Yeah, downloading may be in the gray area. But I guess ROMs are pretty useless if you already own the game, and its in a format a PC can read, ie PSX, PS2, Xbox, etc. This is all a moot point if you aren't afraid to "copy that floppy".
The same way every other console survives, like NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, etc. There may not be any emulators out, but PS2s haven't phased out yet either. I believe emulators are legal if you own the console, and the roms are legal if you own the game.
You sir need to be modded up.
How piracy managed to get in the dictionary with respect to copyright infringement, I'll never know. This is a slang term which in its actual definition has very little in common to the acts described by the **AA. I can't stress enough how twisted this situation is, with all the brain washing and "studies" performed by **AA and friends. People need to start thinking for themselves instead of horribly disfigured articles and news reports doing it for them.
What strikes me as odd is that you were modded Insightful. Insightful is the new stupid, I guess.
OK so lets say they do make portable code. Oh shit, what happened to the framerate? Oh thats right, they made portable code, and its not optimized for individual platforms!!
It's the same reason there aren't any viruses for the Mac. No one cares enough. Stick to your sheltered iLife.
Google has added more functionality to their Docs and Spreadsheets for FREE. It doesn't REQUIRE you to use it. It is there to be useful. People are going to use PowerPoint whether you like it or not. This is FREE use of software. If you want to complain about it, I'll be in the hallway handing out free kicks to the face.
You could probably work on it offline as well using Work Offline or whatever.. or at least I think so, haven't tried it myself. You just wouldn't be able to save to the server, just to HD, which is fine.
Personally, I use it because I don't like Open Office (a few bugs, plus layout design and other things i just don't agree with). It's great because I don't have to bother saving it to a USB key or anything, and I can access it from anywhere with internet access. So from school to work to home I can open it and start working on it. I can also collaborate, which I find very useful for School and projects. Keeps track of revisions and such. So it has some functionality that OpenOffice/MSOffice doesn't (or if they do, it certainly isn't as accessible or convenient).
Plus, Google's interfaces are extremely good, from a personal point of view and UI Design point of view.
It would be useful (although no clue about the OSS thing) but I can't see it happening anytime soon.. Visio isn't really used by the general public, unlike PPT, Word and Excel. I'm all for a Visio, I'm sick of using Office.
You are 100% correct.. if we followed even remotely close to how physics is actually calculated, no one would want to play any games, because of horrible framerates.. take Ray Tracing for example. It models light sources pretty decently, far from perfect, but actually follows physics laws (reflections, refractions, shadowing, etc). Yet it is so computationally expensive that it is extremely rare to use it in realtime. I'm sure many animated movies use it or something similar, but as it stands hardware just isnt capable. So we still use rasterization to get the job done. If any calculus is done, its behind the scenes like for graphics libraries perhaps.
Thanks for your input.:)
I've yet to come across people I personally know that need to be taught about ethical practice, but I guess the people I know are just a small sample of a huge population right? So my opinion is certainly biased.
No worries, I get a little defensive sometimes. Its completely understandable to assume I was just throwing a useless, ignorant opinion around, especially if you were an instructor, I can only imagine what you've had to put up with. Its good to know there are reasonable, intelligible people here on slashdot:)
I enjoy learning new things. That's why I'm in university. You are right, however, it definitely depends on the line of business. The line of business I am interested in certainly doesn't involve java, which it then becomes of very little use for me, and which brings me back to my point about why we should be given more choice (what I was getting at in my original post). Apologies if I made it unclear, my skills do not lie in writing.
What I'm ultimately trying to say, is Java should NOT be forced upon students as it was for me. This kind of thing should be open to choice, and I believe that choice could bring more students to CS. This is just part of the choice, as I don't believe its the only thing in need of repairing. OO programming can be accomplished in C++ as well, and I think giving that kind of option to learn one or the other, would benefi many students. Yes it is more difficult to create perfectly OO code in C++, but I would imagine it would be beneficial for students to not rely on Java to do it all for them. You could go into the theory a little deeper than I was taught but I believe coding it for yourself is better practice. Maybe thats just me.
Yes, thanks for pointing out the obvious.
What you wrote about well-rounded skills, and C/C++ etc etc, well, oh my, seems like you tried to be funny. Please read my posts more carefully. Did I say Java was useless? No. I said the course was. Although, Java doesn't seem to be all that popular. How many sleek, low memory consumption, low CPU clock consumption Java programs are commercially available, as opposed to C/C++? Not alot. I would hazard a guess that C# also takes a large portion of that as well.
I'll leave java to the web developers thanks.
The ethics course I took was damn useless. I felt I learned very little knowledge that I didn't already have. Maybe for some people its a new concept, but to me its common sense. It certainly wasn't worth the 500$ I had to pay for it.
