Have to agree with you, I have added Sony to my very small list of companies not to buy things from. Yesterday I bought a camcorder from Canon even though both Canon and Sony were final runner ups, I put my 800$ on a Canon for one reason... Sony DRM is an insult to consumers and I am sure my miniscule decision will not matter but I feel good that I will not be giving money to a company that thinks it is ok to distribute a rootkit with their music CDs. And I actually checked the music CDs I was buying to make sure they were not from Sony. The only way we can have our voices heard is not by making noise but by not spending money ontheir products... when you affect their profits it hurts a lot more and while I am one person and my immediate actions will not even affect the company, I am hoping there are more people out there that believe in honest practices.
One of Java's greatest flaws is it doesn't have any way to make an object constant (C/C++ have const). And if you say 'final' you clearly do not uderstand what that keyword does in java and should consult the java language reference. Without constness, it is very hard to design code that is used as intended without needing javadoc for explanation, it should be intuitive. Luckily they added enums in 1.5 (about f'n time).
OOC: When you start out completely gimped, you can't really fall off the floor:)
OT: The BlackBerry fragment send was a bug and IT people should have upgraded their servers when it came out, unless this is a new bug that sendsout fragments. In any case, I don't think any executive is worries as they never know how to use anything by PowerPoint and probably send presentations to each other instead of emails.
It's always a trade-off of salary and doing what you like in the software industry. As a senior game developer you can make 80-100k but you will be working 50-70 hours a week and even weekends. Being a senior software developer in a financial or banking corporation will get you 90-120k and 40 hour work weeks, but the sheer boredom on working on financial apps needs to be considered. So the bottom line is do you want to do what you love and become a hamster in a wheel or will you grow think skin and work on tedious and boring applications for stability, more free time, and better options/bonuses?
That is the question that most software engineers ask themselves and a heavy factor is if you have something outside of work that matters a lot to you (family, involved hobby, etc).
Real software has been as close to a virus an anything can get, it takes serious effort to uninstall it also. Not to mention the constant nagging, requirement of email, etc. I will avoids them at all cost.
Real's motto: "We can't innovate, so we litigate."
Mozilaa doesn't want to sell me anything and it's a great browser and has a huge head start on these guys... I'll pass thank you. This sounds to me like an idea that the clueless were buying into about 8 years ago.
When with you do an MMOPRG?
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've always thought that you had a very novel approach to games and created some of the most addicting games. Will you be doing any MMORPG games? (which are already addicting, but I can only image how addicting you can make them:)
At least there was no rioting, raping or pillaging, I would say it was a success. With these Debian people you can never tell which way things will go.
WoW has a long way to go until they get the pet issues right, too bad they didn't learn any lessons from EQ. I played a mage and necro to 65, so I was all about pet classes and endured the horrid growing pains early in 1998 and through 2002 when I finally gave up, at that point the pets were mediocre in the lower planes and you really needed a focus to get them to be workable, luckily the LDON one was relatively easy to get, but rest of the focii were a royal pain. I was 2 boxing a mage and cleric just so I could get some xp somewhere away from everyone that could train me... Eventually I gave up (when cleric hit 65) at that point seeing that LDON focus would not get me too far and all I could do was clear Droga/Nurga.
I really hope Blizzard adds useful things like neutral pets, ability to suspect/recall pets (best way would be to create a gateway to the stables, so you could store pet in stables, navigate over the chasms and such, then get pet back from the stables portal), ability to cure pets' disease and poison, more pet stat boosts, etc.
EQ2 servers were empty by comparisson to the EQ servers maybe 2 years ago. Outside of the newbie zone it's pretty barren.
I checked on EQ about 3 months ago at a friend's house (I refuse to go back) and almost every zone he went on was either completely empty or had 1 person running through it en route to a raid zone where almost everyone plays in (since many guilds imploded and combined into 1 big guild just so they can handle the high end content).
We then played some EQ2 (for sh*ts and giggles) and zones for people 20 were semi populated, but zones for mid 30s were pretty empty. I suppose there are more crowded zones for the high end but from 20 on it's a lonely grind.
By contract most of WoW servers are heavily populated with 20-30 people in many zones. This is how EQ was in 2000-2002 roughly and I suspect WoW will be in a few years when the next best thing is out.
