One year of SQL is significant experience?
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The Art of SQL
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Perhaps that's what's wrong with database development these days (just check out The Daily WTF, as it seems they have a SQL example every other day). When a single year of experience is considered "significant" and "experienced", it's no wonder there are so many crap DBAs out there. We look for people with 5+ years of C# experience (ha! Good luck finding someone with more than 5 years experience...) for intermediate-level developer positions. There's no way someone with only a year of SQL experience would qualify for an intermediate-level DBA position.
Just as background, I've been doing development on SQL Server for 6 years now (from SQL 7 to SQL 2005). I'm still learning, still finding ways to improve my code's cleanliness and performance, still finding new things I can do in SQL. For example, SQL 2005 finally has CTEs, making it only the second database to implement that ANSI SQL99 standard. CTEs make it very easy to do things that were painfully hard before, like walking a tree or implementing a recursive algorithm over sets of data.
After my fourth year of working with SQL, I'd have been willing to say I had "significant" experience with SQL. Four years is arbitrary -- it really depends on how much you work with it day to day. Someone may have "significant" experience after only two years, while someone else may not be significantly experienced until he's worked with SQL for eight years. If you had to put a number of years on what would constitute significant experience, I'd err on the safe side and go with three or four years. Certainly not just one year.
Again - why should I have to install another little widget on my laptop or PC (which has to be MS, btw) for functionality that is technically already in the X360? Furthermore, if a change in GUI is all it takes to make you forget your using an MS product... I'm assuming that your entire network is already MS centric.
You don't. You could certainly copy all of your music to the Xbox 360 hard drive, if you really wanted to. You can also connect mp3 players and external hard drives (FAT32-formatted only) via USB and read from those. However, if you want to do the streaming thing you need something that will feed it the data. Windows Media Connect is little more than an app that feeds UPnP media devices (like the Xbox 360, or the Roku Soundbridge, or one of the many other "networked media devices out there). As such, you don't really need WMC to get your data. You just need something that will do the same thing as WMC, like Connect360 for OS X. I'd be surprised if nobody's working on (or already finished) a similar app for Linux.
How loud are your regular drives exactly? The drive in my laptop (IBM T41) is audible during spin-up, and quiets down a lot afterwards. The X360 on the other hand starts loud and stays loud - loud enough that sitting about 5 feet away from it, I have to turn up the volume on the stereo significantly to mask the drive noise. Yes, I understand that loud drives are common. But the day that a quiet gizmo will come out that does what I want it to do, the X360 will be relegated to strictly playing games that are exclusive to the X360. And that's not MS' goal.
Supposedly the new Samsung drive is quieter than the orignal Hitachi drive. You can try talking Microsoft into doing a gratis swap, or you could try to find one for sale somewhere (I'm sure the llamma will get some eventually, but who knows when or for what price?). Then again, my 360 has a Hitachi drive and the sound is not so overwhelming when it's ~10 feet away in my media center. Maybe I've just gotten used to it.
Sheesh, give some stuff that I want, and I'll finally redeem my 15000 pts card
You spent $187.50USD on Microsoft Points? Damn. Then again, it would cost you $957.38USD, or 76,590.4 Points, to purchase everything on the Marketplace (as of last month, anyway).
80 Points = $1USD, so 15,000 Points = $187.50USD. I assume you mean either 1,500 Points (purchased through the Marketplace online for $18.75USD) or a 1,600 Point card purchased for $20USD + tax from a brick and mortar store.
I did. It's called IE7. But I guess you didn't notice the part where I mentioned testing with Firefox as well.
P.S. and a decent operating system while you're at it.
Linux runs my home network, but Windows pays the bill. Therefore, I run Windows. I'm not looking to spend the money to get a Mac, so what else would you suggest?
So they haven't tested a beta browser, possibly on a beta operating system, and this is a problem? I'd say it's your browser that's the problem, it works fine in Firefox.
Beta browser, yes. Beta OS, no. I'm on XPSP2. Anyway, while IE7 is still beta, it's layout-complete. That means that barring any really major bugs, the HTML/CSS behavior you get today in Beta 2 is what you'll get when IE7 actually ships. Maybe Slashdot happened to find a major bug in IE7 layout, but I doubt it.
And I like it. It's clean, modern, and it twists the nips on all the/. luddites, which is always a plus in my book.
I like the layout as well, mostly. It does need some tweaking (mostly positioning, spacing, and a few minor color tweaks for readability), but overall it looks good. The problem is that it looks good at the expense of functionality. The site is very resource-intensive now, and a lot of the new functionality (like collapsing sections, circa 1998) is just broken (again, in IE7). It's a sad fact of life that it's easier to give criticism than praise, and I'm sorry that I jumped right into the problems without mentioning that I do like the direction it's going. However, I'm also not going to bury my head in the sand and rain down kudos when there are still problems.
Am I just hallucinating, or did slashdot just switch over to that new CSS layout like they were threatening to last week?
(Yeah, yeah, this is off-topic)
Looks like you're not hallucinating. However, it also looks like they didn't really bother testing it, either.
Loading pages spikes my IE7 process to 100% CPU for a minute or so, even on short pages like this one.
The subject and comment box I'm typing in right now extend too far to the right (or more precisely, they're not lining up on the left correctly, pushing the boxes out to the right).
A number of the collapsible arrows on the main page to hide sections and such simply don't work
Speaking of the left-hand section headers, don't click on them. If you do, you'll waste a couple minutes while Slashdot AJAXly tries to load configuration information.
The "Meta Moderated" link in the "Have you Meta Moderated recently?" block is unreadable (dark green on dark gray)
Bulleted lists in comments don't display correctly, at least in the preview. For those that can't tell, this indented section here is supposed to be a bulleted list. (This one is also broken in FF)
Interestingly enough, most of the above issues are fine in Firefox. While I realize Slashdot is Firefox-friendly and anti-Microsoft, I wouldn't be surprised if 50%+ of their traffic is still on Internet Explorer. I don't have IE6 installed on this machine so I can't veriify that the site works correctly there, but it's horribly broken with IE7. Way to go, guys.
And to take it a step further, what about the David Koresh types whose idea of raising children includes teenage sex with elders?
That would be statutory rape, and illegal. The government should intervene on the legal issue of rape, not on the issue of how the children are raised.
but what about parents hitting their kids with a belt? Spanking them?
Are you saying spanking is good or bad? Spanking is part of responsible child-rearing, and unless the kid is hospitalized or otherwise abused (spanking, and even hitting with a belt IMHO (the leather strap part, not the buckle), is not abuse) the government should stay the fuck out.
What about the mental torture involved in telling a child it will go to hell?
Now that's just weird. Does telling a kid that he will go to hell actually curb bad behavior? I'd think a good whippin' would be more effective.
Worse still, some ideas pose a danger to society. At the moment, it appears that the world may be hurtling toward a global holy war between Christianity and Islam, one that could conceivably kill every person on the planet. Is it worth allowing children to be indoctorinated to interpret the Bible literally, knowing that it likely increases the odds of that outcome?
The state doesn't get to make that decision. Religion and government should be separate. While I'm of the belief that you should raise children with an open minding, teaching them about other religions beyond your own (for example, how many Christians do you think really understand that Islam's Allah is the exact same God as the Christian god and Jewish Yahweh?), I shouldn't be allowed to force that on others. If you want to raise your kids to be good little Muslim-hating Christians, that's you're right. You're going to hell for it (see above:), but hey, that's your decision.
