all of the hard-corps PC nerds thought that Steam was the key to all evil? "I won't own the discs! I have to be on the internet to play? They can get my credit card information?"
I can't wait for the outrage later when it is discovered that various agencies at the local, state, and federal levels use their ownership of this "free" internet to trample the hell out of the users rights. Hopefully they will do it in new and interesting ways, like charging you sales tax for something bought from out of state, or asking you to report the income on an in-game gold sale, or flagging you as a trouble maker for reading 2600.org.
"Your honor, as you can see from these records, the defendant followed a link from Digg to a story about medicinal marijuana. He is clearly preoccupied with drug use."
Use the internet of the state, expect no rights or privacy, no matter what they say. 3 years from now, when another administration comes into power (at whatever government level, from either party), they can and often will rewrite the rules.
Ever since I saw "Ghost in the Shell", I have had a vision of Neuromance with the people parts as Anime and the Cyberspace parts as computer-generated.
That would cut the costs down to $50 million easy. And the director would be able to capture any part of the story/characters/environment they wanted.
It is X-mas time. Games are shipping. When a game is complete, the publisher of the game tends to cut all support to the developer, or at least stretch time taken for negotiations of the next contract to an extreme. Since small developers usually live milestone to milestone - they don't have the money in the bank to survive their burn rate for more than a month or two.
So, watch for "Gone Gold" announcement of smaller games, look up the developer, and give them a call. You can get an entire team for prices that are cheap compared to normal contracting rates, and game programmer tend to be a little smarter, better, and faster (and more bug ridden) than normal coders.
...whose stock is valued on the growth of the company. The entire company culture revolves around this. At least this guy is honest about that, and they are not lying to the potential peons.
All of their top people have oodles of stock options. Seriously, look at the executive trading. They are in it for the money. Period. I worked there in the early 90's - it was always like that. I made money from it, and sometimes wish I could have stayed, and made even more.
Expecting any different is based on fantasy, not any previous experience. Any cool game to come from EA (UO, Sims, Battlefield) was likely from an outside developer, and was probably seriosly undervalued and almost canceled many times by the suits. When the suits try to "innovate", you get EA.COM, Earth and Beyond, and Sims Online.
-Donut
ps. Any pointing back to their past is fairly worthless argument. Starbucks used to be a coffee shop run by hippies, and Walmart was a grungy place to buy rejected crap for cheap.
They own that building outright. Moved there in 1995. Bought it from Netware. Brent Thale suggested it to Robert Garriot as a joke, when we were out-growing the building up north.
I have a friend that works there. It is true. Here are the details that I know about:
1. They are not done with UOX. It is in Beta. Origin Beta or real Beta, who knows. They think they can move development to california for the Earth and Beyond people to finish?!?!?!
2. There were 230 people working there.
3. The studio management may have known, but I know they were still hiring and relocating people to Austin several weeks ago.
4. This was the worst kept secret in Austin. Everyone knew last week. Except the employees.
5. UO support moving to california.
6. Origin owned that building.
I have been gone from there for almost 6 years, but I spent 10 there. It is a little sad, but not unexpected. EA tried to shut it down back in '99, but pulled back from the brink for some reason. Feel sorry for their new employees, especially the new GM.
-Donut, Origin Alumni 1990-1999 Ultima VI, Ultima VII, Strike Commander, Serpent Isle, Pacific Strike, Longbow, Longbow2, A-10.
While the protests in the big cities were blanket-covered by the media, they represented a incredibly small portion of the voting population. And those were people who were not going to vote Republican anyway, so Congress and the President lost nothing by ignoring them.
Sorry to bring reality in, but those protests were not significant.
Wow, they could have saved all that money if they had given some of those new bills to Madonna and Britney to flash after they lip-locked last month. Since that image traveled around the internet, was shown multiple times on TV, was in all the papers, it seems that celebrity lesbian acts might be the ultimate example of viral marketing.
Hmmmm...I claim copyright, patent, and trademark on CelebrityLesbianViralMarketing. Time to go type up a business plan...
This begs the question: Which is more efficient: Burning natural gas to make a car go, or converting natural gas (with steam, which requires energy to make) to hydrogen, and burning that to make your car go?
As a game developer, I am/will use the heck out of C# and.NET to develop software - just not the runtime portions of my games.
