You're partially right. They don't generally have the mentality that they should go out looking for projects to contribute to. I imagine that creating a project tailored for them won't increase the likelihood of their doing so.
On the other hand, many artists, musicians, and designers are more than happy to work on free projects from time to time. The project managers just need to find them first. They won't find you.
That is a bit of an exaggeration isn't it? Unless you're considering time == money, you can get everything you listed for free with a bit of effort and teamwork. (The one man team is somewhat rare.)
Anyway, a number of my associates have had some success working with a game engine that I've been working on (http://zenilib.com). It is free and targets Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. I'm not sure it would meet WK2's definition of a game engine though. He seems to liken a game engine more to something awaiting mods / content.
Kodu is pretty well done. At a presentation I attended a couple months back, I was impressed by the level of polish they gave the system. The UI is fairly slick considering you have to use an Xbox 360 controller.
As far as programming is concerned, it is essentially a rule based system. You give it conditions and actions to take when the conditions are met. The rules fire behind the scenes and you don't have to worry about it. One of their design goals was to make it somewhat unbreakable. Even if you give it stupid rules, things still work to some degree. You can't cause their system to infinite-loop, for example. (The length of a rule is strictly limited.)
However, to make certain types of games, some users ended up having to do strange and complex tricks involving the creation of invisible objects. Rules would then test for interactions with these objects. That type of thing could be avoided easily with a more traditional programming language. I suppose the problem is indicative of a small failing in trying to reach a balance between programming and modding development styles.
Still, I think it will be a very interesting "toy" for people to experiment with in the near future.
Thanks for posting. I honestly cannot understand the nasty comments coming from some other people in this thread. A few people making a joke is one thing, but to have dozens of Slashdotters honestly describing this situation as good is rather bizarre.
Even if learning the hard way is the only way for some people, that doesn't mean we have to have no compassion for them.
1. Installers that don't need Steam. 2. Games that don't need Steam for single player. 3. Pro-rated bundles that don't make me feel like I'm wasting my money because a better bundle is coming if I wait a few months.
Honestly, because of points 1 and 2, I've convinced myself that I'm paying for the privilege of playing on their servers, rather than actually buying games. Point 3 just means I only buy the games I really want to play, which ultimately makes them less money (from me).
Also, you don't have to pay exorbitant shipping fees to get games that they never bothered to release in your country, despite having localized it for your language. (Or do Americans generally have difficulty understanding the Queen's English?)
I have been forced to switch back to the official Adobe Acrobat Reader to print many documents, at least in Windows. Foxit and Sumatra are simply no good at printing. Foxit was okay with some documents but not others. Sumatra always tried to generate multiple gigabytes to send to my HP LaserJet 2200D. Acrobat Reader on the other hand was able to manage every document I tried with a megabyte or two, at most.
You're right that the links I pointed to don't say that. However, the presentation I attended included some results for tests in which a model trained on one person were used to determine which noun was being considered by another person. They achieved fairly high accuracy in these tests as well. (Of course the accuracy was slightly lower than when using a model trained for the subject.)
When featured on an episode of 60 minutes, they tried using an existing model on one of the reporters and happened to achieve 100% accuracy over 10 noun predictions, IIRC.
Tom Mitchell et al. have done some work on differentiating memory recall of nouns. Hearing him give a talk on the subject really made me rethink some things. To what extent are different human brains structured similarly? It seems as though two people thinking about a given noun (e.g. a hammer) really have similarities in their fMRI patterns.
Microsoft would have to create a flag so that programmers can set it to tell the system that it is a security related program and thus should be allowed to execute under the admin account.
The problem with your implementation suggestion is that software developers who don't respect good security practices as it is will not respect such an API. If it is easier to set a flag asserting that the program is "security related" than to follow good software development practices, that is what they will do.
What you suggest is either impossible, extremely undesirable, or both, assuming that by "they" you mean Microsoft.
For them to prevent certain classes of applications from running, without special knowledge, would require a kind of analysis similar in nature to solving the halting problem - a problem well known to be unsolvable.
Then the course of action is to require applications requiring root privileges to be signed by Microsoft, essentially making Windows a closed platform for developers. Furthermore, any applications they sign would have to be bullet-proof, getting back to the halting problem.
