No, this is management's fault. The only time a programmer fails is if something wasn't delivered on time, or they just don't produce, or their stuff doesn't make it past QC. Then fire them.
If bad code makes it into the wild, then somebody signed off on it. Somebody cut corners on testing. Somebody decided deadline is more important than quality. Somebody insisted it had to run the newest Microsoft code.
Hitachi had agreed to license BeOS, and ship a dual-boot system using Be's boot loader and an icon on the desktop that enabled a Windows user to reboot into BeOS with one click.
"Microsoft sent two U.S. managers to Japan who expressed their 'anger' with Hitachi over its arrangement with Be, and 'reminded' Hitachi of the terms of its Windows license," according to the claim. "
Ahh, that's 'cause that's the Windows standard. CTRL-A as anything but Select All is utterly bewildering to me.
Windows has a lot of flaws, but I like the hotkey conventions:
ctrl-A select all ctrl-S save ctrl-X,C,V - cut copy paste ctrl-Z undo ctrl-Y redo ctrl left/right/up/down - move by word or paragraph. ctrl-F find ctrl-G go
move the cursor? Thats what the cursor keys are for. Home,e nd, are for end of line. Just hold shift to take the whole line out.
But its not my front door. Its the door to my basement. I don't have a front door. Or I wouldn't, if Lynksys made shit that worked like it was supposed to.
No. This is Lynksys' fault. Perhaps the user runs WEP, and trusts all the other users of his LAN. Therefore, in theory, they don't need ot bother with passwording their box, because as far as they know, no untrusted person has access to it anyways. So an intelligent user just damn might well be able to reasonably say "fuck it, admin is fine, not like anyone else has access to it". If they knew that the thing was gonna be exposed to the internet regardless, then they would've changed it.
You know how I know that? Cause I have one of these goddamn things and thats what I fucking did. And I'm very annoyed. Well, I did change the password eventually (after I talked around to other people who would use the thing and could agree on a password), but I still am using no username.
How about I have one less child then I had intended, and tell you to piss off? After all, say if I was gonna have 3 kinds, but instead have 2 and keep myself. That 3rd kid would have produced a whole family tree of his own, while I just produce myself after those first 2. Wow. Shocker.
As with most things in life, overpopulation in a life-prolonged society is only a problem for extremely unobservant people.
Have you ever filed a patent? Do you know how much it costs? I'll give you a hint: a hell of a fucking lot more than it would cost to hire someone to do a freaking Google search for a few days.
I don't give a shit if they're observing me, provided they're also doing something about real problems in the theatre while they're observing. Spy on the camcorders all you like, but you damn well better castrate the punk with the laser pointer then.
Absolutely. Directly oriented with how she _uses_ the computer.
Another good one is Visual Basic 6. I know many computer-illiterate people who picked that up - it seems natural to them, as it looks and feels like making a typical MS program.
If she wants to automate her daily computer tasks in a fun and easy way or make simple action games, I recommend Python. Its imposing at first, but IMHO its the easiest text language to learn and tinker with (want to know what does what? Help(modulename) ). Python is the language all computer n00bs should learn. Easy sequential programming that can lead to GUIs, games, full OOP, etc. and all relevant packages are easy to get and learn.
I think its a sign that genres other than FPS games need to get off of their pathetic asses and start producing decent developers tools with their engines. 99% of mods are made on FPS engines, and the rest of the game types just don't really support it well.
What the hell does Savage have to do with anything? The BattleZone games mixed FPS and RTS games back in the '90s, and did it better imho (well, if you wanted one army per player, at least).
"Your right. They should be having daily press briefings about how they screwed up, how they haven't found any WMDs, and how utterly embarassing that whole bit has been."
You know, that might help. I mean, it seems like some sort of an apology might be in order. After all, they did indirectly and directly cause the deaths of ten thousand people, and ruin the lives of millions of others, without any legitimate reason that holds up to any scrutiny at all.