Now, the government can educate. They can teach parents how to parent effectively. They can teach diverse opinions in schools (if they give all religions equal coverage, then it's not government getting into religion -- it's government teaching history). They can teach people to respect those who are different from them, whether by race, religion, skin color, sexuality, or whatever. They can pass laws to punish hate crimes and then strictly enforce them. But they can't dictate morals or how you choose to raise your children.
It's become taboo to talk about things like this, and I think it's partially because it's very uncomfortable to do so. I don't like the idea of the government telling people what (or what not) to believe any more than you do. I don't want to believe that allowing people to believe the things they want is so dangerous. And I'm aware that it's just as likely that the views mandated by a government could just as easily be the wrong ones. But ignoring the problem won't make it go away.
Sadly, this kind of frank, open conversation will never happen in the media. Where it will happen is on university campuses across the nation. Keep the government out of it. Let the universities teach what they want to teach. No, that semester class on the history of Islam from its origin to today is not going to breed terrorists. People should be allowed to learn or not learn as they choose, though not learning may have dire consequences (ie, you don't learn about Islam, so you think of them as infidels. Your strict Christian background causes you to hate them, so you go out and set fire to a mosque. Now you've committed arson and a hate crime, and you'll get to enjoy the next few decades in a 75 square foot jail cell with your new roommate Bubba). If people choose to stay willfully ignorant, then that's sad but it's nothing I can or should stop.
But seriously, if anyone ever needed proof that the left/right thing in the US is a false paradigm and all the partisan stuff in the mainstream news is ridiculous, this is it.
You're just learning this now? Before there was Jack Thompson, there was Tipper Gore, Democrat, friend to the RIAA and religious right, lover of censorship, and such a bad parent that when she heard her daughter listening to music she found objectionable she went and started a fundamentalist group to try to censor music rather than actually parenting her daughter. Ronald Reagan, Republican, "economic libertarian", and thus supposedly against "big government", increased deficit spending throughout both of his terms in office, hidden behind his voodoo economics-based tax cuts (whether the tax cuts worked as intended or if the increased government spending was the catalyst for economic recovery is still a subject of debate).
There really is little difference between Democrats and Republicans. Oh, every Democrat would like to think he's more "progressive" than those stodgy Replubicans, and every Replubican would like to think he's more "responsible" than those hippy Democrats, but they're all the same damned thing. You have to go to the fringes to find something different. If you value personal freedom and minimalist government, vote Libertarian as you're not going to get that from Democrats or Republicans. If you value social assistance and community, vote Green because you're not going to get that from Democrats or Republicans, either. If you like the status quo, flip a coin and choose Democrat or Republican. You can't lose either way. If you don't like the status quo, the only solution is to vote the bums out.
WHY someone would ever want to download a movie is beyond me. They're alwasy worse quality (especially so before the DVD comes out), and plus, movie theaters (while they may charge too much for food) always have nice air conditioning, excellent sound, a huge screen, and depending on which one you go to, comfy seats.
I don't download movies, but I do rent DVDs (and occassionally buy, but that's very rare). Why do I do that rather than go to the movie theater? Well, others have covered the price angle and the sticky floor angle and the annoying viewers angle. Mine is that I have a better home setup than a theater. I should probably qualify that -- the system is better for a single person sitting 6-8 feet in front of the TV, in the "sweet spot" for the sound system. If I tried to cater to hundreds of people, of course my setup would be inferior. That doesn't matter, though, because I have a target audience of one -- me.
Oh, and it's not just me who'd rather watch movies on his home theater. As HDTV adoption grows, more and more people are choosing to skip the overpriced, uncomfortable theaters and watch the movies at home. Why do you think the DVD release delay of a movie is getting shorter and shorter? It used to be that you wouldn't find the movie on DVD for a year or more after its theatrical release. Now you can sometimes find it (legally) in as little as a month. There's even been talk of simultaneous theater/DVD/Pay-per-view movie releases.
The movie theater will, eventually, go the way of the video game arcade. Most people will watch their movies at home. A few small theaters will stay afloat playing to nostalgia or "fancy" techniques you can't easily get at home. Finally, you'll have just a few specialty theaters (IMAX) who won't be affected at all because they're not in the same game as "Hollywood" theaters. Personally, I'm okay with that.
Why pay $60 USD for one XBox 360 game when you can get two or three XBox games for the same amount?
Most people don't go to the store and randomly buy a game. They have a goal in mind, like, "I want to pick up PGR3." Depending on the game they're looking for, it may not be available on other platforms. If I'm going to the store to buy a copy of PGR3 ($40-50), I'm not going to decide to pick up a copy of Burnout 3 and NFS:U2 ($20 each) instead. Games aren't as elastic as other products. If I go to a restaurant and order a Coke, you can give me a Pepsi or any other non-Coke cola product and I won't much care. If I go to the game store and ask for a copy of Halo, I will very much care if you hand me a copy of Killzone instead.
If I was looking for a new console, I might get an XBox if backward compability is not there on XBox 360. (Not that I would pay $600+ for a console.)
First, the Xbox 360 is $400, not $600 (that's the PS3 you're thinking about), assuming you're quoting in USD. Second, I think Moore is mostly correct about backwards compatibility. The goal is to provide value for your customers during the first few months of a console's life when there are not a bunch of games out yet (and those that are out are launch titles, which generally means "not all that great"). Sony does this with backwards compatibility. Nintendo has historically done it by keeping their launch prices low and expecting you to keep the previous generation console hooked up. Microsoft did it with the 360 by providing extra functionality like demos on Marketplace, Xbox Live Arcade, and Media Center Extender functionality. Backwards compatibility with Xbox games was tacked on because Sony's made it a mandatory bullet point.
Seriously, how many PS1 games did you buy or play on your PS2 in the last three years? I think I played one (FFIX) and purchased none. And the only reason I played it on my PS2 was because it was already connected. I certainly could've dug out my PSOne and hooked it up.
It'll be a while before there are some must die for XBox 360 games.
That depends on the user. I know a lot of people who bought a 360 solely for Geometry Wars (they've since branched out, but that was their killer app). Yes, a $5 game sold them on a $400 console. Personally, PGR3 and Geometry Wars was enough to get me to buy. Oblivion and Fight Night Round 3 were worth purchasing, but I'm really looking forward to Forza 2 at the end of this year. If you're a Halo fanboy, you probably won't buy a 360 until late next year.
I think you mean Halo 3. Nope, FPS bore me to death. Too much time in the Army, I guess. More interested in the Wii controller feedback with speaker aspect for better realism. Black not too bad though.
No, I meant Halo 2. As in, the PC port of Halo 2 will only run on Vista. That's also why I said I agree with you (I played through Halo 2 a year and a half ago; I see no reason why I should buy it again on PC).
1. excessive screen transition/visual chrome - don't need to waste precious resources on that.
So turn it off. You have the choice of Aero Glass (the fancy stuff you don't like, assuming your PC can even handle it), Aero (basically XP's visual style engine with a different default style), and two modes of Classic (one defaulting to win2k/xp classic colors, one defaulting to win98 colors -- I assume they're otherwise the same and you can change your color scheme as you've been able to do since win95).
2. no killer app - already use OpenOffice at home and use MySQL at work.
Halo 2? Okay, I'll agree with this one, but then OS upgrades usually don't happen for "killer apps". They happen because you bought a new computer and you got the OS for "free".
3. price moolah bucks cash - when my laptop cost $500 and a PC costs $250, spending an extra $250+ for Win Vista seems just as insane as shelling out $600 for a PS3 when I can buy a Wii and a PC for that much.
