Atari, actually; the targeting system is called "Missile Command" and most of the problems stem from the fact that it can only intercept missiles moving inside a single two-dimensional plane.
Apple's approach was to make the United States so shiny and expensive that nobody in their right mind would fire a missile at them. Also, they would've replaced the American airspace with a robust aluminum shell. This plan was rejected because citizens would have had to go through a boot camp before they could use Windows software. Okay, and some naysayers complained about the unibody shell making air travel impossible and causing massive damage to nature and agriculture by completely shutting out the sun.
Fair enough, although I have seen nonsensical complaints be brought against Wikipedia for showing oh-so-harmful perfectly legal album covers and the like. After a while it all runs together.
Wow. A +X, Funny thread about how nobody knows Linux and the detergent joke gets downmodded as a Troll. Apparently some people have heard that one once too often...
Since I don't subscribe to the notion that any form of erotica involving minors will turn people into child rapists, I see neither a victim nor a reason to demonize the images.
Well, most Slashdotters are only afraid of sex if it involves themselves and another person. Porn certainly doesn't apply unless you do it either very wrong or very right.
In addition, all children should be jailed for providing one of the key ingredients of child pornography. In fact, since they still continue to do so in jail, they should all receive capital punishment.
Actualy, couldn't Wikimedia now sue Sanger? There should be some kind of defamation lawsuit in it for them if they can prove that his allegations were unsubstantiated.
Seriously, porn is a part of our reality, whether we like it or not, removing it from encyclopedias is like pretending it doesn't exist. Ignoring reality is almost as bad as EVERYTHING that I have seen to date on Fox. Sickening.
Breasts aren't pornography. Penises aren't pornography. The naked human body is not pornography. And yes, at least the more well-known pieces of classical art aren't pornography even if they depict things very much illegal today. You can have all of that on Wikipedia without it ever being pornographic.
I've looked at what Sanger complained about. I've looked at my fair share of obscure Wikipedia articles. I've never encountered anything you could reasonably describe as pornographic. Yes, there were various organs and at one point I stumbled across a photo series depicting an ejaculating penis (appropriately enough illustrating the article about ejaculation) but none of that was pornography.
Yes, someone might probably derive sexual stimulation from some of the pictures. The same applies to pictures of animals. That doesn't mean that zoos are peep shows.
Neither is pornography evil nor is everything involving bare primary or secondary sexual features pornography. Man I wish the United States would just hit puberty already and get over their paralyzing fear of sex.
I also find it easier to sleep in a completely quiet room but we're certainly not prepared as a society to give up all our noisy and bright technology "just" for a better nights sleep.
Actually, noise isn't necessarily problematic - if it's uniform. If you've ever lived in a room directly under the house's roof you'll agree that rain does create noticeable noise but doesn't really keep one from sleeping. Likewise, if you have a computer running, the fans shouldn't be much of a problem if their sound is close enough to uniform noise.
In fact under certain circumstances I find it easier to sleep in a room with artificial noise. Spring is such a time; I rather flood my room with tolerable amounts of pink noise than wake up at 4:30 because of the very non-uniform tweeting of the damn birds outside. In severe cases a pair of in-ear phones and a mix of pink noise and water sounds lets me sleep even through people having a conversation in the same room, which usually wakes me up even if they try to be quiet.
I agree on the light, though. Light murders good sleep.
But if he said "LCD screens" he couldn't have made a point about how the Amazon(R) Kindle(TM) is so much superior in every regard to the iPad and how every home should have at least one Amazon(R) Kindle(TM). Per person.
Then once that first class is done, the students should never need to be "taught" a computer language using an entire course again. Maybe some classes will give a quick day or two on an overview, and some more days on new and different concepts, but not a full course. The students should be able to pick this up on their own by reading the books and manuals.
That may or may not work. I remember one course which touched on CUDA as a side topic. One of the assignments actually included an exercise that required us to learn CUDA on our own and efficiently implement a certain algorithm in it. Within one week while also doing assignments for other courses and the rest of that assignment. I think about two people managed to get all points on that exercise; most turned in code that wouldn't actually run.
