...which is why I work as a games programmer, and earn less than all my classmates. And earn less than most sysadmins I know, even those who are fairly unqualified and inexperienced. But I have an interesting job, and I don't dread going into work the way most of the people outside of the industry I know, so the value is all relative.
A company called JazzMutant makes a multiple-point touchscreen with customisable controls, used to drive virtual synths and audio workstations. It's lovely, and I want one. I wonder if this counts as prior art? It's certainly closer than the people talking about PDAs I think...
He is indeed. Perhaps he's saying this because movies are more often considered to be art? And Uwe Boll is by no stretch of the imagination a respected artist. Perhaps just because, regardless of whether either form is art or not, Uwe Boll makes shit-awful films?
For what it's worth, as someone who makes games for a living, I don't consider most games to be art, including those I have worked on. I just don't see myself as an artist doing what I do, in much the same way that I don't consider a graphic designer laying out a billboard ad to be making art. But that's a personal thing, and Kojima seems to think along the same lines.
What is and isn't considered art is a pretty personal thing, my tastes are probably different to yours, and Kojima's are likely to be different again. There'll never be a consensus on this, gamers and game producers alike need to come to terms with that.
...but probably only for certain gamers, in certain games. To add my normal disclaimer, I'm a games programmer working for Sony (not their opinions in here, just mine, etc etc), but I have relatives and friends with various medical conditions which would have hampered playing games (ranging from colour blindness and deafness through to cerebral palsy and other more serious problems), so I've thought a little about this. None of them are (or were) games players. so this is mostly just guesswork and supposition on my part, but hopefully worthwhile. Anyway!
To take the most extreme example, someone without at least partial use of both legs is unlikely to fully enjoy Dance Dance Revolution or similar using a dance mat as an input device. That's not to say someone nimble couldn't manage, though, but generally. Playing bemani with an alternate controller isn't as much fun, for me anyway, but alternate controllers do at least give the option of participation. Which is a good thing - purely from a developer point of view, the more people you can include in your gaming experience, the better. Genres like this, as well as others where the physical interaction isn't the core of the gameplay, are easiest to make inclusive in this way (with subtitles for deaf players, bright or high-contrast graphics and enlarged text for people with impaired vision, etc). These are, of course, the games where the Revolution controller would probably have the least impact, as they're the least directly interactive in the sense of swinging a bat or shooting a gun.
To jump genres, twitch games like shoot em ups or first person action games almost always require a combination of multiple inputs, exercised with speed and precision. These are things which require much more radical efforts to make inclusive - things like auto aiming and reduced enemy reaction time could help, but would these maybe seem condescending to the player? "Here, let's make things easier for you since you can't manage..." I don't really know, it would be worth asking gamers that. The problem is that unless the Nintendo and game developers consider things like this, Revolution's controller could actually make these games worse for disabled players. For example, the addon controllers already shown could easily mean that some games require two hands to play, but with careful design (or possibly different optional addons designed for different disabilities), it could improve things dramatically for disabled gamers.
Of course, it'll all come down to money in the end - is the disabled gaming market big enough to justify the expense of research and development time for these things to be adequately looked at? Sadly, I'm pretty pessimistic.At least the possibility is there, and people can start to ask the questions. If enough of a market can be found, maybe something good will happen!
...that the bigger problem comes from the perception that other people are submitting the same stories without the thin blog-to-attract-ad-hits wrapper, and having it rejected. Certainly people claim this in many of the Beatles-Beatles and Piquepaille threads. This generates the perception that only the "favoured few" submitters can have story submissions accepted, whether this is true or not.
A quick check to see if the link is substantive, or just a wrapper link around someone else's content to get ad money, or if someone submitted a link to the real content before someone with a wrapper page? Maybe that would help...
...this is quite as bad an idea as it might first appear.
First runs of new format players are pretty expensive. From the earlier article on here, the cheapest HD-DVD player is about 500 dollars. Given that it's just the drive, and doesn't need all the bits the Xbox already has (for converting the signal to different displays, power supply etc) it should be smaller and cheaper than a full player. Yes it's an addon box, but it's probably the cheapest way for someone with a 360 to get HD-DVD as well.
Of course, PS3 will have a BluRay player built in, but will be more expensive than the 360 is now, never mind any possible price decrease between now and then. Time will tell, I suppose!
Many sales figures given as statistics are sales-to-retailers, rather than sales-to-the-public. In other words, it's entirely possible that there havent been 10 million DS units sold to the public, but rather are sitting in stores or warehouses waiting to be sold onwards. The article doesn't say which figure they're using, I've no idea which it is, but it's always worth bearing in mind.
