This whole XNA run-any-game-anywhere sounds very much like Amiga Inc's AmigaDE platform, which is really just Tao's Intent with some extra APIs. Initially billed as a universal platform, AmigaDE turned into a platform for playing PocketPC games, and little else - it was an interesting idea that was technically unfeasable (even Tao said that it wouldn't do what Amiga said it would).
my ex-co-worker who was a major Intel biggot and thought that the Tejas was going to be the best thing ever. Yeah, best thing ever for frying eggs on your PC case.
10.0 was available for free from CompUSA stores, possibly others too. 10.1 was a free upgrade. 10.3 is available for about $90 if you search on froogle.
My wife and I bought Dungeon Siege when it came out as we like Diablo-esque games and the previews painted a picture of it being so. After getting it we were overjoyed with the graphics and overall polish, but he game itself sucketh verily:
* You had little to do in the game other than tell the characters where to move - fighting was automatic.
* The levels were quite sprawling with many parts leaving you wondering where to go next.
* The end game was a huge let-down, with the rest of the game being so graphically beautiful, we were expecting something impressive.
* The enemies weren't very difficult so you could get through the entire game in one playing.
* No jump-to-town spells or potions, meaning that you had to walk huge distances to sell your stuff.
* Due to all of the above the boredom factor set in quite quickly.
The multi-player side of the game was actually worse. Take the above faults and add:
* You had to complete an entire world in one go as the save-game didn't record what you had already done.
* Each world was huge.
Put those together and you effectively had to play for 12+ hours straight to finish a world, otherwise it was a waste of time.
After finishing the game once (took a day) we gave up on it altogether.
The only positive side of the game might be the mods, but there weren't any available when we last played it (two years ago).
The worst practice I ever saw was making the global variables local scope using the extract() function, in... every... single... file... especially the security login files - its almost like register_globals and v4.1 never happened.
Then again this is the same person who insisted in using the $array[key] array syntax which was never the correct way of doing to start with.
And this was the supergenius hired to replace me. Fun city. Glad I don't work there anymore.
> > If something breaks in your code 99% of the time it is your fault. > > I'd argue that lacking a formal specification, the language is > the final arbiter of what's correct. If it compiles and runs, it's > correct. It might be shite code, but if it breaks afterwards because > of a change in the language, it's hardly the fault of the coder.
When the I and B tags were no longer valid in XHTML, was it the fault of the W3C that web code was invalid?
> There have also been a number of changes in how individual functions > behave between point releases where the only rationale seemed to be > that they thought it looked nicer the new way.
I hadn't come across that myself, so I bow to your experience.
All of the changes made so far have been for good reasons, usually security. The $GLOBALS change was a major boon to security, and I'm personally glad that one of the 4.3.x releases broke the invalid $array[key] notation as it'll teach people to RTFM once in a while. If something breaks in your code 99% of the time it is your fault.
The point of having a native port is so that you don''t have to download a vast quantity of extras just to run one daemon. Not everyone has broadband...
Due to the fact that SVN isn't available for Windows (a native port, no cygwyn stuff), I recommend either Perforce or CVSNT + WinCVS. I've used CVSNT at work and home for some time and it works great.
Regarding the brain damage and shorter attention span, there is evidence to show that a combination of popular media and drugs (vaccinations, etc) will affect your attention span (creating ADHD, etc), and many drugs have been linked to long-term minor brain damage. Unfortunately I'm not making this up.
For popular media, consider cartoons: 22 minutes of mayhem. When I was a kid, some twenty years ago, cartoons had a single story that continued through the entire show, and thanks to the teretial TV station where I lived (RTE) they were shown without advertisement breaks. Compare that today with the two and three ad breaks that are shown during the show, and how the cartoons themselves have been broken up into multiple 4-8 minute segments, and its now wonder.
My recommendation is to buy some _good_ books for the core technologies you use and use a combination of web sites (via google), mailing lists and IRC for the rest. Books are your best source for how to do things right, mailing lists and IRC are your best source for what to do when it doesn't work right.
Another idea would be have mandatory re-tests every five or ten years. Then people would have to keep their skills up rather than forgetting them after the first test.
Why would making driving tests more difficult cross racial boundaries? If someone is stupid it doesn't matter if they were born purple with twenty toes. Ditto if they can't drive straight.
It would also be useful if people had to attend classes for fender benders. My brother-in-law did after he had three - he should have after the first one.
Instead of invading our privacy, again, how about:
1. Make the driving tests more difficult, meaning less bad drivers pass them.
2. Mandate annual vehicle inspections - many States / counties don't require them and they should. You don't need a brand-new vehicle to run the kids to school, but on the other hand, your twenty-year-old falling-apart-at-the-seams POS needs to be retired.
3. Put the money into hiring more cops to actually crack down on traffic violations, like running red lights, etc.
4. As a follow-on to #2, offer federally-assisted trade-in vouchers with a sliding rule - the older your car * the poorer you are = higher trade-in amount.
