KazDoran

Simple reason for XGL not being an option to put in the installer. It's still beta software, and not everyone with the specs for it has got it working correctly. I've got it working at the moment, but it still gave me a bit of a headache when suddenly all the Gnome window decorators were gone. No way I could select windows, nor they'd appear in the taskbar at the bottom. It took a few symlinks and a new lib file to put it working correctly, which means Ubuntu 6.06 wasn't completely ready for XGL (although it works just fine in my comp). Maybe 6.10 will change this (fortunately it will) and will allow for XGL to be installed with one or two clicks. Also, mind that a few of the plugins developed for XGL are far from being stable, taking otherwise stable systems to crash. Again, hopefully, that'll be solved. Not an issue from Ubuntu's dev team as far as I know, anyway.

After finishing my AI project, and having used Scheme as the language in another AI-related project, here's my thoughts:Both Scheme and LISP are very powerful languages, as they allow for simple manipulation of data by hiding most of type verification.Both languages earn a thumbs-up for allowing easy definition of abstract data-types. LISP has the advantage to allow some degree of OO programming through it's implementation of classes. It also allows to define structures in their own manner, creating the constructor and accessors automatically, which is definitely a plus.The "everything is a list" point of view of both these languages can be at any time very useful, or very annoying, but it's nothing going against these languages.Scheme, at a first glance, looks like a simplified version of LISP, by using the "define" form for (nearly) every declaration, as opposed to LISP, which uses a different form for different data types: "defun", "defvar", "defconst", etc...LISP has the advantage (to some, a disadvantage) of allowing the same name to be used for several data types. You can define a function called "x" and then assign a value to x, and still use the function.As for debugging, I found Scheme simpler to debug than LISP using the default options (I used Dr. Scheme to code in Scheme and Allegro, connected to Emacs through Slime, to code in LISP). Scheme gives away a very graphical debug info, with arrows pointing to where a function was called, or conflicts between names and/or arguments, as LISP only splattered about the steps in plain text mode, most often showing info about the internal procedures it uses to run our higher level code.My two cents on this!

Obviously supposing the quality (and thus efficiency) of the code is equal in both languages. Nevertheless, it's is the way to go and check it out. I guess VB has lower performance on larger projects though.

Never really went into Darkbasic and stuff like that. Mostly because I'm a developer myself, and as far as I know, companies don't really go much for that kind of stuff. I stick to classic languages, but no doubt Darkbasic can be good for people who want to start off at games.

Problem with VB and other "Visual *" languages (probably except C++, but Microsoft still tries to make it's own standard, so meh): no portability.VB has it's own other issues, sure, but that's the main one.And to see how powerful C++ really is, in little less than 2 weeks and using a 2D graphical library (knowing NOTHING about the lib previously), I made it half way into an online remake of Bomberman (missing the "online" part heh). So yeah, I'd recommend it. Gotta finish that project anytime soon, but meh, college, exams, you name it...

I wouldn't invest on a PPU-enabled card any time soon. It's a bit like dual processors, software has to be coded explicitly to take full advantage of it, and most games are still fully coded to work at full throttle on "regular" machines. Someday, yeah, it'll catch up but until then, I'm saving a couple of bucks. And having a PPU will not only give better performance but will also allow for more realistic effects since it can do more complex calculations in the same time because it's not worried with anything else.

But would you WANT eternal life? Think about it... Living forever isn't probably as good as everyone seems to think. We need the kind of deadline (no pun intended) our bodies put on ourselves to feel any reason to keep existing. Why would you do things if you knew you could always do them later? Many people live every day at a time because they don't really know when they'll die, and as such they take the most out of every day. With this kind of "immortality", there wouldn't be a reason to do so. And if you don't die, then what is life? Is a highly advanced machine with a few organic parts really alive? (thinking about your cyborgish idea) I guess I wouldn't want to live forever at the moment. As for the limit of our bodies, yes, they will decay, in fact they decay really rapidly as you know one can be perfectly healthy at 70 but be in a highly severe state of mental illness at his 80s... And it'll be like that for the next half century at least.

Yes, it's is indeed a feasible and interesting idea.Not only it will take off some strain from the CPU, but it will also (hopefully) allow to compute more realistic physics. As good as they are today, the DO need a lot of work.By adding one of those cards, developers can start working on physics with less restrictions.Also, having dedicated hardware for it may mean you can calculate something that would usually take a lot of maths from your part using only a call to the hardware driver with a few parameters, since it can be done at hardware level.I hope we see some development in this department soon.

It's definitely a good thing. No software in the world can make up for a really good photographer, in my opinion. I guess it takes the human mind to take "that" picture that you look at it and just say "wow..." Sure, you can take red eyes out of photos with a couple of clicks, change the lighting, and all that stuff using software, but what good is a photo like that if know that in reality it wasn't like that? Bet you never thought there was so much philosophy in photography did you? My two cents!

