Your comment was the most insightful I have ever been reading on Slashdot. Kudos for it =)
Western cell phone markets are quite saturated. Nokia cannot increase its market share here anymore and thus Nokia shareholders force Nokia to enter new markets. Nokia has a very big pile of cash for little ventures. N-Gage was one try. Also, Nokia has manufactured GPRS based wireless security cameras and they (at least) had "entreprise products" division which didn't catch any fire as far as I know.
On the other hand, the same applies for Apple. Their computer market share has steadily grown, but I doubt this is enough for the shareholders. It's just matter of time until we see iCell, the Apple cellphone. Maybe Apple wants do it alone, or using white label technology, since co-operation with Motorola really wasn't a hit (the device was iRokr or something like that).
Mobile phones is vastly more difficult business area than MP3 players + selling on-line music. Legal rules, carries, billing, existing customer bases and the technology itself is already complex (think about those 10 000+ patents you need to take care of).
So which one you will buy... a good music player with weak phone capabilities or a good phone with weak music capabilities? Average consumers would probably buy a good music player AND a good phone...
A decision to force iTunes open for competing devices by European governments will probably mix the deck further.
I'd rather not use UQM engine. It's based on the orignal SC2 source which is C code from the beginning of 90s. Programming tools have radically improved in 15 years (i.e. making developers more productive).
The current UQM tree is based on 3DO source code. A long long time ago, before UQM, we asked Paul and Fred for PC source code, but it was lost since the creators didn't bother back-up their old HDs. But AFAIK later popped up that some subcontractor had 3DO source code in safe.
We even had an effort to decompile the SC2 PC version with folks at #starcontrol (kudos for this community which has survived over ten years of waiting for *real* SC3...). It could have been done with enourmous amount of work, but luckily no one had too much time in his/her life =)
In River City Ransom NES game (European version was called Street gangs) I accidentally discovered an easter egg which I think others haven't found. I had a lot of luck for this one... it was a night when I as playing this favorite NES title of mine and I was quiting the game after finishing it. I thought I'll still poke around with the emulator a little bit and ta daa: something very unexpected popped up.
You need an emulator which is capable to showing "pattern memory". Pattern memory blocks of graphics loaded to NES memory, i.e. sprites, tiles and letters. Nesticle can do this.
Finish the game. When end credits start to scroll on the screen, show Nesticle Pattern memory window. There are portraits of game main characters, Alex and Ryan, showing middle finger and playboy sign. This might definitely be no no for Nintendo games, but maybe developers thought that no one can read the video memory of a running game anyway at a certain moment of time...
I posted instructions for the easter egg to some (dead) River City Ransom forum a long time ago, but the site seemed to be pretty dead and no one noticed them.
Maybe some other NES games have similiar hidden video memory tricks like this one?
Indeed it's the millennium of flying cars and laser pistols! And I have also heard rumours about this GUI thing... they don't use keyboards anymore to communicate with machines!
Nokia wasn't the first to introduce user changeable ring tones. Early Ericsson models had this feature also. However, you had to input your ring tone to Ericsson phones manually, note by note, and Ericsson supported only two different note lengths - basically ring tones sounded shit.
AFAIK Nokia has patented OTA (Over The Air) ring tone method. An user can download ring tones in special SMS messages. Nokia introduced OTA ring tones in Nokia 9000 Communicator and Nokia 6110 models. The specification was called "smart messaging" and it also contained operator logos (backgrounds on your phone idle screen), caller group icons and virtual business cards (vcards). Nokia's ring tone format provided much more flexibility than Ericsson's manual ring tones. Though it had only a single voice channel (no harmonics), it provided enough variation in note lengths and pitches to make it possible to create "realistic" ring tones which sounded like real songs.
I remember the time, when ring tone boom was starting to bloom in Finland. I don't know if it hit first in Finland or Japan. However, Finnish mobile operator Radiolinja and its Jukebox service (based on Paananen's Harmonium composer) was the very first commercial ring tone service in Finland around year 1999 . Quickly other Finnish mobile operators copied the business model: send SMS to premium number and you'll receive a ring tone to your Nokia in return.
