Large Nepenthes have been known for many, many years. Do a search on Google images for "Nepenthes mouse" and you'll find examples of where people have had rats and mice fall victim to nepenthes in people's greenhouses so there's little reason it wont happen in the wild, although I suppose you could argue animals should be more wise to it in their natural environments.
There was a story going around various carnivorous plant communities and quite honestly I can't verify it's truth but needless to say it seems plausible. There was apparently a zoo that had some large nepenthes in the monkey enclosure (They're often just called monkey cups because monkeys have been known to drink from them in the wild) and they had to be removed because baby monkeys kept falling into the pitchers and required rescuing before they began to get digested which in turn apparently made many of the children at the zoo observing the monkeys cry.
You can keep nepenthes at home, some species are easy to keep as they don't need a massive amount of humidity and don't need especially warm temperatures but others can be kept in a greenhouse. Personally I keep one in the bathroom as use of the shower provides all the humidity it needs in that room and it does a decent job of dealing with spiders and mossies that make their way in there although be warned, the digestive process isn't particularly fast or terribly exciting, we're talking weeks or months. They do look impressive though, particularly the species with red pitchers or the combined reddish/yellow/green pitchers.
It's interesting keeping carnivorous plants and I started it because I got fed up of insects in my computer room in the summer. I didn't want an insecticutor as the room gets too hot as is and I don't want to use even more electricity so I figured the natural route may be an interesting option, it certainly is. Sundew (drosera), Venus flytraps (dionaea muscipula), Pitcher plants (nepenthes and saracennia) and butterworts (pinguicula) are the best bet.
If you are interested in getting started with carnivorous plants, I don't recommend trying from seed at first and you really need rainwater or distilled water (tap water doesn't cut it) but there are decent suppliers everywhere (www.littleshopofhorrors.co.uk if you're in the UK is decent). The one thing I will say though is please, if you are going to maintain your own creature killing plants use peat from sustainable sources or alternatives! There's no reason you can't keep this type of plant at home though if you can get hold of one from a legitimate source (i.e. not looted from the wild) which isn't too hard.
What I really want is a rat catching venus flytrap or sundew, now THAT would be something;)
I appreciate your responses, you've certainly covered a lot of misconceptions I had regarding HTML 5 so far and whilst I still have some concerns about it. I feel a little less gloomy about the prospect of it becoming mainstream now but there still do seem to be a fair few issues, most notably related to accessibility more than anything.
I do have some questions regarding the choice of some content and media blocks however, why do we have blocks for things such as asides, quotes and code but not for things such as tags (I realise we have tag for individual tags, but not for blocks of tags) and also things such as related links areas and so forth? What if these become more prominent than other areas such as footers? To me it's that the spec seems to specific in some areas, that it's simply not generic enough. We have divs to divide content and we can define what that specific div is for ourselves, do we really want to be defining some content blocks with specific tags whilst others are defined less explicitly in a more generic div?
Would it not have been better to build on top of the more minimal XHTML spec and extend it to support the new features? Rather than end up with this situation where you have tags that really do need to be deprecated but can't be?
I realise that people have many options when it comes to HTML 5 and believe I'll take the most solid, unambiguous, accessible and scalable option I can if I ever end up writing HTML 5 markup but that's not what bothers me, what bothers me is other people having choices and not understanding the consequences of their choices such that their page doesn't work properly in my browser so that as I've mentioned before, we continue to suffer a broken web.
What is being done to discourage or ensure that the average Joes out there write markup that doesn't mangle presentation and content together potentially causing problems?
You seem to be putting a lot of faith in the ability of companies producing browsers to solve a lot of the problems for you but when they have failed thus far to produce browsers that comply with simpler, less ambiguous and more straightforward specs to this point what makes you think they'll be able to support the potentially more problematic HTML 5 spec?
You're right, in an ideal world Javascript would be separated off again, essentially we'd have separate presentation, content and logic.
That way slim devices for example, or accessibility tools can ignore presentation and logic that may otherwise cause problems whilst still delivering the content to users. Someone who is blind needn't care if the website has fancy Javascript effects or even the most perfect layout in the world as long as their screen reader can read the actual articles out.
Mangling everything together is great for the MySpace teenagers who have no binds when developing their site but hopeless in achieving an accessible, scalable, maintainable web.
Why prolong a broken web when you could just figure out what the best way is to get people using the perfect spec?
Large parts of the web were developed by amateur developers using easily accessible and easy to use but broken WYSIWYG editors like Frontpage. Nowadays people seem to use prepackaged stuff like the various web editors hosting packages provide but again they're providing broken HTML, HTML 5 wont change this.
The best thing that can happen is that there is released a straightforward WYSIWYG editor for fully compliant XHTML - it's a tall order for sure but it's a worthwhile endeavour because it keeps development in the hands of the very people that made the web without also breaking it at the same time. The key is getting a strong spec like XHTML in the hands of amateurs, not leaving them with tools that provide broken, non-standards compliant markup - the same tools they'll use even when HTML 5 is out.
