Brilliant straw-man argument there. You now have me burning down forests, killing grizzly bears, starfish, kelp, and other highly important and relevant species that would obviously have a devastating impact on the environment were they suddenly removed. And yes, I'm well aware that size alone does not necessarily dictate importance in the larger scheme of things (e.g. ocean plankton). But the notion that every single species is equally vital to the ecosystem is simply fallacious to any reasoning mind.
Yes, I'm well aware of the dangers of introducing species to new areas or making changes of any sort of an ecosystem. I just happen to think that saving so many human lives is worth the risk in this case. I'm sorry you don't feel the same way.
I'm fairly certain that if someone you cared deeply for was at serious risk of catching Dengue, you really wouldn't give care quite as much how the ecology would fare without those mosquitoes.
Oh, and take a walk out in a tropical region sometime. You'll quickly realize that the notion of the eco-chain being in any significant peril because one species of insect disappears is a bit far-fetched, I think. The number of insects (both in general number as well as the number of species) is pretty staggering. Species have disappeared all throughout history, and nature is fabulous at filling available niches.
I'd have no hesitation in pulling the trigger if it mean eliminating every damn mosquito on earth. Sorry if that sounds unenlightened.
It's a completely ridiculous assertion. There's no difference in natural language skills between Americans and other parts of the world. The reason Americans typically don't learn more than one language is because there is no real practical reason for most to do so. The simple fact of the matter is, a huge percentage of anyone you would ever meet in day to day life speaks English. And those that don't, most people would never come in contact with. Simply pull up a map, and take a quick peek at the Geography of the United States. It's a pretty damn big place. You can get by just fine only knowing English here.
And for what it's worth, my English language skills are just fine, thank you. I really wish I could refrain from pointing out the irony of someone complaining about how we "can't even speak english properly", but I guess I'm just not that enlightened.
I think you're correct in a way, but I might disagree with your conclusion. If you need a more dynamic approach, then a better solution is to break the functionality up into smaller chunks, and build a framework that allows to you re-arrange those chunks with less effort. I suppose this starts moving toward generic programming a bit, but OOP is the mechanism by which you can do that.
Honestly, I think the #1 problem I've seen with object-oriented programming is that people tend to create classes that are far too large and unwieldy. A giant, monolithic class is really very little different than a procedural API that passes around a single context structure to maintain state. And yes, those types of classes are VERY hard to break apart, but not really much more than a procedural equivalent. It takes a lot of experience to be able to effectively break apart functionality into smaller, logical components.
But don't misunderstand... OOP is not some sort of magic bullet. It's not going to solve any problems automatically for you. Like you mentioned, changing requirements are always a challenge.
I think there's a point at which compatibility layers can be reasonably depreciated. At the moment, I'd guess the market still has a very large number of IE6 browsers in it. But when the [number of web pages affected by this] x [percentage of IE6 browsers] is sufficiently low that few enough care to make it an issue, the backward compatibility will be broken.
OO on a basic level is more difficult to understand than a procedural equivalent That's probably true. But a nail gun is also more complex / difficult to understand than a hammer. The reason it's chosen as the tool of choice by professional carpenters is that it's much more powerful.
OOP does seem to be a double-edged sword, though. While well-written object-oriented code can be substantially easier to read and understand than well-written procedural code, badly written OOP code can be harder to understand and more complex than badly-written procedural code. So no, it's not exactly a panacea. But like all powerful tools, it really depends on the skill of the person using it.
However, I think we, as gamers need to take a hard look at the reality of the situation and realize that there is no way on earth that any self-respecting game company is going to allow a revenue stream to pass them by. I'd like to think that a game company with self-respect would NOT engage in a practice if they felt the gaming experience would be harmed by it.
That being said, I have no problem with adverts in game when they make sense. To me, those are games in contemporary settings in which it would be strange NOT to see adverts (sports games are an oft-cited example), and which are NOT intrusive to the game playing experience. The way I figure it, why shouldn't game developers be allowed to leverage some work that's already going into the game (often in the form of fake ads) to earn additional revenue. Money going to developers helps fund cool new games, right?
The beauty of living in a consumer-driven capitalist system is that voting with dollars has more impact than anything we could ever say here on slashdot. It's ultimately a much truer test of people's preferences than posting on a forum. You said it yourself - players complained and left the game. This will not go unnoticed by those holding the money. I actually have faith that the cost of game development in the future will still be paid by the cost of games, not by ads. Keep in mind that the game market is experiencing unprecedented growth. Honestly, some of the companies (like SOE) that are grasping at ad revenue right now are likely doing so out of desperation (because they can't release a decent product to save their lives). These sorts of ham-handed approaches will probably polarize the consumers to reject ads for all but a few specialized projects.
