And what do I do when my buggy rural network connection keeps dropping on me, probably getting me killed, possibly getting my items lost? What kind of service is that offering me? Perhaps your point would be that they're helping other people enough they don't care about my fringe case. I'm still not buying the damn game, though, despite my great love for the first two in the series.
I stopped playing God of War about ten minutes into the game, when I fell off the narrow walkway into the sea and died FIFTEEN TIMES IN A ROW. I'd heard a lot of good things about the game, and I feel silly it's sitting on my shelf wasted, but there's no way I'm putting up with more of that crap.
Call me lousy at the game if you want, but if there's no way past a pointless precision obstacle I'm just not playing your game, and I'm not buying any of your sequels.
I find game development and game playing scratch two very different itches, and I've still got a desire for both. Developing new games is definitely interesting, but it's closer to work than play, especially when you're fussing over error protection, debugging, details, polish, etc. And while it may just be me, I find it generally not all that much fun trying to play my own games -- or what little fun might be there has evaporated by the time I'm done running through testing a few (or a few dozen) times.
Other games still serve as fun, or stress relief, or a distraction, in ways that development doesn't. I will say I play a lot less since I started developing, primarily because I'm always under deadline to get my own work done, so I've got much less time left over for fun.
I keep dreaming of a game where you're *supposed* to die, and you spend roughly half your time working on things from some sort of afterlife, and the other half trying to coordinate the action from the mortal realm. I can imagine scenarios where you're mortal, desperately need to get back to the afterlife, and the game is working to keep you from letting yourself get killed.
Can't decide if overall that'd be a fun twist, or ultimately really disturbing, and of course the anti-game activists would probably have problems with it glorifying death.
Well said. I'd bet there are dozens of industry game workers that hang out here, and hundreds if not thousands of indie game designers (like me) who participate in these discussions. Even with respect to my minimalist-graphic superhero RPG, questions like "would more realism in component X make this action more intriguing, or more tedious?" are worth discussing.
Now excuse me while I run off and invent "Component X" and put it in my game, because we're a little short on the objects-named-like-they're-algebra trope.
So, 3 weeks of unusual weather means this can't help during the 26 weeks of the year when temperatures would cross the threshold daily?
Here in Colorado this would be perfect. Daytime temperatures often swing 30 degrees or more, with daytime highs that are generally a bit warmer than is pleasant, and night-time lows that are generally a bit chilly.
I remember being on a tight deadline and getting frustrated at how often I was checking the clock. I had to put a post-it over the system clock, and another over the one embedded inside the word processor. That did the trick, though. (... he says, intermittently, between bites of lunch and checking email.)
Wow! I didn't know either of those existed, and in recent weeks I've needed the functionality of both. I of course managed with longer workarounds, but those will be handy.
That's the problem with being self-taught, sometimes you don't know useful things are out there, and even when you suspect they are out there, sometimes it's difficult to find them.
If people wish to be plainly understood, they write in prose.
I've definitely read more than enough unintelligible prose. Much of it accidentally so, but plenty of it intentionally vague. Joyce is an easy example, but it's not even remotely uncommon.
You don't give them much credit for the "we wanted to warn other people so they understand how this works" motive, which is actually a good reason to post the article on Slashdot. Other developers probably appreciate seeing the statistics. It's also possible (though much less likely) a few customers will care that the free app they're downloading doesn't support the creators.
Keep in mind with tens or hundreds of thousands of tickets involved, while "losing" may mean you lose some money, it doesn't mean you lose ALL money. At the worst an investment of $100,000 may only return $97,000 with really bad luck. That's unpleasant for the investors, but we're not talking about it all disappearing or anything.
A million's not enough to retire properly for me (and I'd guess most of the slashdot crowd), but 3 million's good enough for me, and being magically brought a third of the way there would be fantastic. I wouldn't quit MY job, but it would pay off the mortgage, instantly dumping our largest monthly expense by far, saving a couple decades of interest, and that would let my wife quit HER job at least, and get us down to one income required. The remainder of that money would probably shave a decade or more off of my estimated retirement date.
