The thing that I have been wondering about is the various items I have read about expected advances in life prolonging medecine.
After they actually figure out how to do it it would be a good ten years before they have something like that that they'll market to humans, but how about extending the lives of dogs?
The thing that gave me the idea was eye dogs. An eye dog costs a lot to train and usually humans outlive them. This can be very traumatic to a blind persion who has had an eye dog for a number of years as a close companion.
If you could either geneticly modify or medicate dogs to live much longer, it seems better all round.
If you could buy something like this for $220 from someone else, I'd jump at the chance. I wouldn't even care if it wasn't a phone or lacked OSX. A nice touchscreen display with a fairly spiffy ARM. would make a nice cousin for the GP2x.
But on the other hand, if all people promoting software gave examples showing representative performance rather than the very best cases, wouldn't the world be a better place.
It's the easiest way to get what I want when I want it. My daughter unplugged the aerial on our TV and it took us two weeks to notice. Broadcast TV just isn't worth the bother, especially because there is an absence of ads on the downloaded material.
Television production is about revenue gathering. TV networks get money from advertising. I think I'd be prepared to pay the equivalent of a viewers worth of advertising income to get ad free programs. iTunes has some programs but they cost too much.
As far as I can tell, for advertising to be worth it, it has to result in an average influence per viewer that results in purchases causing an increase in profit for the business that is greater than the cost per viewer for the advertising.
There is no way I am influenced to buy more than a dollars worth of stuff per hour of viewing, let alone the larger amount of purchasing that would be required to cause a dollar profit for the advertising company.
How much does advertising cost per viewer hour? Why aren't networks directly selling ad free programs for that? I don't mind giving them money if they'll give me what I want when I want it (I demand, could they please supply)
I was talking to someone pre-iPhone announcement about what cell phones should be.
One of the key features I wanted. make something that doesn't do all of those things I don't want but does the things I do want well. Phones have been developing crazy unusable features like mad for years.
So how long did it take for bacteria to go multicellular (actual questions, I don't knnw). How many generations did that take? To properly calculate how many tries it took you should probably count all of the direct clones of anything along the successful branch.
Well there are two parts to evolution. Generating diversity and reducing diversity. Selection pressure can reduce the diversity extremely quickly. That's the fast part.
I just skimmed the lizard article so I'm not sure of the changes spotted in that example but most examples of rapid evolution I have seen are simply changing the prominence of different parts of the existing diversity.
In the timeline of life on earth all breeds of dogs turned up in a blink of an eye. While the changes look extreme, I'm not sure if there is anything at all that goes beyond simple scaling of existing features and changing of pigments. That's the easy stuff.
It might take a million replications for that particular error to hit, but it'd happen eventually.
And that, in a nutshell, is why creationism can be believed by otherwise intelligent people.
Of course it wont take a million replications. You probably know that. Maybe a trillion would be closer to the mark. Evolution is slow, so slow that we can't really conceive of how slow that is. Any attempt at imagining it usually winds up thinking about much much shorter time-frames, and in those time-frames things simply wouldn't happen like that unless they had a helping hand.
As to those probes. How does it take for a million self-replicating probes to become a trillion. People tend to get that one wrong too. Got a chessboard and some rice?
So I bought another console. It didn't teke much effort to decide which console presented me with the best options of games I enjoy playing.
I bought another Dreamcast.
I took it to a friends place the other day and the XBox got unplugged and we had a good blast on the Dreamcast. It may be old but the games are still fun.
So far the only thing that looks like it has a chance of displacing it is the Wii.
All console makers want to make as much as they can. In pure money terms they probably don't care how much their competitors make. The 'Winner' of each console generation sells a lot of units simply because it is the winner. Winning the crown translates to revenue. The competition for the crown is because the crown itself is a strong marketing tool.
You don't have to be at the top though. If the GP2x sells each unit at a profit then they can do ok for themselves. There is also the perennial idea of a linux-based open console. This could happen one day if someone makes a box that can be sold at a profit. They don't have to conquer the world, just make enough to pay their own bills.