Secondly, yes you are right. I would have liked to have gone to a "training school". But, really I wonder what an employer likes to see more on a resume. So before before you start posting about how sad I am, you should probably give me a little credit first.
Calculus: Haven't seen a speck of it, 99% of the math I've done is discrete geometry. Perhaps there are some aspects of calculus I have used and I'm just unaware, but from what we have applied calculus mathematics to, just doesn't seem to fit with 3 dimensional graphics so far. What do you mean by graphics heavy lifting? I have programmed a first person shooter in openGL, and I haven't had to use anything like that yet. Obviously I'm not a professional game programmer so I don't pretend to know everything. Could you be talking about advanced lighting, or shadowing, reflections/refractions?
Operating Systems: Sort of useful. Granted, its obvious how the knowledge of these systems would help me, but this particular class I took doesn't teach me anything parallelism class doesn't.
Databases: Yes, you're right, Should have thought that through.
Assembly: I just listed this as one of the classes, I don't think its useless, in fact I kind of like it.
Project Management: I don't plan on leading any projects anytime soon, I just do what I'm told:)
Datastructures: Again, just listed as one of the classes. I have found it very useful.
Ethics: Is it just me? Isn't it all common sense?
What would have been more useful:
More depth on parallelism, considering it has nearly become a standard in home computing.
More depth on audio/graphics (maybe seperate classes for animation and realtime graphical rendering
I agree with you 100% on the matters you stated, but I still think a lot of the classes I took, are useless for what I want to do. Calculus is only required if I go for my honours degree. Some of the other courses I took, just seemed like filler courses to make up for the lack of depth.
And about ethics, maybe I should have phrased so that you would know I meant this particular ethics class I took was useless. It felt like a hodge-podge mixture of opinions and common sense that someone threw together in a couple hours. I didn't feel like I gained any knowledge from that course. Ethics is damned important.. but the class I took didn't do a very good job on expanding on that point.
in my 4th year, I can understand why it looks so unattractive. Well, for the first 2 years, all the courses were basically mandatory, and the only ones that weren't had to be non CS classes. Which is pretty stupid in my opinion. If i feel the need to take these other courses, I will. I had to take 3 mainstream courses. The first 2 was basically drilling java into my head. As a C/C++ programmer, I despised it and it felt like review. A lot of the stuff we were taught, I will most likely never use in the field I will be getting into (gaming). Basically, they felt like review courses to get everyone up to speed. Then we have to take a series of specific classes. This included various Calculus classes, Databases, Operating Systems, Ethics (useless), Assembly, Data Structures, Project Management, and the list goes on.
Considering my ideal profession, how useful do you think an entire semester of databases will be for me? Not very useful. Sure, a concept might come in handy here and there, but really, a full course devoted to it is mandatory? What about Calculus? A lot of people say it helps you get into different mindsets, but really, I took it in high school already, I know basic calculus and that should be good enough. Operating Systems? Not very helpful, interesting, but completely useless to me.
There is only one graphics course. There is a second, thats Graphics/Audio, and it JUST became a standard course (used to be available if the Prof. felt like teaching it). There are a couple other courses useful to me, but probably more than half of them aren't. And its very frustrating, paying all these tuition fees, and I can barely concentrate on what I actually want to do. Don't get me wrong, most of these classes are helpful, but a lot of it I can just quickly reference in a book and move on.
I definitely think it would be beneficial to split CS into different strains. We wouldn't be spending obscene amounts of money on courses that may or may not be useful in the future, and more on courses that will most likely be useful. A jack of all trades in CS is useful but I would gather most of us have certain areas we specialize in.
an interesting comparison, but there is a large factor of the already high price for the PS3.. there are few people that want to blow that sort of money on comparable hardware selling for 500 CAN (XBox 360). I don't really consider Sony and Nintendo in the same market anymore.. they have different objectives now.
I definitely agree that they won't learn anything.. consider their proprietary mediums for a prime example.
When you mention capabilities, the Wii pretty much does the same thing (the realistic abilities that is). Well, at least the web browsing, im not entirely sure about movies or MP3s. But I would say that playing those is a very popular idea among console gamers.
Quote from TFA: That's the predicament of digital music and digital video right now. Unprotected content over large BitTorrent networks is akin to having a Star Trek replicator. In order to have a DRM model that parallels the book model, you have to make copying music and movies as tough as photocopying a book.
Slashdot Mirror
True, which is why i mentioned they aren't phased out yet, you should be able to buy them for a quite a while longer.
Yeah, downloading may be in the gray area. But I guess ROMs are pretty useless if you already own the game, and its in a format a PC can read, ie PSX, PS2, Xbox, etc. This is all a moot point if you aren't afraid to "copy that floppy".
