Dude. iD has had some of the harshest copy protection in history.
Of course, DOOM II is a trademark of id Software, copyright 1994-95, so don't mess with it. Remember, if you are playing a pirated copy of DOOM II you are going to HELL. Buy it and avoid an eternity with all the other freeloaders. If you have any problems playing DOOM II, please call our technical support line at (212) 951-3126.
Maybe Starforce are thugs who promote software theft if you don't do business with you, but at least they're not sending you into the Inferno...
Yeah, and this would be insightful if that's what the article actually said.
What the article does say is that there's due to be a year and a half slump to the tune of almost 20%. The previous console slump was about 7%. So, it's prospectively gone up by triple. That is far worse than the previous one. Nobody said worst ever. Just worse than last time.
Can't we just admit that there's been a severe lack of imagination in video game design recently?
No. Because there hasn't been. If you go digging through shareware, through PopCap or MiniClip, on sourceforge, et cetera, you'll find quite a bit of novelty. The problem is disasterously risk-averse publishers built on a long-term untenable business model. It's got nothing whatsoever to do with design. A game costs $6-10 million to bring to market at the low end on TV-bound consoles. People don't take risks on DynoBright, Tower of Goo or Pontifex to the tune of $6-10 million. Instead, they release James Bond 27: No Franchise Lives Forever, because it's gonna profit whether or not it's actually a good game.
Bad for games? Yes. Good for business? Yes.
All those people who say things like "businesses are absurd" or "businesses are ignorant" are honestly pretty damned self involved. If people really could just have a great new idea and bring it to market, this business model would be in the process of collapsing right now. I can think of exactly one game which was bootstrapped that way recently: Roller Coaster Tycoon. Chris is the only guy I know who pulled it off lately, and I'm in the industry. Before that, it was Black and White, except Peter was working on money he had left over from previous successful games like Dungeon Keeper, Syndicate, Magic Carpet and so on, plus industry contacts and whatever.
You think it's a lack of creativity? Great, bring me the next big game. Hell, if it's good, I'll even write it for you and get it published for you, and give you a cut.
Until that day comes, and until you've been through the process of trying to convince a publisher that such and such an idea is a great idea that would sell, then you're really not qualified to comment on what the problem actually is.
The variable-value is assigned to an immutable constant by copying memory; Java does it all the time.
Way to miss the point. I didn't say that a constant couldn't be created from the value held in a variable. That is in fact quite easy, and the syntax is essentially the same as it is in C++. What you were complaining about was that constants couldn't be variables. Constant means it doesn't change. Variable means it changes. Again, in a language without volatility, that doesn't make sense.
It has nothing to do with the way in which the value of the constant is established, and if that's what you originally meant, you should have actually said that, so that I could tell you how that's done instead. Because, y'see, the thing you've changed what you wanted into is also quite possible.
As far as their not being objects or arrays, well, duh: constants are scalars.
That's begging the question, I'm afraid; see Java.
That most certainly is not begging the question. There's a huge difference between the set (!{objects,arrays}) and the set ({string constants}). What you said originally was that they had to be string constants because they couldn't be objects or arrays. The reason I said scalars was so that you'd go "oh right, they can be integers or floats or characters" or all those other things you conveniently removed from the quote.
By the way, begging the question is a fallacy, which is an argument used to support a premise. I'm not arguing. I'm stating. If you don't believe me, you can read the manual, which is both normative and definitive. There is no question of whether or not something is right. If the manual agrees with you you are correct; if it does not, you are not. Even if I was wrong, there is no option for fallacy here, therefore it cannot by definition be petitio principii.
[Y]ou don't need type hinting for base types, because it's a magically typed language.
Then why introduce type-hinting this late in the game (PHP 5)? Zend violated their self-imposed directive of loose types, and did a half-ass job at that.
