Re:Pong != Art, therefore Video Game = Art
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Are Videogames Art?
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I have to disagree with that as a categoric statement, because the same thing can be applied to any other artistic medium.
Just because a movie can be art, doesn't mean that moving pictures => art. Is an infomercial art? Is a self-help book literature? What about a cooking book or a chemical catalogue? And yet we could create art in the shape of infomercials, and literature in the guise of recipe books. The definition of art does not quite cover film development, typography or grammar for that matter. But we accept art for the product it is more than by the specific techniques used.
On the same vein, it is true most games are not art, but rather use art for their own purpose. That doesn't mean you cannot create art in the form of a computer game, and I think the industry has done so (accidentally or not) in ocassion.
But you do have a great point in that Art and Gameplay are independent. The (great game, lousy art) and (lousy game, great art) tuples are actually quite common. What I think is more open to question is whether these two elements are orthogonal, or actually interfere with each other. Is a good interactive game by definition not-art? Or is good interactive art by definition a lousy game?
Ebert and co have an interesting point in that games are, by definition, a surrender of the authorial control that is central to art. But that is not an entirely new concept in art; audience participation has been around for a long time, with admittedly mixed results.
Personally, I think there are games that also fit in the concept of interactive art, I'm just not sure they are the best games (or the best art) by nature. Maybe they cannot be. Fortunately, good art in other mediums tends to have interesting influences in entertainment in general, regardless of how entertaining the original piece was.
Not sure I disagree with the conclusion, but that is a lousy metric; and the definition by comparison is broken.
Marinescu is a leader as much as CmdrTaco is a leader in the community. Neither is on the same bar as the three you describe (as in spawning and defining community), but one can argue that someone who organizes a community to communicate better is a leader of some sort.
The ServerSide.foo sites are very common points of reference in the Java world, and their material is pretty good in general. I may or may not have read books from Marinescu at some point, but I definitely got some of my best points of reference and links to books worth reading from those sites.
Having not heard of the man is not a good metric in general either, since effective leadership can be quite transparent to outsiders. The main reason I'm more familiar with the name/alias behind Slashdot, for that matter, is because of a mix of self-promoting articles and chronic complaints about broken editorial methods.
Why is attendance even an issue? University education is adult education: please treat your students as such.
The ability for independent study is the one major skill universities should cultivate, and for that students should have some responsability over their own educational process. Isn't it better to encourage and enable them?
It is not the business of a university to make students attend classes. It's business is to educate, and attendance only has merit as one among many means towards that agenda. I'd guess this obsession with attendance and pedagogic hand-holding originally came from elementary or high-school system, where the goal of the school has more to do with the loco parentis than with any real education. But it really has no place in adult education.
A "bad student" is not going to start cramming the whole semester before the final just because the podcasts are there... they have been doing this since academic tests have existed, and if anything, video is evidently less efficient (time-wise) than the old all-nighter-with-the-books.
Of course, some teachers try to 'solve' this problem with artificial methods: keeping the chapters that matter secret outside the lecture, changing focus and topics between periods to prevent note-trading, giving attendance weight in the academic grade, or other ways to make being able to pass a reward for being in class.
This is just putting obstacles in the learning process of the students for the sake of solving a non-issue, taking away resources (clear notes and syllabus, lecture material, etc) for an agenda that is not their education.
It solves nothing and makes the availability of these resources at least partially moot. Your "good" students are penalized by going through a hassle for this and losing the flexibility this could have provided. Your "bad" students get to sleep in your class (or disturb it in boredom). Both groups are going to study in their own ways anyway, and both should be evaluated identically based on their comprehension of the material and excercise of any applicable skills.
I fail to see the Funny. (did the moderators RTFA?). This comment does seem a bit disrespectful.
The lady said she completed a VISA application to go to Russia, and went to China last year. She was legitimately comparing the complexity of Passport/VISA requests to a common subscriptions service contract.
Now, I don't know if either country has particularly complex VISA application processes, but even if they are not the accumulation of absurdities, redundancies and mistranslations that government forms often are, they should be definitely comparable.
Perhaps it wasn't the most interesting quote ever, but there is no reason to be condescending.
Or, he's a minor and society should deal with him with rehabilitation as the primary purpose.
Society tends to consider minors as 'not fully accountable for their actions'. Forcing therapy as part of the deal would at least be consistent with other cases where the defendant is considered only partially responsible for the crime due to mitigating circumstances, like temporary or permanent insanity, addictions, or being a multimillionare celebrity in an intoxicated state.
