HL was released, the SDK had not come out for quite a long time after that.
People went *NUTS* over the SDK. Half-Life, at the time, had some of the most realistic lighting and best textures (Second only to maybe SiN in the Texture Dept) out there. Despite the fact that people did not have the SDK yet, there were already modifications being planned and lots of ground work already done.
Half-Life is still one of the most actively modified games existing, even though there are many, many better engines out there. Natural Selection is a recent and popular example.
Not only is the SDK useful, but it has a huge support base from the community AND from valve. In the past, many modifications to the HL engine have been made just to accomodate mod developers and server operators. They simply know how to treat their user base well, and it has paid off quite well for them. Not only did the original game make a lot of money, but the whole franchise and games made by *fans* made money for them... One of which was Counter-Strike.
You are describing groups of people, with different views, morality, and steadfastness. Some are agressors, some are protectors. I own guns, as many other people here do too. Have I killed anyone? No.
However, it only takes one person to make a tinfoil hat.
Sorry, I don't mean to jolt, but it's kind of sad that we're talking about the ability to be anonymous, and you turn it (albeit unintentionally, and the people saying 'right on!' are just as bad) into a drug war argument.
It's no better than the 'drugs support terrorism' ads, really. I have nothing against that particular cause but discrediting it with associating it with something almost completely unrelated is just giving the guys that disagree with you more fodder.
Sony and the Playstation line has always been really, really liberal about what comes out on their systems. If you take a look at a lot of the peripherals that exist over in japan, you'll see that we don't have shit (and I mean that, there is a lot of shit:)
I have a PS2, simply because I know what kinds of games that I will get. Anything people want to put out on it, pretty much.
I have found the games I enjoy most often exist on the Playstation line. Microsoft and Nintendo are very stringent on what comes out on their systems.... Nintendo, in particular, has a lot of good games, but most of them come from Nintendo themselves. The sad thing is that so much branding goes on in those games, for me, it makes it hard to play. I've heard Kingdom Hearts is a great game, but I really don't care too much for disney, for the same reasons I don't care much for nintendo.
With the PS2, I can't confirm this, but it seems that anyone who has the cash to buy the SDK and associated hardware is able to make a game for it. I like that. It gives me more choice.
Anyone who has used XML knows perfectly well that it's entirely possible to describe the complete dataset for content, layout, and presentation, within an XML document, in a form which can be easily parsed by humans and software alike. Completely. Using open standards, even.
I fail to see how this is different than what I said. It's entirely possible to do all this in a database as well. All XML really does is assign data to fields that are marked up by a key. Depending on how those keys are marked up, the rules may be transformed. This certainly sounds like a set of tables to me.
Don't get me wrong, XML sure makes a lot of things easier to do, but everything can be done in a database as well.
In fact, one could even abstract it to the point where the.doc format is a database as well. Most file formats are designed with extensibility in mind, and that requires some form of relational mechanism, which is one of the key ingredients in a database.
I really fail to see how you agreed with me so well, but maintained the ability to present it as an argument.
I agree. I don't subscribe (literally) to the "you must pay to play" section of video games out there, but the games I do play a lot (Counter-Strike and NWN), are riddled with older and younger groups alike.
Counter-Strike, a skill-based game that requires a *lot* of time to be "good", is comprised highly of a group of people between the ages of 16-22, that is, the group that is most likely to be jobless and not going to school. Playing on a sick day or when I was out of work, I noticed the people during the day (especially during the summer), were a much lower grade of player on a personal level, but were significantly more skilled. The converse, was that (I have trouble with insomnia, when I was out of work it was particularily bad) the people during the nighttime in the servers on the N.A. continent were full of intelligent, but poorly skilled people. Most of them worked graveyard, or was your stereotypical "night owl" hacker type. A good portion of them were computer savants. 5-10pm was the best time to meet the players I enjoyed the most. Playing on the right server is the ultimate way to find the best players. Our clan server (We are not a competing clan, in fact, my wife and several others' wives are in the clan as well) pretty much only has activity during that time. The majority of our group is 22 and older, our oldest is >40, IIRC. A lot of them hold well-paying positions in the bay area.
NWN, on the other hand, seemed like a lost cause to me at first. NWN doesn't really encourage the persistent world concept, and tons of people were trying ot build them, but the fact that it's so hard to make long-standing quests or quests that aren't very repetitive left a lot of well-designed but mostly powergaming servers. A lot of the players were good people, but still, there wasn't a lot of questing and role-playing being done.