If the amount of media attention that HTML 5 has gained thus far had instead been spent on letting people know HTML 4 is being phased out and XHTML is the way forward then it'd be much better for the web as a whole.
"And xhtml also sucks for hand-coded pages since it is full of redundant closing tags, for things like , , , li, and so on. It's only more typing and more obfuscating syntactic sugar."
But that's exactly the point, you're suggesting the browser should simply guess where to end blocks, that breeds ambiguity when there's no set way to decide where a specific block should end, browsers simply have to make a best guess and when different browsers guess differently then well, you get fucked up pages on some browsers.
I'm not really sure how explicity declaring the end of a block in any way obfuscates the code, it makes it much clearer as you can see rather easily where a specific block ends. Of course if you correctly indent your tags then matching up start and end tags is plenty easy enough.
"To me it is obvious that it is a waste of manpower to require of millions of people to learn the exact strict xhtml rules rather than make the browsers more flexible with non-conformant input, in a well-defined cross-browser portable manner."
But that's an impossible task without a strict ruleset, if there's no set way to do things then how can each browser vendor possibly know how they should be implementing things? I don't see learning the exact strict rules as that big a deal as they're pretty simple and certainly if you understand CSS, there's absolutely no reason you wouldn't be able to understand XHTML's strict syntax, the very fact it has less tags that are redundant with CSS (i.e. underline, bold etc.) means if anything it's easier than things like HTML5 where you seemingly have to find a specific tag for many things such articles and video but not quite everything so you still have to mangle CSS in as well, it leads to your presentation code being horribly mangled in with your content.
"HTML 5 will add new useful features. XHTML adds nothing that wasn't already possible in HTML 4.01-strict"
You mean apart from the very fact that it's eXtensible without any real limitations? I'd say that's a pretty big bonus. Currently HTML 5 defines lots of new things such as video and sound, but what happens if something new comes along, like 3D stuff or something related to touch computing for example? Do we have to wait until they ratify a new HTML spec like HTML 6 or HTML 5.1? With XHTML the industry can bring forth it's own solution an awful lot quicker than any HTML standards comittee will ever be able to.
"I think you are talking about spacer GIFs and table markup. As far as I know, you can still abuse tables for page layout in XHTML. Moreover, to make a page that is really portable between 1024 pixel monitors and devices with a 150 pixel-wide screen requires much more than just xhtml/css; both the CSS and the page structure need to be carefully designed to be portable, in a way that is not enforced by the xhtml spec."
No, that's not the case, the whole point of HTML is you have the loose structure and the content defined in the XHTML with the presentation defined in the CSS, with a handheld device you may simply ignore the CSS or apply your own to present it in a format best suited to your device. With HTML 5 you have presentation embedded inside the HTML itself and so you have to either ignore specific tags which can be troublesome if matching end tags aren't included (see my first point in this post), it is more resource intensive and it makes it harder to apply a device specific presentation layer (stylesheet) if other presentation is already declared in the body of the document.
It goes further than personal home pages too, HTML 5 web applications are going to be an absolute nightmare to maintain for large businesses if they end up finding they're pretty much forced to adopt it. If you have a content management system and you have a web team responsible for ensuring a corporate standard for the site is met in terms of presentation and layout then the last thing you want is for your employees to be able to randomly change font settings and so forth by including inline tags - you may as well let them free on your stylesheets!
HTML 5 is probably the worst thing that can happen to the web right now, slowly but surely XHTML compliance was bringing together browsers and sites, you only have to look at the magnificent jump in compatibility of sites from IE6 and Firefox 1 to IE7 and Firefox 2, whilst far from ideal still, developing Standards compliant code for the latest generation of browsers is much less of a headache than it's ever been.
HTML 5 increases ambiguity, it's a language seemingly designed for the MySpace generation - people who just want to hack together quick and dirty sites without any care or thought for scalability and accessibility. The simplification of XHTML over HTML whereby ambiguity is decreased by fixed rules, and less presentation tags was absolutely fantastic for developing sites that work on a variety of user agents as much more is left for the user agent to figure out so that small handheld devices could finally display compliant sites in a way that best fit the screen. Accessibility software such as screen readers have a much easier time as they could largely ignore CSS and stick to reading out the actual content without worry that some random presentation tags with a non-strict syntax was going to bugger up the parsing.
The most important concept with XHTML was separation of presentation from content coupled with a strict syntax and HTML 5 goes against these two extremely important points for ensuring we have a clean, standardised, accessible web. It's also quite a problem that HTML 5 says "Oh you don't have to use this or that, you can do it was you want", a standard needs to make up it's fucking mind not sit on the fence because otherwise it's not much of a standard as you get people doing things in many different ways, some of which are undoubtedly going to break in some user agent or another.
Essentially what's happened with HTML 5 is we've got a language that caters for those incapable of working with a well structured language, on one hand this is great because more people can publish to the web, on the other it's awful as it basically fucks up the web further. Instead of dumbing down the underlying language and breaking the web as a result, we should be producing better tools for working with the existing language keeping the web clean without leaving it difficult to publish to.