I think you're missing the point when you think Spore only appeals to the geek interests its technology implies. Based on that reasoning you could say that SimCity only appeals to urban engineers and game theorists, or a closer analogy, that the Tamagotchi was a toy for biologists and zoologists.
It's not about such a specific demographic. Frankly, for the Sims, I don't think it was about so much 'moms and girlfriends'. That was just the most atypical gamer segment and easy to point out, but the user base was much wider than that, at least from the Sim-ers I know personally.
Honestly, I'm not sure we can have a clear idea about the proper target of Spore until we see the full game. But if Wright' history (and successes) are any indication, I think you are overestimating the perceived importance of all the cool procedural-content technology will have to the average player (as opposed to the devs). I'd expect the actual game to be lightweight enough that it will not matter that much to the player if it were the great engine of emergent behavior it is intended to be, or just cleverly edited content sent through those tubes the internets are made of.
This may be moderated as funny, but if you replace 'people' with 'gamers', I think it is quite correct.
The interesting thing is that his target hasn't been 'gamers' for a while, if ever.
And I still see non-gamers playing with their Sims and virtual doll-houses longer than I could think humanly enjoyable. They don't play his games because of his creativity, inventiveness and reputation. They don't have any idea who Will Wright is, and to be honest, they would never call the Sims 'creative' or 'inventive' in any way.
They still play it because it is just a game, and they enjoy playing it. And maybe because they didn't have to spend a quarter of their free time honing reflexes and virtual skillz to 'p0wn and not be p0wned'.
Hopefully that should not be an issue for normal activity.
But I'm worried when someone (or their office staff) are crazy enough to send a whole Internet through, since it always takes forever and it will clog up the tubes for everyone else too.
We should keep the Senate away from the Internets or make them pay their due for those tubes.
This abuse of sending Internets for free around has to stop, specially the big ones. I sent an email yesterday that has not arrived, and I bet it was because someone sent one of those Internets.
After I RTFA'd, I realized I would agree a bit with you if code reviews were typically performed as described in the article, although for different reasons.
They're not only suggesting a formal code review (with fancy printouts and email tracking and logs and supervision and lots of program management stuff). They're suggesting team-wide formal code reviews.
Although they do suggest being selective about the pieces of code to review, and this can be very useful for very critical code, in most cases such a wide meeting will feel like a waste of time except for the smallest of teams. There's a population count and a level of detail at which a meeting has diminishing returns, because it's difficult to keep everyone focused and communication gets tricky in disagreements.
I think narrower code reviews, in both scope and audience, are far more useful to improve quality. It also makes it easier to keep it at the peer consultation level rather than an inquisitorial mood.
Although I think pair programming can be great in many contexts, I think they really have mostly complementary advantages:
a) An in-depth code review (formal or not) has a big difference from pair programming: the analysis is done by a fresh pair of eyes. Pair programming can result in two people who are too close to the code to detect flaws in their underlying assumptions.
In my experience, code reviews are not that useful to detect syntax or style errors, nor do I think they're meant to be. That's the kind of thing you can automate with a tool anyway. If you're spending all your time looking for that, I agree most people will feel it is a waste of time.
But code reviews can be extremely useful at a higher level: to detect design gaps and flaws in the implementation, or just get improvement suggestions that a fresh set of eyes ban provide, once you see the whole solution.
Often the very process of explaining the whole solution top-down after implementation allows you to detect issues. Other times you can identify common patterns and needs in different features that we're not visible before ('hey, I had to do the same thing elsewhere and we have a common utility class/method for this that avoids this obscure bug here').
b) I don't see how it should be that different regarding the attitude problems you are describing.
If people get so easily offended by a code review, it seems to me it'd be because of team problems bigger than a code review process: either the programmer thinks their code is perfect (which is something to fear) or they don't trust their peer enough to have honest conversations about code.
I guess this is the one advantage of pair programming, it forces people to work closely and practically guarantees that trust. But I do not think you need to lock two people in a room and do everything together for them to trust each other professionally in a healthy work environment.
Heck, code reviews should be fun.
They're peer conversations about code, and if you enjoy programming it should be fun to argue techniques and solutions with your colleagues, even (specially?) when there are strong disagreements. Both sides typically learn something from it; even if a lot of times it is not something you want or need to change in the current code, it will be useful knowledge elsewhere in the future. Just like college or academia, for that matter, back when coding was done for fun.
I really like the concept of electronic distributions, although I may be biased because the game quality in my experience has been so much better than my typical impulse retail pick (e.g.: Stardock, Steam).
