Or just split the difference, keep everyone happy, and decide to do both proposals. Hence leading to configuration boxes from hell adorned with approximately seven thousand checkboxes.
Most of the 'heavy lifting' in the porting to Amiga was already done by William Reeve, so he deserves the bulk of the credit. I mostly just did some graphical sprucing up for the A1200 chipset, bugfixing, and things like figuring out how to get the game saves to work on the CD32.
I didn't work on the core of Syndicate Wars, although some of the library code I worked on at Bullfrog I think found its way in there. I mostly worked on Dungeon Keeper, a bunch of library code, and a couple of cancelled projects.
Yeah, Exile was a great game, but it was bloody difficult.
I must admit that despite working on the A1200 and C32 ports (I'm Tony Cox), I never actually played through the whole original game myself. Without walkthroughs from Peter (and William Reeve) I'd never have seen the whole game except during debugging.
It was ahead of its time, though. Despite all the clever little tricks in the code (of which there were many), Peter's overall architecture was clean and one that wouldn't look too amiss in a modern title. I probably learned more about game development from walking through Peter's code than I did from any other single experience.
Iain Banks I'll grant you, but Stephen Baxter sucks as a writer. Seriously.
Now, to be fair, Mr. Baxter has really great imaginative ideas, and reading his books is sure to turn up some thoughts you'd never had before, but frankly, they're a bit of a chore. The characters are one dimensional at best, the prose is plodding, and there is no sense of pacing or tension in the plot development. The text appears to merely be a vehicle to transport you from one of his 'big ideas' to the next. The ideas are good, it's just a shame you have to wade through such turgid prose to get to the next one.
I like to read Baxter for the cool ideas, but I generally find myself speed-reading and skimming along to the next good bit because I just don't care about the characters or what happens to them. I certainly don't find his books satisfying as literature, or worthy of a second reading.
If you think the Kyoto Treaty will have adverse economic effects, just wait until you see the adverse economic impact of global climate change...
The point is that, absent government intervention, markets are very bad at factoring in long range issues. Even if it would be economically in society's best long run interests to take action on the environment, because the costs incurred down the road are so massive, investors are generally unable to take a long-term enough view. If you can make 10% more profit for the next 20 years, at the sacrifice of the whole company in 80, then many investors choose to take that trade (after all, they'll be dead in 80 years).
The way to make the market work is to apply economic pressure for those long term effects. You 'bring forward' those costs from the future to allow the market to properly act on them today. One way of doing this is with, for example, emissions taxes.
I should also point out that they work, and without crippling the economy. Look that the leap in the average fuel efficiency of American cars during the 70s as a result of the oil crises. That was economic pressure being applied in the form of taxes and higher oil prices, which led to car manufacturers drastically improving the fuel efficiencies of their products. Did that crush the American economy? Apparently not.
We have plenty of evidence that very strongly suggests that global warming is the result of human activity, and that it's not a good thing.
Of course, we can never prove this unless we were to run back in time and repeat the whole thing again with tighter environmental controls for comparison. Which is to say that we can never actually prove for 100% certain what is going on - a fact repeatedly seized on by the Big Oil folks.
However, I would point out that this Earth is the only one we have. We do not have the luxury of waiting to see if we really are fucking things up. By the time we wait for 100% proof to be available, it will be too late to do anything about it. That's why we have to start acting now, based on the significant balance of evidence already available to us - and hope that we're not too late.
Of course, it's cheaper for Sony to do this than it would be for Microsoft or Nintendo. Sony has to compensate the developer/publisher more than they'd make by releasing on Xbox or GameCube. Microsoft or Nintendo have to compensate them more than they'd make by releasing on PS2, a significantly bigger sum.
What has left-wing versus right-wing got to do with scientific questions like: are we fucking up the environment?
Regardless of your personal political leanings, why would you want to ignore scientific evidence that we're destroying the planet? The only explanations I can think of are:
(1) You get political funding from Big Oil.
(2) You are uncomfortable with the logical consequences of taking appropriate action, and since you don't want to think of yourself as being anti-environment, it's easier to just convince yourself that your 16MPG SUV isn't really doing any harm.
Why would someone want to believe that we're ruining the planet? It doesn't serve either left-wing or right-wing ideology. The only reason to believe that is because the evidence tell us so.
The canonical example of this principle being ignored is Frontier (the ill-conceived sequal to the classic Elite).