Why complain before you even attempt to correct the situation? Call/e-mail support and explain the situation. You might be able to get that download or perhaps some additional compensation (such as some points). I understand it's more fun to complain on slashdot, but...
"But I don't know anyone else with a 360 that hasn't broken, except you now."
It was this line that cause me to wonder if there are some sour grapes at work here. I work at a gaming company, so of course quite a few have Xboxen. In addition to that, I know a few others as well. Let's put the total number at about thirty that I know personally. Of all those, I know of two hardware failures. Now, thirty isn't exactly a huge sampling number, but it's not tiny either.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was closer to the actual hardware failure rate - 30% sounds ridiculously high by my experience.
Did you not even read his post?
Ensure that the victim does not move - that can cause more injury, especially in a crash where spinal trauma is expected, such as any vehicle collision. They may also be able to stabilize the person to prevent accidental movement. That sounds pretty close to what you are saying here:
In the event of a car accident, the first thing the professionals do (and I am one, and you are not), is to stabalize the spinal cord. The first thing an untrained person would probably try to do is drag the person from the car, possibly killing them in the process.
This is an interesting application of distributed and networked technology (I'm not sure what else to call it - would this be classified as distributed computing?) - using technology to extract information from an extremely large number of processing nodes in a way that is impractical on a smaller scale. It reminds me in a way of projects like Seti@Home/Folding@Home. That is, using the combined technological resources from a large number of people to do some pretty cool things that just weren't possible a few years ago.
It will be interesting to see what other sorts of projects in this vein take shape in the near future.
Lol, I guess someone modded me down as 'redundant' as penalty for my misspelling of 'soldier'. Sheesh, tough crowd. Funny enough though, another common axiom in the armed forces is: "there's no such thing as soldier-proof", which is how I read your post at first.
some Korean MMOs are almost entirely populated by robots Keep in mind that MMO "robots" (more typically called "bots"), are mostly automated scripts that utilize very specialized record-and-playback functionality combined with techniques for screen-analysis, such as recognizing the name of a piece of text used as a navigation marker. These bots exploit the predictive and repetitive nature of MMOs, such as the fact that a particular creature will always spawn in the same location, that a vendor will be in the same place all the time, that the same sequence of actions will consistently lead to the exact same outcome in combat, etc. A human player simply sets up a character in the game with the required equipment / spells, records the proper sequence of actions to defeat the creature, collect the loot, then travel back to town and sell loot to vendor.
While the bots' systems can be sophisticated in their own right, in no way are these bots exhibiting any sort of AI behavior. In that sense, what the Pac-Man AI is doing is much more interesting. Even in modern games, learning AIs are rarely used, except occasionally in initial training of opponents. I've written AI for several commercial games, and in general, it's much easier to simulate intelligence with simpler algorithms than to use true machine learning. BTW, creating a killer bot is really not all that hard. Computers have far better reflexes than people do. It's much harder to create a computer opponent that's entertaining to play against.
I do agree that unions are increasingly becoming more irrelevant given the protection afforded to modern workers. But in some sense, I think the right for a union to exist is perhaps the most valuable thing for workers, in case those protections are ever rescinded, or are not sufficient. For the most part, today's unions' primary roles today are collective bargaining - that is, ensuring their workers get paid as much as possible. From what I've observed, most modern union-issued strikes occur because of a desire to increase employee compensation. Other demands may be a part of the equation, but salary and/or other compensation and benefits are nearly always a factor.
In general though, the idea of bloggers forming a union smacks of someone wanting to collect union dues from others.
Military (or police) equipment is on a whole different level than most commercial devices when it comes to acceptable tolerances for failure. This process is often described as making a piece of equipment "solder-proof". People who don't understand this need to realize that when lives are literally on the line (for both soldiers and civilians), you often have to pay a premium for both the reliability and/or the specialization needed for military applications. You have to take ALL the specifications into account when comparing products and their price points.
In the demo, I heard one of the characters call a female companion "babe" - not exactly what I would expect in a medieval setting. I'm not saying the game wasn't good (the demo was pretty fun), but I heard some pretty bad dialogue just in the time I played.
I hope you're purposefully being a bit obtuse here. He got 30,000 people to yell scripted orcish war chants. Not the same thing as what you or I could do.
Why is a state (as opposed to a Federal unit) spending it's money on anti-trust discovery? Because it's a great way for an ambitious Attorney General to get his name in the papers? And isn't it strange how the folks that bring these charges always seem to have a competitor company operating within their borders.