I found another server, City of Arabel that really shines in the role-playing department. You'll never get banned for not role-playing, but you'll get bored really quick. The quests are designed to get you up to around level 3 on your own -- after that, you pretty much have to role play and be involved in DM-related quests (several are run a day) to enjoy it at all. I don't believe there is a character above 15, and then, there aren't many of those guys anyways.
However, my foray with Diablo was crap indeed. Sure, you had a lot of fantasy-loving geeks there, but when you don't really have any goal other than to get your character up to the highest level with the best items, there's not much to guarantee you're going to be with good players.
It's great to see someone else gets it. Postscript is actually a language which describes layout -- really, nothing is stopping you from doing all your work in it. Same with TeX. Of course, both languages (and they are true languages) are extremely complex and generally benefit from a middle-ground tool to do the real work (LyX, TeXinfo, Acrobat, Dia (?) etc).
Treat XML like a database. It has rules of operation, but what you contain and how you describe the data are completely arbitrary.
That said, if office is really aiming for interoperability, they would publish the XML schema and layout rules. However, as most of us already know, it's just yet another business with the desire to put "XML" on their "Corporate Resume" to make them look more "open".
You must remember though, that the aim is for the most complex scene to run at 30 fps (or higher). When setting up games, I always try to achieve this, means I'll get no slow down while I'm playing.
It might be your fonts. Font clarity is a lot more important when the background is darker than the text.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I actually prefer the opposite (for a couple of reasons, mainly multiple colors for say, a code editor or terminal) and I find that clear fonts really make the difference.
Not to mention of the 3 systems currently in favor, the X-Box simply has the best graphics processor. I really think it'd be pretty hard to argue that, even though I really have no desire to purchase one, myself.
That is a good question. The last time I really spent a lot of time following compiler development, it was with the egcs branch, which had distinct optimizations up to 06. (pgcc, another branch, had 9 of them.) It's very possible that this is not the case after egcs and gcc merged. Another person that I know has mentioned this to me, but when I pointed out the egcs optimizations, he wasn't sure if what you were describing was still the case. One of these days I'll look into it, but really, you can put anything you want after the -O flag and it'll just lower than number to the highest optimization... Of course, you already know that.
Regardless, I have seen a huge improvement over my old debian system. O3 certainly would help over debian's compiles, but debian also compiles for (around 8 months ago) an i586 "standard" CPU target, so the -march isn't hurting things, either. That, and binary packages rely heavily on the package maintainers optimizations. Gentoo gives me the opportunity to change that pretty easily (packages which have known problems with optimizations are forced to do otherwise).
I must admit at first that the notion of speed was the reason I tried gentoo, but really that's not the reason I enjoy it anymore. I listed those in the parent.
Forks often rejoin the root tree once they've accomplished their goals, either intentionally or otherwise.
I have a gut feeling that unless the xwin project really refactors (i hate that word) a LOT of stuff, it's not going to be something that people are dying to install, except for the bleeding edge/at-work beta tester (these guys really piss me off, they spend more time recovering from crashes than actually working) types.
Wait it out - software development (especially in larger projects) is a meritocracy -- no one pays attention to you unless you accomplish something that makes a difference. Given what I've read about the reputation of this guy, he's probably going to bring a lot of good, but lets just wait for it to happen instead of getting all reactionary, eh? You're just wasting your time. Parade or throw tomatoes when something *really* big happens.
Is it "unsolicited commercial e-mail" or "unsolicited bulk e-mail"? If it's UCE, then sending unsolicited non-commercial e-mail to 25,000 people isn't spam. If it's UBE, then sending unsolicited commercial e-mail to 15 people may not be spam depending on your definition of "bulk". If 15 is bulk, what about 2? Can I send unsolicited mail to two people advertising a service I genuinely believe they'll be interested in?
You've got a very good point. I get a lot of ICQ spam that follows:
Hi, I'm (insert female name here)! Please check out my webcam. It's at (url).
Is that really commercial? No. Is it spam? Yes. The website is definately commercial.
Slashdot Mirror
.... Has done just about everything he could to distance himself from what made him famous.
Like Robin Williams.
If this wasn't the Office of Information Awareness, I would agree with you.
Not to mention, John Poindexter, head of the department, was a key member of the Iran-Contra scandal.
You should see some of the internal letters written by him during that period (retrieved by the FOIA). They are frightening at best.
Of course, no one cares about that.
HL was released, the SDK had not come out for quite a long time after that.
