If you don't understand the expressive power and usefulness of functions as first class objects, you should really try using JavaScript differently. As for why you're using Object instances as classes, have you never used Java?
Also, you don't have to set the prototype all at once in a single object. The prototype keyword is used for functions that are common to all instances of the object; you can just as easily set the functions inside the constructor, but that creates a new function object for each instance instead of using one function object defined in the prototype and thus requires more memory. This allows you to change your object's behavior on the fly (if you so choose).
In short, OOP in ECMAScript is not 'totally retarded' at all, just outside your comfort zone. Try it first, THEN flame it, if you still think it's awful.
Hmm. Every time I've done a reinstall off a separately-purchased disc, I've had to call in and tell them so I could activate; conversely, whenever I've done an install off a bundled disc, I've never had a problem. Maybe I'm just lucky... or unlucky. I can't decide which one it is.
If you buy Windows separately from your machine, you have to call them and tell them you're reformatting and you need the key. The discs that you get bundled with computers generally don't need that.
Office 2007 -> Office 2003 Incompatibility Tax
Reformat Every Six Months To Actually Clean The Registry Tax
Call Microsoft Every Time You Have To Reformat Tax
UAC Windows Popping Up All The Freaking Time Tax
who thought Braid left a little something to be desired? It was fun for about 2 hours, but the last hour or so I felt was a bit tedious and not nearly as interesting as the first two. Unfortunately, since it's a static puzzle game, there's very little replay value (except the challenges), though that's not something I'd really fault it for. I guess I was expecting something more for the way people talked about it. I certainly haven't recommended it to anyone I know further than a pithy 'it was interesting'.
In my opinion, Portal (mentioned above) was far superior in quality. The challenges were more than time trials (ever tried to complete the Fewest Portal challenges? Talk about tricky!), and the overall gameplay was more challenging. Admittedly, there was a team behind Portal and only John B. behind Braid, but for two similarly priced games ($20 for Portal vs $15 for Braid), I would have expected reasonably similar quality.
Just wanted to express my $0.02 with respect to what I perceive as a slightly overhyped game.
I don't think most of those games turn a profit, or even that much in revenue. For full-time game developers who don't have a day job to pay the bills, they need to earn money with the games they make. Some go with ad revenue, donations, or micropayments to keep their games free; others, like those from the author of TFA, prefer to charge for their games.
If you would like to play only completely free games, you're certainly welcome to. I'm willing to pay for games that I want to play, and hopefully that will encourage the developers to make more games I like.
My point is that your examples are of games that don't need to make money, which completely ignores the entire indie games market. Don't devalue games because free ones exist; examine the quality and decide if it's worth paying for.
In response to the GP, Ubuntu makes money on service contracts, Firefox on donations and corporate partnerships, and Gmail from ad impressions - analogous to micropayments, donations, and ads in games.
but my intertubes were especially clogged this morning. This, of course, led to a mass panic in my office where everyone simultaneously thought the Wrath of the Conficker had bestruck our network and that I needed to fix it, since I'm the "IT guy".
Of course, now that the issue seems to have resolved itself, I'm a hero. Thanks, Conficker!
Unfortunately, this service and your analysis completely ignore the fact that internet providers advertise optimum rates, not average rates. You may be "getting" a 50mbit connection from your ISP, but that doesn't translate to a sustained 50mbit; get a tool online and monitor your bandwidth during a download and you'll see just how variable your bandwidth actually is.
Just to stream the video for this would require incredible sustained bandwidth. Then, of course, we have to consider the part of TFA where the servers have to do all the rendering and video compression themselves, so unless they're using a seriously lossy compression algorithm, rendering/compression will take a nontrivial amount of time; multiply that by the number of people connected, and they are going to require some serious hardware to sustain this service.
No, this technology won't go anywhere. I'm sure it works great in their test labs, when they're connected by a couple meters of gigabit cable and only a few people are playing at a time. Real world application? Meh. I'll be lining up for an 8th generation console in ~4-5 years.
Are you hiring? From what I've read on/., stories/news articles/studies about the 'entitled generation', and limited personal experience, people who respect other's ability to learn more than what they know is rare. As a recent graduate from a good school, it wasn't terribly difficult to find a job, but none of my interviewers even attempted to investigate how trainable I was as opposed to how much I already knew. I ended up taking a job that had nothing to do with what I learned in school (chemistry), and had to play catch-up for a few months to gain an understanding of a completely different field (materials science). Lucky them I cared enough to learn it instead of being totally useless. I know a few classmates of mine who were somewhat less willing to retrain...
I have a good quote for you, my dad told it to me when I mentioned I was looking to switch careers (to software development):
You can train a smart person to do anything, but you can't train everyone to be smart
Muphry's Law: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."
It had to happen.
Man, it's reassuring to know someone else out there thinks this. I think religion is partly to blame for narrow-mindedness, but mass idiocy is most likely caused by the reasons you've enumerated...
And people wonder why I'm going to partially homeschool my kids.
Not to mention that the two programs you mention are emulators, and the games you play on them were likely commercial games at some point in their life...