If you want to use a programming language in your course you need to touch on all the things people need to know in order to do your assignments. Even if you just write a little introductory script and upload it to the course's CMS. Don't just tell them: "The developer has some documentation somewhere and the language can be used in conjunction with C. That's all you need to know; now write me a multithreaded, maximally-efficient implementation of XYZ."
Yes, you need to learn quickly in the real world but universities should focus more on making sure you actually learn things instead of emulating the real world as closely as possible.
Concerning how real-world emulation can go wrong, here's a story I like to tell:
We have a mandatory two-semester software project at my university. The time I went through it, the lecturer wanted to emulate a real-world project as much as possible so he played a clueless customer who makes up inane requirements.
Okay so far, however he also teased us with the prospect (nay, the promise) of the best candidate implementation actually being used in the read world. You see, he wanted a website he was responsible for redone. Yeah, cheap labor but hey, designing something that actually gets used is kinda exciting for a pre-Bachelor student.
And then he went on to make Java with JSP or an equivalent framework a hard requirement. For the reimplementation of a website currently served from a few text files and some shell scripts. No negotiation, he wouldn't budge on that one.
Needless to say, after spending the first semester just wrangling with Tomcat and various gigantic frameworks all groups finally turned in horribly bloated web apps that required a fairly beefy computer in order to do what any LAMP installation would have done with 300 lines of PHP/Python/Perl on a Pentium II. He opted not to use any of our designs.
The mindboggling thing is that instead of letting us choose which technologies to use and encouraging us to teach those technologies to those in the group who didn't yet know them - giving us both experience in real-world web development and some practice in student-to-student teaching - he settled on Java because it was supposed to be easier. After all, we already had a full semester of writing Hello World in Java! Also, driving home just how much contempt we should have for real-world customers was more important than giving us the chance to do something meaningful when said chance was in fact the very thing used to motivate us.
He did succeed in giving everyone involved a thorough contempt for anything that combines Java and any markup language in any way.
Remember that you at most have one year's worth of time to teach all of this, spread out over about five years. Not everyone studies to become a programmer and depending on how the BSc/MSc or the local equivalent work they may or may not be required to take an arbitrary number of classes which may or may not deal with programming.
In short, you can't assume that a student will spend more than (or even as much as) one course each semester on general-purpose programming, depending on the university's focus and on what the student aims for.
You may think it's a waste to limit teaching people the backgrounds of programming to, say, two basic programming courses and Theoretical Computer Science 1. But we have to solve more problems than just "how can I implement this in the fastest way possible" and getting people to the point where they can, for example, design a semi-automated residence specially tailored to the needs and deficiencies of old people requires a ton of courses that may not involve a single line of code, yet are still genuine computer science (like usability and AI courses). A chip designer likewise wouldn't care about the specifics of C++ string handling just like a general-purpose coder doesn't care about bus arbitration in VHDL.
Your plan is nice for universities specializing in cranking out good general-purpose coders. However, other universities specialize in things like robotics, IC design or usability and have completely different requirements as to what their computer scientists need to be able to do.
It's pretty easy to synchronize files between computers using symbolic links. For example, I copied my data for World of Goo, Aquaria, Pidgin, and other games/programs to Dropbox, made symbolic links on each computer connected to the account, and it acts like the settings are right where they should be.
You are aware that the people who buy World of Goo through Steam think that a symbolic link is when you click an image in a website and something happens?
In addition, the EULA is fixed on the page at time of sale, and DRM can alter the terms of the deal after sale *kindle* *cough* *cough*. Pray I don't alter it any further.
Note that this also applies to any game with a multiplayer component as they can just affix a new EULA to any patch they feel like. Since patches usually break compatibility with older versions you can choose between accepting their new EULA and effectively losing the multiplayer functionality.
Also note that while EULAs can be theoretically challenged in court it's extremely unlikely that any affected gamer is going to do so. Like patents, EULAs are theoretically attackable but practically too expensive to deal with. Even extremely obvious cases could cost you more than you can afford.
Oh, I'm sorry I shouldn't have called them "your games". I think what everyone is trying to point out is that they don't like the whole system that DRM inevitably forces on you. You no longer buy a game and own it as your piece of property. You rent it.
