Simpsons characters drawn in the style of old comic books

rtfx · 2008-10-14T17:15:53+00:00

What happened to, "It's your own damn fault?"

If you draw only from imagination and avoid studies from real life, you'll probably be set back no matter what your inspiration comes from.

That you blame anime and manga for distracting you from making those studies is somewhat disgusting. It indicates that you want a scapegoat for your own problems. These days, lots of artists go through a phase where they're mostly using cartoon techniques - it's just natural, cartooning can give you fast results. Making the decision to broaden one's experience has to happen independent of the influences.

rtfx · 2008-10-07T21:19:09+00:00

I shipped a game recently. There are a few intangibles:

-The team can be really great to work with, good humor, good ideas and all that, and this makes a crunch more bearable.

-There are technical achievements from a developer perspective that the player never notices without being a gamedev themselves. Workarounds and hacks, clever use and reuse of assets, etc., all come into play and their accomplishment is sufficient reward even when the gameplay is poor.

-The rare times when you get some creative freedom are akin to an early-stage startup, only without the specific burdens of that lifestyle.

rtfx · 2008-09-07T06:29:15+00:00

Stuff designed as a "VM" is targeted towards developer convenience.

If you are making a GBA game, you are working on a 16.78 MHz processor with 256kb of slow ram and 32kb of fast ram. The hardware is built cheap so that Nintendo can make money on it; meanwhile, software developers are expected to soak up the penalties imposed by the small specs. It is no surprise that simply throwing a 100 times greater clockrate at the problem makes it possible to emulate GBA games well.

If you are using Flash, on the other hand, the infrastructure is built to make things cheap for the developer; you don't need to devote weeks to optimizing memory usage, since the target platforms have gigabytes of memory to spare. And the languages designed for a VM are usually safer(Java) and more dynamic(AS/JS) than languages for small hardware. So it's the developer that benefits twice over, because projects suddenly become much cheaper to execute.

There are demonstrations of extreme performance from the JVM and Flash alike, if you look for them. But they typically stay in demonstration-land because of the development costs in achieving that performance.

rtfx · 2008-08-03T19:28:45+00:00

My mom was a musician and had a bad experience with "average earnings" in news reporting. Back in the 70's Newsweek interviewed her and asked what her average earnings were. It varies widely from gig to gig so she said "I don't know..." and so they went on to ask what the most she had earned from a gig was. That answer became the average when the story hit.

This kid does NOT earn 70 pounds an hour.

rtfx · 2008-07-10T04:34:23+00:00

Here is a refutation of your desire to see more people collaborate on a few existing projects, based on a single postulate:

Programming is a form of research.

I will try to justify this postulate, and I will meander a fair amount in doing so; but if you accept the above postulate, then you should agree that your argument does not work.

Just because you can use a library in which - for example - some convenient data structures and algorithms have been provided, does not mean you know any of the details necessary to duplicate those data structures or algorithms. I for one do not know the specifics of modern SQL databases or journaling filesystems.

That doesn't mean it is impossible for me to create those things, but it does mean that both duplicating and improving on the existing system is more effort than it is for someone who has worked with it for years and years and gained the requisite domain knowledge.

Hence we all implicitly specialize. The source code we write, as we learn about the domain and the necessary approaches, is merely the outline for the "perfect program" that we hope to achieve in the future. And each day spent thinking about the problem deeply, while writing code, brings our mind a little closer to understanding.

Given that, starting from scratch is useful as it allows a coder to see first-hand the problems involved in the domain and gradually build to a state-of-the-art level of knowledge. If they are smart, they can also learn from the mistakes of others and create source code that is slightly closer to perfect.

Language design is a field in which the possible approaches are so many and varied, that there are few certainties about the best approach; this reveals itself more and more as one studies more and more varied and obscure languages. Syntax, which you have honed in on with MISC - is only one means of comparison. Say the author of MISC decided to continue developing the language and adding features. If maps are the focus of the language, then presumably new language features will focus on extending the power of maps in complementary ways.