CoH is hemmoraging people as well mostly due to lack of high end content and the horribly painful grind once you hit level 35, every level is a sheer excersize in repetative killing.
Well, that's the MMORPG world view from my rather small looking glass.
And yet NPC pathing in EQ was one of the worst, despite the fact it used the rail system. MOBs moved along defined rails to get to you and often would get lost easily and eventually appear right on top of you. This was also very obvious to pet classes where their pet was told to attack a monster in front of you and it decided to go sideway, through 6 interconnecting rooms, up and down some stairs and finally get to its destination with the whole damn dungeon in tow... which was instant death for you and then an hour or two corpse run if you are lucky and then few days of trying to get your lost xp back. Good riddance to sony and their masochistic game. WoW and CoH are so much better in every way.
Funny, I wrote a program that did just that in 1992... Ran on many CD jukeboxes, had a huge database of music and CD id data and was used by lots of restaurants... seems like prior art to me:)
Bad software design can be directly lined to non-technical people designing it in the first place and then giving the developers very little room to work. Sales, marketing, business, legal or management teams should suggest some ideas and let the developers work out the design; then have a UI team build an interface to the given design. It's not a hard concept, but one that is too often misunderstood in the corporate world and thus we have so much bad software...
I didn't make this decision, I joined after everything was decided and management made all the high level deals. I didn't even have any sayso in it, welcome to big corporations and have a nice day.
Unfortunately this is a shop with over 1000 java developers, many who sit on Sun's expert groups and file JSRs, so it was not due to lack of understanding, but lack of performance. We went from 40 machines to run everything to almost 1200 with about 50% conversion while using EJB. Now those 1200 without EJB can power the 100% conversion. Still looking back, C++ code was running great on just 40 machines while Java conversion resulted in about 1200 for similar performance numbers. Those are just the facts, everyone can draw their own conclusion from it (and yes we have 2 teams dedicated to just opotimizing the code and queries).
Java enables people to be wasteful, but that's a whole differnt arguement, email me if you want to discuss it:)
From my experience since introduction of EBJ, it is the wrong tool for every job. I hate to generalize, but I have tried to find a place where EJB works better than other technologies out there and have not. The worst part is for the areas where EJB did work it was so horribly slow that it was only usable on the small scale. Overall, EJB (and the bulk of J2EE) seems to be designed on paper and not in practice. The most useful parts are servlets , you can use them to build nearly everything that you can't build with JSP.
Where I currently work, EBJ was attempted and 6 months later completely gutted and removed, the performance, complexity, tediousness in deployment, and lack of people who know it well were the biggest problems (and this is a place with almost 1000 java developers). At first it seemed like it would work well, allow separation of business and presentation and allow persistence; that's what you get on paper, in real life it is too cumbersome to work with.
I think EJB is going to go the way of CORBA (into the great code graveyard), nice in concept but not very useful when you take your idea from the lab to the real world.
Hey at least in India the perpetrators were promptly arrested which means that teh country is taking this sort of thing seriously. In Nigeria I am convinced the government gets kickbacks from all the scams pouring out of that country. I would rather have a support center in India rather than Africa any day (until African countries start taking this thing seriously that is).
Great advise, game industry is the programming equivalent of a 3rd world country sweatshop.
I have a few friends that thought otherwise and joined game companies (all different ones) and now they are overworked, have no free time, often work weekend, stopped even trying to "think" of dating (yes, yes, at least it was thinking about it before, now it's not even a thought).
I stayed away and work for a programming company that is not a crazy delivery cycle that games are (still a quick cycle, but at least I get my weekends free, and no, I do not think of dating, because wife's hammer of loyalty +5 will smite me quick).
Anyhow, the people who succeed in gaming are theones that get together and write games on their own schedule and do what they like and when it is ready look for a publisher. True the publishers are equivalent of leeches, but at least you get to do what you like, gain experience, and hopefully make some money in the end without feeling like a night worker who can't afford a tub of lube.
Slashdot Mirror
I drive to the person who wrote the web page and ask for a print out (preferable a dot matrix version on green and write lined and perforated paper).
