I'm working on a project where the ambguity had to be written out from the start, it now has three "null" values meaning:
- NO VALUE ASSIGNED (YET)
- ASSIGNED AS UNKNOWN
- ASSIGNED AS NOT APPLICABLE
Now, one may argue that the latter could be normalised out but in the instance of this specific app i created const values to represent these and built queries to exclude them. For example numerics are forced to only be within +/- 2billion to 8dp . And 2000000001 equals "NO VALUE ASSIGNED". NULLs are not allowed in the numeric columns within the DB.
Fortunately this is all clearly laid out within the project documentation for future developers to stumble across but it's hardly perfect.
innerHTML is one of the single most usefull parts of the defacto-DOM. Simply because the browser already has a HTML->DOM converter built in to parse the page as a whole in the first place, so attempting to force coders to serialise objects and manaully, painfully, construct a DOM tree and attach it is pure sado spec writing*.
Onto my main point, why is silverlight a Flash competitor and not a lightweight DOM/Forms/Web App extender designed as a Java retry? As a developer who's been following the WhatWG Web Forms spec for a few years (and lurking on the mailing list) it's nice to see it moving forward, it's just moving too slow.
So I propose an emergent solution. a browser plugin that will provide all the asyncronous web forms goodness that we've wanted all these years with some kind of simple hand-off for allowing browsers to impliment their own native (fast) code. Being able to make nice 2.5d platform games is not my highest priority right now, right now it's getting rid of the cludgy DOM/AJAX bloat that passes for web 2.0 applications and having native (i.e. C++ core) objects, functions and libraries to use instead.
Somewhere in that rant i had a point. Oh yeah, and why is it MS that's releasing this plugin to great fanfare whilst us slashdotters bemoan the lack of a standards-promoting OSS solution. Can't we just, like, you know, make our own?
If the neighbor's kid put a baseball bat through one of your car windows for the fun of it (no doubt whilst in a group of dumb peers) my first suggestion would be to have a word with said neighbours and let them hand out the punishment (grounded, perhaps) whilst working off the cost of the repair bill.
That is, assuming you actually speak to your neighbours, ever.
Disclaimer: IANAGamesProgrammer but i do know a thing or two about randomness in games (see: doom demo format, every "random" event is based on the actions of the player). MY first play-throughs of the first two halos were coop, as were doom2, duke3d, quake1, quake2. (imagine my horror when half life DIDNT have a coop mode!).
Halo is a player-driven game, non-scripted events react to the player. If they lob a grenade at a bunch of enemies they may return fire or scatter. These reactions are probably decided upon by a random number generator somewhere. So. on both systems the initial setup of the game is the same. the monster positions and default movements around the map are the same. so why transmit the details of all that across the network? so long as the player's timestamps are synced the game will be in sync.
firstly, non critical actions dont need to be synced. if player A fires a shotgun at a wall the exact down-to-the-last-pellet blast pattern does not need to be replicated on player B's machine. sure the DAMAGE done by the shotgun blast needs to be synced but dont waste bandwidth making it LOOK identical as the only downside would be the odd occasion where player A says "ooh it made a smiley face" and player B says "you're either blind or full of shit". This also can apply to physical objects, if you blow up a bookshelf and paper goes flying does every single fluttering sheet need to follow the exact same path on each client? i expect not, so long as they're non-blocking and essentially just a visual effect. Half life did this to a certain extent with functions like "create a bunch of splintering wood chunks here" rather than creating and syncing every shard.
so, back to the grenade scenario, instead of sending the grenade and all the resulting movements why not tag a timestamp and random seed to the grenade "throw" event. the player on system 1 throws the grenade, the player on system 2 recieves the events and because their maps are (up until that moment) "naturally" in sync, so long as the responses of the monsters, ai and physics to the grenade event fire according to it's random seed the outcome will be the same.
Now obviously if there's latency and both players lob grenades at the same time at the same enemy hoarde there will be conflict issues. So you need some kind of range based system which knows if the players actions and effects are overlapping to a degree where a subset of local entities NEED to be kept in sync. This might be as simple as checking JUST the xyz origin coords of all the effected entities and any discrepancy results in a forced sync (like how in some networked racing games someone's car will magically jump a few feet over).
just my 2 cents, and probably a little naive when it comes down to keeping things in sync when there's a zillion flood coming at you and fourteen plasma grenades go off at once.
My thoughts exactly, indeed IMO the best fight scene out of all 3 is the sparring scene between Neo and Morpheus - technically not a "fight" at all. And why? because of the long tracking shots and wide angle still shots. You can actually SEE WHAT'S HAPPENING.
A good comparison is Bourne Identity VS Bourne Supremacy, in the former he finds a guy in his apartment, swiftly breaks the guys arm and kicks the shit out of him. It's a great scene and despite being relatively short is quite well put together. In the latter Bourne finds another guy in another house and they fight, for ages, with rolled up magazines, but sod all fighting actually happens, and you can't actually see anything not just because the camera is shaking but because of the fact that it's zoomed right in and it's going cut, cut, cut, cut. Sure it's more "actionny" but it just doesnt WORK.
Same thing for both films' car chases, (though i think B.I.s is overrated by people who clearly haven't seen Ronin, and the music choice didnt help either). In B.I. at least you can see what's going on, in B.S. it's all zoomy, cutty, shaky == confusing. Only the side-impact moment really makes it worthwhile.
OK, OK, I know this IS slashdot but still, here goes my karma:
What DID this guy DO to you and all the other moaning slashdotters? Yeah probably like me you grew up post-Apollo and parte-Shuttle and wanted to be an astronaut when you were a kid, so I guess you're a little bitter that the whole spage-age thing hasn't really happened. But hey, why is it all directed at these guys? Did they sneak into your room when you were a kid and molest you, promising that if you kept it a secret from mommy and daddy that you'd get the first ride into space on their space elevator?
