Won't change a thing. Second rate game publishing houses will continue to line up around the block to make their game the next D&D-alike, even if it means black-boxing a few less than decorous pieces of artwork.
The RPG market has been deluged with games using the d20 game system, and I couldn't be more disappointed with the fact; I really enjoyed alternates like Dream Pod 9's Silhouette, or even White Wolf's systems over D&D's strictly class-based straitjacketed templates. While 3E has more latitude than previous versions of the game, it's still a very rigid, boring system for me that plays more like an overblown wargame than a storytelling game.
All these game developers not writing games for my GameCube is starting to make me worry that I won't have the more high quality games for my console.. Er.. Wait.. What did Eidos publish that I gave a damn about? I mean, after System Shock 2..
I bought my GameCube, because I like Nintendo's games, not so I could get more of the same from companies like Eidos.
That is definately a key point, as there would be two licenses to worry about, instead of just one. If Microsoft terminated either product, your company would need to migrate. That being said, our site has been very happy using Linux+GSX for hosting multiple Win2k servers.
Of course, running VMware on Linux, offers the stability, scalability, and reliability of Linux, and also prevents a business form being locked into one single vendor.
You will still be locked into a single vendor; the one that supplies VMware, which is not Free Software; while this company doesn't have the reputation of jettisoning products on a marketing department's whim, you still need to worry about what happens if the company in question goes under, or is purchased by an aggressive competitor, like Microsoft.
Because I tended to travel for months at a time, and I can consume your average paperback in the span of one-two day's travel. You can only watch so much Headline News at the terminal.;)
Well, then, I stand corrected! Actually, I do occasionally use my Palm for reading short stories during extended trips, since I dislike buying paperbacks and throwing them away.
"Now I travel to Europe and I can't even watch a movie before my battery runs out on my laptop," Goodman said.
I used to travel continuously for my business purposes; if I'm on a plane, that's some of the very rare stable peace and quiet that I can find for my favorite diversions, namely reading or programming. Every time some marketing geek starts bandying around the idea that their new battery technology will allow us to watch a full movie on a single charge, I have to wonder at people's stupidity.
If that's the whole reason you brought a laptop on that plane, you would be much better served to pick up a cheap portable DVD player, and keep your laptop in its case, or rediscover what people used to do before laptops: read. When you pull out that DVD player, or your laptop, for that matter, pretty soon the people next to you start getting nosy. Then they start getting intrusive, because you have presented them with a topic of discussion. Pretty soon, you're having conversations, and that treasured, sacred peace and quiet is shattered with forced contact with other people on the plane.
Call me a snob, but my first response to someone on a plane talking to me is to start methodically weighing the legal consequences of chucking them out the nearest emergency exit.
Mozilla wasn't about money for AOL/Netscape/Time Warner; at least, not directly. It appears to have been a major piece of leverage in AOL's ongoing battles with Microsoft for placement on the Windows desktop. AOL's argument in these negotiations probably ran along the lines of: "Give us what we want, or we'll take Gecko, and drop IE's component, from our app."
When Gecko was started, Microsoft's greatest fear was that web browsers were going to commodify operating systems; is it any wonder that one of Mozilla's most hyped features was XUL, a cross-platform widget toolkit? (And yes, hype is the applicable term, here.. I've finished a rather sizeable Javascript/XUL frontend to our e-business database. Some permanency in the API's, and some coherent documentation would be a wonderful thing..)
Sierra seems like they are trying to beat out Activision and Electronic Arts for pissing on its customers, lately. First, the public relations debacle that culminated here, with one of Sierra's PR reps calling his customer base miniscule and sophomoric, and now an adoption of a licensing scheme which, like every scheme before it, won't hinder pirates but will annoy legitimate users to no end.
I was on the fence about buying Half Life 2, since I really enjoyed the mods for HL1 more than Sierra's game, but I don't think Sierra will be getting a piece of my entertainment budget for a while. It's a shame, because I really like Relic's games.
Does anyone have some solid marketing numbers on market share of XP versus Microsoft's earlier releases? Perhaps they are perceiving some market resistance, and feel they can wait until there is wider adoption of XP before they foist Longhorn on everyone.
Do not forget that Microsoft's marketing department has declared a newer, stabler, more secure Microsoft for our future.. We need to consider the slim possibility that they may actually be serious, and will wait until Longhorn is truly done before they release it.
I actually use links (not lynx. Educate yourself.)quite often on my OS X rig.. Sometimes, I don't feel like loading up Safari when I'm programming, and links's network code is still far beyond that of any other browser.