Do we really want to prolong the old situation of sites that only work or look differently with some browsers and that are inaccesible to people with special accessibility requirements? Not to mention that aren't scalable as content and presentation get mangled into one and hence really aren't maintainable either?
It's because Rare (Now owned by MS Game Studios) owns the code etc., Activision owns the IP and Nintendo owns the game rights.
They were going to release it on live arcade and the virtual console but MS/Nintendo/Activision couldn't decide how to share profits so it was ditched across all platforms.
The petition exists to try and make the companies agree a profit share and bring the project back to life. The rumour was that Rare had a working port with online multiplayer support for the XBox 360 only 2months from completion and the Wii version would've been a direct part, hence thus far so near yet so far.
So they should spend an absolute fortune on preparing the code for release, separating it out from the stuff that doesn't belong to them and spending thousands of lawyer hours checking that it's all okay to release for what, 11,000 petitioners? Just to put that into context, the current petition to get Goldeneye on XBox live arcade is at 18,000 signatures and growing.
It's not as if once they'd removed all the stuff didn't belong to them they'd be left with a working system, just random chunks of code, many of which will likely be somewhat worthless without the rest of the code that had to be removed.
Whilst this is indeed a clear case of weak AI, it's not quite as simple as the weak AI vs. strong AI thing. Weak AI in itself can be broken down into different levels, the AI mentioned in this article seems to be just a run of the mill application of symbolic AI, and whilst symbolic AI.
Because such programs like this are the ones that for some reason make the headlines they're also the ones that make people think "well, AI is a bit of a let down then really isn't it" but weak AI goes further than just symbolic AI, many accept that symbolic AI has a much less promising future right now and all the important research that goes into AI that might actually seem more intelligent is in the field of biologically inspired AI which is still right now only providing us with weak AI, but it's weak AI that is often so much more impressive than old fashioned rehashes of various symbolic AI implementations as per this article.
I'm not suggesting that the basis of your comment was wrong - you're certainly correct that this type of AI really isn't that impressive and as such it's hard to call it intelligent, however I do feel you were wrong to dismiss current AI as a whole with your comment that it's the only type of AI we have, because this specific type of AI (symbolic AI) really isn't the only type we have. Biologically inspired computing has been pushing symbolic AI out the spotlight for over a decade now and absolutely demolishing it in terms of the impressive kind of demonstrations it's bringing forth.
Of course, that's not to say symbolic AI is worthless either, it's certainly has it's place for things like this, chess and for expert systems and so forth. The biggest problem is that when AI becomes commonplace and people implement it left right and centre they find it easy to overlook the intelligent part of it and see it as "just another bit of code to implement". This is essentially the case with the poster you were replying to - we find it easier to call something intelligent if we don't understand it ourselves, but when we understand it ourselves we don't see it as intelligent.
No I doubt it was to be honest, it's just that the article suggests that Toshiba has one-upped Microsoft's version by doing it without the table they used in their recent demos, but as the stuff I posted demonstrated, MS had already done this too so what Toshiba did was actually nothing MS (and likely other companies as you mention) hadn't done already.
MS just seems to be the primary pusher of this into the mainstream market right now, I'd say that's the only real difference.
Are games like Scrabble even modern enough to be covered by copyright laws and so forth?
Is it not like music and such where there's a limited copyright term, and hence is this term not over yet for many of these games? I'm sure some of them are pretty old?
In the UK, the average wage is around £24k a year iirc, game developers will earn £30k+ so that's where my average wage comment stems from.
I do know a lot about the casual game development market as it happens, and I've purchased and enjoyed my fair share of casual games (Venture Africa, Venture Arctic, Tribal Trouble, Minions of Mirth to name a few). Furthermore, I've studied it quite heavily because it's something I was and to an extent still am very interested in. Essentially, the very reason I feel I can comment on it is because I've weighed up the pros and cons of it against various other spare-time endevours that I both enjoy and that would also bring in additional income such as web development, or application development. One of the points I have paid attention to is that piracy is always going to be an issue, but one that I'm going to have to accept and handle - this is why I like the idea of Microsoft's Live Arcade and XNA because it does provide a platform where it wouldn't be an issue. As for which route I've chosen, I haven't yet, I'm furthering my studies instead which is eating up my spare time, however when this round of studies is out the way in a year or two then I'm almost certainly going to go back to the indie development route - I have in the past worked on mods including Airquake 2, Bots for the original Quake 1 TF and Q3F and as such I'm no stranger to releasing work for free.
There have certainly been some fantastic successes in the indie game scene, obviously the most prominent is probably Popcap because they really have achieved great success but they also seemed to have a good business plan from the outset, one that negates piracy in many ways even if only indirectly. I notice that your games are anime themed and most people I know that watch anime are well versed in the use of torrents as it's often the only way to get hold of a lot of anime outside asian countries. As such I'd also argue that your games are going to become a much bigger target for piracy, because the people you're marketing for are too used to just using torrents and from what I understand, some anime films have had their distribution through bittorrent even if unofficially given the okay nod by the creators as such again lessening the userbase which are going to be happy for your product. Now contrast this to Popcap's games, many of which are marketed at casual, much less computer literate users - you only have to walk into our secretarial office at work full of middle aged women to see how many of them are playing there games and have even purchased them legitimately.