Are they making outlandish, unfounded claims with the sole intention of scraping money from willing idiots? Possibly, I don't know for sure, but I'd love to see a space elevator go up, and the technological and exploratory benefits to mankind that followed. So let's give these guys a chance, even if all they're doing is collecting ideas, theories and munging it together with some nice 3d graphics the more people take notice and take the idea seriously the better. But so what if they don't shit one out of their assholes tomorrow morning just for you personally to ride on, give it a rest.
Critique, debate and peer review on any matter are always warranted but shooting insults and slander from the hip because, well, presumably you expected a LiftPort TM by 2005 and free trips to space or something is frankly unwarranted, childish and should be moderated into oblivion.
If not to solely kill the god awful someone-shoot-the-continuity-guy fuckup where the doctor (Xander Berkley) is shown holding a test tube (that fake-Jerome is actually hiding about his person at that moment in time) instead of the syringe that was just handed back to him. Actually confused me the first time i watched the film about what was going on, even though the editor probably thought "meh, it's just a 0.5 second edit, no one will notice"
Still, one of my favourite films overall, not just SF. Just goes to show that something needn't be flawless to be brilliant
You park your car in the countryside and consult the map, 1km away is what looks like a good picnic spot. So you haul your kit out of the car and set off.
However the 2d map doesnt show the 3d reality of the ground and there is actually a mountain between you and the picnic spot. So instead of it taking you 20 mins to walk there it actually takes you over an hour. Despite the fact that you're walking at a leisurly 3km/hour a lot of that effort is being translated into a vertical displacement and your actual horizontal movement across the Earth's surface suffers.
Now, instead of a 2d-map vs a 3d-mountain you need to think about a 3d-universe vs a 4d-curvature-of-time. Instead of a physical displacement (the vertical axis of the mountain) which is easily observable to our 3d vision there's a temporal displacement, which we can only observe as a slowdown* in time.
seriously, there's no point getting into a bidding war on any item on ebay and this is the approach i take.
I actually think that ebay (or $NewCompetitor) would do well to change the whole system over to blind bidding. That is you put in the max you're willing to pay at the start and have to wait until the auction is over to see who won and at what price and the auto-bid history behind that. Throughout the duration of the auction there would be no "current bid" on display, just the start price and the number of bidders. If person A bids $10 max and person B bids $15 max person B will still win with $10.01 but they'd both have to wait and see.
I've been thinking about doing something like this myself, buying 2/3 drives and just backing up to them from my three systems (desktop,laptop,server). Seen as they're all windows boxen i've ben looking at XXCOPY but havent actually had a go yet.
My idea is to reverse mirror each drive. so for a simple example, a monthly backup, you'd have folders thus (the actual structure here is less important than the idea):
something like that. Where the most recent folder holds the full filesystems at that time, but the previous one holds only the files that are different. Whilst this wont tell you which files were NOT present in previous backups it does mean that a corrupt file will be found in an old backup (being different by virtue of size, hopefully, though a hash check would be handy).
To restore a system from this you'd only be able to reliably use the most recent (so creating "good" mirrors manually before making drastic changes will become a good habit to have) without some jiggery pokery. but to retrieve an old version of a file that you accidentally overwrote thinking you were editing a copy you could just search for it. Big movie files that never changed would only ever be on the backup drive once, either in the latest folder or if you'd deleted it, the backup before the delete.
like i said restoring a system to an arbitrary point in the past may be painful with this setup[*] but for keeping backups of random files and their differing versions around forever it might do the trick.
[*] though thinking about it you could also store a (large) csv file that listed every file in the system tree at the time of the backup along with it's size and hash. To restore you'd have to pull up that list and find the relevant version of each one on the drive to rebuild the tree. fiddly and long-winded, but possible whilst being quite space efficient if you're on a tight $-per-Gigabyte budget.
I've been thinking about this for the past week, how to get studios and non geeks to switch over to pure internet TV? All it needs is a "channel" to be an RSS-like XML list of links to media files (and links to other channels).
You could allow a link to a PNG (of a fixed size) for each link so you can nice purty on-screen listings.
Because it's all open XML you can mashup your own "channels" of your favourite programs
throw in "radio" support
Do all the requests over HTTP. And allow users to store their credit-card / paypal / $other on their own computer / set-top-box (protected from the kids by a 4-digit pin) and have the system set up so that once a user has chosen a bunch of pay-programms to download (lets call that "recording") or to view straight away ("playing") is for their box to connect to each linked pay server via HTTPS and then send the pay info in a POST request.[*]
bish bash bosh, you get an authorised download URL
tag geo coordinates to everything and allow content providers to set up mirror servers and redirect you to those to help aleviate the lack of p2p.
have standard codecs for each media type, H.264 and OGG should do for the time being.
So let's review the technology needed: HTTP,HTTPS,FTP,PNG,OGG,H.264,XML
Thus (bandwidth permitting) true open, cross-platform, cross-device internet tv can be born by the end of the weekend. If anyone can be bothered speccing it up.
[*] The beauty of all this is that if you choose to "record" 1 free program, 1 pay fox program, 2 pay Paramount programs and 1 pay $otherStudio program you do in your living room is enter the pin for their chosen billing account once. the rest is done for them.
Most comments below seem to be missing the point, this is not a solution looking for a problem. For your basic word processing, spreadsheeting, emailing and (sans flash) web surfing a multi-gigahertz laptop with 720i widescreen, DVD RW and about 30 minutes battery life is overkill. Laptop makers have been constantly upgrading the laptop into a full-blown PC and leaving the laptop ethos behind.