I'm reminded of the game State of Emergency, which sold in vast numbers... to retailers only, because it was a bit rubbish and hardly anyone bought it. The most returned game in history, so I'm told...;)
So, with that in mind, I'd say no - Firefox doesn't really need a "Killer App", in my opinion. Shoehorning any P2P other than Bittorrent in there doesn't make much sense to me. The problems they're trying to solve are so very different, I'd be surprised if it wasn't just just too clunky compared to standalone P2P apps.
My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Linux and Windows pass out at 31 Flavors last night! So I guess it must be pretty serious...
Microsoft never said (that I know of) that they were required to use Windows.
No, they just illegally maintained an effective monopoly on PC operating systems for many years. If they don't like the repercussions of their extended and deliberate illegal (and some would say immoral) actions, perhaps they should have complied with the court's verdict earlier. Or maybe just not done it in the first place...:)
If that's the case, why is it that shitty movies and music that sucks are really easy to find for download, whereas classic films and good music are much more difficult to obtain?
The answer is, of course, that most of the people "sharing" just want to download the latest stuff for free instead of having an interest in whether it's any good or not. Hell, maybe they even like Britney Spears or the latest big summer floptastic CGI extravaganza!:O
I'd always been told it was pressure on the carpal tunnel that caused it, not finger movements. So typing with your wrists pressed against the corner of a desk (or in the case more familiar to me, playing bass guitar with the right wrist pressed against the top edge of the instrument) would cause it, not typing with a nice wrist rest or with hands held high, piano-style, above the desk...
There are loads of auctions there which are obviously pirated games - you know, things like "5000 PSP games on one DVD, these games are public domain, honest". Even when these get reported to eBay they do nothing about it, because they make money off of the illegal stuff and the fraud just as much as they do on the legit stuff. And no-one really presses them on it.
We've been playing this a lot in the office, and although it's fun I'll warn you all that it's fairly buggy. The first patch is already out and does seem to help a little, but it still manages to crash back to Windows, and sometimes brings the whole machine down on various differently-specced PCs. Not sure if the patch has fixed this one, but there's also a tendency for graphical corruption on my home PC which persists even if I close and reload a saved game after the corruption has started.
Other than that, it's an excellent game. I'd never played any of the previous Civs but I'm having a good time with this one;)
I tend to pick a reputable retailer I've already done trade with, and if the price is more than say 10% different I just assume it's a scam and ignore it unless I know someone else personally who's traded with them. Even if the difference is less than 10% I still prefer to buy from companies I or my friends have dealt with. I may miss some good bargains that way, but I've never been scammed...
Maybe I'm just an ignorant sexist male game developer. Admittedly, I've only ever worked on driving games, and games with no women in them. But still...
The "thoughtful" references to the authors mentioned makes it sound like the games industry is some sort of male consipiracy, trying to force women to look like Lara Croft. I don't really see how they stretch to that, thought. Beyond fighting games like DOA or Rumble Roses, I don't see much in the way of game designers turning to "jiggle technology" instead of gameplay (and even DOA does tend to change a little from version to version). To be honest, looking back through time I can't think of that many games with hugely overblown female avatars at all, especially in comparison to overblown male avatars.
And lately, of course, we're tending more towards first-person games where you don't see any avatar at all, except in cutscenes. Or games like Tomb Raider where the size of the breasts are immaterial because of the chase-camera view. As I said, I've worked on driving games, where your gender is never even referred to.
So, since the article only says this is a big problem in lots of titles and never actually mentions any of them by name (the "jiggle" leads me to think of the fighting games I mentioned before, as well as the spinoff Beach Volleyball game), what should we as game producers be doing to combat the male conspiracy to twist women's appearances to our evil will?
Also, as a final aside, anyone else find it interesting that the recent Playboy game was designed by Brenda Brathwaite, who is in fact a real actual female woman?
Now, I'm not an American, so I may be wrong about this. Which is why I'm going to ask you Yankee slashdotters;)
I've seen a few posts already complaining that this is against the Constitution. But I was always of the impression that the Constitution was something that only applied to the government - you know, "Congress shall pass no law..." or whatever the exact wording is. So, how does the reality of free speech being prevented in private establishments like this university fall under the Constitutional umbrella? Or does it apply at all?
...I personally wouldn't put it past a different company competing with Sony (say MS, who just had a big product launch, or Nintendo who compete directly with the PSP itself) to pay for something like this to make Sony look bad. But then I am incredibly cynical.
