He also had to deal with a man that was trying to commit suicide by cop. He tired to kill himself and my brother in law stopped him.
Of course you may be skipping details, but that scenario is not attempted suicide-by-cop. That's attempted suicide-in-front-of-cop. SBC is provoking an officer to kill you, when you can't bring yourself to kill yourself unaided.
2. You are not filming/photographing something you legally cannot (like a port or inside a mall)
In the USA at least, there's no legal framework that bans filming inside shopping malls. There is simply a legal framework that allows the private owners of the mall to make rules dictating whatever behavior they like or not, and if as a guest you do not comply with these rules, you must leave. If you do not leave when requested by any private owner, whether following their rules or not, you can be reported and arrested/ticketed by police for trespassing. In any case, the private owners cannot (1) take your equipment, (2) delete your pictures, (3) force you to do anything but leave the premises.
Personally, I think that since most shopping malls get huge tax incentives and other public funding, they should be held to certain accessibility and public use laws. However, that's rarely the case, and the private owners can enjoy this micro-fief in which to control their "guests" at their whim. If you don't like it, shop elsewhere.
And lastly, if a police officer ever asks you to delete a photograph, follow the ACLU bust guidelines. "Am I under arrest, or am I free to go?" Since a photograph is copyright-protected simply through the act of creation, destruction of a photograph is (1) destruction of your personal property, and (2) destruction of legal evidence. The cop needs to be reminded as gently as possible that there are two options and that you know this: they arrest you (securing all evidence safely) or wave goodbye.
Some courts have made pronouncements to the effect that the court does not "understand the technology" well enough to make the dismissal determination, and that therefore the determination should be made after completion of pretrial discovery. I submit that, if the court does not understand the technology well enough, it means that the plaintiffs have not pled their claim well enough and their complaint should be dismissed.
I agree with the basic premise that a high-level scripting language is a great first tool. No explicit compiler required, and you can accomplish things in a pretty straightforward way.
Just after learning the basics of imperative programming, though, I would recommend a short primer in how microprocessors or microcontrollers work. Registers, limited storage, direct access to hardware, opcodes, and so on.
As it happens, a little while ago I decided I wanted to write a cheesy simulator for a six-bit microcontroller in python. The bytes are six bits, the address space is six bits wide. It all fits on a chess board. http://halley.cc/code?python/octalplus.py
ISPs banning Usenet to get rid of child porn is like cities banning Wal*Mart to get rid of lead paint from China. Or more like banning Wal*Mart, Target and Pizza Hut to get rid of Barney-themed products from China that have lead paint.
Er, you don't do a release for specific "features," but once the release has been made, customers rely on knowing what "features" are (or are not) in the release they're using. There should be a sane and rational comparison rule to know if one version is newer (and likely to have more good "features" and fewer bad "features") or not. Ubuntu uses dorky names but anyone who knows the alphabet and the comparison rule can at least decide if "Beaver" is older or newer than "Walrus." I don't care what the kernel uses, but it should be something people can figure out the ordering.
Hey, I heard the Parameterized Ultra-Fair Order One Irreversible Hypoxic Process Scheduler is in the newest kernel. Wait, is that in 2.6.43.-12b34_+omicron-rc6, or not?
I am a pretty big fan of the Final Fantasy series, but when I heard the first rumblings of Sony PS3, I decided I just wasn't going to follow. Some of the Final Fantasy styled artwork could be stunning on high-def screens so I do know what I'm missing out on. Blu-Ray just wasn't interesting to me and the platform is too expensive to be just for games. I won't buy anything Microsoft either. Too bad, but it's just a game, and there has been and will be more great games for the platform I did pick. It's not always about the pixel count.
Okay, I'm sure you've gotten this joke a statistically significant number of times, but have you done any metrics on how many people ask you... "Longevity research? De Grey? Dorian Gray?" per month? Does this joke get weaker over time, or stronger? Can you give us some sort of picture of the phenomenon?