Comparing Wii + PC to PS3 isn't really fair, as any PC you can buy for $350 (assuming the Wii will be $250) is going to suck for gaming. It's probably more fair to say you could buy a Wii and an Xbox 360 instead of a PS3. Aside from that, your pricing is a little off. If you're upgrading an existing PC to Vista, why not buy the upgrade (usually $90-100)? If you're buying a new PC or laptop, the "Microsoft Tax" is only around $40 (OEM volume pricing). If you're building a new PC, why wouldn't you buy an OEM copy for around the same price as an upgrade? Yes, you can't just go out to one of the big box stores and pick up an OEM copy of Windows (maybe you can do so at Fry's?), but there are many legitimate places online where you can get an OEM copy of Windows when you purchase some piece of hardware (usually bundled with a mobo, cpu, or hard drive, which is all stuff you'll need to buy anyway if you're building a PC).
You can't mix and match code within a project, although you can use vb/net libraries fine within c# programs and vice versa.
Said more correctly, you can't mix and match code within an assembly (generic term for "a compiled chunk of code", which could be a library (dll), an executable (exe), or even a separate sandbox within another assembly (.NET's XML serializer generates an assembly on the fly to serialize or deserialize XML, for example)). A "project" in Visual Studio compiles to a single assembly, either dll or exe, while a "solution" (which most people would think of as a "project") encompasses one or more "projects". Each "project" in your solution can be written in whichever language you like (MC++^WC++/CLI, C#, VB.NET, J#, F#, JScript.NET, IronPython, etc). The caveat is that your code must conform to the Common Language Specification (CLS) which is essentially a subset of language features that all.NET languages must implement. Languages are allowed to implement more features than those defined by CLS, but should not implement less. This does provide for some pretty arbitrary restrictions (no unsigned types), and some inclusions that may mean extensions to a language (like method overloading, which didn't exist in VB6). You can usually do what you want without worrying about CLS compliance, but every now and then you will get caught up in an issue where what you want to do in one language won't be accessible by another.
Do the.Net languages allow a decent functional "Mix 'n Match" capability? If so, I'd make sure the VB rewrite was in VB.Net (or are there VB.Net idiosyncrasies that would justify sticking with the old VB6?) and then I'd learn C# really well. At some point in the project some component might fall under the "this will really suck under VB, and we can tackle it much better by writing this piece in C#" which will let you get a toe-hold on the idea of using a better language.
.NET languages are all pretty much interoperable, so long as you make sure to build your assembly as CLSCompliant (which may limit usage of some language features). The main problem is that VB.NET is quite a bit different from VB6. For someone who's only ever done VB code, it's easier to learn VB.NET than C#, but for everybody else you may as well start directly with C#. In the past, I'd have advocated building your UI with VB and calling C++ COM objects for any heavy lifting. Now, I'd recommend you go C# and do everything there.
As for the tasks VB are not suited for (again, I only know VB6, not VB.Net) the biggest glaring omission in my experience was the lack of decent Regular Expressions, or Hash Tables / "Dictionaries"--unless you link to the VBScript/IE6 library like everyone used to. On the other hand, there are IMOHO problems with languages like Perl that make them bad for a number of solutions, but that hasn't stopped nutty fanatics from treating them like "golden hammers".
You get regular expressions and collections with.NET (though not as many different collections as in Java, unless you bring in the J# assemblies for your project). You also get generics, anonymous methods (anonymous delegates, lambda functions, closures, whatever you want to call them), and quite a bit more cool stuff, though I have no idea how well that's exposed through the VB.NET language. Even cooler than that, you could subversively write modules in a functional language like F# (a dialect of ML) and nobody'd know the difference from their VB.NET or C# environments. (yeah, you can do that with Java as well.)
For reasons that you've stated, I whole heartedly feel that Sony will have a successful launch purely because of their fanatical customer base. There are people willing to pay $999 for a CPU in their computer, and there are people willing to pay $600+ for a GPU. Why wouldn't Sony find a few million customers willing to shell out for the next version of their hardware? There is a market of consumers paying extra to watch TV shows in high definition. They want to see their movies in HD as well. To these people, the system is worth it, even if the price of games is increased.
I don't think your comparisons are apt. Keep in mind, Sony's expecting to sell 6 million consoles in their first 6 months (or was it the first three months? I don't remember what Kutaragi predicted). The market for $999 CPUs in the non-business market is maybe a few tens of thousands. Same goes for the market for $600 GPUs. The market of people willing to pay more for HD movies would rather buy an HD-DVD player for $500 (Toshiba's cheaper player is selling much better than their more expensive one) or even shell out $1000 for a Blu-Ray player rather than buy a dual-purpose machine like the PS3 (the people willing to do that will not compromise on quality, and multi-purpose machines are always a compromise). Even then, those people still number maybe in the tens of thousands. I have no doubt Sony will sell their first million very quickly. I also expect to see tens of thousands on ebay at exorbitant prices (by most counts, there were only 40,000 Xbox 360s sold through ebay at greater than market price). There's no way their fanatically loyal fan base will hold up their 6 million projection, especially given the way Kutaragi's treated them lately.
Where I expect the market to cool for Sony is 3 months after launch, after the fanatical customers have taken the systems home. After the excitement is gone, and when the realism sets in. Where prices start to matter. And people take things into account such as the idea that it doesn't offer better games, only better looking.
I agree, but I don't think you're going to see Sony getting anywhere near their sales projections. They'll spin, publish "shipped consoles" numbers as if they're sales ("We shipped 6 million consoles in the first three months," without saying that 5 million of those are still setting on store shelves or in warehouses), but the truth will come out. And that's assuming they can even get 6 million consoles on the market. Microsoft had difficulties with manufacturing the 360, which is a very simple machine in comparison to the PS3 (less complex CPU, older tech optical drive). If the rumors of 20-30% yields for Cell wafers are true, Sony may be lucky to get even 1 million PS3s on store shelves in the first 3 months.
A Ferrari 911? Did Ferrari buy Porsche and not tell anyone?:)
Great and lots of programmers (oh yeah sure, just 'buy the engine', don't give me that)
Why not go buy an engine? Get one or two good programmers, get a cheap engine from someone like Garage Games, and focus on your real assets. The market is going more and more towards splitting into "engine developers" and "game developers". Id rarely even builds games anymore, preferring to focus on their engine creation (they work with third parties like Grey Matter or Raven to build games like Enemy Territories and Quake IV). Epic focuses on building the Unreal technology while letting 2nd and 3rd parties like Digital Illusions and Ubisoft build games around them. There's nothing wrong with licensing technology, and you're probably better off for doing so (you can get more and better technology than what you would be able to develop while trying to make a game to make money at the same time).
Great script
Great gameplay (so difficult to pinpoint and define, isn't it?)
I would argue these are the same thing. If your gameplay is RPG-style, you need an excellent script. If your gameplay is something like Katamari, script doesn't really matter much.
Great music and sound effects
This really depends on your gameplay. One guy with a mic and the willingness to make stupid sounds with his mouth will get you all of the sound effects you need. Music is harder, and yet easier at the same time. Depending on your game, you may not even need music (I'd rather listen to the sound of the engine in a racing game) or you could allow the player to provide the music. Other games need good music, but that shouldn't be too hard to come by. There are starving musicians everywhere. You just need to find them. Put up posters around the local college campus. Troll the boards online at places like Song Fight or Overclocked Remix. For a minor outlay of cash ($500-$1000 is probably more than enough in most cases), you can get some pretty excellent music for your game.
