I've dealt with XBLIG and outside of a few miracle games, it's pretty much nothing more than a festering pit.
That's the side effect of making something accessible to more people. In general, the things people create are worthless and all around pretty terrible. For some reason/. seems to treat "indie" as a wholesome mark of quality in juxtaposition to the manufactured games from big firms. The reality is when you ask amateurs and hobbyists to come up with a game, 90% of what comes back is garbage. Games like Minecraft are one in a million and the quality of these gems should not be synonymous with "indie"
That said, they're shooting themselves in the foot making it hard for people to develop for their platform. Indie developers need access.
That's exactly what Xbox Live Indie Games is for. Now this has its own associated problems, but it's not as expensive to develop for due to a less stringent review process.
The player does A, then B, then C, with obstacles along the way.
And I would argue there's nothing wrong with that. It's just an interactive story. Stories have been told as long as humanity has communicated, and they have taken all kinds of forms. Given the reader (or in the case of video games the viewer) a choice in the story deepens his or her engagement in it, even if the choice is superficial.
Most of what he's railing against seems to be the heavily cutscene-driven stories in games... I personally sympathize with him on that.
I can understand that you might not like that type of gameplay, but there are people out there want different things out of the games they play
Ultimately, playing a video game is about satisfying some emotional desire. Games like WoW satisfy my desire to manage statistics and give me satisfaction through acquiring items and improving my character. Games like Quake or Unreal are satisfy my competitive desire to beat other players. In the same vein, games like Final Fantasy with long epic cutscenes and deep, involved storylines satisfy an emotional desire to connect with a group of characters, identify with their plight, and see them through to success. Really, the first two items in the list I can do by reading a book or watching a movie. Adding an interactive element makes it seem like I'm the one enabling their success, even though I'm really just along for the ride.
I mean, let's distill the gameplay of Final Fantasy for a second. You have a group of characters, you find weapons and abilities, and engage in battle repeatedly until a final ultimate battle. How fun would a game be that is purely that? It might actually be reasonably fun... Infinity Blade comes to mind as an example of such a game. But it wouldn't be nearly as good without the deep involved story in there. To this day I remember how I felt watching Aeris die, and that was 15 years ago. I never felt anything close to that beating the 500th level in Infinity Blade. To reiterate my point, I doubt I would have felt the same about way if Final Fantasy 7 was just a movie.
Remember the old Sierra adventure games like King's Quest and Space Quest? Most of what made those games fun was the fact that you were being told a story. The puzzles were fun in their own right, but hardly ever had any deep relation to the plot at hand. The only real reason for completing them was to advance the storyline. Those games could have easily been published as printed stories, but they were more fun with the animated characters, beautiful scenery, and (in later games) voice acting.
I have to disagree. My iPad 1 is really feeling old after a couple consecutive software updates. After the multitasking update, I experienced many app crashes. Games like Infinity blade won't even load unless I start it after a fresh reboot. The newest iBooks 2 update is exceptionally slow to open even regular ebooks. Safari crashes regulary and especially on longer pages. Were my desktop computer doing these things I would simply upgrade the RAM for $30. Instead I have to buy a new iPad 2 for at least $499 or never update my software.
Because I think in human spatial terms, not computer science terms. If I rename something, to me it is the same thing with a different name. If I move something, it is the same thing in a different place. But here we have an operation called move that renames a file and does not move it at all. That is not intuitive.
Files are locations in file systems. They're where the bytes are.
I knew someone would say this. Semantically, the file is the object of interest, and its location is in the folder. What I say, is "I want to rename the file", not "I want to move the bytes in the file to a new location". That's the whole problem with this. The user has to have an understanding of computer science to understand why the command is called move rather than rename to rename a file. This is not intuitive.
The problem is there aren't a "few" and that you can hardly get very far with only a "few." With a GUI there's hardly anything I have to actually memorize. I can go into a program I haven't used in years, look at its menu structure and immediately figure out what commands and options are possible.
If we've got a society full of computer illiterates then the computing industry is not going to advance very fast, or else advance towards creating products for idiots.