But an initial release is EXACTLY where I think most developers still need a publisher (even if they want to take that role themselves). Getting the word of mouth out there does not seem that easy, Internet or not. I doubt I would have heard of the GalCiv2 release if I had not both played the original GalCiv back in the day, and there was significant buzz for the sequel from the usual suspects (gaming media, stores, etc.).
Each succesful electronic distribution I've seen rests on the success and popularity of a previously successful retail game. Steam rests on Half-Life, and Stardock's seems to rest on GalCiv and non-gaming products. Now once they're out there, they open the doors for a lot of other games that didn't get the exposure, but at that point they are acting as publishers/retail-shelf for other games... I'm not sure how that works, number-wise, for a non-casual gaming title.
I personally prefer the electronic distribution model, because it is far more convenient for all parties when bandwidth is available. But I do not think we have develop full alternatives to the marketing clout of the traditional publisher yet.
They aren't? Then why are they posted by 'editors', who are free to reject them?
I think "editorial oversight" normally has a function that is a bit different than detecting typos, and it has more to do with what Slashdot Editors (gasp!) are doing in a binary fashion: reviewing content for quality, style and fact-checking, to decide what gets published.
Spelling, or even a basic respect of grammar, IS a question of professionalism, in and out of media publications.
I agree that the function of the Slashdot editor is not to convert every post into a masterpiece of wit and literary style, but a run on the spell-checker wouldn't hurt anywhere near what you describe. I'd expect it would take less time than a dup-check, which is badly needed as well.
Well, there ARE some competent horror movies, which respect the suspension of disbelief enough for it to have a chance to be scary. I think that's one reason japanese thrillers like Ringu and Dark Water have become popular (and remade) in recent years: the characters actions are easier to justify than those of "random sorority cheerleaders on campus during serial killer sprees".
Although they did overuse the mother theme a bit to push the characters into impossible situations.
I do find depressing that Hollywood can only remake a good horrof film these days. Whether it is by stealing from markets with more vitality, or from its own legacy from better times (e.g.: Omen).
I'm not sure "creepy" and "deep" horror are qualitatively different; causing this on an interactive environment may be a matter of expertise in the art more than an impossibility. But I do agree that the "passivity" of other mediums has some advantages.
I found the System Shock series pretty scary, and I'm having great fun playing "Call of Cthulu" right now (more than I expected, actually). Both mix traditional plot techniques in the gameplay pretty seamlessly, and I'd have a hard time finding 'deeper' horror in a movie or book these days.
We have thousands of years of storytelling tradition, so our tools to elicit horror, or any other dramatic effect, are based on tight control of the plot and pressing the right psychological buttons. It's actually pretty independant of the talent at the medium itself, but it does require limiting the audience's freedom, which in spite of the hype of sandbox games may be a requirement for enjoyable games in many of genres.
The most successful examples of "creepy" horrors I've seen in games have seamless, consistent transitions of free gameplay and tightly controlled plot events. If they move the game in the active-passive axis without breaking suspension of disbelief it works very well. This is not that different from the challenges in filmmaking, it's just that game designers have less experience doing that.
Great, then please go ahead and do that: earn your own billions to spend on your own monumental projects.
To impress future generations, make sure to engrave your achievements. Something along the lines of: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
While you're doing that, I'm glad someone is humble enough to spend resources on mundane problems like world pandemics, disaster prevention and recovery, ineffective education systems, and other issues that cripple long term development (economic and otherwise).
You know, the kind whose solutions will be required to make the achievements you propose into sustainable contributions to the advancement of humankind, instead of an excercise in the comparative studies of metaphorical male genitalia.
But maybe that's just my own foolish priorities; I'd prefer to have those space colonies self-sustaining and bubbling with life, trade and commerce rather than live and die in the span of a sudden monetary intervention.
I don't think you have read the article, really. You should: it's not great, but it is very short.
The article raises the point that the difference, and 'the real IP', is the motivation and commitment behind the core developer group, not just familiarity with the source. Keeping the code free does not eliminate all the risk, because being open-source does not magically make every collaborator able to carry on the torch.
Summary quote: "The code without the people is worth nothing". I tend to agree.
Yes, the same dependency on the core team applies with closed-source. But the risk is well-known there: if the team leaves, no one (literally) knows the code. On open source, if the core team leaves, it is still very probable no one (really) knows the code. I think anyone developing non-trivial apps knows the second point has always been the one that matters, but the target of the post seems to be VCs doing risk evaluation.
My impression was that this was not an article about "Open Source is bad because X", but rather preventing some naive delusions a VC may have regarding open-source: the many eyes argument is not a silver bullet, and open-source is not magically risk-free.
