What makes you think a compiler will be able to do it better than a human?
When people write games, they do all kinds of crazy stunts to ensure they have as few multiplications as possible. Can you really trust a compiler to get the code right for that tight inner loop? Figuring out parallelism might be hard, but game programming has always been hard.
Also, you avoided mentioning memory. It doesn't matter if Haskell uses marginally less memory if it's in the wrong place when you need it. Is that texture in RAM, VRAM, or swap? That sort of thing makes a big difference in terms of performance. And games must maintain a certain framerate. Sometimes it's completely unacceptable to use swap, even if the time gets made up later.
I'm not against functional languages, it's just a question of using the right tool for the job. You use high level languages for high level tasks, and low level languages for low level tasks. If you're writing a compiler or an AI or a raytracer, where realtime performance it not an issue, sure, functional languages are great. But games have always been married to the hardware, and I don't see how that could change any time soon.
Not any serious games that push as many polygons as possible. A demanding game must get at the raw hardware, and you don't really want to do that with a scripting language. Sure, you can compile python, but good humans will still beat compilers, especially on exotic hardware.
When you're writing a game engine, you want to manage your own memory. For many games, calls to malloc and free are too expensive. You want to be able to shuffle game data around. You want to be able to use inline assembly, for floating point stuff. You want to be able to take a pointer and run it across a goddam buffer. You want actual for loops, not a for each.
Sure, python is pretty good for web programming. And it works OK for small, 2D games, too. But it's not like people avoid functional languages out of ignorance. Imperative programming is still popular for a reason.
However, nowadays, you have to be careful about stuff in real life getting on the internet. You know those forms people make you fill out sometimes, with your name, email, phone, street address, etc? Some stupid fucks will type those up and put those online. To be truly paranoid, you need a nickname, throwaway email, PO Box, etc.
The problem is, if you want to drive, get loans, etc. you have to give up your identity. If you register to vote, get a drivers license, or get a credit card, you will be in a bloody database somewhere. The only real way to avoid this would be to use someone else's identity (borrow a birth certificate, etc.).
No. On the internet, there is absolutely no reason for censorship. Not in the sense discussed here: a service provider being required to block something. If someone posts kiddy porn, or incites a riot, you arrest the person who made the kiddy porn, or the person who incited the riot. There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to force a takedown of the video. Unlike some would have you believe, you simply cannot be harmed by information. Be it kiddy porn, hate speech, or political soapboxing.
This is exactly right. People whine all the time about stuff on youtube. OMG, lesbians kissing! OMG amputees! OMG suggestive audio! And, youtube actually is reasonably sensitive to complaints. However, as the old saying goes, your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins. Or, it should, anyway. If Muslims don't like athiests being rude on youtube, they shouldn't watch it. It's the internet, for God's sake. Either feed the troll, or ignore it. It's not hurting you.
And this applies to countries, too. If you don't like it, block it. Don't screw everyone else over. Although, in this instance, I think it probably has more to do with the incumbents feeling their power disappear. Desperate, greedy people often come up with really shitty arguments (series of tubes, anyone), and it isn't necessarily anything to be shocked about. The internet WILL rewrite politics, no matter what they do.
Slashdot -> Arstechnica -> Happypenguin -> warren25smash -> Ian Crossland.
Very little slips past both Slashdot and Ars, although Slashdot is more concise, and avoids the bias of ars. But Ars has more in-depth articles. Happypenguin, to see if my games have been updated, warren for "political commentary". Warren is as biased as hell, but he's fairly rational, and tends to cover the most important stuff. Then, I round things out with a bit of crossmack, just because it feels good.
Well, I used to live out in the woods. My parents never lock the door, mainly because the door doesn't shut. Also, my brothers poured wax in the keyhole, making it hard to insert the key.
Besides, I've carried washing machines and stuff down that hill, and looting the place would really be more trouble than it's worth.
Oh, they'd keep us around. It's pretty hard to sell porn to dead people.
Of course, they might start selling porn to each other. That's when we'd be really screwed. Imagine spending half your time as image-recognition hardware, and the other half making crappy porn movies.
I find it ironic how stuff like this ends up being the among the more practical applications for AI. I mean, science fiction is usually about robots taking over. Instead, we end up with an internet full of bots trying to sell viagra, bots trying to block viagra, bots trying to break captchas, bots trying to detect copyright infringement, p2p systems to insure privacy, and so on.
I don't think this sort of searching for pirated content is going to be terribly effective, though. I mean, it might be able to catch the blatant stuff like youtube, but ultimately, they're never going to kill p2p, especially once private trackers become more common.
Yeah, that's a nice thought. But they don't want you on all the time, either. I could understand this sort of logic when they were using phone lines; they only have so many modems in their pool. Still, I've heard stories about how comcast will periodically autokick you in order to reclaim your ip address.