Great voice actors
I'd really recommend indie developers stay away from voice acting. Nintendo rarely uses it, and everybody loves their games (in fact, when they do use voice acting it's usually annoying. Hey! Listen!). Skip the expense by skipping the voice actors. Of course, you could do it in a humorous way and use your developers as the actors. Don't do this if you're going for "serious"!
Great characters (Deus Ex)
Again, this goes back to script/gameplay. You may not need characters at all if you're building a puzzle game. If you can't come up with great characters while writing your script or designing your gameplay, then you failed on the script or gameplay.
Great graphics (these days... sigh)
Then why does everybody here always say they prefer gameplay to graphics? You really have to think about your target. You're probably not going to be able to compete with the big boys in terms of graphics goo-gawgery, so don't try. You'll need something better than developer art, but not by much.
Multiplayer functionality
Depends on your game. Stardock consciously decided against multiplayer for GalCiv2 and that game is doing very well.
$600 isn't so expensive for first adopters. And don't forget that to play with a XBOX 360 you need a new $1200 TV. So you are spending $1600, but if you buy a PlayStation 3 you are spending $1800. It's so different?
When first adopters are accustomed to spending $300 for a console launch (later adopters get it at the $150-$200 price point), $600 is quite a lot. Double, in fact. As for the price of a TV,
You don't need it. Oh, sure, you won't get to enjoy the "next-generation high definition graphics" as much, but the games will still be quite playable on an old SDTV.
Even if you did need it, you wouldn't need more than 720p or 1080i for the Xbox 360 (which is available for as little as $500, depending on brand, size, and technology of the TV you want to buy). For the PS3, you'll want a 1080p set, so consider that'll be at least $2500, if not much more. $400 + $500 = $900 for a 360 with a TV. $600 + $2500 = $3100 for a PS3 with a TV.
Then again, most early adopters will already have an HDTV, so they're not factoring that price into the equation. A $200 difference is a lot when you're comparing $400 to $600.
If you want to play XBOX 360 without HD, you can buy a XBOX or a PlayStation 2 at a lower price per hardware and per game.
Not necessarily true. Aside from the fact that there are games on 360 that you simply can't play on Xbox or PS2 (like Oblivion or PGR3), just because you don't have HD doesn't mean you won't benefit from the newer system's extra horsepower. More actors on screen, more particle effects, better physics and AI, better frame rates (especially imporant in racing games -- PGR3 on 360 at 60fps is much smoother than Forza on Xbox at 30fps), etc. Sure, you don't get the benefit of higher resolution textures, and you may have to sacrifice some vertical resolution for letterboxing, but outside of first-person shooters where pixel-level accuracy counts you're not going to miss it all that much.
In theory I'm not going to buy the PS3, and neither will billions of other humans because of the price.
Don't you mean "in practice"? In theory, you and everybody else will buy a PS3 because it's a PS3 and you love Sony (damn, that Kutaragi knows everything). In practice, you're tired of getting poked in the butt by Sony and you really don't want to go get a second job just to afford a PS3, so you're not buying one. In theory, you'll buy a PS3 even if there are no games for it, because you're just that loyal. In practice, most of the games on the PS3 (aside from Gran Turismo: not quite HD and Metal Gear Suicide) will be on the 360 as well, and you're not quite sure that historical japanese warriors had to fight giant crabs. In theory, Riiiiidge Racer emulation of PS1 games would be the killer app to make you buy a PSP. In practice, the handheld is poorly designed with bad battery life, has no really good games (and what good games it does have, like GTA: Libery City Stories, will make their way back to the real consoles anyway), is ruled by an iron hand to prevent homebrew software (you have a choice -- either run homebrew or run real games, but not both), and UMD is a dead format for movies.
In theory, Sony's already won this round of the console wars, and probably the next two or three generations as well. In practice, Sony's minus one foot and taking careful aim at the one that's left. They'll be lucky if the PS3 gets even a lukewarm reception on launch, as the more likely scenario is a major crash and burn. The customer goodwill they're apparently trying to trade on has been gone for some time now, and they don't even know it.
I picked a Motorola V180 for the following features:... It seems to be as good a flip phone as you can get without having a camera.
Meh. I'm still happy with my 5 year old Motorola V60i. Monochrome screen, great battery life, small screen on the outside (shows me who's calling, or the current time), so cheap you'll probably not even be able to get it from your provider, no camera. It's also a tri-band GSM phone, which means you'll be able to use it just about anywhere in the world.
I could go even more basic, as the v60i does have some games and internet stuff (which I don't use, and you won't even know it's there if you don't scroll most of the way down the menu), but then you're into non-flip phone territory. My battery's going to give out soon (5 years on the same battery is pretty damned good), but I'm going to just replace the battery and not the phone. In fact, the only way I will ever upgrade to a different phone is if this one physically stops working and I can no longer get another v60i (unlikely, given ebay), or all wireless providers switch to some new technology that prevents a tri-band GSM phone from working.
You are correct that they are adults (legally able to sign a contract). They are also teenagers.
I don't know if the OP meant it this way, but I took it as a comment on how US society (or at least the media) tries to excuse behavior. Legally, at 18 you're an adult. The term "teen", while technically referring to someone between the ages of 13 and 19, tends to imply "child". So, are you still a child at age 18? What about at age 25? As an example, the local news continually referred to both the shooter and victims of the recent rave killing here in Seattle as "kids". The shooter was 28. Some of his victims were 21, 22, 26, and 32. Are those "kids"?
Maybe it's a sign of our aging baby boomer population, who see anybody younger than them as kids. Maybe it's because of our economic climate that keeps "kids" in university until 25 or 26 (and then only graduating with a Bachelor's degree, not even a Master's or better). Maybe it's our "take no responsibility" society that wants to blame anything but the person (thus the person is a "kid" who didn't know any better, rather than an adult). Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it.
You eigther have better traffic law firms or pay a lot for better lawyers
Maybee not exactly that, but invariably you wind up paying the court twice as much for a non-moving violation and your lawyers about a hundred bucks.
There you go. I do pay more for a lawyer. The attorney I use charges $250-$300 per ticket (it's been a while, so I don't know if her fees have increased), but she has a 5+ year winning streak (she's so good that several local municipalities have enacted laws specifically to counter-act her). I pay my attorney $300, and then walk away. Anywhere from a week to two years later, she sends me a letter in the mail saying that the issue has been successfully resolved and that it was a pleasure working with me. Traffic tickets here trend rather high, averaging $100 or so per "trivial" ticket. Court fees aren't much cheaper, so unless I want to just pay the ticket I can expect to be out ~$200 fighting it on my own (because if I fight it on my own, I expect to lose). $300 for an attorney is not a bad deal when you look at it that way, especially since I don't pay anything to the court (well, unless I lose, but my attorney's never lost for me yet).
once the prosecutor failed to return after the lunch break.
If you go to court for a trial the officer often doesn't show (if you 'apeal' the odds of him showing up for both is pretty low in my limited experience) and this gets the case tossed.
