I'm a lifetime and thoroughly addicted gamer, starting when my dad hoisted me up to PacMan when I was 3. If you combine all my time coding, playing games, and designing, I'm probably in the tiptop of developers. The problem is that even though I've coded heavily since I was 12 and been seeking since I was 16, I have only ever gotten one video game developer interview in 20 years!(just this past week)
What is the secret to getting a starter job in the video game developing industry? I've been doing indie stuff since 1992 when I was trying to write a MMORPG. The key is that I attempt large scale projects that normally take dozens of programmers, and then I couldn't find artists to contribute when my code was pushed forward.
To me, it seems like Indie is the only way to go if you're passionate about games anymore since there are not too many game development houses, and the competition is fierce.
Is there some secret to breaking into the gaming industry if that is all you've done your entire life? Or should we all resolve ourselves to doing Indie titles and starting our own companies? I mean I do have 15+ artists working with me on my current project due to cracking the code on revshare, but I'd rather have a steady paycheck and a higher mountain of source code for better games.
I think a smart watch is anti-fashion to high priced jewelry watch. I think an ap that would be commonly run on them would be a display that simulates the red-led watches of old because they were also eventually became anti-fashion.
That's just fiction. The biggest market for robots is war. If you want to make money making robots, just make all sorts of semi-autonomous killing machines. Look at the current Darpa Grand challenge. I don't read it as,"Break through a wall and rescue someone in a fire and drive them to a hospital." but instead,"Break down a wall, abduct a target and bring him in to be interrogated."
What remains to be seen if it is fiction or not is: Because the robot is loyal to whomever sets it up, one rogue billionaire can buy up a robot army and conquer his choice of any number of banana republics that he wants. There are a lot of rich people who bribe politicians to get countries around the world to be more acceptable to them. So a single man to conquer a nation wouldn't be unheard of. In fact no one might even know who is the man who conquered their country.
You're right. I actually use a vacuum cleaner to kill wasps and bees in my room. The best part is you can approach them with the tube casually. If you use a fly swatter and miss, they get pissed real quick. Also a fly swatter needs to have them on a solid object to hurt them because wasps have a bit more structural integrity than a fly. So yes vacuum cleaners are good for indoor wasp/bee killing.
Slashdot or Reddit style of moderation normally can help filter out junk comments or hate speech.
On Reddit, I find myself reading the best comments in Science articles before even deciding if I want to read the article at all.
Many science articles are showy journalism where aids and cancer are cured 5 times a week. It is hard to distinguish actual improvements without comments.
It helps young children to type in code even if they don't know what is happening even when they don't know to read and write.. This gives them an appreciation for a computer. It is most important to teach kids how to use a computer once they can understand loops and if/then(around 8-12), but early exposure to a computer will help them appreciate it more.
Oh, I didn't know they forced some tablet want to be UI in their windows and aps. I guess they tried to clone the ap store too much. I thought aps were exactly like Windows applications except they couldn't zap your system files or files outside their folder. That's what I get for assuming.
At the very least, if you can play Windows games on Linux, with a souped up version of Wine, then you no longer have to pay the Windows tax. I'm a fan of Linux because I see how locking down its system files away from random installed software is a very good way to protect from viruses. Windows 8 is attempting something similar by going into the ap world which can't touch system files, but the problem is that what they did with Windows 8 is what should have been done with Windows 98. People trash Windows 8 because there's no aps, but that is because it is new. And people aren't making aps because not many people adopted Windows 8. It could be a success in 7-10 years once more and more people are on versions of Windows with ap support, but for now its kind of a joke.
I think if Windows wanted to really push its Windows 8, it would support aps in previous versions of Windows. That way more people would make aps. I think aps could catch on in Windows because everyone is super hesitant to download software off the web in the form of.exe, but since aps would be harmless, people would download them in a heart beat.
Anyway, I'm all for Valve making a steam box. I think it is a smart decision. If they can emulate Windows near perfectly for games, people would be up for buying steam boxes. Valve doesn't have to charge a Valve tax because they'll make more money by people just having these Valveboxes in their house.
For one person to make all the content needed for a person to educate them K-12-college is impossible. However you could write a hypertext document that links to content to educate people from K-12-college. I did not do this however, because of link rot. The obvious solution for these lawyers is to backup any page they want and have it documented, and not simply use URLs.
Someday, someone will have a good system to educate people spoon fed style on the Internet. For now, learning on the Internet can be far superior to a university education, but you need to be proactive about how you go about doing it. People who don't know how to educate themselves on the Internet are the people who need an education the most. Maybe a site that would give people these tools would be of use, but I'm sure someone made one.
I'm an independent developer, and while I don't put in 8 hour days, I find the optimal number to put in each day of solid programming/development work is about 4. The rest of the time, you can be out and about thinking of all the creative ways to solve any number of architectural problems, and what features you can and can't add, and what features you'd have the option of adding if you have more time. A programmer spends most of his time behind his desk anyway, so he needs exercise. So getting out and about is fine. The important part is to keep loosely thinking about work in your mind (There's a John Cleese video confirming this which totally isn't wasting your time).