As the other poster said, Google Search and an MMO are totally different beasts. Search is embarrassingly parallel: your search is stateless and does not need to be reflected on all the other users who are searching for similar terms. But in an MMO, if you want to change the world state, that state change needs to be observed nearly immediately by all the clients who are currently looking in that direction.
The number one mistake of any new MMO service is the failure to be MMO. Does it scale? Will it work when even 1% of the US broadband users are trying it out? Will it work when every visitor has added a hundred ginormous phallic temples to every acre of land? Will it work when ten thousand of your closest "friends" attend your online bar-mitzvah?
Don't use themes that are hard for illiterate slobs or new-to-English folks to spell properly. I remember at one company I worked, the art director decided that all the art machines would be named after famous artists, especially her favorite: impressionism masters. Yeah, right, let's connect up to matisse, gaugin, renoir, manet, monet, delecroix, macchiaioli, or seurat, there's a file on there I need.
First, good monitor. If the CRT is old, the caps are breaking down and dot pitch starts to suck.
Next, for the text editors you use all day, select a moderate contrast. Not bright text on black, and not dark text on white. The background should be no lighter than #CCCCCC or darker than #333333. Save the high contrast for brief sessions, like email or web.
Lastly, every built-in color syntax highlighting theme I've seen makes the source code look like a carnival midway, if not the Vegas strip. Lose half the colors or more. I personally like to distinguish between code, comments and constant literals. All the code looks the same; after using a language for more than a couple weeks, you shouldn't need the editor to highlight keywords or function names or braces any differently. I do highlight comment keywords like TODO and REVIEW and BUGBUG but they are far less than 1% of the text.
I've said it before, but it didn't seem like ANYONE reported on the timing of Colin Powell's shift to supporting the war. He was steadfastly the only administration dove, until the week that he gave very off-party-line comments defending affirmative action admissions policies in universities. It was like he was given a bone, allowed to speak his mind on university admissions, in exchange for future devotion to the hawk position on Iraq. I could just imagine the "come to Jesus meeting" that must have happened in 2003. That very week, I lost all respect for the man.
At that price, you can get a whole old Nokia 770 Internet Tablet that still runs well, at 800x480. Seeing as how nicely python runs on it (though a bit slow on ARM) and many other standard Linux tools too, it could be the whole brains of the beast.
As far as I'm concerned, if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing. Maybe even better if it's in a better shape.
Heh, I have a lot of Ikea furniture I would sell as antiques, then.
For no-name talent, perhaps that's true. What you're suggesting is a bit like visiting the television studio mockup of a well-known landmark, vs visiting the actual landmark. The intangible connection comes from knowing that it WAS Davinci or Picasso or Monet who applied their skills personally, it WAS on this hallowed ground that a truce was signed, it WAS this flag that stood upon the hill, it WAS this laboratory in which the first light bulb burned brightly through nothing more than harnessed lightning. The image itself is only half the appeal, and for the other half, they accept the degradation of the media. Today, if we saw the Mona Lisa with all her eyebrows and eye lashes that have faded to obscurity in the intervening centuries, it would just seem wrong and out of place.
One would think this is the case, but many companies fail this. It takes an archivists' mindset to institute this as policy in the early days of a small company.
In fact I know that Microsoft was pretty bad about this in years past. Even though storage is cheap, they have had to ask employees for old products like MS-DOS 1.1 or MS-DOS 2.0 floppies from time to time, as the official archivists were unable to produce the "silvers" (copies from their golden masters sent to reproduction) or in fact any boxed copies at all.
I left the apostrophes around the word 'double' in the title because the linked site has them, but for the life of me I can't figure out why.
This is a very common headlining technique in non-USA journalism. The Australian news service is not drawing the conclusion that traffic will double. The news service is quoting a report from Cisco. As such, the headline can be ready as "IP Traffic Said to Double Every Two Years." The use of quotes instead of the omitted words is a space-saving technique, much like using a comma instead of the word and in "CmdrTaco Confused, Disoriented by Quotes."
