Minecraft is really pretty much a completely new genre in itself so no one had cracked it until Notch came along.
But mostly my point was it's easy to point to Microsoft's failures, it's easy to even point to disaffected Bungie splitting up from MS, but ultimately MS has turned Halo into one of the most loved, most succesful, most profitable gaming franchises in history and that's no small feat.
I'm not going to begin to guess what may or may not happen if they take over Minecraft, but I don't think you can realistically assume that it'll automatically flop under them. Minecraft updates do seem quite slow and relatively low on features to my eye so I can certainly see the benefit to Minecraft of a much better funded, much better equipped studio driving it forward - that's not to say I expect that will definitely be the case but I think there's a distinct possibility if nothing else.
Yeah, because it's not like Halo ever became the single most best selling and most profitable Sci-Fi FPS franchise in history following Microsoft's takeover of Bungie or anything is it?
In video games the storyline is more than just the intro sequence or cutscenes - I know that's easy to forget in many modern games. The storyline is played out by you the player, so the gameplay is part of the storyline experience- the weapons, the gameplay, the physics, the things you do and interact with are all part of that interactive storyline narrative.
"The programmer says that Mojang must release the Minecraft server code to the public domain since decompiled, deobfuscated versions of the Java code are included in the Bukkit project before he will withdraw the DMCA."
Again, it seems it's not be who is "a bit dim", unless of course you're saying I made up the summary, but I doubt you're accusing me of going to the extreme of hacking Slashdot so I can only concur that you just didn't read it yourself and are being wilfully ignorant so as to not admit that yes you were in fact completely wrong.
Agreed, I have seen a bit of that sometimes, though luckily it's mostly on trivial issues (like that you described).
The problem with the EU is that it's the biggest government in the world with the smallest relative media relations department (basically non-existent) so national governments get to blame shit on it that are nothing to do with it and it has no real staff dedicated to countering that which is why trust in it has been eroded over the years.
Of course the solution is for the EU to start being able to explain to people what it does and why it does things, but cue the cries and screams of propaganda from the likes of Farage if they dare to better fund explanation of what exactly the EU's purpose and reasoning - to folks like Farage the idea of his propaganda being countered would be unacceptable.
If you'd actually bothered to read my comments on the Russia/Ukraine issue, rather than cherry picking a couple out of the hundred or so I've probably made where you've managed to find a link to the BBC, you'd note that I provided citations from the BBC, FT, Al Jazeera, Xinhua, Ukrainian media, Turkish media, Malaysian media, Europe wide media, North American media and in some cases even Russian media, as well as non-aligned charitable organisations and so forth to back up my points.
Thus the comments I've made are based not on the opinion of the BBC but on a combination of the reporting by the world's media and if you think that's biased then my previous point stands - what you're taking issue with is not BBC bias, but in fact that you're upset that no one is parroting the Kremlin's propaganda lines, not even it's traditional allies like China.
So yes, as a guzzler of RT propaganda you may persist in believing that the BBC is biased, but you then also have to accept that the whole of the world's media is biased because I've regularly cross referenced between what the BBC says, and what, say, the Chinese say. Rather than continue to consider that this is a problem of BBC bias, you may wish to consider that your continued belief that RT is the one true media source and that the rest of the world is wrong is where the actual problem is. I don't expect you to though because when one is absorbed with the idea that their preferred media source is right and pretty much the whole of the rest of the world is wrong then there's no real helping them.
I do agree Quake 2 was decent, but as you say it was ultimately the exception. I suspect though even this may be because Romero in part must've had some influence there - he didn't leave id until '96 and Quake 2 was released in 97.
Ironically he left because of an argument between Carmack and him about the future of the company. The company hasn't done so well since Carmack got his way so as great of an enginer programmer Carmack is I'm still not convinced that he's a talented games developer, because he just never managed to get the game - i.e. the fun bit - right.
I think therefore that both Carmack and Romero were in the wrong - Carmack couldn't make games without Romero, just tech demos, and Romero couldn't finish a project on time and budget without Carmack's forcing of focus.
People forget that whilst Ion Storm failed under Romero and let that define Romero's career but it can hardly be argued that id has been a stellar success under Carmack - despite it's initial relatively massive wealth as a games studio from it's early successes it still ended up getting bought out by one of the smallest publishers in the industry (Zenimax).
You keep using the word dim as an insult towards me yet seem to repeatedly be unable to grasp the concept that offering the open sourcing of the Minecraft server source code as a solution to the problem he has decided to create is identical to asking for the Minecraft source code, I'm not sure why you struggle with with such a simple concept, but apparently you do. Maybe you're, well, a bit dim?
"It's two years of his work (and Wolfe was one of the biggest contributors to the project) under basically false pretences."
Well no, it's not false pretences at all, he knew both the licensing situation and that he was working for free and should've known that no one owed him jack shit. The fact he apparently understood none of this is entirely his own stupid fault.
"By the way, using the blanket insult "you FOSS zealots" says a lot more about you than it does me. You know nothing about me, or my overall stance on software licensing."
What I know is that you're defending an indefensible action that only FOSS zealots would defend and that is precisely the reason companies and developers are put off working with the FOSS community. Whatever you may think you are, that's good enough for me to call a spade a spade and if you don't like it, then well, tough shit- that's what you get when you defend the indefensible.
A far more mature and sensible solution to the problem would be to publicly air your distaste, walk away and get the fuck over it. It's not difficult, except for this guy who seems to have a childish grudge and determination to enact revenge for his own stupidity in working on something where the licensing wasn't clear it seems. Would you seriously start in a job where the contract was written in a manner where you may find you don't get paid for your work at the end of the day? No of course you wouldn't, but if you did and didn't get paid then what the hell would you expect? No one owes this guy anything, he volunteered his times and that was entirely upto him, it doesn't give him the right to fuck everyone else.
I mostly agree, the BBC is actually very centrist (in fact if anything leaning left on some issues such as Gaza/Israel).