I can't understand why you'd want to do that. You'd end up having to transcode the thing, which would screw with your quality. You'd have no control over the capture, or the encoding, or any part of the process.
Sure, your solution is probably just fine for transferring crap home movies or something. But, if, for example, you want to transfer some old, rare fansubs, you're not going to want to fuck around.
Yeah, they have a lot of child prostitutes. However, they have a totally different sort of culture over there. It's considered an honorable sort of thing to do, and they get treated better than prostitutes in most western countries. There was an article in science news about this a while back.
But I agree that blocking youtube for something trivial like that is a bit extreme.
No, it's not necessarily because they're hosting that they're going over the limit. I can suck down a hundred gigs in less than a week over bittorrent. The problem isn't that it's capped, the problem is that it's advertised as unlimited.
We've got that here in the US, but I don't know that it makes a difference. I think it has more to do with how socially acceptable it is to litter.
That, or Americans are too rich and lazy to return the stuff:P
I never read the news. I just read the tags. How else would I get first post? I mean, if it says "bigbrother", "privacy", "yes", and "no", I pretty much know that the article is about surveillance, and I know enough to copy-paste my post about citizen vigilantism and Heinlein. Likewise, if it says "mafiaa", "piracy", and "bittorrent", I need to post my bit about how copyright law should be repealed. Or, maybe it says "wiimote", "hardhack". Then I post about how all that stuff with the wiimote has already been done before and how everyone is just a bunch of nintendo fanboys. If it says "education", I write about homeschooling, and if it says "linux", I write about how ubuntu hosed my MBR.
Yeah, that sort of thing always pisses me off. Nobody has even defined consciousness for humans. Hell, we still argue about when humans are human (brain death and abortion and all that). Nobody has solved the zombie problem. Still, we get animal-rights people and religious nuts who each assert their own versions of dualism.
Not that it really makes a difference. You can argue that apes should have human rights, but that doesn't mean they're going to get it. Humans don't have human rights.
It's only when they put ads on paid-for stuff that it gets irritating. Tasteful, unobtrusive, contextual ads are just fine with me. Of course, I still block them anyway.
Frankly, I think their best bet would be to make ads that people want to watch. If you go on youtube, a compilation of funny ads is one of the top videos of all time. Put another way, you create a self-replicating meme, and tag on a payload.
Of course, Bittorrent Inc. is probably screwed. The kind of people who use bittorrent are usually not terribly concerned about legality anyway. So asking them to buy a bunch of DRMed crap, and waste their bandwidth on ads is probably not a smart idea. If they set up a nice, clean FTP server with plain old MPEGs, they might get people to pay for it, if they were lucky. They might attract videophiles with too much money, who want to max out their pipes. But if it's bittorrent, you're paying them so they can use your bandwidth.
Civilization always was boring for me that way. The whole point is to get a "cycle" ahead of your opponent in military technology, build Leonardo's, and then just steamroller the bastard with your cavalry horde. All while keeping your cities small so they don't cost you any money.
Of course, I never really got into the higher skill levels.
"Deconstruction is examining philosophical positions in a way which strips them of their cultural artifacts."
Deconstructionism is all about finding some self-referential "contradiction", thumping one's chest, and then feeling clever. Which possibly makes it the most useless, arrogant, and shallow form of thought ever conceived. Seriously, shut the fuck up already. Deconstructionism is like the feedback you hear when you turn up the gain too much on a microphone. It's shrill, meaningless self-reference, and just plain irritating.
See, I LIKE nihilism. I like Nietzsche. I like Zen. I believe a meaningless world is reason for hope, because it leaves a blank slate that is open to interpretation. But it still bugs me when people dance around in the trappings of logic. Either embrace self-contradiction, or don't. Don't claim to accept it, and then whine about how it's so depressing. Or meta-analyse it.
Self-analysis is impossible. It's meaningless, but more importantly, it's utterly useless. It's like trying to do eye surgery on yourself. Or trying to stick your head up your ass. Seriously, I have no clue why academics still believe in the self. Because if there is no self, there is no self-analysis, and no contradiction. Fuck Descartes and his cogito. Fuck that bastard up the ass. He's responsible for all the wankery in western philosophy that wasn't caused by Plato.
Why do postmodern literary dipshits bother to/analyse/ everything if they think it's futile anyway? Oh well, I guess it makes for interesting movies.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think a compiler will be able to do it better than a human?
When people write games, they do all kinds of crazy stunts to ensure they have as few multiplications as possible. Can you really trust a compiler to get the code right for that tight inner loop? Figuring out parallelism might be hard, but game programming has always been hard.