The other thing, which I've covered already is about cost, your games are selling for £10 - £15 and I have to ask what makes you feel why people would play that when they can get equally good casual games on the likes of Xbox live arcade for £3, £6 or £9 mostly depending on the game with small games and classics for £3, decent sized new games for £6 such as Cloning Clyde or large games or downloadable XBox classic games for £9. The other barrier is advertising, how do people find out about your games? Are you certain you're marketing well? I dare say that the first some people even hear about your games is via the very torrent sites you're complaining about - is there anything you can do to try and convert these people into buyers? - I think you'd be suprised how many people would be willing to pay something like £3 - £5 to have their own registered copy of a product, sure it's not the price you want per unit, but it's a lot better than nothing and could potentially net you more overall.
I've yet to find someone making games as a full time job that isn't not only surviving, but on a better than average wage, however just like everyone else they work for well established companies.
Trying to start your own game development business as a full time endevour whilst churning out games that really aren't any better than the sort you might see churned out by a 12 year old with Click and Play or Torque Game Builder is never going to work, even if piracy became non-existent, because people just aren't willing to pay £10 for something that aint that great, especially when you can pick up 6 - 12 month old AAA blockbusters for the same price or less.
If however then you're producing games on the side as a hobby or an additional income, then please go and re-read my thread.
Regardless, your reply to me still misses the fundamental point I made here originally - that bad business models are bad business models no matter how much you insist that your bad business model has a right to succeed. If that bad business model is your only income, that doesn't create some god given right to a free ticket, it's still a bad business model.
Perhaps the guy was setting up his machine ready to play Duke Nukem Forever expecting its imminent release and the guy at Microsoft knew better and put in what he thought was a suitable follow up date for checking if it worked out okay for him?
...some people just don't feel the price you charge for the premium content is worth it?
Can you also be sure that people haven't gone on to buy the content after anyway?
Are you sure your page isn't putting people off purchasing?
Can you be sure the people downloading it would've bought it even if they couldn't download it free?
The problem is you're stuck in the RIAA type mindset that if something is available for download illegally that you're definitely losing money as a result, this is absolutely not necessarily the case. Its much more likely it makes no difference to your income and best case may even improve it.
The only real problem I can see is that it may be frustrating knowing people are enjoying your product for free but you have to ask yourself why you developed it in the first place in that case, was it for the fun of developing it? was it so other people could enjoy it or was it just to make money? It's only the latter case here where it would be a problem.
As for pricing I'll cite a personal example, I hate paying £39.99 for a XBox 360 game, I simply will not pay that much as I don't feel it's worth that much. I will however gladly buy them when they drop to the £14.99 - £29.99 range. As such, it's not that I'm unwilling to buy things, they just have to be priced in an acceptable range and the same goes for movies and this is exactly why HD formats haven't really taken off yet - the majority of people are happy to pay between £3 and £13 for a DVD, but they sure as hell aren't going to pay the £20+ even if it is in HD. I checked your site and your game sells at rough £10, I mean in the nicest possible way but I can download games off the XBox 360's live arcade for less than half that that are equally as good.
The final thing to take away is whatever your reasons for disliking having your product posted on the pirate bay etc. you certainly aren't going to be able to stop it, so why not make the most of it and embrace it? Try and get feedback on it, post a comment with a donate link in the torrent comments, even negate the worth of it by releasing your own free version with ads, there's plenty of people who'd rather download a with ads version from the official download source than a even an ad free potentially virus ridden source - hell play dirty if you really feel you have to and post in the comments that it is virus infected to convince people of the value-ad bonus of downloading it from a safe, official source!
I was under the impression that urban panic is already well documented for many different scenarios, and I can't see how modelling it in a computer/mathematical simulation is in any way groundbreaking. It seems like the type of project you might set undergraduate students to do as a run of the mill exercise not something particularly groundbreaking and newsworthy.
Is there something about this particular approach that makes it groundbreaking?
True, depends on the business though I think. A few places I've worked people do their browsing in work time and then do their shopping and such in their lunch time;)
I think it's because IE updates can be pushed silently by either WSUS or directly from Windows update whereas Firefox updates have to be pulled from Firefox's update site(s).
It's beneficial to be able to push out updates at a time where it's a little more quiet (lunchtime, night time) than having the network congested with update traffic and users systems slowing down during working hours.
I think better, more official active directory integration would help no end. Pushing out updates is slightly more difficult because I'm not aware of any way to push out 3rd party application updates via WSUS, however it may be possible!
Slashdot Mirror
Large Nepenthes have been known for many, many years. Do a search on Google images for "Nepenthes mouse" and you'll find examples of where people have had rats and mice fall victim to nepenthes in people's greenhouses so there's little reason it wont happen in the wild, although I suppose you could argue animals should be more wise to it in their natural environments.