But I can most definitely give you an example of one area where the BBC is right wing leaning, not just right wing leaning but hard right leaning - it's website comments section. Now, I believe moderation of this is outsource IIRC so that might be the source of the problem, but there are regularly any number of people on there spouting far-right rhetoric about immigrants that go untouched, and yet if you offer a counter-argument such as "I've never had any issues with immigrants, in fact I've found Polish immigrants to be hard working, and have had a better quality of work from them than many British labourers" and you get rapidly silenced by the moderation team. This isn't a one off thing but a pretty consistent pattern, I suspect this is because the sort of bottom of the pile monkeys being contracted to do the moderation are the same sort of bottom of the pile monkeys that blame everyone but themselves for their career predicament.
As such the BBC comments sections have become a cesspit of right through to far right vitriol and bile spewing. An area of shame on the rest of the site.
No it's not, that's why even now it's well established that there are Russian regulars in Ukraine, the BBC still errs on the side of caution by calling those that are established as such "rebels" rather than "Russian soldiers" or similar.
The BBC may not fit your particular bias, but it's actually fairly unbiased - it takes immense caution before taking sides as in the example above. In fact, the BBC ended up in a massive fight with the government some years back precisely because it called out the then government over it's lies that led to the Iraq war once it had actual evidence so to call it a government mouthpiece is a bit of a joke. It does back up British values certainly, but that's a different thing - if you're looking for it to support Putin's or China's authoritarianism then no, it wont do that. There is certainly still some bias at the BBC in some areas - for example, coverage involving their own journalists is pretty poor, when Alan Johnson was kidnapped in Gaza they had daily coverage of it but stories about a kidnapped aid worker that were running at the same time went lightly reported which always struck me as a pretty blatant failure in objectivity but all in all it's very much a top tier news source in terms of quality and objectivity.
Likely when you say you're avoiding bias, what you really mean is that you don't like unbiased or low bias news and you're actually looking for confirmation bias and want something that will back up your own predetermined biases, and, well, have fun with that if that's what you're after, that's not what the BBC is, nor what we would ever want it to be.
It's not really fair to paint Romero as a complete failure, he brought soul to id's games, their games were just hollow without him. The success of Wolfenstein, then Doom, then Quake can't be pinned on one person, it was the culmination of talent at id with John Carmack doing great work with graphics programming advances, people like American McGee producing great maps, Romero coming up with great storylines, and Paul Steed producing great models and so on.
What Romero failed at was going it alone, he just didn't have what it took to manage a project and studio all by himself, that's where he failed. But credit where credit's due, he was responsible in no small part for breathing much of the life into id's games which is why without him, we just had these soulless graphics tech demos that id has produced ever since he left.
This guy above all else knows what makes an FPS great, what he needs is a great team to take the whole business side of things off him and a great project leader that will give him the freedom to do most of what he wants, but the common sense to reign him in where he starts pushing the boat out just a bit too much in terms of what's practical in a reasonable timeframe and with finite resources. If he finds that, I don't see why he can't breathe life into a great FPS like he's done many times before the great Daikatana fuck up.
The problem is BBC worldwide, it's a law unto itself and it needs to be reigned in. It's been doing things this last decade that are unacceptable, from buying companies it really should not be buying into because they're outside it's remit, to doing a real shit job of distribution, for example, shows paid for by the BBC license fee payer are sold on commercially by BBC Worldwide yet BBC Worldwide sells them in the US but not the UK so us in the UK who pay for the content in the first fucking case can't even buy Bluray discs of the content to keep like those in other countries can. I wanted to purchased Hidden Kingdoms on Bluray for my parents but BBC Worldwide only produce a US region version on Bluray and only sell it in the US even though it's production was financed by UK license fee payers - we can't get a copy except on DVD which completely defeats the object of such a show that's so heavily focussed on visuals.
This episode shouldn't be used to shame the BBC as a whole, it's at odds with what most people in the BBC proper believe, it's those at the top of the BBC responsible for reigning in BBC worldwide that's the problem - they let it go off and do it's own thing completely independently and it's gone feral and gotten rabies as a result.
Thus, if anyone does complain to the BBC about this I strongly advise you to lean towards making the point that enough is enough, BBC Worldwide needs to be reigned in and as it's whole owned by the BBC it needs to be pulled towards the views of license fee payers and not be allowed to continue to run amock doing it's own thing. BBC Worldwide makes a ton of profit for the BBC, but it can only do so because it's allowed to sell on content that UK TV license fee payers have paid for in the first place.
It's also worth noting that the BBC's charter is coming up for renegotiation soon too, so it's getting to the point where the BBC really can be forced to making sweeping changes or face having it's budget cut.
There's nothing dense about understanding that if you demand proprietary source code be made available that you're demanding access to the source code. It's really not rocket science and I can see why you FOSS zealots have such a bad name.
I don't really take issue with him being offended by some going on or another, but giving someone a choice of shutting down one project or open sourcing another because of some pet peeve is just a real dick thing to do. There's nothing wrong with the status quo unless Mojang decides to enforce the fact that their code was originally used illegally, something they've chosen not to do instead preferring to support their fan community.
You may think there's some technicality here or there that makes him right but it doesn't really matter. Other companies, other developers look at this and it's the sort of petty pathetic childishness that turns people away from open source software and giving that community access or support for anything. If there's a danger you're going to get burnt working with the FOSS community then why the fuck would you want to go near it?
He's telling them to open source the proprietary Minecraft server source code at the barrel of a DMCA notice that is extremely popular, broadly used and financed by Mojang. How is that not a ransom?
Telling someone they can either suffer a crippling of a product they support or to hand over some entirely non-GPL source code is direct a ransom as it gets - demanding the Minecraft server source code - something that isn't his but that he's demanding - absolutely is a demand for material gain.
"But if we mean that the Scala programmers are in demand, then yes, Scala is popular."
