapping to mathematical functions. foo(x) vs (foo x)
i.e.
void foo( int x )
{
if (true-expresion)
{
then-expression ;
}
}
vs. the leading '(' is complely redundant but needed because of the syntax.
(defun bar (x)
(if (true-expression)
(then-expression)
)
)
Apparently you have a hard time understanding...
1. Just because you [legally] CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD do it, and
2. There is a big difference legality and morality.
Sometimes the two coincide, other times they are out of touch of reality. i.e. Prohibition, victim-less crimes such as smoking tobacco vs. other drugs, using synthetic DMT vs. the DMT that your brain naturally produces, etc.
> This makes me uncomfortable, because it makes attacking someone outside of a mosque because you have a problem with their religion somehow worse than attacking someone outside a sci-fi convention because you have a problem with geeks. /tongue in cheek ... ;-)
Everyone knows it’s those fucking LARPers wrecking it for the Ren Faire folks, of course nothing beats a good 'ol fight going then "Star Wars vs. Star Trek"
http://www.brunching.com/images/geekchartbig.gif
Anyways, Religion is kindergarten Spirituality.
I would have to agree.
Repeating what I posted in comment 34102848
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1849680&cid=34102848
This is why I find Go to be infinitely more interesting then Chess. There are no hundreds of standard openings to memorize like in Chess -- every game is pretty much guaranteed to be unique. The golden era of Chess was the early 1900s with famous players like Alexander Alekhine, Jose Capablanca, etc, as everyone was still exploring opening moves -- the commentaries of the games are amazing, interesting and very fun to read. This is Chess's weakness -- games become too predictable and boring.
> Also never really cared for chess or Go.
I found Chess to be pretty boring for the most part once you get to a certain [skill] level.
Go is a completely differetn world.
Go is infinitely more interesting then Chess. There are no hundreds of standard openings to memorize like in Chess -- every game is pretty much guaranteed to be unique. The golden era of Chess was the early 1900s with famous players like Alexander Alekhine, Jose Capablanca, etc, as everyone was still exploring opening moves -- the commentaries of the games are amazing, interesting and very fun to read. This is Chess's weakness -- games become too predictable and boring.
The other very nice thing with Go is that it is _much_ more scalable when players have different skill sets. The handicap system is Chess is lame -- it is not granular enough due to every piece having a high importance (I did _not_ say value) via controlling the board by proximity of location. The Go handicap system is much nicer -- finer granularity, so you can easily hone in on the right handicap to have an 'even' match.
Cheers
> Why is 300 variations a problem?
Oblg. Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html
Or said another way ...
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/05/gcc-opensslc-fno-random-seed.html
People in the Linux community love to talk about how Linux is all cooperation and programmer love-making. But just take a look. These people don't cooperate. There are hundreds of slightly different distributions. Distributions don't talk to upstream. Upstream doesn't talk to distributions. Ten different programs are written to do the same thing in ten different shitty ways. When I ask two people to work together to solve my problem, I don't mean, "please independently come up with ten solutions each, none of which solve my problem. Thanks."
--
"When I was 20, 'wasting' time to get Linux/BSD work was an investment in learning; at 40 I'd rather waste time gaming / movies, then trying to dick around with all the package dependencies"
- UnknownSoldier
> The whole thing about certain frame rates being un-seeable is total crap.
Yup, completely agree.
Back in the CRT days I would prefer a 100 Hz monitor refresh rate for a steady image, with a frame rate of 72 Hz. Decreasing returns after that.
Sorry for sounding like a jerk, but your exposition on rods and cones is all nice and good, but it is _completely_ missing the point, and tells you have never actually shipped a game.
1. You provide "head room" or "breathing room" so when the level designers and artists go crazy, you don't blow you frame rate budget,
2. If you can't hit 60 Hz when you ship, you can still EASILY hit 30 Hz. It is MUCH harder when you are already barely pushing 30 Hz at alpha/beta and you need to guarantee every playable area needs to hit 30 Hz without having to drastically redo levels / models, and/or optimize code
3. 60 Hz is smoother then 30 Hz, (yes there are people that can tell)
> So why is Carmack talking about 60 fps on a graphics engine designed for phones? Is he actually clueless about the issue,
As he practically _invented_ 3d first person shooters on PC, I _seriously_ doubt that.