;)
There was a story going around various carnivorous plant communities and quite honestly I can't verify it's truth but needless to say it seems plausible. There was apparently a zoo that had some large nepenthes in the monkey enclosure (They're often just called monkey cups because monkeys have been known to drink from them in the wild) and they had to be removed because baby monkeys kept falling into the pitchers and required rescuing before they began to get digested which in turn apparently made many of the children at the zoo observing the monkeys cry.
You can keep nepenthes at home, some species are easy to keep as they don't need a massive amount of humidity and don't need especially warm temperatures but others can be kept in a greenhouse. Personally I keep one in the bathroom as use of the shower provides all the humidity it needs in that room and it does a decent job of dealing with spiders and mossies that make their way in there although be warned, the digestive process isn't particularly fast or terribly exciting, we're talking weeks or months. They do look impressive though, particularly the species with red pitchers or the combined reddish/yellow/green pitchers.
It's interesting keeping carnivorous plants and I started it because I got fed up of insects in my computer room in the summer. I didn't want an insecticutor as the room gets too hot as is and I don't want to use even more electricity so I figured the natural route may be an interesting option, it certainly is. Sundew (drosera), Venus flytraps (dionaea muscipula), Pitcher plants (nepenthes and saracennia) and butterworts (pinguicula) are the best bet.
If you are interested in getting started with carnivorous plants, I don't recommend trying from seed at first and you really need rainwater or distilled water (tap water doesn't cut it) but there are decent suppliers everywhere (www.littleshopofhorrors.co.uk if you're in the UK is decent). The one thing I will say though is please, if you are going to maintain your own creature killing plants use peat from sustainable sources or alternatives! There's no reason you can't keep this type of plant at home though if you can get hold of one from a legitimate source (i.e. not looted from the wild) which isn't too hard.
What I really want is a rat catching venus flytrap or sundew, now THAT would be something
I appreciate your responses, you've certainly covered a lot of misconceptions I had regarding HTML 5 so far and whilst I still have some concerns about it. I feel a little less gloomy about the prospect of it becoming mainstream now but there still do seem to be a fair few issues, most notably related to accessibility more than anything.
I do have some questions regarding the choice of some content and media blocks however, why do we have blocks for things such as asides, quotes and code but not for things such as tags (I realise we have tag for individual tags, but not for blocks of tags) and also things such as related links areas and so forth? What if these become more prominent than other areas such as footers? To me it's that the spec seems to specific in some areas, that it's simply not generic enough. We have divs to divide content and we can define what that specific div is for ourselves, do we really want to be defining some content blocks with specific tags whilst others are defined less explicitly in a more generic div?
Would it not have been better to build on top of the more minimal XHTML spec and extend it to support the new features? Rather than end up with this situation where you have tags that really do need to be deprecated but can't be?
I realise that people have many options when it comes to HTML 5 and believe I'll take the most solid, unambiguous, accessible and scalable option I can if I ever end up writing HTML 5 markup but that's not what bothers me, what bothers me is other people having choices and not understanding the consequences of their choices such that their page doesn't work properly in my browser so that as I've mentioned before, we continue to suffer a broken web.
What is being done to discourage or ensure that the average Joes out there write markup that doesn't mangle presentation and content together potentially causing problems?
You seem to be putting a lot of faith in the ability of companies producing browsers to solve a lot of the problems for you but when they have failed thus far to produce browsers that comply with simpler, less ambiguous and more straightforward specs to this point what makes you think they'll be able to support the potentially more problematic HTML 5 spec?
How is the allowance of tables amongst other things an "extreme length" when it comes to separation of semantics and style?
You're right, in an ideal world Javascript would be separated off again, essentially we'd have separate presentation, content and logic.
That way slim devices for example, or accessibility tools can ignore presentation and logic that may otherwise cause problems whilst still delivering the content to users. Someone who is blind needn't care if the website has fancy Javascript effects or even the most perfect layout in the world as long as their screen reader can read the actual articles out.
Mangling everything together is great for the MySpace teenagers who have no binds when developing their site but hopeless in achieving an accessible, scalable, maintainable web.
Why prolong a broken web when you could just figure out what the best way is to get people using the perfect spec?
Large parts of the web were developed by amateur developers using easily accessible and easy to use but broken WYSIWYG editors like Frontpage. Nowadays people seem to use prepackaged stuff like the various web editors hosting packages provide but again they're providing broken HTML, HTML 5 wont change this.
The best thing that can happen is that there is released a straightforward WYSIWYG editor for fully compliant XHTML - it's a tall order for sure but it's a worthwhile endeavour because it keeps development in the hands of the very people that made the web without also breaking it at the same time. The key is getting a strong spec like XHTML in the hands of amateurs, not leaving them with tools that provide broken, non-standards compliant markup - the same tools they'll use even when HTML 5 is out.
If the amount of media attention that HTML 5 has gained thus far had instead been spent on letting people know HTML 4 is being phased out and XHTML is the way forward then it'd be much better for the web as a whole.