Elite had unrealistic but fun space combat. Elite is a gaming classic.
Frontier has space-geek realism. Which means that combat consists of firing your laser at a tiny pixel-sized dot in the distance for a while and waiting to see which one of you blows up first. Which might be grittily real, but it's pretty fucking dull. Frontier is a gaming disaster.
Organisms are not DESIGNED to do anything. They EVOLVED that way. That includes evolving optimal replication error rates (if a mutation resulted in too little or too few future mutations, that strain dies out or stagnates).
I think once you have replication, the possibility of at least some mutation occuring, albeit very infrequently, and an environmental selection mechanism, then you have all the ingredients for evolution to occur. That doesn't mean these things are going to evolve into something interestingly different overnight, but if they were allowed to evolve over millions of years, I'm sure plenty of stuff would emerge.
Depends on your definition of 'significance'. Also, suppose you have a definition for 'significant' or 'interesting' integers. There must then be a smallest integer, K, which is not 'interesting'. But is that property not, in itself, 'interesting'?
To be more specific: It's clearly possible to design certain kinds of games where all the authority is in the server - for example first-person shooters typically work in this fashion. The trouble is that those techniques don't apply so well to some other game genres, notably RTS games.
In the typical client-server style, your bandwidth requirements to an individual client scale with the perceptual complexity of the game to an individual client. In most FPS games, the complexity is relatively low - only a few units moving around that a client can see at any given time. If the complexity grows, things grind to a halt (try this with a large Quake level that's just a huge open box filled with rocket launchers - the performance sucks).
In RTS games, the perceptual complexity of the game is large. There may be hundreds of units that the client can see at any one time. In order to cut-down bandwidth requirements, a different network model is required. The usual solution is a lockstep model, where clients exchange user-inputs and each models the world deterministically. This means that bandwidth now scales only with the number of clients, and that the game can have arbitrary perceptual complexity. The drawback is increased latency (to allow for buffering, since the packets now have to be transmitted reliably), and less ability to do things like join-in-progress. Fortunately, those drawbacks are less of an issue for most RTS games than for shooters.
An additional drawback of the lockstep model is that every client needs a complete state of the world, even if it is not displayed to the user. This allows client-side hacks (e.g. subverting fog-of-war), which are indeed problems.
Combining the best of both worlds would be great, but nobody has figured out a way to do it in a satisfactory fashion yet.
No, but the space in my entertainment center does. With all the audio, TV, and console stuff in my entertainment center I'm basically out of space, and the spaghetti of cabling is starting to get unruly. If I get a new console, I'll probably have to ditch an existing one (or at least move it to another room, which pretty much means it won't get played).
Yes, I could just let it sprawl all over my living room floor, but my girlfriend tends to get crabby about that kind of thing, especially when we have guests.
Just like a poker game in a brick-and-mortar casino, the casino doesn't really care whether you win or lose, so long as you play, because you're being paid by the other players not the house. The house makes money by taking a 'rake', either a percentage of every pot (usually) or a per-time charge (less common).
My experience with online poker has been that they have always paid up when asked, and I've not noticed anything that would indicate cheating on any widespread scale. Perhaps it might be common at higher stakes, but at anything below $10/$20 I just haven't seen it.
I was responding to the suggestion that because Blizzard have to ban people, their game is broken and somehow they haven't been doing their job.
My point is that in 'real life' games, the equivalent of being banned by Blizzard exists too. If you regularly griefed in pickup golf or tennis games (you know, where you turn up at the club and get paired with whichever other random member happens to want to play at that time), you might be asked not to renew your club membership. That doesn't mean tennis or golf are intrinsically broken games. It just means that people are assholes and sometimes you need to deal with that.
Imagine you belong to a tennis club where you can play scratch games of doubles. Sometimes your doubles partner just deliberately throws the game. You'd probably try to avoid playing that person, but if he persistently did that he might well be subject to sanction and perhaps ejection from the tennis club for unsporting behaviour.
Does that mean doubles tennis is a broken game? Or does it just mean that you sometimes need extra social or organisational structures to make games work? On the 'net, those problems can be harder to solve because of the relative anonymity, so your range of solutions is narrower.
Runaway inflation is a problem because the money supply is uncontrolled in many virtual economies. Prices for raw materials and items from in-game vendors can be fixed, but that doesn't stop the player prices from spiralling uncontrollably, and typically turning into barter economies for all but the most common of goods, with money (gold, credits, whatever) being essentially worthless for non-newbies.
