c, c++, java, perl, python, php, pascal, javascript, whatever - you can write all your source the old way - line-by-line, and most of us do. Heck, even Delphi, one of the better IDEs, doesn't require the IDE environment if you really want to go the type-in-all-the-source route. Last I looked, both c/c++ and java were available for free for all the major platforms.
None of those are line-oriented programming languages. They are block-oriented and some of them are object-oriented programming languages. A line-oriented programming language looks like this:
10 print "Hello World!" 20 goto 10
A block-oriented programming language looks like this:
And an object-oriented one looks something like this:
public class HelloWorld extends Object { private class NoMessageException extends Exception { public NoMessageException(String cause) { super(cause); } }
private final String message;
public HelloWorld(String message) throws NoMessageException { if (message == null) throw new NoMessageException("No message."); this.message = message; }
public void printMessageInEndlessLoop() throws IOException { /* * Some subclass in some distant future might throw IOException, * so better make everyone catch it already. */ while(true) System.out.println(message); }
I realize that there's easier ways to do it with Java than the one shown, but as many in Slashdot have said, the guy who doesn't produce code that makes a computer science professor get an orgams by just reading it is not going to get a job - I'm talking to you, whoever it was that said that using a goto results in automatic rejection of the applicant.
So, anyway: if you were a kid, you might write the two-line Basic script, or even the C one; but would you bother with Java, or would you give up ? And more importantly, since kids mostly learn from other people's code at the beginning: which code is the easiest to reverse engineer ?
Seriously. It's been in constant development for decades now, game play (and balance) continues to improve,
Yeah. It keeps on getting new and interesting ways to die:).
I don't think a game where you can actually die in god mode (by getting your brains eaten by a mind flayer) is very "balanced". Altought the ability to make a succubus into a pet makes up for it;).
And now I began wondering how to add a dating sim to Nethack. Argh.
insanely difficuly but incredibly fun when you first start playing, excellent learning curve all the way through where you can get further and further with just exploration, and with time you can learn to win more than half the time and yet it's still fun.
Well, actually you still always lose. But at least you'll get past the first level, after having learned the most important rule - don't fight, run.
I mean, really. This game throws Death, Pestilence and Famine against you at the final level - after you've fough through Hell twice and elemental planes once. By what twisted logic is that balanced ?-)
Spore - Hurry up and release the damn thing! And I WILL torrent it from the US while I wait for a UK release if they do that staggered release date crap.
If you haven't played Spore yet, then how do you know that it's a game "every gamer should try" ? Sure, it sounds good, but so did Black & White. In fact every game that has a halfway competent marketing department sounds good. That's what marketing departments do, they make shit look like gold.
I really think you should play the game before recommending it to anyone. Unless, of course, you're part of the marketing department...
Give me a break. When you get to the point where you are trying to care about what people think about you in a war you are losing. War is for one thing only--the destruction of your enemy.
No. War is about trying to meet some objectives while someone else is using violence trying to stop you. Your goal may or may not require (or be) the destruction of the opposition, and in some cases it may even require subduing the opposition without killing them. But only an idiot loses sight of his goal in the heat of battle. After all, what's the point of defeating one opponent if doing so causes so much public relations damage that you gain two more ?
Diplomacy is the most important weapon for a soldier, since it allows him to fight one enemy at the time with allies at his side instead of being attacked from all directions at once with no one at his side. Wars are often won or lost before the first shot is fired, just because one side has more direct or indirect allies. You stop caring what people think of you, and you will lose. I thought that Vietnam would have driven that point home...
Fight with friends by your side and you'll be victorious. Stop caring at them, and you'll find them gone, perhaps to your enemy's side, and then you die. It's that simple. Only a fool claims a victory that costs more than it gains. You don't want to be modern-day Pyrrhus, now do you ?
The thing hurts like you're being cooked alive, and stops immediately once you're out of the way, but leaves no physical trace of injury.
I think the CIA just found a new favored method of information extraction / recreation.
Mod me down if you will, but you have to admit that that's a torturers dream - hurts like hell but won't leave evidence or run the risk of killing the subject prematurely. And with any luck it will also destroy any video tapes and photos of the incident.
Do you walk to work everyday because your car might have an unexpected problem? Do you ride a bike from California to New York, because airplanes sometimes get late at the boarding gate and busses might break in the middle of the trip?