Just a minor quibble.. In light of recent studies that indicate a small increase in dopamine levels when a person acquires a new piece of information, there is some change in psychochemistry going on here that may have a mild physical addiction. Nothing in even the same ballpark as heroin or other opiates, however.
This doesn't justify the hysterical implications of "EverQuest killed my marriage / this child", though; if it hadn't been EQ, it would have been some other escapist fantasy. The only solid way to deal with so-called gaming addiction is to reduce the addict's need to escape.
Unfortunately, the larger publishers will never blame their own fad-chasing, demographic hunting marketers for their failures. It will be the fault of p2p piracy, emulator fans and other online minorities that don't exist strictly at their request.
Speaking as a former QA engineer, I always considered the technical writer's job unenviable; our writers were often brought into the project relatively late, and were forced to convert ill-written, poorly maintained design documents into end-user documentation. These individuals often faced conflicting pressures from both QA, who wanted factual, useful documentation, and Marketing, who usually wanted the facts kept out of the manual.
From what I encountered, to be a successful technical writer, you must mix equal parts bullshit artist, oracle and saint, and be willing to accept mediocre pay and searing criticism. Good technical writers are definately needed in this world, but the good ones don't seem to stay in the field for long, and the bad ones get promoted to management based on their tenure.
If Iran is willing to impose a 15000 item blacklist on its ISPs, wouldn't it be willing to impose some network monitoring restrictions, as well? What precludes the State from rounding up individuals who use the US-sponsored anonymizer service, whose addresses are promulgated over monitored propaganda sources? How many public arrests would it take to chase an already suppressed populace away from these proxies?
I think this is just a nice little publicity stunt / ego stroking expedition for the U.S. propaganda arm. An effective anonymous proxy would not be so widely disseminated, and would want to change addresses before the Iranian government caught on, not after, to keep its clientele moving.
Articles like this are like a mere Slashdot troll gone large, and to reference this sort of article merely encourages the troll. Of course the movie's physics are ludicrous. Of course, it doesn't make any sort of sense. Neither does Bugs Bunny, despite being an excellent source of entertainment in the opinion of many people.
If someone wrote an article commenting about how much they enjoyed The Hulk's excesses, they might get two or three reads, depending on how many of their immediate relatives have internet access. That same journo, writing a disparaging article about even the most obvious things, gets far more attention as people who either agree with his view or disagree, pick up the article and procede to flame away in the comments. This same effect also explains much of the popularity of shows like Seinfeld, which made trivial sniping a way of life.
If you have a go-nowhere state machine, the amount of memory involved is unimportant. If the state machine's traverse of states can be encompassed by either machine, again, the amount of memory involved is unimportant. The original statement, that the Palm is a general purpose machine, capable of "infringing" on many ludicrous patents, would appear to be quite sound, in my opinion.
I suppose it would come as no surprise that I also consider the JDK to be a colossus, as well. Squeak, compared to other production Smalltalk environments, is a veritable juggernaut, coming with a large array of semi-complete applications built into the default image, including a 3D animation tool, a web browser, email client, irc client, midi player, unused truetype font support, two separate GUI's and heaven knows what else.
I find Squeak interesting, but for serious tasks, its overfeatured standard image makes it a less than ideal choice for me. There are, of course, multiple projects in the works for paring down the size of the image, but, as with many things in Squeak, there has been no clear consensus on how to do it.
Thank you for your response, Sashav; the mentioned features do appear to be compelling for me. When I get time, I'll give Afterstep a try; the Avoid Cover feature has my curiousity.
There are two major open source implementations of Smalltalk commonly available today: GNU/Smalltalk and Squeak.
GNU/Smalltalk is more server-oriented, and does not support Smalltalk's traditional MVC GUI, espousing a new system based off Tk. It is fairly fast, and somewhat lighter weight than Squeak, making it a better choice for headless applications like application servers.
Squeak is, at the moment, mind-blowingly huge, but it provides both the venerable MVC GUI and Morphic, which is derived from Sun Microsystems' Self programming language. It also has been ported to many non-Unix platforms, like Win32, WinCe, MacOS 9, etc.
This incurs the inevitable question: how does this help me use my computer? I understand that it provides remarkable flexibility for allowing me to customize how my desktop looks, and coloring the window titlebars, but to be honest, are there any compelling usability-related features in AfterStep 2.0 when compared with more venerable window managers, like Blackbox, which is much lighter weight for me?
Mark me down as disagreeing. A mature class library is a key feature from the standpoint of these "pragmatic programmers" Reinventing the wheel is not a great way to get your application out the door. This doesn't mean you need to build your libraries into the interpreter directly, you can dynamically load them in a modular fashion, like Perl, Python, Ruby, and most other modern interpreters do.
