I spent a year in QA and watched the best testers (dedicated, observant, smart, literate) get ignored while the slackers who turned up for Full Contract interviews in suits got the full time contracts instead. Great logic there. (For the record I don't consider myself one of the "good" testers and got the hell out of there as fast as I could).
To this day I keep in touch with people in the department, most are either still there or got moved up the ladder one notch... in QA. Very occasionally you'll hear about people who became designers from QA through a combination of much luck and huge determination (we're talking practically writing entire design docs themselves to prove they had what it took). From my experience and talking to other people who spent years in test, we're talking one in a hundred maybe. The senior testers will sometimes be lucky enough to move into web production or marketing but there are much better routes to those positions. I have personally met one person who made it into design from test. One.
Not true. The issue is the BIOS on these chips which is a hacked version of the MS one, that's what's illegal about it. You can legally hack and reverse engineer the XBox as much as you like unless I'm mistaken. The chip he was selling, Enigmah, came with the hacked BIOS preinstalled and was therefore illegal. Had he been selling one of these blank mod chips (which you then add a BIOS to yourself) I doubt they'd have had such a strong legal case against him.
Hope you don't mind if I refine that a little - not trying to be a jerk, it's cool you picked all that up, I'm just trying to convince myself here that what little Japanese I've remembered from years of learning is actually occasionally useful;)
> "Watashi = I"
Yep. "Boku" can also mean the same, though only guys use boku. I think.
> "Daymo = but"
"Demo" actually.
> "mushi mushi = hello"
"Moshi Moshi". As far as I know this is ONLY used when they pick up the phone, first thing. It's like when we pick up and say "Hello?" but they only use it on the phone. Weird, I know.
> "Un-o = excuse me"
Do you mean "Anoh"? I think they tend to us this like we use "Uhhhh". Excuse me is "sumimasen".
"Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings did great justice to J.R. Tolkien's war and class-conscious trilogy"
As I think Tolkien himself pointed out this wasn't at all the point of his books despite what so many scholars and others think - this is a case of reading far too much into a book as happens all too often. It does happen that authors just write for the sake of a good, fun story sometimes. Tolkien wanted to create a mythology. No hidden messages about war or class, just an enjoyable story about another land part inspired by various real-world mythologies but at the same time entirely its own mythology when viewed as a complete and lovingly detailed whole. Both Middle Earth and the books were made purely for the sake of doing so.
Anyone learning web design is bound to have heard the above - Keep It Simple, Stupid (and indeed it seems I'm not the first to mention KISS here). I'm a terrible artist so my sites aren't the most visually intricate, but by sticking to what I think are some important web design rules anyone can make a decent site. Here are my main rules:
- Pick three colours and stick to them. Background colour, foreground colour (i.e. text colour) and a third one, maybe for menu graphics and the logo. This doesn't mean your site has to have ONLY three colours, but if you primarily stick to three main ones your site will be cleaner and have a stronger visual identity. There should also be very strong contrast between text and the background colour (I say very strong because, for example, red is harder to read on black than white is).
- On a similar note, for type only use two fonts max - one for the regular type and one for titles (in my experience a sans-serif font like Arial works best for type as its easier to read and a serif one like Times New makes headlines etc. stand out more).
- Stick to the four click rule. If you have to click more than four links to get anywhere on your site the navigation is too complex, though you really want to strive for three clicks max or even two for a small site.
- Your site should pass what I call the Granny Test. You don't literally need a Grandmother for this, just someone with little more than a basic knoweledge of how to use the net, AOL types basically. Get them to play around with your site and give feedback - they'll be a lot more unforgiving than a net savvy user, but at the same time net savvy users will be grateful for any improvements made at the suggestion of your "Granny".:)
- If you've got more than 5 links on one page, start categorising them. Simple.
- A number of my previous points have been to do with this, but it's still worth hammering home the importance of consistency. Aside from potentially confusing some, if half your pages look like they're on a different site it looks unproffesional.