People went *NUTS* over the SDK. Half-Life, at the time, had some of the most realistic lighting and best textures (Second only to maybe SiN in the Texture Dept) out there. Despite the fact that people did not have the SDK yet, there were already modifications being planned and lots of ground work already done.
Half-Life is still one of the most actively modified games existing, even though there are many, many better engines out there. Natural Selection is a recent and popular example.
Not only is the SDK useful, but it has a huge support base from the community AND from valve. In the past, many modifications to the HL engine have been made just to accomodate mod developers and server operators. They simply know how to treat their user base well, and it has paid off quite well for them. Not only did the original game make a lot of money, but the whole franchise and games made by *fans* made money for them... One of which was Counter-Strike.
You are mislead.
....about having a nickname and taking credit for a discovery that essentially belonged to a blind college hermit?
You are describing groups of people, with different views, morality, and steadfastness. Some are agressors, some are protectors. I own guns, as many other people here do too. Have I killed anyone? No.
However, it only takes one person to make a tinfoil hat.
Sorry, I don't mean to jolt, but it's kind of sad that we're talking about the ability to be anonymous, and you turn it (albeit unintentionally, and the people saying 'right on!' are just as bad) into a drug war argument.
It's no better than the 'drugs support terrorism' ads, really. I have nothing against that particular cause but discrediting it with associating it with something almost completely unrelated is just giving the guys that disagree with you more fodder.
Sony and the Playstation line has always been really, really liberal about what comes out on their systems. If you take a look at a lot of the peripherals that exist over in japan, you'll see that we don't have shit (and I mean that, there is a lot of shit :)
An asshole looks like this: *
I have a PS2, simply because I know what kinds of games that I will get. Anything people want to put out on it, pretty much.
I have found the games I enjoy most often exist on the Playstation line. Microsoft and Nintendo are very stringent on what comes out on their systems.... Nintendo, in particular, has a lot of good games, but most of them come from Nintendo themselves. The sad thing is that so much branding goes on in those games, for me, it makes it hard to play. I've heard Kingdom Hearts is a great game, but I really don't care too much for disney, for the same reasons I don't care much for nintendo.
With the PS2, I can't confirm this, but it seems that anyone who has the cash to buy the SDK and associated hardware is able to make a game for it. I like that. It gives me more choice.
Heh, if you have a buzzword/bullshit bingo card related to XML, it's a guaranteed winner no matter how you slice it. :)
:)
That was kind of the point of what I wrote.
Anyone who has used XML knows perfectly well that it's entirely possible to describe the complete dataset for content, layout, and presentation, within an XML document, in a form which can be easily parsed by humans and software alike. Completely. Using open standards, even.
.doc format is a database as well. Most file formats are designed with extensibility in mind, and that requires some form of relational mechanism, which is one of the key ingredients in a database.
I fail to see how this is different than what I said. It's entirely possible to do all this in a database as well. All XML really does is assign data to fields that are marked up by a key. Depending on how those keys are marked up, the rules may be transformed. This certainly sounds like a set of tables to me.
Don't get me wrong, XML sure makes a lot of things easier to do, but everything can be done in a database as well.
In fact, one could even abstract it to the point where the
I really fail to see how you agreed with me so well, but maintained the ability to present it as an argument.
I agree. I don't subscribe (literally) to the "you must pay to play" section of video games out there, but the games I do play a lot (Counter-Strike and NWN), are riddled with older and younger groups alike.
Counter-Strike, a skill-based game that requires a *lot* of time to be "good", is comprised highly of a group of people between the ages of 16-22, that is, the group that is most likely to be jobless and not going to school. Playing on a sick day or when I was out of work, I noticed the people during the day (especially during the summer), were a much lower grade of player on a personal level, but were significantly more skilled. The converse, was that (I have trouble with insomnia, when I was out of work it was particularily bad) the people during the nighttime in the servers on the N.A. continent were full of intelligent, but poorly skilled people. Most of them worked graveyard, or was your stereotypical "night owl" hacker type. A good portion of them were computer savants. 5-10pm was the best time to meet the players I enjoyed the most. Playing on the right server is the ultimate way to find the best players. Our clan server (We are not a competing clan, in fact, my wife and several others' wives are in the clan as well) pretty much only has activity during that time. The majority of our group is 22 and older, our oldest is >40, IIRC. A lot of them hold well-paying positions in the bay area.
