"...let's review the procedure for obtaining broadband in the U.S. Step #1: Call up your cable or DSL provider, walk through the options, and decide what you want. Step #2: Receive and install the modem, or have an installer do it for you. Step #3: There is no Step #3!"
So, let's review the procedure for obtaining broadband in the UK:
Step #1: Call up BT, to make sure you have a line capable of receiving broadband. (Apparently everyone in the US can receive a broadband connection. That's what this guy says, anyway!)
Step #2: l up your cable or DSL provider, walk through the options, and decide what you want.
Step #3: Receive and install the modem, or have an installer do it for you.
Step #4: There is no Step 4! Unless there's a problem, in which case the useless bureaucracy of BT kicks in!
Seriously though, this guy's problem with "The Horror of BT" is just him making a lot of noise about nothing. There's plenty of room for more legitimate gripes about how BT run things - for instance, if you have a fault with a line, their engineers will only come out between 9am-5pm Mon-Fri. Absolutely useless for 99% of the working population!:/
...for BECTA teachers, specifically their internet connections. They had no idea whatsoever about computers, or how to use them. I don't think that going from Windows to Linux will necessarily help these people, not without giving them a great deal more training than they got when they were given Windows systems to learn (I believe they got 1 day's worth of Windows tuition).
It isn't just the quality of the tool, it's how well you can use it. We need to educate the educators more, regardless of which technology they end up using...
...asking if this is a good thing, the answer is an unqualified yes.
A few years back, a shop in the city I live in got caught selling counterfeit Windows CDs (ie not burned CDRs, proper screen-printed looks-like-MS-legit discs) to their customers. Until now, technically (and wrongly, morally speaking, IMHO) this resulted in them running illegal unlicensed copies of Windows, for which they had no recourse. So now, MS will give people in similar situations a nice shiny *legal* copy of Windows, and go after the dodgy vendor.
has just been laid off from the Greenock plant, where he was involved in manufacturing for 20 or so years. He's now working in a call centre handling mortgage applications...:(
The UK as a whole seems to be moving towards this kind of economy - jobs involving manufacturing, especially, are going, to be replaced by jobs where you can be sacked at the drop of a hat, and are generally pretty poorly treated. Sad.
...since surely the first step in changing unjustly-attained corporate sponsored IP law is educating people why it is such a bad thing in and of itself.
"Copying a shitty CD will get me fined a billion dollars and raped in prison? That law sucks! Where do I sign up to change it?"
Also, I don't know if scouts in other countries is much like scouts here in the UK, but we used to make our own music, perhaps they could encourage these kids to create stuff instead of stealing/copying-with-infringement (delete as applicable) the shit the corporate machine is spewing out.
But seriously, speaking as a game programmer (just made unemployed by liquidating employer, cheers guys), he's probably correct to an extent.
Games rarely undergo really fundamental shifts in how they work. It's fairly easy to trace paths of evolution in fairly small obvious steps concept-wise from Space Invaders (shoot bad guys on a single screen) through Operation Wolf et al (shoot bad guys from a first person non-interactive scrolling view) to Doom (shoot bad guys from a first-person interactive view) to Half-Life 2 (shoot bad guys from a first-person interactive view when Steam will let you connect). You get the odd new genre-busting title, or one which suddenly kicks a genre into popularity (e.g. Wolfenstein 3D was pretty popular, but Doom reached a whole new level of infamy among the non gaming populace).
I guess I just don't see how it can necessarily be a bad thing that most of the big companies don't go reaching for the genre-buster every time, or even some of the time. I remember when EA first brought out John Madden on the Megadrive/Genesis, it was pretty ground-breaking stuff, same with the first FIFA soccer games. Now they mostly just change the player names every year, and make a metric assload of cash out of it. By contrast, you get a company like my previous employers, who try for big original IP concepts with every game, then crash and burn because no-one will publish them (and in our case the managers seem to have no clue about business, but I digress).
I'd love to work on games which revolutionise gaming every year or two. I'd also quite enjoy actually having a job, where I get paid, can buy a house and car and so forth without the spectre of unemployment hanging over me literally every day, which is what happens at smaller game studios unless they're very very fortunate.
I'm now looking at moving to a different country, because there are very few games jobs left where I am, none of them are hiring. Perhaps I'll end up somewhere cool, but I'll settle for a regular paycheck even if it means making Generic TemplateGame 2006/7/8/...
...about violent games is that parents are buying them for their children, and abdicating the responsibility for moral choice about what their kids see and participate in to complete strangers, ie us game developers.
If they're making an informed choice to say "Ok Jimmy, you can smoke cops and bang that ho!", they can't complain about it. If they're not making that choice and the kid does it anyway, that's their fault too...