Maybe the cops are different where you live, but I've never felt comfortable enough to bet on the officer not showing (cops are paid to go to court. It's a nice, easy day off the street. Why wouldn't they go?). I hire lawyers because I don't know all of the legal proceedings and it's not worth my time to learn. I do know that my lawyers never use "hope the officer doesn't show" as their only legal tactic (or a legal tactic at all -- judges are all too likely to grant a prosecutor's continuance request to allow the officer time to show up). They file for discovery, attack the accuracy of the measurement system (radar: has the officer religiously followed the maintenance schedule? pacing: when was the car's speedometer last calibrated? When was the officer last through training? laser: Was the officer stationary? What's his sharp-shooter rating?), and find all of the little loopholes and tricks that a lay person will never know existed. It's worth the money for a lawyer for what is essentially a guaranteed victory regardless of the traffic infraction (I'm talking stuff like tickets, here, not DUI or at-fault accidents). Just the simple fact that I don't have to be at the courthouse in person is worth the price of the lawyer, because I'll make up the cost by not losing hours of productivity.
If you can't prove the officer's allegation wrong (and that's flat out prove, not put a lot of doubt on it) on any ticket the judge just rules against you.
See, the flaw in your logic is that traffic infractions are a "special case" -- they're income. As such, the system has every incentive to make it difficult for you to prove your innocence, and since the penalties for you are "light" (maybe an increase in insurance, beyond the ticket price you'll pay) they're not so concerned about innocent or guilty. If you really care, do what I do. Find yourself the best traffic attorney in your area and hire them for any ticket. It doesn't matter how small, or what insurance increase I may or may not be looking at, or even if the ticket price plus the premium increase is less than the lawyer's fees. I will hire the attorney and the attorney will get the charge cleared. Sure, I may spend more, but at least that money doesn't go to the government (directly, anyway -- the attorney still has to pay his taxes of course). It's not a matter of right and wrong. It's a matter of principle. If the government can't run on the tax dollars they're already getting from me (property and sales here, as there's no state income tax), then they'll just have to tighten their belts. If everyone fought their tickets, there'd no longer be an incentive to use them for income and we might actually see some sane traffic laws and enforcement (proper 85th percentile speed limits, true elimination of quotas, enforcement of more egregious behavior like lane discipline violations, etc).
Good thing I only get a ticket every couple of years, or I'd go bankrupt on principle:)
I was always in favour of an idea that a judge who finally signs on a punishment for a person who is later found innocent would have to have to endure the same punishment him/herself... Would decrease the number of death sentences drastically, do not you think?
Judges generally have nothing to do with death penalties. Prosecutors get to ask for it (if the case warrants and the jurisdiction allows) and juries get to hand it out. The judge has some discretion to decide if the jury is completely off-base, but he's not going to decide for the death penalty if a jury decided against it. Like the government, the judicial system is set up with checks and balances on power so a single person can't be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.
I guess if the defendant opted for a bench trial rather than a jury trial the judge would get to decide, but nobody's stupid enough to choose a bench trial in something as important as a murder trial (I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if a bench trial is even an option in a felony case like murder).
but if justice does not prevail, I'd consider that "harm" to society as a whole
But what is justice? In the legal system, it's being able to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty. The state has the burden, and they must do so using only legal methods (thus many cases won on technicalities like an illegal search). It sounds like the system is set up in favor of the criminal, but that's not the case. It's set up in such a way that a false-negative is much more likely than a false-positive. In a country that (supposedly) values freedom, it's more important to let a guilty man go free than to wrongfully convict an innocent. Maybe you think that's wrong, but those are the ideals that drive our justice system.
Although I'm sure that will change as we give up more and more freedom in exchange for "security". Before you know it, we'll be back to "guilty until proven innocent". (as if we're not there already. How many of you think OJ killed his wife? But he was never proven guilty, thus he must be innocent under "innocent until proven guilty".)
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Perhaps that's what's wrong with database development these days (just check out The Daily WTF, as it seems they have a SQL example every other day). When a single year of experience is considered "significant" and "experienced", it's no wonder there are so many crap DBAs out there. We look for people with 5+ years of C# experience (ha! Good luck finding someone with more than 5 years experience ...) for intermediate-level developer positions. There's no way someone with only a year of SQL experience would qualify for an intermediate-level DBA position.
Just as background, I've been doing development on SQL Server for 6 years now (from SQL 7 to SQL 2005). I'm still learning, still finding ways to improve my code's cleanliness and performance, still finding new things I can do in SQL. For example, SQL 2005 finally has CTEs, making it only the second database to implement that ANSI SQL99 standard. CTEs make it very easy to do things that were painfully hard before, like walking a tree or implementing a recursive algorithm over sets of data.
After my fourth year of working with SQL, I'd have been willing to say I had "significant" experience with SQL. Four years is arbitrary -- it really depends on how much you work with it day to day. Someone may have "significant" experience after only two years, while someone else may not be significantly experienced until he's worked with SQL for eight years. If you had to put a number of years on what would constitute significant experience, I'd err on the safe side and go with three or four years. Certainly not just one year.
You don't. You could certainly copy all of your music to the Xbox 360 hard drive, if you really wanted to. You can also connect mp3 players and external hard drives (FAT32-formatted only) via USB and read from those. However, if you want to do the streaming thing you need something that will feed it the data. Windows Media Connect is little more than an app that feeds UPnP media devices (like the Xbox 360, or the Roku Soundbridge, or one of the many other "networked media devices out there). As such, you don't really need WMC to get your data. You just need something that will do the same thing as WMC, like Connect360 for OS X. I'd be surprised if nobody's working on (or already finished) a similar app for Linux.
Supposedly the new Samsung drive is quieter than the orignal Hitachi drive. You can try talking Microsoft into doing a gratis swap, or you could try to find one for sale somewhere (I'm sure the llamma will get some eventually, but who knows when or for what price?). Then again, my 360 has a Hitachi drive and the sound is not so overwhelming when it's ~10 feet away in my media center. Maybe I've just gotten used to it.
You spent $187.50USD on Microsoft Points? Damn. Then again, it would cost you $957.38USD, or 76,590.4 Points, to purchase everything on the Marketplace (as of last month, anyway).
80 Points = $1USD, so 15,000 Points = $187.50USD. I assume you mean either 1,500 Points (purchased through the Marketplace online for $18.75USD) or a 1,600 Point card purchased for $20USD + tax from a brick and mortar store.
I did. It's called IE7. But I guess you didn't notice the part where I mentioned testing with Firefox as well.
Linux runs my home network, but Windows pays the bill. Therefore, I run Windows. I'm not looking to spend the money to get a Mac, so what else would you suggest?
Beta browser, yes. Beta OS, no. I'm on XPSP2. Anyway, while IE7 is still beta, it's layout-complete. That means that barring any really major bugs, the HTML/CSS behavior you get today in Beta 2 is what you'll get when IE7 actually ships. Maybe Slashdot happened to find a major bug in IE7 layout, but I doubt it.
I like the layout as well, mostly. It does need some tweaking (mostly positioning, spacing, and a few minor color tweaks for readability), but overall it looks good. The problem is that it looks good at the expense of functionality. The site is very resource-intensive now, and a lot of the new functionality (like collapsing sections, circa 1998) is just broken (again, in IE7). It's a sad fact of life that it's easier to give criticism than praise, and I'm sorry that I jumped right into the problems without mentioning that I do like the direction it's going. However, I'm also not going to bury my head in the sand and rain down kudos when there are still problems.
(Yeah, yeah, this is off-topic)
Looks like you're not hallucinating. However, it also looks like they didn't really bother testing it, either.
- Loading pages spikes my IE7 process to 100% CPU for a minute or so, even on short pages like this one.
- The subject and comment box I'm typing in right now extend too far to the right (or more precisely, they're not lining up on the left correctly, pushing the boxes out to the right).
