Re:For great justice...
on
Game Writing
·
· Score: 1
The quality of game storylines and dialogue is currently a couple of notches below that of DC/Marvel monthly comics, which is quite pathetic.
I'm not ready to award a Pulitzer to a comic book yet, but I would say that Bruce Jones (Incredible Hulk) and Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man, Alias, Powers) have done some good work for Marvel lately.
Having picked up some of the Marvel compilations on CD-ROM, I have to say that the new generation has far surpassed Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
I don't know about "intentionally shutting out" other platforms, but it's pretty clear that Windows will always be the only first-tier.NET platform. That said, I'm currently evaluating Unity an up-and-coming Mac game engine that uses Mono.
Prior to reading this article, I was ambivalent about Office XML. The push to standardize Office's "DNA sequence" seemed disingenuous, but at least the format was described in detail. Now I see that the table-sagging 6,000 pages is just the tip of the iceberg: this "standard" effectively includes, by reference, the source code for every prior version of Office, to which only Microsoft has access.
In addition to the top-ten list, Game Tunnel has genre and technology lists. The following are the highest-ranked Mac games in their respective categories:
#1 action and #4 graphics - Titan Attacks
#2 casual - TubeTwist
#3 rpg and technical excellence - Minions of Mirth
#3 multiplayer - Rage of Magic 2
#4 sim and #2 innovation - Toribash
Arkanoid/kid's - Fizzball
Of all the games, I've only tried the demo of the Torque-based TubeTwist, which I liked enough to give as a birthday gift, although I have yet to purchase it for myself.
Another great game in the same genre is Enigmo (which I actually like better than its three-dimensional sequel, Enigmo 2).
Those interested in GNUstep as a poor man's Yellow Box may be interested in a younger, more focused project: Cocotron. It seeks to clone Foundation and Appkit, and to provide tools to cross compile for other platforms with Xcode. It's a little Windows centric, but support for Linux, Solaris, and others seems to be in the works.
One thing I miss from Linux is package management. Whether it's a.app with its associated files in/Library or ~/Library, or a.pkg installer, or a Makefile that installed to/usr/local, I'd like something like an RPM database where I can find out what package owns what files, and I'd like a common interface for uninstalling packages.
This Forbes article is more in line with my recollection of the story. IBM approached Sun with a handful of bogus patents, which Sun's engineers handily debunked. However, rather than risk IBM digging through its portfolio for actually infringed patents, Sun coughed up the protection fee.
Eudora FAQ: "QUALCOMM has decided not to remain in the email market."
Also, "QUALCOMM plans to stop trafficking advertisements [to the existing Sponsored mode] at some point during open source development."
If you read the Penelope page at the Mozilla Wiki, you'll see that the six core members of the project are Qualcomm employees.
"QUALCOMM continues to have a keen interest in the users of Eudora, and is being kind enough to donate the time of the above staff members to the Penelope project."
Rather than becoming faceless contributors to Thunderbird, they chose to continue the Eudora legacy.
I don't mind the look so much, but there is an annoying change in the spreadsheet interface. When you sort by Album, the secondary sort is the new Album Artist column, which is blank for songs that you haven't purchased from the iTMS, and there is no tertiary sort. In other words, all the Greatest Hits you've ripped won't sort properly.
the album art was something I had to do in external programs
Apple seems to have learned its lesson from the mini-store incident. Not only does iTunes ask before uploading information to Apple, it gives you something in return.
If Apple reverse engineered the Windows API, Microsoft would probably make "improvements" to it out of spite, to cause things to break when run on the Mac's reverse-engineered API.
Win32 is a pretty stable API at this point. There have been additions in XP and 2003, but there aren't many apps. that won't run on Windows 2000. I really only see Microsoft "breaking" WINE-like projects in two ways: sabotaging their own applications, and promoting Win64.
In the first case, Microsoft leverages the Office monopoly. Through the EULA and run-time checks, the apps. are required to run on an actual copy of Windows.
The WINE project has already encountered this with Windows Genuine Advantage.
In the second case, Microsoft just moves the goal posts again. OS/2 was a terrific platform for Win16 apps., but never adapted to Win32. While 64-bit Windows is kind of a mess right now, I think there will be some compelling Win64 apps. before Vista's end of life. Will WINE be ready?
Linear extrapolation would take us to about eighty-two-million today, comfortably over Vista's projected fifty-million
Linux distributions (including this linearly extrapolated Red Hat Linux) contain an office suite, development tools, and a DBMS, so you should also compare them to Office, Visual Studio, and SQL Server.
At least with the $0.99/track pricing model, I know that music is mine, no matter what the RIAA and Apple decide is a fair price 5 years down the road.
Actually, Apple has, at least twice, retroactively changed the terms of the DRM to the detriment of the consumer:
a playlist containing a restricted song may only be burned seven times, instead of ten;
restricted songs may only be streamed to five distinct clients per day, instead of five concurrent clients.
It's not hard to imagine additional restrictions that would not benefit the consumer.
Indeed, Apple could disable songs entirely for accounts suspected of unauthorized file sharing.