Some of this might sound blindingly obvious or basic, but looking around the net, all too often it seems they're not obvious enough to enough people. Well, those are my starting suggestions for good site design, others can (and already have) offer some more detailed and technical suggestions.:)
Thought I seriously doubt it happened in this case, often magazines (at least here in the UK) will review beta copies of games, a practice that can be annoying and plain lame when the game is clearly so incomplete that they're skipping over the incomplete features and assuming they'll be fine in the final game. PC Zone in the UK had a review of Giants months before it was released. They even reviewed Simon The Sorceror 3D almost a year ago now and that game still isn't out due to publisher problems, so the mag shot themselves in the foot on that one.
I'm happy with my subscription to ign.com. Cheaper than a magazine and doesn't accumulate into big piles. Sure, most of it's free but I like paying for the rest to help them stay running. The writing standard isn't quite up to that of the best British magazines (disclaimer - this is not an anti-American journalism rant) but at the end of the day the opinion matters most and I haven't noticed IGN "cheating" yet. I'm sure we'll soon see magazine "reviews" of this press beta that internet sites are rightly only *previewing* of Freedom Force.
UPDATE by icemind: This emulator is a fake. according to these messages on the slashdot forums - this is a fake one. Could someone at/. try reading their own comments section??
Must be. a) The XBox DVD drive spins backwards to read the data b) It lists Soul Calibre 2 as a working game. Soul Calibre 2 isn't even out yet, not even in the arcades. Oh, and c) They stole the screenshots from IGN, for example:
There are so many reasons why ION died, you can't attribute it to one thing. For one, Daikatana was terrible. Utterly dire, and I'm not just following common opinion, I had to review the thing and complete it. The game was abysmal and would have been far better, maybe even *gasp* playable, if they had done the following:
- Stopped doors killing your sidekicks
- Stopped sidekicks shooting you
- Removed the stupid tiny robo-bugs at the start
- Removed the overkill "top slot" weapons (which 90% of the time killed you too) or make you invulnerable to your own shots
- Muted the stupid friggin' sidekicks, or at least re-record them with decent voice actors.
- Removed the stupid and out of place save gem system
That would only have gone half way to making the side kicks useful though - every reviewer I know, including me, just told them to stay put at the start of the level, completed the level, then dragged them to the exit. They were just such a stupidly ill-conceived idea from the start. If you're doing sidekicks, make them invulnerable or expendable, not a liability.
The hugely ambitious and overstretched development cycle didn't help either, people were sick of hearing about it by the time it finally came out, but the core of the problem was the above fundamental flaws in the game. I'm just stunned that they failed to spot and fix these hair tearingly annoying features. Romero was just given free rein to throw in a stupid amount of content (pointlessly - it would have been no better or worse with half the number of guns, levels or monsters). I'm sure in his pride he wilfully ignored the criticisms of the game too (as outlined above). It was a disaster waiting to happen. Even the excellent Deus Ex and Anachronox couldn't save ION Dallas (though Warren Spector and ION Austin still exist, thank goodness - eagerly anticipating Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3). Still, at least the games industry got this wake up call early, we shouldn't be seeing such blindly big spends again any time soon.
In response to your question about Third Law, they are a games company formed largely from Ex-ION people who walked. Their first game was KISS: Psycho Circus (yes, as in the band, not as corny as it sounds though) which was a competent, decent enough shooter with some nice ideas, certainly a lot better than Daikatana. I think one of the guys who left said to Romero "you can't polish a turd" in response to a comment from Romero. Love that quote.:)
"The Amsterdam district court ruled two weeks ago that the KaZaa P2P program is acting unlawfully by making software available that allows users to download music files and must shut down."
So next up are they going to order Washington University to shut down for making wu-ftpd available? That's software that lets people download music files too.
Maybe they've finally made it interesting since the last time I tried final fantasy, but the ridiculous completion times get me. 30 hours is my absolute max, and even then the game has to be consistently good and extremely well paced to displace so much time (didn't one FF take like 80 hours?). I'd rather spend that immense amount of time completing other games (I like this thing called variety). Plus the turn based combat got old ages ago, they've tweaked with it in each game but they've never tried anything new (like, say, the one turn based combat system I like, no, love - Panzer Dragoon Saga's). I'll probably buy it anyway, I'm a whore like that, but for the two reasons above I really doubt it's going to grab me, though I hold out hope.
"Now that's rich. I challenge you to name any Microsoft product where the price has dropped with mass production"
Microsoft Sidewinder Joysticks. You're thinking of software, where the price rarely drops, unlike hardware, where it often (eventually) does, especially as they have stiff competition in that area.