Oh, I also work for Sony. But I didn't spraypaint anything:D
...seem to suffer from the same problem - although they run the full range of medial production, none of them seem to be able to effectively merge the different parts of the company to produce any great result.After all, Time Warner have a huge back catalog of music and film sitting there, but they've provided no means for customers of AOL to access any of it. Maybe they're working on that, i dunno, but all these big merged conglomerates like Sony BMG, Time Warner, none of them are visibly making any real efforts to do things involving the full spectrum of business interests they cover.
I always wonder if it's because despite being "merged" on paper, internally they still run as separate businesses with all the competing and territoriality that implies...:(
...many others here, I find it very off-putting that I'm required to enter my credit card details for a free trial. That very requirement has just lost them a customer, since I refuse to provide credit card details to people who don't intend to charge me for anything.
I remember free-trial-card-required things like this from a few years back, and I didn't take them up then. I don't really enjoy having sites store my credit card information at all, and wish they wouldn't. After all, what's to stop a billing error, or a hacker harvesting my card number, or a disgruntled employee using my card to buy kiddie porn, or anything else? One-off entry is much nicer. I just wish I knew for sure how many internet stores kept records of my card details, before finding out the hard way one day:(
..."all programmers responsible for creating the software", I mean.
Depending on the definition of "the software", and how rigorously you wanted to check for tampering that could include:
* the Diebold application programmers * the compiler programmers (persumably Visual Studio and related tools in this case) * any third-party library programmers (drivers for custom voting boxes, maybe?) * the operating system programmers (various Microsofties) * BIOS programmers (low-level tampering might not be impossible, I dunno) * CPU microcode programmers (really low-level tampering might not be impossible, I really dunno!)
and so on. Could an OSS solution provider actually give a full list of all the contributers to all of the sensible entries in the list? (Assuming the last two are kind of a joke, depending on their technical feasibility for which I have no idea)
At the very least, Diebold should be providing their application source code to the court. They could lob the ball into Microsoft's court for the OS, at least...
Slashdot Mirror
...which is why I work as a games programmer, and earn less than all my classmates. And earn less than most sysadmins I know, even those who are fairly unqualified and inexperienced. But I have an interesting job, and I don't dread going into work the way most of the people outside of the industry I know, so the value is all relative.
A company called JazzMutant makes a multiple-point touchscreen with customisable controls, used to drive virtual synths and audio workstations. It's lovely, and I want one. I wonder if this counts as prior art? It's certainly closer than the people talking about PDAs I think...
He is indeed. Perhaps he's saying this because movies are more often considered to be art? And Uwe Boll is by no stretch of the imagination a respected artist. Perhaps just because, regardless of whether either form is art or not, Uwe Boll makes shit-awful films?
For what it's worth, as someone who makes games for a living, I don't consider most games to be art, including those I have worked on. I just don't see myself as an artist doing what I do, in much the same way that I don't consider a graphic designer laying out a billboard ad to be making art. But that's a personal thing, and Kojima seems to think along the same lines.
What is and isn't considered art is a pretty personal thing, my tastes are probably different to yours, and Kojima's are likely to be different again. There'll never be a consensus on this, gamers and game producers alike need to come to terms with that.
...but probably only for certain gamers, in certain games. To add my normal disclaimer, I'm a games programmer working for Sony (not their opinions in here, just mine, etc etc), but I have relatives and friends with various medical conditions which would have hampered playing games (ranging from colour blindness and deafness through to cerebral palsy and other more serious problems), so I've thought a little about this. None of them are (or were) games players. so this is mostly just guesswork and supposition on my part, but hopefully worthwhile. Anyway!
To take the most extreme example, someone without at least partial use of both legs is unlikely to fully enjoy Dance Dance Revolution or similar using a dance mat as an input device. That's not to say someone nimble couldn't manage, though, but generally. Playing bemani with an alternate controller isn't as much fun, for me anyway, but alternate controllers do at least give the option of participation. Which is a good thing - purely from a developer point of view, the more people you can include in your gaming experience, the better. Genres like this, as well as others where the physical interaction isn't the core of the gameplay, are easiest to make inclusive in this way (with subtitles for deaf players, bright or high-contrast graphics and enlarged text for people with impaired vision, etc). These are, of course, the games where the Revolution controller would probably have the least impact, as they're the least directly interactive in the sense of swinging a bat or shooting a gun.