All of these are exceptions to the rule that everything works fine. With computer, everything working fine is the exception and automation screwing up is the rule.
Technological convenience is not about perfection. It's about saving time and/or confort and giving you possibilities. Automated softwares give me the possibility of enjoying life without having to lose time learning (even if it takes two minutes to do it) configuration syntaxes and dealing with software interaction problems. Yes, sometimes these things break. Then I just reinstall them.
And, since software is deterministic, it goes through the same auto-configure steps and arrives at the same wrong conclusion. Assuming, of course, that you can reinstall - I've seen quite a few situations where the software refused to reinstall since automation told it that if any piece (such as a registry setting left behind by the uninstaller) of previous install still remained in the system, the program was already installed and could not be reinstalled.
In the end, I spent less time bothering about my computer than I would have spent if I manually configured everything.
Yeah; I suppose the average user would give up after only a few futile reinstall attempts.
As I said to another guy in the thread: I CAN open my car and fix it. But I WON'T. If my cars starts giving me problems all the time, I'll just replace it.
It must be fun to be rich enough to have the option of being ignorant. Guess what ? I don't have that option. I have to keep the damn rustbucket going for one more mile - and another one and another one - since the alternative is walking. And that means being able to access every last configuration detail and fine-tune everything.
You don't need to prove all the time that you're knowledgeable. Sometimes things need to be objective and dumbed-down.
Dunno what objectivity or proving anything has to do with this. But trying to hide complexity is not going to work, it simply leads to users who have no idea of causal relationships in their computer and thus have trouble getting it to do what they want.
Whoever rejects that needs to spend less time on the computer and worry more about family, work and a career. People need to stop giving computers too much importance, as innovative knowledge is more important than technical encyclopedic knowledge.
Nice finish. You actually managed to imply "think of the children" in a thread about computer auto vs. manual configuration. That's no mean feat; perhaps you should consider a career in politics ?-)
I also like the part of "innovative knowledge" vs. "encyclopedic knowledge"; it means nothing (perhaps you meant creativity vs. knowledge ?) but sure sounds good.
It's time to put the computer to work for us, instead of the opposite. We need programs with better configuration handling and detection. A lot of Linux apps need the user to insert of lot of data that the application could simply obtain automatically.
And propably get it wrong. After which you have the oh-so-fun time of figuring out where the problem is and how to force the application to trust you.
There's nothing quite as fun as an application that refuses to install because it thinks you don't have enough disk space (since its makers didn't realize that hard disk space would one day be measured in gigabytes), except perhaps a monitor that claims that it can't do over 75 Hz refresh rates (it can), which in turn forces a Windows-user to use the unofficial refresh frequency override in NVidia's drivers, but that won't work unless you have administrator privileges - nice !
Now, admittedly, writing in modelines for XFree is not fun either, but once written, they stay there. The darn thing won't lose its settings or misbehave otherwise. So the difference between an automated system and a manual one is that manual one is hard to use, while an automated one is impossible to fix if it breaks.
How would Spore be adapted to the Gameboy? Obviously there is more to it than just porting the software.
It evolves to survive with limited resources of the new environment. This will likely result in reduction of size and possibly intelligence too, as well as dropping some of the visual mating signals. The question remains, however, if these adaptations are sufficient to compete with the native species.
It better evolve, since right now it sounds like an amalgam of Civilization, Master of Orion, SimCity and Quest for Eden, and it's going to take some mighty leap to get those elements to mesh together.
Re:1900s 3 D stereoscope post cards come to mind
on
Are Videogames Art?
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· Score: 1
Nice try at relativism but the world doesn't really work that way.
Look at this whole discussion. Everyone is offering their opinion about whether games are art or not. Seems to me that they are all referring to their personal understanding of what art is, and that those understandings do not neccessarily meet. In other words, this very discussion seems to point towards art being relative.
Nice try at relativism but the world doesn't really work that way. There is a reason we still read Dostoevsky and not other dime store novels of the same era. Some art works for whatever reason have lasting value, and other don't. The best way to express why they have lasting value is that they move us in a non trivial way and give us deep insights into what it means to be human.
It isn't particularly surprising that several people find artistic value from the same subject; they are, after all, all humans and have their brains wired in basically same way. That does not invalidate my point: that "art" is not a quality of the object being examined but rather something that is created in the brains of the watcher.