FairPlay is relatively easy to crack, but that's not the point.
Users typically are the people who came along for the ride thanks to the developer's good will....
And if nobody uses it because I'm not bending over backwards for them, well, I could care less because I'm not out to win a popularity contest.
As Fred Brooks points out in The Mythical Man Month, a program is only part of a product.
Some project maintainers simply lack the will or the resources to turn a program into a product (documentation, packaging, testing, regular releases, etc.).
If and when I release software (free or otherwise) that has the problem of too many users, I hope I will have the resources to take advantage of their many eyes.
This kind of double-eged relationship is a given when a company has offerings at multiple levels of the software stack.
With Windows, SQL Server, IIS, and.NET, Microsoft is in a position to compete for virtually every part of a contract.
You see the same thing on AIX with DB2, Informix, and WebSphere competing with Oracle, et al.
Maybe it's significant that Microsoft acknowledges that there are viable free competitors, but everyone else has known that for some time.
While there is potential for a conflict of interest ("DOS isn't done..."), I don't think Microsoft has the kind of monopoly in the enterprise market to get away with it.
If Oracle runs poorly on Windows, Microsoft may lose the Windows sale to Solaris or Linux, rather than win the SQL Server sale.
The consumer line of laptops have had several differentiating features from the pro line.
I am optimistic that the MacBook will have decent features, even if some are limited to BTO or a more expensive configuration, for the following reasons:
the Mac mini is excellent (dual-core, 2 GB, 120 GB), except for the integrated graphics buzz kill
the video port on the iMac is no longer limited to mirroring
it is rumored that there will be no 12"/13" MacBook Pro
I would not be impressed by a single-core laptop with integrated graphics.
Yeah right, Shuttle released their mini PC with similar size in 2001, over two years before Mac mini.
I actually prefer the Shuttle form factor, not least of which because it can accommodate a 3.5" hard drive, but it's not even in the same weight class as the mini.
While Boot Camp might help show prospective purchasers the superiority of Apple hardware, those purchasers would have to buy their Macs first and then convince themselves that they had done the right thing, which is totally backwards.
It's not that Apple hardware is superior, it's that it occupies a part of the market with relatively little competition.
The iMac is the best all-in-one I've seen, and the Mac mini is virtually unique.
With officially sanctioned drivers and a boot loader, I can see lots of people buying a Mac just to run Windows.
The fact that it comes with OS X is just icing on the cake.
I timed a little (single-threaded) utility that makes extensive use of GList, GQueue, and GHashTable. It was measurably, but not significantly, slower with GLib 2.10.1 than with 2.8.5. Those charts show impressive gains for multi-threaded apps., though.
Licensing your code under a license another group could change at a whim is dumb. Really, really dumb.
Do you think releasing your code to the public domain is "really, really dumb"?
How about a BSD- or MIT-style license?
When you release code under a permissive license, you accept the risk that someone will release a fork under a more restrictive license, but nothing they do can bind you to that license.
The "or later" extension to the GNU GPL is simple pragmatism.
Due to the so-called "viral" nature of copyright and copyleft, it would be difficult for a license to evolve without it.
Similarly, the GNU LGPL includes a clause that allows relicensing under the GPL.
There is simply no other way for it to be compatible with copyleft.
This license is less free than others because of the new provisions.
I predict that the new wording will drive more new projects to BSD style licensing
If you dislike GPL3, you may as well continue to use GPL2.
As a practical matter, you should include the "later version" provision.
After all, most BSD-style licenses will likely be compatible with GPL3.
Someone can just as easily GPL3-fork a BSD project as a GPL2 project.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not ready to award a Pulitzer to a comic book yet, but I would say that Bruce Jones (Incredible Hulk) and Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man, Alias, Powers) have done some good work for Marvel lately. Having picked up some of the Marvel compilations on CD-ROM, I have to say that the new generation has far surpassed Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
I don't know about "intentionally shutting out" other platforms, but it's pretty clear that Windows will always be the only first-tier .NET platform. That said, I'm currently evaluating Unity an up-and-coming Mac game engine that uses Mono.
Prior to reading this article, I was ambivalent about Office XML. The push to standardize Office's "DNA sequence" seemed disingenuous, but at least the format was described in detail. Now I see that the table-sagging 6,000 pages is just the tip of the iceberg: this "standard" effectively includes, by reference, the source code for every prior version of Office, to which only Microsoft has access.
- #1 action and #4 graphics - Titan Attacks
- #2 casual - TubeTwist
- #3 rpg and technical excellence - Minions of Mirth
- #3 multiplayer - Rage of Magic 2
- #4 sim and #2 innovation - Toribash
- Arkanoid/kid's - Fizzball
Of all the games, I've only tried the demo of the Torque-based TubeTwist, which I liked enough to give as a birthday gift, although I have yet to purchase it for myself. Another great game in the same genre is Enigmo (which I actually like better than its three-dimensional sequel, Enigmo 2).Those interested in GNUstep as a poor man's Yellow Box may be interested in a younger, more focused project: Cocotron. It seeks to clone Foundation and Appkit, and to provide tools to cross compile for other platforms with Xcode. It's a little Windows centric, but support for Linux, Solaris, and others seems to be in the works.