I'm still ticked that Produs 8 was phased out for Prodos 16. I believe one of the Ultimas used a custom version of Produs 8.
Sad that (Apple) Dos 3.3 had 30 character filenames in 1979, (Prodos 8 had 15 character filenames AND sub-directories in 1983), yet MS-DOS was stuck in asinine 8.3 mode for 12 years from 1983.
Someone please mod parent up for that link.
Very interesting article on game design, philosophy - perserverance vs performance.
> Try getting through Left4Dead on Expert Realism. It's a whole different style of gameplay from even the Advanced setting. I can see why people these days might not have the patience for that sort of thing.
While I mostly agree with you, I do have to object the difficulty. Expert difficulty is not THAT difficult. It's more important to have a good team that:
a) communicates, and
b) works together
I play a lot of PUGS (pick-up groups) and play with a lot of noobs playing on Expert that really should go back to Advanced. Most people don't even understand the basics of:
a) crouching in front
b) choke points
c) situational awareness
d) melee spam (less of a necessity since Valve put in melee stamina.)
On non expert, you can afford to be "sloppy". On expert each of your mistakes will stick out like a sore thumb. Trouble is most aren't interested in learning _why_ they fucked up in the first place. (I'm looking at you mr/miss mic spam so I can't hear the specials.)
> A good leader can actually talk a novice player to success even against a modestly competent opponent.
True. Done that many, many times, and pulled off some amazing saves.
The main problem with a game ramping up the difficulty is that the risk/reward ratio is completely out of whack. I got better things to do then wasting my time trying to complete a game that some narcissistic sadist designer thinks is "fun", and I suspect many people feel the same way. A challenge is one thing -- a difficult challenge with nothing / little to show for success is pointless.
> Actually the losses suffered by the copyright owner through people using illegal copies are quite real.
Not to belittle your point, but show me _one_ company that actually _lists_ these loses due to piracy on its balance sheet. Until then, they are just that, fictitious losses.
> Are we talking console(OpenGL ES)? Pretty much all of them.
Try again.
XBox 360 - no.
Wii - no. (I wrote an in-house OpenGL implementation using the native GX calls and shipped 2 games that used it.)
DS - no.
PS2 - no. (I fixed a few bugs in the existing in-house OpenGL implementation.)
As a gamer, we sadly don't have much choice with DX11 ...
but otherwise I agree. WinXP works. Why can't I legally buy it at a discounted priced, knowing full well, that it won't be supported ??
There are only 2 real reasons to upgrade an OS:
- security fixes
- new device support
Of course non-technical people see it as
- new shiny (nothing wrong with that, as long as the other 2 are kept in mind)
I'm still waiting for the year that MS has a GUI that doesn't suck, aka tab Window Title Bars, ala Be OS, let alone being able to customize it.
> Windows Vista sucked horribly. Windows 7 fixed some suckage with Windows Vista.
Care to give some examples please?
Running XP + Win7 at home and haven't noticed any problems. Running XP + Vista at work, and only running into 3 real issues..
a) Vista: Robocopy (or xcopy) will sometimes report "Error 5" - and refuse to copy files .zip files using the built-in .zip browser. Vista & Win7 seem solid with this. It has gotten so bad I've switched over to the open-source Explorer++ http://www.explorerplusplus.com/
b) Vista: WTH did they do to the network stack in Vista? I'm [tried] using a VPN, and there are Virtual Network Adapters listed that I just can't remove.
c) XP: Explorer allways crashing on my XP box. Browsing a LOT of
Windows has ALWAYS had shitty IO. Slow networking browsing, copying files off a bad CD stalls the _whole_ system. Have never found a decent work around with any version of Windows. Now if only MS would stop moving the fucking user's home directory every other version of Windows. (At least Vista / Win 7 it seems to be finally consistent.)
Cheers