So, I've used both Windows and Linux for years. I'm a game programmer, so Windows is a necessary evil. Anyway, one day I showed up to a LUG codefest with my Windows laptop in tow, to work on some open source (cross-platform) stuff, along with the gang. I popped open my laptop, booted it up, and WINCED as the Windows startup sound played. I looked up, and nobody seemed to notice -- except for our vision-impaired buddy, who tilted his head up from his laptop, and said, "I hear... WINDOWS." All eyes turned towards me.
So, um, yeah. I'm very much in favor of being able to disable boot-up sounds. There are times when you DON'T want the whole damn room hearing your machine boot.
I have corrected interviewers in the past, and still received a job offer. Take it to a higher authority, if necessary, to convince them of their error. I once put the K&R smackdown on one guy who was trying to ask a trick question, and didn't have his facts straight. As long as you make an effort not to bruise their egos too much about it, they will usually come away with a positive impression. If they don't, then you don't want to work with them, anyway.
I agree with DiegoV. There are no "mitigating circumstances" for rape, and I sincerely hope mcrbids merely misunderstood that phrase when he used it.
Yes, there are some survival tactics you can teach your children, that may (if they listen) keep them safer than they might otherwise be. It's good to tell them not to drink with strangers, for example. But, I've been robbed at gunpoint just walking in a well-lit area on a college campus. We take calculated risks every day, whether we realize it or not. Even walking across the street can get people killed for no good reason. Yes, teaching your children to be safe is a perfectly reasonable thing, but placing blame on victims is reprehensible and disgusting.
"I finished my EE degree and entered the engineering workforce at 28. If anything I found my age may have helped me."
Also, returning students tend to be more serious about their studies, and many do much better in college than they would have when they were younger. I knew a number of returning students from their 20s to their 40s when I was in college, and they all seemed to be doing well -- and none of them seemed to regret going back.
Honestly, you're still young! I'm 33, and I just started learning electric bass about a month ago, and I'm forming new pathways in my brain so fast, it's simply shocking. Brains are one of those use-it-or-lose-it things. You keep it well exercised, and it'll be as agile as you need it to be for a very long time.
I'm with you on this one. I think people are reading in something that isn't there. If the small companies weren't welcome, the ESA wouldn't have bothered to even mention the new conference format in the letter.
Trust me, I feel your pain, man. I was working one place where my CRT was going bad, and making a high pitched squealing noise. I told our IT guy, and he said he couldn't hear anything. I told him to get the damn monitor away from me. So, the next day, I came into work, and I had a new monitor, but I could still hear that high pitched squealing noise... coming from BEHIND me. He apparently thought I was crazy, so he had solved the problem in the laziest way he could -- by swapping my monitor with the one in the cubicle behind mine. I walked over to his desk, told him to follow me, and then I pointed out the offending monitor. He was in shock. I was like, "Yes, I CAN hear it, and no, I'm NOT crazy, and for the last time, WOULD YOU GET THAT THING AWAY FROM ME?"
This is exactly the sort of blockbuster-obsessed thinking that is currently strangling the industry, making the barrier of entry too high for small companies, and ultimately stifling innovation. The "blockbuster" line of thinking gives us thrilling games like "NFL Roster Update 2006." Whee.
The cost of game production is increasing faster than the revenue being made from games. The reason so many companies are currently investigating episodic content is because they are desperate for alternative models -- anything to break out of this death spiral. A willingness to investigate alternatives is not "insane." It's necessary.
Oh. Mah. Gawd. We aren't interested in programming? What have I been doing with my life? I knew I should've become a hairdresser! Maybe it's not too late! Somebody get me the number for the nearest cosmetology school! Why, here I was, all about to accept another game programming job offer, when I could be perming hair! What was I thinking!?!
Well, in most media, this is what reviewers are for. Roger Ebert, for example, is happy to point out that he watches bad movies, so you don't have to. If you just buy any old thing that comes in a pretty box, you've got nothing but yourself to blame. There's a lot of crap out there -- even finished crap.
Sometimes, in spite of all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it, a high-minded developer who lacks sufficient funds to finish polishing a product chooses not to ship at all, rather than release something unfinished. Is this the best approach? Would you prefer nothing at all to a buggy product?
