Keyboards aren't a great test because a smart designer will design the keyboard so that the edges of the virtual buttons fall on the touch screen grid. This is a very easy to implement trick to make touch screen keyboards work well even on touch screens with lower touch resolution.
A web browser and links are a whole different ball of wax and it's harder to fake the precision a high resolution touch screen offers.
>So, why does it take companies who aren't cell-phone manufacturers to design great ones?
Traditional cell phone manufacturers have it ingrained in their collective skulls about what works in a cell phone, because it worked in the past.
Toshiba and Apple don't. They know what doesn't work ; )
How do you know they weren't proxies to make it look like the Chinese were behind it and take suspicion off of someone in the US, or even Russia? Did you do forensics on the chinese computers to find out?
Deep within a dolphin's body it's temperature is normally 35 degrees to 36.9 degrees, while it's outer body temperature is usually cooler. In comparison, man's body temperature is 37.3 degrees
Inaccurate. Arcade games and 2600 games turned over (space invaders, asteroids etc.) or you finished them (pole position, dragon's lair). PCB's didn't fry.
Been there, done it. Games you finish came about in the early 80's as a response to long lines at machines and people's capability to turn them over and play them indefinitely. If you could play for 3 days on the same quarter, the machine wasn't making any money. With pole position you finished the race. With Dragon's Lair you rescued the princess.
Can't speak to NES because I was in college when that came out and I didn't play games any more, well, except tetris in the quad =D
Where have you been? Time-line jumping is all the rage! I think it started with SWG in 2004, where you had a universe full of jedi during the timeline between Episode IV and Episode V, when canon says there were 2 jedi and 2 sith. This promises to be a SWG repeat of canon breaking buggy assed grindfest fun!
If you really care about Star Trek, run from this game as fast as you can. I'm sure it will be enough to make a Vulcan cry.
When I read that one of the new player mobs were borg, and your "mission" is to kill x number of them like kobolds in DDO, I almost snorted hot coffee out of my nose.
World of Star Trek? No thanks! This is nothing but opportunism riding the coattails of a successful movie. If they wanted to make a seriously good game it would take longer than 18 months. This game will last less time than it took to get it into beta. Either that or it will be on life support after a year, then it will be rehashed into a new game, in a doomed attempt to save it, and it will suck even more. I can already see the writing on the wall...
What a shame. Unfortunately games based on entertainment franchises usually suck.
Correction, it has been a franchise being developed into a game for 5 years. This game is completely different than the one which was originally started, and that one was scrapped 18 months ago, when the original developer went out of business and they scrapped the game, Cryptic bought the franchise and started development on it from square 1.
It is a new game. Wow has been in production for 5 years or so. Of course it's more polished. STO is still in beta, and will be for the next couple of years;)
STO doesn't have an economy yet and there are quite a few other features that aren't implemented yet. With MMO's, beta is the new alpha... On February 2 it will enter beta as defined by non-game developers, but it's really still alpha because it's not even feature complete.
You either get in now, and get items and experience that will help you later when they get the game done, or you join in a couple of years when it's polished and be a noob.
MMO's are usually done this way because they are very complex and the developers run out of money before they can finish it. As a player you have a choice of when to join.
I've been through 8 mmos and they are all the same with regard to game releases. They are never done or even feature complete when they are released. Whether you choose to support this or not is up to you. Buyer beware ; )
There have been a lot of mental diseases invented between 1938 and now.
My non professional opinion is that they are mostly all the same disease. It's called "the human condition".
Life sucks and everyone is different. When a common coping mechanism, which is viewed as negative, is found in lots of people BINGO! New disease, new drug created to treat it, $$$$! This is not exactly a good thing unless you own a drug company or get paid $200 an hour to be their friend.
From a engineer's standpoint, writing the stream constitutes a copy, whether it goes to disk or a network. It has to be written to a buffer on your local machine to play smoothly therefore at some point all of it is stored on your computer. It doesn't matter how long it's there, or what type of storage (memory or disk) it's written to, it's a copy if it exists in two different places at the same time.
Copyright law doesn't imply how much of a movie needs to be there to constitute a copy, but IANAL, I'm an engineer. That's where the lawyers take over;)
Streamed simply means that it's watched as the bytes come in. You've still downloaded the entire thing. You have to download it to "stream" it.
I work in the US and have similar working conditions. Then again I work for a software company and we are kicking ass. If times weren't so good I'm sure it would suck. I work 9-5 with a lunch break and just achieved 20 days vacation a year + holidays + floating holidays(basically 4 days you can take when you want).
My job rocks, for an IT job. Most of my peers in other companies don't have it so good.
