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Comment Re:Double Irish (Score 1) 825

That's easy. The only bit that is taxed is corporate income. Yet any money spent for redistribution, investment in the corporation, etc is not taxed. In short, the only part that's taxed is the money earned in a year and sitting in a bank account, dividends from stock for a year, etc. Taxing corporations motivates them to not sit on piles of cash but instead either (1) pay it as wages or dividends or (2) improve the company and presumably improve the economy/country.

Were you proposing a system? Or confused about today's system? It's an interesting proposal, but of course dividends are double-taxed today.

Overall, though, I think people are confused about why a corporation would "hoard" money in bad times. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the reserves needed to see you through a couple standard deviations of possible futures. We all benefit from corporations not going under if bad times continue, after all. So, unless you're actually a fan of bailouts, perhaps cut a company some slack when they build some reserves when facing uncertain times?

Why? If they're still hiring people in the US, still being taxed in the US, etc, why does it matter?

The executives want all the most important jobs close to them. All the top-tier engineering jobs, all the HR, product managers, senior corporate managers and other "useless overhead" jobs, all the jobs that pay really well tend to be where the corporate HQ is.

Comment Re:DIrty (Score 1) 227

I also love hockey - I think it edges out NFL football on my TV sports list. I'm able to separate the entertainment from the entertainers... otherwise I'd have a hard time listening to music or watching films! Baseball is still my favorite stadium experience, and unlike football I can watch just about any level from high school up without losing my mind.

Comment Re:Double Irish (Score 2, Insightful) 825

We "must" tax the corporation? What kind of goal is that? Do you see the end-goal of a government as being to tax everything it can as much as it can? Many people do, it seems.

How about, instead, the government works to grow the US economy as much as possible. More jobs, more income, the tax revenue thing will work out OK in the end.

. Don't like it, go somewhere like Somalia and conduct your business. Good riddance

No, you fool, how about we have more jobs here instead of your befuddled plan? Only a statist cares more about taxes than the health of the nation.

Comment Re: Double Irish (Score 3, Insightful) 825

Did you have an argument to go with that assertion?

No system of taxation has ever gotten federal revenues above 19% of GDP for long, and corporate taxes are a fairly small portion of federal revenue to begin with. We only tax corporations out of some sense of social justice, not because it's a useful way to fund the government. The key ingredient to "saving the country" is to spend less that we actually take in in federal revenue. We can hypothesize all day about what might happen with some new tax plan, but long term if we don't spend less than we make, it will end in tears.

The proper goal and aim of the government is not to feather its own nest with larger taxes in the first place, but to grow the economy! I give 0 fucks whether corporations pay taxes here or not, the important thing is whether the incentives are to have jobs here or not - especially well-paying high-skill jobs! And each and every law that makes it more expensive to do business in America detracts from that,

But perhaps you had an argument along those lines?

Comment Re:So what's the real story here? (Score 4, Interesting) 145

First, their job is to make life safer for everyone and to prevent crime. They do that.

WTF? Someone actually believes this? *boggle*

I used to deliver pizza for a living. Sometimes you get mugged. Once as I returned to the store, battered and bleeding, there was a cop right there in the store, getting some free pizza.

He seemed annoyed that we interrupted his free-pizza-getting by asking him to at least write an incident report. He outright rejected the notion that the police should make the area safer, and instead chastised us for doing business in such a dangerous neighborhood. He also wrote me a ticket for something about my car. Presumably the only reason he didn't shake me down for the money I had on me was that someone else had already stole that.

0 interest in policing. 0 interest in making things safer. 0 interest in preventing crime in any way that required effort on his part. They don't do that. They take your money and extort businesses for free stuff. That's what the police do.

Comment Re:Double Irish (Score 0) 825

The real problem is that companies can be headquartered anywhere! America benefits hugely from having the US be the home of choice for corporate HQs. Lots of high-paying jibs here because of that. But enough BS like this and there simply won't be any large US corporations any more.

We don't need a corporate income tax anyhow. We tax wages, and we tax distributions via dividends and capital gains - what exactly do we accomplish by taxing the corporation itself? We're going to tax that same money anyhow, so we're better off keeping the US as the preferred HQ location for multinationals.