I also repeat my point about watching clouds and finding shapes - and maybe even deep insights - there.
Perhaps there are video games that will have lasting value, the original Sim City and Myst seem to point in that direction but even these high quality games don't move me very deeply, sorry.
A management simulation rarely moves people to tears:).
Again perhaps there are games capable of moving people in non trivial, non melodramatic, or visceral ways, but I haven't seem them yet.
I named a few. And "melodrama" simply means that the emphasis is on the plot; so unless you are saying that only character driven stories can be art, I'm a bit confused about what you're trying to say.
I think the fundamental problem with video games now is that they are an ephemeral medium very tied to having the latest video card and processor, and may not even viewable at all in 50 years except in crude emulations.
Both Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross can be played in perfect emulators (ZSnes and Epsxe, respectively), where "perfect emulator" is one which reproduces original graphics, sound and program flow exactly as it was in the original hardware (both emulators are also capable of filtering graphics to improve them), so I'm a bit uncertain what you mean by "crude".
Again video games MAY transcend being a novelty item in historical terms but to me they haven't proven that proposition yet.
Since there are emulators that play nearly every game of such obsolete systems as NES, SNES and Playstation already, and since they seem to be quite popular, I'd say that it has been proven.
Another problem is that artistic masterworks are identified strongly with the personality of their creators, where as video games don't have that same strong personality and are identified more with their publishing houses than their authors.
Video games are usually produced by a group of people instead of a single person, and are identified with that group; usually the group forms some kind of development house company for legal reasons. Different development houses tend to produce very different games.
Again not that these things can't in theory be overcome but to not even acknowledge them as hurdles and to go for easy relativism would be very naive.
Well, until someone can come up with a definition of art that actually defines anything (as opposed to making vague references about "touching people on the subconscious level" or something else that can't possibly be verified) and is not completely arbitrary ("t
I think you hit the nail on the head when you ask "are they GOOD art." Of course video games COULD be good art, but 99.999% are not. Is Myst perhaps good art? Perhaps, but I'd argue even Myst doesn't touch us at the level good art touches us which is in a region of the subconscious beyond words.
They aren't. Neither is anything else. "Art" isn't a property of an entity; no object has the power to touch us on the subconscious or any other level, it is us who reach out to touch it. "Art" is in the eye of the beholder. It is possible to find deep and fundamental meaning from a circle of stones sitting on sand, from a comic book, from a painting, or from clouds in the sky.
That's why the question "Are videogames art" is meaningless. "Art", for me, is whatever I choose to interpret as art; this may or may not coincide with someone else's choice.
Of course this is all completely separate from the technical skill of whoever made the drawing, composition, or 3D model in question. A stickman is a stickman. But that isn't really relevant to this debate.
I have never seen a video game with wabi sabi. Photographs and movies yes, video games not yet.
Chrono Trigger / Cross ? Final Fantasy 7 ? Maybe even Harvest Moon or Princess Maker 2 ? All of those can bring about melancholy, if you let them. It is possible to look at anything and feel nothing; it is possible to look at anything and be moved to tears. Again, it's all in how you choose to look at it.
The only times programming should be interrupted is acts of terrorism or large natural disasters, not expensive scientific experiments.
Why ? The chances are that if you didn't already know about it, then neither will affect you directly in any way. There's no reason why either should get immediate coverage. Besides, terrorism thrives on attention; interrupting the programming for it is a great way of helping terrorists spread terror.
The best response for terrorism is to continue the programming as normal and then cover the event in evening news. Interrupting the programming will inflate the fear generated by the strike and therefore help terrorists. It won't help anyone else, except ratings.
As for natural disasters, again, unless you happen to be in their route the chances are that you don't need to know immediately. They, too, can wait until evening news.
Besides, in the end, natural catastrophes are basically just big accidents and terrorism is a few maniacs murdering people. Neither is likely to have a lasting impact, unless we are talking about an extinction level event. Shuttle launches - all space vechile launches - on the other hand are absolutely vital for the future of humanity as a species, and certainly deserve coverage.
Think of it this way: If you have a 20 KHz signal, at 40 KHz you get 2 sample periods per cycle. Only 2 - fine if your signal is a perfect square wave, you get 1 sample at -max and the other at +max.