The originally planned in-game economy becomes useless for meaningful trade, and the 'real' game economy is conducted via eBay or primitive bartering. Where of course it's difficult for the operators of the virtual world to perform any regulatory functions.
While I'm sure that professional mathematicians are not influenced by the money, I don't think the Clay Institute prize is by any means a travesty. After all, it raises awareness of mathematics to the general public. Having a big cash prize attached to something makes it more newsworthy (which might be a sad fact, but is hardly the fault of the Clay Institute).
Now, I'm sure it's a stretch to imagine that many kids are going to see coverage of the Poincare Conjecture and be sparked to become mathematicians as a result, but I think in these days when many kids (and adults) are almost proud to be virtually innumerate, anything which brings maths to mainstream attention can't be a bad thing.
While it's bad to be prejudiced about such things, there is a huge amount of 'circumstantial' evidence that P != NP, and so it really would be a huge surprise if they turned out to be equal. (Similarly, most mathematicians believe that the Riemann Hypothesis and Poincare Conjecture are both true, and would be extremely surprised if they were not.)
If P were equal to NP, then you could have a nice contructive proof in the form of a polynomial-time algorithm for an NP-complete problem. That's a pretty straightward thing to tackle, and lots of people have tried, so the fact that nobody has been successful does very heavily suggest that it's not possible in principle. Proving that no such algorithm can exist (e.g. by finding an exponential lower-bound on the complexity of an NP problem) seems to me to be conceptually trickier.
Concorde passengers were ordinary people in the sense that anybody could purchase a ticket; you didn't have to be in the military. Sure, the tickets were expensive, but they were not totally out of reach for the reasonably affluent if flying on Concorde was important to them, it's just that most people had other priorities. I'm sure there are plenty of geeks here that spend thousands on computers and fancy home theatre setups, and we think of those things as being purchased by 'ordinary people'.
* 2003: Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype (but ordinary people fly faster than sound on a regular basis)
Except that, sadly, Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype the same year that commercial supersonic flights were discontinued.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, printing presses should be regulated, because they put scribes and illuminators out of work.
Or just split the difference, keep everyone happy, and decide to do both proposals. Hence leading to configuration boxes from hell adorned with approximately seven thousand checkboxes.
Most of the 'heavy lifting' in the porting to Amiga was already done by William Reeve, so he deserves the bulk of the credit. I mostly just did some graphical sprucing up for the A1200 chipset, bugfixing, and things like figuring out how to get the game saves to work on the CD32.
I didn't work on the core of Syndicate Wars, although some of the library code I worked on at Bullfrog I think found its way in there. I mostly worked on Dungeon Keeper, a bunch of library code, and a couple of cancelled projects.
Yeah, Exile was a great game, but it was bloody difficult.
I must admit that despite working on the A1200 and C32 ports (I'm Tony Cox), I never actually played through the whole original game myself. Without walkthroughs from Peter (and William Reeve) I'd never have seen the whole game except during debugging.
It was ahead of its time, though. Despite all the clever little tricks in the code (of which there were many), Peter's overall architecture was clean and one that wouldn't look too amiss in a modern title. I probably learned more about game development from walking through Peter's code than I did from any other single experience.
Iain Banks I'll grant you, but Stephen Baxter sucks as a writer. Seriously.
Now, to be fair, Mr. Baxter has really great imaginative ideas, and reading his books is sure to turn up some thoughts you'd never had before, but frankly, they're a bit of a chore. The characters are one dimensional at best, the prose is plodding, and there is no sense of pacing or tension in the plot development. The text appears to merely be a vehicle to transport you from one of his 'big ideas' to the next. The ideas are good, it's just a shame you have to wade through such turgid prose to get to the next one.
I like to read Baxter for the cool ideas, but I generally find myself speed-reading and skimming along to the next good bit because I just don't care about the characters or what happens to them. I certainly don't find his books satisfying as literature, or worthy of a second reading.
If you think the Kyoto Treaty will have adverse economic effects, just wait until you see the adverse economic impact of global climate change...
The point is that, absent government intervention, markets are very bad at factoring in long range issues. Even if it would be economically in society's best long run interests to take action on the environment, because the costs incurred down the road are so massive, investors are generally unable to take a long-term enough view. If you can make 10% more profit for the next 20 years, at the sacrifice of the whole company in 80, then many investors choose to take that trade (after all, they'll be dead in 80 years).