We have a society full of idiots. Did you know that 50% of the population has a double digit IQ? Have you actually ever taught anyone computer science? It's not something everyone is cracked out for. Besides, it pays to create products most people can use. Look at how well Apple is doing.
Further, I don't know if your premise holds true, since the computing industry is and has been advancing at a spectacular pace despite most of the world being computer illiterate. In fact I would argue that the reason the computer industry advances at all is because computers are becoming more and more accessible to the common man. Do you remember when people predicted that computers would be a niche? That was a time when it took a team of scientists to turn the damn thing on. Of course something like that would have no potential. But what we have now are simple elegant devices that anyone can use.
You said you find it stupid to have to use a GUI to print 4 different documents. Yet most people would find it stupid to have to learn programming to print 4 documents. Besides you can print documents with windows powershell. I'm not sure what you're trying to argue.
UEFI secure boot is enabled by default, but they don't say anything about disabling it or giving the user the option to.
Actually, in the Windows Hardware Certification doc they say "On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup." Page 116
Would you be happy exploiting illiterate folk if you're the only one who knows how to read? Doesn't it make it worse when they refuse to try to read?
I would if their job involved reading. And likewise I am pissed off when I have to help my peers do things they should know how to do. But am I mad that the marketing or accounting departments don't have the knowhow to batch convert PDFs? No. Their job is to sell products and prepare financials. I was hired for my skillset, they were hired for theirs.
Or 1)Open terminal. 2) for i in quiz*.doc;do lp -n 15 $i;done.
That sounds like a real time saver. Except that for most people who don't understand loops, variables, and programming in general, the time required to learn what all that actually means is orders of magnitude longer than it takes to press print 4 times.
They claim the Win8 is better because you can mount ISOs from the GUI while on Linux you have to use the command line.
Microsoft claimed nothing of the sort. I see Sandro Villinger of itworld saying that... but where is Microsoft making that claim?
How the hell is mnt a random abbreviation for mount? Seems very logical to me. ls as the command to list files in a directory? I wonder where those letters came from.
And what about rename? It's rn right? or is it rnme? No... it's mv... because when I want to rename something the first thing I think is moving it to the same place with a different name. There are dozens of examples like this
Good thing, too. Rooting around trying to do something when you don't know what you're doing is a really bad idea, anyway.
It's also the easiest way to learn, and the way I learned pretty much everything I know. It feeds right into my exploratory nature... much different than a manual with a list of commands and flags. How exciting!
Wait... someone paid you to do something you are good at that they are not good at.... and you're pissed off about this? Isn't this the way society functions? I pay someone to bake my bread because I don't know how to do it and they are better at me. Does the baker turn around and say "Wow, what a fucking moron that guy is. Doesn't he see how easy it is to bake his own damn bread?" Why do geeks seem to be the only people with this attitude?
But we're not talking about people who need to be "empowered" in the computing domain. How does a bash shell help a baker? How does a shell help my lawyer, or my auto mechanic? How much of their jobs would really be made better, and by how much, if they were bash gurus?
I get that, but that doesn't preclude your app from looking and feeling the same. Your app is going to need some work, there's not question of that. But you can still use a mouse and keyboard with it. It can still be laid out the same. It can have a similar UI and a similar layout; it doesn't have to be touch friendly.
I get that. But that's not how my mind works. Personally I think of moving as going from one location to another, and in my mind, a location in the file system is a folder. Therefore by my logic moving a file is moving it from one folder to another, not moving it to the same folder with a different name. That's what tips me up.
Language is applicable every single day and absolutely crucial to my job, my social life, and every other aspect of my being. Shell syntax may be empowering to some, but it is hardly as pervasive in most people's lives to be as beneficial as a social language.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should I have to pay for developers to patch a broken game I already paid for?
I've dealt with XBLIG and outside of a few miracle games, it's pretty much nothing more than a festering pit.
That's the side effect of making something accessible to more people. In general, the things people create are worthless and all around pretty terrible. For some reason /. seems to treat "indie" as a wholesome mark of quality in juxtaposition to the manufactured games from big firms. The reality is when you ask amateurs and hobbyists to come up with a game, 90% of what comes back is garbage. Games like Minecraft are one in a million and the quality of these gems should not be synonymous with "indie"
arbitrary decisions on whether your app is either good enough, cool enough or "tasteful" enough
At time I wish they were doing this, but evidenced by some of the bad, lame, untasteful apps on the appstore, they are not.