Note that this applies to games distributed through physical media as well. You obtained a license for the game as well as the medium the game is on; the EULA will most likely tell you that the game is still not your property. Because it isn't.
Well, I went to http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/ and clicked the huge button. Steam took over from there. That's it. (Of course now I'm waiting for that damn download to finish.)
Pretty cool about licensing alright. I just entered my original Half-Life retail CD key. Steam recognized it as... a Half-Life Platinum Pack key, giving me the game, both addons and five different mods. I'm not complaining.
(I can remember those mods being part of a regular Half-Life update at some point but I didn't know that the same apparently applies to the addons.)
If you have anything to contribute (and aren't too lazy to do so), consider joining the openDarkEngine team. They're working on a reimplementation of the Dark Engine, which is used in the Thief games and System Shock 2. Unfortunately, progress is slow.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with OPDE, merely interested and too lazy to contribute.
That's exactly why OS X's application bundle model is so great: The bundle contains pretty much everything the application needs to run. There are only very few external dependencies, which are guaranteed by the operating system. That means that (assuming there won't be another platform switch) any application I write now will run much further down the line simply because it contains almost everything it needs.
Yes, you waste storage having ten copies of libvorbis around. Hard drives are big, though, and libraries represent a shrinking part of a game's storage needs. Things like TeX are still installed system-wide even under OS X.
You also get the ability to trivially have various installations of the same program around. Just put them in different directories or rename them and you're set.
Per-user installation is also trivial since for the usual bundle-only program there literally is no installation procedure. There's the recommended procedure of moving it to/Applications but you can also run it from ~/Downloads or even right out of the disk image it came in.
Of course you don't get the comfort of a package manager. That's the price you pay for the comfort of app bundles.
Got any further info on that? I'm involved in a cross-playtform game project and we wanted to use OpenAL. If Valve has found some critical issue I'd really like to know more about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just think of what a nuclear plowshare would be capable of.
Atari, actually; the targeting system is called "Missile Command" and most of the problems stem from the fact that it can only intercept missiles moving inside a single two-dimensional plane.
Apple's approach was to make the United States so shiny and expensive that nobody in their right mind would fire a missile at them. Also, they would've replaced the American airspace with a robust aluminum shell. This plan was rejected because citizens would have had to go through a boot camp before they could use Windows software. Okay, and some naysayers complained about the unibody shell making air travel impossible and causing massive damage to nature and agriculture by completely shutting out the sun.
Fair enough, although I have seen nonsensical complaints be brought against Wikipedia for showing oh-so-harmful perfectly legal album covers and the like. After a while it all runs together.
Wow. A +X, Funny thread about how nobody knows Linux and the detergent joke gets downmodded as a Troll. Apparently some people have heard that one once too often...
Minor nitpick: "Defamation" is a generic term for both slander and libel.
Since I don't subscribe to the notion that any form of erotica involving minors will turn people into child rapists, I see neither a victim nor a reason to demonize the images.
Well, most Slashdotters are only afraid of sex if it involves themselves and another person. Porn certainly doesn't apply unless you do it either very wrong or very right.
Actually, Linux is a German detergent brand. I have no idea why we should care about detergent all of a sudden.
Fox News is a forum?
In addition, all children should be jailed for providing one of the key ingredients of child pornography. In fact, since they still continue to do so in jail, they should all receive capital punishment.
Actualy, couldn't Wikimedia now sue Sanger? There should be some kind of defamation lawsuit in it for them if they can prove that his allegations were unsubstantiated.
Seriously, porn is a part of our reality, whether we like it or not, removing it from encyclopedias is like pretending it doesn't exist. Ignoring reality is almost as bad as EVERYTHING that I have seen to date on Fox. Sickening.
Breasts aren't pornography. Penises aren't pornography. The naked human body is not pornography. And yes, at least the more well-known pieces of classical art aren't pornography even if they depict things very much illegal today. You can have all of that on Wikipedia without it ever being pornographic.
I've looked at what Sanger complained about. I've looked at my fair share of obscure Wikipedia articles. I've never encountered anything you could reasonably describe as pornographic. Yes, there were various organs and at one point I stumbled across a photo series depicting an ejaculating penis (appropriately enough illustrating the article about ejaculation) but none of that was pornography.
