Re:Why are old arcade games considered good?
on
10 Gateway Games
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· Score: 1
It's just a time stealer designed to trick people into thinking they are accomplishing something when in the end your are left with nothing (see Everquest et al).
You discovered this after playing it for hours and hours and hours, didn't you? I sure did. Don't care for the game now though -- I tried playing the Sims 2 (borrowed a copy) and just couldn't get into it at all.
My gf never played games before I bought my playstation, save for Myst on her PC (it came with her PC.. she never even finished it). She is now completely hooked on Katamari Damacy and the Sims (Bustin' Out, which is really an excellent console port). She even named her sim Kate Damashii. I never even get to play GTA anymore (which is fine, I just play UT or Morrowind on my PC)
Re:Such Innovation In a Time of Little
on
We Love Katamari
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Peter Molyneaux, Will Wright, Warren Specter... give me a few minutes.
Oh, but we have to love everything Japanese, isn't their culture so superior, everything that comes out of Japan is superior, blah blah blah. Well no, 90% of Japanese games are like "Super Princess Maker 23" that involve seducing cartoon children by clicking through menu dialogs so trite as to make Leisure Suit Larry look like William Shakespeare.
Katamari was a hit because it stood out, and it stood out by actually being fun.
Re:Such Innovation In a Time of Little
on
We Love Katamari
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> I have noted that most of the "diluted" games that have cool graphics but no gameplay are usually american games
Final *cough* Fantasy
Nice movies on that DVD. Wish there was some game there too.
What RMS is pointing out is that you SHOULD care. Linus didn't care, he was warned about it, but he didn't listen and in the end it bit him in the ass.
"And this, little Timmy, is why Linux no longer exists today, for it died on that very day when no one eeeeever wrote another line of code for it again."
It's _possible_ that GL had three episodes in mind when he wrote Star Wars, though the movie is written to hedge that bet, since it's pretty self-contained, except for the villain getting away to fight another day. Obviously Empire Strikes Back was written with a finale in mind...
But let's not swallow his nonsense about "a trilogy of trilogies", which were more a product of his own grandiose dreams than any actual plan. He started at "Episode IV" as a dramatic device, to drop you into the action, and even called it an "Episode" because it was intended to bring that old-fashioned space opera to the big screen, with all the cheesiness intact. Thus the scrolling-off-to-the-distance text and the wipe cuts everywhere -- it's not like wipe cuts were in vogue even when Star Wars was made.
All this nonsense about prequels and sequel trilogies was just George riding on his own success.
It'd be nice if these supporters of the second amendment weren't also the same fellers who'd like to take up arms to return our country to the "traditional values" they espouse. Something makes me think that as an Educated Liberal Elite, I'd be one of the first against the wall in their happy little revolution, based on the typical rhetoric I usually hear coming out of the NRA.
Quite in fact, they may have grounds to claim a violation of their First Amendment rights to free association (this is more a statutory interpretation of free assembly, but it's held up). They now have standing to gum up the works more then they ever could have on the inside.
Karl Rove really overplayed his hand on this one methinks.
Awww yeah, {COMMO} was the bomb. That program had lots of functionality for being a 56K COM file. I did some neat stuff in its macro language, including having it call qedit as a mail editor. This being DOS, it involved actually quitting and leaving the DTR up, running qedit, then starting back up with a particular macro, namely the return point. A bit like an asm far call actually... Nowadays I never write such hacks, but that old saw about necessity being the mother of invention really holds up.
It does sound like you would like only existing projects to continue and to continue without any influence from other projects.
That's not at all what I said. While OS/2's design might have a lot to offer, it's not as if all technology has stood still in the meantime. Meanwhile, OS/2's code would require such a rewrite as to be only a study of a possible "sample implementation" -- to actually port something like Bento to the existing models would require as much skill as it would take to implement it from specification. In the end, the code may in fact be good for little more than such specification, and even it would likely not be a real joy to read.
And once you have all that out in the open, there's still the matter of whether anyone will actually bother to use it.