...of hearing about this wonderful device / service combination which I am unable to buy. Tivo stopped selling hardware in the UK years ago now, and show no signs of selling any more.
I want to buy it, but don't want a possibly dodgy second-hand premodified one from some person on ebay. I want a new, unchanged, virgin Tivo box to put under my telly. I am entirely aware that there are alternatives, but all either need more time or money (or both, MythTV I'm looking at you here), or are harder to use.
I HAVE MONEY WAITING FOR YOU MISTER TIVO! LET ME KNOW WHEN I CAN GIVE IT TO YOU!:(
Burnout 1 is a fairly straight racing game with excellent crashes, and a few extra game modes. Burnout 2 has more game modes, and focuses more on driving dangerously to earn boost to win. Crash mode makes an appearance here, great fun. B2 is about halfway between 1 and 3, where Burnout 3 is all about the crashing and driving dangerously, almost making the racing itself secondary a lot of the time. In fairness, 2 is good, 3 is the best:)
Disclaimer - I worked on 1 (ports to XBox and GC) and 2 (PS2), but not 3...
...in the hands of a competent web designer, who knows how to use Dreamweaver and how to produce maintainable html/css/whatever without it, Dreamweaver can save a fair bit of time on the visual bits of layout etc. while still spitting out clean and compliant code.
I worked on a 3000+ page static site, and without DW & Templates, that summer would have been hell on earth. At the end though, we finished early and had a site that's still in use today for a large UK university both internally and externally. Result!:)
The most likely reason...
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 1
...is that the vast amount of general opinion is vastly in disagreement - most people acknowledge that, while being fairly unoriginal, Halo is one of the best games of all time. High scores across the board, online and in magazines, from biased and relatively unbiased reviewers, sales figures in the zillions, etc. I know we're supposed to be fair when we moderate, but I suspect people who disagree with the disagreement about Halo's greatness are modding down.
Worth pointing out (Disclaimer: I work as a game programmer) that it is often PUBLISHERS who add this sort of shit once the game is finished and has left the developers' control.
...but how does it make sense to sell the profitable part of a business and keep the unprofitable part? "Focussing" on the unprofitable part to try and fix it, yeah, I can see the sense in that, but getting rid of the bit that keeps the money coming in while you sort the problems out?
...does this mean they will actively disallow blu-ray drives & drivers from Longhorn somehow? I don't know anything about the technical stuff associated with either standard, but surely connecting the drive to an IDE/SCSI/SATA/whatever port and having a driver would be all you'd need?
Can Microsoft stop blu-ray working on Longhorn completely? More lawsuits to follow if they do, I'm thinking...
...for those of us in the UK, at least as long as there continues to be no new Tivo kit worth buying. There are some decent PVRs apparently, but I'm told they all fall short on various aspects...
I didn't want to mod you down for this, so thought I'd post separately:
DevStudio is intractably bound to developing apps that run with MS technology.
Wrong. I'm currently (as in I've alt-tabbed over from it to post this) using it to develop for PS2, using the SN Systems gcc-based toolchain and makefiles. It is trivial to use plug-in compilers, debuggers etc. with VS6 and VS.Net. May not be trivial to write them or interface them, but I didn't get the impression that that was what you meant...
Perhaps the prevalence of wireless networking equipment will eventually lead to huge mesh networks, so that instead of going from me to an ISP to the destination, my voip calls could go from me to my neighbour to the guy down the road. Obviously there are security and privacy issues, but the and even the Internet aren't really needed all of the time for voip to work, and potentially this could work well. It would also mean we could bypass regulation by simply doing it:)
The Flash file format is open. I don't understand your point. Just because something is proprietary doesn't make it not open, or bad for that matter. There are tools out there which output Flash and are notmadebyMacromediathemselves. There are even opensource Flash production mechanisms. Yes, Macromedia could at some point change the file format to obfuscate it, yes they could make it non-backwards-compatible, they could even decide to abandon Flash completely. That doesn't put the genie back in the bottle, and its still not making Flash a bad thing in and of itself.
Slashdot Mirror
"...let's review the procedure for obtaining broadband in the U.S. Step #1: Call up your cable or DSL provider, walk through the options, and decide what you want. Step #2: Receive and install the modem, or have an installer do it for you. Step #3: There is no Step #3!"
:/
So, let's review the procedure for obtaining broadband in the UK:
Step #1: Call up BT, to make sure you have a line capable of receiving broadband. (Apparently everyone in the US can receive a broadband connection. That's what this guy says, anyway!)
Step #2: l up your cable or DSL provider, walk through the options, and decide what you want.