Unfortunately, games cost money to make, and there isn't always enough money to make it to the finish line. Sometimes, they need to release SOMETHING, just so that the company won't go out of business. The failure rates for game companies are absolutely phenomenal.
Is that really what you want? Fewer games? Because that's possibly what you're asking for, whether you realize it or not.
This is nothing to be embarassed about. I occasionally have problems with games that are jittery, have tunnels with low ceilings, or use any kind of camera-bob.
Dramamine does really work, but if Dramamine makes you too sleepy, some people get good results from eating candied ginger, or drinking a real ginger beer/ale with a high ginger content. (If you live too far out in the suburban wasteland to find a good craft ginger beer, you can homebrew it with basic brewing equipment -- but don't go to too much trouble, unless you've verified that ginger actually helps you, first.)
Also, make sure that you play in a well-lit room (yeah, I know, it's a horror game, but playing a dark room will make your head hurt).
If I had stolen someone's job, I'd have bloody well hired him by now, damn it. The fact is, I can't beg borrow or steal people to do the work I do, here. When someone with apropriate experience comes into town, we game companies descend on him like sharks in a feeding frenzy. If you're the little shark, you have a hell of a hard time gettng any of the food.
There are a lot of students training up in the field, but they don't do you much good when you need someone with more experience than they have. We're more than happy to help the new kids learn, but if we don't have experienced people, there's nobody to teach them.
So honestly, I don't want to hear any whinging, until I've got qualified people banging on my door.
What, exactly, is your evidence that men perform better in technical skills than women -- even on average? Do you have any studies that are able to remove cultural influences? Name one, by all means. Produce the data!
You don't have it, because it doesn't exist.
People used to think that women were incapable of all manner of intellectual pursuits. In some of these fields, women now outnumber men at the undergraduate level. So, what makes you so damn confident that you're right? You're just guessing. If history is any indicator, you're probably wrong.
And if you're not wrong, it's irrelevant. Even if there was a vast gap in ability, there are so many completely inept male programmers out there that there is easily room for hundreds more female programmers. I know. I've interviewed some of these guys. Woah boy, it's a shame they couldn't make a career out of growing chiapets.
Perhaps because a boy geek is perceived as a mildly eccentric target for ridicule, whereas a girl geek is an anathema to her peers at that age.
When I was a teenager, I went to a science/math/tech focused high school, so I was sheltered from a lot of this. Even so, there were only two girls in my AP Computer Science course (including myself). It was already too late.
You know what got me interested in computer science? Games. It always goes back to games. Nobody decides to be a computer science major because she really digs Quicken. You've got to be passionate about this stuff, and nothing makes people passionate about computers like games do. If you have more girls playing games, you will have more girls going into computer science. That's all there is to it.
And don't even try to feed me that girls-just-aren't-interested-in-games bullshit. The fact that gamer gender ratios vary widely by country is a strong indicator that this is a societal construct, rather than a biological one. So, nobody is going to get very far with that argument around me.
"People like Dan Zambonini are absolutely wrong, things like 'learning XML' can be done from a book if you know the relivent background about languages and such schemas."
Agreed completely. When the original RFC for XML hit the scenes, I downloaded it, and read it my own damn self, and later studied up on what to do with it. Who in the hell wants to waste their tuition on stuff like that?
The technology flavor of the month is the WRONG THING for a university to be teaching. If that's what you want, you can go to a community college, or some tech training school, and save yourself some cash. Theory lasts way the hell longer than specific technologies do. Any university that isn't giving you the fundamentals is wasting your money.
As an employer, I'm often hiring people for positions which require unusual skillsets. Because it's highly unlikely that I'll find anyone who has the full set of skills they need to do the job, I'm always on the lookout for people with strong theory and fundamentals. They will be more likely to be able to figure out the things they don't know than the guy who studied whatever was hip at the time.
Developers must decide whether to make a gaming experience as realistic as possible, allowing the gamer to step inside the character and his actions, or to keep him at a distance through an unfamiliar visual style.
This is completely backwards, actually. Iconic characters are easier to step into than realistic characters. Realistic characters are more distinctly someone else, and thus, have a sense of otherness about them. Iconic characters, on the other hand, being abstract, can effectively be possessed more completely by any player.