That's why there's a channel for indie devs to submit their projects that go through a peer review process instead of the standard certification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Live_Indie_Games
That said, they're shooting themselves in the foot making it hard for people to develop for their platform. Indie developers need access.
That's exactly what Xbox Live Indie Games is for. Now this has its own associated problems, but it's not as expensive to develop for due to a less stringent review process.
The player does A, then B, then C, with obstacles along the way.
And I would argue there's nothing wrong with that. It's just an interactive story. Stories have been told as long as humanity has communicated, and they have taken all kinds of forms. Given the reader (or in the case of video games the viewer) a choice in the story deepens his or her engagement in it, even if the choice is superficial.
Most of what he's railing against seems to be the heavily cutscene-driven stories in games... I personally sympathize with him on that.
I can understand that you might not like that type of gameplay, but there are people out there want different things out of the games they play
Ultimately, playing a video game is about satisfying some emotional desire. Games like WoW satisfy my desire to manage statistics and give me satisfaction through acquiring items and improving my character. Games like Quake or Unreal are satisfy my competitive desire to beat other players. In the same vein, games like Final Fantasy with long epic cutscenes and deep, involved storylines satisfy an emotional desire to connect with a group of characters, identify with their plight, and see them through to success. Really, the first two items in the list I can do by reading a book or watching a movie. Adding an interactive element makes it seem like I'm the one enabling their success, even though I'm really just along for the ride.
I mean, let's distill the gameplay of Final Fantasy for a second. You have a group of characters, you find weapons and abilities, and engage in battle repeatedly until a final ultimate battle. How fun would a game be that is purely that? It might actually be reasonably fun... Infinity Blade comes to mind as an example of such a game. But it wouldn't be nearly as good without the deep involved story in there. To this day I remember how I felt watching Aeris die, and that was 15 years ago. I never felt anything close to that beating the 500th level in Infinity Blade. To reiterate my point, I doubt I would have felt the same about way if Final Fantasy 7 was just a movie.
Remember the old Sierra adventure games like King's Quest and Space Quest? Most of what made those games fun was the fact that you were being told a story. The puzzles were fun in their own right, but hardly ever had any deep relation to the plot at hand. The only real reason for completing them was to advance the storyline. Those games could have easily been published as printed stories, but they were more fun with the animated characters, beautiful scenery, and (in later games) voice acting.
I have to disagree. My iPad 1 is really feeling old after a couple consecutive software updates. After the multitasking update, I experienced many app crashes. Games like Infinity blade won't even load unless I start it after a fresh reboot. The newest iBooks 2 update is exceptionally slow to open even regular ebooks. Safari crashes regulary and especially on longer pages. Were my desktop computer doing these things I would simply upgrade the RAM for $30. Instead I have to buy a new iPad 2 for at least $499 or never update my software.
Why doesn't it work that way?
Because I think in human spatial terms, not computer science terms. If I rename something, to me it is the same thing with a different name. If I move something, it is the same thing in a different place. But here we have an operation called move that renames a file and does not move it at all. That is not intuitive.
Files are locations in file systems. They're where the bytes are.
I knew someone would say this. Semantically, the file is the object of interest, and its location is in the folder. What I say, is "I want to rename the file", not "I want to move the bytes in the file to a new location". That's the whole problem with this. The user has to have an understanding of computer science to understand why the command is called move rather than rename to rename a file. This is not intuitive.
full version of Office that works well with a mouse and keyboard
So all you have to do is add a bluetooth keyboard to iPad and you get all that? Office and mouse functionality as well? Amazing!
To be fair, Windows 8 and Windows 8 on ARM are still code names. We don't know what the final versions will be called.
The problem is there aren't a "few" and that you can hardly get very far with only a "few." With a GUI there's hardly anything I have to actually memorize. I can go into a program I haven't used in years, look at its menu structure and immediately figure out what commands and options are possible.