Or, if you are unlucky, the waveform happens to be one quarter wavelength later phase, so you end up taking the samples at halfway up and halfway down - which, of course, mean that you don't see any wave at all.
You'll only get the correct wave amplitude in the lucky case your sample points happen to be synchronized to the min and max points of the wave.
This is why "oversampling" is done - 2x sample rate is the minimum required to reproduce a waveform, it doesn't say it reproduces it well.
We can buy MP3s, we can encourage uncompressed and non-lossy recordings -- disk space isn't really an issue any longer, and when there's no compression, there's less work for your CPU to do, so there's a good reason...
But disk needs to work a lot harder to supply the information. With today's CPU speeds I'd say that mp3's are propably better than uncompressed WAV's - the CPU usage is a few percent at most, and getting smaller fast, while disk throughput tends to be the bottleneck of modern machines, especially if it starts swapping...
Lighter fluid, such as the kind that comes with a Zippo, works incredibly well for this purpose. I've used this on everything from CD cases to electronics to books.
I don't think that mixing flammable liquids, electronics that heat up enough to vaporize (and possibly even ignite) them, and electric current is neccessarily a very good idea. Especially since lighter fluid works well as a cleaner because it's a dissolver, and many such dissolvers are capable of dissolving plastics - like the ones used in electric insulators.
This is just false. ISPs and users are damaged all the time by unpatched zombies, in intentional and unintentional DDoS attacks, and spam blasts.
So, basically, you can't be bothered to install a spam filter and doing whatever it takes to defend againt a DDOS (getting the upstream provider install a better firewall, configuring your TCP/IP stack and programs better, etc) but I should be punished if I failed to harden my box against all attacks ?
Yes, he is the culprit, and should be charged with computer tresspass or whatever other crime he has committed. It's like if you leave a gun sitting on the curb in the ghetto and someone finds and uses it for a murder. They should be charged with murder, and you are grossly negligent and should be sued civilly for damages.
It is easy to lock up a gun, and easy to verify that it is indeed locked up behind a sturdy hard-to-break lock and door; it is pretty much impossible to know how vulnerable your computer is.
When the victim acts in a grossly negligent manner, they should be held accountable for their actions. If it were well known that Chevrolet cars came with very faulty tires from the factory, they had even issued a recall for it, offering free replacement, which you were notified of, and you purchased one with faulty tiers and drove it anyway without replacing the factory tires, you'd probably be liable if you killed someone after a blow-out.
Only it is well known that the new tiers are just as likely to have some equally nasty problem. In fact the tiermaker occasionally modifies the tiers so they don't work in certain roads (DRM), and calls these feature striped tiers "security updates".
You keep on making real-life analogies which just don't work. Locking up a gun is simple, changing tiers is simple. Locking up a computer is extremely difficult. Locking it up so it is guaranteed to be proof against any future attack is impossible; not extremely difficult, but impossible.
Apart from this there's no limit to how much you could be liable for. After all, there's no limit to how much damage some virus that infected your system could cause. Consequently, pluggin your computer into a network becomes a gamble - will I catch a nasty virus that devastates half the world and leaves me a debt slave for the rest of my life this time ? And this is assuming that the court system actually works instead of being something to be used in legal blackmail - a false assumption, based on RIAA's tactics.
No, this kind of law will do nothing but help FUD-marketeers and victimize a few poor bastards each year for failing to be computer scientists or daring to try some new programs. I understand that it appeals to the "get tough on crime" -crowd, where the solution to every problem is to hit someone hard, but in real life it accomplishes nothing but ruins lives.
If I don't, it gets resold on ebay or amazon mktplace, often for between $8-$10 net of fees. It's cheaper than netflix, I'm (almost) never without a new movie, and I get to keep a copy of everything I like.
In other words, you allow people to get used DVD's from you instead of making each watcher buy one directly from the maker, therefore lessening the demand for DVD's and causing the artist to starve. Shame on you !
Seriously, getting rid of second-hand market is one of the main reasons for DRM. It's a wonder it's legal in the first place, seeing how much copyright laws are slanted against the public interest nowadays.
The funny thing about it is that you can be fined a (manageable enough) couple of hundred bucks for endangering ( or at least increasing the risk to ) lives by driving too fast, but endanger a massive corporation's profit margins, and you get fined tens of thousands of dollars- it just doesn't make any sense.....