Okay, so in review, I have learned the differences in this conversation that:
US & Canada: Heating from top = broil the grill you do it with = broiler Cooking over barbeque = grill cooking over electric grill = grill temperature in F Oven with a fan in it to increase the flow and aid in even convection (note that all non-microwave ovens heat by convection though) = convection oven
Canada: Same as US but Barbeque instead of "grill" more oftenly used. Temperature often in Celcius, but usually F.
UK: Heating from top = grill, using the grill. Cooking over an outdoor gas grill = barbeque Cooking over electric grill = griddle temperature in Gas Mark oven with a fan = fan oven
Well, it wasn't designed for it. No SDK, and most of the modding being done are exe hacks. So no, it is not moddable in the modern sense of the word. Not when compared to Unreal or Half-Life games.
Umm, yeah, by that logic I can kill you now. Oh, wait, you don't want to die today? When would you rather die? When it occurs naturally? Ohhh.
Its the same with climactic shift. Yes, all we're really doing is accelerating the process. Of course, the faster shift happens, the less time we, and natural systems, have available to adjust. What do you want to tell all the farmers who suddenly have had the rain patterns shift so badly that most of the North American rain ends up in the Arizona desert overnight? Sure, its still there, but fat lot of good it will do in Arizona. What I'm describing isn't a literally plausible scenario, but is the basic concept of the worry people have. Yes, its just shift, its just things readjusting and moving around - but a lot of peoples lives are depending on things staying the same, or changing slowly enough that they can adjust (like telling your kids to go into computers instead of farming, rather then having to give up farming yourself because your region is now too dry for it).
People keep blaming the story - but then they forget games like Half-Life - a game that was, practically, a playable movie. Over-linear storylines are no excuse. There are tons of massively successful hyper-linear games.
ETMatrix was a bad game because it was ugly, clunky, and dull. Not because it had an over-linear storyline. Max Payne has practically the same fantasy-mechanics as The Matrix, and the game just played and looked better even though being an older and smaller project.
The incompetence of movie games is probably mostly due to things happening behind closed doors like a) boardroom micromanagement by non-gaming PHB's b) formulaic design to keep the title safe, resulting in bored developers c) shipping before completion to make deadline
Evidence that it is likely these factors causing the problems appears when you compare to games based on older movies, like the AvP, Star Wars games (except for the glut of ep1 and ep2 games - only a few of those managed not to suck), and Tron 2.0. Remember, even the corny Nintendo Star Wars platformers on the NES and SNES drew piles of rave reviews from magazines.
Still, gameplaywise, I think one of the most common problems is that games are often made in completely the wrong genre for their movie. Like the Starship Troopers RTS - anyone watching the movie could have told you it would be a boring version of StarCraft. Or a Star Trek Spacefighter (remember ST - 25th anniversary, or any of the other ST games where a consitution class starship handles like an X-Wing?). Star Wars is not afraid to make great departures into odd genres, but while they do it they throw out the tight connections to the movies. IMHO, the first Matrix game should have been made not as a Shiny 3rd person adventure (especially not from a team that specializes in cute puzzles, cartoony animation, and twisted humour) but as a Digital Extremes project. UT with more Matrix oriented gametypes and the matrix set of abilities. I would love it to be a "design a character" team FPS game. But no.
If its not, I know some 3d modellers who do this already who are in a lot of trouble - difference is they go door to door shooting storefronts and houses to use as texture maps. They're building a complete and accurate graphical model of a small suburban city in Ontario.
Heheh, this van used with some rangefinding and GPS could make that much, much more interesting. Auto-texturemapping a city possibly?
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No, this is management's fault. The only time a programmer fails is if something wasn't delivered on time, or they just don't produce, or their stuff doesn't make it past QC. Then fire them.
If bad code makes it into the wild, then somebody signed off on it. Somebody cut corners on testing. Somebody decided deadline is more important than quality. Somebody insisted it had to run the newest Microsoft code.
That somebody is the programmer's boss.
This would almost be clever if it weren't for the fact that the US dollar is currently in the tank, and the Canuck dollar is up. Eat it boys.
From the register:
Hitachi had agreed to license BeOS, and ship a dual-boot system using Be's boot loader and an icon on the desktop that enabled a Windows user to reboot into BeOS with one click.
