Comment Re:Changed my mind (Score 1) 433
three or four cars? embellish much?
At least around D.C./Northern VA/Southern MD that's an understatement, not an embellishment.
three or four cars? embellish much?
At least around D.C./Northern VA/Southern MD that's an understatement, not an embellishment.
Hey the Win7 start menu is great, I wish all OSes had something like it. You just type to search instead of having to navigate a big tree of submenus. Most Linux DEs have some kind of app search (like Gnome 2's Alt-F2), that's the closest thing they have to it, although Gnome 3 is coming out with a Win7-like menu.
KDE4's default kickoff launcher and Lancelot launchers have done this since 4.0. Hit the hotkey combo for the kicker or click on it and start typing.
Personally I find KDE4's default launcher the best when I need to use a launcher. Reason why is because for the life of me I can't figure out how in the hell Win7's launcher hierarchy is done. I'm sure it probably makes sense to someone, just not me. KDE's makes a lot of sense to me, so when I DON'T know what I want I can explore what's installed quickly. When I DO know what I want, I just type. Simple, clean, effective, and flexibile.
If society doesn't want to change who are you to tell it it should? Society is people , not mindless robots.
Not to sound like a tool but there's a difference? People en masse seem to gravitate towards a "hive mind" that most easily resonates with their pre-existing beliefs. They only break from it for a significant period of time if what they're being told VASTLY and JARRINGLY goes against what they already believe.
We build entire networks of systems this way using configuration management tools and they behave the exact same way. All the dumb machines spin up an agent (like puppet or CFengine), ask the master what they're supposed to be doing, the master tells them, and they pull themselves back into alignment with the master plan.
At least from where I'm standing society *is* a bunch of mindless robots that already have a configuration management agent installed called, "the media." The only way to steer the configuration of it is to be an administrator, and in this case the only administrators are the lobby groups with shedloads of cash, able to tell society what it's supposed to be doing.
But I don't know, I could be wrong.
But seriously, their R&D department do some pretty cool stuff. Even though MS manage to churn out nine-nines of crap products, occasionally they still come out with something awesome that they manage to get to market (think Kinect).
The problem with that idea is that Kinect was a 90%+ finished product when they bought it.
That's strange, isn't this EXACTLY the sort of thing people praise Apple for? I mean hell, two weeks ago that's exactly what I heard journalists waxing poetic about with Steve Jobs.
At my current employer who shall remain nameless for the time being we do an absolute metric shitload of image and video processing in Java for the US government. There's definitely some issues that continually need ironing out but you can usually get Java to do whatever it is you want if you don't mind spending enough time with it. We also have started using some C# but that's only to replace some positively ancient Access applications and then is probably going to promptly get thrown in the toilet.
One of the nice things about Java is that it's relatively powerful AND flexible. Now personally I loathe Java for many reasons but even I can't argue that it's become very effective. We could do more work in Ruby and Python but that would mean performance losses that we cannot accept and market support that we cannot accept either. We could do more work in C/C++, Fortran, or similar for the heavy lifting but if you've already got the bulk of the application written in Java it's not *that* hard to make the Java code fast enough to work for our purposes (fast, but not realtime fast). Plus your knowledge pool with your developers stays specialized and high (bad for their careers, but if they don't care then by all means bleed 'em dry I suppose...not that I agree).
The better hardware you have the more you can benefit from high skill. High level console play has too much randomness because the players are bottlenecked by the controller/autoaim/low fps/small fov/etc. High level PC play often ends in very one-sided matches where small skill differences can be decisive. It's the difference between casual and hardcore play.
If I'm reading this right there's MORE randomness because the players are all using the SAME controller/autoaim/fps/fov. Yeah, that makes sense.
Talk to id about why Doom 3 multiplayer tanked. I'll give you a hint, players discovered they could simply turn off shadows thereby nullifying the ability to hide.
Isnt Portal the best example of such a method?
No, Vanquish. Personal preference, naturally.
The unfortunate consequence of megatexturing is that nobody will be able to make custom maps for this. Carmack talked about needing an expensive server with 192GiB of RAM to compile the maps.
