Your arguments have no relation to the topic at hand. You have worked with exactly one device. I had no problems developing for my one Android, my app worked great. Then people installed it on other devices and it all went to hell in a handbasket, because there are too many versions of the Android OS floating around, each with compatibility-breaking differences, and then each manufacturer likes to screw with it even further. It is such a horribly fractured platform that it makes the PC look like a goddamned console.
iOS devices adhere to a much more consistent set of features: they all have touch and OpenGL graphics acceleration, only two aspect ratios to worry about, and if your app only specifies the lower-resolution layout, the OS simply scales your entire display proportionally, without reflowing all your UI elements out of scale or alignment. And yes, the apps do write themselves because 99% of the time, if it runs flawlessly in the simulator, it will run just as well on an actual device - ALL of them. If I'm writing a phone-centric app, I can design it once and know it will work on all iPhones. CPU performance may vary, but the app will run and look identical. Same thing with the iPad, they just launched the 3rd model, and I don't even have to worry about supporting it. My existing apps will work perfectly, same as they did on iPads 1 and 2.
Funny, yes, and I hate Java with a passion, but the problem with mobile dev isn't the language or its portability (though the Blackberry sucks giant donkey cock by its use of J2ME). The real issue is hardware disparity. There is far too much variance in the Android world, and the tools provided do absolutely nothing to help prepare for that variance. If there was even some consistency with regards to aspect ratio, we could at least scale interfaces up with minimal pain, but some devices are 320x480, others are 320x320, and some yet are 800x480. I mean, we're making shitty little mobile apps here with limited computing power. I don't even know of that many desktop apps that do a good job of reflowing their UI for any arbitrary size, so why does the mobile world expect us to pull off such miracles on resource-constrained insular devices ?
With IOS, this is a non-issue because they only have two aspect ratios, and the best part is that the iPad will only scale a phone-sized app proportionally. It's not going to stretch it out to full-screen, so all UI widgets keep their relative positions and sizes. With the Android, the standard way to design an image-based layout is using fixed pixel sizes, and since the entire layout system is a giant hack, the result does not scale well at all unless you jump through hoops to use a mindfuck of nested relative "weighted" layouts. While this is understandable from a technical perspective, it's really frustrating to have this worst case scenario as the default, and wholly inacceptable in 2012. Bitmaps remain small while flowed containers will stretch, so you might end up with a gigantic text input box beside a tiny blot of an icon, or a web browser with navigation buttons so small you keep hitting the wrong one.
The Blackberry is even worse. You still have a mess of nested layout controllers, but since there is no visual design tool, you have to position everything in code. This does require clever coding as you wind up overriding almost every paint() method to calculate your ratios and figuring out how to flow or scale content - which I might add is absurdly slow. Scaling a bitmap requires it to be encoded, meaning compressed back to JPEG or PNG, since it is the image reader that does the scaling. If you've ever written bitmap scaling algorithms on 286 or 386 machines, that's roughly the level of performance to expect. Brutal.
We see the same level of mediocrity in C. Just try shrinking your desktop apps to 480x320 and see how they fare, then flip them to 320x480 portrait mode and try to imagine how you would have to change the UI to make things fit. Java makes it more irritating, but the underlying problem is language-agnostic.
There are damn good reasons why studio work is done in 24/192, and while I agree that most playback devices cannot produce the uber-high frequencies, nor would we want them to, I think the arguments against distributing 24/192 are pretty weak.
For one, his argument about digital sampling is bullshit, and demonstrates a poor understanding of the Nyquist-Shannon theorem. In his idealized case of a pure sine wave, yes you only need to sample at the Nyquist frequency. Once you start mixing different sounds together, that all falls apart since the sound wave is no longer a stable shape but rather an additive-subtractive mess of several frequencies, which do reconstruct in such a predictable fashion. Heck, even a simple square wave at f/2 will result in audible distortion on the DAC side, because it simply cannot recreate the infinite "slope". It's not even a matter of hearing up to 22khz, I know I can't anymore, but the harmonics of a true square wave cover the entire range down to 0hz, and that's what you can actually hear. If that square wave gets tapered or rounded by inadequate sampling, you end up with a triangle or sine wave which sounds radically different.
Does the average ear need 24/192 to be satisfied ? No. Does it mean we should entirely stop distributing such content ? Fuck no. I have a pretty decent studio setup, cheap but decent, and good enough ears with the technical training to notice those distortion artifacts. Okay, I'm a freak of hearing with perfect pitch and damn near digital memory for audio - hell I can identify a few dozen vocal mics just by listening to a mixed and mastered CD. Those high resolution recordings are for ME! They provide me with some geeky audio entertainment, which makes it worth the extra download time and minor expense of 24/192 capable equipment. My wife, who is a trained opera singer, cannot hear those details; she doesn't listen in such analytical fashion. Hell she can't even tell if I subtly pitch or time-stretch a track for DJ mixing... For her uses, 44khz is more than enough. So what's so wrong in providing different files for different listeners, and why does this Monty guy think his opinion trumps anyone elses ?