While FOSS gaming is great in theory, don't forget that developing a game can be a full-time job, and full-time employees need to get paid. Some game developers can be motivated to make great games simply because they want to, but many would probably prefer some monetary compensation for the effort put into making a game. For example, the MMO game you suggested would take an incredible amount of effort to create - even without significant content created by the original programmers, that project would take many years. Without a user-oriented pay structure, it would likely depend on sponsorships and ad placement to generate revenue and pay the developers to continue working on it. You may be willing to endure these for a free game, but I would prefer to pay for a game that did not have advertisements all over the place.
As much as I'd love to play great games without paying for them, I would rather play great games I have to pay for than mediocre free games. Even in TFA on indie developers, many of them admit that they're financially stable only due to sponsorships and ad placement, and a few are in on affiliate programs. Flashbang's Steve Swink says "As it turns out, keeping these revenue streams open crushes our fragile creative souls" - though he claims their company can still make great games for free, he admits it has a detrimental effect on their creativity. BTW, they're still planning on monetizing it eventually, making their 'free' version essentially a more fully-featured demo.
I'm all for FOSS, don't get me wrong, and as I said before, I'd love to play a great game for free. Seeing as my options for free games tend to range from 'mediocre' to 'casual', and I'm more of a 'hardcore' gamer, I'd prefer to pay for the games I like. It seems none of the big studios or indie developers have figured out a way to adequately monetize a 100% free-to-play game yet (microtransaction-based games do not count in that category - those are more like partially-free-to-play), and once they do, I'm sure we'll see a huge shift in gaming.
Until then, though, you'll have to be content with what's out there. You can do something about it and join a FOSS game team and make one of the games you want to play, or only buy games that are worth your money. Want to stick it to EA and Rockstar? Stop buying their games. Vote for what you want with your money. If a game is overpriced or poor quality, don't give the developers money. If it's a high quality game, then pay for it - or donate, if you find a FOSS game of that caliber.
You might want to take a look at the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It's a fairly detailed and scientific explanation of why a lot of people have difficulty hiring people smarter/more competent than they are.
I certainly hope you're over-generalizing, though - being a 'kid' myself (22), I'd hate to get lumped in with a bunch of incompetents. Not that I'm some amazing coder, but that I'm willing to learn from people more intelligent/experienced than I am.
I agree - please open source some of your old titles, so aspiring game developers can see how their favorite games work. The community will certainly appreciate any contributions you give to it!
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't understand the expressive power and usefulness of functions as first class objects, you should really try using JavaScript differently. As for why you're using Object instances as classes, have you never used Java?
Also, you don't have to set the prototype all at once in a single object. The prototype keyword is used for functions that are common to all instances of the object; you can just as easily set the functions inside the constructor, but that creates a new function object for each instance instead of using one function object defined in the prototype and thus requires more memory. This allows you to change your object's behavior on the fly (if you so choose).
In short, OOP in ECMAScript is not 'totally retarded' at all, just outside your comfort zone. Try it first, THEN flame it, if you still think it's awful.
Hmm. Every time I've done a reinstall off a separately-purchased disc, I've had to call in and tell them so I could activate; conversely, whenever I've done an install off a bundled disc, I've never had a problem. Maybe I'm just lucky... or unlucky. I can't decide which one it is.
If you buy Windows separately from your machine, you have to call them and tell them you're reformatting and you need the key. The discs that you get bundled with computers generally don't need that.
Now, if only we could harness that energy, we might be able to come up with a cloaking device based on a projected "Somebody Else's Problem" field...
You forgot:
Office 2007 -> Office 2003 Incompatibility Tax
Reformat Every Six Months To Actually Clean The Registry Tax
Call Microsoft Every Time You Have To Reformat Tax
UAC Windows Popping Up All The Freaking Time Tax
Just to name a few.
who thought Braid left a little something to be desired? It was fun for about 2 hours, but the last hour or so I felt was a bit tedious and not nearly as interesting as the first two. Unfortunately, since it's a static puzzle game, there's very little replay value (except the challenges), though that's not something I'd really fault it for. I guess I was expecting something more for the way people talked about it. I certainly haven't recommended it to anyone I know further than a pithy 'it was interesting'.
In my opinion, Portal (mentioned above) was far superior in quality. The challenges were more than time trials (ever tried to complete the Fewest Portal challenges? Talk about tricky!), and the overall gameplay was more challenging. Admittedly, there was a team behind Portal and only John B. behind Braid, but for two similarly priced games ($20 for Portal vs $15 for Braid), I would have expected reasonably similar quality.
Just wanted to express my $0.02 with respect to what I perceive as a slightly overhyped game.
I don't think most of those games turn a profit, or even that much in revenue. For full-time game developers who don't have a day job to pay the bills, they need to earn money with the games they make. Some go with ad revenue, donations, or micropayments to keep their games free; others, like those from the author of TFA, prefer to charge for their games.
If you would like to play only completely free games, you're certainly welcome to. I'm willing to pay for games that I want to play, and hopefully that will encourage the developers to make more games I like.
