Discussions

1 day ago, androidi wrote

@Blue Ink:

That's much closer but not exactly the same as the kind of game and musical scenarios I'm discussing. That sounds more like a "singular" or "relatively rarely repeating" pattern/game.

...

I was simply pointing out that there's plenty of games you can write and play at 60fps, regardless of what kind of lag Direct3D and GPUs introduce, as long as it's constant.

But 60fps is not set in stone: even in XNA you can speed up the game loop (or use a variable speed one), as long as your hardware can keep up. The problem is that higher graphic details are more likely to drive sales rather than a massively faster game loop.

(a hybrid approach, with a faster input loop is technically possible, but it's just a nightmare to pull off)

So yes, you have a point: in some conditions games don't simulate reality faster than humans can interact with it, but that has nothing to do with the technology being used. It has to do with priorities and what is considered to be good enough for the industry.

1 day ago, flyingcolou​rin wrote

Also I am using Win 7 Home edition, But i want to upgrade to Win 8 Ultimate edition. Is it possible? If yes, then how to do it?

As far as I know, the only retail x86 versions of Windows 8 are "Windows 8" and "Windows 8 Pro". From what I read, everything but Windows 7 Enterprise can be upgraded to Windows 8 Pro, so you should be alright. I didn't try that myself though.

What I did try was an in-place upgrade from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 8 Pro on two machines and that went quite well.

@androidi: This reminds me of a game we used to play in high school instead of counting rhymes (hey, we were grown ups, right?): we took a chronograph and tried to stop it as close as possible to some predetermined time, usually 10 seconds.

That's a highly predictable event, so there's no reaction timing involved, and yet it's quite hard to nail the time exactly (that would have been an error of -5..+5 ms as the cheap digital watches we used only had two decimal digits) and nearly impossible to do that consistently. I would be surprised if anybody could get an average significantly better than the (roughly) 17ms of a 60fps game loop.

If you have a chronograph lying around, you may want to try that.

@GoddersUK: let's hope not.

Much as I don't like Apple's behavior in this case, the iPhone does not constitute a monopoly. If you want to sell stuff on the AppStore, you have to abide to Apple's rules, including the 30% cut. If you don't like it, go elsewhere.

I forced myself to watch the entire video and those were minutes I'll sorely regret wasting.

A couple of egregious points: Windows 8 tells you about the corners the first time you run it. Actually, it doesn't just tell you, it shows you. The concept that "placing the mouse in a corner does stuff" is so basic that claiming it's hard to discover is just disingenuous.

The second point is about touch gestures on the touch pad. Actually he has a point, it's a bad, bad experience, bad design, bad implementation. But that's not a problem with Windows, it's the silly touch pad driver that's doing that. Déjà vu, anyone?

My anecdotical experience: I have a laptop with an OEM Synaptics touchpad. When I upgraded it to Windows 8, it kept working exactly like it did before.

It wasn't perfect though, as scrolling didn't seem to work in Reader, so I went and tried downloading the newest driver from Synaptics. Windows 8 wasn't happy (it immediately listed the old driver as an important update) and neither was I as the charms bar kept appearing. Not nearly as disruptive as the task switching, but still quite annoying.

Fixing it boiled down to disabling "Edge swipes" in the control panel; to Synaptics' credit, very little guesswork was required as their control panel, while horrible to look at, comes with short videos showing what each option does. All in all it must have taken me a couple of minutes, tops.

Ok, my mother probably couldn't have figured it out by herself, but again, it's a problem with the laptop manufacturer. If anything, it highlights why it was a good idea for Microsoft to start designing reference hardware or, at least, raise the bar for certification.

@Charles: oops, that "Mark ad spam" button is on a hair trigger. Sorry about that. D:

@exoteric: plenty of landmines out there, but C/C++ macros take the cake, at least in my books.

The funny thing is that if I had to pick the single most influential feature of C/C++ that allowed it to survive for so long, I would probably pick macros, again.

1 hour ago, Dr Herbie wrote

@Proton2: Actually you might as well add the whole of Lisp. Reverse Polish notation? What kind of sadist creates a language based on that?

Herbie

Lots of stack-machine languages are based on Reverse Polish Notation, including Forth, MSIL, HP's RPN. But there's nothing reverse about Lisp.

@Proton2: before IDEs started providing substantial help with that, it was common to use a "final square bracket" that closed any open parenthesis left.

(cons a (cons b (cons (c nil)]

Slightly more dangerous than a having a live piranha in your pocket, but it was a life saver.

1 hour ago, WTFH wrote

Trying to pass off surface as a premier Apple like offering worthy of a premium price, then telling everybody that they have to migrate from a competitor's product on the home page of your website == fail.

*snip*

If it was really a $500 product, then the SDK would stand by itself without trying to desperately migrate people. Even Android doesn't do that and it's $70 bucks.

Please, please, please migrate to our SUPER high priced product. please.

How can it possibly fail now?

Seriously? You can do better than this.

@ryanb: that's a mix of Amazon's aggressive marketing (they are borderline spammers with email) and Google's quasi-monopoly in online advertising.

It's fun to retaliate if you can do without Google's services, though...