This isn't flamebait, but perhaps it is a flame. For the life of me, I can't see how an editor of a news-aggregating service can serve in that capacity for a decade and not pick up on these kinds of things. Even if you wish to disavow being a journalist or an editor, you might perhaps learn a thing or two from them.
I started writing on DOS. (I won't count the Apple ][.) Wrote for PDP-11s. Wrote for Windows. Wrote for SGI GL (before OpenGL). Each new platform was yet another paradigm, yet another set of non-portable libraries or techniques.
I like POSIX, and I like portable languages and toolkits that I can take from platform to platform. I like writing little graphical apps or command-line tools in Perl, Python, GTK, SDL, OpenGL that I can run on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, or even my Nokia N810. All the knowledge is transferrable, all the benefits of the little tools are transferrable with a little work to smooth out details like widget placement or font decisions.
I never bothered to get deep into Objective C, because while it's theoretically transferrable, it is really just used to write for the Apple Carbon/Cocoa/Core/Whatever/Don'tNitPickItsJustAnExample* stack. Same went for DirectX on Windows when I still wrote software for Windows. I would like to make apps that do whizzy things with Core Animation or whatever, but I just can't make myself get excited at the prospect of learning yet another vendor-lockin technology. The hardware-accelerated compositing is cool, the effortless scripting of visual objects is interesting, but not interesting enough to actually learn something that won't be portable.
If I really want a visual effect like Core This or Direct That, I will write a portable library to do it in OpenGL on Python or something. Or if the need isn't extreme, I'll just wait for someone else to write the general library if it ever happens.
One, I have a rule I teach to any programmer under my supervision: strategy in comments, tactics in code. Tactics are what you do to get something done. Strategy explains what you want done. In warfare, an officer focuses on strategy: "secure that hill!" "pick the best two devices!" "find the local minimum!" Don't mention the tools you use to get that job done, soldier, unless you're being fiendishly clever. Comments should be in natural human language, while the code should just accomplish those tasks.
Two, I have a technique I teach to any new programmer, whether they're under my supervision or not: write the comments first. Programming courses always talk about writing pseudocode: why write it on scratch paper, just to throw it away?
# prior server # next server # objects
sub process_ring_packet { # if we have a prior server, ## if this packet was received from the prior, ### if this server created this packet originally, #### kill the packet, it's completed the trip. # scan the packet for all object references. # dispatch packet to object mentioned which we control. # if any object references remain unhandled, ## if we have a next server, ### send the packet to the next server. }
(Pardon the cruddy indentation. Thanks to slashdot's weak formatting features.)
Once the pseudocode is written in human terms, then fill in your actual code in whatever computer language is being employed. Note that I didn't say HOW to do each of the tasks in the comments. I just wrote what needed to get done.
Lastly, as others have indicated, the actual code should not be too clever for your teammates to understand at a glance. Use clear concise words for variable names, without abbreviating them unnecessarily. Use the idioms they're familiar with. Use the language they're familiar with. You shouldn't need any # swap $x and $y comments to explain basic tasks or idioms. If you really find a clever but unusual trick, or you need to hack out something that's not obvious, then you can mention it.
I have configured my editors to highlight tags like #REVIEW: #TODO: #BUGBUG: #HACK: so I can see areas that need more attention. Review things which may or may not be right or done in the best way. List things that are definitely undone but needed. Mark areas where known bugs are located, even if the fix isn't in there yet; give bug tracking numbers if appropriate. Mark code which is overly clever to get around dumb library limitations or which save a lot of processing in obscure ways.
Your associate uses the programming style that triggers my standard "Tactics in Code, Comments in Strategy" rant.
* Explain your intent, then write your code.
This goes beyond just "put comments in your code." When you want to write a routine, or a program, start by describing the problem in natural human terms. One good approach is to open a new text file, write the problem description in English (etc.), but put comment/remark syntax markers around it. For each sentence in the problem description, you can often insert the real programming code necessary, and leave the English description behind.