I'll take that guess at the 90% of the $$$: development, just like in any non-trivial development project. If his 90% of dev cost is less than your 90% of dev time, he has a lot more to spend on chips for his cycles.
Even so, without looking at the code, I wouldn't be so quick to take that guess on the cycles. I've seen my share of crappy native code, and you're more likely to find unfounded skepticism on the perf issues ("it's impossible this code is the problem, it's native!").
The native vs managed code is misleading anyway, because neither the greatest benefits nor the biggest disadvantages of either side is tied to the concept of a VM.
X Language != Y Language just because they have (or even share) a VM, and the feature price can often be paid elsewhere for the differences that matter: - strong vs weak typing? - implicit vs explicit memory management? - declarative vs functional vs procedural? - etc. etc. etc.
Yes, because the longer-leg approach worked so well for 3DO...
There has to be some level of initial success for the price to be driven down by economies of scale, right? Otherwise, the price may go down for entirely different, unprofitable reasons.
The market is not static, a device cannot place itself to compete 4 years in advance. Even if a machine is still the most advanced in the market 4 years from now, if it has been a market failure so far, it has to compete at a disadvantage both with the more popular 'good enough' alternatives and with the promises of every other next-next-gen device.
I think something is missing here: - Diagrams are useful in design - Common syntax and standards are useful in technical artifacts (e.g.: code, documents)
Ergo: - Designing in diagrams using an effective, standard syntax is a joke.
Complaining about UML being insufficient for a complete design is like complaining that CGI is not enough to create a movie. It is both obviously true and obviously besides the point.
Like any decent tool, it serves a particular task for which the alternatives are inferior or more costly. In this case, you wouldn't want to portray all the information you'd normally write out. You'd want to model specific information that needs to be unambiguous, at some level of abstraction, in a way that is simple to digest.
If you think that writing out in English a non-trivial sequence diagram or a large class structure is a better way to communicate this information, you must be surrounded by people with awesome reading comprehension skills.
UML is immensely useful in designing and communicating at the adequate level of abstraction at a time. And yes, so can be any other diagram convention you want to choose. It's not like relational and statechart diagrams are new.
But if you don't spend resources creating a pet Turing-complete scripting language for each project and then training everyone to use it, why do that with your design language, where the most important bugs are likely to originate from? Particularly when you need to train not just your team, but your customers, in your design lingo?
Thank you for posting this. This was actually very concise and informative, at least for me (I'm a dev with no mainframe experience).
I do not have any mod points now, but I really hope someone mods this as Informative. It is certainly more useful than the 'mainframes are awesome' vs 'cluster are th3 rock' posts that pop up all over the place.
Meh. Pitching Mother was much better done. I may keep an eye on what they do based on that sketch, rather than this one.
Sure, this is still somewhat funny, but it was too long for such an over-the-top sketch and it could have been much better if the toned it down a bit.
There were a couple of good moments (e.g.: pizza delivery, some of the larping scene), but it was so over-exaggerated it often killed its own jokes at their prime when the silly gimmicks kept getting in the way of the funny. It might have worked on a smaller sequence, but by the middle of the video it gets repetitive and the punchline delivery got kind of annoying.
Did you read TFA? I'm all for criticizing slashdot summaries for the sake of AMD fanboy-ness, but how exactly is this 'so biased, it's rediculous'?
The summary makes three points regarding the results from the article, or rather, rephrases the single point in 3 ways:
- The FX-60 has a slight edge over Intel's equivalent and runs cooler - It doesn't 'blow away' Intel's equivalent anymore - 'AMD no longer commands the same kind of lead'
IOW: yes, AMD still wins, but it doesn't have the obvious price+perf advantage that it often had. You may actually have to think for a sec before choosing where to spend 1K in CPU bucks. Imagine that.
I'm not sure how exactly you read the article, but I found the summary surprisingly accurate for/.
I don't know why this would be different in US schools, but I think most other modern educational systems have a generalized sticker in the curriculum: typically titled "Introduction to the Scientific Method" or something like that.
Not only was evolution singled out in its theory-ness, but ID was singled out as 'the alternative'. Spaghetti Monster theories aside, there have also been other alternatives with considerable scientific research that were dismissed in favor of darwinism, and within the logic and bar proposded by the ID challenge should be given equal consideration. It would only be fair, once the evidence/methodology bar is lowered to accomodate ID.
When the very definitions of science imply such a disclaimer about theories, the one sensible criticism for impartiality to all alternative theories is to demand that these principles be properly taught to the student.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree with that as a categoric statement, because the same thing can be applied to any other artistic medium.