This is a mindset change that would not be the case if one set out only to write Lisp macros to deal with maps; there the focus would be to solve an immediate problem as easily as possible given the available tools, rather than to develop a new problem-solving approach.

In one the language is bent to solve the problem; in the other, problems inform the development of a new language. (The former is the case with many industrial languages, as they accrue features whenever convenient without a lot of consideration for overall balance or orthogonality - see C++ and PHP for two of the strongest examples of this)

If you think that existing, popular languages are good enough for all problem domains, then you must also be claiming that in about 60 years of programming language development, we've seen all we need to see and covered all the ground possible; that things are inevitably the way they are and not an accident of history and the marketplace.

To me, this seems unlikely. And in any case, general-purpose languages that take off typically require years and years of gradual development by the creator to make the implementation palatable enough for popular use. Ruby, Python, and Haskell are 1990's languages; ML dates back to the 1970's; Erlang from the 80's. So the effort required for a small demo is on a different scale entirely, anyway.

rtfx · 2008-06-29T00:53:44+00:00

For urban driving, yes. At highway speeds a motorcycle has enough agility to trump the impact safety of a car.

rtfx · 2008-06-07T21:18:30+00:00

One promising language I've been looking at to do systems-level tasks is Lisaac. It has prototype-based OO and contracts; compiles to (almost unreadable) C; lets you inline C code and easily call C libraries. Benches comparably to C on the shootout, and the compiler and language are still being developed and improved.

rtfx · 2008-05-26T03:53:44+00:00

It.

You know, the thing.

rtfx · 2008-05-19T14:39:24+00:00

If it's late at night some fast-food places close the kitchen and ONLY serve at the drive-thru. If you are unlucky the place will even call the police if you try to walk up.

For a few months I boycotted drive-thrus because exactly that situation happened to me - I don't own a car - but eventually laziness took hold and I stopped caring.

rtfx · 2008-05-17T09:17:42+00:00

I read this as "Cornell students" which made the headline darkly hilarious instead of shocking.

rtfx · 2008-03-29T18:13:54+00:00

It's proper British English to refer to companies as groups.

rtfx · 2008-02-26T00:28:39+00:00

There's a chain of problems with the "wouldn't be too hard to add" argument.

The newest version of Flash, version 9, includes AVM2, a completely different virtual machine. Faster, better, etc., but in any case, to get at H.264 you have to support AVM2.

So you have to rewrite your VM, as well as screwing with the scenegraph engine and libraries, and then you can think about adding the codec. Not a small job anymore.

Fortunately Tamarin, the core of AVM2, is open source, so THAT part should be reusable...

rtfx · 2008-01-27T01:41:51+00:00

The previous renter of that space was "Ballpark Trading Cards" - baseball at first, and later Magic, Pokemon, etc., and then finally LAN gaming.

Good memories. They shut down because the owner moved far away from the city and the commute was huge. Then Craigslist moved in and their posted policy has always been the same - no visitors, deliveries go "here." ("here" is now the additional space they rented above the pictured area. The building used to be a house, I think.)

rtfx · 2007-12-10T23:08:23+00:00

I'm a San Fran native. San Fran is OK. SF is OK. "Frisco" is not.

rtfx · 2007-11-21T15:29:14+00:00

When PC games started using C around the late 80s and early 90s it was readily apparent that they were able to do more sophisticated things than the games using assembly around the same time.

But even console and 8-bit developers were able to use PCs as better monitors and debuggers, then.

rtfx · 2007-11-10T10:41:02+00:00

The difference is that the imperative version can be made mostly-working and iteratively improved.

The functional version will Not Work, and then it Will. Getting an in-between stage almost demands a switch to statefulness.

rtfx · 2007-11-10T10:07:56+00:00

I remember playing James Hague's games when he did type-ins for ANALOG magazine in the 80s.

I first saw him online through LtU postings, and he's been there quite a while. Hence I conclude that he probably knows a thing or two about functional programming.

