At BSDi, the initial patch (which did have flaws, but it fixed the problem) for the f00f bug was same-day, I believe; might have been next-day, depending on where you're counting from. (Contrary to popular belief, this didn't violate any NDAs.) Now, that was an emergency patch -- it took a while to come up with a patch that fixed the bug without noticable ill side-effects.
We had a better patch later, but the initial emergency patch was VERY fast.
On the other hand, if the initial bug report is "Sometimes the program hangs, no, I don't know when. Maybe every week or two." -- well, that's gonna be hard. Exploits generally have the advantage that an exploit is by nature at least somewhat reproducible, and the hardest part is often getting a reproducer. I've had it take six hours to develop a usable reproducer, and three minutes to develop a patch.
Release time depends hugely on process and procedure. IMHO, an ideal procedure would have some kind of way to get a Temporary Patch out into the field ASAP when there's an exploit.
Removing unreliable automation is a great way to eliminate the possibility of error. Luckily, nearly all humans are capable of reliable performance of repetitive tasks through thousands of repititions, as well as being free from bias.... I wonder, thinking about the DSM-IV characterization of high-functioning autism, whether this couldn't turn into a way to get some kind of economic value from the nearly inexhaustible supply of people on the internet who claim to have Asperger's.
I don't see anything wrong with some of the content being soloable or small-groupable. I have a small group of people I really like to play with; no objections here to the fact that I can't see the whole game (it's not as though I have finished even 50% of the part I've seen, and I've been playing over a year now).
They've been doing that for years. I think they've gotten sued for it on multiple occasions. I also seem to recall hearing that they're disintegrating and shrinking due to the collapse of the sub-prime market, but I could be wrong there.
Makes no difference to me. The difference is, the good games have good controls that aren't just substituting one action for another. They may have some pointless "shake this" actions, but they also make excellent use of the Wiimote.
If you haven't tried Zack & Wiki, you're missing out.
The "waggle" is a myth; good games don't have any "waggle" replacing button mash, they have slick and well-integrated controls.
"Waggle" is just something you see in shovelware, and has nothing to do with the console.
I dunno. I just don't get all the complaints about the graphics; I was running my Wii on a 1080p set and it looked livable to me. As sharp as the PS3? No. But then, my playstation gaming these days consists of FF12. Graphics can go do anatomically improbable things; I want games that are fun to play.
If you're an enchanter (and that's the only way I could see confusing a 90g enchant for a 5g enchant), it should take you about a day to earn a couple hundred gold; just farm the AH for mats.
I know those markets are small, but I think the network effect is significant. If a single Mac sale brings four new PC sales with it, that's a great deal for the company, even if they didn't really make that much directly on the Mac sale.
I agree that they'll still be in a niche market, but I still think it'll benefit from network effects.
Pay the man. If you're dumb enough to ask this question of Slashdot, rather than an attorney, there is simply no point in trying to defend anything. Give up, run away, and never use the Internet again.
No, WoW doesn't. EVE does. They keep bragging about how a minute's play can wipe out months of work. Not interesting to me. In WoW, I can lose an amount of money that will take me as much as an hour to earn back. No problem, I can cope.
I know a lot of people who play WoW. All of us play it, across a mix of Windows and WINE and other systems, because one person we know had a Mac. We wanted to play together, so all of us went with WoW, even though some other games sounded interesting.
I hope the same thing happens for EVE, and they find a sales boost that goes beyond just the influx of Mac and Linux gamers.
(I won't be one of them; I have zero interest in PvP, or in playing a game which is built around real and lasting consequences for mistakes. I play a game like that about 14-18 hours a day already, and I want something different for my recreation.)
Reminds me a bit of the PsOne compact units they did for a while, which eventually dropped to $50.
I see no threat at all to the Wii and 360 from this; $99 is not THAT much cheaper than $129, and at this point, Sony's just going to be picking up people who never got around to the PS2, or whose PS2s broke. I don't think this will have a significant effect on the size of the market, though; the current-gen systems are picking up steam plenty fast.
I just remember the time I tried to run enlightenment on what was, at the time, a high-end machine, and it was unusable, because enlightenment was so graphically intensive.
