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Any chance for a Samsung Gear VR version?
Cardboard is a great ecosystem, but the tracking and latency on Gear VR is just leaps and bounds above what cardboard can do (the GVR unit has its' own low-latency sensors).
I really wish AMD would promote this type of thing more heavily in general (having advanced features that Nvidia restricts to their high-cost cards). I seem to remember a similar thing with AMD being fantastic for Bitcoin mining and from memory it's because Nvidia gimped certain features that were on the cards, while AMD did not.
(on that note, I'm constantly annoyed that despite it being Nvidia specific, everyone supports CUDA for everything cool).
I understand companies have to do this to segregate their products and that it's impractical to have separate fab lines for a chip family for this kind of difference. It's still something I think AMD has a competitive advantage on though and they really need to push that alone (unless they just don't really want to - to sell their own high-end professional cards).
A worse example of this is Nvidia cards not running in systems that have AMD graphics cards in them. Which means, for example, you can't buy a low/mid-range Nvidia card to sit in your system as a dedicated PhysX/CUDA card. I'd consider such a setup for my system and I imagine there's probably others like me out there.
A bit younger (I was in my last year of primary school when I graduated from the C64 to the Amiga 2000). I fondly remember reading through the back of the Amiga 2000 reference manual (the ring-bound one) on Christmas day. It had schematics and everything! (back at that age, schematics just LOOKED cool - I couldn't really read them as such).
I remember those $5 shareware disks you used to be able to get at the markets.
By the end though, several years later.... Oh man.... Games weren't as smooth as on the Amiga, but OH THOSE SIERRA VGA GAMES ON THE PC!!!! Especially compared to their horrible Amiga ports (which were also Sierra abandoning the platform.... the port of King's Quest VI that was done by Revolution Software shows how much better they could have been).
Awesome memories!
A friend pointed out to me that his stance is even funnier when you consider this:
http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/03/neil-young-confirms-ne...
The sad part is that his PR has probably achieved what they wanted to. I mean, I'm on here writing a comment about the Pono Player and talking about it with friends. So yeah....
Absolutely. When you listen to a violin live, you're of course not just getting the violin, but you're getting all the reverb of the environment, the spatial cues created by sound bouncing off your body and around your ears, etc.
So taking a violin sound and then playing it out of a speaker, you're playing into a totally different environment and it's going to sound different. If you've also captured the sound of the environment in which the violin was played, you're then also playing THOSE sounds into a different environment. The reverb still gets affected by the environment your speakers are in.
I think the closest you can get is binaural recordings done with mics worn on your own ears and then played back using suitable headphones.
Even that still doesn't cover the tactile dimension of sound (think about the feeling you get when bass goes through large stage monitors). There are products that try and reproduce this - I haven't tried any of them but would be eager to, as I primarily listen to music with headphones.
Nor does it cover spatialization properly either - without some form of processing, the sound source won't stay in position when you move your head.
A bit off-topic, but the more I think along these lines, the more I imagine the ideal music delivery medium being dry multitrack recordings with mixing and reverb supplied as metadata that's then applied with real-time audio processing. That'd be pretty wild!
EDIT: Just a bit more context. Neil Young has been trying to sell an 'audiophile' grade audio player. This post seems like nothing more than trying to stealthily promote the supposed virtues of his own product.
I'm sorry but what an utter absolute load of crap. Especially given this:
http://gizmodo.com/dont-buy-what-neil-young-is-selling-16784...
Read some of the comments down on his Facebook also. His fans are not happy (rightfully so).
No I don't think that's anything particular to do with the fact that one is iOS and one is Android; Google's OWN YouTube apps are inconsistent.
The Android TV YouTube app, for example, has no way to subscribe to a channel. It also has no immediate 'go back to the video I was watching' either; you have to wait some amount of time until your YouTube history gets updated. This is Google's own YouTube app on their own platform.