Just because a movie can be art, doesn't mean that moving pictures => art. Is an infomercial art? Is a self-help book literature? What about a cooking book or a chemical catalogue?
And yet we could create art in the shape of infomercials, and literature in the guise of recipe books.
The definition of art does not quite cover film development, typography or grammar for that matter. But we accept art for the product it is more than by the specific techniques used.
On the same vein, it is true most games are not art, but rather use art for their own purpose. That doesn't mean you cannot create art in the form of a computer game, and I think the industry has done so (accidentally or not) in ocassion.
But you do have a great point in that Art and Gameplay are independent. The (great game, lousy art) and (lousy game, great art) tuples are actually quite common. What I think is more open to question is whether these two elements are orthogonal, or actually interfere with each other.
Is a good interactive game by definition not-art? Or is good interactive art by definition a lousy game?
Ebert and co have an interesting point in that games are, by definition, a surrender of the authorial control that is central to art. But that is not an entirely new concept in art; audience participation has been around for a long time, with admittedly mixed results.
Personally, I think there are games that also fit in the concept of interactive art, I'm just not sure they are the best games (or the best art) by nature. Maybe they cannot be. Fortunately, good art in other mediums tends to have interesting influences in entertainment in general, regardless of how entertaining the original piece was.
Not sure I disagree with the conclusion, but that is a lousy metric; and the definition by comparison is broken.
Marinescu is a leader as much as CmdrTaco is a leader in the community.
Neither is on the same bar as the three you describe (as in spawning and defining community), but one can argue that someone who organizes a community to communicate better is a leader of some sort.
The ServerSide.foo sites are very common points of reference in the Java world, and their material is pretty good in general.
I may or may not have read books from Marinescu at some point, but I definitely got some of my best points of reference and links to books worth reading from those sites.
Having not heard of the man is not a good metric in general either, since effective leadership can be quite transparent to outsiders.
The main reason I'm more familiar with the name/alias behind Slashdot, for that matter, is because of a mix of self-promoting articles and chronic complaints about broken editorial methods.
Why is attendance even an issue? University education is adult education: please treat your students as such.
The ability for independent study is the one major skill universities should cultivate, and for that students should have some responsability over their own educational process. Isn't it better to encourage and enable them?
It is not the business of a university to make students attend classes. It's business is to educate, and attendance only has merit as one among many means towards that agenda. I'd guess this obsession with attendance and pedagogic hand-holding originally came from elementary or high-school system, where the goal of the school has more to do with the loco parentis than with any real education. But it really has no place in adult education.
A "bad student" is not going to start cramming the whole semester before the final just because the podcasts are there... they have been doing this since academic tests have existed, and if anything, video is evidently less efficient (time-wise) than the old all-nighter-with-the-books.
Of course, some teachers try to 'solve' this problem with artificial methods: keeping the chapters that matter secret outside the lecture, changing focus and topics between periods to prevent note-trading, giving attendance weight in the academic grade, or other ways to make being able to pass a reward for being in class.
This is just putting obstacles in the learning process of the students for the sake of solving a non-issue, taking away resources (clear notes and syllabus, lecture material, etc) for an agenda that is not their education.
It solves nothing and makes the availability of these resources at least partially moot. Your "good" students are penalized by going through a hassle for this and losing the flexibility this could have provided. Your "bad" students get to sleep in your class (or disturb it in boredom).
Both groups are going to study in their own ways anyway, and both should be evaluated identically based on their comprehension of the material and excercise of any applicable skills.
I fail to see the Funny. (did the moderators RTFA?).
This comment does seem a bit disrespectful.
The lady said she completed a VISA application to go to Russia, and went to China last year.
She was legitimately comparing the complexity of Passport/VISA requests to a common subscriptions service contract.
Now, I don't know if either country has particularly complex VISA application processes, but even if they are not the accumulation of absurdities, redundancies and mistranslations that government forms often are, they should be definitely comparable.
Perhaps it wasn't the most interesting quote ever, but there is no reason to be condescending.
Or, he's a minor and society should deal with him with rehabilitation as the primary purpose.
Society tends to consider minors as 'not fully accountable for their actions'. Forcing therapy as part of the deal would at least be consistent with other cases where the defendant is considered only partially responsible for the crime due to mitigating circumstances, like temporary or permanent insanity, addictions, or being a multimillionare celebrity in an intoxicated state.
I think you're missing the point when you think Spore only appeals to the geek interests its technology implies.
Based on that reasoning you could say that SimCity only appeals to urban engineers and game theorists, or a closer analogy, that the Tamagotchi was a toy for biologists and zoologists.