I recommend reading The Undead Zone for a good primer on this topic. It invokes both Mori and McCloud to make the case against realism.
That all said, I think people are making too big a deal about all this, with respect to Zelda. Twilight Princess ISN'T realistic. Link only looks about as realistic as a 3D-ified Disney character, to be honest. The game still looks stylized -- just a different style from last time.
The APA did not release any new research, whatsoever pertaining to electronic games and violence. If you read their own press release, it is quite clear that the APA adopted a resolution based on previous research by others.
While I agree with the value of working hard and being thick-skinned, I must assert that succeeding in a technical field does not require doing anything "like a man." It's an obsolete figure of speech. Hard work and perserverence are not inherently masculine traits.
The fact is, anybody can run an awards show. It might represent the industry badly, but there really isn't a heck of a lot the industry can do about it. Personally, I wish people would stop acting like the Spike TV awards have any kind of legitimacy.
The fact is, we already have an Academy. They're the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (http://www.interactive.org/), and they give out the Interactive Achievement Awards, every year.
However, the best known of the game development awards shows is hosted by the IGDA. This is the Game Developer's Choice Awards (http://www.igda.org/awards/). This show made an appearance on MTV one year (correct me if I'm wrong), and earned a good bit of attention from G4 last year, and hopefully will receive more coverage in the future.
Finally, for the indies, there's the Independent Games Festival (http://www.igf.com/), though the awards part of the festival has generally been tacked onto the Game Developer's Choice Awards event, in the last couple of years.
I am a Lead Programmer in the game industry. I expect quality work from my people. I don't care how brilliant my programmers are -- a programmer on hour 60 is not doing quality work. If an employee of mine is on hour 60, it is because I screwed up.
I don't care if this is someone's dream job. I don't care what they've heard about the industry. It doesn't give us the right to abuse them. That's ridiculous. These are human beings, and they deserve to be treated as such.
While I feel that Open Source is often not the ideal choice for the development of one's core game systems, a game developer can nonetheless make very good use of Open Source libraries and middleware in an otherwise closed-source project. There are dozens of great timesavers out there, like DevIL, and if they aren't ideal for your purposes on a low-budget project, it is often more cost-effective to set aside a little time for one of your programmers to contribute improvements to the open source project than it is to invest in an expensive big-name product that may be overkill for your particular project.
I have to say that I am fantastically impressed with the progress that Sinbad and the gang have made on Ogre over the last couple of years. It is seriously turning into a respectable engine.
Unfortunately, for those of us in the industry, there are often factors that make it hard for us to adopt these technologies right away. For one thing, open source engines are almost always weak in artist tools and scene-building tools, relative to their closed-source counterparts. This is one gap that absolutely needs to be filled, if they're going to get professional buy-in.
The second problem is a bit harder to overcome. The simple fact of the matter is that publishing companies get warm fuzzies when they see a developer using well-known, industry-standard, big-name tools and libraries. If they hear you're using some open source library that grad students wrote, they're going to think you're a garage-operation. Thus, it can be very hard to land a publishing deal, if you go this route.
I think that overcoming the latter problem will require time and maturity. Nobody is about to look down on you if you tell them you're using Linux or Apache. They have street cred. I think that there are definitely game-related libraries that can get there, too, but it's going to take time. There are a few things that are probably there already, such as SDL.
My Prius, purchased in August 2000, averages around 47 mpg, right now. My typical driving patterns involve a 30 minute commute, which includes about ten minutes of slow surface road driving (with traffic lights) followed by a 50mph drive to a tunnel, a slowdown for the toll booth, a long drive through a tunnel at 45, another stretch of 50, and then highway driving the rest of the way.
I have seen my Prius do as well as 80, and as poorly as 27, depending on circumstances. It gets its best mileage when I'm driving at fairly steady speeds, below 60 mph, with my air conditioning off. During my typical commute, my very best mileage is during the tunnel segment of my trip, in spite of the climb at the end of it.
You have to understand, though, that unlike the Insight, the Prius is optimized for emissions, rather than gas mileage. The gas mileage is merely a fringe benefit. In 2000, the Prius was a SULEV, and the Insight was an ULEV (don't know whether this is still true). Part of why the Prius mileage suffers is because of tricks that are done to curb emissions on a cold start. The mileage for the first five minutes is nowhere near as good as a typical cross-section from partway through a trip. So, longer commutes will enjoy better mileage on average than shorter commutes.