If we've got a society full of computer illiterates then the computing industry is not going to advance very fast, or else advance towards creating products for idiots.
We have a society full of idiots. Did you know that 50% of the population has a double digit IQ? Have you actually ever taught anyone computer science? It's not something everyone is cracked out for. Besides, it pays to create products most people can use. Look at how well Apple is doing.
Further, I don't know if your premise holds true, since the computing industry is and has been advancing at a spectacular pace despite most of the world being computer illiterate. In fact I would argue that the reason the computer industry advances at all is because computers are becoming more and more accessible to the common man. Do you remember when people predicted that computers would be a niche? That was a time when it took a team of scientists to turn the damn thing on. Of course something like that would have no potential. But what we have now are simple elegant devices that anyone can use.
You said you find it stupid to have to use a GUI to print 4 different documents. Yet most people would find it stupid to have to learn programming to print 4 documents. Besides you can print documents with windows powershell. I'm not sure what you're trying to argue.
UEFI secure boot is enabled by default, but they don't say anything about disabling it or giving the user the option to.
Actually, in the Windows Hardware Certification doc they say "On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup." Page 116
http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/D/F/ADF5BEDE-C0FB-4CC0-A3E1-B38093F50BA1/windows8-hardware-cert-requirements-system.pdf
By not being able to buy the computer I want because there is an operating system forced down my throat?
Obviously then it's not the computer you want to buy... Tell me, how exactly do you feel about the iPad coming installed with iOS?
Would you be happy exploiting illiterate folk if you're the only one who knows how to read? Doesn't it make it worse when they refuse to try to read?
I would if their job involved reading. And likewise I am pissed off when I have to help my peers do things they should know how to do. But am I mad that the marketing or accounting departments don't have the knowhow to batch convert PDFs? No. Their job is to sell products and prepare financials. I was hired for my skillset, they were hired for theirs.
Or 1)Open terminal. 2) for i in quiz*.doc;do lp -n 15 $i;done.
That sounds like a real time saver. Except that for most people who don't understand loops, variables, and programming in general, the time required to learn what all that actually means is orders of magnitude longer than it takes to press print 4 times.
They claim the Win8 is better because you can mount ISOs from the GUI while on Linux you have to use the command line.
Microsoft claimed nothing of the sort. I see Sandro Villinger of itworld saying that... but where is Microsoft making that claim?
How the hell is mnt a random abbreviation for mount? Seems very logical to me. ls as the command to list files in a directory? I wonder where those letters came from.
And what about rename? It's rn right? or is it rnme? No... it's mv... because when I want to rename something the first thing I think is moving it to the same place with a different name. There are dozens of examples like this
Good thing, too. Rooting around trying to do something when you don't know what you're doing is a really bad idea, anyway.
It's also the easiest way to learn, and the way I learned pretty much everything I know. It feeds right into my exploratory nature... much different than a manual with a list of commands and flags. How exciting!
Wait... someone paid you to do something you are good at that they are not good at.... and you're pissed off about this? Isn't this the way society functions? I pay someone to bake my bread because I don't know how to do it and they are better at me. Does the baker turn around and say "Wow, what a fucking moron that guy is. Doesn't he see how easy it is to bake his own damn bread?" Why do geeks seem to be the only people with this attitude?
But we're not talking about people who need to be "empowered" in the computing domain. How does a bash shell help a baker? How does a shell help my lawyer, or my auto mechanic? How much of their jobs would really be made better, and by how much, if they were bash gurus?
I get that, but that doesn't preclude your app from looking and feeling the same. Your app is going to need some work, there's not question of that. But you can still use a mouse and keyboard with it. It can still be laid out the same. It can have a similar UI and a similar layout; it doesn't have to be touch friendly.
I get that. But that's not how my mind works. Personally I think of moving as going from one location to another, and in my mind, a location in the file system is a folder. Therefore by my logic moving a file is moving it from one folder to another, not moving it to the same folder with a different name. That's what tips me up.
Language is applicable every single day and absolutely crucial to my job, my social life, and every other aspect of my being. Shell syntax may be empowering to some, but it is hardly as pervasive in most people's lives to be as beneficial as a social language.