That includes games, where the dominating factor resides exclusively in the graphics card and the only difference between the low-end and the high end, both using the same graphics card, is less than 10% hit on the already smooth frame rate. That's not really true at all. Many modern games are extremely CPU intensive, and have been optimized for multi-core processors. Keep in mind that any particular game's frame rate may be either CPU or GPU bound, depending on a number of factors, such as the relative power of each component, and how the game developers decided to balance the load between the two systems. In the case you give, if the game is already GPU bound, then of course upgrading the CPU will have little effect. Alternatively, if you've got a slow CPU and the game is limited by this factor, upgrading the video card will obviously have no effect on the frame rate. Keep in mind, the CPU is responsible for: processing animation data, collision and physics processing, pathfinding, artificial intelligence, particle system calculations, large scale visual culling, level of detail calculations, audio mixing and processing, etc.
There are a few of these items that can be partially shunted off to other hardware, but PC game developers can't rely on this - with the exception of basic video acceleration, everything must have a software fallback as well as being reasonably scalable. It's still arguably gaming that drives PC technology forward more than any other sector of the market, because we can always make use of more resources, CPU speed included.
I'm probably setting myself up for a some abuse here, but has anyone other than myself tried out Office 2007 (which is available at my workplace)? I'm curious what the general consensus was - or even some personal anecdotes... Personally, after getting over a bit of a learning curve, I've actually found the whole context-sensitive ribbon system to be pretty innovative, and I actually prefer it now to older versions. I recall a similar concept used in CorelDraw, where specific toolbars would change based on which particular drawing tool was currently in use, and what type of objects in the drawing were selected.
I've read some documentation (some interesting videos too, but I can't seem to find them) on the justification for the shift in thinking - about how, for example, the explosion in the sheer volume of functionality makes packing every single function into a static menu structure somewhat impractical. To be honest, when I look at some other modern applications with their enormous menu systems, I'd actually have to agree.
While one may or may not argue the benefits / drawbacks of a specific implementation such as Office 2007, I think an interesting point of discussion is the growth of dynamic interfaces in general - that is, interfaces that adapt to the context of the current work that is being done, to display the functionality most important to a user based on that specific context. Adaptability may even be appropriate, as a computer learns what tasks a user attempts in specific circumstances, and then adjusts itself to try to make accomplishing those tasks easier in fewer steps.
Computers are becoming more and more powerful, and it should be an interesting challenge to try to package all this functionality in a way that doesn't overwhelm users with more and more complex interfaces.
Your idea that morals and society's implementation of them are only part of the picture. All they do is raise the bar for some people. Sure, as long as your grandparents were able to put a roof over their head and food in their stomach, they never would entertain the idea of theft. But take that away and let one of their kids die from starvation, and if they still thought that everyone around them with more somehow deserved to keep their possession that could save their lives, while they are dieing, and I would say there would be mental problems if they didn't consider theft. Unfortunately, I think you just invalidated your own argument. May I ask what percentage you'd guess of criminals in the United States need to steal to prevent their children from starving to death? In case you missed the point, my grandparents couldn't put a roof over their kids heads, which is why they were living in a chicken coop. I'm not sure how much poorer you expect someone to be before they qualify as being desperate enough for a life of crime, but I'm pretty sure they qualified.
Naturally, when you talk about extreme circumstances, such as starvation, people will justifiably do what they need to in order to survive, or make sure their children survive. But you're talking about a nearly non-existent circumstance nowadays in 1st world countries. No one, unless they deliberately choose to shun assistance, need starve to death or go without shelter. As such, one can say that morals can "raise the bar" to a point where such a consideration is never given, because those desperate choices need never be made. I agree that morals are only part of the picture - but I just tire of the simplistic notion that "poverty causes crime", when the issue is so much more complex than that. I'm guessing we agree more than disagree here, but I think I was just reacting to that particular issue.
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Brilliant straw-man argument there. You now have me burning down forests, killing grizzly bears, starfish, kelp, and other highly important and relevant species that would obviously have a devastating impact on the environment were they suddenly removed. And yes, I'm well aware that size alone does not necessarily dictate importance in the larger scheme of things (e.g. ocean plankton). But the notion that every single species is equally vital to the ecosystem is simply fallacious to any reasoning mind.
Yes, I'm well aware of the dangers of introducing species to new areas or making changes of any sort of an ecosystem. I just happen to think that saving so many human lives is worth the risk in this case. I'm sorry you don't feel the same way.
I'm fairly certain that if someone you cared deeply for was at serious risk of catching Dengue, you really wouldn't give care quite as much how the ecology would fare without those mosquitoes.