Because it's a useful tool. The "self imposed directive" you claim doesn't actually exist. Once again, if you'd bother to read the manual, you would know that magical types only apply to base types. Ho hum, maybe that's why you don't need type hinting for base types. Coincidentally, that's also why you do need type hinting for UDTs. Maybe that's why they made it - so that you could enforce type contstraints where they were nessecary.
Amusingly, this actually is begging the question, though it's better classified as a straw man. Y'see, you've assumed that the reason it's bad that type hinting is going on is that magic typing obviates it. You've also assumed that the reason that type hinting is broken is that it doesn't occur in base types, where it's obviated. Finally, you've decided that they made some broad proclamation which in fact they did not, by implementing a single language feature for UDTs, and that they've somehow broken language consistency by introducing a parallel tool for when the first tool didn't well suit UDTs.
You want to know why they don't magically type UDTs? Because it's not realistic in an inherited language. If you don't see why, then you don't understand inheritance well enough to criticize the decision. There are many cases in which there would be no way for the compiler to magically determine which of several possible bases you actually wanted. Therefore, you need a way to specify it manually.
Please actually read the PHP manual before replying. All of these things are well documented, and you wouldn't be being abrasive if you'd actually read it. Hell, you might even understand the langauge choices they made, which would probably be good, considering how much newer and more limited domain PHP is than Java, and how it's still more popular. There's a reason: it's a language which works well. Sure, it's got some cruft, but you happen to be pointing at one of its best features when you're screaming "this is broken."
Sir is not capitalized. This miscreant tendency is American ignorance of the proper title Sir as given during knighthood by royalty. You may call Sir Edmund Hillary with the capitalized Sir. Given your obvious deep familiarity with the 19th century, perhaps I should also refer to Sir Mick Jagger. Some random person on Slashdot most likely has not attained such a title.
"is it informative" - you've got a typo, and informative is not a proper noun, even when cataloguing moderator points.
As an aside, please don't refer to something as informative unless you know privately. As I display in another reply, in fact the parent post to which you refer is bunk.
To debase is to make immoral, not to water down with ill speech.
To draft is to draw, sketch, or make a crude preliminary version of something. Whereas speech can be drafted, unless this is a particularly subtle insult - which your usage of language suggests that it is in fact not - then what you are looking at is a final copy, not a draft. Even email programs get this one correct.
Queen's English is posessive.
It's called the King's English. The Queen's English is a reference to specifically Queen Victoria, and was a temporary tipping of the hat to the first gynarch generally recognized by Britons. We do not continue to tip our hat to her.
It's hard to tell whether a reference to proper English, immediately followed by the appalling "Internetland," is intentionally tongue in cheek. As a rule of thumb, if people aren't sure whether you're joking, then your joke has failed.
To obtain is to take something which someone else had had previously. Given that frist psot!!1!eleven is not something which can be stolen away from someone else, to use obtain in this fashion is ill.
To covet is to desire or lust for something sexually; it comes through Old High French's "covitiere," thence from Latin's "cupidere," the cherub of Eros. If you covet first post, seek help.
Furthermore appropriately follows further. You've gone from first to third. Further, it makes you look stupid. Furthermore, it should be stated in the fashion I've just given.
Epistles are letters sent by clergy as regards scriptural canon. Even were you the Pope of Grammar, which you are not, this would be incorrect.
"So to speak" is the verbal equivalent of the better-recognized editorial "[sic]." It indicates specifically that you are repeating what someone else has said verbatim, despite being aware of language errors of some or another form. Hence, if I were to say that you had said "pole position of posters, so to speak," so to speak, I would refer to your inane use of the phrase "so to speak."
Congratulation is singular. To refer to congratulations is to refer to a group of such statements, or to such a statement given to a group as a set of individual congratulatory statements. That said, I do applaud your use of the contextually accurate accolade, and hereby give you congratulation therefore.
A toast, in the context of wine, is a speech. You cannot drink a speech.
One drinks for you, not to you.
It is common misconception that the word concieve may be used to refer to impregnation. To concieve a child is to begin to attempt impregnation. Many people who concieve a child never have children, and in most cases time is taken between conception and impregnation.