I also saw Delphi going off course. I'm still using Delphi 5. It does what I want and Later versions only seemed to add things I don't really care about.
On the other hand wouldn't that also imply that there is a difference between feeling sleepy and needing sleep.
How much sleep do you need. Is your judgement of this based upon how sleepy you feel?
I know there is a tendency toward arrogance in science and many think that they can improve upon nature. It is not necessarily the case that they are wrong. Some may take a narrow view that overlooks the wider effects of drugs. This does not mean that this is the case for any particular drug or treatment.
Actually this is the only part of the issue that chould have any impact.
fr-08 fr-019 and a decent number of 64 k demos have shown thad good quality and small size is obtainable. Even older there are procedurally generated data in 8 bit games. That wasn't so much revolutionary as obvious that you'd be an idiot to try and store things in raw data form.
I don't know how people can present these ideas as something new and wonderful, It's more like they are finally getting around to doing something that they should have done some time ago.
The only two things that should be a factor are, Speed of image generation and ease of texture design. Speed solves itself over time, especially when you start getting multi-core when you have a nice task bundle like 'generate texture X'.
There needs to be good tools for design. Some exist now. More will exist soon. I would have started an open source one myself a while back except for may 'must not start another project' mantra.
It bugs me a little though to see obvious things become standard once a critical mass of PHBs become aware of them. I welcome the change, I just hate the obvious being called revolutionary.
But typically indie games are comparable to the open-source games Linux already has;
Oh, I take massive exception to that one. There are a few games like Frozen Bubble That get maybe halfway to the polish of a good indie game. Most of them look little more than a game developed to the proof of concept level.
I'm an indie game-dev sort. I haven't yet released any games under Linux (because I didn't run linux in the past). Now that I do have a Linux box, I'll probably make Linux ports of my next games. And you are absolutely right, I _don't_ expect to make any substantial money from it. Why? I guess for the same reasons that I'm an indie.
The thing that I wonder about. There are a number of big companies who make Linux their bread and butter. Could some of these sponsor projects from indies. You can get surprisingly good bang for your buck from a lot of indies. Wikipedia says Red Hat has around 1,150 employees. Surely they could find maybe 3 teams of three and one solo indie to add some well polished professional looking games to the Linux repertoire. paying another ten people would be a drop in the bucket. It would have a notable impact on the overall impression of Linux by new users.
Not that I've asked any of these big outfits it they'd be up for it. I just figured someone should do it.
I depends on the game model quite a lot. Is failure the inability to succeed or is failure caused by passing a threshold where you could never succeed.
It's sort of like lemmings only with tiny ninja. Of course Ninja are more hardy than lemmings. In this game they cannot die at all. That doesn't mean that it's easy to get them home. To beat a level takes a long time of careful placing of influencers and watching them run around. You tweak the setup much like you would with sim-city.
You can never make the level unsolveable. But It stil presents a challenge completing the levels. Of course in lemmings it's easy to get to a point where you have to nuke them all and start again. Neither way is the 'best' way to make a game though. It's just a different way of doing things.
To say one way is intrisically better than another is silly. You could do that for games with any particular point of difference. Are games where players race to acheive the same goal (such as reach alpha centuri) better than games where players aim for polar opposite goal (destuction of the other player)
It's just a difference. If you like one sort more than another, that's a preference.
Modern CPUs have enough ergs to do compositing, The problem is that they can't get at the memory with enough speed.
I'm a game programmer who prefers doing 2d games. Ideally I'd do everything on the CPU because then there isn't any vaiance between hardware/drivers, but the speed you can write to video memory just plain sucks. Reading is far worse, If you want any blending effects you need you do eveything in a buffer and copy the final frame over.
On the other hand, Raytracing actually gets you a better use of your CPU. It's a lot of computation per write.
All up I think I'd like a video card with nice high speed 2d porter-duff, and a many core cpu for everything else.