Doh, shoulda read the article instead of staring at the pretty pictures.:) Looks like one is in fact a 10 gig and the other an 8 gig. Wonder if it's possible to tell which XBox has which without taking the case off and voiding all the waranties of the XBoxes at your local store.;) Pity it's a proprietary FS too.
Is it just me, or did the Hard OCP XBox use a Seagate HD? Yet this one is Western Digital. Following my experience with WD I'd wanna be damn sure my XBox has a Seagate in there if I buy one.
Wonder what the file system is in there too? Unless it's a proprietary one it must be pretty damn easy to upgrade the things yourself (in which case I'd shove in a sizeable Maxtor pronto). Hmm, and for that matter, I wonder how hard it would be to backup the data on the HD somehow?:) Anyone got any insight on either of these things?
I bought the three Bleemcast releases because I don't have a PlayStation, not because I can't afford one, but because I don't want one, especially as after five years I think it's way overpriced (it must cost them a pitance to produce now yet it still costs the same as the technically superior Dreamcast), not to mention that I have little respect for the business practices of Sony. I may be in the minority in my appreciation for Bleem's efforts, but then they were a pretty small company so, were it not for Sony and their legal action, they could well have survived as a small company targeting a niche market of gamers like myself.
I think Sony lawyers certainly played a big part in killing the company, though Bleem were over ambitious too, but you gotta give these guys credit for sticking in there. I think at the end of things the company was a fraction of its former size, just a few guys working out of their homes off their own cash.
They made a lot of PR screw ups which left a fair few gamers bitter at them (just read some of the comments on the Blues News site). First they left Bleem! PC in a buggy state to move to Bleem for Dreamcast (Bleemcast). Then, having said they'd do Bleemcast packs supporting 100 games each, they ended up doing packs supporting just one game each. But then who can blame them, getting *perfect* emulation along with drastically improving the visuals of the games takes a while even for a single game, especially as every Bleemcast plays every copy (US, EUR, JAP) of that game on any region's Dreamcast, and I'd rather perfect emulation of some games than poor emulation of many. As is they've emulated the only three PS1 games I liked (MGS, Tekken 3 and GT2) and did a great job of it too, so I've no reason to complain about them.
Being over ambitious and getting screwed by Sony lawyers... I'm amazed they survived this far, poor guys. Ah well, thanks to them amongst the last few great Dreamcast games are, strangely, PlayStation ones. That's not a bad legacy to leave behind.
Can't say I trust Tom that much, I prefer Anand's writing usually. I guess none of you have heard how, instead of passing it on to other Euro tech journos like he was supposed to, Tom kept for himself the only preview Voodoo Banshee card to hit Europe before it was publically available?
Indeed. I give it no more than a week before someone jams chewing gum in one of the sockets:)
node
Easier than the current method I guess
on
Movies in Space?
·
· Score: 1
As far as I know, what they tend to do these days for space scenes in films is build a set inside an aeroplane, fly up, then fly back down sharply at just the right speed so that everyone inside is briefly weightless, quickly film the scene, then do it all again - Apollo 13 must've been a nightmare. Certainly not easy, although I'm not sure many movie stars would want to go through getting up into space to film stuff either. Tough pick between the two I guess.:)
I actually just did something similar, except it was for a noisy, huge ol' UPS I nabbed from a friends work (they were gonna throw it out!). SO much quieter in here now, although it's not exactly an ideal solution for a regular PC unless you can extend the audio, PS2, USB, power and monitor cables in to your basement. Plus you actually NEED a basement too - shoving something like that into a closet would probably melt it due to lack of air flow in there. Of course, you could then add a vent to the back of the closet, but then the neighbours would complain. And frankly, going to lengths like that is excesive even for us geeks.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I spent a year in QA and watched the best testers (dedicated, observant, smart, literate) get ignored while the slackers who turned up for Full Contract interviews in suits got the full time contracts instead. Great logic there. (For the record I don't consider myself one of the "good" testers and got the hell out of there as fast as I could).