As for non-rectangular, go gripe at X to provide something better than SHAPE, or work on Fresco... it's certainly a layer well below existing desktop environments, and seems rather unrelated.
most spas are 100+ degrees. i think you got mixed up between centigrade and fahrenheit... water boils at 212F/i
Even so -- I regularly stick my hand into a 450 degree oven when things need moving around in there. It ain't comfy, but I can take 20 seconds of it. I'll assume for the sake of argument that the outside air has cooled things down to a balmy 350 degrees (it hasnt, but my point will still be made)
Now stick your hand into water boiling at a "mere" 212 degrees for just 10 seconds. You've just learned a painful lesson about heat transfer.
Wouldn't it be nice to have the WorkplaceShell on GNU/Linux someday? Or even get something like OpenDoc going again. Being stuck with rectangular windows just seems so 1980's. The browser and *nix has shown that small efficient "parts" make a far better, stable, and secure platform.
Not really -- because the folks in KDE have a component model already, and they like it just plenty. Same goes for GNOME and GNUStep. As for the workplace shell, if no one's even attempting to write their own with today's technology, what makes you think they'll do any better with OS/2's code? Do you think it's a drop-in?
Why does the Open Source world always need someone else's code, let alone ancient DOS-era code? Hell, the source is probably full of FAR pointers and such. Do you really want to work with that?
Yunno, at times I think of rural America about as kindly as Lars Von Trier (director of Dogville), but... who would you blame for gutting these towns and turning them into the rustbelts? Many would point at the big gleaming steel towers, somewhere toward the top.
On the other hand, the first person to call me a "big city elite" can be dismissed as a dumb hayseed like all the rest. Usually more effective when the brushoff is verbal, as in "well I guess this snob here has nothing to learn from such a hick as you, so good day sir"
Nothing like shutdown of debate to resolve issues. Well, at least it resolves my stress.
Ohhh, you mean MICROSOFT's implementation, the one in MFC, the one that makes no sense to use in modern C++, the reason C++ has structured exception handling in the first place, to avoid C macros that cause such problems. Well yeah. If you use setjmp and longjmp, they cause you problems in C++. That's why you don't use them.
C++ exceptions actually tend to suck in their own special way -- exceptions across DLL boundaries are often rife with nasty little surprises. But there's certainly nothing wrong with the idea, in general nor with C++.
... why anyone actually uses such complex map generating software that does such things as break the whole map into grids and hexes and calculate travel times and such. Let me illustrate, go put on your roleplaying hats and compare:
GENERIC OMINOUS SOOTHSAYING SAGE (GOSS): You need to go to Ramadamadingdong, which is eighteen hexes out from your location and standard rules are to roll for encounters each hex. Check hex D14 on your map.
Players: Ok. Let's see we'll need 18 standard ration units then, let's make it an even 20.
---- vs...
GOSS: That which you seek lies in mysterious and distant lands unknown (stretches gnarled finger to emphasize that whole "way out there" thing). Your path is perilous, your tread is treacherous, your fly is unzipped.
Players: This journey, how many days? And thanks (zip).
GOSS: I know not, but this burned fragment of a map drawn on the skin of a Dire Wallaby shall guide your path. Beware, for the hand of a madman was that who authored, or the madman guided the mad hand, or perhaps a sane hand of a mad man--
Players: --Yes, this shall do! (snatches map)... What demon had to be slain that left its ichor to stain this map?
GOSS: Oh, I merely ran out of tissue...
---
OK, I'm feeling a little silly, but you can see how even realistic props can enhance silliness. Nothing wrong with the GM having the hex maps, but for godsakes, please stop exposing these to the players.
State machines are very typically written in terms of goto. Most C compilers still can't do general tailcall elimination (just recursion), so goto is used to make them fast. A protocol stack is one case where speed must trump aesthetics.
> (destructors are never called on objects allocated within an SEH block)...
Absolutely wrong. The reason throwing exceptions has such high overhead is precisely because it has to call the destructors of every object that goes out of scope. You simply don't know what you're talking about.
If you're writing a telecom app, you probably SHOULD be using lightweight processes and IPC. That's Erlang's bread and butter. But telling people that "everything in methodology A can be done in methodology B" is totally uninteresting and unhelpful. Anyone who knows the first thing about computer science can just throw out Church-Turing equivalence and say that they're all equivalent. The fact that I could write the equivalent program by soldering transistors together in the right combinations doesn't exactly sell me on that methodology.