I'm not sure how much research the critics should do. They play the games and tell you what they think of them. If a reviewer approaches a review with more preperatiion than the average gameplayer then their review may be less useful to people who want to play the game.
A game May be brilliant if you know ancient chinese dialects. A keen reviewer might go out and learn those especially for the review. Then they say the game is awesome. Then we all download it and find that it sucks because _we_ don't know ancient chinese dialects.
Often, if a player fails to understand the game they are playing it is the fault of the game.
Well there is Gametrove which is a fairly good place for the shareware titles.
If you want to see some more radical or experimental ideas, try Ludum Dare which is for the 48 hour game development competition. The site isn't 100% at the moment, but the competitions have turned out some great ideas. The Games are not totally polished and some aren't very finished, but there are some gems to be had.
My own past LudumDare Games: ( Not the best ones out there, I've yet to win a LudumDare)
1) no, but it seems to work in the Israel-Lebanon thing. 2) If fairies gave us everthing we wanted there wouldn't be a problem either, but this isn't the norm. 3) If someone invents a funky new algorithm and releases it under GPL I can look at it take the idea and write my own. GPL applies tho the source, not the ideas encoded in the source.
Ahh but that's the thing about making new and innovative games.
Not everyone likes everything.
If everyone made innovative games There would be heaps of games you don't like, There'd also be a few that you really, really, like that others don't.
When you are not going for the lowest common demominator it's unavoidable that you lose the common, but A game shouldn't be everything to every person.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that I have been wondering about is the various items I have read about expected advances in life prolonging medecine.
After they actually figure out how to do it it would be a good ten years before they have something like that that they'll market to humans, but how about extending the lives of dogs?
The thing that gave me the idea was eye dogs. An eye dog costs a lot to train and usually humans outlive them. This can be very traumatic to a blind persion who has had an eye dog for a number of years as a close companion.
If you could either geneticly modify or medicate dogs to live much longer, it seems better all round.
If you could buy something like this for $220 from someone else, I'd jump at the chance. I wouldn't even care if it wasn't a phone or lacked OSX. A nice touchscreen display with a fairly spiffy ARM. would make a nice cousin for the GP2x.
But on the other hand, if all people promoting software gave examples showing representative performance rather than the very best cases, wouldn't the world be a better place.
The #1`reason why I download video.
It's the easiest way to get what I want when I want it. My daughter unplugged the aerial on our TV and it took us two weeks to notice. Broadcast TV just isn't worth the bother, especially because there is an absence of ads on the downloaded material.
Television production is about revenue gathering. TV networks get money from advertising. I think I'd be prepared to pay the equivalent of a viewers worth of advertising income to get ad free programs. iTunes has some programs but they cost too much.
As far as I can tell, for advertising to be worth it, it has to result in an average influence per viewer that results in purchases causing an increase in profit for the business that is greater than the cost per viewer for the advertising.
There is no way I am influenced to buy more than a dollars worth of stuff per hour of viewing, let alone the larger amount of purchasing that would be required to cause a dollar profit for the advertising company.
How much does advertising cost per viewer hour? Why aren't networks directly selling ad free programs for that? I don't mind giving them money if they'll give me what I want when I want it (I demand, could they please supply)
I was talking to someone pre-iPhone announcement about what cell phones should be.
One of the key features I wanted. make something that doesn't do all of those things I don't want but does the things I do want well. Phones have been developing crazy unusable features like mad for years.
Do less but do what you do well.
So how long did it take for bacteria to go multicellular (actual questions, I don't knnw). How many generations did that take? To properly calculate how many tries it took you should probably count all of the direct clones of anything along the successful branch.
Is that what you would call a big number?
Well there are two parts to evolution. Generating diversity and reducing diversity. Selection pressure can reduce the diversity extremely quickly. That's the fast part.
I just skimmed the lizard article so I'm not sure of the changes spotted in that example but most examples of rapid evolution I have seen are simply changing the prominence of different parts of the existing diversity.
In the timeline of life on earth all breeds of dogs turned up in a blink of an eye. While the changes look extreme, I'm not sure if there is anything at all that goes beyond simple scaling of existing features and changing of pigments. That's the easy stuff.