I'm with you on the whole "braindead" argument, but I think the outrage in the article is the profit motive. As a citizen of a nation with free healthcare, I'm absolutely amazed at the ludicrous cost of services in the U.S.
$750k for one organ ? That's as much as a really pimptastic new house! Does the donor's family get a cut of this dirty money ?
Even in 2012, I still play the fuck outta Dungeon Master. I fire it up every few years and play it through. I don't know why, but ever since I discovered it in my friend's massive pile of Amiga disks, I was hooked and had to get it for the ST, and later for the PC. But then, I've never even heard of:
- The Faery Tale Adventure - Starflight - Pool of Radiance - Phantasie
And yes, I've been around. I just wasn't a C64 guy, my home was the Atari. And I think it needs to be said: this top 10 list sucks! There is so much repetition in there, too many dungeon crawls that all end up being the same. DM was a real-time one, the others were turn-based, but beyond that distinction there was a staggering amount of repetition across titles. It simply isn't a genre that allowed much in the way of innovation. Walk, fight, loot, solve simple puzzles.
All of you who are saying this developer and their code just sucks, you've never written any significant mobile apps, have you ?
I work with IOS, Android, Blackberry, WinPhone7. IOS and Win7 are a walk in the park, compared to the other two. IOS, specifically, has stellar compatibility across all devices. I only encounted a single issue with one of my apps, when upgrading to IOS 5, and it had to do with some marginal code I was using, whose undocumented functionality had finally been obsoleted. The fix took all of 15 minutes to research and implement. Most importantly, I only need to design for two sizes: phone, and tablet. If I'm lazy, I can skip the tablet, and let it scale things proportionally. This isn't optimal, but for some apps it's sufficient.
On Android and BB, there are as many display sizes and feature sets as there are devices. Your app might look fine on your emulator and personal device, but be completely out of whack on another, so you end up having to collect numerous devices and installing a dozen emulators to cover any significant portion of the user base. Let's not forget that these emulators are horribly slow and unstable, so if I have to test and debug a build in 10+ different environments, there goes my afternoon. That's for one build! It's quite simple: for Android or BB, I typically take the IOS budget and double it. If I were writing 3D games, I would probably quadruple it because now there are countless GPUs to target and no good middleware available to abstract away those differences. Android and BB development is at least 10 years behind, in terms of comfort and convenience. It often reminds me of writing DOS software.
Windows Phone 7 is actually not too bad. For anyone experienced with Visual Studio, it's a very familiar workflow and has much commonality with IOS development. It's extremely fast to work with, and you can get a good sense of how your app will scale, just by resizing the workspace as you're designing it. I don't care much for the platform itself, but I don't mind developing for it - I find the toolset quite pleasant.
That's the piece I neglected to write in my original post: the developer MUST understand the user. It's not like I sit here on my tech throne, telling people how they should do their jobs. I mean, I do, but only after I've had a chance to see how the users are currently accomplishing their tasks, and figured out how I can make those tasks easier to complete.
I get a lot of people asking me for a web site, or a mobile app, without having the slightest clue what their goals are. They just want it, because someone asked them why they didn't have one already. My job is to offer technical expertise and a completely out-of-the-box take on the problem, because I don't spend 40 hours a week in the user's world, doing their job the way they've always done it. It's up to me to ignore the "old ways" and come up with a new, streamlined path from start to finish. Users simply cannot do this on their own, because they are set in their ways, much like I'm set in my uber-technical ways and you couldn't ask me to change my programming habits, not without showing me a better way because I cannot find it myself.
The biggest trainwrecks I've ever witnessed were projects where the client was dictating too many technical details, effectively positioning themselves as the "analyst", reducing their developer to a mindless coder. So, unskilled analyst + frustrated coder = shitty product. You're pounding out miles of code, getting paid your full rate for it, and you know it's the wrong approach, but any attempt to steer the client is met with extreme resistance, so you eventually concede defeat, fulfill your end of the contract and accept your client's wasted money. What clients want is rarely in-line with what they actually need.
Designers don't think computers. They think bunnies and lolcats and premium blended marijuana.
Programmers think computers. You want a button ? Okay, [button] here's a button. It's too square looking ? Okay, (button) here's a rounded button. Too plain ? Okay, {.,-'button'-,.} here's a fancy button. Too ugly ? Okay, *deletes button* talk to me when you actually want to click the damn button.
End users can't design for shit. They will have an opinion if you put something in front of them, but to ask them to come up with an interface from scratch will not yield any results. They don't know what they want to do until you tell them what they CAN do.
I hear what you're saying about Firefox, but people like you and I are apparently not the target demographic. If I were just a typical web user, the slimmed-down default Firefox UI would be fine. Users want to see the web page, they care very little about extra functionality. They don't even use the goddamned location bar, preferring to have Google as their home page, and searching for "Facebook" in lieu of bookmarks. The first time I saw someone google Facebook 20 times an hour, I was in complete shock. Now a few years later, I've come to accept this as the way normal people use their browser. Thinking is entirely optional, even frowned upon, and this is the crowd to which Firefox is trying to cater.
