Which timer? SetTimeout? SetInterval? Both are failures. I might as well use Date and a while() loop.:P
SoundManager2 is a Flash app. That I need to step outside of javascript to get something done demonstrates javascript's failure to be ready for multimedia.
I don't believe that I "loose". I'm trying to write simple 2D games and I would hope that unloading some work onto the GPU would speed things up, because writing all my own rasterizing code would be a big time sink. I'm not trying to write the next Quake, I'd be happy with a Braid or Snood. I think you see what you want to see, and then accuse me of making assumptions. Double fail.
setTimeout/setInterval doesn't actually surrender control of the thread back to the CPU. My CPU monitor says 99% usage, even when I set long intervals.
Yes, you could use the audio tag. But good luck getting the sound to play at the moment you request it, and fat chance of getting multiple sounds to overlap.
Firebug is the best thing I've found for doing stack traces but it won't tell you where your typo is. If you made a significant change it can be a PITA to track down.
Less than a second to be in a game? I don't think you appreciate how long it takes to load resources before the game is actually running.
I've written a few games using the 2D canvas element. Invariably these games use 99% of the CPU because Javascript doesn't have a real sleep() function. There's no decent way to manipulate sounds (like an FMOD for javascript). Tests on my machine show that changing the line/fill color is expensive. There's no way to switch to full screen or to capture every key stroke/mouse movement. All of which is beside the really big issue: there's no decent debugger.
3D games sound like a nice idea but they'll be prohibitively expensive (time-wise) to develop, suffer bizarre bottlenecks not seen in native code, and have to work through the very limited browser interface. While Assembly demo coders might enjoy the challenge of working in such a limited environment, the rest of the world should wait for some real improvements.
Silly, they won't need to ask permission. They'll build it into every TV and computer monitor and then your "choice" will be to allow monitoring (haha) or join the amish.
If they really do stifle competition then they're ripe for a class action suit. Maybe then we can finally break open the monopoly console makers have on the software that runs on their machines. Telling me I can only use my xbox with games you approve is a bit like saying I can only use the hammer you sold me for prying nails.
And if there isn't one in your neighborhood - organize it. You'll meet all kinds of nerdy cross stitch girls, hang out with roboticists, and who knows what else.
nationwide operators, including Verizon, maintain (PDF) that 'in the absence of exclusivity agreements, wireless carriers would have less incentive to develop and promote innovative handsets.'
That's fine with us! Don't develop the handsets. Focus on building your network's reliability and lowering your cost to consumer. Let someone who knows what they're doing build the handsets.
What's that? Handsets make a lot of money for you? Well then I guess you'll have to do a better job than the 3rd party developers. So much for less incentive! Just when you thought you had all that nasty competition wrapped up, free market forces come along and ruin your day.
You used Heroes as an example? It didn't suck because they changed characters. It sucked because they built up the end of the first season and then didn't deliver. Also, saying it would never work because it didn't work quickly enough... well, I'm sure some Firefly fans would take objection to that.
It's a little strange that you complain it wouldn't work in today's TV landscape, then go on to talk about the semi-mythical "end game". If a show has an end game it's only because the producers got the cancellation order before they finished filming episodes. (Wasn't there a time when LOST was supposed to end at 5 seasons?)
But you asked for an idea that might work. Having only watched two episodes of wooden acting and bad scripting, I wondered why is it only robots could travel back? Why is it people in our present had to stop the robots - couldn't a human from even FURTHER into the future come back and be waiting for the robot to arrive? How about killing the main characters at the start of the episode and having an alternate future come back to save their lives? I'm sure they'll find a way to gloss over the inherent paradoxes.
Developers will ask "Why spend 18 months making a game nobody can play?"
Players will say "why get a machine with no games?"
New gaming consoles can't succeed without a massive investment to get hardware into people's hands. The death of the sega Dreamcast is a perfect example. Make it worthwhile to customers to get the system and then developers will change their tune.
"They are calling on Congress to grant patents only where an invention has social value, where the patent would not stifle innovation, and where the absence of a patent would damage cost-effectiveness."
Ok, fine! All existing patents are cost-effective... to the people who own them. Congratulations, you've solved nothing.
Here's a question for you: How do you prove a patent is stifling innovation? How do you define social value as a metric?