Comment Re:DIrty (Score 1) 227

and the pace is simply glacial

I get your criticisms, except this one. I mean, we are firmly in "subjective" territory here... but the setup-action, setup-action pace of football is fun for me. I like the tension that builds up. I hesitate to ask what you think of the pace of baseball? :)

Submission + - Book Review: Core HTML5 2D Game Programming (corehtml5games.com)

eldavojohn writes: Core HTML5 2D Game Programming details a journey through creating Snail Bait in well defined steps. This simple two dimensional platform game works as a great starting point for anyone interested in making their very first game targeting many desktop and mobile platforms. This incremental process is expertly segmented into logical lessons with the only prerequisite being fluency in JavaScript. One of the most attractive aspects of this book is that the core concepts of this book don’t rely on some flavor of the week JavaScript library or framework.

author David Geary
pages 615 pages
publisher Prentice Hall
rating 9/10
reviewer eldavojohn
ISBN 9780133564242
summary An exercise in 2D game development and mechanics in HTML5 and JavaScript.

First, this book isn't for people who do not recognize HTML5 and JavaScript as a valid development platform for games. I know you’re out there, you can stop reading here and move on to the next article. This book isn't for you. If you have no programming experience this book is likely not for you either. This book dives into concepts faster than Geary’s last book on game development in Canvas. You should also be familiar with JavaScript if you want to effortlessly start on this book. Throughout the book, Geary utilizes object’s JavaScript prototypes to add functions, uses anonymous functions and refers to common programming patterns.

It is worth repeating that the implementation in this book does not rely on a framework or library that could change or go defunct. The game runs entirely on code covered in the book accessing W3C standard specifications like requestAnimationFrame(). As long as JavaScript interpreters don’t change core things like timing control, this book should be relevant to developers for years to come.

The reason this book gets a nine is it accomplishes everything it sets out to do and Geary does a great job dividing up task after incremental task of setting sprite sheets and backgrounds into motion. The reason it doesn't get a ten is that I was personally disappointed with the the author devoting little time to physics and their simulations.

The book is laid out to enable its use as two kinds of resources: cover to cover and chapter specific topics. Reading this straight through, there were only a few times where it felt like I was needlessly being reminded of where I had already read about tangential topics. On the plus side if you ever want to see how Snail Bait implemented something like sound, you need only spend time on the chapter devoted to sound sprites. One mild annoyance I had with the text was that the author seems to always refer to Snail Bait as “Snail Bait” which leads to a Ralph Wiggum-like aversion to pronouns or saying “the game” instead occasionally. It might only be me but it can become tiresome to read “Snail Bait” five or six times on the same page.

You can read a sample chapter here that shows how to implement sprite behaviors.

The first two chapters of the book focus on a set of basic guidelines to follow when doing game development in HTML5 and JavaScript — like keeping certain UI display elements in CSS instead of rendering them as paths or objects in the Canvas. Geary also covers the very absolute simplest concepts of how graphics are going to be displayed and how the background is going to move. He also spends time in Chapter Two showing how to best set up the development environment. It is demonstrated how shortening your cycle of deployment saves you tons of time and the author does a great job on letting you know what tools to use to debug throughout the whole text.

The third chapter delves into draw and rendering graphics in the canvas as well as introducing the reader to the game loop. It spends a good amount of time explaining the use of animation frame control in a browser to keep animations running smoothly. It also begins the auditing of frame rates so that the game can respond to and display things normalized at the rate the user is experiencing them. It also touches on how parallax can be employed to show things closer up moving faster than those further back in the background. This illusion of depth has long been popular and is even finding its way into scrolling on blogs and I wish that Geary would have spent more time on this perhaps in a later chapter but offer the reader more on how to do multiple levels of depth.

The next chapter tackles the core infrastructure of Snail Bait and discusses at length encapsulation of certain functionalities (instead of globals) in the source code as well as Snail Bait’s 2300 line prototype. It bothers me that one file is 2300 lines and I wish there was a better way to do this but as a learning tool, it works even if it is daunting to scroll through. The book adds some helpful pointers about how utterly confusing the “this” keyword can be in JavaScript. Chapter Four really sets the pace for the rest of the book by introducing the use of event listeners and illustrating how the game loop is going to continually be extrapolated.