Oh, and take a walk out in a tropical region sometime. You'll quickly realize that the notion of the eco-chain being in any significant peril because one species of insect disappears is a bit far-fetched, I think. The number of insects (both in general number as well as the number of species) is pretty staggering. Species have disappeared all throughout history, and nature is fabulous at filling available niches.
I'd have no hesitation in pulling the trigger if it mean eliminating every damn mosquito on earth. Sorry if that sounds unenlightened.
It's a completely ridiculous assertion. There's no difference in natural language skills between Americans and other parts of the world. The reason Americans typically don't learn more than one language is because there is no real practical reason for most to do so. The simple fact of the matter is, a huge percentage of anyone you would ever meet in day to day life speaks English. And those that don't, most people would never come in contact with. Simply pull up a map, and take a quick peek at the Geography of the United States. It's a pretty damn big place. You can get by just fine only knowing English here.
And for what it's worth, my English language skills are just fine, thank you. I really wish I could refrain from pointing out the irony of someone complaining about how we "can't even speak english properly", but I guess I'm just not that enlightened.
I think you're correct in a way, but I might disagree with your conclusion. If you need a more dynamic approach, then a better solution is to break the functionality up into smaller chunks, and build a framework that allows to you re-arrange those chunks with less effort. I suppose this starts moving toward generic programming a bit, but OOP is the mechanism by which you can do that.
Honestly, I think the #1 problem I've seen with object-oriented programming is that people tend to create classes that are far too large and unwieldy. A giant, monolithic class is really very little different than a procedural API that passes around a single context structure to maintain state. And yes, those types of classes are VERY hard to break apart, but not really much more than a procedural equivalent. It takes a lot of experience to be able to effectively break apart functionality into smaller, logical components.
But don't misunderstand... OOP is not some sort of magic bullet. It's not going to solve any problems automatically for you. Like you mentioned, changing requirements are always a challenge.
I think there's a point at which compatibility layers can be reasonably depreciated. At the moment, I'd guess the market still has a very large number of IE6 browsers in it. But when the [number of web pages affected by this] x [percentage of IE6 browsers] is sufficiently low that few enough care to make it an issue, the backward compatibility will be broken.
OOP does seem to be a double-edged sword, though. While well-written object-oriented code can be substantially easier to read and understand than well-written procedural code, badly written OOP code can be harder to understand and more complex than badly-written procedural code. So no, it's not exactly a panacea. But like all powerful tools, it really depends on the skill of the person using it.
That being said, I have no problem with adverts in game when they make sense. To me, those are games in contemporary settings in which it would be strange NOT to see adverts (sports games are an oft-cited example), and which are NOT intrusive to the game playing experience. The way I figure it, why shouldn't game developers be allowed to leverage some work that's already going into the game (often in the form of fake ads) to earn additional revenue. Money going to developers helps fund cool new games, right?
The beauty of living in a consumer-driven capitalist system is that voting with dollars has more impact than anything we could ever say here on slashdot. It's ultimately a much truer test of people's preferences than posting on a forum. You said it yourself - players complained and left the game. This will not go unnoticed by those holding the money. I actually have faith that the cost of game development in the future will still be paid by the cost of games, not by ads. Keep in mind that the game market is experiencing unprecedented growth. Honestly, some of the companies (like SOE) that are grasping at ad revenue right now are likely doing so out of desperation (because they can't release a decent product to save their lives). These sorts of ham-handed approaches will probably polarize the consumers to reject ads for all but a few specialized projects.
And honestly, that's how it really should be.
Why complain before you even attempt to correct the situation? Call/e-mail support and explain the situation. You might be able to get that download or perhaps some additional compensation (such as some points). I understand it's more fun to complain on slashdot, but...
"But I don't know anyone else with a 360 that hasn't broken, except you now."
It was this line that cause me to wonder if there are some sour grapes at work here. I work at a gaming company, so of course quite a few have Xboxen. In addition to that, I know a few others as well. Let's put the total number at about thirty that I know personally. Of all those, I know of two hardware failures. Now, thirty isn't exactly a huge sampling number, but it's not tiny either.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was closer to the actual hardware failure rate - 30% sounds ridiculously high by my experience.
The hard part is not going down on the cheap. It's going up on the cheap.
This is an interesting application of distributed and networked technology (I'm not sure what else to call it - would this be classified as distributed computing?) - using technology to extract information from an extremely large number of processing nodes in a way that is impractical on a smaller scale. It reminds me in a way of projects like Seti@Home/Folding@Home. That is, using the combined technological resources from a large number of people to do some pretty cool things that just weren't possible a few years ago.