- A number of the collapsible arrows on the main page to hide sections and such simply don't work
- Speaking of the left-hand section headers, don't click on them. If you do, you'll waste a couple minutes while Slashdot AJAXly tries to load configuration information.
- The "Meta Moderated" link in the "Have you Meta Moderated recently?" block is unreadable (dark green on dark gray)
- Bulleted lists in comments don't display correctly, at least in the preview. For those that can't tell, this indented section here is supposed to be a bulleted list. (This one is also broken in FF)
Interestingly enough, most of the above issues are fine in Firefox. While I realize Slashdot is Firefox-friendly and anti-Microsoft, I wouldn't be surprised if 50%+ of their traffic is still on Internet Explorer. I don't have IE6 installed on this machine so I can't veriify that the site works correctly there, but it's horribly broken with IE7. Way to go, guys.That would be statutory rape, and illegal. The government should intervene on the legal issue of rape, not on the issue of how the children are raised.
Are you saying spanking is good or bad? Spanking is part of responsible child-rearing, and unless the kid is hospitalized or otherwise abused (spanking, and even hitting with a belt IMHO (the leather strap part, not the buckle), is not abuse) the government should stay the fuck out.
Now that's just weird. Does telling a kid that he will go to hell actually curb bad behavior? I'd think a good whippin' would be more effective.
The state doesn't get to make that decision. Religion and government should be separate. While I'm of the belief that you should raise children with an open minding, teaching them about other religions beyond your own (for example, how many Christians do you think really understand that Islam's Allah is the exact same God as the Christian god and Jewish Yahweh?), I shouldn't be allowed to force that on others. If you want to raise your kids to be good little Muslim-hating Christians, that's you're right. You're going to hell for it (see above :), but hey, that's your decision.
Now, the government can educate. They can teach parents how to parent effectively. They can teach diverse opinions in schools (if they give all religions equal coverage, then it's not government getting into religion -- it's government teaching history). They can teach people to respect those who are different from them, whether by race, religion, skin color, sexuality, or whatever. They can pass laws to punish hate crimes and then strictly enforce them. But they can't dictate morals or how you choose to raise your children.
Sadly, this kind of frank, open conversation will never happen in the media. Where it will happen is on university campuses across the nation. Keep the government out of it. Let the universities teach what they want to teach. No, that semester class on the history of Islam from its origin to today is not going to breed terrorists. People should be allowed to learn or not learn as they choose, though not learning may have dire consequences (ie, you don't learn about Islam, so you think of them as infidels. Your strict Christian background causes you to hate them, so you go out and set fire to a mosque. Now you've committed arson and a hate crime, and you'll get to enjoy the next few decades in a 75 square foot jail cell with your new roommate Bubba). If people choose to stay willfully ignorant, then that's sad but it's nothing I can or should stop.
You're just learning this now? Before there was Jack Thompson, there was Tipper Gore, Democrat, friend to the RIAA and religious right, lover of censorship, and such a bad parent that when she heard her daughter listening to music she found objectionable she went and started a fundamentalist group to try to censor music rather than actually parenting her daughter. Ronald Reagan, Republican, "economic libertarian", and thus supposedly against "big government", increased deficit spending throughout both of his terms in office, hidden behind his voodoo economics-based tax cuts (whether the tax cuts worked as intended or if the increased government spending was the catalyst for economic recovery is still a subject of debate).
There really is little difference between Democrats and Republicans. Oh, every Democrat would like to think he's more "progressive" than those stodgy Replubicans, and every Replubican would like to think he's more "responsible" than those hippy Democrats, but they're all the same damned thing. You have to go to the fringes to find something different. If you value personal freedom and minimalist government, vote Libertarian as you're not going to get that from Democrats or Republicans. If you value social assistance and community, vote Green because you're not going to get that from Democrats or Republicans, either. If you like the status quo, flip a coin and choose Democrat or Republican. You can't lose either way. If you don't like the status quo, the only solution is to vote the bums out.
I don't download movies, but I do rent DVDs (and occassionally buy, but that's very rare). Why do I do that rather than go to the movie theater? Well, others have covered the price angle and the sticky floor angle and the annoying viewers angle. Mine is that I have a better home setup than a theater. I should probably qualify that -- the system is better for a single person sitting 6-8 feet in front of the TV, in the "sweet spot" for the sound system. If I tried to cater to hundreds of people, of course my setup would be inferior. That doesn't matter, though, because I have a target audience of one -- me.
Oh, and it's not just me who'd rather watch movies on his home theater. As HDTV adoption grows, more and more people are choosing to skip the overpriced, uncomfortable theaters and watch the movies at home. Why do you think the DVD release delay of a movie is getting shorter and shorter? It used to be that you wouldn't find the movie on DVD for a year or more after its theatrical release. Now you can sometimes find it (legally) in as little as a month. There's even been talk of simultaneous theater/DVD/Pay-per-view movie releases.
The movie theater will, eventually, go the way of the video game arcade. Most people will watch their movies at home. A few small theaters will stay afloat playing to nostalgia or "fancy" techniques you can't easily get at home. Finally, you'll have just a few specialty theaters (IMAX) who won't be affected at all because they're not in the same game as "Hollywood" theaters. Personally, I'm okay with that.
Most people don't go to the store and randomly buy a game. They have a goal in mind, like, "I want to pick up PGR3." Depending on the game they're looking for, it may not be available on other platforms. If I'm going to the store to buy a copy of PGR3 ($40-50), I'm not going to decide to pick up a copy of Burnout 3 and NFS:U2 ($20 each) instead. Games aren't as elastic as other products. If I go to a restaurant and order a Coke, you can give me a Pepsi or any other non-Coke cola product and I won't much care. If I go to the game store and ask for a copy of Halo, I will very much care if you hand me a copy of Killzone instead.
First, the Xbox 360 is $400, not $600 (that's the PS3 you're thinking about), assuming you're quoting in USD. Second, I think Moore is mostly correct about backwards compatibility. The goal is to provide value for your customers during the first few months of a console's life when there are not a bunch of games out yet (and those that are out are launch titles, which generally means "not all that great"). Sony does this with backwards compatibility. Nintendo has historically done it by keeping their launch prices low and expecting you to keep the previous generation console hooked up. Microsoft did it with the 360 by providing extra functionality like demos on Marketplace, Xbox Live Arcade, and Media Center Extender functionality. Backwards compatibility with Xbox games was tacked on because Sony's made it a mandatory bullet point.
Seriously, how many PS1 games did you buy or play on your PS2 in the last three years? I think I played one (FFIX) and purchased none. And the only reason I played it on my PS2 was because it was already connected. I certainly could've dug out my PSOne and hooked it up.
That depends on the user. I know a lot of people who bought a 360 solely for Geometry Wars (they've since branched out, but that was their killer app). Yes, a $5 game sold them on a $400 console. Personally, PGR3 and Geometry Wars was enough to get me to buy. Oblivion and Fight Night Round 3 were worth purchasing, but I'm really looking forward to Forza 2 at the end of this year. If you're a Halo fanboy, you probably won't buy a 360 until late next year.
No, I meant Halo 2. As in, the PC port of Halo 2 will only run on Vista. That's also why I said I agree with you (I played through Halo 2 a year and a half ago; I see no reason why I should buy it again on PC).
So turn it off. You have the choice of Aero Glass (the fancy stuff you don't like, assuming your PC can even handle it), Aero (basically XP's visual style engine with a different default style), and two modes of Classic (one defaulting to win2k/xp classic colors, one defaulting to win98 colors -- I assume they're otherwise the same and you can change your color scheme as you've been able to do since win95).