No it doesn't, because popularity sits on a spectrum, and the level of demand for Scala programmers is at least an order of magnitude lower than for Java, C#, C++, Python, Javascript, and PHP developers for example. Popular would imply Scala is high on the demand rankings, it's just not, not by any measure.
How is it a defect? The fact is that there are different types of equality in a classic OO language (value equality, type equality, reference equality). You've got to be able to denote these somehow, and if someone stupidly uses the wrong concept that's a training issue. Using.equals instead of == if that's what you meant is no different to using the wrong operator elsewhere, it's like using -- instead of ++, or % instead of ^. It's an intentional and sensible language design decision.
It's impossible to create a language whereby user error is eliminated from the equation without eliminating the user from the equation. Yes you can argue that you should switch to languages where references, and values and types don't exist as explicit concepts but then you end up with something like Javascript where implicit variable conversion creates mountains more user error and where the lack of ability to explicitly define reference or value type means you get all sorts of horrendous bugs relating to variable capture that can only be fixed with an ugly verbose poorly readable hack to force creation of a new scope to capture a value.
This isn't entirely fair, it's worth noting that African has equally long been plagued by Christian extremism, and in fact, if we're talking about through history it's probably worth considering that it was the Christian crusades that were prominent in upending what were relatively peaceful societies back then, that's before you go back to the likes of Alexander's adventures through there and so forth also.
With all the focus on the middle east it's easy to forget that there are countries like India, where 10% of the world's muslims (170million) live that seem to harbour barely a single one even slightly interested in extremism. Indonesia has some problems, but it's similarly got a population of 270million muslims, and the vast majority similarly live in peace.
Pretending there's some specific aspect here of Islam that's the problem is complete and utter nonsense when you can similarly point to many hundreds of millions of muslims who don't fall into this stereotype, and when you can similarly point to many millions of Christians who fit the exact same stereotype (in fact, in CAR there are Christian militias carrying out the exact same atrocities as IS right now - beheadings, massacres etc.), it's just not as newsworthy because the middle east is where the West has repeatedly focussed it's attention in recent decades.
This isn't to say I'm some fluffy believer in respect everyone and they'll respect you and all that nonsense, on the contrary, I think we probably missed a chance to neuter IS to some degree and to check Putin's increasing boldness by not striking Syria and I think because we didn't and because Syria's moderates saw the only people that were standing by them in the face of a chemical weapons massacre were the Islamists we allowed IS to grow into a monster taking Qatari, Turkish, and US weapons along to IS with them. I think painting a red line and then not backing it up, even if only with a handful of cruise missile strikes on Syrian airfields used for barrel bombings and missile bases capable of launching chemical attacks was stupid and is a major reason IS was able to grow, and possibly even why Putin felt bold enough to not only annex Crimea but not give a shit when his guys shot down a civilian airliner and still invade Eastern Ukraine afterwards to boot. Maybe that's not the case, we'll never know, but if nothing else I can see how IS has grown as a function of our lack of backing up of red lines and promised support for moderates whilst they were still left with enough hope that someone actually cared about them to be moderate- the only upside is we got Assad to disarm some of his worst chemical weapons like Sarin (he's still using others like Chlorine which weren't part of the disarmament process).
There's no doubt the whole thing's a clusterfuck, but doing nothing is as much a bad option as doing something, and blaming an entire group of people that is over a billion in size and the vast majority of whom are as normal as you and I doesn't help anyone as you can similarly cherry pick conflicts of any religion as an equal and opposite counter-argument - in Burma even the Buddhists are carrying out atrocities for example.
Baghdad is primarily Shia, so they'd never be able to rule it. It's also the place whereby which most people that want IS destroyed come from. They wouldn't flood it to rule it, they'd flood it because it's the biggest threat to them in Iraq. There's an entire area of Baghdad called Sadr city, after a religious leader that has basically his own entire army- these guys alone are strong enough to hold IS off from Baghdad (it was basically a no go area for coalition troops when they invaded and they were more numerous and better equipped and trained than IS), so flooding it would be massively advantageous to them.
That still makes him wrong. Contributing code to an open project and then retroactively trying to ransom it back is a dick move however you spin it.
Anyone doing that is a twat, either don't do the work in the first place, or accept it's out there and let people do what they want. Don't put it out there and then bitch about people using it.
If you have a problem with the project, stop working on it and move the fuck on. Don't try and ruin everyone else's fun over your hissy fit and start making petty demands and threats.
You seem good at that Hail Hitler thing, you must've had a lot of practice under Putin.
Tell me, one last question, if you're so adamant that people should have the freedom of choice, why are you not protesting Putin's consistent prevention of Chechnya breaking free from Russia as it wants?
What's that? you love suppression of democratic will and civilians? Thought so- at least you're consistent though, you neither want the people of Eastern Ukraine, nor the people of Chechnya to be able to break away from Russia, you just want fascist mother Russia to rule over all.
P.S. That's not a Ukrainian military column masquerading as a medical convoy, it's very clearly a Ukrainian military medical convoy, that's why they have green trucks and red crosses, it's kind of exactly what that means. What is a breach of the Geneva convention though is your far right Hitler loving fascist soldiers in Eastern Ukraine.
I'll give you a hint, there's a reason why Europe's far right parties like Frances National Front, Denmark's Party of Freedom and Hungary's Jobbik party and Putin are best of friends- because like those parties, that are the modern day incarnations of the Nazis, so is Putin, and so are you, because you support the far right with your ideals, so fuck off Nazi, we have enough of your shit in the 30s and 40s, we killed most of you off then and we'll do the same if we have to. There's no room for your Jew hating, nationalistic, homophobic, dictator lovers in Europe.
You see, on one hand, we have the Ukrainian election results:
(Note the source- do you really think Israel of all countries full of Jews would defend Ukrainian election results if Ukraine actually voted for Nazis? - if Israel doesn't see Nazism in the Ukrainian regime then no one with any sense would) On the other, we have Putin with his favourite neo-Nazi biker gang:
Yet you keep telling yourself there are magical invisible nazis in Ukraine, all the whilst you're supporting not just people who look like nazis, act like nazis, but people who are real actual nazis. You keep telling yourself you're the good guy for supporting Nazis, we'll keep laughing at you and supplying arms so that your nazi friends keep getting shot as they deserve all whilst you sit in a country with an economy that's being driven into the ground by your favoured nazi loving regime.