"Microsoft sent two U.S. managers to Japan who expressed their 'anger' with Hitachi over its arrangement with Be, and 'reminded' Hitachi of the terms of its Windows license," according to the claim. "
now stfu.
Ahh, that's 'cause that's the Windows standard. CTRL-A as anything but Select All is utterly bewildering to me.
Windows has a lot of flaws, but I like the hotkey conventions:
ctrl-A select all
ctrl-S save
ctrl-X,C,V - cut copy paste
ctrl-Z undo
ctrl-Y redo
ctrl left/right/up/down - move by word or paragraph.
ctrl-F find
ctrl-G go
move the cursor? Thats what the cursor keys are for. Home,e nd, are for end of line. Just hold shift to take the whole line out.
But its not my front door. Its the door to my basement. I don't have a front door. Or I wouldn't, if Lynksys made shit that worked like it was supposed to.
Right. Because every person they detained and tortured was a confirmed terrorist. Read a real newspaper you numpty.
No. This is Lynksys' fault. Perhaps the user runs WEP, and trusts all the other users of his LAN. Therefore, in theory, they don't need ot bother with passwording their box, because as far as they know, no untrusted person has access to it anyways. So an intelligent user just damn might well be able to reasonably say "fuck it, admin is fine, not like anyone else has access to it". If they knew that the thing was gonna be exposed to the internet regardless, then they would've changed it.
You know how I know that? Cause I have one of these goddamn things and thats what I fucking did. And I'm very annoyed. Well, I did change the password eventually (after I talked around to other people who would use the thing and could agree on a password), but I still am using no username.
How about I have one less child then I had intended, and tell you to piss off? After all, say if I was gonna have 3 kinds, but instead have 2 and keep myself. That 3rd kid would have produced a whole family tree of his own, while I just produce myself after those first 2. Wow. Shocker.
As with most things in life, overpopulation in a life-prolonged society is only a problem for extremely unobservant people.
Have you ever filed a patent? Do you know how much it costs? I'll give you a hint: a hell of a fucking lot more than it would cost to hire someone to do a freaking Google search for a few days.
There isn't a free replacement pak yet? I know there is one for Doom (freedoom - its ugly but it gets the job done).
As an aside, is there one for Quake II?
Hmm - perhaps this project could be used for game distros of other opensource GL games such as Cube or Armagetron.
I don't give a shit if they're observing me, provided they're also doing something about real problems in the theatre while they're observing. Spy on the camcorders all you like, but you damn well better castrate the punk with the laser pointer then.
Absolutely. Directly oriented with how she _uses_ the computer.
Another good one is Visual Basic 6. I know many computer-illiterate people who picked that up - it seems natural to them, as it looks and feels like making a typical MS program.
If she wants to automate her daily computer tasks in a fun and easy way or make simple action games, I recommend Python. Its imposing at first, but IMHO its the easiest text language to learn and tinker with (want to know what does what? Help(modulename) ). Python is the language all computer n00bs should learn. Easy sequential programming that can lead to GUIs, games, full OOP, etc. and all relevant packages are easy to get and learn.
I think its a sign that genres other than FPS games need to get off of their pathetic asses and start producing decent developers tools with their engines. 99% of mods are made on FPS engines, and the rest of the game types just don't really support it well.
What the hell does Savage have to do with anything? The BattleZone games mixed FPS and RTS games back in the '90s, and did it better imho (well, if you wanted one army per player, at least).
"Your right. They should be having daily press briefings about how they screwed up, how they haven't found any WMDs, and how utterly embarassing that whole bit has been."
You know, that might help. I mean, it seems like some sort of an apology might be in order. After all, they did indirectly and directly cause the deaths of ten thousand people, and ruin the lives of millions of others, without any legitimate reason that holds up to any scrutiny at all.
Okay, so in review, I have learned the differences in this conversation that:
US & Canada:
Heating from top = broil
the grill you do it with = broiler
Cooking over barbeque = grill
cooking over electric grill = grill
temperature in F
Oven with a fan in it to increase the flow and aid in even convection (note that all non-microwave ovens heat by convection though) = convection oven
Canada: Same as US but
Barbeque instead of "grill" more oftenly used.