Correspondance is the third or latter piece of a private exchange between a small group. This is an edict, if anything.
You wish that something should, not that it shall. Shall is affirmative. The sun shall continue to rise. Something which is indefinate should continue. Murder should remain illegal. Wishing for something definate is silly.
The idea that a correspondance would be eternal is a bit chee
Of course a constant can't be a variable. In a language with no concept of volatility, the two are diametrically opposed.
As far as their not being objects or arrays, well, duh: constants are scalars. What PHP calls a class constant, c/c++ would call a compile-time literal. These are not things whose values cannot change. These are things which are known to be firm from the second the script is started up. You can't have array literals in most languages, and UDT literals almost don't make sense.
As far as they have to be string constants, bologna. They can be integers, floats, characters, or in fact any scalar type PHP supports.
Now, as far as type hinting only working on classes. Of course it only works on classes - you don't need type hinting for base types, because it's a magically typed language. No, that's not a bug. It's also not a feature. It's common sense.
Plz2comment on langauges you understand, kthx. +5 informative my ass.
This sounds like a call for the Flying Spaghetti Architect. More companies that focus on the abstract goals of "software design" and "human computer interface" have failed in my experience than those following traditional development models. I like Joel, but I'd really like to know where he gets his numbers; they are in stark contrast to RAND's numbers, which suggest that nearly 80% of all market entrants fail.
It's all well and good to draw a guy in a green hat on a chart. Real product design requires an understanding of the product domain, something which isn't even addressed here.
The former has to fit as much as possible in anywhere from 4 to 64 kilobytes. The gaming market hasn't seen requirements that harsh since Atari was king. (Even the NES regularly went beyond those limits.)
Yeah, or the Gameboy, which had 8k less than ten years ago, or the Gameboy Color, which had 32k less than 6 years ago. Don't pat them on the backs too hard; writing tetris in 64k just isn't very difficult.
Oh, and by the way, cellular phones with more than 4 megabytes of RAM available to the application reached 90% saturation three years ago. Cellular phones are in fact on the whole more powerful than handheld consoles, not the other way around.
Let me explain the market:
See, there are two problems. For one, you didn't actually say anything that contradicts to whom you were replying. For two, I don't know where you're getting this thing about classic games being what sell well; the bulk of games that are selling well are in fact new games. You could try actually looking into the numbers, since several of the phone vendors make them public, as in fact do the people behind BREW.
The games that sell best are in fact games with a 20 minute average play time, tending towards fantasy sports leagues, puzzle games with concrete progress and network-aware small strategy games. Market research firms tell the tune that the bulk of cellular phone use is during lunch breaks and on public transportation.
It's really easy to just say things and get modded up informative. When you're in the business and spend for real data, though, it turns out that popular belief just tends to be dead wrong.
How is this feasible for hobbyists if the major carriers require that one have a code signing license from a CA trusted by the carrier in order to test a program, and such licenses cost at least $500 per year?
If you think that $500/year is a high startup cost for a business, then I just don't know what to tell you.
Personally, I feel that 640p ought to be enough for any game.
I believe that's spelled 640k.
In other news, limits get pushed back as technology advances. Our grandchildren will need to be reminded that 640 doesn't mean 640 thousand, and it's going to take us a long, long time to explain to them such eventually moot points as anti-aliasing.
It's different when you're dealing with a medicine that has competitors, especially if one of those competitors works better than yours does. Have you noticed how every syndrome has like nine drugs now? In many of those cases there are ups and downs to each, or they're all neck and neck.
In other situations, one's clearly better than the others. That's when the marketing wars begin.
Baloney. Those billions are coming in $100 at a time, and out of the eighteen people I know who ran Google ads, exactly one hasn't had them shut off in exactly this fashion.
I kept open an exchange with Google AdSense and Google Legal for almost three months, just trying to find out what I did wrong. They refused to tell me through almost 15 replies. (That's for more than 40 mails sent.)