Adding translations and comments for every line of code, to explain every single operation, is not effective documentation. Instead, write your intentions for how the routine should work in English, and follow it with several lines of code. Put strategy in comments, tactics in code. This will help you write code cleanly and logically the first time, and it will help your associates decypher the program later. Commenting code shouldn't waste time, it should save time.
If they wrote "// walk the array of customers" (above the loop) instead of "// increment i from 0 to j in increments of one", wouldn't that help you follow the chain of thought so much more? Of course, literate programming would rather you use variable names that conveyed their intent as well.
What it really takes to get this child porn nonsense to stop is that finally somebody important (CEO of large company, politician of major party) will be framed with some.
If kiddo pix were found on one major political figure's desktop, that figure would be sent to jail and everyone would just shrug. Think of all the recent "family values" politicos who are simply erased with a shrug or lambasted for hypocrisy. Some of them may be innocent for all we know, but we're so jaded that hypocrisy is easier to explain than a frame-up.
Your plan would only work if the ones who framed a politician then came clean immediately afterward with PROOF of HOW they framed them, and more convincingly, framing two opposing figures at roughly the same time with different methods. At that point, when proving it was false to begin with, hit hard on the "if you've got nothing to hide" nonsense. Of course, if you plan to do such a campaign, you had better be able to remain firmly unfindable. Or you will be found hanging in your garden shed with a very convincing suicide note.
Final Fantasy has always been focused on one platform. They push the hell out of every polygon budget, every memory limit, that they can get out of the hardware. Even if the core libraries are easily portable, I can imagine they don't relish the thought of porting or dual-targeting the title, because the game will not look as good on one of the platforms. For a title that is all about visuals, that's hard to take.
modern consoles all have networking, which either depend on wifi or need you to route yet more cable to your television area just for some of the games that you will use on your television
modern consoles have plenty of cpu, agreed, but
you definitely notice any lag if you can't write nonblocking network code
you need to actually use the threading cpu features to get the benefits
it's still not in keeping with many game developers to write multithreaded games
we can't limit ourselves to the huge megalith companies if we are discussing more more more variety
Totally agree with you on the keyboard vs headset thing, and the harddrive thing, though.
Slashdot Mirror
He also had to deal with a man that was trying to commit suicide by cop. He tired to kill himself and my brother in law stopped him.
Of course you may be skipping details, but that scenario is not attempted suicide-by-cop. That's attempted suicide-in-front-of-cop. SBC is provoking an officer to kill you, when you can't bring yourself to kill yourself unaided.
2. You are not filming/photographing something you legally cannot (like a port or inside a mall)
In the USA at least, there's no legal framework that bans filming inside shopping malls. There is simply a legal framework that allows the private owners of the mall to make rules dictating whatever behavior they like or not, and if as a guest you do not comply with these rules, you must leave. If you do not leave when requested by any private owner, whether following their rules or not, you can be reported and arrested/ticketed by police for trespassing. In any case, the private owners cannot (1) take your equipment, (2) delete your pictures, (3) force you to do anything but leave the premises.
Personally, I think that since most shopping malls get huge tax incentives and other public funding, they should be held to certain accessibility and public use laws. However, that's rarely the case, and the private owners can enjoy this micro-fief in which to control their "guests" at their whim. If you don't like it, shop elsewhere.
And lastly, if a police officer ever asks you to delete a photograph, follow the ACLU bust guidelines. "Am I under arrest, or am I free to go?" Since a photograph is copyright-protected simply through the act of creation, destruction of a photograph is (1) destruction of your personal property, and (2) destruction of legal evidence. The cop needs to be reminded as gently as possible that there are two options and that you know this: they arrest you (securing all evidence safely) or wave goodbye.
Some courts have made pronouncements to the effect that the court does not "understand the technology" well enough to make the dismissal determination, and that therefore the determination should be made after completion of pretrial discovery. I submit that, if the court does not understand the technology well enough, it means that the plaintiffs have not pled their claim well enough and their complaint should be dismissed.