It's not about such a specific demographic. Frankly, for the Sims, I don't think it was about so much 'moms and girlfriends'.
That was just the most atypical gamer segment and easy to point out, but the user base was much wider than that, at least from the Sim-ers I know personally.
Honestly, I'm not sure we can have a clear idea about the proper target of Spore until we see the full game.
But if Wright' history (and successes) are any indication, I think you are overestimating the perceived importance of all the cool procedural-content technology will have to the average player (as opposed to the devs).
I'd expect the actual game to be lightweight enough that it will not matter that much to the player if it were the great engine of emergent behavior it is intended to be, or just cleverly edited content sent through those tubes the internets are made of.
This may be moderated as funny, but if you replace 'people' with 'gamers', I think it is quite correct.
The interesting thing is that his target hasn't been 'gamers' for a while, if ever.
And I still see non-gamers playing with their Sims and virtual doll-houses longer than I could think humanly enjoyable.
They don't play his games because of his creativity, inventiveness and reputation. They don't have any idea who Will Wright is, and to be honest, they would never call the Sims 'creative' or 'inventive' in any way.
They still play it because it is just a game, and they enjoy playing it.
And maybe because they didn't have to spend a quarter of their free time honing reflexes and virtual skillz to 'p0wn and not be p0wned'.
Hopefully that should not be an issue for normal activity.
But I'm worried when someone (or their office staff) are crazy enough to send a whole Internet through, since it always takes forever and it will clog up the tubes for everyone else too.
We should keep the Senate away from the Internets or make them pay their due for those tubes.
This abuse of sending Internets for free around has to stop, specially the big ones. I sent an email yesterday that has not arrived, and I bet it was because someone sent one of those Internets.
After I RTFA'd, I realized I would agree a bit with you if code reviews were typically performed as described in the article, although for different reasons.
They're not only suggesting a formal code review (with fancy printouts and email tracking and logs and supervision and lots of program management stuff). They're suggesting team-wide formal code reviews.
Although they do suggest being selective about the pieces of code to review, and this can be very useful for very critical code, in most cases such a wide meeting will feel like a waste of time except for the smallest of teams. There's a population count and a level of detail at which a meeting has diminishing returns, because it's difficult to keep everyone focused and communication gets tricky in disagreements.
I think narrower code reviews, in both scope and audience, are far more useful to improve quality. It also makes it easier to keep it at the peer consultation level rather than an inquisitorial mood.
Although I think pair programming can be great in many contexts, I think they really have mostly complementary advantages:
a) An in-depth code review (formal or not) has a big difference from pair programming: the analysis is done by a fresh pair of eyes. Pair programming can result in two people who are too close to the code to detect flaws in their underlying assumptions.
In my experience, code reviews are not that useful to detect syntax or style errors, nor do I think they're meant to be. That's the kind of thing you can automate with a tool anyway. If you're spending all your time looking for that, I agree most people will feel it is a waste of time.
But code reviews can be extremely useful at a higher level: to detect design gaps and flaws in the implementation, or just get improvement suggestions that a fresh set of eyes ban provide, once you see the whole solution.
Often the very process of explaining the whole solution top-down after implementation allows you to detect issues. Other times you can identify common patterns and needs in different features that we're not visible before ('hey, I had to do the same thing elsewhere and we have a common utility class/method for this that avoids this obscure bug here').
b) I don't see how it should be that different regarding the attitude problems you are describing.
If people get so easily offended by a code review, it seems to me it'd be because of team problems bigger than a code review process: either the programmer thinks their code is perfect (which is something to fear) or they don't trust their peer enough to have honest conversations about code.
I guess this is the one advantage of pair programming, it forces people to work closely and practically guarantees that trust. But I do not think you need to lock two people in a room and do everything together for them to trust each other professionally in a healthy work environment.
Heck, code reviews should be fun.
They're peer conversations about code, and if you enjoy programming it should be fun to argue techniques and solutions with your colleagues, even (specially?) when there are strong disagreements. Both sides typically learn something from it; even if a lot of times it is not something you want or need to change in the current code, it will be useful knowledge elsewhere in the future. Just like college or academia, for that matter, back when coding was done for fun.
I really like the concept of electronic distributions, although I may be biased because the game quality in my experience has been so much better than my typical impulse retail pick (e.g.: Stardock, Steam).
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But an initial release is EXACTLY where I think most developers still need a publisher (even if they want to take that role themselves). Getting the word of mouth out there does not seem that easy, Internet or not. I doubt I would have heard of the GalCiv2 release if I had not both played the original GalCiv back in the day, and there was significant buzz for the sequel from the usual suspects (gaming media, stores, etc.).