My point is that your examples are of games that don't need to make money, which completely ignores the entire indie games market. Don't devalue games because free ones exist; examine the quality and decide if it's worth paying for.
In response to the GP, Ubuntu makes money on service contracts, Firefox on donations and corporate partnerships, and Gmail from ad impressions - analogous to micropayments, donations, and ads in games.
but my intertubes were especially clogged this morning. This, of course, led to a mass panic in my office where everyone simultaneously thought the Wrath of the Conficker had bestruck our network and that I needed to fix it, since I'm the "IT guy".
Of course, now that the issue seems to have resolved itself, I'm a hero. Thanks, Conficker!
Unfortunately, this service and your analysis completely ignore the fact that internet providers advertise optimum rates, not average rates. You may be "getting" a 50mbit connection from your ISP, but that doesn't translate to a sustained 50mbit; get a tool online and monitor your bandwidth during a download and you'll see just how variable your bandwidth actually is.
Just to stream the video for this would require incredible sustained bandwidth. Then, of course, we have to consider the part of TFA where the servers have to do all the rendering and video compression themselves, so unless they're using a seriously lossy compression algorithm, rendering/compression will take a nontrivial amount of time; multiply that by the number of people connected, and they are going to require some serious hardware to sustain this service.
No, this technology won't go anywhere. I'm sure it works great in their test labs, when they're connected by a couple meters of gigabit cable and only a few people are playing at a time. Real world application? Meh. I'll be lining up for an 8th generation console in ~4-5 years.
Are you hiring? From what I've read on /., stories/news articles/studies about the 'entitled generation', and limited personal experience, people who respect other's ability to learn more than what they know is rare. As a recent graduate from a good school, it wasn't terribly difficult to find a job, but none of my interviewers even attempted to investigate how trainable I was as opposed to how much I already knew. I ended up taking a job that had nothing to do with what I learned in school (chemistry), and had to play catch-up for a few months to gain an understanding of a completely different field (materials science). Lucky them I cared enough to learn it instead of being totally useless. I know a few classmates of mine who were somewhat less willing to retrain...
I have a good quote for you, my dad told it to me when I mentioned I was looking to switch careers (to software development):
You can train a smart person to do anything, but you can't train everyone to be smart
I'm just hoping that applies to me.
Muphry's Law: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." It had to happen.
Man, it's reassuring to know someone else out there thinks this. I think religion is partly to blame for narrow-mindedness, but mass idiocy is most likely caused by the reasons you've enumerated...
And people wonder why I'm going to partially homeschool my kids.
Not to mention that the two programs you mention are emulators, and the games you play on them were likely commercial games at some point in their life...
While FOSS gaming is great in theory, don't forget that developing a game can be a full-time job, and full-time employees need to get paid. Some game developers can be motivated to make great games simply because they want to, but many would probably prefer some monetary compensation for the effort put into making a game. For example, the MMO game you suggested would take an incredible amount of effort to create - even without significant content created by the original programmers, that project would take many years. Without a user-oriented pay structure, it would likely depend on sponsorships and ad placement to generate revenue and pay the developers to continue working on it. You may be willing to endure these for a free game, but I would prefer to pay for a game that did not have advertisements all over the place.
As much as I'd love to play great games without paying for them, I would rather play great games I have to pay for than mediocre free games. Even in TFA on indie developers, many of them admit that they're financially stable only due to sponsorships and ad placement, and a few are in on affiliate programs. Flashbang's Steve Swink says "As it turns out, keeping these revenue streams open crushes our fragile creative souls" - though he claims their company can still make great games for free, he admits it has a detrimental effect on their creativity. BTW, they're still planning on monetizing it eventually, making their 'free' version essentially a more fully-featured demo.
I'm all for FOSS, don't get me wrong, and as I said before, I'd love to play a great game for free. Seeing as my options for free games tend to range from 'mediocre' to 'casual', and I'm more of a 'hardcore' gamer, I'd prefer to pay for the games I like. It seems none of the big studios or indie developers have figured out a way to adequately monetize a 100% free-to-play game yet (microtransaction-based games do not count in that category - those are more like partially-free-to-play), and once they do, I'm sure we'll see a huge shift in gaming.
Until then, though, you'll have to be content with what's out there. You can do something about it and join a FOSS game team and make one of the games you want to play, or only buy games that are worth your money. Want to stick it to EA and Rockstar? Stop buying their games. Vote for what you want with your money. If a game is overpriced or poor quality, don't give the developers money. If it's a high quality game, then pay for it - or donate, if you find a FOSS game of that caliber.
You might want to take a look at the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It's a fairly detailed and scientific explanation of why a lot of people have difficulty hiring people smarter/more competent than they are. I certainly hope you're over-generalizing, though - being a 'kid' myself (22), I'd hate to get lumped in with a bunch of incompetents. Not that I'm some amazing coder, but that I'm willing to learn from people more intelligent/experienced than I am.
I agree - please open source some of your old titles, so aspiring game developers can see how their favorite games work. The community will certainly appreciate any contributions you give to it!