Doesn't it behoove you to actually find out what you're dismissing out of hand? Microsoft didn't invent AOP, Xerox did, so you're allowed to think critically in this situation.
If you want something to happen when a certain thing occurs, wouldn't you just call a function or a method when that whatever occurs? Why would you want a goto style statement there?
The whole idea of AOP is that it's not a GOTO. The "interceptor" (or whatever the jargon of the week is) gets called, does its thing, returns, and your original function runs. This is nothing, lisp does this with defadvice, even emacs lisp can do this (and indeed emacs lisp makes good use of it).
The neat thing about aspects is that you define them in ONE place. So you tell it "I want function setup_db_connection() and teardown_db_connection() called before every method on any Person, Room, and Resource" (imagine it's a scheduling app). This is just like subclassing, but you don't have to rewrite anything else in the app. In fact, VB programmers who did this sort of hook trickery actually did call it subclassing. If you use a factory pattern, you can do this sort of thing without AOP, but the idea of AOP is to not force you to rewrite everything to use factory patterns -- you just define the "aspect" once, in one place, and it affects everything you tell it to.
I find AOP is a great way to impose "external" conditions like debugging, extra asserts, and tests. I don't think it's necessarily a great way to structure an entire program, though someone with more experience in the methodology might make it work. As a new methodology, it's rife with shoddy implementations, buzzwords, overuse, poor use, and general immaturity. This is how all methodologies start out however -- even structured programming went overboard when it was first introduced to the mainstream.
Like I told the other guy, who will no doubt gleefully jump over my accidental substitution of "PC" for "PowerMac" as some cosmic proof of the inadequacy of my argument: $499 gets me a bitty box with 1/4 of my current RAM, 1/3 of my current HD size, and no DVD capability at all. Getting it up to my current specs pushes the thousand dollar mark.
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It's just a time stealer designed to trick people into thinking they are accomplishing something when in the end your are left with nothing (see Everquest et al).
.. she never even finished it). She is now completely hooked on Katamari Damacy and the Sims (Bustin' Out, which is really an excellent console port). She even named her sim Kate Damashii. I never even get to play GTA anymore (which is fine, I just play UT or Morrowind on my PC)
You discovered this after playing it for hours and hours and hours, didn't you? I sure did. Don't care for the game now though -- I tried playing the Sims 2 (borrowed a copy) and just couldn't get into it at all.
My gf never played games before I bought my playstation, save for Myst on her PC (it came with her PC
Lemme draw you a picture:
The Joke -- here
.
.
.
.
.
.
Your Head -- here
Peter Molyneaux, Will Wright, Warren Specter ... give me a few minutes.
Oh, but we have to love everything Japanese, isn't their culture so superior, everything that comes out of Japan is superior, blah blah blah. Well no, 90% of Japanese games are like "Super Princess Maker 23" that involve seducing cartoon children by clicking through menu dialogs so trite as to make Leisure Suit Larry look like William Shakespeare.
Katamari was a hit because it stood out, and it stood out by actually being fun.
> I have noted that most of the "diluted" games that have cool graphics but no gameplay are usually american games
Final *cough* Fantasy
Nice movies on that DVD. Wish there was some game there too.
> I didn't stand up when they came for the free software zealots ...
There really needs to be an amendment to Godwin's Law to cover Pastor Martin Niemoller as well...
What RMS is pointing out is that you SHOULD care. Linus didn't care, he was warned about it, but he didn't listen and in the end it bit him in the ass.
"And this, little Timmy, is why Linux no longer exists today, for it died on that very day when no one eeeeever wrote another line of code for it again."
It's _possible_ that GL had three episodes in mind when he wrote Star Wars, though the movie is written to hedge that bet, since it's pretty self-contained, except for the villain getting away to fight another day. Obviously Empire Strikes Back was written with a finale in mind ...
But let's not swallow his nonsense about "a trilogy of trilogies", which were more a product of his own grandiose dreams than any actual plan. He started at "Episode IV" as a dramatic device, to drop you into the action, and even called it an "Episode" because it was intended to bring that old-fashioned space opera to the big screen, with all the cheesiness intact. Thus the scrolling-off-to-the-distance text and the wipe cuts everywhere -- it's not like wipe cuts were in vogue even when Star Wars was made.