Slashdot Mirror
Won't change a thing. Second rate game publishing houses will continue to line up around the block to make their game the next D&D-alike, even if it means black-boxing a few less than decorous pieces of artwork.
The RPG market has been deluged with games using the d20 game system, and I couldn't be more disappointed with the fact; I really enjoyed alternates like Dream Pod 9's Silhouette, or even White Wolf's systems over D&D's strictly class-based straitjacketed templates. While 3E has more latitude than previous versions of the game, it's still a very rigid, boring system for me that plays more like an overblown wargame than a storytelling game.
All these game developers not writing games for my GameCube is starting to make me worry that I won't have the more high quality games for my console.. Er.. Wait.. What did Eidos publish that I gave a damn about? I mean, after System Shock 2..
I bought my GameCube, because I like Nintendo's games, not so I could get more of the same from companies like Eidos.
That is definately a key point, as there would be two licenses to worry about, instead of just one. If Microsoft terminated either product, your company would need to migrate. That being said, our site has been very happy using Linux+GSX for hosting multiple Win2k servers.
Of course, running VMware on Linux, offers the stability, scalability, and reliability of Linux, and also prevents a business form being locked into one single vendor.
You will still be locked into a single vendor; the one that supplies VMware, which is not Free Software; while this company doesn't have the reputation of jettisoning products on a marketing department's whim, you still need to worry about what happens if the company in question goes under, or is purchased by an aggressive competitor, like Microsoft.
Because I tended to travel for months at a time, and I can consume your average paperback in the span of one-two day's travel. You can only watch so much Headline News at the terminal. ;)
Well, then, I stand corrected! Actually, I do occasionally use my Palm for reading short stories during extended trips, since I dislike buying paperbacks and throwing them away.
I used to travel continuously for my business purposes; if I'm on a plane, that's some of the very rare stable peace and quiet that I can find for my favorite diversions, namely reading or programming. Every time some marketing geek starts bandying around the idea that their new battery technology will allow us to watch a full movie on a single charge, I have to wonder at people's stupidity.
If that's the whole reason you brought a laptop on that plane, you would be much better served to pick up a cheap portable DVD player, and keep your laptop in its case, or rediscover what people used to do before laptops: read. When you pull out that DVD player, or your laptop, for that matter, pretty soon the people next to you start getting nosy. Then they start getting intrusive, because you have presented them with a topic of discussion. Pretty soon, you're having conversations, and that treasured, sacred peace and quiet is shattered with forced contact with other people on the plane.
Call me a snob, but my first response to someone on a plane talking to me is to start methodically weighing the legal consequences of chucking them out the nearest emergency exit.
Mozilla wasn't about money for AOL/Netscape/Time Warner; at least, not directly. It appears to have been a major piece of leverage in AOL's ongoing battles with Microsoft for placement on the Windows desktop. AOL's argument in these negotiations probably ran along the lines of: "Give us what we want, or we'll take Gecko, and drop IE's component, from our app."
When Gecko was started, Microsoft's greatest fear was that web browsers were going to commodify operating systems; is it any wonder that one of Mozilla's most hyped features was XUL, a cross-platform widget toolkit? (And yes, hype is the applicable term, here.. I've finished a rather sizeable Javascript/XUL frontend to our e-business database. Some permanency in the API's, and some coherent documentation would be a wonderful thing..)
Sierra seems like they are trying to beat out Activision and Electronic Arts for pissing on its customers, lately. First, the public relations debacle that culminated here, with one of Sierra's PR reps calling his customer base miniscule and sophomoric, and now an adoption of a licensing scheme which, like every scheme before it, won't hinder pirates but will annoy legitimate users to no end.
I was on the fence about buying Half Life 2, since I really enjoyed the mods for HL1 more than Sierra's game, but I don't think Sierra will be getting a piece of my entertainment budget for a while. It's a shame, because I really like Relic's games.
Does anyone have some solid marketing numbers on market share of XP versus Microsoft's earlier releases? Perhaps they are perceiving some market resistance, and feel they can wait until there is wider adoption of XP before they foist Longhorn on everyone.
Do not forget that Microsoft's marketing department has declared a newer, stabler, more secure Microsoft for our future.. We need to consider the slim possibility that they may actually be serious, and will wait until Longhorn is truly done before they release it.
Oddly, I don't think many OSS developers are trying to solve the security problems that plague windows. That's Microsoft's job.
I actually use links (not lynx. Educate yourself.)quite often on my OS X rig.. Sometimes, I don't feel like loading up Safari when I'm programming, and links's network code is still far beyond that of any other browser.
You make a valid point; gaming is also a more socially acceptable escape than narcotics use.