I am not sure how far Paananen's pioneering work with ring tones goes. Did Paananen introduce the idea to Nokia? Smart messaging specification was established by Nokia, not by Paananen. I remember, from my high school times (1998), someone (Nokia) had a special SMS number in Finland, from where you could download testing ring tones. The most famous example of them was Leisure Suit Larry theme. By then, operators had not yet realized the potential of ring tone business.
PAANANENS HARMONIUM TOOL WAS NEITHER OPEN SOURCE OR FREE. Paananen's Harmonium was Java applet + server side application sold for mobile phone operators. "He (Paananen) is the designer of a broad range of wireless service products and business models, including Harmonium, the world's first commercial ring tone composer and downloader." (http://www.cooltown.com/cooltown/mpulse/1102-thin ker.asp) And Paananen was not alone with his tools. I personally, and one other Finnish guy, made tools to make your own ring tones for Nokia. I made my MIDI to Nokia tone format converter during summer 1999. You could change your ring tone either using infra-red connection, phone data cable connection or sending a special SMS message by dialling to an operator SMS centre using a modem.
Also, Nokia bundled its own Windows based PC Composer software with PC Suite. PC Suite was a data cable and software package sold separately. PC Composer was crappy software by any standards and the price of a data cable was so high that the kit never reached huge popularities.
Ring tone boom created a lot of ring tone companies which were quite hype during IT boom. Some of them have survived, some not. One of the biggest was iobox.com which was sold to Terramobile (owned by Spanish based mobile operator Telefonica) at an enormous price, about 220 million dollars. Later on, Telefonica closed iobox offices. Its my personal pity, since I was working there. Playing its cards better iobox could have captured quite a big share from the current global ring tone markets. "Hugely popular with consumers, in 2004, mobile phone ring tones are estimated to constitute a business worth over USD 4.5 billion globally" (http://www.mobilemonday.net/mm/story.php?story_id =3655)
Its inevitable that in few years, every phone accepts normal MP3s as ring tones (article referred them as True tones and Master tones). You can download them either over mobile data connection from the Internet (GPRS, UMTS) or over Bluetooth from a computer. The current ring tone business is fighting back to not to lose their business model. They cann
This only makes sense if you are making money selling the hardware...
I think "free SIM market" business model is more customer friendly. E.g. in Scandinavia, phones and SIMs are sold separately. Charging is always minute/traffic amount based. This prevents operators locking phones to their services and crippling phones. But why don't they have similiar systems in US? Has anyone tried free SIM market business model there?
Is it too easy to fool customers with "1$ starting cost" long-term contracts which end to be more expensive than minute based pricing?
into a 40 KBit/sec modem connection without losing responsiveness for the user experience.
I'd like to see any responsive image data over 40 Kbit line. Let's imagine some icon takes 64x64 pixels and is crunched to 4KB compressed. It still takes 0,5 seconds per an icon to load. Opening a start menu, waiting... please be patient.
Anyone who have surfed on a modem knows it's far from real-time responsiveness.
The motivation of open source developers
on
The Power of X
·
· Score: 1
While I love open source, sometimes the fact that it is done for nothing is one of the things that ensures it is developed slowly. Unless you are a full time student, most people are working a day job to put food on the table. Without the cash motivation it is not always easy to spend the time and effort necessary to make a great project. I am not saying the money is what is important to them, though being comfortable, being able to buy a workstation and not living on the street is.
Or not. Some of open source folks are pretty idealistic and income isn't so important thing for them. (Naturally you must have some income to pay your living expenses.)
There is quite good survey trying to find out open source developer motivations. It's made by Boston Consulting Group (big and famous guys in management consulting).
Obviously, the best case would be that your paid for what you want to do (develop open source).
Licence to print cash
on
Sims 2 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I hope Will Wright gets his royalties. No doubt, The Sims is the best selling game idea ever. HC players might not like The Sims, but it's something large crowds want to play.
The Sims franchise has shipped over 24 million units, including more than eight million units of the core product, The Sims.
Since the launch in 2000, The Sims franchise has spawned five expansion packs and a deluxe, console, and online version. The Sims has been translated into more than 17 languages and is sold worldwide.
According to The NPD Group, The Sims base product was the number one selling PC game in 2000, 2001, and 2002.
The Sims franchise games held five of the top ten spots on the 2002 best-selling PC games in North America chart, released by The NPD Group.