Luser checklist: - Does it start with Google ? - Can it get me to Facebook ? - Can it get me to Gmail/Hotmail ? - Can it play Farmville/AngryBirds/Bejeweled/Zuma ?
Now, one could speculate as to why these people use Firefox, when IE9 already does everything they want... I'll suggest that they simply want to be hip. Or, in my wife's case, she uses both IE9 and FF, because then "she has two windows she can put side-by-side".
It's cool. In the last few years, I've come to instinctively assume that any and all AC posts are trolls, unless it's some sensitive, NDA-type topic, and even then I assume a 50% probability of trolliness.
Y'know, it's times like this, I wish Canada had crazy outspoken conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones. For all his mad ranting, he does manage to disseminate a lot of dirty facts about the government. Harper's appointees are so nasty, yet nobody seems to know or care. Look at utter shitbags like Bruce Carson, who somehow got a security clearance and a privileged position by Harper's side, despite numerous fraud convictions. Meanwhile, a guy like me can be denied security clearance over bad credit or a shitty ex-employer. Our whole government is a goddamned joke while this clown is in power.
He must be stopped. And by stopped I mean thrown in prison. And by prison I mean not one of the for-profit prisons he's established. And by established I mean sold to private interests. And by private interests I mean his cronies.
He is George W. Bush with slightly better english diction.
It will be fun when our Amerifag P.M. says "hey BushBamaRomney our prisons are generating record profits thanks to SOPA", and this whole mess gets re-shoved down American citizens' throats, only this time without a last-minute reversal.
See, the funny thing about Canada is our fascist assclown of a fraudulently-elected leader likes to think of us as a beta 51st state. Whatever works here will serve as a case study for the U.S. administration, so your fascist assclowns can go live with the new and improved version of NeoConOS 2.0. Just as we carefully observe U.S. politics, you should be monitoring Canadian politics because they are very closely related on an ideological level.
See... that's what I like about the way Riot implemented their "freemium" content in League of Legends. You cannot buy power. In fact, you can buy almost everything with in-game points (IP), which you earn by playing the game. The only things you cannot obtain for free are skins and IP/XP multipliers. To buy the "power" items, which are runes, you must play until you've earned enough IP. And finally, there are items that can be bought with either IP or money, such as extra champions or rune pages. It becomes a tradeoff between playing time and money. Those who have the extra disposable income can spend it, those who don't can still enjoy the game in its entirety.
I played it for a year without spending a single penny, got to the max level, had a few champs all tricked out and was not missing out on any features. Skins are purely vanity items, but they are still immensely popular. They cost something like $7.50 each. I probably own a dozen or so, for my most played champs. Some of them have different sound effects. It's really just a fun little vanity toy and way to "tip" the game devs for the countless hours of enjoyment I've had with the game.
On the other hand, "pay to win" games are vile, offensive filth in which I refuse to take part. If the whole purpose of a game's design is to artificially cripple free players and force them to pay in order to have any fun, it should have been payware in the first place. Valve knows this all too well, and they specifically avoid releasing game-breaking paid items for TF2, because then the only people having fun will be the ones who spend the most money, which cannibalizes your user base and quickly destroys it. You can buy useless hats, which are just doodads to satisfy your OCD and brag about, and that's perfectly fine.
I still don't quite understand OnLive's business model, or why anyone would go for it. I know how it works, they render everything server-side and send you compressed video - fine. The roundtrip latency is probably not all that bad, as long as you have a short route to the server. I'm fine with the technical aspects, but what about the money ? It seems to me like the only way they can make a buck is via mass pirating.
Those servers can't be cheap, each one is basically a mid-range gaming rig with a hardware video encoder, and can only serve one user at a time. Each needs a copy of the OS and games. You're basically renting access to a $1000+ gaming rig, plus bandwidth. Sure, the benefit is that just about any internet-connected device can now "play" PC games, but how does OnLive turn a profit ? Do they pool the game licenses so they only need as many paid keys as there are simultaneous players ? Or is this like all those ridiculous startups from the dot-com bust, where they spend fucktons of VC money and die a horribly quick death ?
Don't get me wrong, I like the technical merits of OnLive. Even as we said "this will never work", well surprise: it works amazingly well for many people. I just can't see how they can deliver this without charging fucktons of money for the privilege.
It's not so much about being too perfect, but more closely related to what I call "uneven reality". If one aspect seems less real than the rest, like for example picture-perfect facial detail but choppy motion, that tends to trigger the uncanny valley response. It's our brain going "I recognize this as human, but something is very very wrong with them". The same can occur with sounds, as if a non-realistic image or machine is paired with a human voice, we perceive it as a disembodied human, which can be a quite creepy. If you're old enough (or wise enough), think of Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or having a fluent conversation with your toaster. Creepy.
Okay, I like the sound of this. Get me four of those graphics cards so I can SLI the tits out of my hydro bill.