To this day I keep in touch with people in the department, most are either still there or got moved up the ladder one notch... in QA. Very occasionally you'll hear about people who became designers from QA through a combination of much luck and huge determination (we're talking practically writing entire design docs themselves to prove they had what it took). From my experience and talking to other people who spent years in test, we're talking one in a hundred maybe. The senior testers will sometimes be lucky enough to move into web production or marketing but there are much better routes to those positions. I have personally met one person who made it into design from test. One.
He was selling the Enigmah chip. It includes a hacked version of the XBox BIOS, unlike most which come blank.
Not true. The issue is the BIOS on these chips which is a hacked version of the MS one, that's what's illegal about it. You can legally hack and reverse engineer the XBox as much as you like unless I'm mistaken. The chip he was selling, Enigmah, came with the hacked BIOS preinstalled and was therefore illegal. Had he been selling one of these blank mod chips (which you then add a BIOS to yourself) I doubt they'd have had such a strong legal case against him.
Hope you don't mind if I refine that a little - not trying to be a jerk, it's cool you picked all that up, I'm just trying to convince myself here that what little Japanese I've remembered from years of learning is actually occasionally useful ;)
> "Watashi = I"
Yep. "Boku" can also mean the same, though only guys use boku. I think.
> "Daymo = but"
"Demo" actually.
> "mushi mushi = hello"
"Moshi Moshi". As far as I know this is ONLY used when they pick up the phone, first thing. It's like when we pick up and say "Hello?" but they only use it on the phone. Weird, I know.
> "Un-o = excuse me"
Do you mean "Anoh"? I think they tend to us this like we use "Uhhhh". Excuse me is "sumimasen".
Pete
Yep, that always gets me. Nickel, Dime, Quarter? Huh? :) (OK, Quarter is obvious, but other than that).
Anyone know if there is even a single one of these digital projection theatres in the UK?
"Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings did great justice to J.R. Tolkien's war and class-conscious trilogy"
As I think Tolkien himself pointed out this wasn't at all the point of his books despite what so many scholars and others think - this is a case of reading far too much into a book as happens all too often. It does happen that authors just write for the sake of a good, fun story sometimes. Tolkien wanted to create a mythology. No hidden messages about war or class, just an enjoyable story about another land part inspired by various real-world mythologies but at the same time entirely its own mythology when viewed as a complete and lovingly detailed whole. Both Middle Earth and the books were made purely for the sake of doing so.
Anyone learning web design is bound to have heard the above - Keep It Simple, Stupid (and indeed it seems I'm not the first to mention KISS here). I'm a terrible artist so my sites aren't the most visually intricate, but by sticking to what I think are some important web design rules anyone can make a decent site. Here are my main rules:
:)
:)
- Pick three colours and stick to them. Background colour, foreground colour (i.e. text colour) and a third one, maybe for menu graphics and the logo. This doesn't mean your site has to have ONLY three colours, but if you primarily stick to three main ones your site will be cleaner and have a stronger visual identity. There should also be very strong contrast between text and the background colour (I say very strong because, for example, red is harder to read on black than white is).
- On a similar note, for type only use two fonts max - one for the regular type and one for titles (in my experience a sans-serif font like Arial works best for type as its easier to read and a serif one like Times New makes headlines etc. stand out more).
- Stick to the four click rule. If you have to click more than four links to get anywhere on your site the navigation is too complex, though you really want to strive for three clicks max or even two for a small site.
- Your site should pass what I call the Granny Test. You don't literally need a Grandmother for this, just someone with little more than a basic knoweledge of how to use the net, AOL types basically. Get them to play around with your site and give feedback - they'll be a lot more unforgiving than a net savvy user, but at the same time net savvy users will be grateful for any improvements made at the suggestion of your "Granny".
- If you've got more than 5 links on one page, start categorising them. Simple.
- A number of my previous points have been to do with this, but it's still worth hammering home the importance of consistency. Aside from potentially confusing some, if half your pages look like they're on a different site it looks unproffesional.
Some of this might sound blindingly obvious or basic, but looking around the net, all too often it seems they're not obvious enough to enough people. Well, those are my starting suggestions for good site design, others can (and already have) offer some more detailed and technical suggestions.
icemind
Thought I seriously doubt it happened in this case, often magazines (at least here in the UK) will review beta copies of games, a practice that can be annoying and plain lame when the game is clearly so incomplete that they're skipping over the incomplete features and assuming they'll be fine in the final game. PC Zone in the UK had a review of Giants months before it was released. They even reviewed Simon The Sorceror 3D almost a year ago now and that game still isn't out due to publisher problems, so the mag shot themselves in the foot on that one.