Also, you avoided mentioning memory. It doesn't matter if Haskell uses marginally less memory if it's in the wrong place when you need it. Is that texture in RAM, VRAM, or swap? That sort of thing makes a big difference in terms of performance. And games must maintain a certain framerate. Sometimes it's completely unacceptable to use swap, even if the time gets made up later.
I'm not against functional languages, it's just a question of using the right tool for the job. You use high level languages for high level tasks, and low level languages for low level tasks. If you're writing a compiler or an AI or a raytracer, where realtime performance it not an issue, sure, functional languages are great. But games have always been married to the hardware, and I don't see how that could change any time soon.
Not any serious games that push as many polygons as possible. A demanding game must get at the raw hardware, and you don't really want to do that with a scripting language. Sure, you can compile python, but good humans will still beat compilers, especially on exotic hardware.
When you're writing a game engine, you want to manage your own memory. For many games, calls to malloc and free are too expensive. You want to be able to shuffle game data around. You want to be able to use inline assembly, for floating point stuff. You want to be able to take a pointer and run it across a goddam buffer. You want actual for loops, not a for each.
Sure, python is pretty good for web programming. And it works OK for small, 2D games, too. But it's not like people avoid functional languages out of ignorance. Imperative programming is still popular for a reason.
Good luck writing that game of yours in Haskell. For that matter, good luck writing a game in anything other than C/C++.
Lucky you.
However, nowadays, you have to be careful about stuff in real life getting on the internet. You know those forms people make you fill out sometimes, with your name, email, phone, street address, etc? Some stupid fucks will type those up and put those online. To be truly paranoid, you need a nickname, throwaway email, PO Box, etc.
The problem is, if you want to drive, get loans, etc. you have to give up your identity. If you register to vote, get a drivers license, or get a credit card, you will be in a bloody database somewhere. The only real way to avoid this would be to use someone else's identity (borrow a birth certificate, etc.).
More like: "Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch."
No. On the internet, there is absolutely no reason for censorship. Not in the sense discussed here: a service provider being required to block something. If someone posts kiddy porn, or incites a riot, you arrest the person who made the kiddy porn, or the person who incited the riot. There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to force a takedown of the video. Unlike some would have you believe, you simply cannot be harmed by information. Be it kiddy porn, hate speech, or political soapboxing.
I'd give you insightful if I had points.
This is exactly right. People whine all the time about stuff on youtube. OMG, lesbians kissing! OMG amputees! OMG suggestive audio! And, youtube actually is reasonably sensitive to complaints. However, as the old saying goes, your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins. Or, it should, anyway. If Muslims don't like athiests being rude on youtube, they shouldn't watch it. It's the internet, for God's sake. Either feed the troll, or ignore it. It's not hurting you.
And this applies to countries, too. If you don't like it, block it. Don't screw everyone else over. Although, in this instance, I think it probably has more to do with the incumbents feeling their power disappear. Desperate, greedy people often come up with really shitty arguments (series of tubes, anyone), and it isn't necessarily anything to be shocked about. The internet WILL rewrite politics, no matter what they do.
Slashdot -> Arstechnica -> Happypenguin -> warren25smash -> Ian Crossland.
Very little slips past both Slashdot and Ars, although Slashdot is more concise, and avoids the bias of ars. But Ars has more in-depth articles. Happypenguin, to see if my games have been updated, warren for "political commentary". Warren is as biased as hell, but he's fairly rational, and tends to cover the most important stuff. Then, I round things out with a bit of crossmack, just because it feels good.
Well, I used to live out in the woods. My parents never lock the door, mainly because the door doesn't shut. Also, my brothers poured wax in the keyhole, making it hard to insert the key.
Besides, I've carried washing machines and stuff down that hill, and looting the place would really be more trouble than it's worth.
Oh, they'd keep us around. It's pretty hard to sell porn to dead people.
Of course, they might start selling porn to each other. That's when we'd be really screwed. Imagine spending half your time as image-recognition hardware, and the other half making crappy porn movies.
Yeah, sounds like a pretty dark future to me.
I find it ironic how stuff like this ends up being the among the more practical applications for AI. I mean, science fiction is usually about robots taking over. Instead, we end up with an internet full of bots trying to sell viagra, bots trying to block viagra, bots trying to break captchas, bots trying to detect copyright infringement, p2p systems to insure privacy, and so on.
I don't think this sort of searching for pirated content is going to be terribly effective, though. I mean, it might be able to catch the blatant stuff like youtube, but ultimately, they're never going to kill p2p, especially once private trackers become more common.
Yeah, that's a nice thought. But they don't want you on all the time, either. I could understand this sort of logic when they were using phone lines; they only have so many modems in their pool. Still, I've heard stories about how comcast will periodically autokick you in order to reclaim your ip address.
I can't understand why you'd want to do that. You'd end up having to transcode the thing, which would screw with your quality. You'd have no control over the capture, or the encoding, or any part of the process.