The way to make the market work is to apply economic pressure for those long term effects. You 'bring forward' those costs from the future to allow the market to properly act on them today. One way of doing this is with, for example, emissions taxes.
I should also point out that they work, and without crippling the economy. Look that the leap in the average fuel efficiency of American cars during the 70s as a result of the oil crises. That was economic pressure being applied in the form of taxes and higher oil prices, which led to car manufacturers drastically improving the fuel efficiencies of their products. Did that crush the American economy? Apparently not.
We have plenty of evidence that very strongly suggests that global warming is the result of human activity, and that it's not a good thing.
Of course, we can never prove this unless we were to run back in time and repeat the whole thing again with tighter environmental controls for comparison. Which is to say that we can never actually prove for 100% certain what is going on - a fact repeatedly seized on by the Big Oil folks.
However, I would point out that this Earth is the only one we have. We do not have the luxury of waiting to see if we really are fucking things up. By the time we wait for 100% proof to be available, it will be too late to do anything about it. That's why we have to start acting now, based on the significant balance of evidence already available to us - and hope that we're not too late.
"Big Environmentalists"? WTF? Does Greenpeace have a $100Bn market cap I wasn't aware of?
Of course, it's cheaper for Sony to do this than it would be for Microsoft or Nintendo. Sony has to compensate the developer/publisher more than they'd make by releasing on Xbox or GameCube. Microsoft or Nintendo have to compensate them more than they'd make by releasing on PS2, a significantly bigger sum.
What has left-wing versus right-wing got to do with scientific questions like: are we fucking up the environment?
Regardless of your personal political leanings, why would you want to ignore scientific evidence that we're destroying the planet? The only explanations I can think of are:
(1) You get political funding from Big Oil.
(2) You are uncomfortable with the logical consequences of taking appropriate action, and since you don't want to think of yourself as being anti-environment, it's easier to just convince yourself that your 16MPG SUV isn't really doing any harm.
Why would someone want to believe that we're ruining the planet? It doesn't serve either left-wing or right-wing ideology. The only reason to believe that is because the evidence tell us so.
The canonical example of this principle being ignored is Frontier (the ill-conceived sequal to the classic Elite).
Elite had unrealistic but fun space combat. Elite is a gaming classic.
Frontier has space-geek realism. Which means that combat consists of firing your laser at a tiny pixel-sized dot in the distance for a while and waiting to see which one of you blows up first. Which might be grittily real, but it's pretty fucking dull. Frontier is a gaming disaster.
Organisms are not DESIGNED to do anything. They EVOLVED that way. That includes evolving optimal replication error rates (if a mutation resulted in too little or too few future mutations, that strain dies out or stagnates).
I think once you have replication, the possibility of at least some mutation occuring, albeit very infrequently, and an environmental selection mechanism, then you have all the ingredients for evolution to occur. That doesn't mean these things are going to evolve into something interestingly different overnight, but if they were allowed to evolve over millions of years, I'm sure plenty of stuff would emerge.
Depends on your definition of 'significance'. Also, suppose you have a definition for 'significant' or 'interesting' integers. There must then be a smallest integer, K, which is not 'interesting'. But is that property not, in itself, 'interesting'?
To be more specific: It's clearly possible to design certain kinds of games where all the authority is in the server - for example first-person shooters typically work in this fashion. The trouble is that those techniques don't apply so well to some other game genres, notably RTS games.
In the typical client-server style, your bandwidth requirements to an individual client scale with the perceptual complexity of the game to an individual client. In most FPS games, the complexity is relatively low - only a few units moving around that a client can see at any given time. If the complexity grows, things grind to a halt (try this with a large Quake level that's just a huge open box filled with rocket launchers - the performance sucks).
In RTS games, the perceptual complexity of the game is large. There may be hundreds of units that the client can see at any one time. In order to cut-down bandwidth requirements, a different network model is required. The usual solution is a lockstep model, where clients exchange user-inputs and each models the world deterministically. This means that bandwidth now scales only with the number of clients, and that the game can have arbitrary perceptual complexity. The drawback is increased latency (to allow for buffering, since the packets now have to be transmitted reliably), and less ability to do things like join-in-progress. Fortunately, those drawbacks are less of an issue for most RTS games than for shooters.
An additional drawback of the lockstep model is that every client needs a complete state of the world, even if it is not displayed to the user. This allows client-side hacks (e.g. subverting fog-of-war), which are indeed problems.