Sure it does: the corporations make the law. Well, to be exact, they pay their employees in Senate to vote for it, but that's semantics. Anyway, there's plenty of human beings in the US, so the corporations have no incentive to protect them - especially since if you fine someone too hard for speeding, he doesn't have as much money to buy DVD's anymore.
I used to have 2 GB of RAM, but am temporarily forced to only use 512 MB, and I've noticed a huge difference in responsiveness. With 2 GB I could run tens of programs, some light games and compile simultaneously with no loss of responsiveness, now with 512 MB I can barely minimize Visual Studio to view my desktop without everything slowing to a crawl while I'm compiling, so I'd say the problem isn't necessarily in the scheduler.
No, it's in the scheduler allright. An XP machine with a gigabyte of RAM rendering a Poser scene in the background, and not swapping (verified by watching the HD light, besides, it's a simple scene) with nothing else significant running takes a lot longer to respond to clicks than the same machine once the scene has finished rendering.
Based on that, and on what I've heard from other sources, I'd say that Windows scheduler doesn't differentiate IO bound programs and CPU bound programs, like modern Linux kernels do. In other words, there are no dynamic priorities; instead, everything in the same static priority gets an equal share of CPU time, propably without pre-empting them if an IO bound program becomes runnable (to reduce latency), since Windows can't tell the two types apart.
MSFT is basically saying to the EU, "NO SOUP FOR YOU!"
You misspelled "cyanide".
But seriously, the main features Vista right now seem to be transparent windows, faster DirectX (maybe), a lot slower OpenGL (say goodbye to any business use for 3D card) and DRM - and DirectX and online music/movie purchases are completely useless to businessess. Any actual feature got scrapped along the way. So why would anyone want to upgrade to Vista, especially since it likely means upgrading hardware as well ?
Now, maybe if they'd fix the awful scheduler of XP - have they ? Then you could run things like renders or compilers in the background and still have a usefull desktop, like in Linux.
The problem is that those who don't want it are not free . We are forced, by you, at the point of a gun, to pay for it.
The only reason you have anything to pay it with is that the government, at the point of a gun, forces the poor to respect your claim on a disproportionately large amount of this worlds limited natural resources. It is somewhat hypocritical to blame others for using government force to take something which you gained with government force in the first place.
But, if you want to avoid paying, fine: give up all property claims you have. The government no longer forces you to pay anything, since you have nothing, but it no longer enforces your claim to any property either - which means that it'll get taken away from your possession, in all likelihood.
That's the cost of living in civilization and having its protection: sometimes you have to do things you don't want to, or are prevented from doing things you want to.
But for the image mockup stage I have a somewhat unorthodox suggestion. Try Scribus. Since you are doing visual layout anyway, why not use a software that actually is designed to create and manipulate such? Different elements are not tied to graphical layers, and dropping sample texts into them is dead simple.
I have a better idea: use Inkscape. Faster than Scribus, much better tools for lining things up, and generally much better in drawing tools. The resulting SVG might even be directly usable in the page in some circumstances (intraweb application used with Firefox), and can be exported to pixel image files in any case.
Altought, for the first design phase, pen&paper are the king. They're still far superior to everything else as far as ease of use and flexibility are concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
None of those are line-oriented programming languages. They are block-oriented and some of them are object-oriented programming languages. A line-oriented programming language looks like this:
A block-oriented programming language looks like this:
And an object-oriented one looks something like this:
I realize that there's easier ways to do it with Java than the one shown, but as many in Slashdot have said, the guy who doesn't produce code that makes a computer science professor get an orgams by just reading it is not going to get a job - I'm talking to you, whoever it was that said that using a goto results in automatic rejection of the applicant.
So, anyway: if you were a kid, you might write the two-line Basic script, or even the C one; but would you bother with Java, or would you give up ? And more importantly, since kids mostly learn from other people's code at the beginning: which code is the easiest to reverse engineer ?
Yeah. It keeps on getting new and interesting ways to die :).
I don't think a game where you can actually die in god mode (by getting your brains eaten by a mind flayer) is very "balanced". Altought the ability to make a succubus into a pet makes up for it ;).
And now I began wondering how to add a dating sim to Nethack. Argh.
Well, actually you still always lose. But at least you'll get past the first level, after having learned the most important rule - don't fight, run.