No, not at all, evolution occurs due to natural pressures. If a natural pressure such as a drought forces Lions to change behaviour then that's a point at which evolution is forcing the attempting of something new - that learned behaviour goes hand in hand with evolution. Were the elephant populations to remain stable in the face of suddenly being hunted by lions such that they become normal predators of elephants you'd then find the evolutionary pressures would force slowly those elephant hunting lions to gain traits that make them better at it, such as perhaps the ability to more easily penetrate elephant skin, or the ability to jump higher.
You're absolutely right that evolution is slow, but that does not mean we cannot witness elements of it occurring and such a change is a perfect example of exactly that - it's a natural pressure forcing a previously stable species to have to adapt, it's natural selection - those lions that learn to hunt the elephants continue to feed and survive, those that fail to start trying to hunt elephants starve and die and that can very much result in a completely new constant evolutionary battle between a new matching of predator and prey.
I guess it's potentially as much about where you live and whether such opportunities are available, but I'll be honest with you I've done a brutal amount of CRUD work myself before I found what I was looking for - there's not much of it where I am in the UK unless you live in London or Cambridge. More than anything I'd say it's a result of two things:
1) Studying maths such that I can genuinely come up with solutions to problems that your average developer will say "That's not possible", this doesn't require a Phd, but even graduate level maths is enough - fundamentally all you need to be able to do is know what tools exist in the mathematical toolbox, you don't have to know how to implement them off by heart, but if you can turn around and say "Well, that's a classification problem, we're going to need something like neural networks", or "That's an optimisation problem, we can frame it like the travelling salesman problem and look at algorithms that provide approximate solutions from there" then you have everything you need - the actual math and implementation details can be learnt or read up on from articles in books or on the web after that - the key thing is knowing what the options are, implementation and use of the math in question can come when it's relevant.
2) Going through enough of the CRUD crap to get to a level where I'm respected enough to be able to make the choice about when we try something new. For years I saw opportunities to make our products better wherever I worked but when I was starting out no one listens, you've got to know when to say fuck your boss saying no and just do it anyway so you can show them it does work - remember the adage, "It's easier to just do something and ask for forgiveness, than it is to get permission in the first place" or in cases where you know you'll get shot or wont get chance to do it you're stuck doing things the old fashioned and ineffective way, or just not solving said problem at all and leaving some feature out of your software.
So it's ultimately about being able to show you can do it, and using a combination of that, and sitting out the boring shit long enough to get in a senior enough position that there's someone to tell you you can't take a risk and try something different to make your product better than the competitors. It gets easier and easier - the more you take that risk and it pays off the more you're given the freedom to do so. I never did it, but it often crossed my mind that maybe there were times I could've sacrificed some of my spare time to prove ideas I wasn't allowed to prove at work, whilst I don't think people should have to do that due to the fact I firmly believe in people having a good work life balance, it's an option depending on how much you want something and if you feel it's the only way to make yourself heard and get that respect to have the freedom to do it at work in the future. But above all else, you need that ability mostly through maths/comp. sci. knowledge to be able to see scope in everything you do to do it better in a way that's maybe not been done before to differentiate your product.
I guess that's a form of specialisation though? Effectively what you're seeing there is evolution in action- the only Lions that could survive the drought were those that adapted to hunt elephants and that continued afterwards, but whether it's a viable long term strategy is a different question, if you whipe out all your prey in your area then suddenly those elephant hunting lions will be back to square one, such that those who adapted simply to hunt elephants will die due to lack of elephants forcing them back towards the norm. Potentially what may happen is the pride heads off after other herds of elephants that are more capable of fighting off lions and they are dissuaded from further hunting of Elephants (or simply wiped out in a failed hunt) that way too. Of course, the other possibility is that they continue to successfully hunt elephants and it's no longer true that elephants have no persistent sustained natural predators- lions become exactly that, well, until the elephants grow even larger through evolutionary pressure perhaps.
Evolution will always throw up such situations now and again, and I suspect the same was true of this creature, and I suspect the same is true of adult blue whales - I didn't mean so much by saying they don't have any natural predators doesn't necessarily imply they're never ever hunted, simply that it only happens in extreme fringe circumstances that may only be temporary blips in the history of evolution where evolution tries and fails these things tended back to how things were before. Fundamentally such freak events are somewhat unnatural (okay, well, pedantically, everything that happens ever is technically natural, but you get the point) until they become naturalised as normal events.
I think it's more a question when talking about natural predators if it's something that is constant and sustained such that the predator/prey populations stay in balance. If the prey is hunted to extinction then it loses it's natural predators through extinction, it becomes a historical footnote with that natural predator. If they can continue in balance being hunted then that is their natural predator in the cycle of life. We've had fringe cases of pelicans eating pidgeons before, but such fringe cases I do not think are enough to class them as natural predators of pidgeons unless it similarly becomes sustained and commonplace.
So such an event doesn't mean that animals can have no natural predators consistently through time, not at all, evolution isn't binary, it works on a spectrum- there will be periods whereby they are still evolving to be big enough to be free from predators, and there will be periods where the predators caught up, but it's quite possible that this particular specimen (arguably similar to blue whales) reached a size where they were safe and continued to live at that size such that would-be future predators were whiped out by extinction events (the event that killed the dinosaurs, or event now where humans are hunting species to extinction) in a way that that particular branch of life was ended abruptly at a point where no such predators managed to exist for the species in questions.
Though next week, we might find fossils of 29 metre long t-rex cousins too of course:)
Slashdot Mirror
Minecraft is really pretty much a completely new genre in itself so no one had cracked it until Notch came along.