As for the batteries, I can speak for the Prius: 1.) Toyota has a 8-year warranty on the entire Hybrid system, so you don't need to pay for a replacement, for at least seven years. 2.) I've had my car since August 2000, and there are absolutely no issues with my batteries. You do NOT have to replace these "every couple of years," as some people have suggested. They cost more than Dausha suggested (around $3500 retail; they're hoping to get them down to $1000 through economy of scale), but the normal lifespan is 8-10 years. 3.) Toyota and Honda both use a third-party recycler for the batteries. They are not just thrown in a junkyard, somewhere.
There's a lot of FUD out there about these cars, so I like to clear the air whenever I can (so to speak).:)
This looks like a job for Space Systems Lab! In fact, RTSX had already been under consideration for the Sept 2004 Hubble servicing mission. I think this would be a great opportunity to give Ranger a spin. With the increased interest in astronaut safety, there's a very real opportunity here for the space telerobotics community. After all, why do a dangerous all-hands spacewalk outside the ISS, as they did recently, when they could send a robot out to do the dirty work, instead?
Frankly, I'm inclined to agree with your call, on that one, Barbara. Upon cursory glance, this student does sound like a classic case.
ASpies are usually filled with a great passion for certain topics that interest them. One way to get them interested in being social is to introduce them to others who share their passions. Even this can be awkward for some, though.
It is useful, in some cases, to teach them that there are very real, practical reasons for gaining social skills. Rare ASpies have been known to be capable of focusing their amazing learning abilities on attaining social graces, from what I understand. They create sets of rules to operate by. They search for patterns in the behaviors of others, so that they can apply their rules. It sounds horrible -- as though it were some sort of act -- but to some degree, a great deal of social behavior is an act, isn't it? Why else would there be etiquette books and finishing schools?
Perhaps what you wish to teach is not social "skills," but, rather, the ability to find pleasure in being social. Can that be taught?
Well, maybe it's best to start with those aforementioned folks who share your student's passions. Start by making things fun!
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So, I've used both Windows and Linux for years. I'm a game programmer, so Windows is a necessary evil. Anyway, one day I showed up to a LUG codefest with my Windows laptop in tow, to work on some open source (cross-platform) stuff, along with the gang. I popped open my laptop, booted it up, and WINCED as the Windows startup sound played. I looked up, and nobody seemed to notice -- except for our vision-impaired buddy, who tilted his head up from his laptop, and said, "I hear... WINDOWS." All eyes turned towards me.
So, um, yeah. I'm very much in favor of being able to disable boot-up sounds. There are times when you DON'T want the whole damn room hearing your machine boot.
I have corrected interviewers in the past, and still received a job offer. Take it to a higher authority, if necessary, to convince them of their error. I once put the K&R smackdown on one guy who was trying to ask a trick question, and didn't have his facts straight. As long as you make an effort not to bruise their egos too much about it, they will usually come away with a positive impression. If they don't, then you don't want to work with them, anyway.
I agree with DiegoV. There are no "mitigating circumstances" for rape, and I sincerely hope mcrbids merely misunderstood that phrase when he used it.
Yes, there are some survival tactics you can teach your children, that may (if they listen) keep them safer than they might otherwise be. It's good to tell them not to drink with strangers, for example. But, I've been robbed at gunpoint just walking in a well-lit area on a college campus. We take calculated risks every day, whether we realize it or not. Even walking across the street can get people killed for no good reason. Yes, teaching your children to be safe is a perfectly reasonable thing, but placing blame on victims is reprehensible and disgusting.
"I finished my EE degree and entered the engineering workforce at 28. If anything I found my age may have helped me."
Also, returning students tend to be more serious about their studies, and many do much better in college than they would have when they were younger. I knew a number of returning students from their 20s to their 40s when I was in college, and they all seemed to be doing well -- and none of them seemed to regret going back.
Honestly, you're still young! I'm 33, and I just started learning electric bass about a month ago, and I'm forming new pathways in my brain so fast, it's simply shocking. Brains are one of those use-it-or-lose-it things. You keep it well exercised, and it'll be as agile as you need it to be for a very long time.