Tool development takes up an increasing amount of my team's time. We have custom tools for art manipulation, sound manipulation, and data warehousing. Not to mention our tool for level creation, which we hope to release with the game. All of these tools need to be robust, have clean interfaces, and be developed and changed quickly, and grow with the run time modules..NET allows me to use or not use various parts of the run time (assuming that we architected the interfaces correctly!) in a way that can both maximize usefulness (it looks like it will in the game!), and unit test the game code in a better environment.
Remember that C# and.NET are robust enough for these - the.NET IDE proves that.
I won't go into why C# and.NET are better for windows app development - either you have done it, and understand why MFC and C++ blow chunks, or you are in for quite a pleasent suprise when you write that first tool.
Borrow books from the state, and then get suprised when they pay attention to what you are borrowing?
This is like getting angry when the state looks at firearms records of purchases through a federal dealer (they are all federal dealers).
Or getting upset when they use your driver's license to track the fact that you moved.
Or not liking it when they use the fact that you won money at a state lottery to see if you owe child support.
Or getting cranky when they check the visa stamps on your passport.
Or getting miffed when they check your federal college loan records to make sure that you are registered for the draft.
The governments cross-pollinate data on you all of the time, for various reasons, good or bad. This library stuff is new, but at least you can NOT BORROW BOOKS FROM THE STATE and not be affected. Most cases you do not have a choice.
BTW, this behavior is not bound to any presidential administration. The career federal law enforcement have been wishing for the PATRIOT powers for years, and used 9/11 as a means of getting almost all of their wish list items. These are the same people who dealt death at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Too bad you geeks didn't care then.
You are spending too much time on Kazaa. The Internet, and the majority of its casual users, hit a very small number of high traffic sites (Slashdot, google, CNN) that are sitting on very fat pipes. While these sites are distributed somewhat to different geographic locations, it is still very centralized, and not very peer-to-peer.
While it is can be argued that the end points of the small-time user part of the Net may become free from certain ISP based constraints, there will always be a need for Telcos and their fat pipes for a majority of the mainstream content on the web.
-Donut
ps. Before you grip about homogenous content being the death of freedom, reflect on how much more diverse the net is to the bygone days of the Big Three TV networks.
What would be the point of inspecting the spacecraft in orbit? There is no way they can fix it in orbit, they don't have the food or water to stay up, and NASA can't send a rescue craft. If it was a ISS mission, they might stay up longer, and maybe the russians can bail them out. Columbia certainly wasn't in a position to do that.
So, they inspect, and find out they are fuxored. What do they do? Say goodbye to their families Armegeddon style, and eat some cyanide?
The real way to fix this is to make more infrastrucure for space travel. Have more stations, more ships, more flights. Then, if you have a problem in low orbit, you might have a chance to survive.
[All of this logic STOLEN from Rand Simberg.. Please don't sue me!]
First, read this. Yes, it is hearsay, but it will get you started on the issues involved with the current monopoly and the barrier put in place by NASA and the FAA. Also, look at this: The sad story of Beale Aerospace.
Second, I payed 50K to the feds last year. I wish it would all go to NASA. It does not. Even if it did - is NASA the best way to spend space money? What have they done in the last 30 years that is noteworthy? The space shuttle (no economy of scale, since they only built a few), the ISS (a nice experiment that takes almost the entire crew's time to maintain it, and they won't let more of them up there due to "safety reasons", even if they wanted to personally risk it). The moon shot destroyed NASA as a space agency, and made them into a beauracracy with budget problems, politics, pork barreling, and nice fiefdoms.
I wish it was as simple as "get the money and go". There are plenty of people with the money, but as long as the government controls the "permission" and protects their interests first....
Slashdot Mirror
This is a better headline. To those of us over 35, we have been trained to think of 2020 as a long time from now.
DOG BITES MAN!
I enjoy living in Austin, where they seem to test market all the cool nerd stuff.
$2 is pretty cheap for a try-before-you-buy, though. And you get the whole experience, not some limited demo.
all of the hard-corps PC nerds thought that Steam was the key to all evil? "I won't own the discs! I have to be on the internet to play? They can get my credit card information?"
I LOL and LOL and LOL, and play more TF2.
I can't wait for the outrage later when it is discovered that various agencies at the local, state, and federal levels use their ownership of this "free" internet to trample the hell out of the users rights. Hopefully they will do it in new and interesting ways, like charging you sales tax for something bought from out of state, or asking you to report the income on an in-game gold sale, or flagging you as a trouble maker for reading 2600.org.