Yes, someone might probably derive sexual stimulation from some of the pictures. The same applies to pictures of animals. That doesn't mean that zoos are peep shows.
Neither is pornography evil nor is everything involving bare primary or secondary sexual features pornography. Man I wish the United States would just hit puberty already and get over their paralyzing fear of sex.
I also find it easier to sleep in a completely quiet room but we're certainly not prepared as a society to give up all our noisy and bright technology "just" for a better nights sleep.
Actually, noise isn't necessarily problematic - if it's uniform. If you've ever lived in a room directly under the house's roof you'll agree that rain does create noticeable noise but doesn't really keep one from sleeping. Likewise, if you have a computer running, the fans shouldn't be much of a problem if their sound is close enough to uniform noise.
In fact under certain circumstances I find it easier to sleep in a room with artificial noise. Spring is such a time; I rather flood my room with tolerable amounts of pink noise than wake up at 4:30 because of the very non-uniform tweeting of the damn birds outside. In severe cases a pair of in-ear phones and a mix of pink noise and water sounds lets me sleep even through people having a conversation in the same room, which usually wakes me up even if they try to be quiet.
I agree on the light, though. Light murders good sleep.
But if he said "LCD screens" he couldn't have made a point about how the Amazon(R) Kindle(TM) is so much superior in every regard to the iPad and how every home should have at least one Amazon(R) Kindle(TM). Per person.
Then once that first class is done, the students should never need to be "taught" a computer language using an entire course again. Maybe some classes will give a quick day or two on an overview, and some more days on new and different concepts, but not a full course. The students should be able to pick this up on their own by reading the books and manuals.
That may or may not work. I remember one course which touched on CUDA as a side topic. One of the assignments actually included an exercise that required us to learn CUDA on our own and efficiently implement a certain algorithm in it. Within one week while also doing assignments for other courses and the rest of that assignment. I think about two people managed to get all points on that exercise; most turned in code that wouldn't actually run.
If you want to use a programming language in your course you need to touch on all the things people need to know in order to do your assignments. Even if you just write a little introductory script and upload it to the course's CMS. Don't just tell them: "The developer has some documentation somewhere and the language can be used in conjunction with C. That's all you need to know; now write me a multithreaded, maximally-efficient implementation of XYZ."
Yes, you need to learn quickly in the real world but universities should focus more on making sure you actually learn things instead of emulating the real world as closely as possible.
Concerning how real-world emulation can go wrong, here's a story I like to tell:
We have a mandatory two-semester software project at my university. The time I went through it, the lecturer wanted to emulate a real-world project as much as possible so he played a clueless customer who makes up inane requirements.
Okay so far, however he also teased us with the prospect (nay, the promise) of the best candidate implementation actually being used in the read world. You see, he wanted a website he was responsible for redone. Yeah, cheap labor but hey, designing something that actually gets used is kinda exciting for a pre-Bachelor student.
And then he went on to make Java with JSP or an equivalent framework a hard requirement. For the reimplementation of a website currently served from a few text files and some shell scripts. No negotiation, he wouldn't budge on that one.
Needless to say, after spending the first semester just wrangling with Tomcat and various gigantic frameworks all groups finally turned in horribly bloated web apps that required a fairly beefy computer in order to do what any LAMP installation would have done with 300 lines of PHP/Python/Perl on a Pentium II. He opted not to use any of our designs.
The mindboggling thing is that instead of letting us choose which technologies to use and encouraging us to teach those technologies to those in the group who didn't yet know them - giving us both experience in real-world web development and some practice in student-to-student teaching - he settled on Java because it was supposed to be easier. After all, we already had a full semester of writing Hello World in Java! Also, driving home just how much contempt we should have for real-world customers was more important than giving us the chance to do something meaningful when said chance was in fact the very thing used to motivate us.
He did succeed in giving everyone involved a thorough contempt for anything that combines Java and any markup language in any way.
Remember that you at most have one year's worth of time to teach all of this, spread out over about five years. Not everyone studies to become a programmer and depending on how the BSc/MSc or the local equivalent work they may or may not be required to take an arbitrary number of classes which may or may not deal with programming.