Sure, there is only so much data my eyeballs can process, but larger displays do serve a purpose. For example, I would love to have a 4k projector shooting at my wall, instead of two 27" monitors. Actually, I'd like two, stacked on top of each other. Why ? Because then my wall becomes a giant display surface. Even right now, I can't really mentally process the entirety of my pixel space at once, but the realities of multitasking and my working habits dictate that I need a bunch of windows in the sidelines, so that I may occasionally glance over to consult some chart, monitor logs in real-time, or juggle a half-dozen IM and email convos without getting signals crossed, or keep WoW open in the background while I wait for a damn raid to assemble.
So, if Tim Sweeney wants 8000x4000, then I want 16000x8000. He can render all the anatomically correct games his heart desires, but I want moar datas!
I don't know, even in the somewhat crowded field of I.T., we have trouble finding good people for our team. If you're applying at a giant megacorp, I could see how the numbers could work against you. I had a big government job over a decade ago, hated it, and have stuck with small gigs ever since. The money is just as good, and I don't have to put up with bureaucrats and unions and all that other deadweight that comes with critically bloated businesses.
If "every company" is doing it, then every company deserves to fail. Their ex-employees should take their skills and experience and start a new company of their own, minus the bullshit. If you've worked your way into a situation where you can't afford to leave an abusive job, to find or create a better one, that should be your first goal. Save up enough so you can have a few months of freedom. It's better to make a small sacrifice now, than live miserably for the next 10-15 years or until the company really shits down your throat by laying you off.
Yes. Walk out of interviews. People have this fucked up notion that getting a job is some fantastic gift from heaven. No. Employers need you more than you need them. Even fucking Wal-Mart. No people = no profits.
If your employer can't respect your privacy, they won't respect you at all. Being treated like shit is not worth the $40k salary.
What you describe is FAR too intelligent for the current socio-economic climate. It also shits all over the grocers' thinly veiled upselling schemes, since a big part of the shopping "experience" is walking around a giant store full of tempting edibles, with the most common items intentionally spread out all over the place so you have to walk the entire goddamned store.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if my local megagrocer had: - online shopping - ideally, 24/7 delivery, but I'd settle for 9am-9pm, in 4 hour blocks. - waived delivery fees on orders exceeding some high amount, maybe $80-100, to discourage college twits from ordering a single package of pasta
That's it. Now bear in mind, that grocer is only three (big suburban) blocks away from my house. I still avoid going, because:
1. I'm lazy 2. I don't drive 3. I'm fucking lazy, I told you 4. I have better things to do than piss away 90 minutes walking to the store, finding what I want (or not), waiting forever in a checkout line, then waiting for a cab to take all that loot home
What's funny (read: stupid) is I can already do all of this for beer and liquor. I shit you not, my local independent booze delivery guy has a complete e-commerce site, synced to the liquor store's inventory and price list. The thing even sends me email when there's a promotion on my favorite items. So why the fuck can't a giant like Loblaw do the same ? EVERYONE in the neighbourhood has to eat, right ? Sort those orders by street, load them on a truck and go drop them off en-masse, just like the milkman used to do. Ditch the retail location and huge parking lot, replace it with a tiny convenience store stocked with essentials and munchies, and the fortune saved on premium commercial real-estate can pay for the delivery fleet several times over. Megamarts make sense in dense urban areas, like my old downtown apartment, but here in the suburbs they're just a giant box of fail.
There is when you're on a memory-constrained platform, which admittedly the PC is not. Selfmod code is still used in demo coding, especially with 256-byte and 4096-byte competitions, but that is exclusively an academic exercise.
On an embedded system with just a few kbytes of memory, like say an ARM-powered gadget, self-modifying code is still relevant, even in 2012. Just because we can put 4 gigs of Ram in a toaster doesn't mean we should.
Pardon my curiosity, but it sounds like you're building ~$400 servers out of basic desktop components. What kind of workload are you putting on these boxes that scales so well, yet doesn't justify the added expense of high-end server class hardware ? Maybe I'm at the other end of the spectrum, but I wouldn't dream of running a server without redundant power supplies and premium boards that have been built and tested to rigorous specs. The added hardware expense more than makes up for decreased maintenance and downtime.
I used to work for a guy who built servers out of whatever spare parts he had lying around - obsolete desktops, refurbs, ebay junk, whatever. For a while, we were spending at least 10-15 hours a week keeping those things up, or driving down to the datacenter to physically reboot them. I eventually convinced him to spend a LOT more money on fancier hardware, with IPMI, redundant everything and high-efficiency power supplies. Spending that extra thousand up-front meant we could boot them up and practically forget them, uptimes have gone way up and we were logging more billable hours instead of juggling cheap gear. The results spoke for themselves.
Spot on! ION was the best thing that ever happened to the Atom platform. Really, it was the only thing that made it into a usable HTPC or ultra-low-power desktop. They really need to stop shitting down NVidia's throat because they are precisely the kind of aggressive, performance-driven company that would fit alongside Intel's model.