"Your honor, as you can see from these records, the defendant followed a link from Digg to a story about medicinal marijuana. He is clearly preoccupied with drug use."
Use the internet of the state, expect no rights or privacy, no matter what they say. 3 years from now, when another administration comes into power (at whatever government level, from either party), they can and often will rewrite the rules.
Ever since I saw "Ghost in the Shell", I have had a vision of Neuromance with the people parts as Anime and the Cyberspace parts as computer-generated.
That would cut the costs down to $50 million easy. And the director would be able to capture any part of the story/characters/environment they wanted.
It is X-mas time. Games are shipping. When a game is complete, the publisher of the game tends to cut all support to the developer, or at least stretch time taken for negotiations of the next contract to an extreme. Since small developers usually live milestone to milestone - they don't have the money in the bank to survive their burn rate for more than a month or two.
So, watch for "Gone Gold" announcement of smaller games, look up the developer, and give them a call. You can get an entire team for prices that are cheap compared to normal contracting rates, and game programmer tend to be a little smarter, better, and faster (and more bug ridden) than normal coders.
And you can even get really pretty art!
Can be found here.
...whose stock is valued on the growth of the company. The entire company culture revolves around this. At least this guy is honest about that, and they are not lying to the potential peons.
All of their top people have oodles of stock options. Seriously, look at the executive trading. They are in it for the money. Period. I worked there in the early 90's - it was always like that. I made money from it, and sometimes wish I could have stayed, and made even more.
Expecting any different is based on fantasy, not any previous experience. Any cool game to come from EA (UO, Sims, Battlefield) was likely from an outside developer, and was probably seriosly undervalued and almost canceled many times by the suits. When the suits try to "innovate", you get EA.COM, Earth and Beyond, and Sims Online.
-Donut
ps. Any pointing back to their past is fairly worthless argument. Starbucks used to be a coffee shop run by hippies, and Walmart was a grungy place to buy rejected crap for cheap.
The superior product will supplant the inferior one...oh, wait. The check cleared. MSN Search, baby!
That I was afraid to crawl up to my attic, sure I was going to get shot in the head when I poked up.
Shut up cafrelli. Jeez.
Next you are going to complain about Dallas?
-Donut
"Glory Days, they pass you by..."
They own that building outright. Moved there in 1995. Bought it from Netware. Brent Thale suggested it to Robert Garriot as a joke, when we were out-growing the building up north.
I have a friend that works there. It is true. Here are the details that I know about:
1. They are not done with UOX. It is in Beta. Origin Beta or real Beta, who knows. They think they can move development to california for the Earth and Beyond people to finish?!?!?!
2. There were 230 people working there.
3. The studio management may have known, but I know they were still hiring and relocating people to Austin several weeks ago.
4. This was the worst kept secret in Austin. Everyone knew last week. Except the employees.
5. UO support moving to california.
6. Origin owned that building.
I have been gone from there for almost 6 years, but I spent 10 there. It is a little sad, but not unexpected. EA tried to shut it down back in '99, but pulled back from the brink for some reason. Feel sorry for their new employees, especially the new GM.
-Donut, Origin Alumni 1990-1999
Ultima VI, Ultima VII, Strike Commander, Serpent Isle, Pacific Strike, Longbow, Longbow2, A-10.
Your "Mass Protests" were not. During the run up to the war, the majority of Americans supported the use of military force against Iraq.
Read here.
While the protests in the big cities were blanket-covered by the media, they represented a incredibly small portion of the voting population. And those were people who were not going to vote Republican anyway, so Congress and the President lost nothing by ignoring them.
Sorry to bring reality in, but those protests were not significant.
-Donut
Here are 5 off of the top of me head:
1. Iraq -> Kuwait
2. Iraq -> Iran
3. Argentina -> Fauklands
4. Russia -> Afghanistan
5. Everyone -> Israel (twice)
Not all were successful, but the UN had a small hand in only one of them (number 1), and the rest were condemned, talked about, but prosecuted anyway.
And this does not even get into African "countries" and their various tribal/civil wars.
-Donut
Wow, they could have saved all that money if they had given some of those new bills to Madonna and Britney to flash after they lip-locked last month. Since that image traveled around the internet, was shown multiple times on TV, was in all the papers, it seems that celebrity lesbian acts might be the ultimate example of viral marketing.