So you say, but do you have sources? Nintendo's last financials showed 67M software sales and 13M hardware sales. If you exclude the two most successful titles (Wii Play and Wii Sports), it's obviously going to be lower... But if we start excluding pack-ins and bundles, everyone's attach rate looks worse.
The fact is, it's still nowhere near "dismal", even if we go out of our way to try to stack the deck in favor of the Xbox.
People keep claiming the Wii's attach rate is "dismal", but less than a year in, the attach rate is roughly 5 -- about as good as the "incredible" attach rate for the 360 was after its second holiday season, in fact.
It's not actually doing badly; it's just that people sort of assumed it would, and none of them bother to check any facts. An attach rate of 5 with the games drought the Wii's had (like all 1st-year consoles) is quite good, and I bet it'll be a lot higher by January.
This is not the first slip. I seem to recall once having heard that MGS4 was supposed to be very close to a launch title for the PS3 -- when it launched in Spring 2007. Anyone got anything concrete?
I haven't messed with Spaces yet, because I haven't had time to upgrade -- I need a couple days when it's okay for my laptop to be dysfunctional.
I don't know about showing something in all desktops. I bet it can be done, even though I don't know how, just because it's a pretty common feature.
I don't care at all about transition effects. The transition effect I want is the one where, on the next refresh, I see the screen I selected. Nothing else.
You know, all your complaints about windows are the exact REASON that people wanted virtual desktops.
Try using them. After all, this is an article about Leopard.;)
Inconsistent command keys are a problem, yes, but that's true everywhere -- I am perpetually mystified by the variety of mutually exclusive keyboard habits application vendors want me to use.
Here's my experience: OS X slowed me down too when I wasn't used to it. I'm used to that. Once I've gotten used to it, it's pretty decent; Spaces addresses the last big issue I had with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you should try playing one instead of going off rhetoric.
No jumping around needed, nothing "silly", you just play games, and they're fun. Single-player experience is awesome.
I've met parent/kid teams in WoW.
At BSDi, the initial patch (which did have flaws, but it fixed the problem) for the f00f bug was same-day, I believe; might have been next-day, depending on where you're counting from. (Contrary to popular belief, this didn't violate any NDAs.) Now, that was an emergency patch -- it took a while to come up with a patch that fixed the bug without noticable ill side-effects.
We had a better patch later, but the initial emergency patch was VERY fast.
On the other hand, if the initial bug report is "Sometimes the program hangs, no, I don't know when. Maybe every week or two." -- well, that's gonna be hard. Exploits generally have the advantage that an exploit is by nature at least somewhat reproducible, and the hardest part is often getting a reproducer. I've had it take six hours to develop a usable reproducer, and three minutes to develop a patch.
Release time depends hugely on process and procedure. IMHO, an ideal procedure would have some kind of way to get a Temporary Patch out into the field ASAP when there's an exploit.
Removing unreliable automation is a great way to eliminate the possibility of error. Luckily, nearly all humans are capable of reliable performance of repetitive tasks through thousands of repititions, as well as being free from bias. ... I wonder, thinking about the DSM-IV characterization of high-functioning autism, whether this couldn't turn into a way to get some kind of economic value from the nearly inexhaustible supply of people on the internet who claim to have Asperger's.
These are the same things that are always in SEC filings for game companies, no? ... Oh. I see the word that explains the posting: Zonk.
I don't see anything wrong with some of the content being soloable or small-groupable. I have a small group of people I really like to play with; no objections here to the fact that I can't see the whole game (it's not as though I have finished even 50% of the part I've seen, and I've been playing over a year now).
They've been doing that for years. I think they've gotten sued for it on multiple occasions. I also seem to recall hearing that they're disintegrating and shrinking due to the collapse of the sub-prime market, but I could be wrong there.
Makes no difference to me. The difference is, the good games have good controls that aren't just substituting one action for another. They may have some pointless "shake this" actions, but they also make excellent use of the Wiimote.
If you haven't tried Zack & Wiki, you're missing out.
The "waggle" is a myth; good games don't have any "waggle" replacing button mash, they have slick and well-integrated controls.
"Waggle" is just something you see in shovelware, and has nothing to do with the console.