But mostly my point was it's easy to point to Microsoft's failures, it's easy to even point to disaffected Bungie splitting up from MS, but ultimately MS has turned Halo into one of the most loved, most succesful, most profitable gaming franchises in history and that's no small feat.
I'm not going to begin to guess what may or may not happen if they take over Minecraft, but I don't think you can realistically assume that it'll automatically flop under them. Minecraft updates do seem quite slow and relatively low on features to my eye so I can certainly see the benefit to Minecraft of a much better funded, much better equipped studio driving it forward - that's not to say I expect that will definitely be the case but I think there's a distinct possibility if nothing else.
Yeah, because it's not like Halo ever became the single most best selling and most profitable Sci-Fi FPS franchise in history following Microsoft's takeover of Bungie or anything is it?
In video games the storyline is more than just the intro sequence or cutscenes - I know that's easy to forget in many modern games. The storyline is played out by you the player, so the gameplay is part of the storyline experience- the weapons, the gameplay, the physics, the things you do and interact with are all part of that interactive storyline narrative.
From the summary:
"The programmer says that Mojang must release the Minecraft server code to the public domain since decompiled, deobfuscated versions of the Java code are included in the Bukkit project before he will withdraw the DMCA."
Again, it seems it's not be who is "a bit dim", unless of course you're saying I made up the summary, but I doubt you're accusing me of going to the extreme of hacking Slashdot so I can only concur that you just didn't read it yourself and are being wilfully ignorant so as to not admit that yes you were in fact completely wrong.
Yes, and ask a Labour member what they think and they'll tell you it's the established media arm of the Conservative Party.
And that my dear, is precisely why it's largely centrist.
Agreed, I have seen a bit of that sometimes, though luckily it's mostly on trivial issues (like that you described).
The problem with the EU is that it's the biggest government in the world with the smallest relative media relations department (basically non-existent) so national governments get to blame shit on it that are nothing to do with it and it has no real staff dedicated to countering that which is why trust in it has been eroded over the years.
Of course the solution is for the EU to start being able to explain to people what it does and why it does things, but cue the cries and screams of propaganda from the likes of Farage if they dare to better fund explanation of what exactly the EU's purpose and reasoning - to folks like Farage the idea of his propaganda being countered would be unacceptable.
If you'd actually bothered to read my comments on the Russia/Ukraine issue, rather than cherry picking a couple out of the hundred or so I've probably made where you've managed to find a link to the BBC, you'd note that I provided citations from the BBC, FT, Al Jazeera, Xinhua, Ukrainian media, Turkish media, Malaysian media, Europe wide media, North American media and in some cases even Russian media, as well as non-aligned charitable organisations and so forth to back up my points.
Thus the comments I've made are based not on the opinion of the BBC but on a combination of the reporting by the world's media and if you think that's biased then my previous point stands - what you're taking issue with is not BBC bias, but in fact that you're upset that no one is parroting the Kremlin's propaganda lines, not even it's traditional allies like China.
So yes, as a guzzler of RT propaganda you may persist in believing that the BBC is biased, but you then also have to accept that the whole of the world's media is biased because I've regularly cross referenced between what the BBC says, and what, say, the Chinese say. Rather than continue to consider that this is a problem of BBC bias, you may wish to consider that your continued belief that RT is the one true media source and that the rest of the world is wrong is where the actual problem is. I don't expect you to though because when one is absorbed with the idea that their preferred media source is right and pretty much the whole of the rest of the world is wrong then there's no real helping them.
I do agree Quake 2 was decent, but as you say it was ultimately the exception. I suspect though even this may be because Romero in part must've had some influence there - he didn't leave id until '96 and Quake 2 was released in 97.
Ironically he left because of an argument between Carmack and him about the future of the company. The company hasn't done so well since Carmack got his way so as great of an enginer programmer Carmack is I'm still not convinced that he's a talented games developer, because he just never managed to get the game - i.e. the fun bit - right.
I think therefore that both Carmack and Romero were in the wrong - Carmack couldn't make games without Romero, just tech demos, and Romero couldn't finish a project on time and budget without Carmack's forcing of focus.
People forget that whilst Ion Storm failed under Romero and let that define Romero's career but it can hardly be argued that id has been a stellar success under Carmack - despite it's initial relatively massive wealth as a games studio from it's early successes it still ended up getting bought out by one of the smallest publishers in the industry (Zenimax).
You keep using the word dim as an insult towards me yet seem to repeatedly be unable to grasp the concept that offering the open sourcing of the Minecraft server source code as a solution to the problem he has decided to create is identical to asking for the Minecraft source code, I'm not sure why you struggle with with such a simple concept, but apparently you do. Maybe you're, well, a bit dim?
"It's two years of his work (and Wolfe was one of the biggest contributors to the project) under basically false pretences."
Well no, it's not false pretences at all, he knew both the licensing situation and that he was working for free and should've known that no one owed him jack shit. The fact he apparently understood none of this is entirely his own stupid fault.
"By the way, using the blanket insult "you FOSS zealots" says a lot more about you than it does me. You know nothing about me, or my overall stance on software licensing."
What I know is that you're defending an indefensible action that only FOSS zealots would defend and that is precisely the reason companies and developers are put off working with the FOSS community. Whatever you may think you are, that's good enough for me to call a spade a spade and if you don't like it, then well, tough shit- that's what you get when you defend the indefensible.
A far more mature and sensible solution to the problem would be to publicly air your distaste, walk away and get the fuck over it. It's not difficult, except for this guy who seems to have a childish grudge and determination to enact revenge for his own stupidity in working on something where the licensing wasn't clear it seems. Would you seriously start in a job where the contract was written in a manner where you may find you don't get paid for your work at the end of the day? No of course you wouldn't, but if you did and didn't get paid then what the hell would you expect? No one owes this guy anything, he volunteered his times and that was entirely upto him, it doesn't give him the right to fuck everyone else.
I mostly agree, the BBC is actually very centrist (in fact if anything leaning left on some issues such as Gaza/Israel).