5. A Federal plan to repair the trade-ins from #4 that are worth fixing, if it gets another few good years from them.
6. Subsidise clean-fuel vehicles - electric, hybrid, etc. Get rid of gasoline/petrol gorram it!
Just my $0.02 writing as a 28 year old who learned to drive last year and passed the Florida driving test first time despite not doing very well.
I don't intend buying an XBox, but I would buy a reduced-price Playstation 2 due to the awesome RPGs. The XBox doesn't have the games I want, the PS2 does.
I saw this happening at Staples when I worked there. The district manager decreed that nobody was to do overtime, so when it happened the managers altered the time records. Two of the managers, including the general manager, were involved in it.
- Used Dreamweaver because it worked with stylesheets, but yet they just used the font tags to change anything.
- Wouldn't use Dreamweaver's built-in templates, despite the fact that every page except the home page on each site looked the same.
- Wouldn't develop a content management system despite the fact that they had over a hundred static sites that had 98% of the same content duplicated site-to-site and were developing on hundreds more.
- Wouldn't do anything that looked like a shortcut (development wise) because it scared them.
- Had no documentation for their large J2EE system.
- Complained that open-source software was no good, but yet used IBM's Web Sphere which used Apache v1, on Windows no less.
The US operations closed a few months after I left them, but the best part was my manager was fired a few short weeks after.
"... I want you to do these reports every day, should only take you twenty minutes."
So two days of creating the Excel spreadsheet later (I didn't use Excel before that so I had to learn how to do it) I had something that took an hour to fill in every day, and two hours on Mondays due to the weekend. The worst part was that all of the data was either from their database or from a website (user/pass passed via the URL, i.e. I could have spooled it) so I could have written something to automate it but oh no, we can't use any short-cuts, it has to be made by hand every day.
Last year I wrote a large content and ecommerce system using PEAR::DB and Smarty. Smarty was wonderful but I should have used ADOdb as the database abstraction layer. At my current job I use Fusebox 3 which I find to be a better way of approaching the problem as you are dividing up the entire application into bite-sized pieces. From there I just use straight HTML rather than a templating layer. I personally wish I knew about Fusebox 3 last year as my content system was 80% the same architecture, so I could have saved myself the R&D time.
Slashdot Mirror
mv ~glucas/sw3 /dev/null
Damien
This whole XNA run-any-game-anywhere sounds very much like Amiga Inc's AmigaDE platform, which is really just Tao's Intent with some extra APIs. Initially billed as a universal platform, AmigaDE turned into a platform for playing PocketPC games, and little else - it was an interesting idea that was technically unfeasable (even Tao said that it wouldn't do what Amiga said it would).
Damien
my ex-co-worker who was a major Intel biggot and thought that the Tejas was going to be the best thing ever. Yeah, best thing ever for frying eggs on your PC case.
Damien
the witch is dead!
10.0 was available for free from CompUSA stores, possibly others too. 10.1 was a free upgrade. 10.3 is available for about $90 if you search on froogle.
Anyone know what the changes will be in 10.4?
Damien
My wife and I bought Dungeon Siege when it came out as we like Diablo-esque games and the previews painted a picture of it being so. After getting it we were overjoyed with the graphics and overall polish, but he game itself sucketh verily:
* You had little to do in the game other than tell the characters where to move - fighting was automatic.
* The levels were quite sprawling with many parts leaving you wondering where to go next.
* The end game was a huge let-down, with the rest of the game being so graphically beautiful, we were expecting something impressive.
* The enemies weren't very difficult so you could get through the entire game in one playing.
* No jump-to-town spells or potions, meaning that you had to walk huge distances to sell your stuff.
* Due to all of the above the boredom factor set in quite quickly.
The multi-player side of the game was actually worse. Take the above faults and add:
* You had to complete an entire world in one go as the save-game didn't record what you had already done.
* Each world was huge.
Put those together and you effectively had to play for 12+ hours straight to finish a world, otherwise it was a waste of time.
After finishing the game once (took a day) we gave up on it altogether.
The only positive side of the game might be the mods, but there weren't any available when we last played it (two years ago).
Damien
The worst practice I ever saw was making the global variables local scope using the extract() function, in... every... single... file... especially the security login files - its almost like register_globals and v4.1 never happened.
Then again this is the same person who insisted in using the $array[key] array syntax which was never the correct way of doing to start with.
And this was the supergenius hired to replace me. Fun city. Glad I don't work there anymore.
</mode>
Damien
> > If something breaks in your code 99% of the time it is your fault.
>
> I'd argue that lacking a formal specification, the language is
> the final arbiter of what's correct. If it compiles and runs, it's
> correct. It might be shite code, but if it breaks afterwards because
> of a change in the language, it's hardly the fault of the coder.
When the I and B tags were no longer valid in XHTML, was it the fault of the W3C that web code was invalid?
> There have also been a number of changes in how individual functions
> behave between point releases where the only rationale seemed to be
> that they thought it looked nicer the new way.
I hadn't come across that myself, so I bow to your experience.