I'm with you on this one. I think people are reading in something that isn't there. If the small companies weren't welcome, the ESA wouldn't have bothered to even mention the new conference format in the letter.
Trust me, I feel your pain, man. I was working one place where my CRT was going bad, and making a high pitched squealing noise. I told our IT guy, and he said he couldn't hear anything. I told him to get the damn monitor away from me. So, the next day, I came into work, and I had a new monitor, but I could still hear that high pitched squealing noise... coming from BEHIND me. He apparently thought I was crazy, so he had solved the problem in the laziest way he could -- by swapping my monitor with the one in the cubicle behind mine. I walked over to his desk, told him to follow me, and then I pointed out the offending monitor. He was in shock. I was like, "Yes, I CAN hear it, and no, I'm NOT crazy, and for the last time, WOULD YOU GET THAT THING AWAY FROM ME?"
This is exactly the sort of blockbuster-obsessed thinking that is currently strangling the industry, making the barrier of entry too high for small companies, and ultimately stifling innovation. The "blockbuster" line of thinking gives us thrilling games like "NFL Roster Update 2006." Whee.
The cost of game production is increasing faster than the revenue being made from games. The reason so many companies are currently investigating episodic content is because they are desperate for alternative models -- anything to break out of this death spiral. A willingness to investigate alternatives is not "insane." It's necessary.
Oh. Mah. Gawd. We aren't interested in programming? What have I been doing with my life? I knew I should've become a hairdresser! Maybe it's not too late! Somebody get me the number for the nearest cosmetology school! Why, here I was, all about to accept another game programming job offer, when I could be perming hair! What was I thinking!?!
At least put a warning label on it.
Well, in most media, this is what reviewers are for. Roger Ebert, for example, is happy to point out that he watches bad movies, so you don't have to. If you just buy any old thing that comes in a pretty box, you've got nothing but yourself to blame. There's a lot of crap out there -- even finished crap.
You've apparently never heard the phrase "pink slip."
Sometimes, in spite of all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it, a high-minded developer who lacks sufficient funds to finish polishing a product chooses not to ship at all, rather than release something unfinished. Is this the best approach? Would you prefer nothing at all to a buggy product?
Unfortunately, games cost money to make, and there isn't always enough money to make it to the finish line. Sometimes, they need to release SOMETHING, just so that the company won't go out of business. The failure rates for game companies are absolutely phenomenal.
Is that really what you want? Fewer games? Because that's possibly what you're asking for, whether you realize it or not.
This is nothing to be embarassed about. I occasionally have problems with games that are jittery, have tunnels with low ceilings, or use any kind of camera-bob.
Dramamine does really work, but if Dramamine makes you too sleepy, some people get good results from eating candied ginger, or drinking a real ginger beer/ale with a high ginger content. (If you live too far out in the suburban wasteland to find a good craft ginger beer, you can homebrew it with basic brewing equipment -- but don't go to too much trouble, unless you've verified that ginger actually helps you, first.)
Also, make sure that you play in a well-lit room (yeah, I know, it's a horror game, but playing a dark room will make your head hurt).
If I had stolen someone's job, I'd have bloody well hired him by now, damn it. The fact is, I can't beg borrow or steal people to do the work I do, here. When someone with apropriate experience comes into town, we game companies descend on him like sharks in a feeding frenzy. If you're the little shark, you have a hell of a hard time gettng any of the food.
There are a lot of students training up in the field, but they don't do you much good when you need someone with more experience than they have. We're more than happy to help the new kids learn, but if we don't have experienced people, there's nobody to teach them.
So honestly, I don't want to hear any whinging, until I've got qualified people banging on my door.
What, exactly, is your evidence that men perform better in technical skills than women -- even on average? Do you have any studies that are able to remove cultural influences? Name one, by all means. Produce the data!
You don't have it, because it doesn't exist.
People used to think that women were incapable of all manner of intellectual pursuits. In some of these fields, women now outnumber men at the undergraduate level. So, what makes you so damn confident that you're right? You're just guessing. If history is any indicator, you're probably wrong.
And if you're not wrong, it's irrelevant. Even if there was a vast gap in ability, there are so many completely inept male programmers out there that there is easily room for hundreds more female programmers. I know. I've interviewed some of these guys. Woah boy, it's a shame they couldn't make a career out of growing chiapets.