But I can most definitely give you an example of one area where the BBC is right wing leaning, not just right wing leaning but hard right leaning - it's website comments section. Now, I believe moderation of this is outsource IIRC so that might be the source of the problem, but there are regularly any number of people on there spouting far-right rhetoric about immigrants that go untouched, and yet if you offer a counter-argument such as "I've never had any issues with immigrants, in fact I've found Polish immigrants to be hard working, and have had a better quality of work from them than many British labourers" and you get rapidly silenced by the moderation team. This isn't a one off thing but a pretty consistent pattern, I suspect this is because the sort of bottom of the pile monkeys being contracted to do the moderation are the same sort of bottom of the pile monkeys that blame everyone but themselves for their career predicament.
As such the BBC comments sections have become a cesspit of right through to far right vitriol and bile spewing. An area of shame on the rest of the site.
No it's not, that's why even now it's well established that there are Russian regulars in Ukraine, the BBC still errs on the side of caution by calling those that are established as such "rebels" rather than "Russian soldiers" or similar.
The BBC may not fit your particular bias, but it's actually fairly unbiased - it takes immense caution before taking sides as in the example above. In fact, the BBC ended up in a massive fight with the government some years back precisely because it called out the then government over it's lies that led to the Iraq war once it had actual evidence so to call it a government mouthpiece is a bit of a joke. It does back up British values certainly, but that's a different thing - if you're looking for it to support Putin's or China's authoritarianism then no, it wont do that. There is certainly still some bias at the BBC in some areas - for example, coverage involving their own journalists is pretty poor, when Alan Johnson was kidnapped in Gaza they had daily coverage of it but stories about a kidnapped aid worker that were running at the same time went lightly reported which always struck me as a pretty blatant failure in objectivity but all in all it's very much a top tier news source in terms of quality and objectivity.
Likely when you say you're avoiding bias, what you really mean is that you don't like unbiased or low bias news and you're actually looking for confirmation bias and want something that will back up your own predetermined biases, and, well, have fun with that if that's what you're after, that's not what the BBC is, nor what we would ever want it to be.
It's not really fair to paint Romero as a complete failure, he brought soul to id's games, their games were just hollow without him. The success of Wolfenstein, then Doom, then Quake can't be pinned on one person, it was the culmination of talent at id with John Carmack doing great work with graphics programming advances, people like American McGee producing great maps, Romero coming up with great storylines, and Paul Steed producing great models and so on.
What Romero failed at was going it alone, he just didn't have what it took to manage a project and studio all by himself, that's where he failed. But credit where credit's due, he was responsible in no small part for breathing much of the life into id's games which is why without him, we just had these soulless graphics tech demos that id has produced ever since he left.
This guy above all else knows what makes an FPS great, what he needs is a great team to take the whole business side of things off him and a great project leader that will give him the freedom to do most of what he wants, but the common sense to reign him in where he starts pushing the boat out just a bit too much in terms of what's practical in a reasonable timeframe and with finite resources. If he finds that, I don't see why he can't breathe life into a great FPS like he's done many times before the great Daikatana fuck up.
The problem is BBC worldwide, it's a law unto itself and it needs to be reigned in. It's been doing things this last decade that are unacceptable, from buying companies it really should not be buying into because they're outside it's remit, to doing a real shit job of distribution, for example, shows paid for by the BBC license fee payer are sold on commercially by BBC Worldwide yet BBC Worldwide sells them in the US but not the UK so us in the UK who pay for the content in the first fucking case can't even buy Bluray discs of the content to keep like those in other countries can. I wanted to purchased Hidden Kingdoms on Bluray for my parents but BBC Worldwide only produce a US region version on Bluray and only sell it in the US even though it's production was financed by UK license fee payers - we can't get a copy except on DVD which completely defeats the object of such a show that's so heavily focussed on visuals.
This episode shouldn't be used to shame the BBC as a whole, it's at odds with what most people in the BBC proper believe, it's those at the top of the BBC responsible for reigning in BBC worldwide that's the problem - they let it go off and do it's own thing completely independently and it's gone feral and gotten rabies as a result.
Thus, if anyone does complain to the BBC about this I strongly advise you to lean towards making the point that enough is enough, BBC Worldwide needs to be reigned in and as it's whole owned by the BBC it needs to be pulled towards the views of license fee payers and not be allowed to continue to run amock doing it's own thing. BBC Worldwide makes a ton of profit for the BBC, but it can only do so because it's allowed to sell on content that UK TV license fee payers have paid for in the first place.
It's also worth noting that the BBC's charter is coming up for renegotiation soon too, so it's getting to the point where the BBC really can be forced to making sweeping changes or face having it's budget cut.
There's nothing dense about understanding that if you demand proprietary source code be made available that you're demanding access to the source code. It's really not rocket science and I can see why you FOSS zealots have such a bad name.
I don't really take issue with him being offended by some going on or another, but giving someone a choice of shutting down one project or open sourcing another because of some pet peeve is just a real dick thing to do. There's nothing wrong with the status quo unless Mojang decides to enforce the fact that their code was originally used illegally, something they've chosen not to do instead preferring to support their fan community.
You may think there's some technicality here or there that makes him right but it doesn't really matter. Other companies, other developers look at this and it's the sort of petty pathetic childishness that turns people away from open source software and giving that community access or support for anything. If there's a danger you're going to get burnt working with the FOSS community then why the fuck would you want to go near it?
He's telling them to open source the proprietary Minecraft server source code at the barrel of a DMCA notice that is extremely popular, broadly used and financed by Mojang. How is that not a ransom?
Telling someone they can either suffer a crippling of a product they support or to hand over some entirely non-GPL source code is direct a ransom as it gets - demanding the Minecraft server source code - something that isn't his but that he's demanding - absolutely is a demand for material gain.
"But if we mean that the Scala programmers are in demand, then yes, Scala is popular."