As a game developer it makes me cringe at the lack of imagination every time I see things like this.
. jpg
I'm in the last few days of finishing up a game now, I might as well do a quick plug.
http://www.rocksolidgames.com/images/darwin/shot1
Darwin the monkey must break open wooden boxes to gather the bananas inside to fill his balloon.
It might take a million replications for that particular error to hit, but it'd happen eventually.
And that, in a nutshell, is why creationism can be believed by otherwise intelligent people.
Of course it wont take a million replications. You probably know that. Maybe a trillion would be closer to the mark. Evolution is slow, so slow that we can't really conceive of how slow that is. Any attempt at imagining it usually winds up thinking about much much shorter time-frames, and in those time-frames things simply wouldn't happen like that unless they had a helping hand.
As to those probes. How does it take for a million self-replicating probes to become a trillion. People tend to get that one wrong too. Got a chessboard and some rice?
So I bought another console. It didn't teke much effort to decide which console presented me with the best options of games I enjoy playing.
I bought another Dreamcast.
I took it to a friends place the other day and the XBox got unplugged and we had a good blast on the Dreamcast. It may be old but the games are still fun.
So far the only thing that looks like it has a chance of displacing it is the Wii.
All console makers want to make as much as they can. In pure money terms they probably don't care how much their competitors make. The 'Winner' of each console generation sells a lot of units simply because it is the winner. Winning the crown translates to revenue. The competition for the crown is because the crown itself is a strong marketing tool.
You don't have to be at the top though. If the GP2x sells each unit at a profit then they can do ok for themselves. There is also the perennial idea of a linux-based open console. This could happen one day if someone makes a box that can be sold at a profit. They don't have to conquer the world, just make enough to pay their own bills.
I also saw Delphi going off course. I'm still using Delphi 5. It does what I want and Later versions only seemed to add things I don't really care about.
As for making Delphi open source...
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
give it a go.
On the other hand wouldn't that also imply that there is a difference between feeling sleepy and needing sleep.
How much sleep do you need. Is your judgement of this based upon how sleepy you feel?
I know there is a tendency toward arrogance in science and many think that they can improve upon nature. It is not necessarily the case that they are wrong. Some may take a narrow view that overlooks the wider effects of drugs. This does not mean that this is the case for any particular drug or treatment.
Actually this is the only part of the issue that chould have any impact.
fr-08 fr-019 and a decent number of 64 k demos have shown thad good quality and small size is obtainable. Even older there are procedurally generated data in 8 bit games. That wasn't so much revolutionary as obvious that you'd be an idiot to try and store things in raw data form.
I don't know how people can present these ideas as something new and wonderful, It's more like they are finally getting around to doing something that they should have done some time ago.
The only two things that should be a factor are, Speed of image generation and ease of texture design. Speed solves itself over time, especially when you start getting multi-core when you have a nice task bundle like 'generate texture X'.
There needs to be good tools for design. Some exist now. More will exist soon. I would have started an open source one myself a while back except for may 'must not start another project' mantra.
It bugs me a little though to see obvious things become standard once a critical mass of PHBs become aware of them. I welcome the change, I just hate the obvious being called revolutionary.
But typically indie games are comparable to the open-source games Linux already has;
Oh, I take massive exception to that one. There are a few games like Frozen Bubble That get maybe halfway to the polish of a good indie game. Most of them look little more than a game developed to the proof of concept level.
I'm an indie game-dev sort. I haven't yet released any games under Linux (because I didn't run linux in the past). Now that I do have a Linux box, I'll probably make Linux ports of my next games. And you are absolutely right, I _don't_ expect to make any substantial money from it. Why? I guess for the same reasons that I'm an indie.
The thing that I wonder about. There are a number of big companies who make Linux their bread and butter. Could some of these sponsor projects from indies. You can get surprisingly good bang for your buck from a lot of indies. Wikipedia says Red Hat has around 1,150 employees. Surely they could find maybe 3 teams of three and one solo indie to add some well polished professional looking games to the Linux repertoire. paying another ten people would be a drop in the bucket. It would have a notable impact on the overall impression of Linux by new users.