Perhaps because a boy geek is perceived as a mildly eccentric target for ridicule, whereas a girl geek is an anathema to her peers at that age.
When I was a teenager, I went to a science/math/tech focused high school, so I was sheltered from a lot of this. Even so, there were only two girls in my AP Computer Science course (including myself). It was already too late.
You know what got me interested in computer science? Games. It always goes back to games. Nobody decides to be a computer science major because she really digs Quicken. You've got to be passionate about this stuff, and nothing makes people passionate about computers like games do. If you have more girls playing games, you will have more girls going into computer science. That's all there is to it.
And don't even try to feed me that girls-just-aren't-interested-in-games bullshit. The fact that gamer gender ratios vary widely by country is a strong indicator that this is a societal construct, rather than a biological one. So, nobody is going to get very far with that argument around me.
"People like Dan Zambonini are absolutely wrong, things like 'learning XML' can be done from a book if you know the relivent background about languages and such schemas."
Agreed completely. When the original RFC for XML hit the scenes, I downloaded it, and read it my own damn self, and later studied up on what to do with it. Who in the hell wants to waste their tuition on stuff like that?
The technology flavor of the month is the WRONG THING for a university to be teaching. If that's what you want, you can go to a community college, or some tech training school, and save yourself some cash. Theory lasts way the hell longer than specific technologies do. Any university that isn't giving you the fundamentals is wasting your money.
As an employer, I'm often hiring people for positions which require unusual skillsets. Because it's highly unlikely that I'll find anyone who has the full set of skills they need to do the job, I'm always on the lookout for people with strong theory and fundamentals. They will be more likely to be able to figure out the things they don't know than the guy who studied whatever was hip at the time.
This is completely backwards, actually. Iconic characters are easier to step into than realistic characters. Realistic characters are more distinctly someone else, and thus, have a sense of otherness about them. Iconic characters, on the other hand, being abstract, can effectively be possessed more completely by any player.
I recommend reading The Undead Zone for a good primer on this topic. It invokes both Mori and McCloud to make the case against realism.
That all said, I think people are making too big a deal about all this, with respect to Zelda. Twilight Princess ISN'T realistic. Link only looks about as realistic as a 3D-ified Disney character, to be honest. The game still looks stylized -- just a different style from last time.
The APA did not release any new research, whatsoever pertaining to electronic games and violence. If you read their own press release, it is quite clear that the APA adopted a resolution based on previous research by others.
While I agree with the value of working hard and being thick-skinned, I must assert that succeeding in a technical field does not require doing anything "like a man." It's an obsolete figure of speech. Hard work and perserverence are not inherently masculine traits.
The fact is, anybody can run an awards show. It might represent the industry badly, but there really isn't a heck of a lot the industry can do about it. Personally, I wish people would stop acting like the Spike TV awards have any kind of legitimacy.
The fact is, we already have an Academy. They're the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (http://www.interactive.org/), and they give out the Interactive Achievement Awards, every year.
However, the best known of the game development awards shows is hosted by the IGDA. This is the Game Developer's Choice Awards (http://www.igda.org/awards/). This show made an appearance on MTV one year (correct me if I'm wrong), and earned a good bit of attention from G4 last year, and hopefully will receive more coverage in the future.
Finally, for the indies, there's the Independent Games Festival (http://www.igf.com/), though the awards part of the festival has generally been tacked onto the Game Developer's Choice Awards event, in the last couple of years.
I am a Lead Programmer in the game industry. I expect quality work from my people. I don't care how brilliant my programmers are -- a programmer on hour 60 is not doing quality work. If an employee of mine is on hour 60, it is because I screwed up.
I don't care if this is someone's dream job. I don't care what they've heard about the industry. It doesn't give us the right to abuse them. That's ridiculous. These are human beings, and they deserve to be treated as such.
While I feel that Open Source is often not the ideal choice for the development of one's core game systems, a game developer can nonetheless make very good use of Open Source libraries and middleware in an otherwise closed-source project. There are dozens of great timesavers out there, like DevIL, and if they aren't ideal for your purposes on a low-budget project, it is often more cost-effective to set aside a little time for one of your programmers to contribute improvements to the open source project than it is to invest in an expensive big-name product that may be overkill for your particular project.