The game's long list of honors has included being selected "Game of the Year" for 2000 by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences and by numerous other publications in the United States and abroad. The creator of The Sims, Will Wright, was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in February 2002, joining such industry legends as Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto. Will Wright has also been recognized by ISDA in 2002 for his extraordinary body of work and enduring legacy he has established in the interactive entertainment industry.
World Food Programme (WFP) seeks to capitalise on the popularity of video games to educate youngsters (target audience of children aged between eight and 13 years old) about hunger and the work of the aid agency, and not to those who cannot afford food.
There could be better ways to do this, since educating using games seems to be a flawed idea.
Not long after the birth of computer games the first hopes for the potential of learning through games were expressed. Wouldn't it be great if the enthusiasm exhibited when playing games could be used for good, sound learning? Since then, several commercial games showing various degrees of success have been labelled 'edutainment' - a combination of the two words education and entertainment.
However, neither the education nor the entertainment part has been very successful in these titles- combining the two has turned out to be a tough job.
According to the proponents of learning through games the main potential lies in the ability of games to increase motivation through the interactive nature of games, putting the player in control of the learning and the game's options for adjusting the level of difficulty. However, it seems that most edutainment games have problems living up to these reasons for using games in the first place.
In her book Dataspill - Innføring og analyse (translation: Computer games - introduction and analysis) about games Eva Liestøl analyses five different games. She finds that the one game that does not let the player choose his own path through the game world is the edutainment title. She doesn't press the issue but if you look at other edutainment titles, you find the same pattern - educational titles seem to take over the control and narrow down the game universe to make it fit with the intentions of the producer. These intentions are often to convey some specific information about a topic. Closing the game universe and conveying specific information does not fit well with traditional game dynamics, where simple and general rules are the backbone. In stead, educators have to a larger extent turned to the adventure genre, where it is easier to focus on information, but they have found out that even here it is hard to convey the necessary depth of an educational topic.
Furthermore, very few studies have delivered hard evidence that games can be used for learning. Typically the research has been directed at putting learning into games and then assuming that this learning somehow came across to the player. But the ambition should be higher than this. It is not enough to have 'some kind of learning' in games. To truly say that games are great learning tools we must prove - or at least make probable - that games are better than other learning alternatives. And here we are still a long way from the goal - so the dream of games as great educational tools, remains a dream.
(- Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen)
"And how many PHP sites/scripts dynamically generates.png files ? Quite a lot I'd think, so, webservers might be vunerable, but it seems like a longshot to try to inject something to such scripts."
Did you read the article? You don't seem to understand the point here.
The bug affects only loading of PNG images. One can make a specially crafted PNG image which has some invalid fields causing problems in the decoder. The invalid handling of these special error cases may cause an application crash or potential execution of arbitary code in the application which uses libpng.
It is not possible to introduce malicious RAW image data to the encoder. And even if it was possible, you should be able to pump data directly in the encoder, which is not a usual case with dynamically generated images. So, your PHP site is safe.
However, libpng is the most commonly used PNG implementation due to it's free licence. These bugs affect to very many applications (graphics applications, Office applications, user interface managers, browsers, etc.) which happen to use PNG.
A similiar case like this was zlib bugs some time ago.
Microsoft sees its own death in a decade, at least in the current form. Open source movement gains more pace at eventually will catch Microsoft marketshare. Microsoft is preparing for the upcoming battle by building a patent army. They don't have too many ways to fight against free products.
Personally I am big "cancel/ok" hater, but I think I can justify my reasons...
Shouldn't the safest choice be on the right? The rightmost button appears in the same place in every window, so it's the easiest button to locate and click. The position of the leftmost button depends on the number and width of the other buttons.
No. There are two different dialog cases: confirmation dialogs (yes/no/cancel, ok/cancel) and option dialogs (lots of stuff and ok/apply/cancel). Dialog sizes vary and buttons are mislocated anyway. However, usually the lower right corner is used for buttons if buttons cannot be centered for the dialog.
The button order should be "positive actions" on left and "negative actions" on right. There is a simple reason for this. You read in all western languages from left to right. Also, in western ideology you expect the most positive option to come first.
When you are doing something a more common use case is to execute the action instead of cancelling/preventing it. E.g. when you save file you usually want to overwrite, but still you might want to cancel if you have accidentally pressed a save button at a wrong moment. You are saving a file, press a save icon and suddenly pop-up dialog "should this file be overwritten". Then you start reading options from left to to right... you are seeking for "yes" and the faster you find it the better is the usability.