Step #3: Receive and install the modem, or have an installer do it for you.
Step #4: There is no Step 4! Unless there's a problem, in which case the useless bureaucracy of BT kicks in!
Seriously though, this guy's problem with "The Horror of BT" is just him making a lot of noise about nothing. There's plenty of room for more legitimate gripes about how BT run things - for instance, if you have a fault with a line, their engineers will only come out between 9am-5pm Mon-Fri. Absolutely useless for 99% of the working population!
...for BECTA teachers, specifically their internet connections. They had no idea whatsoever about computers, or how to use them. I don't think that going from Windows to Linux will necessarily help these people, not without giving them a great deal more training than they got when they were given Windows systems to learn (I believe they got 1 day's worth of Windows tuition).
It isn't just the quality of the tool, it's how well you can use it. We need to educate the educators more, regardless of which technology they end up using...
...asking if this is a good thing, the answer is an unqualified yes.
A few years back, a shop in the city I live in got caught selling counterfeit Windows CDs (ie not burned CDRs, proper screen-printed looks-like-MS-legit discs) to their customers. Until now, technically (and wrongly, morally speaking, IMHO) this resulted in them running illegal unlicensed copies of Windows, for which they had no recourse. So now, MS will give people in similar situations a nice shiny *legal* copy of Windows, and go after the dodgy vendor.
Does anyone really see a problem with this?
has just been laid off from the Greenock plant, where he was involved in manufacturing for 20 or so years. He's now working in a call centre handling mortgage applications... :(
The UK as a whole seems to be moving towards this kind of economy - jobs involving manufacturing, especially, are going, to be replaced by jobs where you can be sacked at the drop of a hat, and are generally pretty poorly treated. Sad.
...since surely the first step in changing unjustly-attained corporate sponsored IP law is educating people why it is such a bad thing in and of itself.
"Copying a shitty CD will get me fined a billion dollars and raped in prison? That law sucks! Where do I sign up to change it?"
Also, I don't know if scouts in other countries is much like scouts here in the UK, but we used to make our own music, perhaps they could encourage these kids to create stuff instead of stealing/copying-with-infringement (delete as applicable) the shit the corporate machine is spewing out.
Stuff like the shifty floor seen a while back here on /. (http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/081104/Shifty_ tiles_bring_walking_to_VR_Brief_081104.html are helping advance the non-graphics side of things, anyway. Lots of work on haptic interfaces seems to be working on the feedback side, not sure what the current state of that art is though.
;)
I suspect the questioner is actually looking for a holodeck though, we're still quite a ways from that
Modern Gaming Industry Trashes Dvorak
He's a dick!
But seriously, speaking as a game programmer (just made unemployed by liquidating employer, cheers guys), he's probably correct to an extent.
Games rarely undergo really fundamental shifts in how they work. It's fairly easy to trace paths of evolution in fairly small obvious steps concept-wise from Space Invaders (shoot bad guys on a single screen) through Operation Wolf et al (shoot bad guys from a first person non-interactive scrolling view) to Doom (shoot bad guys from a first-person interactive view) to Half-Life 2 (shoot bad guys from a first-person interactive view when Steam will let you connect). You get the odd new genre-busting title, or one which suddenly kicks a genre into popularity (e.g. Wolfenstein 3D was pretty popular, but Doom reached a whole new level of infamy among the non gaming populace).
I guess I just don't see how it can necessarily be a bad thing that most of the big companies don't go reaching for the genre-buster every time, or even some of the time. I remember when EA first brought out John Madden on the Megadrive/Genesis, it was pretty ground-breaking stuff, same with the first FIFA soccer games. Now they mostly just change the player names every year, and make a metric assload of cash out of it. By contrast, you get a company like my previous employers, who try for big original IP concepts with every game, then crash and burn because no-one will publish them (and in our case the managers seem to have no clue about business, but I digress).
I'd love to work on games which revolutionise gaming every year or two. I'd also quite enjoy actually having a job, where I get paid, can buy a house and car and so forth without the spectre of unemployment hanging over me literally every day, which is what happens at smaller game studios unless they're very very fortunate.
I'm now looking at moving to a different country, because there are very few games jobs left where I am, none of them are hiring. Perhaps I'll end up somewhere cool, but I'll settle for a regular paycheck even if it means making Generic TemplateGame 2006/7/8/...
Can you really discover something twice on consecutive days???
;)
"My god, that discovery is even better than it was yesterday! I'm glad we discovered it again. Let's discover pepperoni pizza next!"
Only on Slashdot
...about violent games is that parents are buying them for their children, and abdicating the responsibility for moral choice about what their kids see and participate in to complete strangers, ie us game developers.