"And xhtml also sucks for hand-coded pages since it is full of redundant closing tags, for things like
, , , li, and so on. It's only more typing and more obfuscating syntactic sugar."
But that's exactly the point, you're suggesting the browser should simply guess where to end blocks, that breeds ambiguity when there's no set way to decide where a specific block should end, browsers simply have to make a best guess and when different browsers guess differently then well, you get fucked up pages on some browsers.
I'm not really sure how explicity declaring the end of a block in any way obfuscates the code, it makes it much clearer as you can see rather easily where a specific block ends. Of course if you correctly indent your tags then matching up start and end tags is plenty easy enough.
"To me it is obvious that it is a waste of manpower to require of millions of people to learn the exact strict xhtml rules rather than make the browsers more flexible with non-conformant input, in a well-defined cross-browser portable manner."
But that's an impossible task without a strict ruleset, if there's no set way to do things then how can each browser vendor possibly know how they should be implementing things? I don't see learning the exact strict rules as that big a deal as they're pretty simple and certainly if you understand CSS, there's absolutely no reason you wouldn't be able to understand XHTML's strict syntax, the very fact it has less tags that are redundant with CSS (i.e. underline, bold etc.) means if anything it's easier than things like HTML5 where you seemingly have to find a specific tag for many things such articles and video but not quite everything so you still have to mangle CSS in as well, it leads to your presentation code being horribly mangled in with your content.
"HTML 5 will add new useful features. XHTML adds nothing that wasn't already possible in HTML 4.01-strict"
You mean apart from the very fact that it's eXtensible without any real limitations? I'd say that's a pretty big bonus. Currently HTML 5 defines lots of new things such as video and sound, but what happens if something new comes along, like 3D stuff or something related to touch computing for example? Do we have to wait until they ratify a new HTML spec like HTML 6 or HTML 5.1? With XHTML the industry can bring forth it's own solution an awful lot quicker than any HTML standards comittee will ever be able to.
"I think you are talking about spacer GIFs and table markup. As far as I know, you can still abuse tables for page layout in XHTML. Moreover, to make a page that is really portable between 1024 pixel monitors and devices with a 150 pixel-wide screen requires much more than just xhtml/css; both the CSS and the page structure need to be carefully designed to be portable, in a way that is not enforced by the xhtml spec."
No, that's not the case, the whole point of HTML is you have the loose structure and the content defined in the XHTML with the presentation defined in the CSS, with a handheld device you may simply ignore the CSS or apply your own to present it in a format best suited to your device. With HTML 5 you have presentation embedded inside the HTML itself and so you have to either ignore specific tags which can be troublesome if matching end tags aren't included (see my first point in this post), it is more resource intensive and it makes it harder to apply a device specific presentation layer (stylesheet) if other presentation is already declared in the body of the document.
It goes further than personal home pages too, HTML 5 web applications are going to be an absolute nightmare to maintain for large businesses if they end up finding they're pretty much forced to adopt it. If you have a content management system and you have a web team responsible for ensuring a corporate standard for the site is met in terms of presentation and layout then the last thing you want is for your employees to be able to randomly change font settings and so forth by including inline tags - you may as well let them free on your stylesheets!
Indeed.
HTML 5 is probably the worst thing that can happen to the web right now, slowly but surely XHTML compliance was bringing together browsers and sites, you only have to look at the magnificent jump in compatibility of sites from IE6 and Firefox 1 to IE7 and Firefox 2, whilst far from ideal still, developing Standards compliant code for the latest generation of browsers is much less of a headache than it's ever been.
HTML 5 increases ambiguity, it's a language seemingly designed for the MySpace generation - people who just want to hack together quick and dirty sites without any care or thought for scalability and accessibility. The simplification of XHTML over HTML whereby ambiguity is decreased by fixed rules, and less presentation tags was absolutely fantastic for developing sites that work on a variety of user agents as much more is left for the user agent to figure out so that small handheld devices could finally display compliant sites in a way that best fit the screen. Accessibility software such as screen readers have a much easier time as they could largely ignore CSS and stick to reading out the actual content without worry that some random presentation tags with a non-strict syntax was going to bugger up the parsing.
The most important concept with XHTML was separation of presentation from content coupled with a strict syntax and HTML 5 goes against these two extremely important points for ensuring we have a clean, standardised, accessible web. It's also quite a problem that HTML 5 says "Oh you don't have to use this or that, you can do it was you want", a standard needs to make up it's fucking mind not sit on the fence because otherwise it's not much of a standard as you get people doing things in many different ways, some of which are undoubtedly going to break in some user agent or another.
Essentially what's happened with HTML 5 is we've got a language that caters for those incapable of working with a well structured language, on one hand this is great because more people can publish to the web, on the other it's awful as it basically fucks up the web further. Instead of dumbing down the underlying language and breaking the web as a result, we should be producing better tools for working with the existing language keeping the web clean without leaving it difficult to publish to.
Do we really want to prolong the old situation of sites that only work or look differently with some browsers and that are inaccesible to people with special accessibility requirements? Not to mention that aren't scalable as content and presentation get mangled into one and hence really aren't maintainable either?