I'm happy with my subscription to ign.com. Cheaper than a magazine and doesn't accumulate into big piles. Sure, most of it's free but I like paying for the rest to help them stay running. The writing standard isn't quite up to that of the best British magazines (disclaimer - this is not an anti-American journalism rant) but at the end of the day the opinion matters most and I haven't noticed IGN "cheating" yet. I'm sure we'll soon see magazine "reviews" of this press beta that internet sites are rightly only *previewing* of Freedom Force.
UPDATE by icemind: This emulator is a fake. according to these messages on the slashdot forums - this is a fake one. Could someone at /. try reading their own comments section??
Here's a better formated link
Must be. a) The XBox DVD drive spins backwards to read the data b) It lists Soul Calibre 2 as a working game. Soul Calibre 2 isn't even out yet, not even in the arcades. Oh, and c) They stole the screenshots from IGN, for example:
i d= 171619&object_id=16612&media_type=R&ign_section=27 &page_title=The+Simpsons+Road+Rage+review+on+xbox. ign.com&adtag=network%3Dign%26site%3Dxboxviewer%26 adchannel%3Dxbox%26pagetype%3Darticle&return_url=h ttp%3A%2F%2Fxbox.ign.com%2Freviews%2F16612.html
;) But anway, I'm 99% sure this is fake.
http://mediaviewer.ign.com/mediaPage.jsp?media_
Damn that long link.
- icemind
There are so many reasons why ION died, you can't attribute it to one thing. For one, Daikatana was terrible. Utterly dire, and I'm not just following common opinion, I had to review the thing and complete it. The game was abysmal and would have been far better, maybe even *gasp* playable, if they had done the following:
:)
- Stopped doors killing your sidekicks
- Stopped sidekicks shooting you
- Removed the stupid tiny robo-bugs at the start
- Removed the overkill "top slot" weapons (which 90% of the time killed you too) or make you invulnerable to your own shots
- Muted the stupid friggin' sidekicks, or at least re-record them with decent voice actors.
- Removed the stupid and out of place save gem system
That would only have gone half way to making the side kicks useful though - every reviewer I know, including me, just told them to stay put at the start of the level, completed the level, then dragged them to the exit. They were just such a stupidly ill-conceived idea from the start. If you're doing sidekicks, make them invulnerable or expendable, not a liability.
The hugely ambitious and overstretched development cycle didn't help either, people were sick of hearing about it by the time it finally came out, but the core of the problem was the above fundamental flaws in the game. I'm just stunned that they failed to spot and fix these hair tearingly annoying features. Romero was just given free rein to throw in a stupid amount of content (pointlessly - it would have been no better or worse with half the number of guns, levels or monsters). I'm sure in his pride he wilfully ignored the criticisms of the game too (as outlined above). It was a disaster waiting to happen. Even the excellent Deus Ex and Anachronox couldn't save ION Dallas (though Warren Spector and ION Austin still exist, thank goodness - eagerly anticipating Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3). Still, at least the games industry got this wake up call early, we shouldn't be seeing such blindly big spends again any time soon.
In response to your question about Third Law, they are a games company formed largely from Ex-ION people who walked. Their first game was KISS: Psycho Circus (yes, as in the band, not as corny as it sounds though) which was a competent, decent enough shooter with some nice ideas, certainly a lot better than Daikatana. I think one of the guys who left said to Romero "you can't polish a turd" in response to a comment from Romero. Love that quote.
-icemind
So next up are they going to order Washington University to shut down for making wu-ftpd available? That's software that lets people download music files too.
- icemind
Maybe they've finally made it interesting since the last time I tried final fantasy, but the ridiculous completion times get me. 30 hours is my absolute max, and even then the game has to be consistently good and extremely well paced to displace so much time (didn't one FF take like 80 hours?). I'd rather spend that immense amount of time completing other games (I like this thing called variety). Plus the turn based combat got old ages ago, they've tweaked with it in each game but they've never tried anything new (like, say, the one turn based combat system I like, no, love - Panzer Dragoon Saga's). I'll probably buy it anyway, I'm a whore like that, but for the two reasons above I really doubt it's going to grab me, though I hold out hope.