Not that I've asked any of these big outfits it they'd be up for it. I just figured someone should do it.
I depends on the game model quite a lot. Is failure the inability to succeed or is failure caused by passing a threshold where you could never succeed.
Here's a little freeware game I made for a Ludum Dare http://screamingduck.fileburst.com/TTN.zip
It's sort of like lemmings only with tiny ninja. Of course Ninja are more hardy than lemmings. In this game they cannot die at all. That doesn't mean that it's easy to get them home. To beat a level takes a long time of careful placing of influencers and watching them run around. You tweak the setup much like you would with sim-city.
You can never make the level unsolveable. But It stil presents a challenge completing the levels. Of course in lemmings it's easy to get to a point where you have to nuke them all and start again. Neither way is the 'best' way to make a game though. It's just a different way of doing things.
To say one way is intrisically better than another is silly. You could do that for games with any particular point of difference. Are games where players race to acheive the same goal (such as reach alpha centuri) better than games where players aim for polar opposite goal (destuction of the other player)
It's just a difference. If you like one sort more than another, that's a preference.
Modern CPUs have enough ergs to do compositing, The problem is that they can't get at the memory with enough speed.
I'm a game programmer who prefers doing 2d games. Ideally I'd do everything on the CPU because then there isn't any vaiance between hardware/drivers, but the speed you can write to video memory just plain sucks. Reading is far worse, If you want any blending effects you need you do eveything in a buffer and copy the final frame over.
On the other hand, Raytracing actually gets you a better use of your CPU. It's a lot of computation per write.
All up I think I'd like a video card with nice high speed 2d porter-duff, and a many core cpu for everything else.
I'm not sure how much research the critics should do. They play the games and tell you what they think of them. If a reviewer approaches a review with more preperatiion than the average gameplayer then their review may be less useful to people who want to play the game.
A game May be brilliant if you know ancient chinese dialects. A keen reviewer might go out and learn those especially for the review. Then they say the game is awesome. Then we all download it and find that it sucks because _we_ don't know ancient chinese dialects.
Often, if a player fails to understand the game they are playing it is the fault of the game.
Well there is Gametrove which is a fairly good place for the shareware titles.
. zip
r .gz
t aller.exe
:-)
If you want to see some more radical or experimental ideas, try Ludum Dare which is for the 48 hour game development competition. The site isn't 100% at the moment, but the competitions have turned out some great ideas. The Games are not totally polished and some aren't very finished, but there are some gems to be had.
My own past LudumDare Games: ( Not the best ones out there, I've yet to win a LudumDare)
A lemmings style game only the critters are even smaller, and they are Ninja!
http://screamingduck.fileburst.com/Cruft/TTN.zip
This one was actually a 12 hour game written a week before the LD48 as a warmup
http://screamingduck.fileburst.com/Cruft/LDWarmup
Same as above only for linux.
http://screamingduck.fileburst.com/Cruft/TailV.ta
Urm.. Not sure how to describe this one.
http://screamingduck.fileburst.com/darkvslightins
All free. I do shareware games too but I'll plug those another time
1) no, but it seems to work in the Israel-Lebanon thing.
2) If fairies gave us everthing we wanted there wouldn't be a problem either, but this isn't the norm.
3) If someone invents a funky new algorithm and releases it under GPL I can look at it take the idea and write my own. GPL applies tho the source, not the ideas encoded in the source.
Ahh but that's the thing about making new and innovative games.
Not everyone likes everything.
If everyone made innovative games There would be heaps of games you don't like, There'd also be a few that you really, really, like that others don't.
When you are not going for the lowest common demominator it's unavoidable that you lose the common, but A game shouldn't be everything to every person.
I guess they dare because ($GAME) wasn't released in june
This is how it's done.
http://www.ludumdare.com/
Creativity, cunning, coding and caffine.