Damien
All of the changes made so far have been for good reasons, usually security. The $GLOBALS change was a major boon to security, and I'm personally glad that one of the 4.3.x releases broke the invalid $array[key] notation as it'll teach people to RTFM once in a while. If something breaks in your code 99% of the time it is your fault.
Damien
Web developer for four+ years
Is that you master?
L. Skywalker
> I just did a dependency analysis on svn.exe, and I see no dependencies on cygwin1.dll.
The client of daemon?
Damien
The point of having a native port is so that you don''t have to download a vast quantity of extras just to run one daemon. Not everyone has broadband...
Damien
Due to the fact that SVN isn't available for Windows (a native port, no cygwyn stuff), I recommend either Perforce or CVSNT + WinCVS. I've used CVSNT at work and home for some time and it works great.
Regarding the brain damage and shorter attention span, there is evidence to show that a combination of popular media and drugs (vaccinations, etc) will affect your attention span (creating ADHD, etc), and many drugs have been linked to long-term minor brain damage. Unfortunately I'm not making this up.
For popular media, consider cartoons: 22 minutes of mayhem. When I was a kid, some twenty years ago, cartoons had a single story that continued through the entire show, and thanks to the teretial TV station where I lived (RTE) they were shown without advertisement breaks. Compare that today with the two and three ad breaks that are shown during the show, and how the cartoons themselves have been broken up into multiple 4-8 minute segments, and its now wonder.
Damien
My recommendation is to buy some _good_ books for the core technologies you use and use a combination of web sites (via google), mailing lists and IRC for the rest. Books are your best source for how to do things right, mailing lists and IRC are your best source for what to do when it doesn't work right.
Just my $0.02 from doing this for a few years.
Damien
Another idea would be have mandatory re-tests every five or ten years. Then people would have to keep their skills up rather than forgetting them after the first test.
Damien
Why would making driving tests more difficult cross racial boundaries? If someone is stupid it doesn't matter if they were born purple with twenty toes. Ditto if they can't drive straight.
It would also be useful if people had to attend classes for fender benders. My brother-in-law did after he had three - he should have after the first one.
Damien
Instead of invading our privacy, again, how about:
1. Make the driving tests more difficult, meaning less bad drivers pass them.
2. Mandate annual vehicle inspections - many States / counties don't require them and they should. You don't need a brand-new vehicle to run the kids to school, but on the other hand, your twenty-year-old falling-apart-at-the-seams POS needs to be retired.
3. Put the money into hiring more cops to actually crack down on traffic violations, like running red lights, etc.
4. As a follow-on to #2, offer federally-assisted trade-in vouchers with a sliding rule - the older your car * the poorer you are = higher trade-in amount.
5. A Federal plan to repair the trade-ins from #4 that are worth fixing, if it gets another few good years from them.
6. Subsidise clean-fuel vehicles - electric, hybrid, etc. Get rid of gasoline/petrol gorram it!
Just my $0.02 writing as a 28 year old who learned to drive last year and passed the Florida driving test first time despite not doing very well.
Damien
OSX is easy to use and purdy secure. Why can't Linux be too?
I don't intend buying an XBox, but I would buy a reduced-price Playstation 2 due to the awesome RPGs. The XBox doesn't have the games I want, the PS2 does.
I saw this happening at Staples when I worked there. The district manager decreed that nobody was to do overtime, so when it happened the managers altered the time records. Two of the managers, including the general manager, were involved in it.
Damien
This was the same company that:
- Used Dreamweaver because it worked with stylesheets, but yet they just used the font tags to change anything.
- Wouldn't use Dreamweaver's built-in templates, despite the fact that every page except the home page on each site looked the same.
- Wouldn't develop a content management system despite the fact that they had over a hundred static sites that had 98% of the same content duplicated site-to-site and were developing on hundreds more.
- Wouldn't do anything that looked like a shortcut (development wise) because it scared them.
- Had no documentation for their large J2EE system.
- Complained that open-source software was no good, but yet used IBM's Web Sphere which used Apache v1, on Windows no less.
The US operations closed a few months after I left them, but the best part was my manager was fired a few short weeks after.
F### you Brian.
Damien
"... I want you to do these reports every day, should only take you twenty minutes."
So two days of creating the Excel spreadsheet later (I didn't use Excel before that so I had to learn how to do it) I had something that took an hour to fill in every day, and two hours on Mondays due to the weekend. The worst part was that all of the data was either from their database or from a website (user/pass passed via the URL, i.e. I could have spooled it) so I could have written something to automate it but oh no, we can't use any short-cuts, it has to be made by hand every day.
F### you Yatin.
Damien
Last year I wrote a large content and ecommerce system using PEAR::DB and Smarty. Smarty was wonderful but I should have used ADOdb as the database abstraction layer. At my current job I use Fusebox 3 which I find to be a better way of approaching the problem as you are dividing up the entire application into bite-sized pieces. From there I just use straight HTML rather than a templating layer. I personally wish I knew about Fusebox 3 last year as my content system was 80% the same architecture, so I could have saved myself the R&D time.
Damien