Emulators.
The same way every other console survives, like NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, etc. There may not be any emulators out, but PS2s haven't phased out yet either. I believe emulators are legal if you own the console, and the roms are legal if you own the game.
You sir need to be modded up. How piracy managed to get in the dictionary with respect to copyright infringement, I'll never know. This is a slang term which in its actual definition has very little in common to the acts described by the **AA. I can't stress enough how twisted this situation is, with all the brain washing and "studies" performed by **AA and friends. People need to start thinking for themselves instead of horribly disfigured articles and news reports doing it for them.
That would be one hell of a light show.
Leave the telephone sanitizers, I like living.
Its a pile of counterfeit DVD's!!! Wow, counterfeit DVD's, those really demonstrate how bad Canada's copyright laws are!
What strikes me as odd is that you were modded Insightful. Insightful is the new stupid, I guess. OK so lets say they do make portable code. Oh shit, what happened to the framerate? Oh thats right, they made portable code, and its not optimized for individual platforms!! It's the same reason there aren't any viruses for the Mac. No one cares enough. Stick to your sheltered iLife.
Google has added more functionality to their Docs and Spreadsheets for FREE. It doesn't REQUIRE you to use it. It is there to be useful. People are going to use PowerPoint whether you like it or not. This is FREE use of software. If you want to complain about it, I'll be in the hallway handing out free kicks to the face.
You could probably work on it offline as well using Work Offline or whatever.. or at least I think so, haven't tried it myself. You just wouldn't be able to save to the server, just to HD, which is fine. Personally, I use it because I don't like Open Office (a few bugs, plus layout design and other things i just don't agree with). It's great because I don't have to bother saving it to a USB key or anything, and I can access it from anywhere with internet access. So from school to work to home I can open it and start working on it. I can also collaborate, which I find very useful for School and projects. Keeps track of revisions and such. So it has some functionality that OpenOffice/MSOffice doesn't (or if they do, it certainly isn't as accessible or convenient). Plus, Google's interfaces are extremely good, from a personal point of view and UI Design point of view.
It would be useful (although no clue about the OSS thing) but I can't see it happening anytime soon.. Visio isn't really used by the general public, unlike PPT, Word and Excel. I'm all for a Visio, I'm sick of using Office.
turn it right side up!
Unreal Engine 3 skips the 2600.
You are 100% correct.. if we followed even remotely close to how physics is actually calculated, no one would want to play any games, because of horrible framerates.. take Ray Tracing for example. It models light sources pretty decently, far from perfect, but actually follows physics laws (reflections, refractions, shadowing, etc). Yet it is so computationally expensive that it is extremely rare to use it in realtime. I'm sure many animated movies use it or something similar, but as it stands hardware just isnt capable. So we still use rasterization to get the job done. If any calculus is done, its behind the scenes like for graphics libraries perhaps. Thanks for your input. :)
The fact that you can't read a post is indicative of your literary skills.
I've yet to come across people I personally know that need to be taught about ethical practice, but I guess the people I know are just a small sample of a huge population right? So my opinion is certainly biased. No worries, I get a little defensive sometimes. Its completely understandable to assume I was just throwing a useless, ignorant opinion around, especially if you were an instructor, I can only imagine what you've had to put up with. Its good to know there are reasonable, intelligible people here on slashdot :)
I enjoy learning new things. That's why I'm in university. You are right, however, it definitely depends on the line of business. The line of business I am interested in certainly doesn't involve java, which it then becomes of very little use for me, and which brings me back to my point about why we should be given more choice (what I was getting at in my original post). Apologies if I made it unclear, my skills do not lie in writing. What I'm ultimately trying to say, is Java should NOT be forced upon students as it was for me. This kind of thing should be open to choice, and I believe that choice could bring more students to CS. This is just part of the choice, as I don't believe its the only thing in need of repairing. OO programming can be accomplished in C++ as well, and I think giving that kind of option to learn one or the other, would benefi many students. Yes it is more difficult to create perfectly OO code in C++, but I would imagine it would be beneficial for students to not rely on Java to do it all for them. You could go into the theory a little deeper than I was taught but I believe coding it for yourself is better practice. Maybe thats just me.
Yes, thanks for pointing out the obvious. What you wrote about well-rounded skills, and C/C++ etc etc, well, oh my, seems like you tried to be funny. Please read my posts more carefully. Did I say Java was useless? No. I said the course was. Although, Java doesn't seem to be all that popular. How many sleek, low memory consumption, low CPU clock consumption Java programs are commercially available, as opposed to C/C++? Not alot. I would hazard a guess that C# also takes a large portion of that as well. I'll leave java to the web developers thanks.