It's interesting that you mention YouTube, because the thing that finally convinced me that a 'web app' could be indistinguishable from a native app was YouTube's Leanback interface (YouTube TV). Check it out:
Video player functionality aside (I understand the complaints), that thing full-screened just feels like a native app.
I totally agree with this.
The main point I want to put across is that it's unfortunate that as software engineers, we have somewhat of a tendency to feel guilty for what we do earn and as a whole profession we can be prone to underselling our own value. I find the parent comment a perfect reflection of this tendency.
It gets more complicated when you ask the question "How much money is the software engineer making for the company vs. what the company pays them?"
For argument's sake, let's say you're paid $80K per year. On the one hand, you may think that is high (it always depends what your frame of reference is). If the code you produce directly makes the company millions of dollars though, does that change your assessment of the 'reasonableness' of that salary?
This is the argument I've heard as to why sports stars get paid so much (because you have to look at what they get paid vs the amount of money they're making for the comapnies paying them).
It's a real can of worms.
Going to sound a bit cynical here, but really isn't $30 million just spare change to a VC?
To us we see $30 million and think "that's a ton of money!! how could he get that funding?" but to the VC it's like "Here's a bit of spare change, maybe you'll make something out of this, maybe not".
From that viewpoint alone I could understand why a VC would fund this. I mean, could you guarantee that it's NOT going to be some breakout hit? What if you did pass on that $30 million investment and the company did actually turn out to be valuable? It's easy to say post-hoc once the company has been stupid that the VCs ought to have known about it, but it looks different if you think back to what the VCs must have known when they were approached.
Relevant talk by 'Uncle Bob' about how Scrum became what it is now, as opposed to what it was intended to be:
I agree with you in principle but find that code editors let me down in that regard.
Say I split a function up into a few sub-functions because it's getting big. Now I have the problem that I'm jumping forwards and backwards through the code when I want to explore what that function does:
SomeMassiveFunction() { SubfunctionA(); SubfunctionB(); SubfunctionC(); SubfunctionD(); }
SubfunctionA() { } ....
In this case, SubfunctionC() might end up a few pages down in source code. So now it's a context switch to go there and then go back.
Now this can be somewhat avoided with good function names (so you don't HAVE to jump backwards and forwards) and keyboard shortcuts (to make the process quicker), but it's still a trade-off that I think needs to be kept in mind.
I continually find this idea that there aren't older developers really really strange, from my own experience. Every job I've had has included me being on the younger end of the spectrum and developers a lot older than me.
The lead developer at my current company is in his mid-50s and he's as interested as anyone I've known (and more interested than a lot of engineers I've known) in learning new APIs, etc.
I know, anecdata and all that :)
Possibly a bit off-topic, but I find the Haskell teaching materials on FP Complete great but I've always been a bit confused about their IDE.
It's web-only right? Could I use it to develop something that uses local graphics (like SDL or such), or play around with the Haskell School of Music lessons with actual audio output? What do people generally use for a local IDE? Is Leksah any good?
I'm on Windows, FWIW.
You phrased that way better than I did. That's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.
That's a fair criticism and I do find communicating WHY something is difficult, especially to a manager who doesn't code, to be a challenge at times. It is something I'm conscious of and I'm working on. I agree that respect has to be earned.
For what it's worth, I'm not talking about dictating what the customer's requirements should be (as in "That's a stupid idea, I think this is what you should do instead"). I'm talking about "This will take three weeks even though it looks like a simple change because there are still plenty of unknowns" ... "But we have already promised the customer that this will be done in a few days (without consulting engineering), can't you just do it quick and then we'll fix it up later? (but later never comes)" type stuff. Or never being given the time to implement a test framework or refactor and then being criticized because customers find bugs. That kind of thing I find difficult and frustrating.
Why do you say that recursion is a poor programming practice (curious)? What if the solution using recursion results in more readable or declarative code? (especially with languages/compilers that do tail-call optimization properly?)
