That "one little point" is actually a big deal. Up to that time, nerdy gamers who preferred RPGs to fighters and racing games lived by the "good graphics don't make a good game" mantra, and were actively hostile to improved graphics and systems that boasted ever-greater graphics capabilities--the idea being that game developers are a finite resource, and effort spent on graphics is effort not spent on the gameplay and story-writing.
Then the bomb, in the form of Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation, was dropped.
The gameplay was as smooth or smoother than any other RPG of the time period, the story was was acceptably decent (whether is was good or not is subject to strenuous debate). But it had killer graphics. All of a sudden, the crap people were spewing about graphics not mattering or not improving the experience was demonstrably false,[1] and in an instant, the video game industry was changed. FFVII led, in a serious way, the charge for multi-million-dollar big-budget games, by requiring development studios to have story AND gameplay AND graphics, instead of just one or two. It also introduced a huge number of people into console role-playing games, indubitably far more than any other title.
[1]: I think that this is actually the reason that so many self-proclaimed "old-school" RPGers hate Final Fantasy VII so much: it made them look like total chumps and they resent Square for "abandoning" them... in favor of more exciting, playable games that more people than ever enjoy. Just goes to show, there's no pleasing some people.
He was talking about something else entirely, but certain of Juvenal's remarks are apropos to all free societies: "Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard against the guardians, indeed.
You were lucky to have atomic matter. In my day, all we had to anything with was quark soup--and that includes eating! Oh, it was disgusting but it was all we had! And we loved it!
They should team up with the Log Cabin Republicans. Then they can be the Butt-Pirate Party! And that will disarm about 90% of the potential insults, too.
Cascading style sheets are a great idea... if you can cleanly separate form from content. Certainly, this is nowhere more true than in writing, as things like the poetry of e.e. cummings, hieroglyphic inscription, and the calligraphic writings of the ancient Chinese are all examples of where the medium becomes the message with profound results. While most attempts at creating genuine multimedia art over the internet still have their tongues firmly planted in-cheek (ytmnd springs to mind), I'd suspect that within a generation (if not a generation of internet time), HTML-/XML-based art will take off in a major way. In what ways do you see the informatic schema of separating data from the presentation thereof running into the artistic schema of holism and integrating all aspects of presentation?
The advantage to C is primarily not that's it's readable (C can be pretty arcane, and assembler for a given hardware platform is easy to follow once you've familiarized yourself with the basic instruction formats), but that it's portable (in fact, one of the best quotes I've heard about C is that it combines all of the power and flexibility of machine code with all the elegance and readability of machine code). The readability is largely a side effect of choosing a good base of common syntax objects (loops and operators), with a not-too-large and completely separable library for all the complex tasks like I/O.
Remember, for years people wrote all their operating systems in assembler--until late '73 the Unix kernel was still all-assembler, and if DMR had developed a low-level language with ugly syntax but all the other good characteristics of C, we'd probably be using that instead.
Function overloading, like operator overloading, is a crutch for lazy people with little understanding of computers.
Ignoring all the technical details as to why it's a bad idea, it serves no actual purpose as far as improving maintainability, speed, or code size. What the compiler has to do with shitty languages to support overloading is to translate each unique function name like do_stuff into a symbol like _Z8_do_stuffxyz, and creates a separate block of code to handle each separate case. This adversely affects compilation time and can only hurt the efficiency of the executable. As a programmer, you have to write separate functions for each overloaded case, so it doesn't save any development time. And finally, other people reading or maintaining the code have to figure out version of a given function is being called at a given time, what the types of the parameters are, what the namespace is, etc etc etc. When it's easier (or even necessary) to recompile the code with debugging symbols on, load it into a debugger, set a few breakpoints and execute just to figure out what function is being callled on a given line, you have a very shitty program. When you have a language that encourages that sort of thing, you have a very shitty language.
I'm sure kernel devs thank whatever gods they may or may not believe in every day that they don't have to deal with function or operator overloading, and you and every other two-bit C++ hacker-wannabe that would try to contribute code.
Actually, I think the real problem is that Brazil is really more of a raw-talent-based team than one that emphasizes strategy or on-the-field tactics--Brazil (and to a lesser extent, the rest of South America and most of sub-Saharan Africa) embody a style of play that is a little less organized, a little more ad-hoc and adaptive. Thus, there is more "randomness" their playing, and by definition randomness is impossible to predict. On the other hand, I'd imagine that this computer would fare well against highly-regimented teams like those in Eastern Europe, and South Korea. They housed Japan already, and may stand well against the Croats.
On Adobe's Webpage, Photoshop Elements for Windows costs $90. I don't think that's free by anyone's definition.
The idea is to make the reduced edition 1) Good enough for home use, and 2) a free download that's considered essential, so one of the first things that anyone does when they get a new computer is to install it (like the way AIM is among teenagers).