This is a solution to a very current problem. Smartphones are too small to be used for serious work, and laptops are too big, heavy and powerful to be lugged around everywhere.
My ideal "notebook" computer would be somewhere between this, the Psion Revo and Psion Series 7. Personally i dont even see the need for the color screen for the four tasks i described above (the revo is 16-shades-of-grey) but it's needed as a feature so that people at least consider the thing.
All you need then is enough RAM to get around in (256mb seems fine to me), enough storage to store a good chunk of files (a few gigs) and enough power to use a USB flash drive. Build in Wifi, bluetooth and an RJ45 for wired ethernet and that will do me fine. So long as the thing runs passively cooled the battery life should be fine.
The Revo's grey-backed non-lit LCD is quite readable in a reasonable amount of ambient light so eink would probably be overkill for the time being but i'd even consider that once the update rate gets to about.1 of a second.
Seriously, how hard is it for an OS to just not allow write access to any application at all outside it's home directory?
Ok, sure, if you've downloaded it to the desktop and tried to run it it should sandbox but let's assume you've installed something to "programs/theTool". theTool should have full disk access to that folder and THAT's IT.
if it needs to store per-user details on a multi-user machine let it use cookies. an app could cleverly save a user-cookie that tells itself the name of a sub directory IN ITS OWN PATH that has any other crap in it that user needed to use (images,sounds, malware executables).
if the user wants to load/save something outside that path (i.e. their home/documents directory/a usb key) then they should be presented with the standard built-in OS API driven load/save file dialog. which has 2 input variables: preferred file name, preferred file extension. (note no choice of location so no defaulting to "c:/windows/system.ini" , the OS can track the last-used folder for that app in a static string). And no events either, so no quickly flashing it up and running a macro to hit the OK button for the user.
a similar situation can be set up for the IP stack, just present an API to the App. the user's firewall wont show ports and such outside of advanced mode, just let them choose send and recieve per app with an OS-driven link to a neutral web-site that lists apps and what they do (by name, version, exe hash etc. all scanned by the OS not provided by the app). So when an app asks for IP permission the user can view the web page (obviously requiring a default-enabled browser) that says "Recommendation: DO NOT ALLOW" or "Required for OS to function".
If you're on a long tightening bend, with adverse camber and you need to stick it to the inside to drag out the apex you can't be doing either, you have to be patient.*
Trying to think of one off the top of my head, um, the left hander after the tunnel on that GT3 track that's a sort of a figure 8 shape, heh. Though there's an old story about Michael Schumacher figuring out a similar trick at Spa Francorchamps on his first ever F1 race there (which involved keeping the revs low in 5th gear on a corner that others were finding tricky to get right in a lower gear).
If you have a good set of analog controllers (like a foot pedal set) then, yes, there's an argument to be made that you need to "use the accelerator" to keep your revs up. If you're counting that as "accelerating" then we are in agreement and i'll promptly shut up.
*Unless you've got tyre wear turned off, and a fat 4wd rig and you can drift for miles, but that wont always help because certain games/scenarios wont give you that option.
Surely having your curtains closed in broad daylight on a large number of occasions when *public* surveylance shows you were clearly in the house along with certain other undesirables will then construed in court to suggest to the jury that you were clearly up to something.
Maybe not conclusive evidence either way but one stroke of the brush towards painting you as a terrorist.
See, for example, current terrorism trials in the UK pointing out that someone occasioanally attended a certain mosque where a certain preacher sometimes delivered anti-western speeches. Exactly what that has to do with the actual evidence about wether the person in question physically constructed a bomb is beyond me.
I just want a box that i plug one end into the TV and the other to my router and, instead of buying channels and programming just tell it the names of the TV shows and sporting events i want to see. And that's it. When a show is (mostly) downloaded to the box then the on-screen guide would pop it up as available to watch. select->play.
Obviously there would need to be the infrastructure in place so that at 9pm EST on tuesday the people who really want to can watch a new show or sporting event "live", but when it comes down to it I time-shift most of my TV (via ye ole faithful VHS) so i'd be more than happy if the box downloaded shows to it's internal HD at "off peak" times, such as 3am.
Search Wikipedia for "Top Up TV Anytime". They're doing something along these lines over the UK's freeview system (Digital TV over UHF, rather than the net) - using spare night time bandwidth to "cache" shows for up to 7 days, totalling ~90 hours a week, but it still uses the channel model the parent suggests. The programming they serve and the amount they charge means i don't bother with it myself but as a proof-of-concept i think it's mostly bang-on.
Ultimatley though I like the idea of being able to set the box to scan the net for "MLB : SF Giants or Chicago Cubs games", as i live in the uk and only get 1 or 2 random games a week at stupid-o-clock in the morning. Whilst mlb.com already does (DRM'ed) downloads of games but at last check it was quite hard to download them from the site without the title of the file being touted including the final score (D'oh!). I'd still be happy to to pay for the games i download this way, provided it was simple and i only had to set up one pay account on my box and it'd handle the UK->US exchange rate/transaction transparently too.
In the UK we mostly drive stick, and the stick is mounted on the floor between the seats. In my car it's about a foot from the wheel. Now I can change gears, moving my arm from wheel to stick to wheel - including smooth accelerator and clutch action - from across the H pattern (say 3rd to 4th) in less than a second. In fact i reckon it's close to half a second, sometimes that also involves operating the indicator lever too as i'm probably negotiating a junction (switching it off as well as on, i can't stand the auto-off).