The technology is really impressive, but I can't imagine it being worth this. id has always been very friendly to the map/mod community—they're the last company I'd have expected this from.
A couple of years ago at QuakeCon John Carmack actually talked a bit about this and it's not at all surprising. He talked about how the problem for the mapping/modding community is that the games are so massively complex now it's nearly impossible to make anything of note without a software development team of your own. And he's right. Go back to the days of Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake and you've got HUGE volumes of mods, maps, and so forth. You could actually bang out a fairly interesting little map for Doom in an afternoon, then tweak it the following day.
Now fast forward to something like Far Cry or Doom 3. Modding these with anything even HALFWAY to the degree of those older games is nearly impossible. Replacing models with your own requires huge expenditures of time, talent, and skills that most people flat-out don't have (when's the last time you built a 3D rendered model on par with a character from Gears of War?). Instead, John saw that cell phones and other smaller games were where all the creativity was going. After all, pulling down the Android Dev kit is free, banging out a little game or modding someone else's isn't too terribly difficult by comparison and you've got a lot of examples to go off of.
Where John is seeing the "modding/mapping" community going is starting small. You start with smaller modifications, indie games, and other such things. When these are popular enough you attract more people and can start working on larger projects. Eventually you roll this up into a larger group that IS capable of modding the complicated titles in a tractable period of time (or just start your own studio, like with Splash Damage).
But hey, that's just what the man said. I think he's right and I think he knows a lot more about the topic than I do, but it's just his opinion. I guess they could be willingly spurning communities en masse as well. Which reminds me, id Tech 4 is due to be released open source soon...
Thank you. I always despise people who mindlessly repeat something without ever giving it some critical analysis first. If knowledge were power, then scientists and geniuses would be meeting at the Bilderberg, not just the bank/oil cartel boys (with their social information system lackey twits, of course).
I'm not really interested in hopping into a perfectly good argument here but I feel compelled to note that "knowledge is power" doesn't actually specify the KIND of knowledge. Knowing how to get two atoms to combine in a particularly useful fashion may, depending on your goals, not get you the kind of power you desire. If you're looking to control a country knowledge of political opposition's activities would be far more useful. If you're looking to cause massive amounts of devastation then the former would be quite a bit more useful in the form of a bomb.
Seriously, Jabber alone is one of the biggest OSS failures we've ever seen, behind maybe only Diaspora. It got a huge amount of hype and attention, but could never make anything of it. Sure, there are a small number of companies that use it internally, but it has never really progressed beyond that. It has never gone mainstream in any measurable way.
Have you seen this little thing called "Facebook Chat"?
I wouldn't call Google Talk a failure, either. Especially given that it is the default IM app on all Android phones (and, starting with 2.3.4, also the default voice/video chat app).
Quake Live uses XMPP for all network communication. It's quite a marvel, really, and that's just one rather-popular game. There's plenty of other uses of XMPP in the wild. Just because you close your eyes doesn't mean it's not there for you to see.
As a recently graduated engineer [...]
That would be part of the problem. The grandparent's perspective is not so much cynical as it's built on another basic philosophy, "you have to know when to cut your losses."
Is it possible to society in the US, at least as far as this particular problem is concerned? Maybe. When considering your own personal well-being and even the well-being of your family and friends would it be better to stay, slog it out, and most likely make little-to-no-headway in the problem or simply pack up, move somewhere else, and start reaping the benefits RIGHT NOW?
This is a personal decision but it's not overly cynical to say we're too far into the problem. Like Ptolemy and Copernicus there's a certain point of tweaking the old model where it just doesn't make sense anymore when you could just move to the new model and make life significantly simpler. Also consider the following: if every pissed off engineer left the country how fast do you think our social elite would bust their asses to change conditions to bring them back? Same end goal, different way to go about it, and in the meantime the engineers get all the benefits.
Personally I think it's too far to bother with saving. Not that I don't think it could be done but people with the power don't give a shit. If they start giving a shit I'll stop looking outside the country for work.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