What is the state of advergaming right now? Almost non-existant
What are you talking about? I have advergaming on the Sega Genesis. Go get your PS1 racing games. They've all got real-world billboards. Almost 15% of EA's revenue was advergaming in 2002, the first year they reported on it seperately. The state of advergaming was pervasive before this millennium started. It's just that we're subtle, we do it in ways you were already used to from the real world, and so you never noticed.
The problem is that excludes whole genres from advertising. Publishers and developers aren't stupid. We're not going to cut away entire genres just because we can't figure out how to put up billboards; that'd just mean that somebody else would come fill in the genre and take the profits away.
It's a market model. We're not going to push our customers away. We're going to use enough advertising that it doesn't bother you, and no more. I've been laughing to myself over the last two months about how in an uproar slashdot suddenly is over advergaming; it was big on the PS1 ten years ago. We're subtle, y'see. You guys didn't even notice. Go get your original copy of Midnight Club or Driver. There are billboards for real products on the sides of the streets, except you're already used to that, so it didn't register.
Yes, there will be a few egregious examples of bad taste and of taking it too far. This month's whipping horse is the Subway debacle. But, for every game like that, there are a hundred games which are already advertising, and aren't registering in your mind. Look through the rubble in your favorite WW2 game; you're in for a shock. It's been all over the place for a long time now.
Quit being such reactionaries. It's not ruining your gaming experience. In fact, it's making your game experience much better, in the way that TV commercials do. (Asbestos pants on.) You don't pay enough to support the kind of media you want, but commercial sponsorship does, and on an increasing platform tied to merit - if your show is good, the advertisers will fight to advertise through you, which means more money, which facilitates a better show. It's a good model, and I don't think many people at Slashdot realize just how much of their media is fundamentally dependant on that kind of money.
Advergaming has been here for a long, long time, and it's not going to suddenly blow up and get gross just because you finally noticed it.
Somehow I doubt that software publishing companies will restrain themselves until every surface possible advertises something and pop-up ads or spam exist in every game.
That would ruin the game. Smarmy comments are cute and all, but believe it or not, we are in fact trying to keep our customers.
Hold your breath. The issue is that advertising is how these increasingly expensive games can be deployed at the costs you're used to. Or, didn't you wonder how the average game cost could have tripled in the last year, the average price could decline by five percent and profits could have maintained steady?
It's all well and good to talk about how awful it is that a game costs $50, even though that translates to less money per hour than movies, magazines, theater, books or in fact pretty much anything other than TV. However, to pretend to understand the economic model behind it is silly. Advergaming is pushing the cost of games way down. It's just that your insatiable hunger for eye candy over gameplay is providing an effective counterweight.
Your memory does serve you wrong. They had pit steel at the time. The bulk of armor in the day was bronze, due largely to availability. And no, it was lack of iron, not lack of iron technology. Doesn't matter if you know how to work it if you don't have much to speak of.
You haven't been alive long enough to be experienced. Six years isn't much, especially if it's been spent doing one kind of thing in one language.
I've been programming for more than two decades, and I know better than to suggest that I'm particularly experienced. Here's a cold shock: comp sci is simply a larger field than most. You're not going to be experienced until you're 40.
Armor that covered the knee? This was 1500 BC not AD.
Actually, it was 1322. By the New Kingdom, Egypt had complex armor making capabilities. They were in fact distributing chariot armies all over the Senet area on a standardized-width rut road system, something typically attributed to Rome. Egypt had some fairly complex metallurgy practices, and even had rudimentary pit steel-making capabilities, though there were no surface iron deposits nearby for them to really use in the way that the Assyrians did.
The reason you don't see armor on depictions of Egyptian warfare isn't a technological one in the sense that they didn't know how to make armor, but rather that the climate generally didn't allow for it - Egypt is fucking hot, and people would cook. Tutankhamen and other pharoahs wore armor as a ceremonial and last ditch protective thing (fat lot of good it did him,) and could get away with it because they were being moved in covered, shaded transportation vessels. Even then, several pharoahs are never depicted wearing armor - Seti I and Setnahke being good examples, shown wearing only normal clothes and the lapis crown.