It's because Rare (Now owned by MS Game Studios) owns the code etc., Activision owns the IP and Nintendo owns the game rights.
They were going to release it on live arcade and the virtual console but MS/Nintendo/Activision couldn't decide how to share profits so it was ditched across all platforms.
The petition exists to try and make the companies agree a profit share and bring the project back to life. The rumour was that Rare had a working port with online multiplayer support for the XBox 360 only 2months from completion and the Wii version would've been a direct part, hence thus far so near yet so far.
So they should spend an absolute fortune on preparing the code for release, separating it out from the stuff that doesn't belong to them and spending thousands of lawyer hours checking that it's all okay to release for what, 11,000 petitioners? Just to put that into context, the current petition to get Goldeneye on XBox live arcade is at 18,000 signatures and growing.
It's not as if once they'd removed all the stuff didn't belong to them they'd be left with a working system, just random chunks of code, many of which will likely be somewhat worthless without the rest of the code that had to be removed.
Yes, but not as often larger than wales.
Whilst this is indeed a clear case of weak AI, it's not quite as simple as the weak AI vs. strong AI thing. Weak AI in itself can be broken down into different levels, the AI mentioned in this article seems to be just a run of the mill application of symbolic AI, and whilst symbolic AI.
Because such programs like this are the ones that for some reason make the headlines they're also the ones that make people think "well, AI is a bit of a let down then really isn't it" but weak AI goes further than just symbolic AI, many accept that symbolic AI has a much less promising future right now and all the important research that goes into AI that might actually seem more intelligent is in the field of biologically inspired AI which is still right now only providing us with weak AI, but it's weak AI that is often so much more impressive than old fashioned rehashes of various symbolic AI implementations as per this article.
I'm not suggesting that the basis of your comment was wrong - you're certainly correct that this type of AI really isn't that impressive and as such it's hard to call it intelligent, however I do feel you were wrong to dismiss current AI as a whole with your comment that it's the only type of AI we have, because this specific type of AI (symbolic AI) really isn't the only type we have. Biologically inspired computing has been pushing symbolic AI out the spotlight for over a decade now and absolutely demolishing it in terms of the impressive kind of demonstrations it's bringing forth.
Of course, that's not to say symbolic AI is worthless either, it's certainly has it's place for things like this, chess and for expert systems and so forth. The biggest problem is that when AI becomes commonplace and people implement it left right and centre they find it easy to overlook the intelligent part of it and see it as "just another bit of code to implement". This is essentially the case with the poster you were replying to - we find it easier to call something intelligent if we don't understand it ourselves, but when we understand it ourselves we don't see it as intelligent.
No I doubt it was to be honest, it's just that the article suggests that Toshiba has one-upped Microsoft's version by doing it without the table they used in their recent demos, but as the stuff I posted demonstrated, MS had already done this too so what Toshiba did was actually nothing MS (and likely other companies as you mention) hadn't done already.
MS just seems to be the primary pusher of this into the mainstream market right now, I'd say that's the only real difference.
Microsoft has done surface without the table, in fact, that's how the whole tech started off.
See here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xujhFInvyxo
or here:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/03/microsoft_research_techfe.html
It's the original demonstration from where the current surface stemmed.
A specific table isn't essential to the surface concept.
Are games like Scrabble even modern enough to be covered by copyright laws and so forth?
Is it not like music and such where there's a limited copyright term, and hence is this term not over yet for many of these games? I'm sure some of them are pretty old?
In the UK, the average wage is around £24k a year iirc, game developers will earn £30k+ so that's where my average wage comment stems from.
I do know a lot about the casual game development market as it happens, and I've purchased and enjoyed my fair share of casual games (Venture Africa, Venture Arctic, Tribal Trouble, Minions of Mirth to name a few). Furthermore, I've studied it quite heavily because it's something I was and to an extent still am very interested in. Essentially, the very reason I feel I can comment on it is because I've weighed up the pros and cons of it against various other spare-time endevours that I both enjoy and that would also bring in additional income such as web development, or application development. One of the points I have paid attention to is that piracy is always going to be an issue, but one that I'm going to have to accept and handle - this is why I like the idea of Microsoft's Live Arcade and XNA because it does provide a platform where it wouldn't be an issue. As for which route I've chosen, I haven't yet, I'm furthering my studies instead which is eating up my spare time, however when this round of studies is out the way in a year or two then I'm almost certainly going to go back to the indie development route - I have in the past worked on mods including Airquake 2, Bots for the original Quake 1 TF and Q3F and as such I'm no stranger to releasing work for free.
There have certainly been some fantastic successes in the indie game scene, obviously the most prominent is probably Popcap because they really have achieved great success but they also seemed to have a good business plan from the outset, one that negates piracy in many ways even if only indirectly. I notice that your games are anime themed and most people I know that watch anime are well versed in the use of torrents as it's often the only way to get hold of a lot of anime outside asian countries. As such I'd also argue that your games are going to become a much bigger target for piracy, because the people you're marketing for are too used to just using torrents and from what I understand, some anime films have had their distribution through bittorrent even if unofficially given the okay nod by the creators as such again lessening the userbase which are going to be happy for your product. Now contrast this to Popcap's games, many of which are marketed at casual, much less computer literate users - you only have to walk into our secretarial office at work full of middle aged women to see how many of them are playing there games and have even purchased them legitimately.