No it doesn't, because popularity sits on a spectrum, and the level of demand for Scala programmers is at least an order of magnitude lower than for Java, C#, C++, Python, Javascript, and PHP developers for example. Popular would imply Scala is high on the demand rankings, it's just not, not by any measure.
How is it a defect? The fact is that there are different types of equality in a classic OO language (value equality, type equality, reference equality). You've got to be able to denote these somehow, and if someone stupidly uses the wrong concept that's a training issue. Using .equals instead of == if that's what you meant is no different to using the wrong operator elsewhere, it's like using -- instead of ++, or % instead of ^. It's an intentional and sensible language design decision.
It's impossible to create a language whereby user error is eliminated from the equation without eliminating the user from the equation. Yes you can argue that you should switch to languages where references, and values and types don't exist as explicit concepts but then you end up with something like Javascript where implicit variable conversion creates mountains more user error and where the lack of ability to explicitly define reference or value type means you get all sorts of horrendous bugs relating to variable capture that can only be fixed with an ugly verbose poorly readable hack to force creation of a new scope to capture a value.
C#? F#? It depends what blend of OO and functional you really want.
This isn't entirely fair, it's worth noting that African has equally long been plagued by Christian extremism, and in fact, if we're talking about through history it's probably worth considering that it was the Christian crusades that were prominent in upending what were relatively peaceful societies back then, that's before you go back to the likes of Alexander's adventures through there and so forth also.
With all the focus on the middle east it's easy to forget that there are countries like India, where 10% of the world's muslims (170million) live that seem to harbour barely a single one even slightly interested in extremism. Indonesia has some problems, but it's similarly got a population of 270million muslims, and the vast majority similarly live in peace.
Pretending there's some specific aspect here of Islam that's the problem is complete and utter nonsense when you can similarly point to many hundreds of millions of muslims who don't fall into this stereotype, and when you can similarly point to many millions of Christians who fit the exact same stereotype (in fact, in CAR there are Christian militias carrying out the exact same atrocities as IS right now - beheadings, massacres etc.), it's just not as newsworthy because the middle east is where the West has repeatedly focussed it's attention in recent decades.
This isn't to say I'm some fluffy believer in respect everyone and they'll respect you and all that nonsense, on the contrary, I think we probably missed a chance to neuter IS to some degree and to check Putin's increasing boldness by not striking Syria and I think because we didn't and because Syria's moderates saw the only people that were standing by them in the face of a chemical weapons massacre were the Islamists we allowed IS to grow into a monster taking Qatari, Turkish, and US weapons along to IS with them. I think painting a red line and then not backing it up, even if only with a handful of cruise missile strikes on Syrian airfields used for barrel bombings and missile bases capable of launching chemical attacks was stupid and is a major reason IS was able to grow, and possibly even why Putin felt bold enough to not only annex Crimea but not give a shit when his guys shot down a civilian airliner and still invade Eastern Ukraine afterwards to boot. Maybe that's not the case, we'll never know, but if nothing else I can see how IS has grown as a function of our lack of backing up of red lines and promised support for moderates whilst they were still left with enough hope that someone actually cared about them to be moderate- the only upside is we got Assad to disarm some of his worst chemical weapons like Sarin (he's still using others like Chlorine which weren't part of the disarmament process).
There's no doubt the whole thing's a clusterfuck, but doing nothing is as much a bad option as doing something, and blaming an entire group of people that is over a billion in size and the vast majority of whom are as normal as you and I doesn't help anyone as you can similarly cherry pick conflicts of any religion as an equal and opposite counter-argument - in Burma even the Buddhists are carrying out atrocities for example.
Baghdad is primarily Shia, so they'd never be able to rule it. It's also the place whereby which most people that want IS destroyed come from. They wouldn't flood it to rule it, they'd flood it because it's the biggest threat to them in Iraq. There's an entire area of Baghdad called Sadr city, after a religious leader that has basically his own entire army- these guys alone are strong enough to hold IS off from Baghdad (it was basically a no go area for coalition troops when they invaded and they were more numerous and better equipped and trained than IS), so flooding it would be massively advantageous to them.
That still makes him wrong. Contributing code to an open project and then retroactively trying to ransom it back is a dick move however you spin it.
Anyone doing that is a twat, either don't do the work in the first place, or accept it's out there and let people do what they want. Don't put it out there and then bitch about people using it.
If you have a problem with the project, stop working on it and move the fuck on. Don't try and ruin everyone else's fun over your hissy fit and start making petty demands and threats.
You seem good at that Hail Hitler thing, you must've had a lot of practice under Putin.
Tell me, one last question, if you're so adamant that people should have the freedom of choice, why are you not protesting Putin's consistent prevention of Chechnya breaking free from Russia as it wants?
What's that? you love suppression of democratic will and civilians? Thought so- at least you're consistent though, you neither want the people of Eastern Ukraine, nor the people of Chechnya to be able to break away from Russia, you just want fascist mother Russia to rule over all.
P.S. That's not a Ukrainian military column masquerading as a medical convoy, it's very clearly a Ukrainian military medical convoy, that's why they have green trucks and red crosses, it's kind of exactly what that means. What is a breach of the Geneva convention though is your far right Hitler loving fascist soldiers in Eastern Ukraine.
I'll give you a hint, there's a reason why Europe's far right parties like Frances National Front, Denmark's Party of Freedom and Hungary's Jobbik party and Putin are best of friends- because like those parties, that are the modern day incarnations of the Nazis, so is Putin, and so are you, because you support the far right with your ideals, so fuck off Nazi, we have enough of your shit in the 30s and 40s, we killed most of you off then and we'll do the same if we have to. There's no room for your Jew hating, nationalistic, homophobic, dictator lovers in Europe.
You see, on one hand, we have the Ukrainian election results:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/f...
(Note the source- do you really think Israel of all countries full of Jews would defend Ukrainian election results if Ukraine actually voted for Nazis? - if Israel doesn't see Nazism in the Ukrainian regime then no one with any sense would) On the other, we have Putin with his favourite neo-Nazi biker gang:
http://ukraineinvestigation.co...
http://climateerinvest.blogspo...