Have to agree with you, I have added Sony to my very small list of companies not to buy things from. Yesterday I bought a camcorder from Canon even though both Canon and Sony were final runner ups, I put my 800$ on a Canon for one reason... Sony DRM is an insult to consumers and I am sure my miniscule decision will not matter but I feel good that I will not be giving money to a company that thinks it is ok to distribute a rootkit with their music CDs. And I actually checked the music CDs I was buying to make sure they were not from Sony. The only way we can have our voices heard is not by making noise but by not spending money ontheir products... when you affect their profits it hurts a lot more and while I am one person and my immediate actions will not even affect the company, I am hoping there are more people out there that believe in honest practices.
One of Java's greatest flaws is it doesn't have any way to make an object constant (C/C++ have const). And if you say 'final' you clearly do not uderstand what that keyword does in java and should consult the java language reference. Without constness, it is very hard to design code that is used as intended without needing javadoc for explanation, it should be intuitive. Luckily they added enums in 1.5 (about f'n time).
Just my 2 cents.
OOC: When you start out completely gimped, you can't really fall off the floor :)
OT: The BlackBerry fragment send was a bug and IT people should have upgraded their servers when it came out, unless this is a new bug that sendsout fragments. In any case, I don't think any executive is worries as they never know how to use anything by PowerPoint and probably send presentations to each other instead of emails.
It's always a trade-off of salary and doing what you like in the software industry. As a senior game developer you can make 80-100k but you will be working 50-70 hours a week and even weekends. Being a senior software developer in a financial or banking corporation will get you 90-120k and 40 hour work weeks, but the sheer boredom on working on financial apps needs to be considered. So the bottom line is do you want to do what you love and become a hamster in a wheel or will you grow think skin and work on tedious and boring applications for stability, more free time, and better options/bonuses?
That is the question that most software engineers ask themselves and a heavy factor is if you have something outside of work that matters a lot to you (family, involved hobby, etc).
Dilemma indeed.
The post mixed up Heisenber's Uncertainty and Schoodinger's Cat... But heck all this modern physics stuff looks the same up here.
Ebay is Java...
Real software has been as close to a virus an anything can get, it takes serious effort to uninstall it also. Not to mention the constant nagging, requirement of email, etc. I will avoids them at all cost.
Real's motto: "We can't innovate, so we litigate."
Mozilaa doesn't want to sell me anything and it's a great browser and has a huge head start on these guys... I'll pass thank you. This sounds to me like an idea that the clueless were buying into about 8 years ago.
I've always thought that you had a very novel approach to games and created some of the most addicting games. Will you be doing any MMORPG games? (which are already addicting, but I can only image how addicting you can make them :)
WINE... http://www.winehq.com/
At least there was no rioting, raping or pillaging, I would say it was a success. With these Debian people you can never tell which way things will go.
You click on Georgia the country and it takes you to Atlanta, Georgia map... works just like all other MS products.
WoW has a long way to go until they get the pet issues right, too bad they didn't learn any lessons from EQ. I played a mage and necro to 65, so I was all about pet classes and endured the horrid growing pains early in 1998 and through 2002 when I finally gave up, at that point the pets were mediocre in the lower planes and you really needed a focus to get them to be workable, luckily the LDON one was relatively easy to get, but rest of the focii were a royal pain. I was 2 boxing a mage and cleric just so I could get some xp somewhere away from everyone that could train me... Eventually I gave up (when cleric hit 65) at that point seeing that LDON focus would not get me too far and all I could do was clear Droga/Nurga.
I really hope Blizzard adds useful things like neutral pets, ability to suspect/recall pets (best way would be to create a gateway to the stables, so you could store pet in stables, navigate over the chasms and such, then get pet back from the stables portal), ability to cure pets' disease and poison, more pet stat boosts, etc.
EQ2 servers were empty by comparisson to the EQ servers maybe 2 years ago. Outside of the newbie zone it's pretty barren.
I checked on EQ about 3 months ago at a friend's house (I refuse to go back) and almost every zone he went on was either completely empty or had 1 person running through it en route to a raid zone where almost everyone plays in (since many guilds imploded and combined into 1 big guild just so they can handle the high end content).
We then played some EQ2 (for sh*ts and giggles) and zones for people 20 were semi populated, but zones for mid 30s were pretty empty. I suppose there are more crowded zones for the high end but from 20 on it's a lonely grind.
By contract most of WoW servers are heavily populated with 20-30 people in many zones. This is how EQ was in 2000-2002 roughly and I suspect WoW will be in a few years when the next best thing is out.