That is an interesting interpretation of involvement. It is certainly valid, to some degree. On the other hand, I still fail to see how the openness of the project is important for this type of involvement. If they were used as a focus group for an identical closed source, proprietary,..., project, would their experience be any different?
How is giving kids free software to play with equivalent to involving them in free software? If they aren't working on the software itself, how are they involved? I understand it is a sandbox that they can play with, but what is the importance of its openness as far as the kids are concerned?
I have taught high schoolers to develop video games in their free time using a FOSS game engine I put together. That seems more like involving kids in free software, to me.
This, on the other hand, is a cool way of allowing kids to interact with video game simulations in a way that allows them to be creative. It sounds like it works well for a relatively young age group as well, which is a good thing. However, while the summary of this interesting idea is not bad, the subject line is somewhat insane. I don't think we need to artificially emphasize the openness of our projects to garner a good reception on Slashdot.
Who told you that CO2 is the only emission that we should be concerned with? Personally, I've never caught a whiff of CO2 and thought to myself "Ack. My lungs!" Honestly, there are worse emissions, albeit possibly in smaller quantities. I'm certainly no expert on the matter.
I recently had the opportunity to hear Sid Meier talk about random events in the Civilization series. It is unfortunate that this article doesn't mention any of his insights regarding player's psychology when it comes to "luck".
Apparently the average player expects to win regularly, even if probability allows for long strings of losses. If you lose two even fights in a row in a game of Civilization, you are literally guaranteed to win the third, IIRC. This is how their "karma" system is implemented.
Additionally, players expect a fight of 30 vs 20 to be much more of a sure thing than a fight of 3 to 2, even though the ratio is the same. Apparently you ought to get some sort of boost when the numbers are higher in order to satisfy most players. This actually makes a degree of sense to me, because I would expect the variance to be less in the first case, but he didn't address the issue and I didn't ask.
This article gives an interesting categorization of the types of randomness and luck that can exist in games, but it appears to do little to address these ideas. This is too bad, really. It might be interesting to see how these hacks affect these probabilistic features of Civilization according to their charts.
I have been working on a game engine using C++ for a couple years now, and I have successfully used it to teach (mostly) high schoolers at Camp CAEN (http://www.campcaen.com) and just recently college students as well. The youngest person to learn how to use it this past summer was an 11 year old IIRC.
I actually believed that the ideads not from 'I, Robot' were from The Humanoids, by Jack Williamson.
Spoilers below:
The plot in which humanoid robots are welcomed into society only to later enslave humanity, in order to protect it, comes right from the novel. Additionally, so does the idea of going to the supercomputer at the center of it all to shut it down.
What you say seems to have some merit as well. I would think that the movie takes ideas from many sources rather than just one, or even two.
Independent game development studios are not part of company that publishes games. Since they must go to a publisher to sell their games, they are considered to be independent. Independent game development studios are a subset of third party game development studios.
Indie game development studios are small groups that are often poorly funded if they are funded at all. They generally try to make small games that garner attention by being different in a way that seems novel and interesting. Unlike regular independ game development studios, they rarely attempt to make AAA titles. Still, they are a subset of independent game development studios.
The days of one or two people with next to no money attempting to produce a commercially viable game are still very much alive. Some of them are even successful.
...at least for me. I don't care about optimizations that allow a page to be loaded and rendered 0.1 seconds faster. The lower bound on how fast a page loads is rarely imposed by the browser anyway.
I often like to use the "Open All in Tabs" feature of Firefox, in which an arbitrarily high number of bookmarks in a folder are opened and loaded simultaneously. I can open and load 15 sites (with adblocking) in under 3 seconds. Chrome seemed to take a second to open just one tab, let alone 15.
I'm not saying I'm the normal user, but test more than the scripting engine and the rendering system before saying a browser "tops speed tests".
Slashdot Mirror
You're partially right. They don't generally have the mentality that they should go out looking for projects to contribute to. I imagine that creating a project tailored for them won't increase the likelihood of their doing so.
On the other hand, many artists, musicians, and designers are more than happy to work on free projects from time to time. The project managers just need to find them first. They won't find you.
That is a bit of an exaggeration isn't it? Unless you're considering time == money, you can get everything you listed for free with a bit of effort and teamwork. (The one man team is somewhat rare.)