It's not salvation, but it's still a tremendous boost.
Spot on. Focusing on the taxes without considering the investment over time is asking for trouble, too. If the prize is big enough (and many of the multi-decade payouts are), you're at the highest tax rate whether it's lump sum or annual, but your potential earnings from the lump sum today far outpace the total earnings you'd get over 20 or 30 years, despite the penalty you get from taking the lump sum.
Despite being a respectable professional geek now, I have in the past been both a store clerk (on a couple of occasions) and worked in a dishroom. I'm pretty sure my IQ has been the same the entire time. I'm also still solidly (upper) middle class, as are probably most of the people on this site.
Man, I would *love* a "Soon I Will Be Invincible" movie. Though I'd love it more if that guy wrote another 4-5 books in the same world. Probably the most enjoyable read of the past decade, and an inspiration (one of many, but definitely there) for my own little superhero game.
One of the nice things about selling entirely digital goods is even if PayPal sides with the purchaser (and I've only had one chargeback in four years) I'm not actually out any real cost. At worst I just disable the associated account and that's the end of the story.
I still don't keep that much money in my PayPal account, nor do I keep all that much in the bank account it's tied to. Just in case.
I'll agree with you that *only* accepting PayPal is silly, and bad business. My little side business doesn't make much, but I've got three payment options available, and I'd work with someone who was really interested in something else, if the amount made it worth the time required to set it up.
Still, not accepting PayPal at all would be financial suicide. I'd lose 95% of my sales (assuming I can't afford a merchant account, which I can't), an no amount of other third-party options provided could make up for that.
Depending on the situation, I think people can also have uncanny valley effects with regards to animals, because I've got an example sitting in my house. My father in law bought us a life-sized plush dog at one point, and it's definitely unsettling in its not-quite-lifelike nature, even as it sits motionless.
I do suspect our sensitivity to animals is going to hinge a lot on familiarity. Someone who never spends any time around dogs might not feel the way I do about the plush, and I might not be able to tell an animatronic emu from a real one, while an emu farmer could probably spot an impostor immediately, from great distance.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever gotten spam from a compromised account (or spoofed as such) that wasn't immediately obvious as spam. For the most part my friends don't have much in common with spammers in terms of writing style. I've called my friends on a couple of false positives ("did you really just email me this flash file out of the blue with a subject titled 'sooo funny!!!!' with no other text? yeah? I see...") but the spam is always pretty clearly spam, to me.
It's only a problem if you get the dust on you. Across the internet, you should be totally safe. Just keep a cat around, just in case. Unless you happen to have some immortal weapons handy.
if you actually study what Christ originally taught instead of what has been added/removed/changed over the centuries by the various fractures. Remember that 'traditional' Christianity, isn't.
I don't think there's anybody who actually practices anything remotely like what any religious founders actually preached. It doesn't take much research to see how much they've all changed over the centuries, and most modern interpretations wouldn't even really be recognizable to early practitioners. It's not surprising when human practices and institutions change, but seeing something that's supposed to be divinely inspired change with human whims is part of what makes me skeptical of the whole system.
Try the same approach in the same field of business today and you will fail. Invariably. Likewise with the next EBay, the next Amazon, the next Facebook. No, they were not the first. But they were amongst the first and they were there and "the best" at just the right time when the service they offered suddenly got popular.
This reminds me of some time I spent helping code a framework for a site billed as "the eBay of South America." Definitely designed as a me-too, and several years after eBay really took off. I've since checked and see that the site name now redirects to eBay, so it's been absorbed. What I'm really curious is if the site went out of business and got picked up (just another copycat failure) or if it was purchased by eBay for a tidy sum, which might be reason enough to justify trying to get into a market dominated by giants, if you can still cash in. Certainly Microsoft buys out little companies all the time if they've got something related to a Microsoft business but with a key niche feature.