Each succesful electronic distribution I've seen rests on the success and popularity of a previously successful retail game.
Steam rests on Half-Life, and Stardock's seems to rest on GalCiv and non-gaming products. Now once they're out there, they open the doors for a lot of other games that didn't get the exposure, but at that point they are acting as publishers/retail-shelf for other games... I'm not sure how that works, number-wise, for a non-casual gaming title.
I personally prefer the electronic distribution model, because it is far more convenient for all parties when bandwidth is available. But I do not think we have develop full alternatives to the marketing clout of the traditional publisher yet.
There is a pretty good post-mortem on GalCiv2 at GamaSutra that I think is relevant to the topic: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060405/wardel
They aren't? Then why are they posted by 'editors', who are free to reject them?
I think "editorial oversight" normally has a function that is a bit different than detecting typos, and it has more to do with what Slashdot Editors (gasp!) are doing in a binary fashion: reviewing content for quality, style and fact-checking, to decide what gets published.
Spelling, or even a basic respect of grammar, IS a question of professionalism, in and out of media publications.
I agree that the function of the Slashdot editor is not to convert every post into a masterpiece of wit and literary style, but a run on the spell-checker wouldn't hurt anywhere near what you describe.
I'd expect it would take less time than a dup-check, which is badly needed as well.
I thought the reliable test was to see if the terrorist floats.
Well, there ARE some competent horror movies, which respect the suspension of disbelief enough for it to have a chance to be scary.
I think that's one reason japanese thrillers like Ringu and Dark Water have become popular (and remade) in recent years: the characters actions are easier to justify than those of "random sorority cheerleaders on campus during serial killer sprees".
Although they did overuse the mother theme a bit to push the characters into impossible situations.
I do find depressing that Hollywood can only remake a good horrof film these days. Whether it is by stealing from markets with more vitality, or from its own legacy from better times (e.g.: Omen).
I'm not sure "creepy" and "deep" horror are qualitatively different; causing this on an interactive environment may be a matter of expertise in the art more than an impossibility. But I do agree that the "passivity" of other mediums has some advantages.
I found the System Shock series pretty scary, and I'm having great fun playing "Call of Cthulu" right now (more than I expected, actually). Both mix traditional plot techniques in the gameplay pretty seamlessly, and I'd have a hard time finding 'deeper' horror in a movie or book these days.
We have thousands of years of storytelling tradition, so our tools to elicit horror, or any other dramatic effect, are based on tight control of the plot and pressing the right psychological buttons. It's actually pretty independant of the talent at the medium itself, but it does require limiting the audience's freedom, which in spite of the hype of sandbox games may be a requirement for enjoyable games in many of genres.
The most successful examples of "creepy" horrors I've seen in games have seamless, consistent transitions of free gameplay and tightly controlled plot events. If they move the game in the active-passive axis without breaking suspension of disbelief it works very well. This is not that different from the challenges in filmmaking, it's just that game designers have less experience doing that.
Great, then please go ahead and do that: earn your own billions to spend on your own monumental projects.
To impress future generations, make sure to engrave your achievements. Something along the lines of:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
While you're doing that, I'm glad someone is humble enough to spend resources on mundane problems like world pandemics, disaster prevention and recovery, ineffective education systems, and other issues that cripple long term development (economic and otherwise).
You know, the kind whose solutions will be required to make the achievements you propose into sustainable contributions to the advancement of humankind, instead of an excercise in the comparative studies of metaphorical male genitalia.
But maybe that's just my own foolish priorities; I'd prefer to have those space colonies self-sustaining and bubbling with life, trade and commerce rather than live and die in the span of a sudden monetary intervention.
I don't think you have read the article, really. You should: it's not great, but it is very short.
The article raises the point that the difference, and 'the real IP', is the motivation and commitment behind the core developer group, not just familiarity with the source. Keeping the code free does not eliminate all the risk, because being open-source does not magically make every collaborator able to carry on the torch.
Summary quote: "The code without the people is worth nothing". I tend to agree.
Yes, the same dependency on the core team applies with closed-source. But the risk is well-known there: if the team leaves, no one (literally) knows the code. On open source, if the core team leaves, it is still very probable no one (really) knows the code.
I think anyone developing non-trivial apps knows the second point has always been the one that matters, but the target of the post seems to be VCs doing risk evaluation.
My impression was that this was not an article about "Open Source is bad because X", but rather preventing some naive delusions a VC may have regarding open-source: the many eyes argument is not a silver bullet, and open-source is not magically risk-free.