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Your arguments have no relation to the topic at hand. You have worked with exactly one device. I had no problems developing for my one Android, my app worked great. Then people installed it on other devices and it all went to hell in a handbasket, because there are too many versions of the Android OS floating around, each with compatibility-breaking differences, and then each manufacturer likes to screw with it even further. It is such a horribly fractured platform that it makes the PC look like a goddamned console.
iOS devices adhere to a much more consistent set of features: they all have touch and OpenGL graphics acceleration, only two aspect ratios to worry about, and if your app only specifies the lower-resolution layout, the OS simply scales your entire display proportionally, without reflowing all your UI elements out of scale or alignment. And yes, the apps do write themselves because 99% of the time, if it runs flawlessly in the simulator, it will run just as well on an actual device - ALL of them. If I'm writing a phone-centric app, I can design it once and know it will work on all iPhones. CPU performance may vary, but the app will run and look identical. Same thing with the iPad, they just launched the 3rd model, and I don't even have to worry about supporting it. My existing apps will work perfectly, same as they did on iPads 1 and 2.
Funny, yes, and I hate Java with a passion, but the problem with mobile dev isn't the language or its portability (though the Blackberry sucks giant donkey cock by its use of J2ME). The real issue is hardware disparity. There is far too much variance in the Android world, and the tools provided do absolutely nothing to help prepare for that variance. If there was even some consistency with regards to aspect ratio, we could at least scale interfaces up with minimal pain, but some devices are 320x480, others are 320x320, and some yet are 800x480. I mean, we're making shitty little mobile apps here with limited computing power. I don't even know of that many desktop apps that do a good job of reflowing their UI for any arbitrary size, so why does the mobile world expect us to pull off such miracles on resource-constrained insular devices ?
With IOS, this is a non-issue because they only have two aspect ratios, and the best part is that the iPad will only scale a phone-sized app proportionally. It's not going to stretch it out to full-screen, so all UI widgets keep their relative positions and sizes. With the Android, the standard way to design an image-based layout is using fixed pixel sizes, and since the entire layout system is a giant hack, the result does not scale well at all unless you jump through hoops to use a mindfuck of nested relative "weighted" layouts. While this is understandable from a technical perspective, it's really frustrating to have this worst case scenario as the default, and wholly inacceptable in 2012. Bitmaps remain small while flowed containers will stretch, so you might end up with a gigantic text input box beside a tiny blot of an icon, or a web browser with navigation buttons so small you keep hitting the wrong one.
The Blackberry is even worse. You still have a mess of nested layout controllers, but since there is no visual design tool, you have to position everything in code. This does require clever coding as you wind up overriding almost every paint() method to calculate your ratios and figuring out how to flow or scale content - which I might add is absurdly slow. Scaling a bitmap requires it to be encoded, meaning compressed back to JPEG or PNG, since it is the image reader that does the scaling. If you've ever written bitmap scaling algorithms on 286 or 386 machines, that's roughly the level of performance to expect. Brutal.
We see the same level of mediocrity in C. Just try shrinking your desktop apps to 480x320 and see how they fare, then flip them to 320x480 portrait mode and try to imagine how you would have to change the UI to make things fit. Java makes it more irritating, but the underlying problem is language-agnostic.
There are damn good reasons why studio work is done in 24/192, and while I agree that most playback devices cannot produce the uber-high frequencies, nor would we want them to, I think the arguments against distributing 24/192 are pretty weak.
For one, his argument about digital sampling is bullshit, and demonstrates a poor understanding of the Nyquist-Shannon theorem. In his idealized case of a pure sine wave, yes you only need to sample at the Nyquist frequency. Once you start mixing different sounds together, that all falls apart since the sound wave is no longer a stable shape but rather an additive-subtractive mess of several frequencies, which do reconstruct in such a predictable fashion. Heck, even a simple square wave at f/2 will result in audible distortion on the DAC side, because it simply cannot recreate the infinite "slope". It's not even a matter of hearing up to 22khz, I know I can't anymore, but the harmonics of a true square wave cover the entire range down to 0hz, and that's what you can actually hear. If that square wave gets tapered or rounded by inadequate sampling, you end up with a triangle or sine wave which sounds radically different.
Does the average ear need 24/192 to be satisfied ? No. Does it mean we should entirely stop distributing such content ? Fuck no. I have a pretty decent studio setup, cheap but decent, and good enough ears with the technical training to notice those distortion artifacts. Okay, I'm a freak of hearing with perfect pitch and damn near digital memory for audio - hell I can identify a few dozen vocal mics just by listening to a mixed and mastered CD. Those high resolution recordings are for ME! They provide me with some geeky audio entertainment, which makes it worth the extra download time and minor expense of 24/192 capable equipment. My wife, who is a trained opera singer, cannot hear those details; she doesn't listen in such analytical fashion. Hell she can't even tell if I subtly pitch or time-stretch a track for DJ mixing... For her uses, 44khz is more than enough. So what's so wrong in providing different files for different listeners, and why does this Monty guy think his opinion trumps anyone elses ?
I'm with you on the whole "braindead" argument, but I think the outrage in the article is the profit motive. As a citizen of a nation with free healthcare, I'm absolutely amazed at the ludicrous cost of services in the U.S.