Thanks, NYCL.
1. Define what the software should do
No.
1. Define what the user's goal is
I agree with the basic premise that a high-level scripting language is a great first tool. No explicit compiler required, and you can accomplish things in a pretty straightforward way.
Just after learning the basics of imperative programming, though, I would recommend a short primer in how microprocessors or microcontrollers work. Registers, limited storage, direct access to hardware, opcodes, and so on.
As it happens, a little while ago I decided I wanted to write a cheesy simulator for a six-bit microcontroller in python. The bytes are six bits, the address space is six bits wide. It all fits on a chess board. http://halley.cc/code?python/octalplus.py
ISPs banning Usenet to get rid of child porn is like cities banning Wal*Mart to get rid of lead paint from China. Or more like banning Wal*Mart, Target and Pizza Hut to get rid of Barney-themed products from China that have lead paint.
Er, you don't do a release for specific "features," but once the release has been made, customers rely on knowing what "features" are (or are not) in the release they're using. There should be a sane and rational comparison rule to know if one version is newer (and likely to have more good "features" and fewer bad "features") or not. Ubuntu uses dorky names but anyone who knows the alphabet and the comparison rule can at least decide if "Beaver" is older or newer than "Walrus." I don't care what the kernel uses, but it should be something people can figure out the ordering.
Hey, I heard the Parameterized Ultra-Fair Order One Irreversible Hypoxic Process Scheduler is in the newest kernel. Wait, is that in 2.6.43.-12b34_+omicron-rc6, or not?
I am a pretty big fan of the Final Fantasy series, but when I heard the first rumblings of Sony PS3, I decided I just wasn't going to follow. Some of the Final Fantasy styled artwork could be stunning on high-def screens so I do know what I'm missing out on. Blu-Ray just wasn't interesting to me and the platform is too expensive to be just for games. I won't buy anything Microsoft either. Too bad, but it's just a game, and there has been and will be more great games for the platform I did pick. It's not always about the pixel count.
Okay, I'm sure you've gotten this joke a statistically significant number of times, but have you done any metrics on how many people ask you... "Longevity research? De Grey? Dorian Gray?" per month? Does this joke get weaker over time, or stronger? Can you give us some sort of picture of the phenomenon?
As the other poster said, Google Search and an MMO are totally different beasts. Search is embarrassingly parallel: your search is stateless and does not need to be reflected on all the other users who are searching for similar terms. But in an MMO, if you want to change the world state, that state change needs to be observed nearly immediately by all the clients who are currently looking in that direction.
The number one mistake of any new MMO service is the failure to be MMO. Does it scale? Will it work when even 1% of the US broadband users are trying it out? Will it work when every visitor has added a hundred ginormous phallic temples to every acre of land? Will it work when ten thousand of your closest "friends" attend your online bar-mitzvah?
Don't use themes that are hard for illiterate slobs or new-to-English folks to spell properly. I remember at one company I worked, the art director decided that all the art machines would be named after famous artists, especially her favorite: impressionism masters. Yeah, right, let's connect up to matisse, gaugin, renoir, manet, monet, delecroix, macchiaioli, or seurat, there's a file on there I need.
First, good monitor. If the CRT is old, the caps are breaking down and dot pitch starts to suck.
Next, for the text editors you use all day, select a moderate contrast. Not bright text on black, and not dark text on white. The background should be no lighter than #CCCCCC or darker than #333333. Save the high contrast for brief sessions, like email or web.
Lastly, every built-in color syntax highlighting theme I've seen makes the source code look like a carnival midway, if not the Vegas strip. Lose half the colors or more. I personally like to distinguish between code, comments and constant literals. All the code looks the same; after using a language for more than a couple weeks, you shouldn't need the editor to highlight keywords or function names or braces any differently. I do highlight comment keywords like TODO and REVIEW and BUGBUG but they are far less than 1% of the text.