Well, yeah, I kinda agree. But I'd always prefer creating my own engine to using a pre-made one. If it were open-source, well I wouldn't care so much, but I like having full control over the power and flexibility of the engine, that's why I like working directly with the graphical API. But that's just me. Several times I found my games throwing away segmentation faults because... well... let's say I was pushing that engine up too much. Some bugs are really a bummer to find and an ever greater one to fix. I now recall a bug on the SDL library for example. If you run the game fullscreen you can't render text contained on a char* it'll just blow off! You have to go windowed mode or use a fixed char array instead... Something you can't live with on your game sometimes. By using custom made engines you can [try to] circumvent some of these obstacles, but no doubt about it, they make the development way longer and harder. By the way, I guess I'd never use VB to code a serious attempt at a game. The code gets really large really fast and it becomes unmanageable. I prefer C/C++.

In my opinion, Java has far too much nitpicky details to begin with. First, every time you want to make a new public class, you have to make a new file with it inside. This forces you to import loads of files for small projects. In the other hand, C allows you to declare all the data structures in the same file (not recommended ) and you don't have to worry if they are or are not in the same file. In C it's easier to make mistakes, but then again, you learn a LOT with them. It's a bit funny when your first programs start spitting out wierd characters or just seg fault because you moved too far into that array... Has it was said before, after learning C, Java will look like a simplified version of it. Sort of. If you're just learning the basics, there's no point in going over interoperability, because the standard C libraries are avaliable for every system. C is also great to learn how some higher level functions work. You can very easily manipulate strings, lists, arrays and trees in Java, but it's not nearly as fun! Why? Because you'll WANT to do them all by yourself some day, because that existing tree type doesn't do stuff the way you'd like it to. Up goes the home-made one! Sure you can do all that in Java as well, but let's say Java doesn't encourage that much by having all those things ready to use. All in all, I (as you may have noticed because, oh I don't know, I didn't talk about anything else this whole post) voted for C.

Nice post you have there, I mostly agree with you.Yes, most books are either too complicated or WAY too simple, and either way, the reader doesn't get much from them. Books do have the advantage of taking them everywhere to read (not everyone owns a laptop or has internet connection everywhere) but I guess the "pluses" end there. Well, that and the fact you aren't tempted to copy-paste the examples provided. Never heard of anyone actually learning from that. :PNot every author has the capability to explain clearly, too. This goes for web pages and books. Best books I've ever read were Thinking in Java/C++ and the C Programming Book (or what's it called? ).Web sites DO have the advantage of being free, but they're not nearly as comfortable to read, especially if you're trying to code while you read about it. Also, many web sites do NOT get people to do good programming, quite the contrary. Since web pages are mostly free and the author often knows quite a deal of the language, he might tend to write rather obscure code in the examples, for instance, not caring too much about how is a total newbie going to be able to read it.So my own conclusion is that you should use both methods. Yes, buy books (the good ones) and google around, ask on forums (like this one ), and whatnot.But a point you forgot to mention, is that to learn, you have to CODE. A lot. One doesn't learn just by reading, neither by doing plain copy-paste. If you do just that, you won't ever be able to do more complex stuff, because you don't know the basics.

Yes, inform yourself before even trying it. Hope I'm not breaking any rules here, please moderate it if so. Anyway, first thing off, when/if you go for it, identify the copy protection on the game. This can be done with numerous software, or googling about the game. After you know it, if you don't have any info on how the protection works, you have to disassemble the .exe, where you'll get an ASM (assembly code) dump. Check the hex codes for the instructions you wish to manipulate and then using a hex editor, either change the operation codes (opcode, or in english, the hexadecimal corresponding to the binary code that encodes an Intel 386/686 machine instruction) to what you found about, or you'll have to go on a blind search. Mostly what you do is change the conditional JMP (for JuMP) instructions to either jump to the place regardless of the condition or based on the negation of the original condition. A good tool might be Hackman (google it up ) and there's a few others but I guess it'll do for the most part. It's tricky, and you'll take quite a while (mostly because it's not a user-friendly process - fortunately ), but if you keep cool and work an instruction at a time, you'll get there eventually, for most protections. If the protection is Starforce 3, forget about it, it takes a full time experienced team working on it and it can take up close to a year even in those cases.

Yes that is definitely feasible, but you don't actually need a form for that, I believe PHP has functions that allow to retrieve a client's IP address when they visit the page, so you could just have a private page where you go to update your IP address. If you have enough patience to do it, you can also build a small program that runs on your pc in the background, visiting that page every half an hour or so, thus updating your IP address regularly.

Yay I got it to work! Here's how it goes, a very simple script, without password verification: 1) CHMOD your /tmp directory to 775 (very important!) 2) Create a form like this: <form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="process.php" method="post"><input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="50000" />File: <input type="file" name="uploadedfile"><br><input type="submit" value="Submit"></form> You MUST have enctype="multipart/form-data" or the file upload won't work! MAX_FILE_SIZE limits the maximum file size, in bytes (in this case, around 50 KB). 3) Now the script inside process.php: <?$upload_dir="upload/"$upload_path = $upload_dir . basename($_FILES['uploadedfile']['name']);if(!move_uploaded_file($_FILES['uploadedfile']['tmp_name'], $upload_path)){ echo "Upload failed."; }?> Set the $upload_dir variable to whatever directory you wish to upload the file to. The $upload_path variable will be the relative path to the file when it's in place. If by any chance the file fails to upload, you'll be notified. Hope this will help. To create a password protection just create a new form where you type the password and do a basic check to see if it matches.