The other thing, which I've covered already is about cost, your games are selling for £10 - £15 and I have to ask what makes you feel why people would play that when they can get equally good casual games on the likes of Xbox live arcade for £3, £6 or £9 mostly depending on the game with small games and classics for £3, decent sized new games for £6 such as Cloning Clyde or large games or downloadable XBox classic games for £9. The other barrier is advertising, how do people find out about your games? Are you certain you're marketing well? I dare say that the first some people even hear about your games is via the very torrent sites you're complaining about - is there anything you can do to try and convert these people into buyers? - I think you'd be suprised how many people would be willing to pay something like £3 - £5 to have their own registered copy of a product, sure it's not the price you want per unit, but it's a lot better than nothing and could potentially net you more overall.
I've yet to find someone making games as a full time job that isn't not only surviving, but on a better than average wage, however just like everyone else they work for well established companies.
Trying to start your own game development business as a full time endevour whilst churning out games that really aren't any better than the sort you might see churned out by a 12 year old with Click and Play or Torque Game Builder is never going to work, even if piracy became non-existent, because people just aren't willing to pay £10 for something that aint that great, especially when you can pick up 6 - 12 month old AAA blockbusters for the same price or less.
If however then you're producing games on the side as a hobby or an additional income, then please go and re-read my thread.
Regardless, your reply to me still misses the fundamental point I made here originally - that bad business models are bad business models no matter how much you insist that your bad business model has a right to succeed. If that bad business model is your only income, that doesn't create some god given right to a free ticket, it's still a bad business model.
Perhaps the guy was setting up his machine ready to play Duke Nukem Forever expecting its imminent release and the guy at Microsoft knew better and put in what he thought was a suitable follow up date for checking if it worked out okay for him?
To destroy competition and make PostgreSQL even stronger ;) ?
...some people just don't feel the price you charge for the premium content is worth it?
Can you also be sure that people haven't gone on to buy the content after anyway?
Are you sure your page isn't putting people off purchasing?
Can you be sure the people downloading it would've bought it even if they couldn't download it free?
The problem is you're stuck in the RIAA type mindset that if something is available for download illegally that you're definitely losing money as a result, this is absolutely not necessarily the case. Its much more likely it makes no difference to your income and best case may even improve it.
The only real problem I can see is that it may be frustrating knowing people are enjoying your product for free but you have to ask yourself why you developed it in the first place in that case, was it for the fun of developing it? was it so other people could enjoy it or was it just to make money? It's only the latter case here where it would be a problem.
As for pricing I'll cite a personal example, I hate paying £39.99 for a XBox 360 game, I simply will not pay that much as I don't feel it's worth that much. I will however gladly buy them when they drop to the £14.99 - £29.99 range. As such, it's not that I'm unwilling to buy things, they just have to be priced in an acceptable range and the same goes for movies and this is exactly why HD formats haven't really taken off yet - the majority of people are happy to pay between £3 and £13 for a DVD, but they sure as hell aren't going to pay the £20+ even if it is in HD. I checked your site and your game sells at rough £10, I mean in the nicest possible way but I can download games off the XBox 360's live arcade for less than half that that are equally as good.
The final thing to take away is whatever your reasons for disliking having your product posted on the pirate bay etc. you certainly aren't going to be able to stop it, so why not make the most of it and embrace it? Try and get feedback on it, post a comment with a donate link in the torrent comments, even negate the worth of it by releasing your own free version with ads, there's plenty of people who'd rather download a with ads version from the official download source than a even an ad free potentially virus ridden source - hell play dirty if you really feel you have to and post in the comments that it is virus infected to convince people of the value-ad bonus of downloading it from a safe, official source!
I was under the impression that urban panic is already well documented for many different scenarios, and I can't see how modelling it in a computer/mathematical simulation is in any way groundbreaking. It seems like the type of project you might set undergraduate students to do as a run of the mill exercise not something particularly groundbreaking and newsworthy.
Is there something about this particular approach that makes it groundbreaking?
True, depends on the business though I think. A few places I've worked people do their browsing in work time and then do their shopping and such in their lunch time ;)
I think it's because IE updates can be pushed silently by either WSUS or directly from Windows update whereas Firefox updates have to be pulled from Firefox's update site(s).
It's beneficial to be able to push out updates at a time where it's a little more quiet (lunchtime, night time) than having the network congested with update traffic and users systems slowing down during working hours.
I think better, more official active directory integration would help no end. Pushing out updates is slightly more difficult because I'm not aware of any way to push out 3rd party application updates via WSUS, however it may be possible!
Better standards compliance and better compiler optimization as the version numbers increase are probably the primary reasons to upgrade from VS6.