And more about corners...
according to Fitt's law every corner is equally good if the initial cursor position cannot be fixed. Optimal situation would be that the buttons would be located at the nearest corner of a mouse pointer, but jumping buttons would confure user. The lower right corner is best, because when you read from up to down, from left to right, the confirmation for choices is presented as a last item, after reading through all choices you are making.
What's so special about Java or.NET that makes them the talk of the day, while other much more interesting languages seem to be ignored in this matter?
As a Java and Python developer I have at least
one reason: executing speed. Python is very dynamic language. It makes it sloooow... e.g.
Python lacks primitives. This might be a good idea from a programming theory viewpoint, but in practice the speed limit of HW always hits the application at some point unless you are doing "just" scripts.
.NET and Java don't need special commands (map, etc.) to optimize for loops away.
Also, Python gives great freedom to a developer. This leads easily to unmaintainable code. Of course good developers can avoid this, but rarely *all* developers have that good skills.
Why are laptops going widescreen? Shouldnt PCs be streaching the other way.
Laptops aren't used only as text editors anymore. Gaming and multimedia takes advantage of widescreen. Sooner or later all DVD/TV broadcasts will be 16:9. Natural image, unlike text, is better to be bigger in horizontal direction than vertical direction. This is simply because our eyes are located next to each other sideways:)
But this can be a false economy, especially with programs that are used frequently: precompiled binaries will never run as quickly as those compiled with the right optimizations for your own machine.
Here comes the pain...
How can I tell which are the right optimizations? I assume precompiled binaries were compiled with gcc -O3. Beyond -O3 everything goes magic.
Instead of spending hours and hours doing profiling and testing I'll just gladly accept that my Firefox renders slashdot.org 1.05% slower.
> JDIC also provides Java developers with a way to tap into the functionality of the client operating system they are run from. Sasaki said one of the first applications built with the JDIC project was a Java screen saver that runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
JDIC sounds like Sun has finally gave up "100% pure Java" principle and allows Java developers to access native functionality easily. For example, Swing has been burden because it has "Java only" implementation. It totally ignores all UI provided by client OS which means that text boxes and file dialogs never behave correctly in Swing. On the other hand this allows you to run "Windows themed Swing" under Gnome, but who wants that...
SWT and Eclipse league have wrapped native components and provided their own implementation only if native platform lacks the specific components. This is why SWT reacts 3x quicker than Swing, follows native GUI guidelines and is a pleasure to use compared to its Swing counterparts. Also, drilling through SWT to use native OS mechanisms like COM is easy. This is often required for compatibility reasons.
> For example, rather than using Java's own HTML-rendering capabilities, a developer could use a JDIC to integrate a Web browser running on the local operating system, such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla.
SWT had this from the beginning. For example, Eclipse on Windows use IE as help viewer by default.
> the one game I played shitloads just for the audio was Star Control 2.
Star Control 2 has been the only game which impressed me by its audio. Back to the days PC sound cards use to be rare as ice cream in Hell. Sound fx and music was limited to "beep bob beep". Compared to the sound standards of the era, R2-D2 was a potential Eurovision candidate.
Then SC2 came and pushed 4 channel digital sound through PC speaker on 286 using similiar technique as some PC tracker softwares. Instead of annoying beeps you heard adrealine rising action music. This was quite a leap in PC world. (Amiga had had good built-in since the beginning.)
I hope I could live those kind of moments again. However, nothing big in the horizon. Digital sound quality has reached "good enough" level and you cannot simply increase the quality by adding bits anymore. The framework for impressive 3D audio exists, but the wow effect for utilizing its full potential in games isn't wow enough to gain development costs back in increased game sales.
> You've obviously never worked with win32. We're talking a half-dozen library calls and about the same number of strange handle types & structures to do something simple like get a directory listing & then look at the dates on files.
This is not bad documenting. This is bad design. Notice the difference. Even though interfaces are mess they are still documented well.