To jump genres, twitch games like shoot em ups or first person action games almost always require a combination of multiple inputs, exercised with speed and precision. These are things which require much more radical efforts to make inclusive - things like auto aiming and reduced enemy reaction time could help, but would these maybe seem condescending to the player? "Here, let's make things easier for you since you can't manage..." I don't really know, it would be worth asking gamers that. The problem is that unless the Nintendo and game developers consider things like this, Revolution's controller could actually make these games worse for disabled players. For example, the addon controllers already shown could easily mean that some games require two hands to play, but with careful design (or possibly different optional addons designed for different disabilities), it could improve things dramatically for disabled gamers.
Of course, it'll all come down to money in the end - is the disabled gaming market big enough to justify the expense of research and development time for these things to be adequately looked at? Sadly, I'm pretty pessimistic.At least the possibility is there, and people can start to ask the questions. If enough of a market can be found, maybe something good will happen!
...if the quality of the images in the sample there are anything to go by, I'll avoid using OO.o to do anything like that in future.
I'm not talking about content, just quality - the "Note" ovals are shockingly bad-looking. Maybe it's just a poor export or conversion.
...that the bigger problem comes from the perception that other people are submitting the same stories without the thin blog-to-attract-ad-hits wrapper, and having it rejected. Certainly people claim this in many of the Beatles-Beatles and Piquepaille threads. This generates the perception that only the "favoured few" submitters can have story submissions accepted, whether this is true or not.
A quick check to see if the link is substantive, or just a wrapper link around someone else's content to get ad money, or if someone submitted a link to the real content before someone with a wrapper page? Maybe that would help...
Good news, everyone! :)
...this is quite as bad an idea as it might first appear.
First runs of new format players are pretty expensive. From the earlier article on here, the cheapest HD-DVD player is about 500 dollars. Given that it's just the drive, and doesn't need all the bits the Xbox already has (for converting the signal to different displays, power supply etc) it should be smaller and cheaper than a full player. Yes it's an addon box, but it's probably the cheapest way for someone with a 360 to get HD-DVD as well.
Of course, PS3 will have a BluRay player built in, but will be more expensive than the 360 is now, never mind any possible price decrease between now and then. Time will tell, I suppose!
Disclaimer: I work for Sony :)
;)
Many sales figures given as statistics are sales-to-retailers, rather than sales-to-the-public. In other words, it's entirely possible that there havent been 10 million DS units sold to the public, but rather are sitting in stores or warehouses waiting to be sold onwards. The article doesn't say which figure they're using, I've no idea which it is, but it's always worth bearing in mind.
I'm reminded of the game State of Emergency, which sold in vast numbers... to retailers only, because it was a bit rubbish and hardly anyone bought it. The most returned game in history, so I'm told...
Can someone tell me why my original post was offtopic? I said I didn't think their killer app was any good! :(
...this is a dupe.
:)
But I didn't comment last time!
So, with that in mind, I'd say no - Firefox doesn't really need a "Killer App", in my opinion. Shoehorning any P2P other than Bittorrent in there doesn't make much sense to me. The problems they're trying to solve are so very different, I'd be surprised if it wasn't just just too clunky compared to standalone P2P apps.
My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Linux and Windows pass out at 31 Flavors last night! So I guess it must be pretty serious...
Microsoft never said (that I know of) that they were required to use Windows.
:)
No, they just illegally maintained an effective monopoly on PC operating systems for many years. If they don't like the repercussions of their extended and deliberate illegal (and some would say immoral) actions, perhaps they should have complied with the court's verdict earlier. Or maybe just not done it in the first place...
If that's the case, why is it that shitty movies and music that sucks are really easy to find for download, whereas classic films and good music are much more difficult to obtain?
:O
The answer is, of course, that most of the people "sharing" just want to download the latest stuff for free instead of having an interest in whether it's any good or not. Hell, maybe they even like Britney Spears or the latest big summer floptastic CGI extravaganza!
I'd always been told it was pressure on the carpal tunnel that caused it, not finger movements. So typing with your wrists pressed against the corner of a desk (or in the case more familiar to me, playing bass guitar with the right wrist pressed against the top edge of the instrument) would cause it, not typing with a nice wrist rest or with hands held high, piano-style, above the desk...
There are loads of auctions there which are obviously pirated games - you know, things like "5000 PSP games on one DVD, these games are public domain, honest". Even when these get reported to eBay they do nothing about it, because they make money off of the illegal stuff and the fraud just as much as they do on the legit stuff. And no-one really presses them on it.
We've been playing this a lot in the office, and although it's fun I'll warn you all that it's fairly buggy. The first patch is already out and does seem to help a little, but it still manages to crash back to Windows, and sometimes brings the whole machine down on various differently-specced PCs. Not sure if the patch has fixed this one, but there's also a tendency for graphical corruption on my home PC which persists even if I close and reload a saved game after the corruption has started.