I mean, really. This game throws Death, Pestilence and Famine against you at the final level - after you've fough through Hell twice and elemental planes once. By what twisted logic is that balanced ?-)
If you haven't played Spore yet, then how do you know that it's a game "every gamer should try" ? Sure, it sounds good, but so did Black & White. In fact every game that has a halfway competent marketing department sounds good. That's what marketing departments do, they make shit look like gold.
I really think you should play the game before recommending it to anyone. Unless, of course, you're part of the marketing department...
No. War is about trying to meet some objectives while someone else is using violence trying to stop you. Your goal may or may not require (or be) the destruction of the opposition, and in some cases it may even require subduing the opposition without killing them. But only an idiot loses sight of his goal in the heat of battle. After all, what's the point of defeating one opponent if doing so causes so much public relations damage that you gain two more ?
Diplomacy is the most important weapon for a soldier, since it allows him to fight one enemy at the time with allies at his side instead of being attacked from all directions at once with no one at his side. Wars are often won or lost before the first shot is fired, just because one side has more direct or indirect allies. You stop caring what people think of you, and you will lose. I thought that Vietnam would have driven that point home...
Fight with friends by your side and you'll be victorious. Stop caring at them, and you'll find them gone, perhaps to your enemy's side, and then you die. It's that simple. Only a fool claims a victory that costs more than it gains. You don't want to be modern-day Pyrrhus, now do you ?
I think the CIA just found a new favored method of information extraction / recreation.
Mod me down if you will, but you have to admit that that's a torturers dream - hurts like hell but won't leave evidence or run the risk of killing the subject prematurely. And with any luck it will also destroy any video tapes and photos of the incident.
All of these are exceptions to the rule that everything works fine. With computer, everything working fine is the exception and automation screwing up is the rule.
And, since software is deterministic, it goes through the same auto-configure steps and arrives at the same wrong conclusion. Assuming, of course, that you can reinstall - I've seen quite a few situations where the software refused to reinstall since automation told it that if any piece (such as a registry setting left behind by the uninstaller) of previous install still remained in the system, the program was already installed and could not be reinstalled.
Yeah; I suppose the average user would give up after only a few futile reinstall attempts.
It must be fun to be rich enough to have the option of being ignorant. Guess what ? I don't have that option. I have to keep the damn rustbucket going for one more mile - and another one and another one - since the alternative is walking. And that means being able to access every last configuration detail and fine-tune everything.
Dunno what objectivity or proving anything has to do with this. But trying to hide complexity is not going to work, it simply leads to users who have no idea of causal relationships in their computer and thus have trouble getting it to do what they want.
Nice finish. You actually managed to imply "think of the children" in a thread about computer auto vs. manual configuration. That's no mean feat; perhaps you should consider a career in politics ?-)
I also like the part of "innovative knowledge" vs. "encyclopedic knowledge"; it means nothing (perhaps you meant creativity vs. knowledge ?) but sure sounds good.
And propably get it wrong. After which you have the oh-so-fun time of figuring out where the problem is and how to force the application to trust you.
There's nothing quite as fun as an application that refuses to install because it thinks you don't have enough disk space (since its makers didn't realize that hard disk space would one day be measured in gigabytes), except perhaps a monitor that claims that it can't do over 75 Hz refresh rates (it can), which in turn forces a Windows-user to use the unofficial refresh frequency override in NVidia's drivers, but that won't work unless you have administrator privileges - nice !
Now, admittedly, writing in modelines for XFree is not fun either, but once written, they stay there. The darn thing won't lose its settings or misbehave otherwise. So the difference between an automated system and a manual one is that manual one is hard to use, while an automated one is impossible to fix if it breaks.
It evolves to survive with limited resources of the new environment. This will likely result in reduction of size and possibly intelligence too, as well as dropping some of the visual mating signals. The question remains, however, if these adaptations are sufficient to compete with the native species.
It better evolve, since right now it sounds like an amalgam of Civilization, Master of Orion, SimCity and Quest for Eden, and it's going to take some mighty leap to get those elements to mesh together.
Look at this whole discussion. Everyone is offering their opinion about whether games are art or not. Seems to me that they are all referring to their personal understanding of what art is, and that those understandings do not neccessarily meet. In other words, this very discussion seems to point towards art being relative.