No no, the gold dust didn't cause the infection. Gold is a noble metal, and is non-toxic. It's just that we found little gold bits embedded in his knee that look like pieces of armor, and that means he got stabbed or slashed, and back in those days, that pretty much always meant infection anyway. With that context, what is known about how he died makes much more sense, and so now a knee infection - the gold is just evidence of the wound - is the most likely cause of death.
Is there a reason that they didn't publish their findings in a regular journal like Nature or Science or whatever journal Egyptologists use?
Er, they did. Slashdot just doesn't cover those. Thing is, we *do* cover physics journals, and the method they used to detect the gold in the first place is of interest to physicists. This also got into medical journals and traveller's journals (national geographic being the only traveller's journal most people recognize.)
Who said anything about unusual? For that matter, who said anything about an arrowhead? Tutankhamen was believed to have died from a blow to the head which led to partial paralysis, hence the walking sticks, but now we found scraps of gold in the knee which look like decorations from armor, suggesting he healed over a wound from presumably a sword which gave way to infection which killed him.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude. iD has had some of the harshest copy protection in history.
Of course, DOOM II is a trademark of id Software,
copyright 1994-95, so don't mess with it. Remember, if you
are playing a pirated copy of DOOM II you are going to HELL.
Buy it and avoid an eternity with all the other freeloaders.
If you have any problems playing DOOM II, please call our
technical support line at (212) 951-3126.
Maybe Starforce are thugs who promote software theft if you don't do business with you, but at least they're not sending you into the Inferno...
Yeah, and this would be insightful if that's what the article actually said.
What the article does say is that there's due to be a year and a half slump to the tune of almost 20%. The previous console slump was about 7%. So, it's prospectively gone up by triple. That is far worse than the previous one. Nobody said worst ever. Just worse than last time.
Can't we just admit that there's been a severe lack of imagination in video game design recently?
No. Because there hasn't been. If you go digging through shareware, through PopCap or MiniClip, on sourceforge, et cetera, you'll find quite a bit of novelty. The problem is disasterously risk-averse publishers built on a long-term untenable business model. It's got nothing whatsoever to do with design. A game costs $6-10 million to bring to market at the low end on TV-bound consoles. People don't take risks on DynoBright, Tower of Goo or Pontifex to the tune of $6-10 million. Instead, they release James Bond 27: No Franchise Lives Forever, because it's gonna profit whether or not it's actually a good game.
Bad for games? Yes. Good for business? Yes.
All those people who say things like "businesses are absurd" or "businesses are ignorant" are honestly pretty damned self involved. If people really could just have a great new idea and bring it to market, this business model would be in the process of collapsing right now. I can think of exactly one game which was bootstrapped that way recently: Roller Coaster Tycoon. Chris is the only guy I know who pulled it off lately, and I'm in the industry. Before that, it was Black and White, except Peter was working on money he had left over from previous successful games like Dungeon Keeper, Syndicate, Magic Carpet and so on, plus industry contacts and whatever.
You think it's a lack of creativity? Great, bring me the next big game. Hell, if it's good, I'll even write it for you and get it published for you, and give you a cut.
Until that day comes, and until you've been through the process of trying to convince a publisher that such and such an idea is a great idea that would sell, then you're really not qualified to comment on what the problem actually is.
No way. The fedex caveman commercial and the magic fridge commercial were both awesome.
That every single other commercial sucked in a way that people from the 1950s would have been embarrassed to watch is, um, mostly coincidental.
Of course a constant can't be a variable.
The variable-value is assigned to an immutable constant by copying memory; Java does it all the time.
Way to miss the point. I didn't say that a constant couldn't be created from the value held in a variable. That is in fact quite easy, and the syntax is essentially the same as it is in C++. What you were complaining about was that constants couldn't be variables. Constant means it doesn't change. Variable means it changes. Again, in a language without volatility, that doesn't make sense.