Halo 2? Okay, I'll agree with this one, but then OS upgrades usually don't happen for "killer apps". They happen because you bought a new computer and you got the OS for "free".
Comparing Wii + PC to PS3 isn't really fair, as any PC you can buy for $350 (assuming the Wii will be $250) is going to suck for gaming. It's probably more fair to say you could buy a Wii and an Xbox 360 instead of a PS3. Aside from that, your pricing is a little off. If you're upgrading an existing PC to Vista, why not buy the upgrade (usually $90-100)? If you're buying a new PC or laptop, the "Microsoft Tax" is only around $40 (OEM volume pricing). If you're building a new PC, why wouldn't you buy an OEM copy for around the same price as an upgrade? Yes, you can't just go out to one of the big box stores and pick up an OEM copy of Windows (maybe you can do so at Fry's?), but there are many legitimate places online where you can get an OEM copy of Windows when you purchase some piece of hardware (usually bundled with a mobo, cpu, or hard drive, which is all stuff you'll need to buy anyway if you're building a PC).
Said more correctly, you can't mix and match code within an assembly (generic term for "a compiled chunk of code", which could be a library (dll), an executable (exe), or even a separate sandbox within another assembly (.NET's XML serializer generates an assembly on the fly to serialize or deserialize XML, for example)). A "project" in Visual Studio compiles to a single assembly, either dll or exe, while a "solution" (which most people would think of as a "project") encompasses one or more "projects". Each "project" in your solution can be written in whichever language you like (MC++^WC++/CLI, C#, VB.NET, J#, F#, JScript.NET, IronPython, etc). The caveat is that your code must conform to the Common Language Specification (CLS) which is essentially a subset of language features that all .NET languages must implement. Languages are allowed to implement more features than those defined by CLS, but should not implement less. This does provide for some pretty arbitrary restrictions (no unsigned types), and some inclusions that may mean extensions to a language (like method overloading, which didn't exist in VB6). You can usually do what you want without worrying about CLS compliance, but every now and then you will get caught up in an issue where what you want to do in one language won't be accessible by another.
.NET languages are all pretty much interoperable, so long as you make sure to build your assembly as CLSCompliant (which may limit usage of some language features). The main problem is that VB.NET is quite a bit different from VB6. For someone who's only ever done VB code, it's easier to learn VB.NET than C#, but for everybody else you may as well start directly with C#. In the past, I'd have advocated building your UI with VB and calling C++ COM objects for any heavy lifting. Now, I'd recommend you go C# and do everything there.
You get regular expressions and collections with .NET (though not as many different collections as in Java, unless you bring in the J# assemblies for your project). You also get generics, anonymous methods (anonymous delegates, lambda functions, closures, whatever you want to call them), and quite a bit more cool stuff, though I have no idea how well that's exposed through the VB.NET language. Even cooler than that, you could subversively write modules in a functional language like F# (a dialect of ML) and nobody'd know the difference from their VB.NET or C# environments. (yeah, you can do that with Java as well.)
I don't think your comparisons are apt. Keep in mind, Sony's expecting to sell 6 million consoles in their first 6 months (or was it the first three months? I don't remember what Kutaragi predicted). The market for $999 CPUs in the non-business market is maybe a few tens of thousands. Same goes for the market for $600 GPUs. The market of people willing to pay more for HD movies would rather buy an HD-DVD player for $500 (Toshiba's cheaper player is selling much better than their more expensive one) or even shell out $1000 for a Blu-Ray player rather than buy a dual-purpose machine like the PS3 (the people willing to do that will not compromise on quality, and multi-purpose machines are always a compromise). Even then, those people still number maybe in the tens of thousands. I have no doubt Sony will sell their first million very quickly. I also expect to see tens of thousands on ebay at exorbitant prices (by most counts, there were only 40,000 Xbox 360s sold through ebay at greater than market price). There's no way their fanatically loyal fan base will hold up their 6 million projection, especially given the way Kutaragi's treated them lately.
I agree, but I don't think you're going to see Sony getting anywhere near their sales projections. They'll spin, publish "shipped consoles" numbers as if they're sales ("We shipped 6 million consoles in the first three months," without saying that 5 million of those are still setting on store shelves or in warehouses), but the truth will come out. And that's assuming they can even get 6 million consoles on the market. Microsoft had difficulties with manufacturing the 360, which is a very simple machine in comparison to the PS3 (less complex CPU, older tech optical drive). If the rumors of 20-30% yields for Cell wafers are true, Sony may be lucky to get even 1 million PS3s on store shelves in the first 3 months.
A Ferrari 911? Did Ferrari buy Porsche and not tell anyone? :)
Why not go buy an engine? Get one or two good programmers, get a cheap engine from someone like Garage Games, and focus on your real assets. The market is going more and more towards splitting into "engine developers" and "game developers". Id rarely even builds games anymore, preferring to focus on their engine creation (they work with third parties like Grey Matter or Raven to build games like Enemy Territories and Quake IV). Epic focuses on building the Unreal technology while letting 2nd and 3rd parties like Digital Illusions and Ubisoft build games around them. There's nothing wrong with licensing technology, and you're probably better off for doing so (you can get more and better technology than what you would be able to develop while trying to make a game to make money at the same time).
I would argue these are the same thing. If your gameplay is RPG-style, you need an excellent script. If your gameplay is something like Katamari, script doesn't really matter much.
This really depends on your gameplay. One guy with a mic and the willingness to make stupid sounds with his mouth will get you all of the sound effects you need. Music is harder, and yet easier at the same time. Depending on your game, you may not even need music (I'd rather listen to the sound of the engine in a racing game) or you could allow the player to provide the music. Other games need good music, but that shouldn't be too hard to come by. There are starving musicians everywhere. You just need to find them. Put up posters around the local college campus. Troll the boards online at places like Song Fight or Overclocked Remix. For a minor outlay of cash ($500-$1000 is probably more than enough in most cases), you can get some pretty excellent music for your game.
I'd really recommend indie developers stay away from voice acting. Nintendo rarely uses it, and everybody loves their games (in fact, when they do use voice acting it's usually annoying. Hey! Listen!). Skip the expense by skipping the voice actors. Of course, you could do it in a humorous way and use your developers as the actors. Don't do this if you're going for "serious"!
Again, this goes back to script/gameplay. You may not need characters at all if you're building a puzzle game. If you can't come up with great characters while writing your script or designing your gameplay, then you failed on the script or gameplay.
Then why does everybody here always say they prefer gameplay to graphics? You really have to think about your target. You're probably not going to be able to compete with the big boys in terms of graphics goo-gawgery, so don't try. You'll need something better than developer art, but not by much.
Depends on your game. Stardock consciously decided against multiplayer for GalCiv2 and that game is doing very well.
The central theme I've noticed in my replies
When first adopters are accustomed to spending $300 for a console launch (later adopters get it at the $150-$200 price point), $600 is quite a lot. Double, in fact. As for the price of a TV,
Then again, most early adopters will already have an HDTV, so they're not factoring that price into the equation. A $200 difference is a lot when you're comparing $400 to $600.
Not necessarily true. Aside from the fact that there are games on 360 that you simply can't play on Xbox or PS2 (like Oblivion or PGR3), just because you don't have HD doesn't mean you won't benefit from the newer system's extra horsepower. More actors on screen, more particle effects, better physics and AI, better frame rates (especially imporant in racing games -- PGR3 on 360 at 60fps is much smoother than Forza on Xbox at 30fps), etc. Sure, you don't get the benefit of higher resolution textures, and you may have to sacrifice some vertical resolution for letterboxing, but outside of first-person shooters where pixel-level accuracy counts you're not going to miss it all that much.