NWN, on the other hand, seemed like a lost cause to me at first. NWN doesn't really encourage the persistent world concept, and tons of people were trying ot build them, but the fact that it's so hard to make long-standing quests or quests that aren't very repetitive left a lot of well-designed but mostly powergaming servers. A lot of the players were good people, but still, there wasn't a lot of questing and role-playing being done.
I found another server, City of Arabel that really shines in the role-playing department. You'll never get banned for not role-playing, but you'll get bored really quick. The quests are designed to get you up to around level 3 on your own -- after that, you pretty much have to role play and be involved in DM-related quests (several are run a day) to enjoy it at all. I don't believe there is a character above 15, and then, there aren't many of those guys anyways.
However, my foray with Diablo was crap indeed. Sure, you had a lot of fantasy-loving geeks there, but when you don't really have any goal other than to get your character up to the highest level with the best items, there's not much to guarantee you're going to be with good players.
It's great to see someone else gets it. Postscript is actually a language which describes layout -- really, nothing is stopping you from doing all your work in it. Same with TeX. Of course, both languages (and they are true languages) are extremely complex and generally benefit from a middle-ground tool to do the real work (LyX, TeXinfo, Acrobat, Dia (?) etc).
:)
Treat XML like a database. It has rules of operation, but what you contain and how you describe the data are completely arbitrary.
That said, if office is really aiming for interoperability, they would publish the XML schema and layout rules. However, as most of us already know, it's just yet another business with the desire to put "XML" on their "Corporate Resume" to make them look more "open".
Sorry for all the double-quoted words.
You must remember though, that the aim is for the most complex scene to run at 30 fps (or higher). When setting up games, I always try to achieve this, means I'll get no slow down while I'm playing.
I have a gut feeling Carmack would take issue with that. He has a lot of loyalty amongst linux gamers.
It might be your fonts. Font clarity is a lot more important when the background is darker than the text.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I actually prefer the opposite (for a couple of reasons, mainly multiple colors for say, a code editor or terminal) and I find that clear fonts really make the difference.
Not to mention of the 3 systems currently in favor, the X-Box simply has the best graphics processor. I really think it'd be pretty hard to argue that, even though I really have no desire to purchase one, myself.
Enjoy.
That is a good question. The last time I really spent a lot of time following compiler development, it was with the egcs branch, which had distinct optimizations up to 06. (pgcc, another branch, had 9 of them.) It's very possible that this is not the case after egcs and gcc merged. Another person that I know has mentioned this to me, but when I pointed out the egcs optimizations, he wasn't sure if what you were describing was still the case. One of these days I'll look into it, but really, you can put anything you want after the -O flag and it'll just lower than number to the highest optimization... Of course, you already know that.
Regardless, I have seen a huge improvement over my old debian system. O3 certainly would help over debian's compiles, but debian also compiles for (around 8 months ago) an i586 "standard" CPU target, so the -march isn't hurting things, either. That, and binary packages rely heavily on the package maintainers optimizations. Gentoo gives me the opportunity to change that pretty easily (packages which have known problems with optimizations are forced to do otherwise).
I must admit at first that the notion of speed was the reason I tried gentoo, but really that's not the reason I enjoy it anymore. I listed those in the parent.
NEWS FLASH:
LINUX IS COOLER THAN WINDOWS
I really wish someone would keep a tally of these articles. Jesus, 3 years ago this was starting to get old, now it's just stupid.
Did someone pay for that story or something? I'm sure Rob & Crew have heard this enough times, too.
You're not even considering R&D time for these companies to get up to speed with what google already has in algo's, server tech, and otherwise.
:)
Take a couple days off and sleep. You'll feel better later
....what happens first.
Forks often rejoin the root tree once they've accomplished their goals, either intentionally or otherwise.
I have a gut feeling that unless the xwin project really refactors (i hate that word) a LOT of stuff, it's not going to be something that people are dying to install, except for the bleeding edge/at-work beta tester (these guys really piss me off, they spend more time recovering from crashes than actually working) types.
Wait it out - software development (especially in larger projects) is a meritocracy -- no one pays attention to you unless you accomplish something that makes a difference. Given what I've read about the reputation of this guy, he's probably going to bring a lot of good, but lets just wait for it to happen instead of getting all reactionary, eh? You're just wasting your time. Parade or throw tomatoes when something *really* big happens.
You've got a very good point. I get a lot of ICQ spam that follows:
Is that really commercial? No. Is it spam? Yes. The website is definately commercial.
Please do not fall into the trap of throwing us all into a single bucket.
Thank you.
You are confusing the internet with ARPA, I think.