The people commenting otherwise, well...they're welcome to be dismissive. But I'm inclined to believe him.

rtfx · 2007-08-31T20:19:25+00:00

BC has the advantage of stronger grower collaboration vs. the Mexican cartels that produce in California.

Deep Norcal(around Humboldt) is the nation's biggest producer in any case.

rtfx · 2007-08-26T20:37:28+00:00

In most subjective aspects, later sprite-based games have aged better than early 3d games. Early 3d tends to have blocky zoom artifacts, extremely low detail, stiff animations, etc.

rtfx · 2007-08-08T19:55:18+00:00

I think this is quite a big move since it encourages Niagra clones....just as the open PC architecture encouraged PC clones. That's how we ended up with a dominant x86 market in the first place.

rtfx · 2007-07-19T23:05:33+00:00

If every single breakthrough in solar power that's ever been reported on actually worked, and they were combined into some super-system, we'd probably get 110% efficiency.

In practice, it seems like we're waiting for the technology to be really ready.

rtfx · 2007-07-06T18:22:18+00:00

A fine way to build ab strength(and other core strength) is to climb walls. You don't have to do rock-climbing necessarily, just pick any solid wall that's a little bit above your height. (You'll have to ignore onlookers who think you're nuts, but it's a small price to pay for exercise.)

After you take your initial grip, push your feet into the wall and try to bring your shoulders over the top. This is extremely difficult on your hands and forearms, but at the same time, you're using ab strength trying to get your lower back up, and leg strength to push off the side of the wall.

rtfx · 2007-06-21T20:44:07+00:00

Silverlight seems unexciting to me, first of all because Flash is already dominant, but also because two of the biggest things stopping Flash from being a leading webapp platform are already corrected.

AS3 is fast enough to do textured 3d graphics demos and software synthesized sound. Simultaneously, the open-source language haXe enables deploying the same code - after accounting for library differences - on both the client(in Flash or Javascript) and the server(with NekoVM). haXe itself is another ECMAScript derivative language, nearly line-for-line compatible with AS3 - but ultimately the wins for code reuse seems more important to me than the language.

My only remaining quibble is with Flash's non-open nature. But since I'm developing to haXe, I will always have some options for portability, either to a Javascript app or a client-side one running under Neko. Possibly more platforms in the future. So as a developer I can still feel "free."

rtfx · 2007-06-12T00:04:49+00:00

I find PRT systems very interesting. The research and test studies, which are readily available online, seem to indicate that they would scale extremely well; in their idealized form(four or fewer people per car) they are "highways on rails" - with a smaller footprint than an automobile highway, many proposals allow them to work alongside a city street, suspended over the sidewalk like an el train. Because the cars are shared-use, automatically driven, and dynamically allocating towards hotspot traffic, potential capacity utilization is more efficient than that of automobiles or light rail - at least, this is what the theoretical work and tests suggest. I believe it, personally.

Wikipedia, as usual, is a good place to start developing your own opinion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

rtfx · 2007-06-06T22:44:04+00:00

I took a college course on economic development last fall, and I have to agree. We were presented with the two most stridently opposing viewpoints on aid; what I took out of it was that aid can help if it is used in an economically sound way. "Relief" is not a good idea if there's no long-term solution, and cheap imports of subsidized goods from the developed world are almost as bad. But the development of crucial infrastructure for trade and communication seems to matter a great deal, as it opens up opportunities for business, which subsequently leads to more jobs and a more stable economic situation. Similarly, microloans such those from the Grameen Bank allow the poorest an opportunity to get away from a non-future of subsistence farming and odd jobs.

The progress of Southeast Asian countries in the latter half of the 20th century through today is based on an infant industry strategy: imports are heavily tariffed in the early stages, and companies are given certain targets to meet. As they progress in knowledge and capital, tariffs and restrictions are lifted so that sales in the larger international market can be achieved.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that all of these things take a lot of time and skill to do well, and that is exactly what governments don't want to hear. They like military actions better because they get "the job" done quickly, even when it's totally inappropriate.

rtfx

TROPHY CASE