I've said it before, but it didn't seem like ANYONE reported on the timing of Colin Powell's shift to supporting the war. He was steadfastly the only administration dove, until the week that he gave very off-party-line comments defending affirmative action admissions policies in universities. It was like he was given a bone, allowed to speak his mind on university admissions, in exchange for future devotion to the hawk position on Iraq. I could just imagine the "come to Jesus meeting" that must have happened in 2003. That very week, I lost all respect for the man.
At that price, you can get a whole old Nokia 770 Internet Tablet that still runs well, at 800x480. Seeing as how nicely python runs on it (though a bit slow on ARM) and many other standard Linux tools too, it could be the whole brains of the beast.
As far as I'm concerned, if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing. Maybe even better if it's in a better shape.
Heh, I have a lot of Ikea furniture I would sell as antiques, then.
For no-name talent, perhaps that's true. What you're suggesting is a bit like visiting the television studio mockup of a well-known landmark, vs visiting the actual landmark. The intangible connection comes from knowing that it WAS Davinci or Picasso or Monet who applied their skills personally, it WAS on this hallowed ground that a truce was signed, it WAS this flag that stood upon the hill, it WAS this laboratory in which the first light bulb burned brightly through nothing more than harnessed lightning. The image itself is only half the appeal, and for the other half, they accept the degradation of the media. Today, if we saw the Mona Lisa with all her eyebrows and eye lashes that have faded to obscurity in the intervening centuries, it would just seem wrong and out of place.
One would think this is the case, but many companies fail this. It takes an archivists' mindset to institute this as policy in the early days of a small company.
In fact I know that Microsoft was pretty bad about this in years past. Even though storage is cheap, they have had to ask employees for old products like MS-DOS 1.1 or MS-DOS 2.0 floppies from time to time, as the official archivists were unable to produce the "silvers" (copies from their golden masters sent to reproduction) or in fact any boxed copies at all.
This is a very common headlining technique in non-USA journalism. The Australian news service is not drawing the conclusion that traffic will double. The news service is quoting a report from Cisco. As such, the headline can be ready as "IP Traffic Said to Double Every Two Years." The use of quotes instead of the omitted words is a space-saving technique, much like using a comma instead of the word and in "CmdrTaco Confused, Disoriented by Quotes."
This isn't flamebait, but perhaps it is a flame. For the life of me, I can't see how an editor of a news-aggregating service can serve in that capacity for a decade and not pick up on these kinds of things. Even if you wish to disavow being a journalist or an editor, you might perhaps learn a thing or two from them.
I started writing on DOS. (I won't count the Apple ][.) Wrote for PDP-11s. Wrote for Windows. Wrote for SGI GL (before OpenGL). Each new platform was yet another paradigm, yet another set of non-portable libraries or techniques.
I like POSIX, and I like portable languages and toolkits that I can take from platform to platform. I like writing little graphical apps or command-line tools in Perl, Python, GTK, SDL, OpenGL that I can run on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, or even my Nokia N810. All the knowledge is transferrable, all the benefits of the little tools are transferrable with a little work to smooth out details like widget placement or font decisions.
I never bothered to get deep into Objective C, because while it's theoretically transferrable, it is really just used to write for the Apple Carbon/Cocoa/Core/Whatever/Don'tNitPickItsJustAnExample* stack. Same went for DirectX on Windows when I still wrote software for Windows. I would like to make apps that do whizzy things with Core Animation or whatever, but I just can't make myself get excited at the prospect of learning yet another vendor-lockin technology. The hardware-accelerated compositing is cool, the effortless scripting of visual objects is interesting, but not interesting enough to actually learn something that won't be portable.
If I really want a visual effect like Core This or Direct That, I will write a portable library to do it in OpenGL on Python or something. Or if the need isn't extreme, I'll just wait for someone else to write the general library if it ever happens.