$750k for one organ ? That's as much as a really pimptastic new house! Does the donor's family get a cut of this dirty money ?
Even in 2012, I still play the fuck outta Dungeon Master. I fire it up every few years and play it through. I don't know why, but ever since I discovered it in my friend's massive pile of Amiga disks, I was hooked and had to get it for the ST, and later for the PC. But then, I've never even heard of:
- The Faery Tale Adventure
- Starflight
- Pool of Radiance
- Phantasie
And yes, I've been around. I just wasn't a C64 guy, my home was the Atari. And I think it needs to be said: this top 10 list sucks! There is so much repetition in there, too many dungeon crawls that all end up being the same. DM was a real-time one, the others were turn-based, but beyond that distinction there was a staggering amount of repetition across titles. It simply isn't a genre that allowed much in the way of innovation. Walk, fight, loot, solve simple puzzles.
All of you who are saying this developer and their code just sucks, you've never written any significant mobile apps, have you ?
I work with IOS, Android, Blackberry, WinPhone7. IOS and Win7 are a walk in the park, compared to the other two. IOS, specifically, has stellar compatibility across all devices. I only encounted a single issue with one of my apps, when upgrading to IOS 5, and it had to do with some marginal code I was using, whose undocumented functionality had finally been obsoleted. The fix took all of 15 minutes to research and implement. Most importantly, I only need to design for two sizes: phone, and tablet. If I'm lazy, I can skip the tablet, and let it scale things proportionally. This isn't optimal, but for some apps it's sufficient.
On Android and BB, there are as many display sizes and feature sets as there are devices. Your app might look fine on your emulator and personal device, but be completely out of whack on another, so you end up having to collect numerous devices and installing a dozen emulators to cover any significant portion of the user base. Let's not forget that these emulators are horribly slow and unstable, so if I have to test and debug a build in 10+ different environments, there goes my afternoon. That's for one build! It's quite simple: for Android or BB, I typically take the IOS budget and double it. If I were writing 3D games, I would probably quadruple it because now there are countless GPUs to target and no good middleware available to abstract away those differences. Android and BB development is at least 10 years behind, in terms of comfort and convenience. It often reminds me of writing DOS software.
Windows Phone 7 is actually not too bad. For anyone experienced with Visual Studio, it's a very familiar workflow and has much commonality with IOS development. It's extremely fast to work with, and you can get a good sense of how your app will scale, just by resizing the workspace as you're designing it. I don't care much for the platform itself, but I don't mind developing for it - I find the toolset quite pleasant.
That's the piece I neglected to write in my original post: the developer MUST understand the user. It's not like I sit here on my tech throne, telling people how they should do their jobs. I mean, I do, but only after I've had a chance to see how the users are currently accomplishing their tasks, and figured out how I can make those tasks easier to complete.
I get a lot of people asking me for a web site, or a mobile app, without having the slightest clue what their goals are. They just want it, because someone asked them why they didn't have one already. My job is to offer technical expertise and a completely out-of-the-box take on the problem, because I don't spend 40 hours a week in the user's world, doing their job the way they've always done it. It's up to me to ignore the "old ways" and come up with a new, streamlined path from start to finish. Users simply cannot do this on their own, because they are set in their ways, much like I'm set in my uber-technical ways and you couldn't ask me to change my programming habits, not without showing me a better way because I cannot find it myself.
The biggest trainwrecks I've ever witnessed were projects where the client was dictating too many technical details, effectively positioning themselves as the "analyst", reducing their developer to a mindless coder. So, unskilled analyst + frustrated coder = shitty product. You're pounding out miles of code, getting paid your full rate for it, and you know it's the wrong approach, but any attempt to steer the client is met with extreme resistance, so you eventually concede defeat, fulfill your end of the contract and accept your client's wasted money. What clients want is rarely in-line with what they actually need.
Sexual lightswitch rave!
Designers don't think computers. They think bunnies and lolcats and premium blended marijuana.
Programmers think computers. You want a button ? Okay, [button] here's a button. It's too square looking ? Okay, (button) here's a rounded button. Too plain ? Okay, {.,-'button'-,.} here's a fancy button. Too ugly ? Okay, *deletes button* talk to me when you actually want to click the damn button.
End users can't design for shit. They will have an opinion if you put something in front of them, but to ask them to come up with an interface from scratch will not yield any results. They don't know what they want to do until you tell them what they CAN do.
I hear what you're saying about Firefox, but people like you and I are apparently not the target demographic. If I were just a typical web user, the slimmed-down default Firefox UI would be fine. Users want to see the web page, they care very little about extra functionality. They don't even use the goddamned location bar, preferring to have Google as their home page, and searching for "Facebook" in lieu of bookmarks. The first time I saw someone google Facebook 20 times an hour, I was in complete shock. Now a few years later, I've come to accept this as the way normal people use their browser. Thinking is entirely optional, even frowned upon, and this is the crowd to which Firefox is trying to cater.