The ethics course I took was damn useless. I felt I learned very little knowledge that I didn't already have. Maybe for some people its a new concept, but to me its common sense. It certainly wasn't worth the 500$ I had to pay for it. Secondly, yes you are right. I would have liked to have gone to a "training school". But, really I wonder what an employer likes to see more on a resume. So before before you start posting about how sad I am, you should probably give me a little credit first.
Calculus: Haven't seen a speck of it, 99% of the math I've done is discrete geometry. Perhaps there are some aspects of calculus I have used and I'm just unaware, but from what we have applied calculus mathematics to, just doesn't seem to fit with 3 dimensional graphics so far. What do you mean by graphics heavy lifting? I have programmed a first person shooter in openGL, and I haven't had to use anything like that yet. Obviously I'm not a professional game programmer so I don't pretend to know everything. Could you be talking about advanced lighting, or shadowing, reflections/refractions? Operating Systems: Sort of useful. Granted, its obvious how the knowledge of these systems would help me, but this particular class I took doesn't teach me anything parallelism class doesn't. Databases: Yes, you're right, Should have thought that through. Assembly: I just listed this as one of the classes, I don't think its useless, in fact I kind of like it. Project Management: I don't plan on leading any projects anytime soon, I just do what I'm told :)
Datastructures: Again, just listed as one of the classes. I have found it very useful.
Ethics: Is it just me? Isn't it all common sense?
What would have been more useful:
More depth on parallelism, considering it has nearly become a standard in home computing.
More depth on audio/graphics (maybe seperate classes for animation and realtime graphical rendering
I agree with you 100% on the matters you stated, but I still think a lot of the classes I took, are useless for what I want to do. Calculus is only required if I go for my honours degree. Some of the other courses I took, just seemed like filler courses to make up for the lack of depth. And about ethics, maybe I should have phrased so that you would know I meant this particular ethics class I took was useless. It felt like a hodge-podge mixture of opinions and common sense that someone threw together in a couple hours. I didn't feel like I gained any knowledge from that course. Ethics is damned important.. but the class I took didn't do a very good job on expanding on that point.
in my 4th year, I can understand why it looks so unattractive. Well, for the first 2 years, all the courses were basically mandatory, and the only ones that weren't had to be non CS classes. Which is pretty stupid in my opinion. If i feel the need to take these other courses, I will. I had to take 3 mainstream courses. The first 2 was basically drilling java into my head. As a C/C++ programmer, I despised it and it felt like review. A lot of the stuff we were taught, I will most likely never use in the field I will be getting into (gaming). Basically, they felt like review courses to get everyone up to speed. Then we have to take a series of specific classes. This included various Calculus classes, Databases, Operating Systems, Ethics (useless), Assembly, Data Structures, Project Management, and the list goes on.
Considering my ideal profession, how useful do you think an entire semester of databases will be for me? Not very useful. Sure, a concept might come in handy here and there, but really, a full course devoted to it is mandatory? What about Calculus? A lot of people say it helps you get into different mindsets, but really, I took it in high school already, I know basic calculus and that should be good enough. Operating Systems? Not very helpful, interesting, but completely useless to me.
There is only one graphics course. There is a second, thats Graphics/Audio, and it JUST became a standard course (used to be available if the Prof. felt like teaching it). There are a couple other courses useful to me, but probably more than half of them aren't. And its very frustrating, paying all these tuition fees, and I can barely concentrate on what I actually want to do. Don't get me wrong, most of these classes are helpful, but a lot of it I can just quickly reference in a book and move on.
I definitely think it would be beneficial to split CS into different strains. We wouldn't be spending obscene amounts of money on courses that may or may not be useful in the future, and more on courses that will most likely be useful. A jack of all trades in CS is useful but I would gather most of us have certain areas we specialize in.
an interesting comparison, but there is a large factor of the already high price for the PS3.. there are few people that want to blow that sort of money on comparable hardware selling for 500 CAN (XBox 360). I don't really consider Sony and Nintendo in the same market anymore.. they have different objectives now.
I definitely agree that they won't learn anything.. consider their proprietary mediums for a prime example.
When you mention capabilities, the Wii pretty much does the same thing (the realistic abilities that is). Well, at least the web browsing, im not entirely sure about movies or MP3s. But I would say that playing those is a very popular idea among console gamers.
I'm pretty sure that IS the comparison.
Quote from TFA:
That's the predicament of digital music and digital video right now. Unprotected content over large BitTorrent networks is akin to having a Star Trek replicator. In order to have a DRM model that parallels the book model, you have to make copying music and movies as tough as photocopying a book.
Do you think people will still be interested in finding loopholes in XP security after a brand new windows has been released?