When you're learning to drive stick it seems like the most complex, impossible task in the universe, having to coordinate all four limbs in a very precise fashion, including the spacial knowledge of the location of said stick and gears so you don't have to look. It's slow and painful to learn and you stall the engine a lot whilst doing so.
It's only after driving ~20,000 miles in the same car that i can do it all so fast and efficiently.
Back to LHO and the bolt action rifle. I'm fairly certain that having never operated a gun in my life i'd find the bolt action reload a real slow difficult pain in the ass. But if i had trained, reloaded, fired repeatedly the same gun hundreds of time's i'm fairly certain the same would apply. I wouldnt have to get up from my prone position, fiddle around in my pockets for cartridges and fumble the lever to reload. I wouldnt even need to take my eye from the sights, i could do it, without looking because my spatial knowlege and muscle memory associated with the rifle would operate my limbs for me. In the end it'd be just as fast and easy as changing gears in a car.
In conclusion, it'd be easy for any old Joe to pick up one of those rifles and after five min os fiddling with the bolt action reload - having never encountered one before - to summarise that operating it 3 or more times in a 6 second period would be impossible.
Hence it's all about teamwork, you need a coder, modeller, texture artist and a mapper. The more of these you can competently do yourself the merrier.
I worked on a HL1 mod (Uncrossable Parallel, the code is still out there) and stuck in a load of changes, one of the more subtle-but-effective ones was moving the footstep sound code client side, expanding the scope but slimlining the overhead of the materials detection that went with that and syncing it to the model animations. Plus i added a 3rd person deathcam, before Halo came out. But i couldnt even draw a single grey texture or construct a model of a cube if someone promised me a gerzillion dollars for my efforts. I'm somewhat better at mapping though, provided the textures and models are already to hand and i have an idea what i'm building to start with, my skill lies more towards the programming aspect of them too, though*.
I have a couple ideas for standalone games, and will probably start prototyping one up on the q2 / q3 engine soonish. but unless i can get together with an interested moddeler and texture artist i'm screwed.
*e.g. Double Trouble: each team has two flags, capture either for a point a time but capture both within 30 seconds of each other (they linger on your capture points for that long) and you get a total of 5. none of this could be done with scripting, it all involved a LOT of control entities that triggered each other, i was building flip-flops out of them and all sorts. The map whilst being a cool concept and looking quite good too was cramped, prone to grenade spam and ran really slow in the outdoor area, darnit!
So things are cycling around again, then. Ever since PDAs lost the keyboard* i've been pining for someone to come out with a new iteration of the fantastic Psion** range I'm a Revo+ man myself and even though they're getting on a bit (circa 1999) they do what they do very fast and very efficiently. Addmitedly with no sound and a 16-shade B&W screen you're not going to get much FPS gaming done on them but i'm fairly certain that's the exact point. For email and basic web browsing (via infra red -> mobile phone modem at the mo, heh), word processing, spreadsheeting and playing simcity it's great.
The fact of the matter is that it would be fairly trivial to spec together *today* the hardware that can be both a pocket-device and a full desktop PC when you plug it into it's dock. The problem is the demands of both the bloated software requirements just to run an OS AND the expectations of all the geeks around here ("It can't play back 1080p over HDMI, therefore it sucks").
As for the phone part, the physical size wont really matter if you get a bluetooth headset packaged with it, no Nokia n-gage Taco embarrasment required.
*tiny rubber keys a-la blackberry do NOT count! **Wikipedia it, and while you're at it check out the bluetooth enabled NG Revo that never got made, ahh the possibilities.
Me Too. And one of these days i'm going to crack open the steering column and physically disable the automatic indicator shutoffs (i presume it's some kind of cam/latch that the steering axle catches as it rotates past) the damned things always seem to stay on or go off at the wrong times. i WANT manual indicators
plus if they were all manual you wouldnt have idiots driving for miles with them stuck on because they assumed it had turned itself off.
One of those "solutions" to a non existent problem, [sigh]. (Though electric windows would be handy if it's a hot day and you want to open the rear-passenger-side, fortunatley my car is small enough that i can actually just about reach the manual crank handle, heh)
Please someone get cracking with this. If only so that every time i log into a machine at work i dont get a welcome to windows splash and have to re-confirm every bloody dialog with "do not ask me this again". (disclaimer: I work in an MS-laden workplace but am one of those secret amiga owners in real-life TM)
It should just be my desktop, same shortcuts, start menu layout, installed programs etc.
even if i'm logged in on two systems at once they'd sync and mirror across... now here's a thought that would seal the whole thing and ramp it up from a GUI'ed up dumb terminal: If one of those two systems was my laptop and the other my workstation then i'd still be able to take the laptop home and access all my projects and documents. So I could work on something on the train, hook up to the net when i got home and bam! the VPN kicks in and i'm synced back to work again. This would then also need to be able to work if i took the laptop on vacation and didnt go online for a week, so long as i hooked it up when i got back to the office before logging onto my system it'd be synced up.
OK so there'd need to be a filesystem behind it all that could handle locks and version conflicts cleanly for when i forget to sync the laptop or someone edits a collaborative document but sod the details, let me dream!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm working on a project where the ambguity had to be written out from the start, it now has three "null" values meaning:
- NO VALUE ASSIGNED (YET)
- ASSIGNED AS UNKNOWN
- ASSIGNED AS NOT APPLICABLE
Now, one may argue that the latter could be normalised out but in the instance of this specific app i created const values to represent these and built queries to exclude them. For example numerics are forced to only be within +/- 2billion to 8dp . And 2000000001 equals "NO VALUE ASSIGNED". NULLs are not allowed in the numeric columns within the DB.