Anyway, a number of my associates have had some success working with a game engine that I've been working on (http://zenilib.com). It is free and targets Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. I'm not sure it would meet WK2's definition of a game engine though. He seems to liken a game engine more to something awaiting mods / content.
Kodu is pretty well done. At a presentation I attended a couple months back, I was impressed by the level of polish they gave the system. The UI is fairly slick considering you have to use an Xbox 360 controller.
As far as programming is concerned, it is essentially a rule based system. You give it conditions and actions to take when the conditions are met. The rules fire behind the scenes and you don't have to worry about it. One of their design goals was to make it somewhat unbreakable. Even if you give it stupid rules, things still work to some degree. You can't cause their system to infinite-loop, for example. (The length of a rule is strictly limited.)
However, to make certain types of games, some users ended up having to do strange and complex tricks involving the creation of invisible objects. Rules would then test for interactions with these objects. That type of thing could be avoided easily with a more traditional programming language. I suppose the problem is indicative of a small failing in trying to reach a balance between programming and modding development styles.
Still, I think it will be a very interesting "toy" for people to experiment with in the near future.
Thanks for posting. I honestly cannot understand the nasty comments coming from some other people in this thread. A few people making a joke is one thing, but to have dozens of Slashdotters honestly describing this situation as good is rather bizarre.
Even if learning the hard way is the only way for some people, that doesn't mean we have to have no compassion for them.
Wishlist:
1. Installers that don't need Steam.
2. Games that don't need Steam for single player.
3. Pro-rated bundles that don't make me feel like I'm wasting my money because a better bundle is coming if I wait a few months.
Honestly, because of points 1 and 2, I've convinced myself that I'm paying for the privilege of playing on their servers, rather than actually buying games. Point 3 just means I only buy the games I really want to play, which ultimately makes them less money (from me).
Also, you don't have to pay exorbitant shipping fees to get games that they never bothered to release in your country, despite having localized it for your language. (Or do Americans generally have difficulty understanding the Queen's English?)
I have been forced to switch back to the official Adobe Acrobat Reader to print many documents, at least in Windows. Foxit and Sumatra are simply no good at printing. Foxit was okay with some documents but not others. Sumatra always tried to generate multiple gigabytes to send to my HP LaserJet 2200D. Acrobat Reader on the other hand was able to manage every document I tried with a megabyte or two, at most.
Is Okular for Windows any better?
Too expensive to implement. I recommend JBOF (Just a Bunch Of Freezers) for your lawyer storage needs.
Because emailled files get onto your computer magically without you downloading them, right?
If you run your own personal e-mail services, then that is exactly what happens. (I know too many people who do this.)
I have control over the webpage of a student group, and nobody even seemed to notice my changes yesterday... :-(
You're right that the links I pointed to don't say that. However, the presentation I attended included some results for tests in which a model trained on one person were used to determine which noun was being considered by another person. They achieved fairly high accuracy in these tests as well. (Of course the accuracy was slightly lower than when using a model trained for the subject.)
When featured on an episode of 60 minutes, they tried using an existing model on one of the reporters and happened to achieve 100% accuracy over 10 noun predictions, IIRC.
Tom Mitchell et al. have done some work on differentiating memory recall of nouns. Hearing him give a talk on the subject really made me rethink some things. To what extent are different human brains structured similarly? It seems as though two people thinking about a given noun (e.g. a hammer) really have similarities in their fMRI patterns.
Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080529141354.htm
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/320/5880/1191
Has she tried turning it off and on again?
Microsoft would have to create a flag so that programmers can set it to tell the system that it is a security related program and thus should be allowed to execute under the admin account.
The problem with your implementation suggestion is that software developers who don't respect good security practices as it is will not respect such an API. If it is easier to set a flag asserting that the program is "security related" than to follow good software development practices, that is what they will do.
What you suggest is either impossible, extremely undesirable, or both, assuming that by "they" you mean Microsoft.
For them to prevent certain classes of applications from running, without special knowledge, would require a kind of analysis similar in nature to solving the halting problem - a problem well known to be unsolvable.
Then the course of action is to require applications requiring root privileges to be signed by Microsoft, essentially making Windows a closed platform for developers. Furthermore, any applications they sign would have to be bullet-proof, getting back to the halting problem.