One thing I miss from Linux is package management. Whether it's a .app with its associated files in /Library or ~/Library, or a .pkg installer, or a Makefile that installed to /usr/local, I'd like something like an RPM database where I can find out what package owns what files, and I'd like a common interface for uninstalling packages.
The iMac and Mac Pro are now available with 750 GB drives.
This Forbes article is more in line with my recollection of the story. IBM approached Sun with a handful of bogus patents, which Sun's engineers handily debunked. However, rather than risk IBM digging through its portfolio for actually infringed patents, Sun coughed up the protection fee.
If you read the Penelope page at the Mozilla Wiki, you'll see that the six core members of the project are Qualcomm employees. "QUALCOMM continues to have a keen interest in the users of Eudora, and is being kind enough to donate the time of the above staff members to the Penelope project." Rather than becoming faceless contributors to Thunderbird, they chose to continue the Eudora legacy.
Ubuntu looks really nice, but I'm still using SUSE, because AMD64 Debian eschews LSB and FHS, making it difficult to run 32-bit software.
I don't mind the look so much, but there is an annoying change in the spreadsheet interface. When you sort by Album, the secondary sort is the new Album Artist column, which is blank for songs that you haven't purchased from the iTMS, and there is no tertiary sort. In other words, all the Greatest Hits you've ripped won't sort properly.
Apple seems to have learned its lesson from the mini-store incident. Not only does iTunes ask before uploading information to Apple, it gives you something in return.
Win32 is a pretty stable API at this point. There have been additions in XP and 2003, but there aren't many apps. that won't run on Windows 2000. I really only see Microsoft "breaking" WINE-like projects in two ways: sabotaging their own applications, and promoting Win64.
In the first case, Microsoft leverages the Office monopoly. Through the EULA and run-time checks, the apps. are required to run on an actual copy of Windows. The WINE project has already encountered this with Windows Genuine Advantage.
In the second case, Microsoft just moves the goal posts again. OS/2 was a terrific platform for Win16 apps., but never adapted to Win32. While 64-bit Windows is kind of a mess right now, I think there will be some compelling Win64 apps. before Vista's end of life. Will WINE be ready?
Linux distributions (including this linearly extrapolated Red Hat Linux) contain an office suite, development tools, and a DBMS, so you should also compare them to Office, Visual Studio, and SQL Server.
Actually, Apple has, at least twice, retroactively changed the terms of the DRM to the detriment of the consumer: a playlist containing a restricted song may only be burned seven times, instead of ten; restricted songs may only be streamed to five distinct clients per day, instead of five concurrent clients.
It's not hard to imagine additional restrictions that would not benefit the consumer. Indeed, Apple could disable songs entirely for accounts suspected of unauthorized file sharing. FairPlay is relatively easy to crack, but that's not the point.
As Fred Brooks points out in The Mythical Man Month, a program is only part of a product. Some project maintainers simply lack the will or the resources to turn a program into a product (documentation, packaging, testing, regular releases, etc.). If and when I release software (free or otherwise) that has the problem of too many users, I hope I will have the resources to take advantage of their many eyes.
While there is potential for a conflict of interest ("DOS isn't done ..."), I don't think Microsoft has the kind of monopoly in the enterprise market to get away with it.
If Oracle runs poorly on Windows, Microsoft may lose the Windows sale to Solaris or Linux, rather than win the SQL Server sale.
I am optimistic that the MacBook will have decent features, even if some are limited to BTO or a more expensive configuration, for the following reasons:
I would not be impressed by a single-core laptop with integrated graphics.
Are you sure that femaleupperbodynude.nif is a male texture?
The author of the Lone Wolf series has generously allowed many of them to be published on line, free of charge.
I actually prefer the Shuttle form factor, not least of which because it can accommodate a 3.5" hard drive, but it's not even in the same weight class as the mini.
I timed a little (single-threaded) utility that makes extensive use of GList, GQueue, and GHashTable. It was measurably, but not significantly, slower with GLib 2.10.1 than with 2.8.5. Those charts show impressive gains for multi-threaded apps., though.
Do you think releasing your code to the public domain is "really, really dumb"? How about a BSD- or MIT-style license? When you release code under a permissive license, you accept the risk that someone will release a fork under a more restrictive license, but nothing they do can bind you to that license.
The "or later" extension to the GNU GPL is simple pragmatism. Due to the so-called "viral" nature of copyright and copyleft, it would be difficult for a license to evolve without it. Similarly, the GNU LGPL includes a clause that allows relicensing under the GPL. There is simply no other way for it to be compatible with copyleft.
If you dislike GPL3, you may as well continue to use GPL2. As a practical matter, you should include the "later version" provision. After all, most BSD-style licenses will likely be compatible with GPL3. Someone can just as easily GPL3-fork a BSD project as a GPL2 project.