This Saturday I have to work 3 hours during an outage window starting at 9 AM. However I only need to work half a day on Friday, or Monday, whichever I choose. That's about as bad as my job gets.
USA IT workers aren't willing to unionize because we know that leads to what's happening to the auto industry. Unionized companies eventually collapse under their own weight. Unions had their place in time but now we have labor laws. They aren't needed anymore and indeed, they are counter productive. If someone knows they can't be fired, they tend to become lazy. I know, I worked in union shops before I went back to college.
Half my co-workers were worthless. On night shift they smoked pot and slept on the job, stole tools from each other and generally sucked to be around. I had one guy set up a trap for me. He was pissed off that the current union starting wage was adjusted for inflation and higher than in 1965 when he started. That irked him to no end and he took it out on me because I was New Guy. I didn't tell him how much I made, there was a chart that was handed out once a year at union meetings. Everyone knew how much everyone else made because that is defined by the union.
Unions are a lower form of communism, nothing more, nothing less. Your pay is decided by how much time you have put in, not your quality of work and union workers are always pissed off about something ridiculous.
You think stuff is being outsourced now? Unionize it and watch what happens. There's no incentive to work hard and everyone in a given job description makes the exact same wage regardless of what miracles they can pull off or how talented they are.
The union experience I had boiled down to union workers being the biggest bunch of sniveling infants I've ever had the misfortune to be associated with. They were all miserable and in the union because they couldn't do anything else.
If someone tried to start a union where I work, and I found out about it, I'd do everything in my power to get them canned as fast as possible. I definitely don't want that bullshit where I work. If our profession started becoming unionized, I'd become a bartender before I joined a local.
It's been my experience that deadlines aren't met because half the features are added in the last week of coding, usually dropped on your desk at 4PM Friday, one working hour before the Monday 9 AM deadline.
I always have a mantis database full of two types of tickets on deadline Friday. The ones I closed over 3 weeks ago, and the 51 that were created today between 12PM and 4PM. I'm still leaving at 5PM for happy hour and I'm taking my kid to the zoo tomorrow;)
I'll sleep great all weekend. In the meeting on Monday, I'll shrug a few times and not care when people's faces get red. When the meeting is over I'll start working on my tickets.
They will figure out a way. We can make it harder for them, and this is a good thing to do because we'll catch more of them, but they'll still find a way.
My kid loved all three prequels. Given the target audience, that makes them a success. Maybe people don't like the prequels because they are grownups now./shrug
All I know is my dad thought the first 3 were crap. Probably because he was a grownup. Us kids loved them.
I think everyone is pissed at Lucas because they feel abandoned. You don't like them because they were never meant to be liked by you. You like the old ones because you were a kid when you first saw them. I have no problem turning on my sense of wonder and suspension of disbelief. I loved all 6 star wars movies and the animated series'.
Get over it, they are tween movies, a space soap opera meant for kids, like Buck Rogers. You need to look at them from that perspective. Then again I'm totally into Sponge-bob and iCarly too. I step down to my son's level and watch the stuff with him. When I'm there, I love it. I don't like serious movies or tv shows. I'd rather watch Toy Story than Seven.
I'm not sure how you can take a set of movies called "Star Wars" seriously to begin with. Adults expecting something more is like expecting High School Musical or Hannah Montana to be as satisfying as Gone With the Wind.
Analyzing every detail and character takes all the fun out of it. It's like critiquing the latest McDonalds happy meal and talking about how it doesn't measure up to what a meal at a 5 star French restaurant should be.
The whole subject of Lucas "ruining" Star Wars is decidedly stupid. Move on, grow up, and let it go, or enjoy the movies for what they are: movies for kids.
Get it done wins every time. Power is cheaper than a competent C++ coder's time and time to market is shorter for PHP. I'm not saying it's right, it's just reality kicking idealism's ass again./shrug
doesn't bother me... with one exception. You are doing the implementation, something that would take 5 minutes to fix pops up, and it gets rolled back because of it. What they don't know won't hurt them and if it ends up taking longer, rollback is still an option so you lose nothing by working out the implementation kink. There's always at least one with a complex application and making me come in on a weekend, AGAIN because of a 5 minute problem really irks me. Shit happens, let me deal with it and get it done, especially when the rollback takes longer than the hot fix would.
Slashdot Mirror
Keyboards aren't a great test because a smart designer will design the keyboard so that the edges of the virtual buttons fall on the touch screen grid. This is a very easy to implement trick to make touch screen keyboards work well even on touch screens with lower touch resolution.
A web browser and links are a whole different ball of wax and it's harder to fake the precision a high resolution touch screen offers.
>So, why does it take companies who aren't cell-phone manufacturers to design great ones?
Traditional cell phone manufacturers have it ingrained in their collective skulls about what works in a cell phone, because it worked in the past.