Actually, I think people whine because they've learned the truth of the old adage, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." People's myspace sites aren't just poor html; they're hideously ugly and frequently illegible, with the most obnoxious possible music playing in the background with dubious legality. Myspace would be a much more hospitable place to "hang out" if people had the taste and restraint to make it not painful to see.
The problem with MySpace is the problem with the Web generally: there's lots of content, but none of it is any damn good.
What has made Google from a nifty tool to a worldwide phenomenon is the breadth of their searches--they are no longer about searching the web only. You can search also Usenet, maps, scholarly research, online vendors, books, email, and even your own files and images on your PC. You can also use Google to search the web for images, videos, stocks, catalogs, blogs, and news articles. Simply beating Google in web search won't dethrone them, you'd need to beat them everywhere (or at least make their other search services irrelevant).
The solution to this problem for software to have a "free version" that has all of the basic functionality that one needs to run the program on a day-to-day basis, and then when they try to do something fancy like shift the color tone, nag them to buy the full/regular version. Most of the people who buy photoshop now are graphic professionals, who need those features anyway, and it can get everyone else who illegally copies the program off their addiction to pirated Adobe software (the trick will be to figure out exactly which features go in the free version and which go in the pro version). Adobe doesn't actually lose any sales, because the free product is replacing pirated copies, not licensed ones, and may help create sales among home-photo-editing power users and wannabe graphic designers (a particularly brilliant maneuver would involve paying someone to be the defendant in a huge lawsuit over illegitimate copies to draw attention to the new, free version, and then settling for "an undisclosed amount").
That said, implementing such a plan would require a high-level executive with a great of insight and and problem-solving capability, and high-level executives are not terribly well-known for either of these traits. Here's hoping, though.
What's that? VMS? I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the roar of an operating system under which whole classes of common exploits are programatically impossible.
But that's not how Capitalism works! Everybody knows that under Capitalism, you're entitled to make more money every year, even if no one wants the product or service you provide anymore. Just ask the content consortia.
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That "one little point" is actually a big deal. Up to that time, nerdy gamers who preferred RPGs to fighters and racing games lived by the "good graphics don't make a good game" mantra, and were actively hostile to improved graphics and systems that boasted ever-greater graphics capabilities--the idea being that game developers are a finite resource, and effort spent on graphics is effort not spent on the gameplay and story-writing.
Then the bomb, in the form of Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation, was dropped.
The gameplay was as smooth or smoother than any other RPG of the time period, the story was was acceptably decent (whether is was good or not is subject to strenuous debate). But it had killer graphics. All of a sudden, the crap people were spewing about graphics not mattering or not improving the experience was demonstrably false,[1] and in an instant, the video game industry was changed. FFVII led, in a serious way, the charge for multi-million-dollar big-budget games, by requiring development studios to have story AND gameplay AND graphics, instead of just one or two. It also introduced a huge number of people into console role-playing games, indubitably far more than any other title.
[1]: I think that this is actually the reason that so many self-proclaimed "old-school" RPGers hate Final Fantasy VII so much: it made them look like total chumps and they resent Square for "abandoning" them... in favor of more exciting, playable games that more people than ever enjoy. Just goes to show, there's no pleasing some people.
Why not--Homer was the first to write extensively about Ajax!
He was talking about something else entirely, but certain of Juvenal's remarks are apropos to all free societies: "Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard against the guardians, indeed.
You were lucky to have atomic matter. In my day, all we had to anything with was quark soup--and that includes eating! Oh, it was disgusting but it was all we had! And we loved it!
I'm glad I run OpenBSD. I get wi-fi drivers, *and* they don't suck!
They should team up with the Log Cabin Republicans. Then they can be the Butt-Pirate Party! And that will disarm about 90% of the potential insults, too.
Cascading style sheets are a great idea... if you can cleanly separate form from content. Certainly, this is nowhere more true than in writing, as things like the poetry of e.e. cummings, hieroglyphic inscription, and the calligraphic writings of the ancient Chinese are all examples of where the medium becomes the message with profound results. While most attempts at creating genuine multimedia art over the internet still have their tongues firmly planted in-cheek (ytmnd springs to mind), I'd suspect that within a generation (if not a generation of internet time), HTML-/XML-based art will take off in a major way. In what ways do you see the informatic schema of separating data from the presentation thereof running into the artistic schema of holism and integrating all aspects of presentation?
Geez, suddenly Sun charging $1/CPU-hour seems like a reasonable price.
You call all that annoying text-processing simplicity? I say go back to running instructions from punchcards.