One, I have a rule I teach to any programmer under my supervision: strategy in comments, tactics in code. Tactics are what you do to get something done. Strategy explains what you want done. In warfare, an officer focuses on strategy: "secure that hill!" "pick the best two devices!" "find the local minimum!" Don't mention the tools you use to get that job done, soldier, unless you're being fiendishly clever. Comments should be in natural human language, while the code should just accomplish those tasks.
Two, I have a technique I teach to any new programmer, whether they're under my supervision or not: write the comments first. Programming courses always talk about writing pseudocode: why write it on scratch paper, just to throw it away?
(Pardon the cruddy indentation. Thanks to slashdot's weak formatting features.)
Once the pseudocode is written in human terms, then fill in your actual code in whatever computer language is being employed. Note that I didn't say HOW to do each of the tasks in the comments. I just wrote what needed to get done.
Lastly, as others have indicated, the actual code should not be too clever for your teammates to understand at a glance. Use clear concise words for variable names, without abbreviating them unnecessarily. Use the idioms they're familiar with. Use the language they're familiar with. You shouldn't need any # swap $x and $y comments to explain basic tasks or idioms. If you really find a clever but unusual trick, or you need to hack out something that's not obvious, then you can mention it.
I have configured my editors to highlight tags like #REVIEW: #TODO: #BUGBUG: #HACK: so I can see areas that need more attention. Review things which may or may not be right or done in the best way. List things that are definitely undone but needed. Mark areas where known bugs are located, even if the fix isn't in there yet; give bug tracking numbers if appropriate. Mark code which is overly clever to get around dumb library limitations or which save a lot of processing in obscure ways.
* Explain your intent, then write your code.
This goes beyond just "put comments in your code." When you want to write a routine, or a program, start by describing the problem in natural human terms. One good approach is to open a new text file, write the problem description in English (etc.), but put comment/remark syntax markers around it. For each sentence in the problem description, you can often insert the real programming code necessary, and leave the English description behind.
Adding translations and comments for every line of code, to explain every single operation, is not effective documentation. Instead, write your intentions for how the routine should work in English, and follow it with several lines of code. Put strategy in comments, tactics in code. This will help you write code cleanly and logically the first time, and it will help your associates decypher the program later. Commenting code shouldn't waste time, it should save time.
If they wrote "// walk the array of customers" (above the loop) instead of "// increment i from 0 to j in increments of one", wouldn't that help you follow the chain of thought so much more? Of course, literate programming would rather you use variable names that conveyed their intent as well.
If kiddo pix were found on one major political figure's desktop, that figure would be sent to jail and everyone would just shrug. Think of all the recent "family values" politicos who are simply erased with a shrug or lambasted for hypocrisy. Some of them may be innocent for all we know, but we're so jaded that hypocrisy is easier to explain than a frame-up.
Your plan would only work if the ones who framed a politician then came clean immediately afterward with PROOF of HOW they framed them, and more convincingly, framing two opposing figures at roughly the same time with different methods. At that point, when proving it was false to begin with, hit hard on the "if you've got nothing to hide" nonsense. Of course, if you plan to do such a campaign, you had better be able to remain firmly unfindable. Or you will be found hanging in your garden shed with a very convincing suicide note.
Final Fantasy has always been focused on one platform. They push the hell out of every polygon budget, every memory limit, that they can get out of the hardware. Even if the core libraries are easily portable, I can imagine they don't relish the thought of porting or dual-targeting the title, because the game will not look as good on one of the platforms. For a title that is all about visuals, that's hard to take.
- modern consoles all have networking, which either depend on wifi or need you to route yet more cable to your television area just for some of the games that you will use on your television
- modern consoles have plenty of cpu, agreed, but
- you definitely notice any lag if you can't write nonblocking network code
- you need to actually use the threading cpu features to get the benefits
- it's still not in keeping with many game developers to write multithreaded games
- we can't limit ourselves to the huge megalith companies if we are discussing more more more variety
Totally agree with you on the keyboard vs headset thing, and the harddrive thing, though.