CoH is hemmoraging people as well mostly due to lack of high end content and the horribly painful grind once you hit level 35, every level is a sheer excersize in repetative killing.
Well, that's the MMORPG world view from my rather small looking glass.
And yet NPC pathing in EQ was one of the worst, despite the fact it used the rail system. MOBs moved along defined rails to get to you and often would get lost easily and eventually appear right on top of you. This was also very obvious to pet classes where their pet was told to attack a monster in front of you and it decided to go sideway, through 6 interconnecting rooms, up and down some stairs and finally get to its destination with the whole damn dungeon in tow... which was instant death for you and then an hour or two corpse run if you are lucky and then few days of trying to get your lost xp back. Good riddance to sony and their masochistic game. WoW and CoH are so much better in every way.
Me: I rolled a 1...
DM: A critical failure, you fumbled.
DM: "You dropped your linux mug full of coffee on yourself."
Me: Can I roll for a saving throw.
DM: No, coffee stains are irresistable, your charisma is 4 until 6pm.
So where do I get the official slashdot d20?
Funny, I wrote a program that did just that in 1992... Ran on many CD jukeboxes, had a huge database of music and CD id data and was used by lots of restaurants... seems like prior art to me :)
Bad software design can be directly lined to non-technical people designing it in the first place and then giving the developers very little room to work. Sales, marketing, business, legal or management teams should suggest some ideas and let the developers work out the design; then have a UI team build an interface to the given design. It's not a hard concept, but one that is too often misunderstood in the corporate world and thus we have so much bad software...
I didn't make this decision, I joined after everything was decided and management made all the high level deals. I didn't even have any sayso in it, welcome to big corporations and have a nice day.
Unfortunately this is a shop with over 1000 java developers, many who sit on Sun's expert groups and file JSRs, so it was not due to lack of understanding, but lack of performance. We went from 40 machines to run everything to almost 1200 with about 50% conversion while using EJB. Now those 1200 without EJB can power the 100% conversion. Still looking back, C++ code was running great on just 40 machines while Java conversion resulted in about 1200 for similar performance numbers. Those are just the facts, everyone can draw their own conclusion from it (and yes we have 2 teams dedicated to just opotimizing the code and queries).
:)
Java enables people to be wasteful, but that's a whole differnt arguement, email me if you want to discuss it
From my experience since introduction of EBJ, it is the wrong tool for every job. I hate to generalize, but I have tried to find a place where EJB works better than other technologies out there and have not. The worst part is for the areas where EJB did work it was so horribly slow that it was only usable on the small scale. Overall, EJB (and the bulk of J2EE) seems to be designed on paper and not in practice. The most useful parts are servlets , you can use them to build nearly everything that you can't build with JSP.
Where I currently work, EBJ was attempted and 6 months later completely gutted and removed, the performance, complexity, tediousness in deployment, and lack of people who know it well were the biggest problems (and this is a place with almost 1000 java developers). At first it seemed like it would work well, allow separation of business and presentation and allow persistence; that's what you get on paper, in real life it is too cumbersome to work with.
I think EJB is going to go the way of CORBA (into the great code graveyard), nice in concept but not very useful when you take your idea from the lab to the real world.
Hey at least in India the perpetrators were promptly arrested which means that teh country is taking this sort of thing seriously. In Nigeria I am convinced the government gets kickbacks from all the scams pouring out of that country. I would rather have a support center in India rather than Africa any day (until African countries start taking this thing seriously that is).
It's an inside joke between wife and me actually :) Hey we still go to death metal concerts every once in a while when we can find a baby sitter!
Great advise, game industry is the programming equivalent of a 3rd world country sweatshop.
I have a few friends that thought otherwise and joined game companies (all different ones) and now they are overworked, have no free time, often work weekend, stopped even trying to "think" of dating (yes, yes, at least it was thinking about it before, now it's not even a thought).
I stayed away and work for a programming company that is not a crazy delivery cycle that games are (still a quick cycle, but at least I get my weekends free, and no, I do not think of dating, because wife's hammer of loyalty +5 will smite me quick).
Anyhow, the people who succeed in gaming are theones that get together and write games on their own schedule and do what they like and when it is ready look for a publisher. True the publishers are equivalent of leeches, but at least you get to do what you like, gain experience, and hopefully make some money in the end without feeling like a night worker who can't afford a tub of lube.
YMMV.