Fortunately this is all clearly laid out within the project documentation for future developers to stumble across but it's hardly perfect.
I wander if they're using it to power the Japanese http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-09-14T031447Z_01_T113034_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-JAPAN-SPACE-COL.XML&archived=False?
http://www.xmlopen.org/ooxml-wiki/index.php/Office_Open_XML_Overview
Well written and critiqued from the Granddaddy of all Standards Organisations. They have no axe to grind whatsoever, now someone tell me THAT's FUD.
innerHTML is one of the single most usefull parts of the defacto-DOM. Simply because the browser already has a HTML->DOM converter built in to parse the page as a whole in the first place, so attempting to force coders to serialise objects and manaully, painfully, construct a DOM tree and attach it is pure sado spec writing*.
Onto my main point, why is silverlight a Flash competitor and not a lightweight DOM/Forms/Web App extender designed as a Java retry? As a developer who's been following the WhatWG Web Forms spec for a few years (and lurking on the mailing list) it's nice to see it moving forward, it's just moving too slow.
So I propose an emergent solution. a browser plugin that will provide all the asyncronous web forms goodness that we've wanted all these years with some kind of simple hand-off for allowing browsers to impliment their own native (fast) code. Being able to make nice 2.5d platform games is not my highest priority right now, right now it's getting rid of the cludgy DOM/AJAX bloat that passes for web 2.0 applications and having native (i.e. C++ core) objects, functions and libraries to use instead.
Somewhere in that rant i had a point. Oh yeah, and why is it MS that's releasing this plugin to great fanfare whilst us slashdotters bemoan the lack of a standards-promoting OSS solution. Can't we just, like, you know, make our own?
* sadocification?
If the neighbor's kid put a baseball bat through one of your car windows for the fun of it (no doubt whilst in a group of dumb peers) my first suggestion would be to have a word with said neighbours and let them hand out the punishment (grounded, perhaps) whilst working off the cost of the repair bill.
That is, assuming you actually speak to your neighbours, ever.
Disclaimer: IANAGamesProgrammer but i do know a thing or two about randomness in games (see: doom demo format, every "random" event is based on the actions of the player). MY first play-throughs of the first two halos were coop, as were doom2, duke3d, quake1, quake2. (imagine my horror when half life DIDNT have a coop mode!).
Halo is a player-driven game, non-scripted events react to the player. If they lob a grenade at a bunch of enemies they may return fire or scatter. These reactions are probably decided upon by a random number generator somewhere. So. on both systems the initial setup of the game is the same. the monster positions and default movements around the map are the same. so why transmit the details of all that across the network? so long as the player's timestamps are synced the game will be in sync.
firstly, non critical actions dont need to be synced. if player A fires a shotgun at a wall the exact down-to-the-last-pellet blast pattern does not need to be replicated on player B's machine. sure the DAMAGE done by the shotgun blast needs to be synced but dont waste bandwidth making it LOOK identical as the only downside would be the odd occasion where player A says "ooh it made a smiley face" and player B says "you're either blind or full of shit". This also can apply to physical objects, if you blow up a bookshelf and paper goes flying does every single fluttering sheet need to follow the exact same path on each client? i expect not, so long as they're non-blocking and essentially just a visual effect. Half life did this to a certain extent with functions like "create a bunch of splintering wood chunks here" rather than creating and syncing every shard.
so, back to the grenade scenario, instead of sending the grenade and all the resulting movements why not tag a timestamp and random seed to the grenade "throw" event. the player on system 1 throws the grenade, the player on system 2 recieves the events and because their maps are (up until that moment) "naturally" in sync, so long as the responses of the monsters, ai and physics to the grenade event fire according to it's random seed the outcome will be the same.
Now obviously if there's latency and both players lob grenades at the same time at the same enemy hoarde there will be conflict issues. So you need some kind of range based system which knows if the players actions and effects are overlapping to a degree where a subset of local entities NEED to be kept in sync. This might be as simple as checking JUST the xyz origin coords of all the effected entities and any discrepancy results in a forced sync (like how in some networked racing games someone's car will magically jump a few feet over).
just my 2 cents, and probably a little naive when it comes down to keeping things in sync when there's a zillion flood coming at you and fourteen plasma grenades go off at once.
My thoughts exactly, indeed IMO the best fight scene out of all 3 is the sparring scene between Neo and Morpheus - technically not a "fight" at all. And why? because of the long tracking shots and wide angle still shots. You can actually SEE WHAT'S HAPPENING.
A good comparison is Bourne Identity VS Bourne Supremacy, in the former he finds a guy in his apartment, swiftly breaks the guys arm and kicks the shit out of him. It's a great scene and despite being relatively short is quite well put together. In the latter Bourne finds another guy in another house and they fight, for ages, with rolled up magazines, but sod all fighting actually happens, and you can't actually see anything not just because the camera is shaking but because of the fact that it's zoomed right in and it's going cut, cut, cut, cut. Sure it's more "actionny" but it just doesnt WORK.
Same thing for both films' car chases, (though i think B.I.s is overrated by people who clearly haven't seen Ronin, and the music choice didnt help either). In B.I. at least you can see what's going on, in B.S. it's all zoomy, cutty, shaky == confusing. Only the side-impact moment really makes it worthwhile.
OK, OK, I know this IS slashdot but still, here goes my karma:
What DID this guy DO to you and all the other moaning slashdotters? Yeah probably like me you grew up post-Apollo and parte-Shuttle and wanted to be an astronaut when you were a kid, so I guess you're a little bitter that the whole spage-age thing hasn't really happened. But hey, why is it all directed at these guys? Did they sneak into your room when you were a kid and molest you, promising that if you kept it a secret from mommy and daddy that you'd get the first ride into space on their space elevator?