I have to say that I am fantastically impressed with the progress that Sinbad and the gang have made on Ogre over the last couple of years. It is seriously turning into a respectable engine.
Unfortunately, for those of us in the industry, there are often factors that make it hard for us to adopt these technologies right away. For one thing, open source engines are almost always weak in artist tools and scene-building tools, relative to their closed-source counterparts. This is one gap that absolutely needs to be filled, if they're going to get professional buy-in.
The second problem is a bit harder to overcome. The simple fact of the matter is that publishing companies get warm fuzzies when they see a developer using well-known, industry-standard, big-name tools and libraries. If they hear you're using some open source library that grad students wrote, they're going to think you're a garage-operation. Thus, it can be very hard to land a publishing deal, if you go this route.
I think that overcoming the latter problem will require time and maturity. Nobody is about to look down on you if you tell them you're using Linux or Apache. They have street cred. I think that there are definitely game-related libraries that can get there, too, but it's going to take time. There are a few things that are probably there already, such as SDL.
So, keep up the good work, folks!
My Prius, purchased in August 2000, averages around 47 mpg, right now. My typical driving patterns involve a 30 minute commute, which includes about ten minutes of slow surface road driving (with traffic lights) followed by a 50mph drive to a tunnel, a slowdown for the toll booth, a long drive through a tunnel at 45, another stretch of 50, and then highway driving the rest of the way.
:)
I have seen my Prius do as well as 80, and as poorly as 27, depending on circumstances. It gets its best mileage when I'm driving at fairly steady speeds, below 60 mph, with my air conditioning off. During my typical commute, my very best mileage is during the tunnel segment of my trip, in spite of the climb at the end of it.
You have to understand, though, that unlike the Insight, the Prius is optimized for emissions, rather than gas mileage. The gas mileage is merely a fringe benefit. In 2000, the Prius was a SULEV, and the Insight was an ULEV (don't know whether this is still true). Part of why the Prius mileage suffers is because of tricks that are done to curb emissions on a cold start. The mileage for the first five minutes is nowhere near as good as a typical cross-section from partway through a trip. So, longer commutes will enjoy better mileage on average than shorter commutes.
As for the batteries, I can speak for the Prius: 1.) Toyota has a 8-year warranty on the entire Hybrid system, so you don't need to pay for a replacement, for at least seven years. 2.) I've had my car since August 2000, and there are absolutely no issues with my batteries. You do NOT have to replace these "every couple of years," as some people have suggested. They cost more than Dausha suggested (around $3500 retail; they're hoping to get them down to $1000 through economy of scale), but the normal lifespan is 8-10 years. 3.) Toyota and Honda both use a third-party recycler for the batteries. They are not just thrown in a junkyard, somewhere.
There's a lot of FUD out there about these cars, so I like to clear the air whenever I can (so to speak).
This looks like a job for Space Systems Lab! In fact, RTSX had already been under consideration for the Sept 2004 Hubble servicing mission. I think this would be a great opportunity to give Ranger a spin. With the increased interest in astronaut safety, there's a very real opportunity here for the space telerobotics community. After all, why do a dangerous all-hands spacewalk outside the ISS, as they did recently, when they could send a robot out to do the dirty work, instead?
Frankly, I'm inclined to agree with your call, on that one, Barbara. Upon cursory glance, this student does sound like a classic case.
ASpies are usually filled with a great passion for certain topics that interest them. One way to get them interested in being social is to introduce them to others who share their passions. Even this can be awkward for some, though.
It is useful, in some cases, to teach them that there are very real, practical reasons for gaining social skills. Rare ASpies have been known to be capable of focusing their amazing learning abilities on attaining social graces, from what I understand. They create sets of rules to operate by. They search for patterns in the behaviors of others, so that they can apply their rules. It sounds horrible -- as though it were some sort of act -- but to some degree, a great deal of social behavior is an act, isn't it? Why else would there be etiquette books and finishing schools?
Perhaps what you wish to teach is not social "skills," but, rather, the ability to find pleasure in being social. Can that be taught?
Well, maybe it's best to start with those aforementioned folks who share your student's passions. Start by making things fun!