Luser checklist:
- Does it start with Google ?
- Can it get me to Facebook ?
- Can it get me to Gmail/Hotmail ?
- Can it play Farmville/AngryBirds/Bejeweled/Zuma ?
Now, one could speculate as to why these people use Firefox, when IE9 already does everything they want... I'll suggest that they simply want to be hip. Or, in my wife's case, she uses both IE9 and FF, because then "she has two windows she can put side-by-side".
#idontwanttoliveonthisplanetanymore
It's cool. In the last few years, I've come to instinctively assume that any and all AC posts are trolls, unless it's some sensitive, NDA-type topic, and even then I assume a 50% probability of trolliness.
Y'know, it's times like this, I wish Canada had crazy outspoken conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones. For all his mad ranting, he does manage to disseminate a lot of dirty facts about the government. Harper's appointees are so nasty, yet nobody seems to know or care. Look at utter shitbags like Bruce Carson, who somehow got a security clearance and a privileged position by Harper's side, despite numerous fraud convictions. Meanwhile, a guy like me can be denied security clearance over bad credit or a shitty ex-employer. Our whole government is a goddamned joke while this clown is in power.
This.
He must be stopped. And by stopped I mean thrown in prison. And by prison I mean not one of the for-profit prisons he's established. And by established I mean sold to private interests. And by private interests I mean his cronies.
He is George W. Bush with slightly better english diction.
It will be fun when our Amerifag P.M. says "hey BushBamaRomney our prisons are generating record profits thanks to SOPA", and this whole mess gets re-shoved down American citizens' throats, only this time without a last-minute reversal.
See, the funny thing about Canada is our fascist assclown of a fraudulently-elected leader likes to think of us as a beta 51st state. Whatever works here will serve as a case study for the U.S. administration, so your fascist assclowns can go live with the new and improved version of NeoConOS 2.0. Just as we carefully observe U.S. politics, you should be monitoring Canadian politics because they are very closely related on an ideological level.
See... that's what I like about the way Riot implemented their "freemium" content in League of Legends. You cannot buy power. In fact, you can buy almost everything with in-game points (IP), which you earn by playing the game. The only things you cannot obtain for free are skins and IP/XP multipliers. To buy the "power" items, which are runes, you must play until you've earned enough IP. And finally, there are items that can be bought with either IP or money, such as extra champions or rune pages. It becomes a tradeoff between playing time and money. Those who have the extra disposable income can spend it, those who don't can still enjoy the game in its entirety.
I played it for a year without spending a single penny, got to the max level, had a few champs all tricked out and was not missing out on any features. Skins are purely vanity items, but they are still immensely popular. They cost something like $7.50 each. I probably own a dozen or so, for my most played champs. Some of them have different sound effects. It's really just a fun little vanity toy and way to "tip" the game devs for the countless hours of enjoyment I've had with the game.
On the other hand, "pay to win" games are vile, offensive filth in which I refuse to take part. If the whole purpose of a game's design is to artificially cripple free players and force them to pay in order to have any fun, it should have been payware in the first place. Valve knows this all too well, and they specifically avoid releasing game-breaking paid items for TF2, because then the only people having fun will be the ones who spend the most money, which cannibalizes your user base and quickly destroys it. You can buy useless hats, which are just doodads to satisfy your OCD and brag about, and that's perfectly fine.
I still don't quite understand OnLive's business model, or why anyone would go for it. I know how it works, they render everything server-side and send you compressed video - fine. The roundtrip latency is probably not all that bad, as long as you have a short route to the server. I'm fine with the technical aspects, but what about the money ? It seems to me like the only way they can make a buck is via mass pirating.
Those servers can't be cheap, each one is basically a mid-range gaming rig with a hardware video encoder, and can only serve one user at a time. Each needs a copy of the OS and games. You're basically renting access to a $1000+ gaming rig, plus bandwidth. Sure, the benefit is that just about any internet-connected device can now "play" PC games, but how does OnLive turn a profit ? Do they pool the game licenses so they only need as many paid keys as there are simultaneous players ? Or is this like all those ridiculous startups from the dot-com bust, where they spend fucktons of VC money and die a horribly quick death ?
Don't get me wrong, I like the technical merits of OnLive. Even as we said "this will never work", well surprise: it works amazingly well for many people. I just can't see how they can deliver this without charging fucktons of money for the privilege.
It's not so much about being too perfect, but more closely related to what I call "uneven reality". If one aspect seems less real than the rest, like for example picture-perfect facial detail but choppy motion, that tends to trigger the uncanny valley response. It's our brain going "I recognize this as human, but something is very very wrong with them". The same can occur with sounds, as if a non-realistic image or machine is paired with a human voice, we perceive it as a disembodied human, which can be a quite creepy. If you're old enough (or wise enough), think of Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or having a fluent conversation with your toaster. Creepy.
Okay, I like the sound of this. Get me four of those graphics cards so I can SLI the tits out of my hydro bill.