It has nothing to do with the way in which the value of the constant is established, and if that's what you originally meant, you should have actually said that, so that I could tell you how that's done instead. Because, y'see, the thing you've changed what you wanted into is also quite possible.
As far as their not being objects or arrays, well, duh: constants are scalars.
That's begging the question, I'm afraid; see Java.
That most certainly is not begging the question. There's a huge difference between the set (!{objects,arrays}) and the set ({string constants}). What you said originally was that they had to be string constants because they couldn't be objects or arrays. The reason I said scalars was so that you'd go "oh right, they can be integers or floats or characters" or all those other things you conveniently removed from the quote.
By the way, begging the question is a fallacy, which is an argument used to support a premise. I'm not arguing. I'm stating. If you don't believe me, you can read the manual, which is both normative and definitive. There is no question of whether or not something is right. If the manual agrees with you you are correct; if it does not, you are not. Even if I was wrong, there is no option for fallacy here, therefore it cannot by definition be petitio principii.
[Y]ou don't need type hinting for base types, because it's a magically typed language.
Then why introduce type-hinting this late in the game (PHP 5)? Zend violated their self-imposed directive of loose types, and did a half-ass job at that.
Because it's a useful tool. The "self imposed directive" you claim doesn't actually exist. Once again, if you'd bother to read the manual, you would know that magical types only apply to base types. Ho hum, maybe that's why you don't need type hinting for base types. Coincidentally, that's also why you do need type hinting for UDTs. Maybe that's why they made it - so that you could enforce type contstraints where they were nessecary.
Amusingly, this actually is begging the question, though it's better classified as a straw man. Y'see, you've assumed that the reason it's bad that type hinting is going on is that magic typing obviates it. You've also assumed that the reason that type hinting is broken is that it doesn't occur in base types, where it's obviated. Finally, you've decided that they made some broad proclamation which in fact they did not, by implementing a single language feature for UDTs, and that they've somehow broken language consistency by introducing a parallel tool for when the first tool didn't well suit UDTs.
You want to know why they don't magically type UDTs? Because it's not realistic in an inherited language. If you don't see why, then you don't understand inheritance well enough to criticize the decision. There are many cases in which there would be no way for the compiler to magically determine which of several possible bases you actually wanted. Therefore, you need a way to specify it manually.
Please actually read the PHP manual before replying. All of these things are well documented, and you wouldn't be being abrasive if you'd actually read it. Hell, you might even understand the langauge choices they made, which would probably be good, considering how much newer and more limited domain PHP is than Java, and how it's still more popular. There's a reason: it's a language which works well. Sure, it's got some cruft, but you happen to be pointing at one of its best features when you're screaming "this is broken."
Hush, dear. You don't understand.
Uh.
Of course a constant can't be a variable. In a language with no concept of volatility, the two are diametrically opposed.
As far as their not being objects or arrays, well, duh: constants are scalars. What PHP calls a class constant, c/c++ would call a compile-time literal. These are not things whose values cannot change. These are things which are known to be firm from the second the script is started up. You can't have array literals in most languages, and UDT literals almost don't make sense.
As far as they have to be string constants, bologna. They can be integers, floats, characters, or in fact any scalar type PHP supports.
Now, as far as type hinting only working on classes. Of course it only works on classes - you don't need type hinting for base types, because it's a magically typed language. No, that's not a bug. It's also not a feature. It's common sense.
Plz2comment on langauges you understand, kthx. +5 informative my ass.
This sounds like a call for the Flying Spaghetti Architect. More companies that focus on the abstract goals of "software design" and "human computer interface" have failed in my experience than those following traditional development models. I like Joel, but I'd really like to know where he gets his numbers; they are in stark contrast to RAND's numbers, which suggest that nearly 80% of all market entrants fail.
It's all well and good to draw a guy in a green hat on a chart. Real product design requires an understanding of the product domain, something which isn't even addressed here.