It will be interesting to see what other sorts of projects in this vein take shape in the near future.
Lol, I guess someone modded me down as 'redundant' as penalty for my misspelling of 'soldier'. Sheesh, tough crowd. Funny enough though, another common axiom in the armed forces is: "there's no such thing as soldier-proof", which is how I read your post at first.
While the bots' systems can be sophisticated in their own right, in no way are these bots exhibiting any sort of AI behavior. In that sense, what the Pac-Man AI is doing is much more interesting. Even in modern games, learning AIs are rarely used, except occasionally in initial training of opponents. I've written AI for several commercial games, and in general, it's much easier to simulate intelligence with simpler algorithms than to use true machine learning. BTW, creating a killer bot is really not all that hard. Computers have far better reflexes than people do. It's much harder to create a computer opponent that's entertaining to play against.
I do agree that unions are increasingly becoming more irrelevant given the protection afforded to modern workers. But in some sense, I think the right for a union to exist is perhaps the most valuable thing for workers, in case those protections are ever rescinded, or are not sufficient. For the most part, today's unions' primary roles today are collective bargaining - that is, ensuring their workers get paid as much as possible. From what I've observed, most modern union-issued strikes occur because of a desire to increase employee compensation. Other demands may be a part of the equation, but salary and/or other compensation and benefits are nearly always a factor.
In general though, the idea of bloggers forming a union smacks of someone wanting to collect union dues from others.
Military (or police) equipment is on a whole different level than most commercial devices when it comes to acceptable tolerances for failure. This process is often described as making a piece of equipment "solder-proof". People who don't understand this need to realize that when lives are literally on the line (for both soldiers and civilians), you often have to pay a premium for both the reliability and/or the specialization needed for military applications. You have to take ALL the specifications into account when comparing products and their price points.
Anyone know why NASA is specifying human-powered moon buggy designs?
In the demo, I heard one of the characters call a female companion "babe" - not exactly what I would expect in a medieval setting. I'm not saying the game wasn't good (the demo was pretty fun), but I heard some pretty bad dialogue just in the time I played.
I hope you're purposefully being a bit obtuse here. He got 30,000 people to yell scripted orcish war chants. Not the same thing as what you or I could do.
There are a few of these items that can be partially shunted off to other hardware, but PC game developers can't rely on this - with the exception of basic video acceleration, everything must have a software fallback as well as being reasonably scalable. It's still arguably gaming that drives PC technology forward more than any other sector of the market, because we can always make use of more resources, CPU speed included.
I am.
Thanks Brian. I'll check your essay out.
I'm probably setting myself up for a some abuse here, but has anyone other than myself tried out Office 2007 (which is available at my workplace)? I'm curious what the general consensus was - or even some personal anecdotes... Personally, after getting over a bit of a learning curve, I've actually found the whole context-sensitive ribbon system to be pretty innovative, and I actually prefer it now to older versions. I recall a similar concept used in CorelDraw, where specific toolbars would change based on which particular drawing tool was currently in use, and what type of objects in the drawing were selected.
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/08/22/711808.aspx
I've read some documentation (some interesting videos too, but I can't seem to find them) on the justification for the shift in thinking - about how, for example, the explosion in the sheer volume of functionality makes packing every single function into a static menu structure somewhat impractical. To be honest, when I look at some other modern applications with their enormous menu systems, I'd actually have to agree.
While one may or may not argue the benefits / drawbacks of a specific implementation such as Office 2007, I think an interesting point of discussion is the growth of dynamic interfaces in general - that is, interfaces that adapt to the context of the current work that is being done, to display the functionality most important to a user based on that specific context. Adaptability may even be appropriate, as a computer learns what tasks a user attempts in specific circumstances, and then adjusts itself to try to make accomplishing those tasks easier in fewer steps.
Computers are becoming more and more powerful, and it should be an interesting challenge to try to package all this functionality in a way that doesn't overwhelm users with more and more complex interfaces.
Naturally, when you talk about extreme circumstances, such as starvation, people will justifiably do what they need to in order to survive, or make sure their children survive. But you're talking about a nearly non-existent circumstance nowadays in 1st world countries. No one, unless they deliberately choose to shun assistance, need starve to death or go without shelter. As such, one can say that morals can "raise the bar" to a point where such a consideration is never given, because those desperate choices need never be made. I agree that morals are only part of the picture - but I just tire of the simplistic notion that "poverty causes crime", when the issue is so much more complex than that. I'm guessing we agree more than disagree here, but I think I was just reacting to that particular issue.