Combining the best of both worlds would be great, but nobody has figured out a way to do it in a satisfactory fashion yet.
There is still such a thing as the Hardware Abstraction Layer. It's not the same thing as the now defunct microkernel.
No, but the space in my entertainment center does. With all the audio, TV, and console stuff in my entertainment center I'm basically out of space, and the spaghetti of cabling is starting to get unruly. If I get a new console, I'll probably have to ditch an existing one (or at least move it to another room, which pretty much means it won't get played).
Yes, I could just let it sprawl all over my living room floor, but my girlfriend tends to get crabby about that kind of thing, especially when we have guests.
Just like a poker game in a brick-and-mortar casino, the casino doesn't really care whether you win or lose, so long as you play, because you're being paid by the other players not the house. The house makes money by taking a 'rake', either a percentage of every pot (usually) or a per-time charge (less common).
My experience with online poker has been that they have always paid up when asked, and I've not noticed anything that would indicate cheating on any widespread scale. Perhaps it might be common at higher stakes, but at anything below $10/$20 I just haven't seen it.
I was responding to the suggestion that because Blizzard have to ban people, their game is broken and somehow they haven't been doing their job.
My point is that in 'real life' games, the equivalent of being banned by Blizzard exists too. If you regularly griefed in pickup golf or tennis games (you know, where you turn up at the club and get paired with whichever other random member happens to want to play at that time), you might be asked not to renew your club membership. That doesn't mean tennis or golf are intrinsically broken games. It just means that people are assholes and sometimes you need to deal with that.
Try this analogy for size:
Imagine you belong to a tennis club where you can play scratch games of doubles. Sometimes your doubles partner just deliberately throws the game. You'd probably try to avoid playing that person, but if he persistently did that he might well be subject to sanction and perhaps ejection from the tennis club for unsporting behaviour.
Does that mean doubles tennis is a broken game? Or does it just mean that you sometimes need extra social or organisational structures to make games work? On the 'net, those problems can be harder to solve because of the relative anonymity, so your range of solutions is narrower.
Runaway inflation is a problem because the money supply is uncontrolled in many virtual economies. Prices for raw materials and items from in-game vendors can be fixed, but that doesn't stop the player prices from spiralling uncontrollably, and typically turning into barter economies for all but the most common of goods, with money (gold, credits, whatever) being essentially worthless for non-newbies.
The originally planned in-game economy becomes useless for meaningful trade, and the 'real' game economy is conducted via eBay or primitive bartering. Where of course it's difficult for the operators of the virtual world to perform any regulatory functions.
While I'm sure that professional mathematicians are not influenced by the money, I don't think the Clay Institute prize is by any means a travesty. After all, it raises awareness of mathematics to the general public. Having a big cash prize attached to something makes it more newsworthy (which might be a sad fact, but is hardly the fault of the Clay Institute).
Now, I'm sure it's a stretch to imagine that many kids are going to see coverage of the Poincare Conjecture and be sparked to become mathematicians as a result, but I think in these days when many kids (and adults) are almost proud to be virtually innumerate, anything which brings maths to mainstream attention can't be a bad thing.
While it's bad to be prejudiced about such things, there is a huge amount of 'circumstantial' evidence that P != NP, and so it really would be a huge surprise if they turned out to be equal. (Similarly, most mathematicians believe that the Riemann Hypothesis and Poincare Conjecture are both true, and would be extremely surprised if they were not.)
If P were equal to NP, then you could have a nice contructive proof in the form of a polynomial-time algorithm for an NP-complete problem. That's a pretty straightward thing to tackle, and lots of people have tried, so the fact that nobody has been successful does very heavily suggest that it's not possible in principle. Proving that no such algorithm can exist (e.g. by finding an exponential lower-bound on the complexity of an NP problem) seems to me to be conceptually trickier.
Concorde passengers were ordinary people in the sense that anybody could purchase a ticket; you didn't have to be in the military. Sure, the tickets were expensive, but they were not totally out of reach for the reasonably affluent if flying on Concorde was important to them, it's just that most people had other priorities. I'm sure there are plenty of geeks here that spend thousands on computers and fancy home theatre setups, and we think of those things as being purchased by 'ordinary people'.
Except that, sadly, Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype the same year that commercial supersonic flights were discontinued.
So why not just shut down the app in question (or prompt the user to do so) rather than rebooting the whole freaking system?