It isn't particularly surprising that several people find artistic value from the same subject; they are, after all, all humans and have their brains wired in basically same way. That does not invalidate my point: that "art" is not a quality of the object being examined but rather something that is created in the brains of the watcher.
I also repeat my point about watching clouds and finding shapes - and maybe even deep insights - there.
A management simulation rarely moves people to tears :).
I named a few. And "melodrama" simply means that the emphasis is on the plot; so unless you are saying that only character driven stories can be art, I'm a bit confused about what you're trying to say.
Both Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross can be played in perfect emulators (ZSnes and Epsxe, respectively), where "perfect emulator" is one which reproduces original graphics, sound and program flow exactly as it was in the original hardware (both emulators are also capable of filtering graphics to improve them), so I'm a bit uncertain what you mean by "crude".
Since there are emulators that play nearly every game of such obsolete systems as NES, SNES and Playstation already, and since they seem to be quite popular, I'd say that it has been proven.
Video games are usually produced by a group of people instead of a single person, and are identified with that group; usually the group forms some kind of development house company for legal reasons. Different development houses tend to produce very different games.
Well, until someone can come up with a definition of art that actually defines anything (as opposed to making vague references about "touching people on the subconscious level" or something else that can't possibly be verified) and is not completely arbitrary ("t
They aren't. Neither is anything else. "Art" isn't a property of an entity; no object has the power to touch us on the subconscious or any other level, it is us who reach out to touch it. "Art" is in the eye of the beholder. It is possible to find deep and fundamental meaning from a circle of stones sitting on sand, from a comic book, from a painting, or from clouds in the sky.
That's why the question "Are videogames art" is meaningless. "Art", for me, is whatever I choose to interpret as art; this may or may not coincide with someone else's choice.
Of course this is all completely separate from the technical skill of whoever made the drawing, composition, or 3D model in question. A stickman is a stickman. But that isn't really relevant to this debate.
Chrono Trigger / Cross ? Final Fantasy 7 ? Maybe even Harvest Moon or Princess Maker 2 ? All of those can bring about melancholy, if you let them. It is possible to look at anything and feel nothing; it is possible to look at anything and be moved to tears. Again, it's all in how you choose to look at it.
Why ? The chances are that if you didn't already know about it, then neither will affect you directly in any way. There's no reason why either should get immediate coverage. Besides, terrorism thrives on attention; interrupting the programming for it is a great way of helping terrorists spread terror.
The best response for terrorism is to continue the programming as normal and then cover the event in evening news. Interrupting the programming will inflate the fear generated by the strike and therefore help terrorists. It won't help anyone else, except ratings.
As for natural disasters, again, unless you happen to be in their route the chances are that you don't need to know immediately. They, too, can wait until evening news.
Besides, in the end, natural catastrophes are basically just big accidents and terrorism is a few maniacs murdering people. Neither is likely to have a lasting impact, unless we are talking about an extinction level event. Shuttle launches - all space vechile launches - on the other hand are absolutely vital for the future of humanity as a species, and certainly deserve coverage.
Or, if you are unlucky, the waveform happens to be one quarter wavelength later phase, so you end up taking the samples at halfway up and halfway down - which, of course, mean that you don't see any wave at all.
You'll only get the correct wave amplitude in the lucky case your sample points happen to be synchronized to the min and max points of the wave.
Or neccessarily at all, it seems to me.
But disk needs to work a lot harder to supply the information. With today's CPU speeds I'd say that mp3's are propably better than uncompressed WAV's - the CPU usage is a few percent at most, and getting smaller fast, while disk throughput tends to be the bottleneck of modern machines, especially if it starts swapping...
I don't think that mixing flammable liquids, electronics that heat up enough to vaporize (and possibly even ignite) them, and electric current is neccessarily a very good idea. Especially since lighter fluid works well as a cleaner because it's a dissolver, and many such dissolvers are capable of dissolving plastics - like the ones used in electric insulators.
Simple: the cat is dead but its brains were made into a catgirl android by maniacal Japanese scientists. Take that, Schrödinger !
To be fair, this includes the changes to device drivers too and not only kernel core.
And now I've defended Microsoft. I never thought I'd see this day :|.
So tell me: what does WPF do that PDF and SVG don't do ? Other than lock the user to Windows, that is.
So, basically, you can't be bothered to install a spam filter and doing whatever it takes to defend againt a DDOS (getting the upstream provider install a better firewall, configuring your TCP/IP stack and programs better, etc) but I should be punished if I failed to harden my box against all attacks ?