It's very nice of you to tell congress to change something. How about you do real work and come up with specific wording?
What's the acronym for an article that's the opposite of FUD, but just as useless? PITS (Pie in the Sky)?
Just look at Firefly. Would there be such a rabid fan community if the series had finished even one season with a cliffhanger? They made every show like it was their last and they never had a cliffhanger. 6 seasons of fighting, say, niska, or badger, or the reavers would have gotten predictable and dull. Hooray for endings of any kind.
Also, try to remember this is just one more reason TV sucks.
But at least they're not following the RIAA by, say, suing customers for watching free TV online.
Someone over there has learned the lesson and is trying to turn this into an opportunity.
Someone over there is smarter than all those RIAA lawyers put together.
Hey, cable guys! Here's what we'll do: We'll keep paying for channels we don't need IF you can deliver more bandwidth and faster downloads from internet.
In fact, get out of TV altogether and just do the cable. How much extra bandwidth could I get if you dropped those 500 channels from your tubes?
It's PC vs TV and PC is winning. Get with the program.
Ah yes, but if the system can be monetized then it will grow itself on the back of people's greed. It will also stop script kiddies and large institutions from doing blanket sweeps. Remember the story where the NYDOJ had the right to 10 unsigned wiretaps, so they rotated them at super-high speeds to listen to thousands of conversations at once? Tsk, tsk.
If the government (aka tax paying citizens) are paying for these cameras then shouldn't the data on them be available to every tax paying citizen?
put them all up on google maps, with GPS and orientation information.
allow searching by camera & history (so, for example, i can replay my car accident from yesterday and see who was at fault) and let me tag interesting events in recordings.
charge an access fee that goes towards maintaining the cameras
Keep a publicly available record of who watches which camera.
Slashdot Mirror
Which timer? SetTimeout? SetInterval? Both are failures. I might as well use Date and a while() loop. :P
SoundManager2 is a Flash app. That I need to step outside of javascript to get something done demonstrates javascript's failure to be ready for multimedia.
I don't believe that I "loose". I'm trying to write simple 2D games and I would hope that unloading some work onto the GPU would speed things up, because writing all my own rasterizing code would be a big time sink. I'm not trying to write the next Quake, I'd be happy with a Braid or Snood. I think you see what you want to see, and then accuse me of making assumptions. Double fail.
setTimeout/setInterval doesn't actually surrender control of the thread back to the CPU. My CPU monitor says 99% usage, even when I set long intervals.
Yes, you could use the audio tag. But good luck getting the sound to play at the moment you request it, and fat chance of getting multiple sounds to overlap.
Firebug is the best thing I've found for doing stack traces but it won't tell you where your typo is. If you made a significant change it can be a PITA to track down.
Less than a second to be in a game? I don't think you appreciate how long it takes to load resources before the game is actually running.
I've written a few games using the 2D canvas element. Invariably these games use 99% of the CPU because Javascript doesn't have a real sleep() function. There's no decent way to manipulate sounds (like an FMOD for javascript). Tests on my machine show that changing the line/fill color is expensive. There's no way to switch to full screen or to capture every key stroke/mouse movement. All of which is beside the really big issue: there's no decent debugger.
3D games sound like a nice idea but they'll be prohibitively expensive (time-wise) to develop, suffer bizarre bottlenecks not seen in native code, and have to work through the very limited browser interface. While Assembly demo coders might enjoy the challenge of working in such a limited environment, the rest of the world should wait for some real improvements.
Silly, they won't need to ask permission. They'll build it into every TV and computer monitor and then your "choice" will be to allow monitoring (haha) or join the amish.
*Inner* Exhibitionist?
If they really do stifle competition then they're ripe for a class action suit. Maybe then we can finally break open the monopoly console makers have on the software that runs on their machines. Telling me I can only use my xbox with games you approve is a bit like saying I can only use the hammer you sold me for prying nails.
Ultima: The Second Age Of Darkness: Tales of Sosaria: The Lord British Years: Friends of The Stranger: Iolo's Quest: Fetch Me A Toothpick.
And thanks to digital distribution they don't have to fit it on the front of a box.
I doubt it will be as much of a grind as sitting through Transformers 2.
That's like saying the drawback to commercial aircraft is that they are designed by aeronautical engineers.