Yeah, because the guy who made Daikatana, he can sure make it in the PC gaming world.
The former has to fit as much as possible in anywhere from 4 to 64 kilobytes. The gaming market hasn't seen requirements that harsh since Atari was king. (Even the NES regularly went beyond those limits.)
Yeah, or the Gameboy, which had 8k less than ten years ago, or the Gameboy Color, which had 32k less than 6 years ago. Don't pat them on the backs too hard; writing tetris in 64k just isn't very difficult.
Oh, and by the way, cellular phones with more than 4 megabytes of RAM available to the application reached 90% saturation three years ago. Cellular phones are in fact on the whole more powerful than handheld consoles, not the other way around.
Let me explain the market:
See, there are two problems. For one, you didn't actually say anything that contradicts to whom you were replying. For two, I don't know where you're getting this thing about classic games being what sell well; the bulk of games that are selling well are in fact new games. You could try actually looking into the numbers, since several of the phone vendors make them public, as in fact do the people behind BREW.
The games that sell best are in fact games with a 20 minute average play time, tending towards fantasy sports leagues, puzzle games with concrete progress and network-aware small strategy games. Market research firms tell the tune that the bulk of cellular phone use is during lunch breaks and on public transportation.
It's really easy to just say things and get modded up informative. When you're in the business and spend for real data, though, it turns out that popular belief just tends to be dead wrong.
A game can once again be made by one person
How is this feasible for hobbyists if the major carriers require that one have a code signing license from a CA trusted by the carrier in order to test a program, and such licenses cost at least $500 per year?
If you think that $500/year is a high startup cost for a business, then I just don't know what to tell you.
and yes, they consider Americans stupid.
Don't worry, it's mutual.
Personally, I feel that 640p ought to be enough for any game.
I believe that's spelled 640k.
In other news, limits get pushed back as technology advances. Our grandchildren will need to be reminded that 640 doesn't mean 640 thousand, and it's going to take us a long, long time to explain to them such eventually moot points as anti-aliasing.
It's different when you're dealing with a medicine that has competitors, especially if one of those competitors works better than yours does. Have you noticed how every syndrome has like nine drugs now? In many of those cases there are ups and downs to each, or they're all neck and neck.
In other situations, one's clearly better than the others. That's when the marketing wars begin.
Baloney. Those billions are coming in $100 at a time, and out of the eighteen people I know who ran Google ads, exactly one hasn't had them shut off in exactly this fashion.
I kept open an exchange with Google AdSense and Google Legal for almost three months, just trying to find out what I did wrong. They refused to tell me through almost 15 replies. (That's for more than 40 mails sent.)
What is the state of advergaming right now? Almost non-existant
What are you talking about? I have advergaming on the Sega Genesis. Go get your PS1 racing games. They've all got real-world billboards. Almost 15% of EA's revenue was advergaming in 2002, the first year they reported on it seperately. The state of advergaming was pervasive before this millennium started. It's just that we're subtle, we do it in ways you were already used to from the real world, and so you never noticed.
The problem is that excludes whole genres from advertising. Publishers and developers aren't stupid. We're not going to cut away entire genres just because we can't figure out how to put up billboards; that'd just mean that somebody else would come fill in the genre and take the profits away.
It's a market model. We're not going to push our customers away. We're going to use enough advertising that it doesn't bother you, and no more. I've been laughing to myself over the last two months about how in an uproar slashdot suddenly is over advergaming; it was big on the PS1 ten years ago. We're subtle, y'see. You guys didn't even notice. Go get your original copy of Midnight Club or Driver. There are billboards for real products on the sides of the streets, except you're already used to that, so it didn't register.
Yes, there will be a few egregious examples of bad taste and of taking it too far. This month's whipping horse is the Subway debacle. But, for every game like that, there are a hundred games which are already advertising, and aren't registering in your mind. Look through the rubble in your favorite WW2 game; you're in for a shock. It's been all over the place for a long time now.