Temperature often in Celcius, but usually F.
UK:
Heating from top = grill, using the grill.
Cooking over an outdoor gas grill = barbeque
Cooking over electric grill = griddle
temperature in Gas Mark
oven with a fan = fan oven
I know. The very fact that there exists an organization with that name is hilarious. Hats off to them.
Fsck that, just code it in Java or Python or some other interpreted language that most people already have the interpreter for.
Actually, a Python e-mail worm might not even be hard to code: batteries included + low linguistic security = evil, evil fun.
I'm thinking some of the games they want are done already. Colonization is a big one for teaching history.
Too bad Sim Earth hasn't had a remake. That would be awesome for teaching geology and evolutionary biology.
And of course, a modified Scorched Earth will teach all you need to know about ballistic kinematics.
Well, it wasn't designed for it. No SDK, and most of the modding being done are exe hacks. So no, it is not moddable in the modern sense of the word. Not when compared to Unreal or Half-Life games.
Silly me - I was just thinking "if only GTA was actually moddable, this would be a neat setting"... and had forgotten about Hit 'n' Run.
Umm, yeah, by that logic I can kill you now. Oh, wait, you don't want to die today? When would you rather die? When it occurs naturally? Ohhh.
Its the same with climactic shift. Yes, all we're really doing is accelerating the process. Of course, the faster shift happens, the less time we, and natural systems, have available to adjust. What do you want to tell all the farmers who suddenly have had the rain patterns shift so badly that most of the North American rain ends up in the Arizona desert overnight? Sure, its still there, but fat lot of good it will do in Arizona. What I'm describing isn't a literally plausible scenario, but is the basic concept of the worry people have. Yes, its just shift, its just things readjusting and moving around - but a lot of peoples lives are depending on things staying the same, or changing slowly enough that they can adjust (like telling your kids to go into computers instead of farming, rather then having to give up farming yourself because your region is now too dry for it).
Too bad the Iridium project was killed, it would be really, really good for this situation.
People keep blaming the story - but then they forget games like Half-Life - a game that was, practically, a playable movie. Over-linear storylines are no excuse. There are tons of massively successful hyper-linear games.
ETMatrix was a bad game because it was ugly, clunky, and dull. Not because it had an over-linear storyline. Max Payne has practically the same fantasy-mechanics as The Matrix, and the game just played and looked better even though being an older and smaller project.
The incompetence of movie games is probably mostly due to things happening behind closed doors like
a) boardroom micromanagement by non-gaming PHB's
b) formulaic design to keep the title safe, resulting in bored developers
c) shipping before completion to make deadline
Evidence that it is likely these factors causing the problems appears when you compare to games based on older movies, like the AvP, Star Wars games (except for the glut of ep1 and ep2 games - only a few of those managed not to suck), and Tron 2.0. Remember, even the corny Nintendo Star Wars platformers on the NES and SNES drew piles of rave reviews from magazines.
Still, gameplaywise, I think one of the most common problems is that games are often made in completely the wrong genre for their movie. Like the Starship Troopers RTS - anyone watching the movie could have told you it would be a boring version of StarCraft. Or a Star Trek Spacefighter (remember ST - 25th anniversary, or any of the other ST games where a consitution class starship handles like an X-Wing?). Star Wars is not afraid to make great departures into odd genres, but while they do it they throw out the tight connections to the movies. IMHO, the first Matrix game should have been made not as a Shiny 3rd person adventure (especially not from a team that specializes in cute puzzles, cartoony animation, and twisted humour) but as a Digital Extremes project. UT with more Matrix oriented gametypes and the matrix set of abilities. I would love it to be a "design a character" team FPS game. But no.
Its a CCD, not a full camera. No flash. And for this application, you better bet its got good light noise.
If its not, I know some 3d modellers who do this already who are in a lot of trouble - difference is they go door to door shooting storefronts and houses to use as texture maps. They're building a complete and accurate graphical model of a small suburban city in Ontario.
Heheh, this van used with some rangefinding and GPS could make that much, much more interesting. Auto-texturemapping a city possibly?