Are they making outlandish, unfounded claims with the sole intention of scraping money from willing idiots? Possibly, I don't know for sure, but I'd love to see a space elevator go up, and the technological and exploratory benefits to mankind that followed. So let's give these guys a chance, even if all they're doing is collecting ideas, theories and munging it together with some nice 3d graphics the more people take notice and take the idea seriously the better. But so what if they don't shit one out of their assholes tomorrow morning just for you personally to ride on, give it a rest.
Critique, debate and peer review on any matter are always warranted but shooting insults and slander from the hip because, well, presumably you expected a LiftPort TM by 2005 and free trips to space or something is frankly unwarranted, childish and should be moderated into oblivion.
If not to solely kill the god awful someone-shoot-the-continuity-guy fuckup where the doctor (Xander Berkley) is shown holding a test tube (that fake-Jerome is actually hiding about his person at that moment in time) instead of the syringe that was just handed back to him. Actually confused me the first time i watched the film about what was going on, even though the editor probably thought "meh, it's just a 0.5 second edit, no one will notice"
Still, one of my favourite films overall, not just SF. Just goes to show that something needn't be flawless to be brilliant
You park your car in the countryside and consult the map, 1km away is what looks like a good picnic spot. So you haul your kit out of the car and set off.
However the 2d map doesnt show the 3d reality of the ground and there is actually a mountain between you and the picnic spot. So instead of it taking you 20 mins to walk there it actually takes you over an hour. Despite the fact that you're walking at a leisurly 3km/hour a lot of that effort is being translated into a vertical displacement and your actual horizontal movement across the Earth's surface suffers.
Now, instead of a 2d-map vs a 3d-mountain you need to think about a 3d-universe vs a 4d-curvature-of-time. Instead of a physical displacement (the vertical axis of the mountain) which is easily observable to our 3d vision there's a temporal displacement, which we can only observe as a slowdown* in time.
* or speedup, depending on who's observing who
Lots of folk around here have been bemoaning the UI and Font Rendering, parent explains this very clearly
(I'm a javascript/css hacker and have already posted "tested in Safari 3.0" against various things on my site. Inc my AJAX framework
seriously, there's no point getting into a bidding war on any item on ebay and this is the approach i take.
I actually think that ebay (or $NewCompetitor) would do well to change the whole system over to blind bidding. That is you put in the max you're willing to pay at the start and have to wait until the auction is over to see who won and at what price and the auto-bid history behind that. Throughout the duration of the auction there would be no "current bid" on display, just the start price and the number of bidders. If person A bids $10 max and person B bids $15 max person B will still win with $10.01 but they'd both have to wait and see.
I've been thinking about doing something like this myself, buying 2/3 drives and just backing up to them from my three systems (desktop,laptop,server). Seen as they're all windows boxen i've ben looking at XXCOPY but havent actually had a go yet.
My idea is to reverse mirror each drive. so for a simple example, a monthly backup, you'd have folders thus (the actual structure here is less important than the idea):
z:\server\2007-01-31\c
z:\server\2007-01-31\d
z:\server\2007-02-28\c
z:\server\2007-02-28\d
something like that. Where the most recent folder holds the full filesystems at that time, but the previous one holds only the files that are different. Whilst this wont tell you which files were NOT present in previous backups it does mean that a corrupt file will be found in an old backup (being different by virtue of size, hopefully, though a hash check would be handy).
To restore a system from this you'd only be able to reliably use the most recent (so creating "good" mirrors manually before making drastic changes will become a good habit to have) without some jiggery pokery. but to retrieve an old version of a file that you accidentally overwrote thinking you were editing a copy you could just search for it. Big movie files that never changed would only ever be on the backup drive once, either in the latest folder or if you'd deleted it, the backup before the delete.
like i said restoring a system to an arbitrary point in the past may be painful with this setup[*] but for keeping backups of random files and their differing versions around forever it might do the trick.
[*] though thinking about it you could also store a (large) csv file that listed every file in the system tree at the time of the backup along with it's size and hash. To restore you'd have to pull up that list and find the relevant version of each one on the drive to rebuild the tree. fiddly and long-winded, but possible whilst being quite space efficient if you're on a tight $-per-Gigabyte budget.
I've been thinking about this for the past week, how to get studios and non geeks to switch over to pure internet TV? All it needs is a "channel" to be an RSS-like XML list of links to media files (and links to other channels).
You could allow a link to a PNG (of a fixed size) for each link so you can nice purty on-screen listings.
Because it's all open XML you can mashup your own "channels" of your favourite programs
throw in "radio" support
Do all the requests over HTTP. And allow users to store their credit-card / paypal / $other on their own computer / set-top-box (protected from the kids by a 4-digit pin) and have the system set up so that once a user has chosen a bunch of pay-programms to download (lets call that "recording") or to view straight away ("playing") is for their box to connect to each linked pay server via HTTPS and then send the pay info in a POST request.[*]
bish bash bosh, you get an authorised download URL
tag geo coordinates to everything and allow content providers to set up mirror servers and redirect you to those to help aleviate the lack of p2p.
have standard codecs for each media type, H.264 and OGG should do for the time being.
So let's review the technology needed: HTTP,HTTPS,FTP,PNG,OGG,H.264,XML
Thus (bandwidth permitting) true open, cross-platform, cross-device internet tv can be born by the end of the weekend. If anyone can be bothered speccing it up.
[*] The beauty of all this is that if you choose to "record" 1 free program, 1 pay fox program, 2 pay Paramount programs and 1 pay $otherStudio program you do in your living room is enter the pin for their chosen billing account once. the rest is done for them.