Slashdot Mirror
And what do I do when my buggy rural network connection keeps dropping on me, probably getting me killed, possibly getting my items lost? What kind of service is that offering me? Perhaps your point would be that they're helping other people enough they don't care about my fringe case. I'm still not buying the damn game, though, despite my great love for the first two in the series.
I stopped playing God of War about ten minutes into the game, when I fell off the narrow walkway into the sea and died FIFTEEN TIMES IN A ROW. I'd heard a lot of good things about the game, and I feel silly it's sitting on my shelf wasted, but there's no way I'm putting up with more of that crap.
Call me lousy at the game if you want, but if there's no way past a pointless precision obstacle I'm just not playing your game, and I'm not buying any of your sequels.
I find game development and game playing scratch two very different itches, and I've still got a desire for both. Developing new games is definitely interesting, but it's closer to work than play, especially when you're fussing over error protection, debugging, details, polish, etc. And while it may just be me, I find it generally not all that much fun trying to play my own games -- or what little fun might be there has evaporated by the time I'm done running through testing a few (or a few dozen) times.
Other games still serve as fun, or stress relief, or a distraction, in ways that development doesn't. I will say I play a lot less since I started developing, primarily because I'm always under deadline to get my own work done, so I've got much less time left over for fun.
I keep dreaming of a game where you're *supposed* to die, and you spend roughly half your time working on things from some sort of afterlife, and the other half trying to coordinate the action from the mortal realm. I can imagine scenarios where you're mortal, desperately need to get back to the afterlife, and the game is working to keep you from letting yourself get killed.
Can't decide if overall that'd be a fun twist, or ultimately really disturbing, and of course the anti-game activists would probably have problems with it glorifying death.
Well said. I'd bet there are dozens of industry game workers that hang out here, and hundreds if not thousands of indie game designers (like me) who participate in these discussions. Even with respect to my minimalist-graphic superhero RPG, questions like "would more realism in component X make this action more intriguing, or more tedious?" are worth discussing.
Now excuse me while I run off and invent "Component X" and put it in my game, because we're a little short on the objects-named-like-they're-algebra trope.
So, 3 weeks of unusual weather means this can't help during the 26 weeks of the year when temperatures would cross the threshold daily?
Here in Colorado this would be perfect. Daytime temperatures often swing 30 degrees or more, with daytime highs that are generally a bit warmer than is pleasant, and night-time lows that are generally a bit chilly.
I've heard that from about 5 different sources, none of them Rumsfeld, though. Wise words, whoever first made them up.
I remember being on a tight deadline and getting frustrated at how often I was checking the clock. I had to put a post-it over the system clock, and another over the one embedded inside the word processor. That did the trick, though. (... he says, intermittently, between bites of lunch and checking email.)
It's a genuine modern-day hydra, you mean?
Wow! I didn't know either of those existed, and in recent weeks I've needed the functionality of both. I of course managed with longer workarounds, but those will be handy.
That's the problem with being self-taught, sometimes you don't know useful things are out there, and even when you suspect they are out there, sometimes it's difficult to find them.
If people wish to be plainly understood, they write in prose.
I've definitely read more than enough unintelligible prose. Much of it accidentally so, but plenty of it intentionally vague. Joyce is an easy example, but it's not even remotely uncommon.
You don't give them much credit for the "we wanted to warn other people so they understand how this works" motive, which is actually a good reason to post the article on Slashdot. Other developers probably appreciate seeing the statistics. It's also possible (though much less likely) a few customers will care that the free app they're downloading doesn't support the creators.
Keep in mind with tens or hundreds of thousands of tickets involved, while "losing" may mean you lose some money, it doesn't mean you lose ALL money. At the worst an investment of $100,000 may only return $97,000 with really bad luck. That's unpleasant for the investors, but we're not talking about it all disappearing or anything.
A million's not enough to retire properly for me (and I'd guess most of the slashdot crowd), but 3 million's good enough for me, and being magically brought a third of the way there would be fantastic. I wouldn't quit MY job, but it would pay off the mortgage, instantly dumping our largest monthly expense by far, saving a couple decades of interest, and that would let my wife quit HER job at least, and get us down to one income required. The remainder of that money would probably shave a decade or more off of my estimated retirement date.