The advantage to C is primarily not that's it's readable (C can be pretty arcane, and assembler for a given hardware platform is easy to follow once you've familiarized yourself with the basic instruction formats), but that it's portable (in fact, one of the best quotes I've heard about C is that it combines all of the power and flexibility of machine code with all the elegance and readability of machine code). The readability is largely a side effect of choosing a good base of common syntax objects (loops and operators), with a not-too-large and completely separable library for all the complex tasks like I/O.
Remember, for years people wrote all their operating systems in assembler--until late '73 the Unix kernel was still all-assembler, and if DMR had developed a low-level language with ugly syntax but all the other good characteristics of C, we'd probably be using that instead.
Function overloading, like operator overloading, is a crutch for lazy people with little understanding of computers.
Ignoring all the technical details as to why it's a bad idea, it serves no actual purpose as far as improving maintainability, speed, or code size. What the compiler has to do with shitty languages to support overloading is to translate each unique function name like do_stuff into a symbol like _Z8_do_stuffxyz, and creates a separate block of code to handle each separate case. This adversely affects compilation time and can only hurt the efficiency of the executable. As a programmer, you have to write separate functions for each overloaded case, so it doesn't save any development time. And finally, other people reading or maintaining the code have to figure out version of a given function is being called at a given time, what the types of the parameters are, what the namespace is, etc etc etc. When it's easier (or even necessary) to recompile the code with debugging symbols on, load it into a debugger, set a few breakpoints and execute just to figure out what function is being callled on a given line, you have a very shitty program. When you have a language that encourages that sort of thing, you have a very shitty language.
I'm sure kernel devs thank whatever gods they may or may not believe in every day that they don't have to deal with function or operator overloading, and you and every other two-bit C++ hacker-wannabe that would try to contribute code.
Actually, I think the real problem is that Brazil is really more of a raw-talent-based team than one that emphasizes strategy or on-the-field tactics--Brazil (and to a lesser extent, the rest of South America and most of sub-Saharan Africa) embody a style of play that is a little less organized, a little more ad-hoc and adaptive. Thus, there is more "randomness" their playing, and by definition randomness is impossible to predict. On the other hand, I'd imagine that this computer would fare well against highly-regimented teams like those in Eastern Europe, and South Korea. They housed Japan already, and may stand well against the Croats.
On Adobe's Webpage, Photoshop Elements for Windows costs $90. I don't think that's free by anyone's definition.
The idea is to make the reduced edition 1) Good enough for home use, and 2) a free download that's considered essential, so one of the first things that anyone does when they get a new computer is to install it (like the way AIM is among teenagers).
Actually, I think people whine because they've learned the truth of the old adage, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." People's myspace sites aren't just poor html; they're hideously ugly and frequently illegible, with the most obnoxious possible music playing in the background with dubious legality. Myspace would be a much more hospitable place to "hang out" if people had the taste and restraint to make it not painful to see.
The problem with MySpace is the problem with the Web generally: there's lots of content, but none of it is any damn good.
Nah, astronomers prefer bare-backing.
Evidently they don't wipe either. And people say Linux users never get viruses!
What has made Google from a nifty tool to a worldwide phenomenon is the breadth of their searches--they are no longer about searching the web only. You can search also Usenet, maps, scholarly research, online vendors, books, email, and even your own files and images on your PC. You can also use Google to search the web for images, videos, stocks, catalogs, blogs, and news articles. Simply beating Google in web search won't dethrone them, you'd need to beat them everywhere (or at least make their other search services irrelevant).
The solution to this problem for software to have a "free version" that has all of the basic functionality that one needs to run the program on a day-to-day basis, and then when they try to do something fancy like shift the color tone, nag them to buy the full/regular version. Most of the people who buy photoshop now are graphic professionals, who need those features anyway, and it can get everyone else who illegally copies the program off their addiction to pirated Adobe software (the trick will be to figure out exactly which features go in the free version and which go in the pro version). Adobe doesn't actually lose any sales, because the free product is replacing pirated copies, not licensed ones, and may help create sales among home-photo-editing power users and wannabe graphic designers (a particularly brilliant maneuver would involve paying someone to be the defendant in a huge lawsuit over illegitimate copies to draw attention to the new, free version, and then settling for "an undisclosed amount").
That said, implementing such a plan would require a high-level executive with a great of insight and and problem-solving capability, and high-level executives are not terribly well-known for either of these traits. Here's hoping, though.
I'd prefer a python-to-Common-Lisp compiler, but only because I hate running out of stack space for recursive algorithms.
What's that? VMS? I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the roar of an operating system under which whole classes of common exploits are programatically impossible.
Tell that to Giordano Bruno.
But that's not how Capitalism works! Everybody knows that under Capitalism, you're entitled to make more money every year, even if no one wants the product or service you provide anymore. Just ask the content consortia.
'Cause Solaris is a type of Linux, duh!
Not a ribbon?