Don't you mean "in practice"? In theory, you and everybody else will buy a PS3 because it's a PS3 and you love Sony (damn, that Kutaragi knows everything). In practice, you're tired of getting poked in the butt by Sony and you really don't want to go get a second job just to afford a PS3, so you're not buying one. In theory, you'll buy a PS3 even if there are no games for it, because you're just that loyal. In practice, most of the games on the PS3 (aside from Gran Turismo: not quite HD and Metal Gear Suicide) will be on the 360 as well, and you're not quite sure that historical japanese warriors had to fight giant crabs. In theory, Riiiiidge Racer emulation of PS1 games would be the killer app to make you buy a PSP. In practice, the handheld is poorly designed with bad battery life, has no really good games (and what good games it does have, like GTA: Libery City Stories, will make their way back to the real consoles anyway), is ruled by an iron hand to prevent homebrew software (you have a choice -- either run homebrew or run real games, but not both), and UMD is a dead format for movies.
In theory, Sony's already won this round of the console wars, and probably the next two or three generations as well. In practice, Sony's minus one foot and taking careful aim at the one that's left. They'll be lucky if the PS3 gets even a lukewarm reception on launch, as the more likely scenario is a major crash and burn. The customer goodwill they're apparently trying to trade on has been gone for some time now, and they don't even know it.
Meh. I'm still happy with my 5 year old Motorola V60i. Monochrome screen, great battery life, small screen on the outside (shows me who's calling, or the current time), so cheap you'll probably not even be able to get it from your provider, no camera. It's also a tri-band GSM phone, which means you'll be able to use it just about anywhere in the world.
I could go even more basic, as the v60i does have some games and internet stuff (which I don't use, and you won't even know it's there if you don't scroll most of the way down the menu), but then you're into non-flip phone territory. My battery's going to give out soon (5 years on the same battery is pretty damned good), but I'm going to just replace the battery and not the phone. In fact, the only way I will ever upgrade to a different phone is if this one physically stops working and I can no longer get another v60i (unlikely, given ebay), or all wireless providers switch to some new technology that prevents a tri-band GSM phone from working.
I don't know if the OP meant it this way, but I took it as a comment on how US society (or at least the media) tries to excuse behavior. Legally, at 18 you're an adult. The term "teen", while technically referring to someone between the ages of 13 and 19, tends to imply "child". So, are you still a child at age 18? What about at age 25? As an example, the local news continually referred to both the shooter and victims of the recent rave killing here in Seattle as "kids". The shooter was 28. Some of his victims were 21, 22, 26, and 32. Are those "kids"?
Maybe it's a sign of our aging baby boomer population, who see anybody younger than them as kids. Maybe it's because of our economic climate that keeps "kids" in university until 25 or 26 (and then only graduating with a Bachelor's degree, not even a Master's or better). Maybe it's our "take no responsibility" society that wants to blame anything but the person (thus the person is a "kid" who didn't know any better, rather than an adult). Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it.
There you go. I do pay more for a lawyer. The attorney I use charges $250-$300 per ticket (it's been a while, so I don't know if her fees have increased), but she has a 5+ year winning streak (she's so good that several local municipalities have enacted laws specifically to counter-act her). I pay my attorney $300, and then walk away. Anywhere from a week to two years later, she sends me a letter in the mail saying that the issue has been successfully resolved and that it was a pleasure working with me. Traffic tickets here trend rather high, averaging $100 or so per "trivial" ticket. Court fees aren't much cheaper, so unless I want to just pay the ticket I can expect to be out ~$200 fighting it on my own (because if I fight it on my own, I expect to lose). $300 for an attorney is not a bad deal when you look at it that way, especially since I don't pay anything to the court (well, unless I lose, but my attorney's never lost for me yet).
Wow! No way would that happen here.
Maybe the cops are different where you live, but I've never felt comfortable enough to bet on the officer not showing (cops are paid to go to court. It's a nice, easy day off the street. Why wouldn't they go?). I hire lawyers because I don't know all of the legal proceedings and it's not worth my time to learn. I do know that my lawyers never use "hope the officer doesn't show" as their only legal tactic (or a legal tactic at all -- judges are all too likely to grant a prosecutor's continuance request to allow the officer time to show up). They file for discovery, attack the accuracy of the measurement system (radar: has the officer religiously followed the maintenance schedule? pacing: when was the car's speedometer last calibrated? When was the officer last through training? laser: Was the officer stationary? What's his sharp-shooter rating?), and find all of the little loopholes and tricks that a lay person will never know existed. It's worth the money for a lawyer for what is essentially a guaranteed victory regardless of the traffic infraction (I'm talking stuff like tickets, here, not DUI or at-fault accidents). Just the simple fact that I don't have to be at the courthouse in person is worth the price of the lawyer, because I'll make up the cost by not losing hours of productivity.
See, the flaw in your logic is that traffic infractions are a "special case" -- they're income. As such, the system has every incentive to make it difficult for you to prove your innocence, and since the penalties for you are "light" (maybe an increase in insurance, beyond the ticket price you'll pay) they're not so concerned about innocent or guilty. If you really care, do what I do. Find yourself the best traffic attorney in your area and hire them for any ticket. It doesn't matter how small, or what insurance increase I may or may not be looking at, or even if the ticket price plus the premium increase is less than the lawyer's fees. I will hire the attorney and the attorney will get the charge cleared. Sure, I may spend more, but at least that money doesn't go to the government (directly, anyway -- the attorney still has to pay his taxes of course). It's not a matter of right and wrong. It's a matter of principle. If the government can't run on the tax dollars they're already getting from me (property and sales here, as there's no state income tax), then they'll just have to tighten their belts. If everyone fought their tickets, there'd no longer be an incentive to use them for income and we might actually see some sane traffic laws and enforcement (proper 85th percentile speed limits, true elimination of quotas, enforcement of more egregious behavior like lane discipline violations, etc).
Good thing I only get a ticket every couple of years, or I'd go bankrupt on principle :)
Judges generally have nothing to do with death penalties. Prosecutors get to ask for it (if the case warrants and the jurisdiction allows) and juries get to hand it out. The judge has some discretion to decide if the jury is completely off-base, but he's not going to decide for the death penalty if a jury decided against it. Like the government, the judicial system is set up with checks and balances on power so a single person can't be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner.
I guess if the defendant opted for a bench trial rather than a jury trial the judge would get to decide, but nobody's stupid enough to choose a bench trial in something as important as a murder trial (I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if a bench trial is even an option in a felony case like murder).
But what is justice? In the legal system, it's being able to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty. The state has the burden, and they must do so using only legal methods (thus many cases won on technicalities like an illegal search). It sounds like the system is set up in favor of the criminal, but that's not the case. It's set up in such a way that a false-negative is much more likely than a false-positive. In a country that (supposedly) values freedom, it's more important to let a guilty man go free than to wrongfully convict an innocent. Maybe you think that's wrong, but those are the ideals that drive our justice system.
Although I'm sure that will change as we give up more and more freedom in exchange for "security". Before you know it, we'll be back to "guilty until proven innocent". (as if we're not there already. How many of you think OJ killed his wife? But he was never proven guilty, thus he must be innocent under "innocent until proven guilty".)