I loved Civilization and Railroad Tycoon as much as the next guy [actually probably more than the next guy...], but Sid Meier hasn't made a great game in 15 years. He's had his name on things, and helped out; but I always got the impression he was playing golf in a hat made of money rather than doing actual game design.
Oh, indeed. But there's also more games being made.
Just like movies, every once and a while something innovative comes along.
For every 100 Generic Action Movies there's something like Memento. Similarly for every 100 Generic First Person Shooters, there something like Puzzle Pirates.
Cost. Meh. People still like good stuff. People still like new stuff. Investors still want to make money. Every so often, investors remember this, and make assloads of money on good new stuff. Not to mention alot of the great movies and great games of the past decade were low budget deals and succeeded anyways.
Note that this doesn't just apply to computer science.
I majored in Aeronautical Engineering. Yeah, it'd be cool to do stuff with planes, sit at a computer and do modelling and design... Aeronautical Engineering isn't sitting a computer and doing design. It's mechanic work. Surely there's a design portion where there's kind of lab coat architecture, just like there's structure design work with coding, but most of your time is spent hammering away at things.
IANAL, but that is not exactly true. If everyone is providing the games and the hardware, technically you would *all* have to get permission from the copyright holders if there is an audience more than a certain amount [50 if I remember correctly?] and there's a cost involved to get in , OR if one of the displays is over some set amount... 60 inches or some such. [this last provision actually allowed the NFL to prevent the showing of the last Super Bowl in Las Vegas]
Though most of the lan parties I've been to, everyone is playing, and there is no audience.
Personally, I found that perl was kind of odd and not fantastic until I learned perl with regexes [via O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions, highly recommended]. Then alot of the little nuances made alot more sense. Alot of the examples in that book were things perl does easily in a few lines, but would cause most programmers to gouge their eyes out if they needed to do it in C.
Sigh. As someone that has done internationalization for a large company you've all heard of, it was a *joke*. [though my point that Indian developers might first take part in a project to make software easier to use by their countrymen was not]
It's public information. Sure, it's really creepy and will be abused, but what are people going to do, put all the data back in the bottle? People here of all places should realise that public really does mean public.
Oddly enough, a good deal of the innovation I've seen has been in other genres. Puzzle Pirates [www.puzzlepirates.com] and starscape [google for it] for example.
They're not innovative at first glance. Starscape is just asteriods, and puzzle pirates takes a bunch of poptop style games. The trick is that they both give those simple, fun games some context. They take older games and add upon them. Not just more guns, prettier graphics, but actually taking them and doing something *new*.
Well, generally yes. The basic ideals of libertarians is that the government should act within their rights granted by law. The problem comes when the government has done things outside the law, such as entities like the FDA.
The Libertarian party canidates I've seen would lean towards eliminating the FDA, where as I would lean towards making the FDA an government right by law. Certainly the government is too large and unwieldy, but some parts *are* necissary, even though they lay beyond the scope of current constitutional allowances.
Sorry if that didn't make a lot of sense, it's early...
Heh, my father is... 52 now(?) and while he's never played pnp D&D, he's an old wargamer who loved the old bard's tale games [and introduced his children to them] and kept playing computer RPGs up through the gold box games and the Black Isle games.
It might be me, but I've seen more bugs created because of assumptions made about abstractions, or because someone was used to a pre-made abstraction and didn't learn how things actually worked.
Want to make better software? How about actually scheduling enough QA time to test it? When development time runs over schedule, push the damned ship date back!
I managed to grapple to an enemy who had a quad lightning gun, full health, switch to shotgun, and kill him that way.
Impressive as that is, we were both in the university lab [20-30 machines with people doing schoolwork]. So after that he stood up, slammed his headphones down, turned and yell "You son of a bitch!".
I am not a lawyer, but I don't see how that license prevents anyone from dumping the app into the KitchenSink Linux install. Since all linux distros have to be free to download [in part] anyways it is [or at least legally argued] non-commercial use.
Either way, yes, amazing, fabulous, and good.