Quit being such reactionaries. It's not ruining your gaming experience. In fact, it's making your game experience much better, in the way that TV commercials do. (Asbestos pants on.) You don't pay enough to support the kind of media you want, but commercial sponsorship does, and on an increasing platform tied to merit - if your show is good, the advertisers will fight to advertise through you, which means more money, which facilitates a better show. It's a good model, and I don't think many people at Slashdot realize just how much of their media is fundamentally dependant on that kind of money.
Advergaming has been here for a long, long time, and it's not going to suddenly blow up and get gross just because you finally noticed it.
Somehow I doubt that software publishing companies will restrain themselves until every surface possible advertises something and pop-up ads or spam exist in every game.
That would ruin the game. Smarmy comments are cute and all, but believe it or not, we are in fact trying to keep our customers.
Hold your breath. The issue is that advertising is how these increasingly expensive games can be deployed at the costs you're used to. Or, didn't you wonder how the average game cost could have tripled in the last year, the average price could decline by five percent and profits could have maintained steady?
It's all well and good to talk about how awful it is that a game costs $50, even though that translates to less money per hour than movies, magazines, theater, books or in fact pretty much anything other than TV. However, to pretend to understand the economic model behind it is silly. Advergaming is pushing the cost of games way down. It's just that your insatiable hunger for eye candy over gameplay is providing an effective counterweight.
Your memory does serve you wrong. They had pit steel at the time. The bulk of armor in the day was bronze, due largely to availability. And no, it was lack of iron, not lack of iron technology. Doesn't matter if you know how to work it if you don't have much to speak of.
Young != inexperienced
You haven't been alive long enough to be experienced. Six years isn't much, especially if it's been spent doing one kind of thing in one language.
I've been programming for more than two decades, and I know better than to suggest that I'm particularly experienced. Here's a cold shock: comp sci is simply a larger field than most. You're not going to be experienced until you're 40.
if people want to get the latest and greatest
87% IE, 12% Mozilla after four years. Lesson learned: people don't want the latest and greatest.
Armor that covered the knee? This was 1500 BC not AD.
Actually, it was 1322. By the New Kingdom, Egypt had complex armor making capabilities. They were in fact distributing chariot armies all over the Senet area on a standardized-width rut road system, something typically attributed to Rome. Egypt had some fairly complex metallurgy practices, and even had rudimentary pit steel-making capabilities, though there were no surface iron deposits nearby for them to really use in the way that the Assyrians did.
The reason you don't see armor on depictions of Egyptian warfare isn't a technological one in the sense that they didn't know how to make armor, but rather that the climate generally didn't allow for it - Egypt is fucking hot, and people would cook. Tutankhamen and other pharoahs wore armor as a ceremonial and last ditch protective thing (fat lot of good it did him,) and could get away with it because they were being moved in covered, shaded transportation vessels. Even then, several pharoahs are never depicted wearing armor - Seti I and Setnahke being good examples, shown wearing only normal clothes and the lapis crown.
No no, the gold dust didn't cause the infection. Gold is a noble metal, and is non-toxic. It's just that we found little gold bits embedded in his knee that look like pieces of armor, and that means he got stabbed or slashed, and back in those days, that pretty much always meant infection anyway. With that context, what is known about how he died makes much more sense, and so now a knee infection - the gold is just evidence of the wound - is the most likely cause of death.
Is there a reason that they didn't publish their findings in a regular journal like Nature or Science or whatever journal Egyptologists use?
Er, they did. Slashdot just doesn't cover those. Thing is, we *do* cover physics journals, and the method they used to detect the gold in the first place is of interest to physicists. This also got into medical journals and traveller's journals (national geographic being the only traveller's journal most people recognize.)
Who said anything about unusual? For that matter, who said anything about an arrowhead? Tutankhamen was believed to have died from a blow to the head which led to partial paralysis, hence the walking sticks, but now we found scraps of gold in the knee which look like decorations from armor, suggesting he healed over a wound from presumably a sword which gave way to infection which killed him.
How that got modded informative is beyond me.