"since it premiered in the UK already for you lucky brits"
:) We usually get films well after America (ditto books and computer games). Even Australia gets them sooner sometimes.
... for once.
"Now that's rich. I challenge you to name any Microsoft product where the price has dropped with mass production"
Microsoft Sidewinder Joysticks. You're thinking of software, where the price rarely drops, unlike hardware, where it often (eventually) does, especially as they have stiff competition in that area.
Doh, shoulda read the article instead of staring at the pretty pictures. :) Looks like one is in fact a 10 gig and the other an 8 gig. Wonder if it's possible to tell which XBox has which without taking the case off and voiding all the waranties of the XBoxes at your local store. ;) Pity it's a proprietary FS too.
- icemind
Is it just me, or did the Hard OCP XBox use a Seagate HD? Yet this one is Western Digital. Following my experience with WD I'd wanna be damn sure my XBox has a Seagate in there if I buy one.
:) Anyone got any insight on either of these things?
Wonder what the file system is in there too? Unless it's a proprietary one it must be pretty damn easy to upgrade the things yourself (in which case I'd shove in a sizeable Maxtor pronto). Hmm, and for that matter, I wonder how hard it would be to backup the data on the HD somehow?
- icemind
I bought the three Bleemcast releases because I don't have a PlayStation, not because I can't afford one, but because I don't want one, especially as after five years I think it's way overpriced (it must cost them a pitance to produce now yet it still costs the same as the technically superior Dreamcast), not to mention that I have little respect for the business practices of Sony. I may be in the minority in my appreciation for Bleem's efforts, but then they were a pretty small company so, were it not for Sony and their legal action, they could well have survived as a small company targeting a niche market of gamers like myself.
I think Sony lawyers certainly played a big part in killing the company, though Bleem were over ambitious too, but you gotta give these guys credit for sticking in there. I think at the end of things the company was a fraction of its former size, just a few guys working out of their homes off their own cash.
They made a lot of PR screw ups which left a fair few gamers bitter at them (just read some of the comments on the Blues News site). First they left Bleem! PC in a buggy state to move to Bleem for Dreamcast (Bleemcast). Then, having said they'd do Bleemcast packs supporting 100 games each, they ended up doing packs supporting just one game each. But then who can blame them, getting *perfect* emulation along with drastically improving the visuals of the games takes a while even for a single game, especially as every Bleemcast plays every copy (US, EUR, JAP) of that game on any region's Dreamcast, and I'd rather perfect emulation of some games than poor emulation of many. As is they've emulated the only three PS1 games I liked (MGS, Tekken 3 and GT2) and did a great job of it too, so I've no reason to complain about them.
Being over ambitious and getting screwed by Sony lawyers... I'm amazed they survived this far, poor guys. Ah well, thanks to them amongst the last few great Dreamcast games are, strangely, PlayStation ones. That's not a bad legacy to leave behind.
- icemind
Can't say I trust Tom that much, I prefer Anand's writing usually. I guess none of you have heard how, instead of passing it on to other Euro tech journos like he was supposed to, Tom kept for himself the only preview Voodoo Banshee card to hit Europe before it was publically available?
Indeed. I give it no more than a week before someone jams chewing gum in one of the sockets :)
node
As far as I know, what they tend to do these days for space scenes in films is build a set inside an aeroplane, fly up, then fly back down sharply at just the right speed so that everyone inside is briefly weightless, quickly film the scene, then do it all again - Apollo 13 must've been a nightmare. Certainly not easy, although I'm not sure many movie stars would want to go through getting up into space to film stuff either. Tough pick between the two I guess. :)
node
I actually just did something similar, except it was for a noisy, huge ol' UPS I nabbed from a friends work (they were gonna throw it out!). SO much quieter in here now, although it's not exactly an ideal solution for a regular PC unless you can extend the audio, PS2, USB, power and monitor cables in to your basement. Plus you actually NEED a basement too - shoving something like that into a closet would probably melt it due to lack of air flow in there. Of course, you could then add a vent to the back of the closet, but then the neighbours would complain. And frankly, going to lengths like that is excesive even for us geeks. ;)