MSDN API docs: - Are up-to-date - Are consistent - Have working search capability (even offline if you a local MSDN copy)
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment was the most insightful I have ever been reading on Slashdot. Kudos for it =)
Western cell phone markets are quite saturated. Nokia cannot increase its market share here anymore and thus Nokia shareholders force Nokia to enter new markets. Nokia has a very big pile of cash for little ventures. N-Gage was one try. Also, Nokia has manufactured GPRS based wireless security cameras and they (at least) had "entreprise products" division which didn't catch any fire as far as I know.
On the other hand, the same applies for Apple. Their computer market share has steadily grown, but I doubt this is enough for the shareholders. It's just matter of time until we see iCell, the Apple cellphone. Maybe Apple wants do it alone, or using white label technology, since co-operation with Motorola really wasn't a hit (the device was iRokr or something like that).
Mobile phones is vastly more difficult business area than MP3 players + selling on-line music. Legal rules, carries, billing, existing customer bases and the technology itself is already complex (think about those 10 000+ patents you need to take care of).
So which one you will buy... a good music player with weak phone capabilities or a good phone with weak music capabilities? Average consumers would probably buy a good music player AND a good phone...
A decision to force iTunes open for competing devices by European governments will probably mix the deck further.
I'd rather not use UQM engine. It's based on the orignal SC2 source which is C code from the beginning of 90s. Programming tools have radically improved in 15 years (i.e. making developers more productive).
The current UQM tree is based on 3DO source code. A long long time ago, before UQM, we asked Paul and Fred for PC source code, but it was lost since the creators didn't bother back-up their old HDs. But AFAIK later popped up that some subcontractor had 3DO source code in safe.
We even had an effort to decompile the SC2 PC version with folks at #starcontrol (kudos for this community which has survived over ten years of waiting for *real* SC3...). It could have been done with enourmous amount of work, but luckily no one had too much time in his/her life =)
In River City Ransom NES game (European version was called Street gangs) I accidentally discovered an easter egg which I think others haven't found. I had a lot of luck for this one... it was a night when I as playing this favorite NES title of mine and I was quiting the game after finishing it. I thought I'll still poke around with the emulator a little bit and ta daa: something very unexpected popped up.
You need an emulator which is capable to showing "pattern memory". Pattern memory blocks of graphics loaded to NES memory, i.e. sprites, tiles and letters. Nesticle can do this.
Finish the game. When end credits start to scroll on the screen, show Nesticle Pattern memory window. There are portraits of game main characters, Alex and Ryan, showing middle finger and playboy sign. This might definitely be no no for Nintendo games, but maybe developers thought that no one can read the video memory of a running game anyway at a certain moment of time...
I posted instructions for the easter egg to some (dead) River City Ransom forum a long time ago, but the site seemed to be pretty dead and no one noticed them.
Maybe some other NES games have similiar hidden video memory tricks like this one?
Tab completion in sftp!
This is 2005, come on.
Indeed it's the millennium of flying cars and laser pistols! And I have also heard rumours about this GUI thing... they don't use keyboards anymore to communicate with machines!
Nokia wasn't the first to introduce user changeable ring tones. Early Ericsson models had this feature also. However, you had to input your ring tone to Ericsson phones manually, note by note, and Ericsson supported only two different note lengths - basically ring tones sounded shit.
AFAIK Nokia has patented OTA (Over The Air) ring tone method. An user can download ring tones in special SMS messages. Nokia introduced OTA ring tones in Nokia 9000 Communicator and Nokia 6110 models. The specification was called "smart messaging" and it also contained operator logos (backgrounds on your phone idle screen), caller group icons and virtual business cards (vcards). Nokia's ring tone format provided much more flexibility than Ericsson's manual ring tones. Though it had only a single voice channel (no harmonics), it provided enough variation in note lengths and pitches to make it possible to create "realistic" ring tones which sounded like real songs.
I remember the time, when ring tone boom was starting to bloom in Finland. I don't know if it hit first in Finland or Japan. However, Finnish mobile operator Radiolinja and its Jukebox service (based on Paananen's Harmonium composer) was the very first commercial ring tone service in Finland around year 1999 . Quickly other Finnish mobile operators copied the business model: send SMS to premium number and you'll receive a ring tone to your Nokia in return.
I am not sure how far Paananen's pioneering work with ring tones goes. Did Paananen introduce the idea to Nokia? Smart messaging specification was established by Nokia, not by Paananen.