Sure, there is only so much data my eyeballs can process, but larger displays do serve a purpose. For example, I would love to have a 4k projector shooting at my wall, instead of two 27" monitors. Actually, I'd like two, stacked on top of each other. Why ? Because then my wall becomes a giant display surface. Even right now, I can't really mentally process the entirety of my pixel space at once, but the realities of multitasking and my working habits dictate that I need a bunch of windows in the sidelines, so that I may occasionally glance over to consult some chart, monitor logs in real-time, or juggle a half-dozen IM and email convos without getting signals crossed, or keep WoW open in the background while I wait for a damn raid to assemble.
So, if Tim Sweeney wants 8000x4000, then I want 16000x8000. He can render all the anatomically correct games his heart desires, but I want moar datas!
I don't know, even in the somewhat crowded field of I.T., we have trouble finding good people for our team. If you're applying at a giant megacorp, I could see how the numbers could work against you. I had a big government job over a decade ago, hated it, and have stuck with small gigs ever since. The money is just as good, and I don't have to put up with bureaucrats and unions and all that other deadweight that comes with critically bloated businesses.
If "every company" is doing it, then every company deserves to fail. Their ex-employees should take their skills and experience and start a new company of their own, minus the bullshit. If you've worked your way into a situation where you can't afford to leave an abusive job, to find or create a better one, that should be your first goal. Save up enough so you can have a few months of freedom. It's better to make a small sacrifice now, than live miserably for the next 10-15 years or until the company really shits down your throat by laying you off.
Yes. Walk out of interviews. People have this fucked up notion that getting a job is some fantastic gift from heaven. No. Employers need you more than you need them. Even fucking Wal-Mart. No people = no profits.
If your employer can't respect your privacy, they won't respect you at all. Being treated like shit is not worth the $40k salary.
What you describe is FAR too intelligent for the current socio-economic climate. It also shits all over the grocers' thinly veiled upselling schemes, since a big part of the shopping "experience" is walking around a giant store full of tempting edibles, with the most common items intentionally spread out all over the place so you have to walk the entire goddamned store.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if my local megagrocer had:
- online shopping
- ideally, 24/7 delivery, but I'd settle for 9am-9pm, in 4 hour blocks.
- waived delivery fees on orders exceeding some high amount, maybe $80-100, to discourage college twits from ordering a single package of pasta
That's it. Now bear in mind, that grocer is only three (big suburban) blocks away from my house. I still avoid going, because:
1. I'm lazy
2. I don't drive
3. I'm fucking lazy, I told you
4. I have better things to do than piss away 90 minutes walking to the store, finding what I want (or not), waiting forever in a checkout line, then waiting for a cab to take all that loot home
What's funny (read: stupid) is I can already do all of this for beer and liquor. I shit you not, my local independent booze delivery guy has a complete e-commerce site, synced to the liquor store's inventory and price list. The thing even sends me email when there's a promotion on my favorite items. So why the fuck can't a giant like Loblaw do the same ? EVERYONE in the neighbourhood has to eat, right ? Sort those orders by street, load them on a truck and go drop them off en-masse, just like the milkman used to do. Ditch the retail location and huge parking lot, replace it with a tiny convenience store stocked with essentials and munchies, and the fortune saved on premium commercial real-estate can pay for the delivery fleet several times over. Megamarts make sense in dense urban areas, like my old downtown apartment, but here in the suburbs they're just a giant box of fail.
there is never any need for self modifying code
There is when you're on a memory-constrained platform, which admittedly the PC is not. Selfmod code is still used in demo coding, especially with 256-byte and 4096-byte competitions, but that is exclusively an academic exercise.
On an embedded system with just a few kbytes of memory, like say an ARM-powered gadget, self-modifying code is still relevant, even in 2012. Just because we can put 4 gigs of Ram in a toaster doesn't mean we should.
Pardon my curiosity, but it sounds like you're building ~$400 servers out of basic desktop components. What kind of workload are you putting on these boxes that scales so well, yet doesn't justify the added expense of high-end server class hardware ? Maybe I'm at the other end of the spectrum, but I wouldn't dream of running a server without redundant power supplies and premium boards that have been built and tested to rigorous specs. The added hardware expense more than makes up for decreased maintenance and downtime.
I used to work for a guy who built servers out of whatever spare parts he had lying around - obsolete desktops, refurbs, ebay junk, whatever. For a while, we were spending at least 10-15 hours a week keeping those things up, or driving down to the datacenter to physically reboot them. I eventually convinced him to spend a LOT more money on fancier hardware, with IPMI, redundant everything and high-efficiency power supplies. Spending that extra thousand up-front meant we could boot them up and practically forget them, uptimes have gone way up and we were logging more billable hours instead of juggling cheap gear. The results spoke for themselves.
Thanks for the tip! I'll give them a try, I've been wanting a low-power office/surf machine anyway.
Spot on! ION was the best thing that ever happened to the Atom platform. Really, it was the only thing that made it into a usable HTPC or ultra-low-power desktop. They really need to stop shitting down NVidia's throat because they are precisely the kind of aggressive, performance-driven company that would fit alongside Intel's model.