If they're making an informed choice to say "Ok Jimmy, you can smoke cops and bang that ho!", they can't complain about it. If they're not making that choice and the kid does it anyway, that's their fault too...
...of hearing about this wonderful device / service combination which I am unable to buy. Tivo stopped selling hardware in the UK years ago now, and show no signs of selling any more.
:(
I want to buy it, but don't want a possibly dodgy second-hand premodified one from some person on ebay. I want a new, unchanged, virgin Tivo box to put under my telly. I am entirely aware that there are alternatives, but all either need more time or money (or both, MythTV I'm looking at you here), or are harder to use.
I HAVE MONEY WAITING FOR YOU MISTER TIVO! LET ME KNOW WHEN I CAN GIVE IT TO YOU!
Those of us outside the US can sometimes get good map stuff from http://www.multimap.com
Better than this US-only shit, even if it doesn't cover everywhere at least its slightly more ambitious in its scope...
I am a Scotsman, you insensitive clod!
:)
(kilts are better than trousers, clearly)
...until I can actually buy a new set of tivo hardware here in the uk, why would I care about being able to develop for it?
:(
I really want one, too, but don't fancy going down the 2nd hand route
Burnout 1 is a fairly straight racing game with excellent crashes, and a few extra game modes. Burnout 2 has more game modes, and focuses more on driving dangerously to earn boost to win. Crash mode makes an appearance here, great fun. B2 is about halfway between 1 and 3, where Burnout 3 is all about the crashing and driving dangerously, almost making the racing itself secondary a lot of the time. In fairness, 2 is good, 3 is the best :)
Disclaimer - I worked on 1 (ports to XBox and GC) and 2 (PS2), but not 3...
...in the hands of a competent web designer, who knows how to use Dreamweaver and how to produce maintainable html/css/whatever without it, Dreamweaver can save a fair bit of time on the visual bits of layout etc. while still spitting out clean and compliant code.
:)
I worked on a 3000+ page static site, and without DW & Templates, that summer would have been hell on earth. At the end though, we finished early and had a site that's still in use today for a large UK university both internally and externally. Result!
...is that the vast amount of general opinion is vastly in disagreement - most people acknowledge that, while being fairly unoriginal, Halo is one of the best games of all time. High scores across the board, online and in magazines, from biased and relatively unbiased reviewers, sales figures in the zillions, etc. I know we're supposed to be fair when we moderate, but I suspect people who disagree with the disagreement about Halo's greatness are modding down.
I quite like the name - "No More Radio"...
Worth pointing out (Disclaimer: I work as a game programmer) that it is often PUBLISHERS who add this sort of shit once the game is finished and has left the developers' control.
...but how does it make sense to sell the profitable part of a business and keep the unprofitable part? "Focussing" on the unprofitable part to try and fix it, yeah, I can see the sense in that, but getting rid of the bit that keeps the money coming in while you sort the problems out?
Insanity!
...does this mean they will actively disallow blu-ray drives & drivers from Longhorn somehow? I don't know anything about the technical stuff associated with either standard, but surely connecting the drive to an IDE/SCSI/SATA/whatever port and having a driver would be all you'd need?
Can Microsoft stop blu-ray working on Longhorn completely? More lawsuits to follow if they do, I'm thinking...
...for those of us in the UK, at least as long as there continues to be no new Tivo kit worth buying. There are some decent PVRs apparently, but I'm told they all fall short on various aspects...
Wrong. I'm currently (as in I've alt-tabbed over from it to post this) using it to develop for PS2, using the SN Systems gcc-based toolchain and makefiles. It is trivial to use plug-in compilers, debuggers etc. with VS6 and VS.Net. May not be trivial to write them or interface them, but I didn't get the impression that that was what you meant...
Hmm, I meant to say: ...there are security and privacy issues, but the ISPs and even the Internet aren't really needed all of the time for voip to work
Perhaps the prevalence of wireless networking equipment will eventually lead to huge mesh networks, so that instead of going from me to an ISP to the destination, my voip calls could go from me to my neighbour to the guy down the road. Obviously there are security and privacy issues, but the and even the Internet aren't really needed all of the time for voip to work, and potentially this could work well. It would also mean we could bypass regulation by simply doing it :)
The Flash file format is open. I don't understand your point. Just because something is proprietary doesn't make it not open, or bad for that matter. There are tools out there which output Flash and are not made by Macromedia themselves. There are even open source Flash production mechanisms. Yes, Macromedia could at some point change the file format to obfuscate it, yes they could make it non-backwards-compatible, they could even decide to abandon Flash completely. That doesn't put the genie back in the bottle, and its still not making Flash a bad thing in and of itself.