It is easy to lock up a gun, and easy to verify that it is indeed locked up behind a sturdy hard-to-break lock and door; it is pretty much impossible to know how vulnerable your computer is.
Only it is well known that the new tiers are just as likely to have some equally nasty problem. In fact the tiermaker occasionally modifies the tiers so they don't work in certain roads (DRM), and calls these feature striped tiers "security updates".
You keep on making real-life analogies which just don't work. Locking up a gun is simple, changing tiers is simple. Locking up a computer is extremely difficult. Locking it up so it is guaranteed to be proof against any future attack is impossible; not extremely difficult, but impossible.
Apart from this there's no limit to how much you could be liable for. After all, there's no limit to how much damage some virus that infected your system could cause. Consequently, pluggin your computer into a network becomes a gamble - will I catch a nasty virus that devastates half the world and leaves me a debt slave for the rest of my life this time ? And this is assuming that the court system actually works instead of being something to be used in legal blackmail - a false assumption, based on RIAA's tactics.
No, this kind of law will do nothing but help FUD-marketeers and victimize a few poor bastards each year for failing to be computer scientists or daring to try some new programs. I understand that it appeals to the "get tough on crime" -crowd, where the solution to every problem is to hit someone hard, but in real life it accomplishes nothing but ruins lives.
In other words, you allow people to get used DVD's from you instead of making each watcher buy one directly from the maker, therefore lessening the demand for DVD's and causing the artist to starve. Shame on you !
Seriously, getting rid of second-hand market is one of the main reasons for DRM. It's a wonder it's legal in the first place, seeing how much copyright laws are slanted against the public interest nowadays.
Sure it does: the corporations make the law. Well, to be exact, they pay their employees in Senate to vote for it, but that's semantics. Anyway, there's plenty of human beings in the US, so the corporations have no incentive to protect them - especially since if you fine someone too hard for speeding, he doesn't have as much money to buy DVD's anymore.
No, it's in the scheduler allright. An XP machine with a gigabyte of RAM rendering a Poser scene in the background, and not swapping (verified by watching the HD light, besides, it's a simple scene) with nothing else significant running takes a lot longer to respond to clicks than the same machine once the scene has finished rendering.
Based on that, and on what I've heard from other sources, I'd say that Windows scheduler doesn't differentiate IO bound programs and CPU bound programs, like modern Linux kernels do. In other words, there are no dynamic priorities; instead, everything in the same static priority gets an equal share of CPU time, propably without pre-empting them if an IO bound program becomes runnable (to reduce latency), since Windows can't tell the two types apart.
You misspelled "cyanide".
But seriously, the main features Vista right now seem to be transparent windows, faster DirectX (maybe), a lot slower OpenGL (say goodbye to any business use for 3D card) and DRM - and DirectX and online music/movie purchases are completely useless to businessess. Any actual feature got scrapped along the way. So why would anyone want to upgrade to Vista, especially since it likely means upgrading hardware as well ?
Now, maybe if they'd fix the awful scheduler of XP - have they ? Then you could run things like renders or compilers in the background and still have a usefull desktop, like in Linux.
The only reason you have anything to pay it with is that the government, at the point of a gun, forces the poor to respect your claim on a disproportionately large amount of this worlds limited natural resources. It is somewhat hypocritical to blame others for using government force to take something which you gained with government force in the first place.
But, if you want to avoid paying, fine: give up all property claims you have. The government no longer forces you to pay anything, since you have nothing, but it no longer enforces your claim to any property either - which means that it'll get taken away from your possession, in all likelihood.
That's the cost of living in civilization and having its protection: sometimes you have to do things you don't want to, or are prevented from doing things you want to.
Two world wars and Tony Blair broke UK's spine. UK is not a superpower anymore, and hasn't been for a while.
Oh well, maybe it recovers after the US crashes and burns, who knows ?
I have a better idea: use Inkscape. Faster than Scribus, much better tools for lining things up, and generally much better in drawing tools. The resulting SVG might even be directly usable in the page in some circumstances (intraweb application used with Firefox), and can be exported to pixel image files in any case.
Altought, for the first design phase, pen&paper are the king. They're still far superior to everything else as far as ease of use and flexibility are concerned.