Toshiba and Apple don't. They know what doesn't work ; )
Hallelujah! Someone understands. Humans used to live on Mars until the republicans killed the planet!
How do you know they weren't proxies to make it look like the Chinese were behind it and take suspicion off of someone in the US, or even Russia? Did you do forensics on the chinese computers to find out?
Isn't the use of Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi against the Geneva convention? We could get in a lot of trouble.
I knew Obama was trouble. Doesn't he know you never engage in a land war with China?
All he needs to do now is hire Michael Moore to make a documentary and Al Gore to invent Mars.
Deep within a dolphin's body it's temperature is normally 35 degrees to 36.9 degrees, while it's outer body temperature is usually cooler. In comparison, man's body temperature is 37.3 degrees
http://www.indianchild.com/dolphins.htm
Maybe dolphins evolved that way because sperm's ideal temperature is constant across species. IANAB so can only speculate.
you can sue anyone for any reason. some lawyer will probably take the case (and your money)
Inaccurate. Arcade games and 2600 games turned over (space invaders, asteroids etc.) or you finished them (pole position, dragon's lair). PCB's didn't fry.
Been there, done it. Games you finish came about in the early 80's as a response to long lines at machines and people's capability to turn them over and play them indefinitely. If you could play for 3 days on the same quarter, the machine wasn't making any money. With pole position you finished the race. With Dragon's Lair you rescued the princess.
Can't speak to NES because I was in college when that came out and I didn't play games any more, well, except tetris in the quad =D
Where have you been? Time-line jumping is all the rage! I think it started with SWG in 2004, where you had a universe full of jedi during the timeline between Episode IV and Episode V, when canon says there were 2 jedi and 2 sith. This promises to be a SWG repeat of canon breaking buggy assed grindfest fun!
If you really care about Star Trek, run from this game as fast as you can. I'm sure it will be enough to make a Vulcan cry.
When I read that one of the new player mobs were borg, and your "mission" is to kill x number of them like kobolds in DDO, I almost snorted hot coffee out of my nose.
World of Star Trek? No thanks! This is nothing but opportunism riding the coattails of a successful movie. If they wanted to make a seriously good game it would take longer than 18 months. This game will last less time than it took to get it into beta. Either that or it will be on life support after a year, then it will be rehashed into a new game, in a doomed attempt to save it, and it will suck even more. I can already see the writing on the wall...
What a shame. Unfortunately games based on entertainment franchises usually suck.
Correction, it has been a franchise being developed into a game for 5 years. This game is completely different than the one which was originally started, and that one was scrapped 18 months ago, when the original developer went out of business and they scrapped the game, Cryptic bought the franchise and started development on it from square 1.
The game being released has been in development for 18 months and was started in 2008. http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=20942
It is a new game. Wow has been in production for 5 years or so. Of course it's more polished. STO is still in beta, and will be for the next couple of years ;)
STO doesn't have an economy yet and there are quite a few other features that aren't implemented yet. With MMO's, beta is the new alpha... On February 2 it will enter beta as defined by non-game developers, but it's really still alpha because it's not even feature complete.
You either get in now, and get items and experience that will help you later when they get the game done, or you join in a couple of years when it's polished and be a noob.
MMO's are usually done this way because they are very complex and the developers run out of money before they can finish it. As a player you have a choice of when to join.
I've been through 8 mmos and they are all the same with regard to game releases. They are never done or even feature complete when they are released. Whether you choose to support this or not is up to you. Buyer beware ; )
There have been a lot of mental diseases invented between 1938 and now.
My non professional opinion is that they are mostly all the same disease. It's called "the human condition".
Life sucks and everyone is different. When a common coping mechanism, which is viewed as negative, is found in lots of people BINGO! New disease, new drug created to treat it, $$$$! This is not exactly a good thing unless you own a drug company or get paid $200 an hour to be their friend.
From a engineer's standpoint, writing the stream constitutes a copy, whether it goes to disk or a network. It has to be written to a buffer on your local machine to play smoothly therefore at some point all of it is stored on your computer. It doesn't matter how long it's there, or what type of storage (memory or disk) it's written to, it's a copy if it exists in two different places at the same time.
Copyright law doesn't imply how much of a movie needs to be there to constitute a copy, but IANAL, I'm an engineer. That's where the lawyers take over ;)
Streamed simply means that it's watched as the bytes come in. You've still downloaded the entire thing. You have to download it to "stream" it.
I work in the US and have similar working conditions. Then again I work for a software company and we are kicking ass. If times weren't so good I'm sure it would suck. I work 9-5 with a lunch break and just achieved 20 days vacation a year + holidays + floating holidays(basically 4 days you can take when you want).