It's not salvation, but it's still a tremendous boost.
Spot on. Focusing on the taxes without considering the investment over time is asking for trouble, too. If the prize is big enough (and many of the multi-decade payouts are), you're at the highest tax rate whether it's lump sum or annual, but your potential earnings from the lump sum today far outpace the total earnings you'd get over 20 or 30 years, despite the penalty you get from taking the lump sum.
Despite being a respectable professional geek now, I have in the past been both a store clerk (on a couple of occasions) and worked in a dishroom. I'm pretty sure my IQ has been the same the entire time. I'm also still solidly (upper) middle class, as are probably most of the people on this site.
Well, I just watched Prince of Persia last weekend. I'm pretty sure a Zelda movie would be 900% worse than that.
Man, I would *love* a "Soon I Will Be Invincible" movie. Though I'd love it more if that guy wrote another 4-5 books in the same world. Probably the most enjoyable read of the past decade, and an inspiration (one of many, but definitely there) for my own little superhero game.
One of the nice things about selling entirely digital goods is even if PayPal sides with the purchaser (and I've only had one chargeback in four years) I'm not actually out any real cost. At worst I just disable the associated account and that's the end of the story.
I still don't keep that much money in my PayPal account, nor do I keep all that much in the bank account it's tied to. Just in case.
I'll agree with you that *only* accepting PayPal is silly, and bad business. My little side business doesn't make much, but I've got three payment options available, and I'd work with someone who was really interested in something else, if the amount made it worth the time required to set it up.
Still, not accepting PayPal at all would be financial suicide. I'd lose 95% of my sales (assuming I can't afford a merchant account, which I can't), an no amount of other third-party options provided could make up for that.
Depending on the situation, I think people can also have uncanny valley effects with regards to animals, because I've got an example sitting in my house. My father in law bought us a life-sized plush dog at one point, and it's definitely unsettling in its not-quite-lifelike nature, even as it sits motionless.
I do suspect our sensitivity to animals is going to hinge a lot on familiarity. Someone who never spends any time around dogs might not feel the way I do about the plush, and I might not be able to tell an animatronic emu from a real one, while an emu farmer could probably spot an impostor immediately, from great distance.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever gotten spam from a compromised account (or spoofed as such) that wasn't immediately obvious as spam. For the most part my friends don't have much in common with spammers in terms of writing style. I've called my friends on a couple of false positives ("did you really just email me this flash file out of the blue with a subject titled 'sooo funny!!!!' with no other text? yeah? I see ...") but the spam is always pretty clearly spam, to me.
It's only a problem if you get the dust on you. Across the internet, you should be totally safe. Just keep a cat around, just in case. Unless you happen to have some immortal weapons handy.
if you actually study what Christ originally taught instead of what has been added/removed/changed over the centuries by the various fractures. Remember that 'traditional' Christianity, isn't.
I don't think there's anybody who actually practices anything remotely like what any religious founders actually preached. It doesn't take much research to see how much they've all changed over the centuries, and most modern interpretations wouldn't even really be recognizable to early practitioners. It's not surprising when human practices and institutions change, but seeing something that's supposed to be divinely inspired change with human whims is part of what makes me skeptical of the whole system.
Try the same approach in the same field of business today and you will fail. Invariably. Likewise with the next EBay, the next Amazon, the next Facebook. No, they were not the first. But they were amongst the first and they were there and "the best" at just the right time when the service they offered suddenly got popular.
This reminds me of some time I spent helping code a framework for a site billed as "the eBay of South America." Definitely designed as a me-too, and several years after eBay really took off. I've since checked and see that the site name now redirects to eBay, so it's been absorbed. What I'm really curious is if the site went out of business and got picked up (just another copycat failure) or if it was purchased by eBay for a tidy sum, which might be reason enough to justify trying to get into a market dominated by giants, if you can still cash in. Certainly Microsoft buys out little companies all the time if they've got something related to a Microsoft business but with a key niche feature.