...on the expected hardware specifications, see Notebook Review: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=348239
That is an interesting interpretation of involvement. It is certainly valid, to some degree. On the other hand, I still fail to see how the openness of the project is important for this type of involvement. If they were used as a focus group for an identical closed source, proprietary, ..., project, would their experience be any different?
How is giving kids free software to play with equivalent to involving them in free software? If they aren't working on the software itself, how are they involved? I understand it is a sandbox that they can play with, but what is the importance of its openness as far as the kids are concerned?
I have taught high schoolers to develop video games in their free time using a FOSS game engine I put together. That seems more like involving kids in free software, to me.
This, on the other hand, is a cool way of allowing kids to interact with video game simulations in a way that allows them to be creative. It sounds like it works well for a relatively young age group as well, which is a good thing. However, while the summary of this interesting idea is not bad, the subject line is somewhat insane. I don't think we need to artificially emphasize the openness of our projects to garner a good reception on Slashdot.
Who told you that CO2 is the only emission that we should be concerned with? Personally, I've never caught a whiff of CO2 and thought to myself "Ack. My lungs!" Honestly, there are worse emissions, albeit possibly in smaller quantities. I'm certainly no expert on the matter.
I recently had the opportunity to hear Sid Meier talk about random events in the Civilization series. It is unfortunate that this article doesn't mention any of his insights regarding player's psychology when it comes to "luck".
Apparently the average player expects to win regularly, even if probability allows for long strings of losses. If you lose two even fights in a row in a game of Civilization, you are literally guaranteed to win the third, IIRC. This is how their "karma" system is implemented.
Additionally, players expect a fight of 30 vs 20 to be much more of a sure thing than a fight of 3 to 2, even though the ratio is the same. Apparently you ought to get some sort of boost when the numbers are higher in order to satisfy most players. This actually makes a degree of sense to me, because I would expect the variance to be less in the first case, but he didn't address the issue and I didn't ask.
This article gives an interesting categorization of the types of randomness and luck that can exist in games, but it appears to do little to address these ideas. This is too bad, really. It might be interesting to see how these hacks affect these probabilistic features of Civilization according to their charts.
Disclaimer: Blatant Self Promotion
I have been working on a game engine using C++ for a couple years now, and I have successfully used it to teach (mostly) high schoolers at Camp CAEN (http://www.campcaen.com) and just recently college students as well. The youngest person to learn how to use it this past summer was an 11 year old IIRC.
http://zenipex.com/zenilib
Of course, I am biased.
I actually believed that the ideads not from 'I, Robot' were from The Humanoids, by Jack Williamson.
Spoilers below:
The plot in which humanoid robots are welcomed into society only to later enslave humanity, in order to protect it, comes right from the novel. Additionally, so does the idea of going to the supercomputer at the center of it all to shut it down.
What you say seems to have some merit as well. I would think that the movie takes ideas from many sources rather than just one, or even two.
Independent game development studios are not part of company that publishes games. Since they must go to a publisher to sell their games, they are considered to be independent. Independent game development studios are a subset of third party game development studios.
Indie game development studios are small groups that are often poorly funded if they are funded at all. They generally try to make small games that garner attention by being different in a way that seems novel and interesting. Unlike regular independ game development studios, they rarely attempt to make AAA titles. Still, they are a subset of independent game development studios.
The days of one or two people with next to no money attempting to produce a commercially viable game are still very much alive. Some of them are even successful.
http://db.tigsource.com/top
http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html
...at least for me. I don't care about optimizations that allow a page to be loaded and rendered 0.1 seconds faster. The lower bound on how fast a page loads is rarely imposed by the browser anyway.
I often like to use the "Open All in Tabs" feature of Firefox, in which an arbitrarily high number of bookmarks in a folder are opened and loaded simultaneously. I can open and load 15 sites (with adblocking) in under 3 seconds. Chrome seemed to take a second to open just one tab, let alone 15.
I'm not saying I'm the normal user, but test more than the scripting engine and the rendering system before saying a browser "tops speed tests".
Not the Linux codec AFAIK. The devil is in the details. Choose a less Microsoft-centric DVD drive manufacturer, if you can find one.