I played the beta of the game, and it was quite interesting and entertaining. I never got the full version though for reasons I don't remember. Perhaps I'll check this out again.
It's not that hard to take a quick peek over your shoulder before you turn your signal on and merge. Most drivers around here don't even bother with the turn signal. Adding technology will not make inherently unsafe drivers [or the drivers around them] more safe.
Umm, nope, not in maybe two years. Maybe they moved to their core competancy: "Rainbow Six" since the only 'new releases' on their site are flight sims, realistic commando games or Uru, none of which I'm terribly interested in.
If they have gotten better, good for them. After multiple games that did not work out of the box, I'll stay away until they produce something I *am* interested in, *and* has proven itself in front of trusted friends and/or reviewers.
Every profession has specific technical terms. Someone who is not a professional won't know all of the terms and all of the conventions that a professional does. Do doctors use every medical term when describing a problem? No, they use a few and try to explain so the patient can understand. Do mechanics use every mechanical term when describing a problem? No, they give you a summary of the problem and the various solutions.
Any good computer professional should not use every professional term when talking with a non-professional. Because you're communicating. The goal of communicating is transfer of information. Using terms the non-professional doesn't know [or rather 'unsupported protocol features' for the *really* technical out there] does not help you communicate...
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I loved Civilization and Railroad Tycoon as much as the next guy [actually probably more than the next guy...], but Sid Meier hasn't made a great game in 15 years. He's had his name on things, and helped out; but I always got the impression he was playing golf in a hat made of money rather than doing actual game design.
Oh, indeed. But there's also more games being made.
Just like movies, every once and a while something innovative comes along.
For every 100 Generic Action Movies there's something like Memento. Similarly for every 100 Generic First Person Shooters, there something like Puzzle Pirates.
Cost. Meh. People still like good stuff. People still like new stuff. Investors still want to make money. Every so often, investors remember this, and make assloads of money on good new stuff. Not to mention alot of the great movies and great games of the past decade were low budget deals and succeeded anyways.
Ugh.
Come on. We've heard the "there's nothing new under the sun" "gamers are getting old" arguments before.
Hell, we've even heard the "limits of hardware" argument before.
Thousands of years of human history has shown that there's always something new under the sun, and human interests are constant.
Video games will go away when something else becomes more fun and not before.
Not exactly.
I don't think most men have to conciously decide to get a hard on when a hottie walks by.
And anyways, what's the diffence between picking up the signals that say "get some water" and "you're thirsty"?
Note that this doesn't just apply to computer science.
I majored in Aeronautical Engineering. Yeah, it'd be cool to do stuff with planes, sit at a computer and do modelling and design... Aeronautical Engineering isn't sitting a computer and doing design. It's mechanic work. Surely there's a design portion where there's kind of lab coat architecture, just like there's structure design work with coding, but most of your time is spent hammering away at things.
IANAL, but that is not exactly true. If everyone is providing the games and the hardware, technically you would *all* have to get permission from the copyright holders if there is an audience more than a certain amount [50 if I remember correctly?] and there's a cost involved to get in , OR if one of the displays is over some set amount... 60 inches or some such. [this last provision actually allowed the NFL to prevent the showing of the last Super Bowl in Las Vegas]
Though most of the lan parties I've been to, everyone is playing, and there is no audience.
Personally, I found that perl was kind of odd and not fantastic until I learned perl with regexes [via O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions, highly recommended]. Then alot of the little nuances made alot more sense. Alot of the examples in that book were things perl does easily in a few lines, but would cause most programmers to gouge their eyes out if they needed to do it in C.
Indeed, paranoia is by far more fun to play, and is a far better actual game.
Sorry, nothing can stand the humor and sheer absurdity of HOL's rulebooks [if you can call them that.]
Sigh. As someone that has done internationalization for a large company you've all heard of, it was a *joke*. [though my point that Indian developers might first take part in a project to make software easier to use by their countrymen was not]
*ducks*
It's public information. Sure, it's really creepy and will be abused, but what are people going to do, put all the data back in the bottle? People here of all places should realise that public really does mean public.