Most comments below seem to be missing the point, this is not a solution looking for a problem. For your basic word processing, spreadsheeting, emailing and (sans flash) web surfing a multi-gigahertz laptop with 720i widescreen, DVD RW and about 30 minutes battery life is overkill. Laptop makers have been constantly upgrading the laptop into a full-blown PC and leaving the laptop ethos behind.
.1 of a second.
This is a solution to a very current problem. Smartphones are too small to be used for serious work, and laptops are too big, heavy and powerful to be lugged around everywhere.
My ideal "notebook" computer would be somewhere between this, the Psion Revo and Psion Series 7. Personally i dont even see the need for the color screen for the four tasks i described above (the revo is 16-shades-of-grey) but it's needed as a feature so that people at least consider the thing.
All you need then is enough RAM to get around in (256mb seems fine to me), enough storage to store a good chunk of files (a few gigs) and enough power to use a USB flash drive. Build in Wifi, bluetooth and an RJ45 for wired ethernet and that will do me fine. So long as the thing runs passively cooled the battery life should be fine.
The Revo's grey-backed non-lit LCD is quite readable in a reasonable amount of ambient light so eink would probably be overkill for the time being but i'd even consider that once the update rate gets to about
Seriously, how hard is it for an OS to just not allow write access to any application at all outside it's home directory?
,sounds, malware executables).
Ok, sure, if you've downloaded it to the desktop and tried to run it it should sandbox but let's assume you've installed something to "programs/theTool". theTool should have full disk access to that folder and THAT's IT.
if it needs to store per-user details on a multi-user machine let it use cookies. an app could cleverly save a user-cookie that tells itself the name of a sub directory IN ITS OWN PATH that has any other crap in it that user needed to use (images
if the user wants to load/save something outside that path (i.e. their home/documents directory/a usb key) then they should be presented with the standard built-in OS API driven load/save file dialog. which has 2 input variables: preferred file name, preferred file extension. (note no choice of location so no defaulting to "c:/windows/system.ini" , the OS can track the last-used folder for that app in a static string). And no events either, so no quickly flashing it up and running a macro to hit the OK button for the user.
a similar situation can be set up for the IP stack, just present an API to the App. the user's firewall wont show ports and such outside of advanced mode, just let them choose send and recieve per app with an OS-driven link to a neutral web-site that lists apps and what they do (by name, version, exe hash etc. all scanned by the OS not provided by the app). So when an app asks for IP permission the user can view the web page (obviously requiring a default-enabled browser) that says "Recommendation: DO NOT ALLOW" or "Required for OS to function".
If you're on a long tightening bend, with adverse camber and you need to stick it to the inside to drag out the apex you can't be doing either, you have to be patient.*
Trying to think of one off the top of my head, um, the left hander after the tunnel on that GT3 track that's a sort of a figure 8 shape, heh. Though there's an old story about Michael Schumacher figuring out a similar trick at Spa Francorchamps on his first ever F1 race there (which involved keeping the revs low in 5th gear on a corner that others were finding tricky to get right in a lower gear).
If you have a good set of analog controllers (like a foot pedal set) then, yes, there's an argument to be made that you need to "use the accelerator" to keep your revs up. If you're counting that as "accelerating" then we are in agreement and i'll promptly shut up.
*Unless you've got tyre wear turned off, and a fat 4wd rig and you can drift for miles, but that wont always help because certain games/scenarios wont give you that option.
Surely having your curtains closed in broad daylight on a large number of occasions when *public* surveylance shows you were clearly in the house along with certain other undesirables will then construed in court to suggest to the jury that you were clearly up to something.
Maybe not conclusive evidence either way but one stroke of the brush towards painting you as a terrorist.
See, for example, current terrorism trials in the UK pointing out that someone occasioanally attended a certain mosque where a certain preacher sometimes delivered anti-western speeches. Exactly what that has to do with the actual evidence about wether the person in question physically constructed a bomb is beyond me.
I just want a box that i plug one end into the TV and the other to my router and, instead of buying channels and programming just tell it the names of the TV shows and sporting events i want to see. And that's it. When a show is (mostly) downloaded to the box then the on-screen guide would pop it up as available to watch. select->play.
Obviously there would need to be the infrastructure in place so that at 9pm EST on tuesday the people who really want to can watch a new show or sporting event "live", but when it comes down to it I time-shift most of my TV (via ye ole faithful VHS) so i'd be more than happy if the box downloaded shows to it's internal HD at "off peak" times, such as 3am.
Search Wikipedia for "Top Up TV Anytime". They're doing something along these lines over the UK's freeview system (Digital TV over UHF, rather than the net) - using spare night time bandwidth to "cache" shows for up to 7 days, totalling ~90 hours a week, but it still uses the channel model the parent suggests. The programming they serve and the amount they charge means i don't bother with it myself but as a proof-of-concept i think it's mostly bang-on.
Ultimatley though I like the idea of being able to set the box to scan the net for "MLB : SF Giants or Chicago Cubs games", as i live in the uk and only get 1 or 2 random games a week at stupid-o-clock in the morning. Whilst mlb.com already does (DRM'ed) downloads of games but at last check it was quite hard to download them from the site without the title of the file being touted including the final score (D'oh!). I'd still be happy to to pay for the games i download this way, provided it was simple and i only had to set up one pay account on my box and it'd handle the UK->US exchange rate/transaction transparently too.