Sure, your solution is probably just fine for transferring crap home movies or something. But, if, for example, you want to transfer some old, rare fansubs, you're not going to want to fuck around.
Yeah, they have a lot of child prostitutes. However, they have a totally different sort of culture over there. It's considered an honorable sort of thing to do, and they get treated better than prostitutes in most western countries. There was an article in science news about this a while back.
But I agree that blocking youtube for something trivial like that is a bit extreme.
It's called meatspace. Of course, if the singularity actually happens, be prepared for v1@g4@ hawking bots in real life, too.
Heh. I get 100M down, 100M up. Whole TV episodes in 5 minutes. And I change my MAC every 3 hours, being the paranoid bastard that I am.
No, it's not necessarily because they're hosting that they're going over the limit. I can suck down a hundred gigs in less than a week over bittorrent. The problem isn't that it's capped, the problem is that it's advertised as unlimited.
We've got that here in the US, but I don't know that it makes a difference. I think it has more to do with how socially acceptable it is to litter. That, or Americans are too rich and lazy to return the stuff :P
I never read the news. I just read the tags. How else would I get first post? I mean, if it says "bigbrother", "privacy", "yes", and "no", I pretty much know that the article is about surveillance, and I know enough to copy-paste my post about citizen vigilantism and Heinlein. Likewise, if it says "mafiaa", "piracy", and "bittorrent", I need to post my bit about how copyright law should be repealed. Or, maybe it says "wiimote", "hardhack". Then I post about how all that stuff with the wiimote has already been done before and how everyone is just a bunch of nintendo fanboys. If it says "education", I write about homeschooling, and if it says "linux", I write about how ubuntu hosed my MBR.
Yeah, that sort of thing always pisses me off. Nobody has even defined consciousness for humans. Hell, we still argue about when humans are human (brain death and abortion and all that). Nobody has solved the zombie problem. Still, we get animal-rights people and religious nuts who each assert their own versions of dualism.
Not that it really makes a difference. You can argue that apes should have human rights, but that doesn't mean they're going to get it. Humans don't have human rights.
I say just kill 'em all and let God sort it out.
It's only when they put ads on paid-for stuff that it gets irritating. Tasteful, unobtrusive, contextual ads are just fine with me. Of course, I still block them anyway.
Frankly, I think their best bet would be to make ads that people want to watch. If you go on youtube, a compilation of funny ads is one of the top videos of all time. Put another way, you create a self-replicating meme, and tag on a payload.
Of course, Bittorrent Inc. is probably screwed. The kind of people who use bittorrent are usually not terribly concerned about legality anyway. So asking them to buy a bunch of DRMed crap, and waste their bandwidth on ads is probably not a smart idea. If they set up a nice, clean FTP server with plain old MPEGs, they might get people to pay for it, if they were lucky. They might attract videophiles with too much money, who want to max out their pipes. But if it's bittorrent, you're paying them so they can use your bandwidth.
Civilization always was boring for me that way. The whole point is to get a "cycle" ahead of your opponent in military technology, build Leonardo's, and then just steamroller the bastard with your cavalry horde. All while keeping your cities small so they don't cost you any money.
Of course, I never really got into the higher skill levels.
That's all that AI does. It just searches a tree of decisions based on some heuristic. Hell, that's all people do.
"There also some reference to the iconoclastic irreverence in Australian larrikin tradition in my previous posts."
Where I'm from, we call that trolling. Yeah, I know, it took me a while to catch on. You win.
"Deconstruction is examining philosophical positions in a way which strips them of their cultural artifacts."
/analyse/ everything if they think it's futile anyway? Oh well, I guess it makes for interesting movies.
Deconstructionism is all about finding some self-referential "contradiction", thumping one's chest, and then feeling clever. Which possibly makes it the most useless, arrogant, and shallow form of thought ever conceived. Seriously, shut the fuck up already. Deconstructionism is like the feedback you hear when you turn up the gain too much on a microphone. It's shrill, meaningless self-reference, and just plain irritating.
See, I LIKE nihilism. I like Nietzsche. I like Zen. I believe a meaningless world is reason for hope, because it leaves a blank slate that is open to interpretation. But it still bugs me when people dance around in the trappings of logic. Either embrace self-contradiction, or don't. Don't claim to accept it, and then whine about how it's so depressing. Or meta-analyse it.
Self-analysis is impossible. It's meaningless, but more importantly, it's utterly useless. It's like trying to do eye surgery on yourself. Or trying to stick your head up your ass. Seriously, I have no clue why academics still believe in the self. Because if there is no self, there is no self-analysis, and no contradiction. Fuck Descartes and his cogito. Fuck that bastard up the ass. He's responsible for all the wankery in western philosophy that wasn't caused by Plato.
Why do postmodern literary dipshits bother to