I'll take that guess at the 90% of the $$$: development, just like in any non-trivial development project.
If his 90% of dev cost is less than your 90% of dev time, he has a lot more to spend on chips for his cycles.
Even so, without looking at the code, I wouldn't be so quick to take that guess on the cycles. I've seen my share of crappy native code, and you're more likely to find unfounded skepticism on the perf issues ("it's impossible this code is the problem, it's native!").
The native vs managed code is misleading anyway, because neither the greatest benefits nor the biggest disadvantages of either side is tied to the concept of a VM.
X Language != Y Language just because they have (or even share) a VM, and the feature price can often be paid elsewhere for the differences that matter:
- strong vs weak typing?
- implicit vs explicit memory management?
- declarative vs functional vs procedural?
- etc. etc. etc.
Yes, because the longer-leg approach worked so well for 3DO...
There has to be some level of initial success for the price to be driven down by economies of scale, right?
Otherwise, the price may go down for entirely different, unprofitable reasons.
The market is not static, a device cannot place itself to compete 4 years in advance. Even if a machine is still the most advanced in the market 4 years from now, if it has been a market failure so far, it has to compete at a disadvantage both with the more popular 'good enough' alternatives and with the promises of every other next-next-gen device.
Me thinks someone doesn't know yet Javascript != Java.
I think something is missing here:
- Diagrams are useful in design
- Common syntax and standards are useful in technical artifacts (e.g.: code, documents)
Ergo:
- Designing in diagrams using an effective, standard syntax is a joke.
Complaining about UML being insufficient for a complete design is like complaining that CGI is not enough to create a movie. It is both obviously true and obviously besides the point.
Like any decent tool, it serves a particular task for which the alternatives are inferior or more costly.
In this case, you wouldn't want to portray all the information you'd normally write out. You'd want to model specific information that needs to be unambiguous, at some level of abstraction, in a way that is simple to digest.
If you think that writing out in English a non-trivial sequence diagram or a large class structure is a better way to communicate this information, you must be surrounded by people with awesome reading comprehension skills.
UML is immensely useful in designing and communicating at the adequate level of abstraction at a time. And yes, so can be any other diagram convention you want to choose. It's not like relational and statechart diagrams are new.
But if you don't spend resources creating a pet Turing-complete scripting language for each project and then training everyone to use it, why do that with your design language, where the most important bugs are likely to originate from?
Particularly when you need to train not just your team, but your customers, in your design lingo?
Thank you for posting this. This was actually very concise and informative, at least for me (I'm a dev with no mainframe experience).
I do not have any mod points now, but I really hope someone mods this as Informative.
It is certainly more useful than the 'mainframes are awesome' vs 'cluster are th3 rock' posts that pop up all over the place.
Meh. Pitching Mother was much better done. I may keep an eye on what they do based on that sketch, rather than this one.
Sure, this is still somewhat funny, but it was too long for such an over-the-top sketch and it could have been much better if the toned it down a bit.
There were a couple of good moments (e.g.: pizza delivery, some of the larping scene), but it was so over-exaggerated it often killed its own jokes at their prime when the silly gimmicks kept getting in the way of the funny. It might have worked on a smaller sequence, but by the middle of the video it gets repetitive and the punchline delivery got kind of annoying.
Did you read TFA? I'm all for criticizing slashdot summaries for the sake of AMD fanboy-ness, but how exactly is this 'so biased, it's rediculous'?
/.
The summary makes three points regarding the results from the article, or rather, rephrases the single point in 3 ways:
- The FX-60 has a slight edge over Intel's equivalent and runs cooler
- It doesn't 'blow away' Intel's equivalent anymore
- 'AMD no longer commands the same kind of lead'
IOW: yes, AMD still wins, but it doesn't have the obvious price+perf advantage that it often had. You may actually have to think for a sec before choosing where to spend 1K in CPU bucks. Imagine that.
I'm not sure how exactly you read the article, but I found the summary surprisingly accurate for
I don't know why this would be different in US schools, but I think most other modern educational systems have a generalized sticker in the curriculum: typically titled "Introduction to the Scientific Method" or something like that.
Not only was evolution singled out in its theory-ness, but ID was singled out as 'the alternative'. Spaghetti Monster theories aside, there have also been other alternatives with considerable scientific research that were dismissed in favor of darwinism, and within the logic and bar proposded by the ID challenge should be given equal consideration. It would only be fair, once the evidence/methodology bar is lowered to accomodate ID.
When the very definitions of science imply such a disclaimer about theories, the one sensible criticism for impartiality to all alternative theories is to demand that these principles be properly taught to the student.