tayssir
Joined 18 years ago
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Feb 7
Recent submissions
Comment · 17 years ago
Comment · 17 years ago
Hi, great game! Just a few thoughts:
* In Act 2, things get more expensive, but I don't seem to pick up much more money. I think many people would stop playing at this point, as it's harder to tech up. (In particular, it makes it harder to casually experiment with weapons. Which of course may fit the theme...)
* It might be nicer for weapons in the store to be more sorted, so I can more easily look at what I want and compare similar weapons.
* In pitched firefights after a while, when I'm keeping the mouse down, the frame rates go down. Which is usually great for me, since it's a lot easier to do ninja things like strafe while grabbing money and dancing with bullets. Dunno if that's a bug or feature. ;)
Comment · 17 years ago
There's many ways that governments protect their local industries. For instance, the US saved its semiconductor industry (Intel, etc) from doom at the hands of the Japanese, by aggressive tariffs and other trade policies. (Intel cofounder Andy Grove mentioned this in the context of worker's rights. [1]) And that's not mentioning all the subsidies that went into building the US high-tech industry [2], as well as US industry in general [3].
That said, I certainly don't think Apple developers are badly off compared to Apple janitors, or Bay Area fastfood workers. And it's not like countries like Japan and Germany are slouches.
And it's possible that the article on Apple under discussion is false, as some commenters claim.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/10/1010grovepinnacor.html [2] http://books.google.com/books?id=Y75K660UfzsC&pg=PA293&#... [3] http://www.newamerica.net/events/2008/why_world_isnt_flat
Comment · 17 years ago
I preferred Postmodern last year, for interacting with Postgresql. Around that time, I vaguely recall it was considered faster than CL-SQL as an Elephant backend; and I found it far easier to install than CL-SQL. (I recall during CL-SQL's installation, it kept signalling errors for each DB it supported which I hadn't installed. Someone at the office said I was supposed to just keep telling Slime to ignore the errors, prodding the install forward. That actually worked.)
Maybe things have changed in the interim?
If the OP chooses Clojure, then I'd note that the Java classpath really demands you respect its inflexibility. add-classpath is a second class citizen; I've had JDBC (the Java DB manager) swear up and down that it registered the MySQL driver I loaded via add-classpath. But come time to read from the DB, it only worked when I ensured that the MySQL driver was loaded at the beginning in the normal way. What that implies is that if I want to load a new DB driver, I'd probably have to restart the JVM. (Or do something absurdly tricky, or debug more deeply.)
Comment · 17 years ago
The New York Times has a handy little graphic about the link between federal subsidy/research and products which create a $1 billion industry:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/04/01/business/200504...
(The accompanying article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/technology/02darpa.html )
For more on how the system works, you can find a readable overview from sources ranging from Bill Gates Sr. to Noam Chomsky: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=90058... http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticlePrint/8114
I'm not sure what pg means with "socialism." (Does this word mean that workplaces are run by the workers, an important concept within socialism? Or is it just something about higher taxes?) In any case, I probably don't agree with his argument that the profit motive is necessary for hard work, though I do believe that people who are their own bosses (self-managing workers) are likely much better for innovation than the alternative.
Comment · 17 years ago
If I understand correctly, that's just like Common Lisp's way to specify cyclic references.
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_dhp...
Comment · 17 years ago
I don't entirely agree. In CL, people pass around slurp-file snippets like:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/89501db253...
Further, Clojure's slurp has an optional encoding argument. (I'm glancing at its sourcecode, in the same emacs buffer that I'm typing this post in.)
If I understand your argument, slurp's too unlispy to include in the language. But at least in the CL world, the user is constantly adding to Lisp as she codes away. And there are many things in the CL spec which often considered unlispy. (Take loop and format. Loop is even criticized for being not well-defined, as well as being incomplete in ways you wouldn't expect, as you start pushing its limits. Though I should mention that I love both loop and format.)
What you wrote was beautiful and more complete (I'm not being sarcastic; it looks like the High CL style, which I consider very aesthetic and good, though that's not the only aesthetic style I appreciate), but I think you're comparing a Clojure feature with something which exists mostly as a CL snippet passed around informally. (And is maybe now in some opensource library.)
Comment · 17 years ago
And a possible future feature is something like statically-checked locking, where order-of-acquisition issues are dealt with.
Comment · 17 years ago
I often wished that I had a cyborg-mode: gaming with a very programmable interface. (With basically something like Emacs and a REPL.) I could teach the computer new things as I explored, and eventually start to play in a very high-level way.
Comment · 17 years ago
Well, the many tools for _The Elements of Computing Systems_ are written in Java, which makes it easy for people to experiment.
http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/software.html
So perhaps a conceivable bonus is that SICP can somehow be merged with that book.
(This is not a direct answer to your question; there's nothing wrong with Scheme; just mentioning advantages of using Clojure.)
Comment · 17 years ago
Well, I think lots of people feel smarter with a better programming language. For instance, my ability to come up with better solutions is better when programming with Clojure than with PHP. It's like that saying, that perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
(Of course, I don't put any stock in IQ; it's just a saying.)
So maybe a more charitable view is that these people (who think Java is too constraining) wish to be smarter than than they currently are. And anyway, who wouldn't get a little frustrated with all the childproofing features in their everyday tools?
Comment · 17 years ago
There's also a Java version (I haven't tried either).
http://www.webtoolkit.eu/jwt#/
Comment · 17 years ago
Actually, Ha-Joon Chang pointed out that the economic powerhouses (US, UK, Japan, etc.) relied on enormous protectionism when they were developing. However, now that they're powerful, they "kick away the ladder" and push developing nations to struggle under the ineffective free-market principles that they knew to avoid.
http://www.newamerica.net/events/2008/why_world_isnt_flat
However, many important developments in math and science ran counter to common sense. In math, people with common-sense arguments resisted numbers which seemed "irrational", "imaginary" and "negative." (Supposedly, there were times when you could die over them.) Euclidean geometry seemed so obvious that people were scared to discuss non-euclidean ones. In science, even Newton had some self-ridicule about spooky action at a distance, like gravity:
"That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an Absurdity that, I believe, no Man who has in philosophic matters a competent Faculty of thinking could ever fall into it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gra...