The next three chapters cover the use of loading screens, sprites and their behaviors. Snail Bait uses all its graphics from an open source game (Replica Island). But if you were to design your own graphics for your game, these chapters do a great job of showing how to construct sprite sheets and how to use tools to construct metadata in the code so that the sprites are usable by the sprite artists. Using the flyweight pattern, Geary sets the stage for more complex behaviors and actions to come in the following chapters.

The next three chapters cover time, stopwatches and their effects on motions and behaviors within the game. The author starts and works from linear motion to non-linear motion and then using transducer functions to affect the time system. The game now has bouncing coins, a jumping player and Geary does a good job of showing the reader how to emulate behaviors in the code.

Naturally what follows next is collision detection and gravity. The collision detection strategies were adequate but I wish that there was more depth at least referenced in the text. This isn't a simple problem and I did like how Geary referenced back to chapter two’s profile and showed how collision detection performance as you implement and refine and optimize your algorithm. The nice thing about this book is that it often tackles problems with a general solution in the code (runner/sprite collision) and then provides the edge case solutions.

In the fourteenth chapter, the author tackles something that has long been a plague in HTML5 games: sound and music. The author doesn't sugarcoat this citing the long history of problems the vendors have had trying to support this in browsers. There’s a great explanation of how to create and handle “sound sprites” (similar to sprite sheets) so that there is only one download for background music and one download for audio sprites.

Next Geary covers the problem of multiple viewport sizes with a focus on mobile devices. Of course this is one of the biggest issues with mobile gaming today. The chapter is lengthy and deals with the many intricacies of scaling, sizing and touch events. This chapter is long but the highly detailed support of multiple platforms and resolutions is a justified discussion point.

In sixteen, the reader gets a treatment of utilizing sprites and their artists to simulate sparks and smoking holes. The book calls this chapter “particle systems” but I don’t think that’s a very good title as the code isn't actually dealing with things at the particle level. Instead this chapter focuses on using sprites to simulate those behaviors via animation. This is completely necessary on a computation inexpensive platform but it is misleading to call these particle systems.

Now that the game looks and functions appropriately, the book covers UI elements like player scores and player lives. The auditing of these metrics are covered in the code as well as warnings when the game begins to run to slowly. It also covers the ‘edge’ condition of winning in the game and the routine that is followed when the user wins the game.

The next chapter introduces the concept of a developer backdoor so that the reader can manually speed up or slow down the game while playing it or even test special cases of the runner sprite interacting with other elements. It’s a useful trick for debugging and playing around but does devote a lot of time to the specialized UI like the speed slider and other things that won’t (or rather shouldn't) be seen by a common player.

Chapter nineteen really felt out of place and very inadequate on important details. It’s a blind rush through using node.js and socket.io to implement server side high scores. The way it’s implemented would make it trivial for someone to submit a high score of MAX_INT or whatever to the server. The metrics reporting is done in a manner that (in my opinion) breaks from long established logging structure one would be familiar with. While it covers important things to record from your users in order to tweak your game, the inadequacy of discussions about shortcomings makes it feel out of place in this text. It's a topic of great depth and I have no problem with an author touching on something briefly in one chapter — this chapter does lack the warnings and caveats found in other chapters though.

Contrary to the previous chapter, the final chapter is a fast application of the entire book’s principles applied to a new game (Bodega’s Revenge). Geary gives a final run through showing how the lengthy prior discussions quickly translate to a new set of sprite sheets and game rules. If this book is ever expanded, I think it would be great to include additional chapters like this although I would pick a more distinct and popular two dimensional game format like a tower defense game or a bejeweled knockoff.

Overall, Core HTML5 2D Game Programming is a great book for a JavaScript developer looking to dabble in game development. You can purchase Core HTML5 2D Game Programming from barnesandnoble.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. If you'd like to see what books we have available from our review library please let us know.

Comment Re:w***e ? (Score 1) 262

"disenchanted/upset customer"? Clearly, you haven't worked in tech support, or known anyone who has, or read any of the blogs or horror stories, or, really, informed yourself in any way about this. Humans have a bell curve of both "crazy" and "mean", and the tail end of either is not something you'd ever want to come into contact with.

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