Just a minor quibble.. In light of recent studies that indicate a small increase in dopamine levels when a person acquires a new piece of information, there is some change in psychochemistry going on here that may have a mild physical addiction. Nothing in even the same ballpark as heroin or other opiates, however.
This doesn't justify the hysterical implications of "EverQuest killed my marriage / this child", though; if it hadn't been EQ, it would have been some other escapist fantasy. The only solid way to deal with so-called gaming addiction is to reduce the addict's need to escape.
Unfortunately, the larger publishers will never blame their own fad-chasing, demographic hunting marketers for their failures. It will be the fault of p2p piracy, emulator fans and other online minorities that don't exist strictly at their request.
Speaking as a former QA engineer, I always considered the technical writer's job unenviable; our writers were often brought into the project relatively late, and were forced to convert ill-written, poorly maintained design documents into end-user documentation. These individuals often faced conflicting pressures from both QA, who wanted factual, useful documentation, and Marketing, who usually wanted the facts kept out of the manual.
From what I encountered, to be a successful technical writer, you must mix equal parts bullshit artist, oracle and saint, and be willing to accept mediocre pay and searing criticism. Good technical writers are definately needed in this world, but the good ones don't seem to stay in the field for long, and the bad ones get promoted to management based on their tenure.
If Iran is willing to impose a 15000 item blacklist on its ISPs, wouldn't it be willing to impose some network monitoring restrictions, as well? What precludes the State from rounding up individuals who use the US-sponsored anonymizer service, whose addresses are promulgated over monitored propaganda sources? How many public arrests would it take to chase an already suppressed populace away from these proxies?
I think this is just a nice little publicity stunt / ego stroking expedition for the U.S. propaganda arm. An effective anonymous proxy would not be so widely disseminated, and would want to change addresses before the Iranian government caught on, not after, to keep its clientele moving.
Articles like this are like a mere Slashdot troll gone large, and to reference this sort of article merely encourages the troll. Of course the movie's physics are ludicrous. Of course, it doesn't make any sort of sense. Neither does Bugs Bunny, despite being an excellent source of entertainment in the opinion of many people.
If someone wrote an article commenting about how much they enjoyed The Hulk's excesses, they might get two or three reads, depending on how many of their immediate relatives have internet access. That same journo, writing a disparaging article about even the most obvious things, gets far more attention as people who either agree with his view or disagree, pick up the article and procede to flame away in the comments. This same effect also explains much of the popularity of shows like Seinfeld, which made trivial sniping a way of life.
If you have a go-nowhere state machine, the amount of memory involved is unimportant. If the state machine's traverse of states can be encompassed by either machine, again, the amount of memory involved is unimportant. The original statement, that the Palm is a general purpose machine, capable of "infringing" on many ludicrous patents, would appear to be quite sound, in my opinion.
I suppose it would come as no surprise that I also consider the JDK to be a colossus, as well. Squeak, compared to other production Smalltalk environments, is a veritable juggernaut, coming with a large array of semi-complete applications built into the default image, including a 3D animation tool, a web browser, email client, irc client, midi player, unused truetype font support, two separate GUI's and heaven knows what else.
I find Squeak interesting, but for serious tasks, its overfeatured standard image makes it a less than ideal choice for me. There are, of course, multiple projects in the works for paring down the size of the image, but, as with many things in Squeak, there has been no clear consensus on how to do it.
Thank you for your response, Sashav; the mentioned features do appear to be compelling for me. When I get time, I'll give Afterstep a try; the Avoid Cover feature has my curiousity.
There are two major open source implementations of Smalltalk commonly available today: GNU/Smalltalk and Squeak. GNU/Smalltalk is more server-oriented, and does not support Smalltalk's traditional MVC GUI, espousing a new system based off Tk. It is fairly fast, and somewhat lighter weight than Squeak, making it a better choice for headless applications like application servers. Squeak is, at the moment, mind-blowingly huge, but it provides both the venerable MVC GUI and Morphic, which is derived from Sun Microsystems' Self programming language. It also has been ported to many non-Unix platforms, like Win32, WinCe, MacOS 9, etc.
This incurs the inevitable question: how does this help me use my computer? I understand that it provides remarkable flexibility for allowing me to customize how my desktop looks, and coloring the window titlebars, but to be honest, are there any compelling usability-related features in AfterStep 2.0 when compared with more venerable window managers, like Blackbox, which is much lighter weight for me?
Mark me down as disagreeing. A mature class library is a key feature from the standpoint of these "pragmatic programmers" Reinventing the wheel is not a great way to get your application out the door. This doesn't mean you need to build your libraries into the interpreter directly, you can dynamically load them in a modular fashion, like Perl, Python, Ruby, and most other modern interpreters do.