I remember, from my high school times (1998), someone (Nokia) had a special SMS number in Finland, from where you could download testing ring tones. The most famous example of them was Leisure Suit Larry theme. By then, operators had not yet realized the potential of ring tone business.
PAANANENS HARMONIUM TOOL WAS NEITHER OPEN SOURCE OR FREE. Paananen's Harmonium was Java applet + server side application sold for mobile phone operators. "He (Paananen) is the designer of a broad range of wireless service products and business models, including Harmonium, the world's first commercial ring tone composer and downloader." (http://www.cooltown.com/cooltown/mpulse/1102-thin ker.asp) And Paananen was not alone with his tools. I personally, and one other Finnish guy, made tools to make your own ring tones for Nokia. I made my MIDI to Nokia tone format converter during summer 1999. You could change your ring tone either using infra-red connection, phone data cable connection or sending a special SMS message by dialling to an operator SMS centre using a modem.
Also, Nokia bundled its own Windows based PC Composer software with PC Suite. PC Suite was a data cable and software package sold separately. PC Composer was crappy software by any standards and the price of a data cable was so high that the kit never reached huge popularities.
Ring tone boom created a lot of ring tone companies which were quite hype during IT boom. Some of them have survived, some not. One of the biggest was iobox.com which was sold to Terramobile (owned by Spanish based mobile operator Telefonica) at an enormous price, about 220 million dollars. Later on, Telefonica closed iobox offices. Its my personal pity, since I was working there. Playing its cards better iobox could have captured quite a big share from the current global ring tone markets. "Hugely popular with consumers, in 2004, mobile phone ring tones are estimated to constitute a business worth over USD 4.5 billion globally" (http://www.mobilemonday.net/mm/story.php?story_id =3655)
Its inevitable that in few years, every phone accepts normal MP3s as ring tones (article referred them as True tones and Master tones). You can download them either over mobile data connection from the Internet (GPRS, UMTS) or over Bluetooth from a computer. The current ring tone business is fighting back to not to lose their business model. They cann
Having +250 C degrees hot (http://www.vac-amps.com/page0018.html) tube inside your computer might not be the coolest idea after all...
Whatever we can come up with, Perl programmers do it with a single line.
The winner is clear. Only one of the candidates says "Hail to the king, baby".
I think "free SIM market" business model is more customer friendly. E.g. in Scandinavia, phones and SIMs are sold separately. Charging is always minute/traffic amount based. This prevents operators locking phones to their services and crippling phones. But why don't they have similiar systems in US? Has anyone tried free SIM market business model there?
Is it too easy to fool customers with "1$ starting cost" long-term contracts which end to be more expensive than minute based pricing?
I'd like to see any responsive image data over 40 Kbit line. Let's imagine some icon takes 64x64 pixels and is crunched to 4KB compressed. It still takes 0,5 seconds per an icon to load. Opening a start menu, waiting... please be patient.
Anyone who have surfed on a modem knows it's far from real-time responsiveness.
Or not. Some of open source folks are pretty idealistic and income isn't so important thing for them. (Naturally you must have some income to pay your living expenses.)
There is quite good survey trying to find out open source developer motivations. It's made by Boston Consulting Group (big and famous guys in management consulting).
A slide that presents the motivations of paid and non-paid open source developrs.
Obviously, the best case would be that your paid for what you want to do (develop open source).
The Sims Franchise Celebrates Three Years at the Top (feb. 2003)
The Sims franchise has shipped over 24 million units, including more than eight million units of the core product, The Sims.
Since the launch in 2000, The Sims franchise has spawned five expansion packs and a deluxe, console, and online version. The Sims has been translated into more than 17 languages and is sold worldwide.
According to The NPD Group, The Sims base product was the number one selling PC game in 2000, 2001, and 2002.
The Sims franchise games held five of the top ten spots on the 2002 best-selling PC games in North America chart, released by The NPD Group.
The game's long list of honors has included being selected "Game of the Year" for 2000 by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences and by numerous other publications in the United States and abroad. The creator of The Sims, Will Wright, was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in February 2002, joining such industry legends as Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto. Will Wright has also been recognized by ISDA in 2002 for his extraordinary body of work and enduring legacy he has established in the interactive entertainment industry.