In the UK we mostly drive stick, and the stick is mounted on the floor between the seats. In my car it's about a foot from the wheel. Now I can change gears, moving my arm from wheel to stick to wheel - including smooth accelerator and clutch action - from across the H pattern (say 3rd to 4th) in less than a second. In fact i reckon it's close to half a second, sometimes that also involves operating the indicator lever too as i'm probably negotiating a junction (switching it off as well as on, i can't stand the auto-off).
When you're learning to drive stick it seems like the most complex, impossible task in the universe, having to coordinate all four limbs in a very precise fashion, including the spacial knowledge of the location of said stick and gears so you don't have to look. It's slow and painful to learn and you stall the engine a lot whilst doing so.
It's only after driving ~20,000 miles in the same car that i can do it all so fast and efficiently.
Back to LHO and the bolt action rifle. I'm fairly certain that having never operated a gun in my life i'd find the bolt action reload a real slow difficult pain in the ass. But if i had trained, reloaded, fired repeatedly the same gun hundreds of time's i'm fairly certain the same would apply. I wouldnt have to get up from my prone position, fiddle around in my pockets for cartridges and fumble the lever to reload. I wouldnt even need to take my eye from the sights, i could do it, without looking because my spatial knowlege and muscle memory associated with the rifle would operate my limbs for me. In the end it'd be just as fast and easy as changing gears in a car.
In conclusion, it'd be easy for any old Joe to pick up one of those rifles and after five min os fiddling with the bolt action reload - having never encountered one before - to summarise that operating it 3 or more times in a 6 second period would be impossible.
sorry, i seem to have ranted a little there
Does anyone else think that the very fact that there are >357 CSS selector compliance tests slightly worrying?
I'm a CSS hacker myself and still find that shocking. Methinks it really is time to scrap HTML(etc) and start over with WWWNG.
Hence it's all about teamwork, you need a coder, modeller, texture artist and a mapper. The more of these you can competently do yourself the merrier.
I worked on a HL1 mod (Uncrossable Parallel, the code is still out there) and stuck in a load of changes, one of the more subtle-but-effective ones was moving the footstep sound code client side, expanding the scope but slimlining the overhead of the materials detection that went with that and syncing it to the model animations. Plus i added a 3rd person deathcam, before Halo came out. But i couldnt even draw a single grey texture or construct a model of a cube if someone promised me a gerzillion dollars for my efforts. I'm somewhat better at mapping though, provided the textures and models are already to hand and i have an idea what i'm building to start with, my skill lies more towards the programming aspect of them too, though*.
I have a couple ideas for standalone games, and will probably start prototyping one up on the q2 / q3 engine soonish. but unless i can get together with an interested moddeler and texture artist i'm screwed.
*e.g. Double Trouble: each team has two flags, capture either for a point a time but capture both within 30 seconds of each other (they linger on your capture points for that long) and you get a total of 5. none of this could be done with scripting, it all involved a LOT of control entities that triggered each other, i was building flip-flops out of them and all sorts. The map whilst being a cool concept and looking quite good too was cramped, prone to grenade spam and ran really slow in the outdoor area, darnit!
So things are cycling around again, then. Ever since PDAs lost the keyboard* i've been pining for someone to come out with a new iteration of the fantastic Psion** range I'm a Revo+ man myself and even though they're getting on a bit (circa 1999) they do what they do very fast and very efficiently. Addmitedly with no sound and a 16-shade B&W screen you're not going to get much FPS gaming done on them but i'm fairly certain that's the exact point. For email and basic web browsing (via infra red -> mobile phone modem at the mo, heh), word processing, spreadsheeting and playing simcity it's great.
The fact of the matter is that it would be fairly trivial to spec together *today* the hardware that can be both a pocket-device and a full desktop PC when you plug it into it's dock. The problem is the demands of both the bloated software requirements just to run an OS AND the expectations of all the geeks around here ("It can't play back 1080p over HDMI, therefore it sucks").
As for the phone part, the physical size wont really matter if you get a bluetooth headset packaged with it, no Nokia n-gage Taco embarrasment required.
*tiny rubber keys a-la blackberry do NOT count!
**Wikipedia it, and while you're at it check out the bluetooth enabled NG Revo that never got made, ahh the possibilities.
Me Too. And one of these days i'm going to crack open the steering column and physically disable the automatic indicator shutoffs (i presume it's some kind of cam/latch that the steering axle catches as it rotates past) the damned things always seem to stay on or go off at the wrong times. i WANT manual indicators
plus if they were all manual you wouldnt have idiots driving for miles with them stuck on because they assumed it had turned itself off.
One of those "solutions" to a non existent problem, [sigh]. (Though electric windows would be handy if it's a hot day and you want to open the rear-passenger-side, fortunatley my car is small enough that i can actually just about reach the manual crank handle, heh)
(seriously)
Please someone get cracking with this. If only so that every time i log into a machine at work i dont get a welcome to windows splash and have to re-confirm every bloody dialog with "do not ask me this again". (disclaimer: I work in an MS-laden workplace but am one of those secret amiga owners in real-life TM)
... now here's a thought that would seal the whole thing and ramp it up from a GUI'ed up dumb terminal: If one of those two systems was my laptop and the other my workstation then i'd still be able to take the laptop home and access all my projects and documents. So I could work on something on the train, hook up to the net when i got home and bam! the VPN kicks in and i'm synced back to work again. This would then also need to be able to work if i took the laptop on vacation and didnt go online for a week, so long as i hooked it up when i got back to the office before logging onto my system it'd be synced up.
It should just be my desktop, same shortcuts, start menu layout, installed programs etc.
even if i'm logged in on two systems at once they'd sync and mirror across
OK so there'd need to be a filesystem behind it all that could handle locks and version conflicts cleanly for when i forget to sync the laptop or someone edits a collaborative document but sod the details, let me dream!