All this nonsense about prequels and sequel trilogies was just George riding on his own success.
Notice how their "other" square is outside of the big grey square? Now that's innovative.
Linux has the same arrangement of squares as Symbian, with a blue background. That's just a different skin. Symbian could do that too.
It'd be nice if these supporters of the second amendment weren't also the same fellers who'd like to take up arms to return our country to the "traditional values" they espouse. Something makes me think that as an Educated Liberal Elite, I'd be one of the first against the wall in their happy little revolution, based on the typical rhetoric I usually hear coming out of the NRA.
Just another form of tyranny, really.
Quite in fact, they may have grounds to claim a violation of their First Amendment rights to free association (this is more a statutory interpretation of free assembly, but it's held up). They now have standing to gum up the works more then they ever could have on the inside.
Karl Rove really overplayed his hand on this one methinks.
Or how about .... get ready for it ...
... sorry for the delay, I had to blow a lot of dust off that old troll.
GNULIX!
Awww yeah, {COMMO} was the bomb. That program had lots of functionality for being a 56K COM file. I did some neat stuff in its macro language, including having it call qedit as a mail editor. This being DOS, it involved actually quitting and leaving the DTR up, running qedit, then starting back up with a particular macro, namely the return point. A bit like an asm far call actually... Nowadays I never write such hacks, but that old saw about necessity being the mother of invention really holds up.
It does sound like you would like only existing projects to continue and to continue without any influence from other projects.
... it's certainly a layer well below existing desktop environments, and seems rather unrelated.
That's not at all what I said. While OS/2's design might have a lot to offer, it's not as if all technology has stood still in the meantime. Meanwhile, OS/2's code would require such a rewrite as to be only a study of a possible "sample implementation" -- to actually port something like Bento to the existing models would require as much skill as it would take to implement it from specification. In the end, the code may in fact be good for little more than such specification, and even it would likely not be a real joy to read.
And once you have all that out in the open, there's still the matter of whether anyone will actually bother to use it.
As for non-rectangular, go gripe at X to provide something better than SHAPE, or work on Fresco
most spas are 100+ degrees. i think you got mixed up between centigrade and fahrenheit... water boils at 212F/i
Even so -- I regularly stick my hand into a 450 degree oven when things need moving around in there. It ain't comfy, but I can take 20 seconds of it. I'll assume for the sake of argument that the outside air has cooled things down to a balmy 350 degrees (it hasnt, but my point will still be made)
Now stick your hand into water boiling at a "mere" 212 degrees for just 10 seconds. You've just learned a painful lesson about heat transfer.
Wouldn't it be nice to have the WorkplaceShell on GNU/Linux someday? Or even get something like OpenDoc going again. Being stuck with rectangular windows just seems so 1980's. The browser and *nix has shown that small efficient "parts" make a far better, stable, and secure platform.
Not really -- because the folks in KDE have a component model already, and they like it just plenty. Same goes for GNOME and GNUStep. As for the workplace shell, if no one's even attempting to write their own with today's technology, what makes you think they'll do any better with OS/2's code? Do you think it's a drop-in?
Why does the Open Source world always need someone else's code, let alone ancient DOS-era code? Hell, the source is probably full of FAR pointers and such. Do you really want to work with that?
Yunno, at times I think of rural America about as kindly as Lars Von Trier (director of Dogville), but ... who would you blame for gutting these towns and turning them into the rustbelts? Many would point at the big gleaming steel towers, somewhere toward the top.
On the other hand, the first person to call me a "big city elite" can be dismissed as a dumb hayseed like all the rest. Usually more effective when the brushoff is verbal, as in "well I guess this snob here has nothing to learn from such a hick as you, so good day sir"
Nothing like shutdown of debate to resolve issues. Well, at least it resolves my stress.
Ohhh, you mean MICROSOFT's implementation, the one in MFC, the one that makes no sense to use in modern C++, the reason C++ has structured exception handling in the first place, to avoid C macros that cause such problems. Well yeah. If you use setjmp and longjmp, they cause you problems in C++. That's why you don't use them.
C++ exceptions actually tend to suck in their own special way -- exceptions across DLL boundaries are often rife with nasty little surprises. But there's certainly nothing wrong with the idea, in general nor with C++.