World Food Programme (WFP) seeks to capitalise on the popularity of video games to educate youngsters (target audience of children aged between eight and 13 years old) about hunger and the work of the aid agency, and not to those who cannot afford food.
a sp:
There could be better ways to do this, since educating using games seems to be a flawed idea.
From http://www.game-research.com/art_myths_of_gaming.
Not long after the birth of computer games the first hopes for the potential of learning through games were expressed. Wouldn't it be great if the enthusiasm exhibited when playing games could be used for good, sound learning? Since then, several commercial games showing various degrees of success have been labelled 'edutainment' - a combination of the two words education and entertainment.
However, neither the education nor the entertainment part has been very successful in these titles- combining the two has turned out to be a tough job. According to the proponents of learning through games the main potential lies in the ability of games to increase motivation through the interactive nature of games, putting the player in control of the learning and the game's options for adjusting the level of difficulty. However, it seems that most edutainment games have problems living up to these reasons for using games in the first place.
In her book Dataspill - Innføring og analyse (translation: Computer games - introduction and analysis) about games Eva Liestøl analyses five different games. She finds that the one game that does not let the player choose his own path through the game world is the edutainment title. She doesn't press the issue but if you look at other edutainment titles, you find the same pattern - educational titles seem to take over the control and narrow down the game universe to make it fit with the intentions of the producer. These intentions are often to convey some specific information about a topic. Closing the game universe and conveying specific information does not fit well with traditional game dynamics, where simple and general rules are the backbone. In stead, educators have to a larger extent turned to the adventure genre, where it is easier to focus on information, but they have found out that even here it is hard to convey the necessary depth of an educational topic.
Furthermore, very few studies have delivered hard evidence that games can be used for learning. Typically the research has been directed at putting learning into games and then assuming that this learning somehow came across to the player. But the ambition should be higher than this. It is not enough to have 'some kind of learning' in games. To truly say that games are great learning tools we must prove - or at least make probable - that games are better than other learning alternatives. And here we are still a long way from the goal - so the dream of games as great educational tools, remains a dream. (- Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen)
"And how many PHP sites/scripts dynamically generates .png files ? Quite a lot I'd think, so, webservers might be vunerable, but it seems
like a longshot to try to inject something to such scripts."
Did you read the article? You don't seem to understand the point here.
The bug affects only loading of PNG images. One can make a specially crafted PNG image which has some invalid fields causing problems in the decoder. The invalid handling of these special error cases may cause an application crash or potential execution of arbitary code in the application which uses libpng.
It is not possible to introduce malicious RAW image data to the encoder. And even if it was possible, you should be able to pump data directly in the encoder, which is not a usual case with dynamically generated images. So, your PHP site is safe.
However, libpng is the most commonly used PNG implementation due to it's free licence. These bugs affect to very many applications (graphics applications, Office applications, user interface managers, browsers, etc.) which happen to use PNG.
A similiar case like this was zlib bugs some time ago.
Microsoft sees its own death in a decade, at least in the current form. Open source movement gains more pace at eventually will catch Microsoft marketshare. Microsoft is preparing for the upcoming battle by building a patent army. They don't have too many ways to fight against free products.
Personally I am big "cancel/ok" hater, but I think I can justify my reasons...
Shouldn't the safest choice be on the right? The rightmost button appears in the same place in every window, so it's the easiest button to locate and click. The position of the leftmost button depends on the number and width of the other buttons.
No. There are two different dialog cases: confirmation dialogs (yes/no/cancel, ok/cancel) and option dialogs (lots of stuff and ok/apply/cancel). Dialog sizes vary and buttons are mislocated anyway. However, usually the lower right corner is used for buttons if buttons cannot be centered for the dialog.
The button order should be "positive actions" on left and "negative actions" on right. There is a simple reason for this. You read in all western languages from left to right. Also, in western ideology you expect the most positive option to come first.
When you are doing something a more common use case is to execute the action instead of cancelling/preventing it. E.g. when you save file you usually want to overwrite, but still you might want to cancel if you have accidentally pressed a save button at a wrong moment. You are saving a file, press a save icon and suddenly pop-up dialog "should this file be overwritten". Then you start reading options from left to to right... you are seeking for "yes" and the faster you find it the better is the usability.