In short, you can't assume that a student will spend more than (or even as much as) one course each semester on general-purpose programming, depending on the university's focus and on what the student aims for.
You may think it's a waste to limit teaching people the backgrounds of programming to, say, two basic programming courses and Theoretical Computer Science 1. But we have to solve more problems than just "how can I implement this in the fastest way possible" and getting people to the point where they can, for example, design a semi-automated residence specially tailored to the needs and deficiencies of old people requires a ton of courses that may not involve a single line of code, yet are still genuine computer science (like usability and AI courses). A chip designer likewise wouldn't care about the specifics of C++ string handling just like a general-purpose coder doesn't care about bus arbitration in VHDL.
Your plan is nice for universities specializing in cranking out good general-purpose coders. However, other universities specialize in things like robotics, IC design or usability and have completely different requirements as to what their computer scientists need to be able to do.
It's pretty easy to synchronize files between computers using symbolic links. For example, I copied my data for World of Goo, Aquaria, Pidgin, and other games/programs to Dropbox, made symbolic links on each computer connected to the account, and it acts like the settings are right where they should be.
You are aware that the people who buy World of Goo through Steam think that a symbolic link is when you click an image in a website and something happens?
In addition, the EULA is fixed on the page at time of sale, and DRM can alter the terms of the deal after sale *kindle* *cough* *cough*. Pray I don't alter it any further.
Note that this also applies to any game with a multiplayer component as they can just affix a new EULA to any patch they feel like. Since patches usually break compatibility with older versions you can choose between accepting their new EULA and effectively losing the multiplayer functionality.
Also note that while EULAs can be theoretically challenged in court it's extremely unlikely that any affected gamer is going to do so. Like patents, EULAs are theoretically attackable but practically too expensive to deal with. Even extremely obvious cases could cost you more than you can afford.
Thats what they remove from all the games I download from piratebay after I buy them so I don't have to use the CD anymore isn't it?
In other terms, you're okay with Steam as well since Steam games can also be pirated.
Oh, I'm sorry I shouldn't have called them "your games". I think what everyone is trying to point out is that they don't like the whole system that DRM inevitably forces on you. You no longer buy a game and own it as your piece of property. You rent it.
Note that this applies to games distributed through physical media as well. You obtained a license for the game as well as the medium the game is on; the EULA will most likely tell you that the game is still not your property. Because it isn't.
Well, I went to http://store.steampowered.com/freeportal/ and clicked the huge button. Steam took over from there. That's it. (Of course now I'm waiting for that damn download to finish.)
Pretty cool about licensing alright. I just entered my original Half-Life retail CD key. Steam recognized it as... a Half-Life Platinum Pack key, giving me the game, both addons and five different mods. I'm not complaining.
(I can remember those mods being part of a regular Half-Life update at some point but I didn't know that the same apparently applies to the addons.)
If you have anything to contribute (and aren't too lazy to do so), consider joining the openDarkEngine team. They're working on a reimplementation of the Dark Engine, which is used in the Thief games and System Shock 2. Unfortunately, progress is slow.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with OPDE, merely interested and too lazy to contribute.
That's exactly why OS X's application bundle model is so great: The bundle contains pretty much everything the application needs to run. There are only very few external dependencies, which are guaranteed by the operating system. That means that (assuming there won't be another platform switch) any application I write now will run much further down the line simply because it contains almost everything it needs.
/Applications but you can also run it from ~/Downloads or even right out of the disk image it came in.
Yes, you waste storage having ten copies of libvorbis around. Hard drives are big, though, and libraries represent a shrinking part of a game's storage needs. Things like TeX are still installed system-wide even under OS X.
You also get the ability to trivially have various installations of the same program around. Just put them in different directories or rename them and you're set.
Per-user installation is also trivial since for the usual bundle-only program there literally is no installation procedure. There's the recommended procedure of moving it to
Of course you don't get the comfort of a package manager. That's the price you pay for the comfort of app bundles.
Got any further info on that? I'm involved in a cross-playtform game project and we wanted to use OpenAL. If Valve has found some critical issue I'd really like to know more about it.