... why anyone actually uses such complex map generating software that does such things as break the whole map into grids and hexes and calculate travel times and such. Let me illustrate, go put on your roleplaying hats and compare:
... What demon had to be slain that left its ichor to stain this map?
GENERIC OMINOUS SOOTHSAYING SAGE (GOSS): You need to go to Ramadamadingdong, which is eighteen hexes out from your location and standard rules are to roll for encounters each hex. Check hex D14 on your map.
Players: Ok. Let's see we'll need 18 standard ration units then, let's make it an even 20.
---- vs...
GOSS: That which you seek lies in mysterious and distant lands unknown (stretches gnarled finger to emphasize that whole "way out there" thing). Your path is perilous, your tread is treacherous, your fly is unzipped.
Players: This journey, how many days? And thanks (zip).
GOSS: I know not, but this burned fragment of a map drawn on the skin of a Dire Wallaby shall guide your path. Beware, for the hand of a madman was that who authored, or the madman guided the mad hand, or perhaps a sane hand of a mad man--
Players: --Yes, this shall do! (snatches map)
GOSS: Oh, I merely ran out of tissue...
---
OK, I'm feeling a little silly, but you can see how even realistic props can enhance silliness. Nothing wrong with the GM having the hex maps, but for godsakes, please stop exposing these to the players.
Go look at my posting history. I actually anticipated you'd jump on top of this misstatement. Simple people are so predictable.
State machines are very typically written in terms of goto. Most C compilers still can't do general tailcall elimination (just recursion), so goto is used to make them fast. A protocol stack is one case where speed must trump aesthetics.
> (destructors are never called on objects allocated within an SEH block)...
Absolutely wrong. The reason throwing exceptions has such high overhead is precisely because it has to call the destructors of every object that goes out of scope. You simply don't know what you're talking about.
If you're writing a telecom app, you probably SHOULD be using lightweight processes and IPC. That's Erlang's bread and butter. But telling people that "everything in methodology A can be done in methodology B" is totally uninteresting and unhelpful. Anyone who knows the first thing about computer science can just throw out Church-Turing equivalence and say that they're all equivalent. The fact that I could write the equivalent program by soldering transistors together in the right combinations doesn't exactly sell me on that methodology.
Doesn't it behoove you to actually find out what you're dismissing out of hand? Microsoft didn't invent AOP, Xerox did, so you're allowed to think critically in this situation.
If you want something to happen when a certain thing occurs, wouldn't you just call a function or a method when that whatever occurs? Why would you want a goto style statement there?
The whole idea of AOP is that it's not a GOTO. The "interceptor" (or whatever the jargon of the week is) gets called, does its thing, returns, and your original function runs. This is nothing, lisp does this with defadvice, even emacs lisp can do this (and indeed emacs lisp makes good use of it).
The neat thing about aspects is that you define them in ONE place. So you tell it "I want function setup_db_connection() and teardown_db_connection() called before every method on any Person, Room, and Resource" (imagine it's a scheduling app). This is just like subclassing, but you don't have to rewrite anything else in the app. In fact, VB programmers who did this sort of hook trickery actually did call it subclassing. If you use a factory pattern, you can do this sort of thing without AOP, but the idea of AOP is to not force you to rewrite everything to use factory patterns -- you just define the "aspect" once, in one place, and it affects everything you tell it to.
I find AOP is a great way to impose "external" conditions like debugging, extra asserts, and tests. I don't think it's necessarily a great way to structure an entire program, though someone with more experience in the methodology might make it work. As a new methodology, it's rife with shoddy implementations, buzzwords, overuse, poor use, and general immaturity. This is how all methodologies start out however -- even structured programming went overboard when it was first introduced to the mainstream.
Like I told the other guy, who will no doubt gleefully jump over my accidental substitution of "PC" for "PowerMac" as some cosmic proof of the inadequacy of my argument: $499 gets me a bitty box with 1/4 of my current RAM, 1/3 of my current HD size, and no DVD capability at all. Getting it up to my current specs pushes the thousand dollar mark.
Ah yes, I can get a toy for $499. Or spend over $1000 to get an equivalent PC. Priced out the low end of PC's lately, BTW? Nice thinking skills.