You don't fly much, do you.
And if there isn't one in your neighborhood - organize it. You'll meet all kinds of nerdy cross stitch girls, hang out with roboticists, and who knows what else.
That's fine with us! Don't develop the handsets. Focus on building your network's reliability and lowering your cost to consumer. Let someone who knows what they're doing build the handsets.
What's that? Handsets make a lot of money for you? Well then I guess you'll have to do a better job than the 3rd party developers. So much for less incentive! Just when you thought you had all that nasty competition wrapped up, free market forces come along and ruin your day.
Isn't that about one month too late to cash in on the Christmas crowd AND the Halloween crowd?
You used Heroes as an example? It didn't suck because they changed characters. It sucked because they built up the end of the first season and then didn't deliver. Also, saying it would never work because it didn't work quickly enough... well, I'm sure some Firefly fans would take objection to that.
It's a little strange that you complain it wouldn't work in today's TV landscape, then go on to talk about the semi-mythical "end game". If a show has an end game it's only because the producers got the cancellation order before they finished filming episodes. (Wasn't there a time when LOST was supposed to end at 5 seasons?)
But you asked for an idea that might work. Having only watched two episodes of wooden acting and bad scripting, I wondered why is it only robots could travel back? Why is it people in our present had to stop the robots - couldn't a human from even FURTHER into the future come back and be waiting for the robot to arrive? How about killing the main characters at the start of the episode and having an alternate future come back to save their lives? I'm sure they'll find a way to gloss over the inherent paradoxes.
We don't watch to see if he survives, we watch to see how he survives
It's the same with a show like this. We know the protagonist isn't going to die, but we watch to see how he manages it.
Only if you enjoy gimmicks. There's so many other stories they could be telling in the same universe.
I like the part where I'm traveling at speed of traffic at 120km/h on the freeway when the power goes out.
Isn't it great that they tested it on the two groups with the least incentive to go fast?
1. Have the spammers declared "illegal enemy combatants" or "network terrorists".
2. Rendition them to afghanistan
3. ?
4. Profit.
Developers will ask "Why spend 18 months making a game nobody can play?"
Players will say "why get a machine with no games?"
New gaming consoles can't succeed without a massive investment to get hardware into people's hands. The death of the sega Dreamcast is a perfect example. Make it worthwhile to customers to get the system and then developers will change their tune.
"They are calling on Congress to grant patents only where an invention has social value, where the patent would not stifle innovation, and where the absence of a patent would damage cost-effectiveness."
... to the people who own them. Congratulations, you've solved nothing.
Ok, fine! All existing patents are cost-effective
Here's a question for you: How do you prove a patent is stifling innovation? How do you define social value as a metric?
It's very nice of you to tell congress to change something. How about you do real work and come up with specific wording?
What's the acronym for an article that's the opposite of FUD, but just as useless? PITS (Pie in the Sky)?
Sure. Without one you couldn't have the other.
We blame the system, the oversight, the laws, the formulas... where's the article that blames the people? Where is the banker who says "mea culpa"?
Just look at Firefly. Would there be such a rabid fan community if the series had finished even one season with a cliffhanger? They made every show like it was their last and they never had a cliffhanger. 6 seasons of fighting, say, niska, or badger, or the reavers would have gotten predictable and dull. Hooray for endings of any kind. Also, try to remember this is just one more reason TV sucks.
But at least they're not following the RIAA by, say, suing customers for watching free TV online.
Someone over there has learned the lesson and is trying to turn this into an opportunity.
Someone over there is smarter than all those RIAA lawyers put together.
Hey, cable guys! Here's what we'll do: We'll keep paying for channels we don't need IF you can deliver more bandwidth and faster downloads from internet.
In fact, get out of TV altogether and just do the cable. How much extra bandwidth could I get if you dropped those 500 channels from your tubes?
It's PC vs TV and PC is winning. Get with the program.
They've been playing Mao?
Ah yes, but if the system can be monetized then it will grow itself on the back of people's greed. It will also stop script kiddies and large institutions from doing blanket sweeps. Remember the story where the NYDOJ had the right to 10 unsigned wiretaps, so they rotated them at super-high speeds to listen to thousands of conversations at once? Tsk, tsk.