Hmmmm...I claim copyright, patent, and trademark on CelebrityLesbianViralMarketing. Time to go type up a business plan...
This begs the question: Which is more efficient: Burning natural gas to make a car go, or converting natural gas (with steam, which requires energy to make) to hydrogen, and burning that to make your car go?
As a game developer, I am/will use the heck out of C# and .NET to develop software - just not the runtime portions of my games.
.NET allows me to use or not use various parts of the run time (assuming that we architected the interfaces correctly!) in a way that can both maximize usefulness (it looks like it will in the game!), and unit test the game code in a better environment.
.NET are robust enough for these - the .NET IDE proves that.
.NET are better for windows app development - either you have done it, and understand why MFC and C++ blow chunks, or you are in for quite a pleasent suprise when you write that first tool.
Tool development takes up an increasing amount of my team's time. We have custom tools for art manipulation, sound manipulation, and data warehousing. Not to mention our tool for level creation, which we hope to release with the game. All of these tools need to be robust, have clean interfaces, and be developed and changed quickly, and grow with the run time modules.
Remember that C# and
I won't go into why C# and
-Donut
Borrow books from the state, and then get suprised when they pay attention to what you are borrowing?
This is like getting angry when the state looks at firearms records of purchases through a federal dealer (they are all federal dealers).
Or getting upset when they use your driver's license to track the fact that you moved.
Or not liking it when they use the fact that you won money at a state lottery to see if you owe child support.
Or getting cranky when they check the visa stamps on your passport.
Or getting miffed when they check your federal college loan records to make sure that you are registered for the draft.
The governments cross-pollinate data on you all of the time, for various reasons, good or bad. This library stuff is new, but at least you can NOT BORROW BOOKS FROM THE STATE and not be affected. Most cases you do not have a choice.
BTW, this behavior is not bound to any presidential administration. The career federal law enforcement have been wishing for the PATRIOT powers for years, and used 9/11 as a means of getting almost all of their wish list items. These are the same people who dealt death at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Too bad you geeks didn't care then.
You are spending too much time on Kazaa. The Internet, and the majority of its casual users, hit a very small number of high traffic sites (Slashdot, google, CNN) that are sitting on very fat pipes. While these sites are distributed somewhat to different geographic locations, it is still very centralized, and not very peer-to-peer.
While it is can be argued that the end points of the small-time user part of the Net may become free from certain ISP based constraints, there will always be a need for Telcos and their fat pipes for a majority of the mainstream content on the web.
-Donut
ps. Before you grip about homogenous content being the death of freedom, reflect on how much more diverse the net is to the bygone days of the Big Three TV networks.
[playing devil's advocate]
What would be the point of inspecting the spacecraft in orbit? There is no way they can fix it in orbit, they don't have the food or water to stay up, and NASA can't send a rescue craft. If it was a ISS mission, they might stay up longer, and maybe the russians can bail them out. Columbia certainly wasn't in a position to do that.
So, they inspect, and find out they are fuxored. What do they do? Say goodbye to their families Armegeddon style, and eat some cyanide?
The real way to fix this is to make more infrastrucure for space travel. Have more stations, more ships, more flights. Then, if you have a problem in low orbit, you might have a chance to survive.
[All of this logic STOLEN from Rand Simberg.. Please don't sue me!]
Here is a guy using google to find out that a journalist's "normal american citizen" source is actually an activist, and a history teacher to boot.
Using google to fact check people is a part of life now - and I love it.
Donut
When layoffs are needed, it is always easier to fire some people across the country than the guy down the hall.
-Donut
First, read this. Yes, it is hearsay, but it will get you started on the issues involved with the current monopoly and the barrier put in place by NASA and the FAA. Also, look at this: The sad story of Beale Aerospace.
Second, I payed 50K to the feds last year. I wish it would all go to NASA. It does not. Even if it did - is NASA the best way to spend space money? What have they done in the last 30 years that is noteworthy? The space shuttle (no economy of scale, since they only built a few), the ISS (a nice experiment that takes almost the entire crew's time to maintain it, and they won't let more of them up there due to "safety reasons", even if they wanted to personally risk it). The moon shot destroyed NASA as a space agency, and made them into a beauracracy with budget problems, politics, pork barreling, and nice fiefdoms.
I wish it was as simple as "get the money and go". There are plenty of people with the money, but as long as the government controls the "permission" and protects their interests first....
Donut