And more about corners... according to Fitt's law every corner is equally good if the initial cursor position cannot be fixed. Optimal situation would be that the buttons would be located at the nearest corner of a mouse pointer, but jumping buttons would confure user. The lower right corner is best, because when you read from up to down, from left to right, the confirmation for choices is presented as a last item, after reading through all choices you are making.
Just my 2 eurocents.
What's so special about Java or .NET that makes them the talk of the day, while other much more interesting languages seem to be ignored in this matter?
.NET and Java don't need special commands (map, etc.) to optimize for loops away.
As a Java and Python developer I have at least one reason: executing speed. Python is very dynamic language. It makes it sloooow... e.g. Python lacks primitives. This might be a good idea from a programming theory viewpoint, but in practice the speed limit of HW always hits the application at some point unless you are doing "just" scripts.
Also, Python gives great freedom to a developer. This leads easily to unmaintainable code. Of course good developers can avoid this, but rarely *all* developers have that good skills.
When I say "Novell" what do you think of first?
Mineral water.
In Finland, we have bottled mineral water called Vichy Novelle.
Why are laptops going widescreen? Shouldnt PCs be streaching the other way.
:)
Laptops aren't used only as text editors anymore. Gaming and multimedia takes advantage of widescreen. Sooner or later all DVD/TV broadcasts will be 16:9. Natural image, unlike text, is better to be bigger in horizontal direction than vertical direction. This is simply because our eyes are located next to each other sideways
Funny.
If you try to google Bagle assembler "source code"
you'll get
Microsoft shares source code with students - ZDNet UK News
But this can be a false economy, especially with programs that are used frequently: precompiled binaries will never run as quickly as those compiled with the right optimizations for your own machine.
Here comes the pain...
How can I tell which are the right optimizations? I assume precompiled binaries were compiled with gcc -O3. Beyond -O3 everything goes magic.
Instead of spending hours and hours doing profiling and testing I'll just gladly accept that my Firefox renders slashdot.org 1.05% slower.
> JDIC also provides Java developers with a way to tap into the functionality of the client operating system they are run from. Sasaki said one of the first applications built with the JDIC project was a Java screen saver that runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
JDIC sounds like Sun has finally gave up "100% pure Java" principle and allows Java developers to access native functionality easily. For example, Swing has been burden because it has "Java only" implementation. It totally ignores all UI provided by client OS which means that text boxes and file dialogs never behave correctly in Swing. On the other hand this allows you to run "Windows themed Swing" under Gnome, but who wants that...
SWT and Eclipse league have wrapped native components and provided their own implementation only if native platform lacks the specific components. This is why SWT reacts 3x quicker than Swing, follows native GUI guidelines and is a pleasure to use compared to its Swing counterparts. Also, drilling through SWT to use native OS mechanisms like COM is easy. This is often required for compatibility reasons.
> For example, rather than using Java's own HTML-rendering capabilities, a developer could use a JDIC to integrate a Web browser running on the local operating system, such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla.
SWT had this from the beginning. For example, Eclipse on Windows use IE as help viewer by default.
Hello,
Your tic tac toe game is too difficult. I cannot win.
Cheers
> the one game I played shitloads just for the audio was Star Control 2.
Star Control 2 has been the only game which impressed me by its audio. Back to the days PC sound cards use to be rare as ice cream in Hell. Sound fx and music was limited to "beep bob beep". Compared to the sound standards of the era, R2-D2 was a potential Eurovision candidate.
Then SC2 came and pushed 4 channel digital sound through PC speaker on 286 using similiar technique as some PC tracker softwares. Instead of annoying beeps you heard adrealine rising action music. This was quite a leap in PC world. (Amiga had had good built-in since the beginning.)
I hope I could live those kind of moments again. However, nothing big in the horizon. Digital sound quality has reached "good enough" level and you cannot simply increase the quality by adding bits anymore. The framework for impressive 3D audio exists, but the wow effect for utilizing its full potential in games isn't wow enough to gain development costs back in increased game sales.
> You've obviously never worked with win32. We're talking a half-dozen library calls and about the same number of strange handle types & structures to do something simple like get a directory listing & then look at the dates on files.
This is not bad documenting. This is bad design. Notice the difference. Even though interfaces are mess they are still documented well.
MSDN API docs:
- Are up-to-date
- Are consistent
- Have working search capability (even offline if you a local MSDN copy)