;)
Other than that, it's an excellent game. I'd never played any of the previous Civs but I'm having a good time with this one
I tend to pick a reputable retailer I've already done trade with, and if the price is more than say 10% different I just assume it's a scam and ignore it unless I know someone else personally who's traded with them. Even if the difference is less than 10% I still prefer to buy from companies I or my friends have dealt with. I may miss some good bargains that way, but I've never been scammed...
Maybe I'm just an ignorant sexist male game developer. Admittedly, I've only ever worked on driving games, and games with no women in them. But still...
The "thoughtful" references to the authors mentioned makes it sound like the games industry is some sort of male consipiracy, trying to force women to look like Lara Croft. I don't really see how they stretch to that, thought. Beyond fighting games like DOA or Rumble Roses, I don't see much in the way of game designers turning to "jiggle technology" instead of gameplay (and even DOA does tend to change a little from version to version). To be honest, looking back through time I can't think of that many games with hugely overblown female avatars at all, especially in comparison to overblown male avatars.
And lately, of course, we're tending more towards first-person games where you don't see any avatar at all, except in cutscenes. Or games like Tomb Raider where the size of the breasts are immaterial because of the chase-camera view. As I said, I've worked on driving games, where your gender is never even referred to.
So, since the article only says this is a big problem in lots of titles and never actually mentions any of them by name (the "jiggle" leads me to think of the fighting games I mentioned before, as well as the spinoff Beach Volleyball game), what should we as game producers be doing to combat the male conspiracy to twist women's appearances to our evil will?
Also, as a final aside, anyone else find it interesting that the recent Playboy game was designed by Brenda Brathwaite, who is in fact a real actual female woman?
Now, I'm not an American, so I may be wrong about this. Which is why I'm going to ask you Yankee slashdotters ;)
I've seen a few posts already complaining that this is against the Constitution. But I was always of the impression that the Constitution was something that only applied to the government - you know, "Congress shall pass no law..." or whatever the exact wording is. So, how does the reality of free speech being prevented in private establishments like this university fall under the Constitutional umbrella? Or does it apply at all?
...I personally wouldn't put it past a different company competing with Sony (say MS, who just had a big product launch, or Nintendo who compete directly with the PSP itself) to pay for something like this to make Sony look bad. But then I am incredibly cynical.
:D
Oh, I also work for Sony. But I didn't spraypaint anything
...seem to suffer from the same problem - although they run the full range of medial production, none of them seem to be able to effectively merge the different parts of the company to produce any great result.After all, Time Warner have a huge back catalog of music and film sitting there, but they've provided no means for customers of AOL to access any of it. Maybe they're working on that, i dunno, but all these big merged conglomerates like Sony BMG, Time Warner, none of them are visibly making any real efforts to do things involving the full spectrum of business interests they cover.
:(
I always wonder if it's because despite being "merged" on paper, internally they still run as separate businesses with all the competing and territoriality that implies...
...many others here, I find it very off-putting that I'm required to enter my credit card details for a free trial. That very requirement has just lost them a customer, since I refuse to provide credit card details to people who don't intend to charge me for anything.
:(
I remember free-trial-card-required things like this from a few years back, and I didn't take them up then. I don't really enjoy having sites store my credit card information at all, and wish they wouldn't. After all, what's to stop a billing error, or a hacker harvesting my card number, or a disgruntled employee using my card to buy kiddie porn, or anything else? One-off entry is much nicer. I just wish I knew for sure how many internet stores kept records of my card details, before finding out the hard way one day
...ugly sunglasses with a built-in USB memory-stick-mp3-player and crappy headphones? That'll work.
The Oakley one might sell on the back of the name, there are brand snobs out there. I don't think I'd touch this thing with a bargepole though.
..."all programmers responsible for creating the software", I mean.
Depending on the definition of "the software", and how rigorously you wanted to check for tampering that could include:
* the Diebold application programmers
* the compiler programmers (persumably Visual Studio and related tools in this case)
* any third-party library programmers (drivers for custom voting boxes, maybe?)
* the operating system programmers (various Microsofties)
* BIOS programmers (low-level tampering might not be impossible, I dunno)
* CPU microcode programmers (really low-level tampering might not be impossible, I really dunno!)
and so on. Could an OSS solution provider actually give a full list of all the contributers to all of the sensible entries in the list? (Assuming the last two are kind of a joke, depending on their technical feasibility for which I have no idea)
At the very least, Diebold should be providing their application source code to the court. They could lob the ball into Microsoft's court for the OS, at least...