Except communism isn't a political philosophy dedicated to the rights of the workers.
Communism is a economic philosophy that aims to distribute wealth equally.
That said, I'm fairly certain that India does not employ communism. They do from what I understand have a fairly rigid socialist government.
I've seen a bit of NetBSD code submitted by Japanese programmer(s).
Though more likely is the fact that their 'itch' is likely internationalization/localization issues which we [dumb Westerners] don't care about.
Oddly enough, a good deal of the innovation I've seen has been in other genres. Puzzle Pirates [www.puzzlepirates.com] and starscape [google for it] for example.
They're not innovative at first glance. Starscape is just asteriods, and puzzle pirates takes a bunch of poptop style games. The trick is that they both give those simple, fun games some context. They take older games and add upon them. Not just more guns, prettier graphics, but actually taking them and doing something *new*.
Well, generally yes. The basic ideals of libertarians is that the government should act within their rights granted by law. The problem comes when the government has done things outside the law, such as entities like the FDA.
The Libertarian party canidates I've seen would lean towards eliminating the FDA, where as I would lean towards making the FDA an government right by law. Certainly the government is too large and unwieldy, but some parts *are* necissary, even though they lay beyond the scope of current constitutional allowances.
Sorry if that didn't make a lot of sense, it's early...
No, the solution should be making voting day a national holiday.
And as a Libertarian, I'll get out and vote once the Libertarians put out an actual libertarian canidate and not some anarchist nutjob.
Heh, my father is... 52 now(?) and while he's never played pnp D&D, he's an old wargamer who loved the old bard's tale games [and introduced his children to them] and kept playing computer RPGs up through the gold box games and the Black Isle games.
Indeed, but if your goal is bugfree software, and not making oodles of cash, you put the ship date back.
It might be me, but I've seen more bugs created because of assumptions made about abstractions, or because someone was used to a pre-made abstraction and didn't learn how things actually worked.
Want to make better software? How about actually scheduling enough QA time to test it? When development time runs over schedule, push the damned ship date back!
Similar:
In Quake 1 using threewave CTF:
I managed to grapple to an enemy who had a quad lightning gun, full health, switch to shotgun, and kill him that way.
Impressive as that is, we were both in the university lab [20-30 machines with people doing schoolwork]. So after that he stood up, slammed his headphones down, turned and yell "You son of a bitch!".
I am not a lawyer, but I don't see how that license prevents anyone from dumping the app into the KitchenSink Linux install. Since all linux distros have to be free to download [in part] anyways it is [or at least legally argued] non-commercial use.
Either way, yes, amazing, fabulous, and good.
I played the beta of the game, and it was quite interesting and entertaining. I never got the full version though for reasons I don't remember. Perhaps I'll check this out again.
No. Nien. Nyet.
It's not that hard to take a quick peek over your shoulder before you turn your signal on and merge. Most drivers around here don't even bother with the turn signal. Adding technology will not make inherently unsafe drivers [or the drivers around them] more safe.
Umm, nope, not in maybe two years. Maybe they moved to their core competancy: "Rainbow Six" since the only 'new releases' on their site are flight sims, realistic commando games or Uru, none of which I'm terribly interested in.
If they have gotten better, good for them. After multiple games that did not work out of the box, I'll stay away until they produce something I *am* interested in, *and* has proven itself in front of trusted friends and/or reviewers.
No offense, but that's not correct.
Every profession has specific technical terms. Someone who is not a professional won't know all of the terms and all of the conventions that a professional does. Do doctors use every medical term when describing a problem? No, they use a few and try to explain so the patient can understand. Do mechanics use every mechanical term when describing a problem? No, they give you a summary of the problem and the various solutions.
Any good computer professional should not use every professional term when talking with a non-professional. Because you're communicating. The goal of communicating is transfer of information. Using terms the non-professional doesn't know [or rather 'unsupported protocol features' for the *really* technical out there] does not help you communicate...
I would, but the game refuses to run on my [or anyone's] machine. I hear it's great, but unless you've [still] got win98 installed, stay away...