My job rocks, for an IT job. Most of my peers in other companies don't have it so good.
This Saturday I have to work 3 hours during an outage window starting at 9 AM. However I only need to work half a day on Friday, or Monday, whichever I choose. That's about as bad as my job gets.
The horrible place you worked sounds like a large bank. Been there, done it, and I'll never work for another bank.
USA IT workers aren't willing to unionize because we know that leads to what's happening to the auto industry. Unionized companies eventually collapse under their own weight. Unions had their place in time but now we have labor laws. They aren't needed anymore and indeed, they are counter productive. If someone knows they can't be fired, they tend to become lazy. I know, I worked in union shops before I went back to college.
Half my co-workers were worthless. On night shift they smoked pot and slept on the job, stole tools from each other and generally sucked to be around. I had one guy set up a trap for me. He was pissed off that the current union starting wage was adjusted for inflation and higher than in 1965 when he started. That irked him to no end and he took it out on me because I was New Guy. I didn't tell him how much I made, there was a chart that was handed out once a year at union meetings. Everyone knew how much everyone else made because that is defined by the union.
Unions are a lower form of communism, nothing more, nothing less. Your pay is decided by how much time you have put in, not your quality of work and union workers are always pissed off about something ridiculous.
You think stuff is being outsourced now? Unionize it and watch what happens. There's no incentive to work hard and everyone in a given job description makes the exact same wage regardless of what miracles they can pull off or how talented they are.
The union experience I had boiled down to union workers being the biggest bunch of sniveling infants I've ever had the misfortune to be associated with. They were all miserable and in the union because they couldn't do anything else.
If someone tried to start a union where I work, and I found out about it, I'd do everything in my power to get them canned as fast as possible. I definitely don't want that bullshit where I work. If our profession started becoming unionized, I'd become a bartender before I joined a local.
It's been my experience that deadlines aren't met because half the features are added in the last week of coding, usually dropped on your desk at 4PM Friday, one working hour before the Monday 9 AM deadline.
I always have a mantis database full of two types of tickets on deadline Friday. The ones I closed over 3 weeks ago, and the 51 that were created today between 12PM and 4PM. I'm still leaving at 5PM for happy hour and I'm taking my kid to the zoo tomorrow ;)
I'll sleep great all weekend. In the meeting on Monday, I'll shrug a few times and not care when people's faces get red. When the meeting is over I'll start working on my tickets.
Some things never change.
... and no system is human proof.
They will figure out a way. We can make it harder for them, and this is a good thing to do because we'll catch more of them, but they'll still find a way.
haha you'd love eve then
Actually their original stated purpose was to grief everyone ;) They did it by getting massive
My kid loved all three prequels. Given the target audience, that makes them a success. Maybe people don't like the prequels because they are grownups now. /shrug
All I know is my dad thought the first 3 were crap. Probably because he was a grownup. Us kids loved them.
I think everyone is pissed at Lucas because they feel abandoned. You don't like them because they were never meant to be liked by you. You like the old ones because you were a kid when you first saw them. I have no problem turning on my sense of wonder and suspension of disbelief. I loved all 6 star wars movies and the animated series'.
Get over it, they are tween movies, a space soap opera meant for kids, like Buck Rogers. You need to look at them from that perspective. Then again I'm totally into Sponge-bob and iCarly too. I step down to my son's level and watch the stuff with him. When I'm there, I love it. I don't like serious movies or tv shows. I'd rather watch Toy Story than Seven.
I'm not sure how you can take a set of movies called "Star Wars" seriously to begin with. Adults expecting something more is like expecting High School Musical or Hannah Montana to be as satisfying as Gone With the Wind.
Analyzing every detail and character takes all the fun out of it. It's like critiquing the latest McDonalds happy meal and talking about how it doesn't measure up to what a meal at a 5 star French restaurant should be.
The whole subject of Lucas "ruining" Star Wars is decidedly stupid. Move on, grow up, and let it go, or enjoy the movies for what they are: movies for kids.
Oh then there's the fact that most web code has a very short lifespan so the investment in C++ isn't always worth it in the long run...
Get it done wins every time. Power is cheaper than a competent C++ coder's time and time to market is shorter for PHP. I'm not saying it's right, it's just reality kicking idealism's ass again. /shrug
doesn't bother me... with one exception. You are doing the implementation, something that would take 5 minutes to fix pops up, and it gets rolled back because of it. What they don't know won't hurt them and if it ends up taking longer, rollback is still an option so you lose nothing by working out the implementation kink. There's always at least one with a complex application and making me come in on a weekend, AGAIN because of a 5 minute problem really irks me. Shit happens, let me deal with it and get it done, especially when the rollback takes longer than the hot fix would.