Yet you keep telling yourself there are magical invisible nazis in Ukraine, all the whilst you're supporting not just people who look like nazis, act like nazis, but people who are real actual nazis. You keep telling yourself you're the good guy for supporting Nazis, we'll keep laughing at you and supplying arms so that your nazi friends keep getting shot as they deserve all whilst you sit in a country with an economy that's being driven into the ground by your favoured nazi loving regime.
No, not at all, evolution occurs due to natural pressures. If a natural pressure such as a drought forces Lions to change behaviour then that's a point at which evolution is forcing the attempting of something new - that learned behaviour goes hand in hand with evolution. Were the elephant populations to remain stable in the face of suddenly being hunted by lions such that they become normal predators of elephants you'd then find the evolutionary pressures would force slowly those elephant hunting lions to gain traits that make them better at it, such as perhaps the ability to more easily penetrate elephant skin, or the ability to jump higher.
You're absolutely right that evolution is slow, but that does not mean we cannot witness elements of it occurring and such a change is a perfect example of exactly that - it's a natural pressure forcing a previously stable species to have to adapt, it's natural selection - those lions that learn to hunt the elephants continue to feed and survive, those that fail to start trying to hunt elephants starve and die and that can very much result in a completely new constant evolutionary battle between a new matching of predator and prey.
I guess it's potentially as much about where you live and whether such opportunities are available, but I'll be honest with you I've done a brutal amount of CRUD work myself before I found what I was looking for - there's not much of it where I am in the UK unless you live in London or Cambridge. More than anything I'd say it's a result of two things:
1) Studying maths such that I can genuinely come up with solutions to problems that your average developer will say "That's not possible", this doesn't require a Phd, but even graduate level maths is enough - fundamentally all you need to be able to do is know what tools exist in the mathematical toolbox, you don't have to know how to implement them off by heart, but if you can turn around and say "Well, that's a classification problem, we're going to need something like neural networks", or "That's an optimisation problem, we can frame it like the travelling salesman problem and look at algorithms that provide approximate solutions from there" then you have everything you need - the actual math and implementation details can be learnt or read up on from articles in books or on the web after that - the key thing is knowing what the options are, implementation and use of the math in question can come when it's relevant.
2) Going through enough of the CRUD crap to get to a level where I'm respected enough to be able to make the choice about when we try something new. For years I saw opportunities to make our products better wherever I worked but when I was starting out no one listens, you've got to know when to say fuck your boss saying no and just do it anyway so you can show them it does work - remember the adage, "It's easier to just do something and ask for forgiveness, than it is to get permission in the first place" or in cases where you know you'll get shot or wont get chance to do it you're stuck doing things the old fashioned and ineffective way, or just not solving said problem at all and leaving some feature out of your software.
So it's ultimately about being able to show you can do it, and using a combination of that, and sitting out the boring shit long enough to get in a senior enough position that there's someone to tell you you can't take a risk and try something different to make your product better than the competitors. It gets easier and easier - the more you take that risk and it pays off the more you're given the freedom to do so. I never did it, but it often crossed my mind that maybe there were times I could've sacrificed some of my spare time to prove ideas I wasn't allowed to prove at work, whilst I don't think people should have to do that due to the fact I firmly believe in people having a good work life balance, it's an option depending on how much you want something and if you feel it's the only way to make yourself heard and get that respect to have the freedom to do it at work in the future. But above all else, you need that ability mostly through maths/comp. sci. knowledge to be able to see scope in everything you do to do it better in a way that's maybe not been done before to differentiate your product.
I guess that's a form of specialisation though? Effectively what you're seeing there is evolution in action- the only Lions that could survive the drought were those that adapted to hunt elephants and that continued afterwards, but whether it's a viable long term strategy is a different question, if you whipe out all your prey in your area then suddenly those elephant hunting lions will be back to square one, such that those who adapted simply to hunt elephants will die due to lack of elephants forcing them back towards the norm. Potentially what may happen is the pride heads off after other herds of elephants that are more capable of fighting off lions and they are dissuaded from further hunting of Elephants (or simply wiped out in a failed hunt) that way too. Of course, the other possibility is that they continue to successfully hunt elephants and it's no longer true that elephants have no persistent sustained natural predators- lions become exactly that, well, until the elephants grow even larger through evolutionary pressure perhaps.
Evolution will always throw up such situations now and again, and I suspect the same was true of this creature, and I suspect the same is true of adult blue whales - I didn't mean so much by saying they don't have any natural predators doesn't necessarily imply they're never ever hunted, simply that it only happens in extreme fringe circumstances that may only be temporary blips in the history of evolution where evolution tries and fails these things tended back to how things were before. Fundamentally such freak events are somewhat unnatural (okay, well, pedantically, everything that happens ever is technically natural, but you get the point) until they become naturalised as normal events.
I think it's more a question when talking about natural predators if it's something that is constant and sustained such that the predator/prey populations stay in balance. If the prey is hunted to extinction then it loses it's natural predators through extinction, it becomes a historical footnote with that natural predator. If they can continue in balance being hunted then that is their natural predator in the cycle of life. We've had fringe cases of pelicans eating pidgeons before, but such fringe cases I do not think are enough to class them as natural predators of pidgeons unless it similarly becomes sustained and commonplace.
So such an event doesn't mean that animals can have no natural predators consistently through time, not at all, evolution isn't binary, it works on a spectrum- there will be periods whereby they are still evolving to be big enough to be free from predators, and there will be periods where the predators caught up, but it's quite possible that this particular specimen (arguably similar to blue whales) reached a size where they were safe and continued to live at that size such that would-be future predators were whiped out by extinction events (the event that killed the dinosaurs, or event now where humans are hunting species to extinction) in a way that that particular branch of life was ended abruptly at a point where no such predators managed to exist for the species in questions.
Though next week, we might find fossils of 29 metre long t-rex cousins too of course :)