Anyone that hates Agile should watch this and at least be comforted by the fact that the community that came up with agile in the first place do recognize that there are problems and that it has become something different today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG4LH6P8Syk
Personally, I've gone from an organisation that was starting to implement what their version of agile was, back to one that has no such thing whatsoever. While I had my complaints about agile, it's sure as heck a lot better than having no agile practices at all, in my experience.
Here's what I want as a software engineer. I want to be respected for my opinion.
If I say that a customer change is a complicated task, I think it's great if my manager engages me and takes me to task on why I think that is -- as long as this is done from a position of respect and not from a position of disbelief.
When I say "We are likely going to have to implement X, because the customer won't give us an answer on it and just like the last feature, they said it was fine not to have right up until the last minute when it suddenly wasn't", I DON'T want the response to be "So, if we don't have to do X, it should only take a few days, right?".
In case it's not obvious, what I'm dealing with right now in my job is management that expects me to be up front with them but can never seem to believe what I say when I am. It's like they take the most blindly optimistic interpretation of what you say, even though that's not what you said, then hold you accountable for what you didn't say when the shit hits the fan.
If I went to my doctor and he said "You need to take this medication or it's 90% likely you'll get sick", most people would think I was an idiot if I decided to decline the doctor's advice, then complained that the doctor didn't know what he was talking about because I got sick.
So yeah, as a software engineer I want to be respected as an expert in my domain in the same way that people generally don't think it's okay to second-guess their lawyers/doctors/basically any other profession it seems than software engineering.
/Vent is now over :)
I think you're absolutely right. This touches on the de-emphasis of game mechanics in modern games in favor of story-telling (see 'The Order' as an extreme example of this -- I'm not saying this to criticize the game, I actually really enjoyed it for what it was).
I think games like Dark Souls strike a chord with people BECAUSE they have great mechanics that are fun in themselves without the need for story. For an EXTREME example of this, look at Flappy Bird. That game was pure mechanics. I'd also put Angry Birds in there as a game with very strong mechanics (with some framing elements). I think Doom is another game that did this wonderfully - to me at least, it plays very much like an arcade game.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I don't think it's the hand-holding per-se that presents a problem. I think what happens is that many games with very weak mechanics happen to have a lot of hand-holding, which leads us to blame the excessive hand-holding when it's just that the gamePLAY (emphasis on PLAY) was weak.
That's why I think it works fine for Dark Souls to have fourth-wall breaking text telling you how to play. The mechanics are strong enough that even when you're told what to do, actually doing it is a fun and playful challenge.
When I say 'play' what I specifically mean is - freedom to experiment within the game's mechanics to find a solution or defeat an obstacle. For that to work, the game has to provide enough mechanics and enough agency for the player to be able to explore them.
When I use the word 'mechanics', I mean anything that can be interactively explored in the game. So, a game's level design can provide mechanics. The way items or weapons work might provide mechanics, etc. A game might have really boring levels but interesting enemies. It might have no enemies and a really interesting world (Myst, for example). A game can make up for a lack of agency in one area (eg- a racing game set on real-world tracks) by providing lots of agency in another area (an interesting AI system that gives the player lots of ways to manipulate the AI in order to win).
The other factor with games like Dark Souls that does go back to hand-holding is that when you play them, you actually feel like you're becoming more skilled as playing the game, as opposed to just being really good at following instructions, or increasing some stat which basically amounts to the game artificially making things easier for you (I'm not saying this as a criticism, just as a point of difference to consider).
Spiderweb games are very highly regarded RPGs that came from the PC. I definitely know TouchArcade has covered their games a few times over the years.
I didn't really get that from the post myself - I read it more as just "the amount of effort we'd need to put in to get it working again just isn't worth it given the sales we have on the platform". It really just sounds like they don't have the time/resources to put into the port.
Which is fair enough. Still a shame though given how highly regarded the Spiderweb games are.