I dunno. I just don't get all the complaints about the graphics; I was running my Wii on a 1080p set and it looked livable to me. As sharp as the PS3? No. But then, my playstation gaming these days consists of FF12. Graphics can go do anatomically improbable things; I want games that are fun to play.
If you're an enchanter (and that's the only way I could see confusing a 90g enchant for a 5g enchant), it should take you about a day to earn a couple hundred gold; just farm the AH for mats.
I know those markets are small, but I think the network effect is significant. If a single Mac sale brings four new PC sales with it, that's a great deal for the company, even if they didn't really make that much directly on the Mac sale.
I agree that they'll still be in a niche market, but I still think it'll benefit from network effects.
Pay the man. If you're dumb enough to ask this question of Slashdot, rather than an attorney, there is simply no point in trying to defend anything. Give up, run away, and never use the Internet again.
No, WoW doesn't. EVE does. They keep bragging about how a minute's play can wipe out months of work. Not interesting to me. In WoW, I can lose an amount of money that will take me as much as an hour to earn back. No problem, I can cope.
WoW, really.
I know a lot of people who play WoW. All of us play it, across a mix of Windows and WINE and other systems, because one person we know had a Mac. We wanted to play together, so all of us went with WoW, even though some other games sounded interesting.
I hope the same thing happens for EVE, and they find a sales boost that goes beyond just the influx of Mac and Linux gamers.
(I won't be one of them; I have zero interest in PvP, or in playing a game which is built around real and lasting consequences for mistakes. I play a game like that about 14-18 hours a day already, and I want something different for my recreation.)
Reminds me a bit of the PsOne compact units they did for a while, which eventually dropped to $50.
I see no threat at all to the Wii and 360 from this; $99 is not THAT much cheaper than $129, and at this point, Sony's just going to be picking up people who never got around to the PS2, or whose PS2s broke. I don't think this will have a significant effect on the size of the market, though; the current-gen systems are picking up steam plenty fast.
I just remember the time I tried to run enlightenment on what was, at the time, a high-end machine, and it was unusable, because enlightenment was so graphically intensive.
Times have changed, I guess.
Spaces can show something in every desktop. The list of "assignments" in preferences has "every space" as an option. You win!
So you say, but do you have sources? Nintendo's last financials showed 67M software sales and 13M hardware sales. If you exclude the two most successful titles (Wii Play and Wii Sports), it's obviously going to be lower... But if we start excluding pack-ins and bundles, everyone's attach rate looks worse.
The fact is, it's still nowhere near "dismal", even if we go out of our way to try to stack the deck in favor of the Xbox.
It'll tank once there's some games out. :)
Gotta agree on that. DM was immersive in a way that many more recent 3D games couldn't touch.
People keep claiming the Wii's attach rate is "dismal", but less than a year in, the attach rate is roughly 5 -- about as good as the "incredible" attach rate for the 360 was after its second holiday season, in fact.
It's not actually doing badly; it's just that people sort of assumed it would, and none of them bother to check any facts. An attach rate of 5 with the games drought the Wii's had (like all 1st-year consoles) is quite good, and I bet it'll be a lot higher by January.
Why? It's the job, not the credentials, that make something "journalism". The guy with the press card shouldn't have any magic rights.
This is not the first slip. I seem to recall once having heard that MGS4 was supposed to be very close to a launch title for the PS3 -- when it launched in Spring 2007. Anyone got anything concrete?
I haven't messed with Spaces yet, because I haven't had time to upgrade -- I need a couple days when it's okay for my laptop to be dysfunctional.
I don't know about showing something in all desktops. I bet it can be done, even though I don't know how, just because it's a pretty common feature.
I don't care at all about transition effects. The transition effect I want is the one where, on the next refresh, I see the screen I selected. Nothing else.
You know, all your complaints about windows are the exact REASON that people wanted virtual desktops.
;)
Try using them. After all, this is an article about Leopard.
Inconsistent command keys are a problem, yes, but that's true everywhere -- I am perpetually mystified by the variety of mutually exclusive keyboard habits application vendors want me to use.
Here's my experience: OS X slowed me down too when I wasn't used to it. I'm used to that. Once I've gotten used to it, it's pretty decent; Spaces addresses the last big issue I had with it.