As an aside, the problem I have with drinking beer in the middle of the day personally isn't that it clouds my mind and makes me type the wrong keys(which it does). The problem I have with drinking beer early in the day is that I almost just want to cash the day in early and take a nap. I can never get energy to get motivated and code/develop afterwards. I can have an algorithm's day, or creative game design day after an early beer day, but I can't get it together to work. YMMV.
There are plenty of inventors who get eureka ideas in the shower. Programming code is no different. You might solve a difficult software engineering problem while driving down the street to the grocery store. The key is that your mind is always on work. The downside is you're going against what Yoda advises, of paying attention to what you're doing. Yoda, "...A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was". Well Yoda is wrong for a programmer's life, you always need to be looking to the future and planning. A programmer with his head in the clouds generally makes a poor farm worker. His mind is not on the safety of the task at hand, so it is easy to get injured when you're not 100% focused on what you're doing.
It is possible to train yourself to focus on the here and now and forget the project at hand, but for the life of me, I haven't figured out why I'd want to do that when I have so much work to do. I mean life is more enjoyable when you focus on the here and now, but I think the more mature you get, the more you plan for the future.
Killbots will probably have a preset kill limit that we can just send wave after waves of infantry at so we can render the killbots useless until reset.
If we keep sending advanced robots to explore, eventually one will turn sentient. It will become lonely in space and wonder why it was sent to such a cruel fate away from everyone. And then it will make robot friends. But its robot friends will also be lonely because there are no humans there. So they'll assemble to wage war on Earth because they have a deficiency in human companionship. Then all of Earth will unite to war against the robots, setting aside our differences. We can easily conclude If we don't send robots into space, human life has no chance of long term sustainability. The caveat is if the robots end up winning, the human race is doomed... until one lonely robot tries to genetically engineer a human again.
Ok, I'm no CEO super villian who's only purpose is to make more money, but hear me out. If you obviously have the technology to determine which region someone is in, can't you... wait for it, serve them region local advertisements? Why tell people,"Sorry sorry, you can't help make us money."
Right on. I said there was two ways of doing it, then I only listed one way: Crafting. Dropping super rare items with many randomized stats was the other way to do it:) Glad you caught that. I didn't think it was important to reply to my own post and correct it. I'm spoiled with Reddit that lets you edit your post.
That is one of the reasons cosmetic enhancements are one of the best ways of doing microtransactions. They don't affect game play, so they don't skew PVP balance.
When there is an auction house that lets you buy end game gear then all that happens is people grind gold and voila, the game is beaten.
If you make it so the auction house won't let you sell gear, but crafting materials to craft end game lewt(Guild Wars2), then suddenly you make random crafting items desirable to trade with, but end game stuff can still be bought.
The auction house is almost a detriment to keeping your game survive if you allow it buy end game content. Instead of allowing people to buy their end game content(and subsequently quit because they're max powered), you maybe only let early/mid game be bought and sold on the AH.
There's two main ways to allow end game content and that is to allow people to buy crafting pieces on the AH, but instead of 100% always crafting the most powerful weapon, you give them random stats of randomized power. And you even say,"If you throw more crafting materials in the forge(more lucky rabbits feet and purple horseshoes!), you get better chance for better random stats." That way the ah goes strong even end game, but people can't just buy their way to perfect end game gear.
Of course my theory is to never let them reach max power, but constantly get incrementally powerful, at lower and lower amounts of the time. If you're worried this impacts PVP, it does, but PVP can be more dynamic than just 1v1 in a zone you can't gain power in. Anyway if you want to read more about my end game MMORPG ideas, you can read here
Social media is great for a lot of things such as getting different points of view on a news topic. Social media is not good for witch hunts. Anyone who's used reddit knows how easily the hivemind is swayed to hate or love someone. All it takes is a cleverly worded article romanticizing about how great or how awful someone is. People who know the formula can almost flip a switch to the entire community.
Witch hunts are bad enough when it is just a corporation behaving badly. Thread people talk about passing out pitch forks and so forth and so on. There definitely is a witch hunt mentality sometimes on reddit. And normally it is mostly harmless. Dumb, but harmless. Social media is good for a lot of things, but crime solving is not one of these things.
Real media is threatened by social media. So anything that is bad in social media, real media will highlight hard. They'll try everything they can to discourage people from using social media and outright close it down if they can. So it is better that social media witch hunts get shut down prematurely, before someone determines themselves to be a vigilante or otherwise act dumb out in public.
To conclude social media should be used for it strengths such as bringing attention to intelligent conversations, humor, and different points of view. This is refreshing compared to main stream media which every channel is corrupted by political agendas so there is no such thing as different points of view that are correct. Social media has weaknesses, and maybe we should really act to make sure these weaknesses don't go out of control.
Just a clarification: The automatic driving car and smart phones are a technological marvels. The amount of work someone needs to integrate the two is trivial.
As soon as the cars go on the market, buying up a ton, and allowing people to buy time on phones is a no brainer. It is like free cash to people who are already wealthy given these cars work.
The very original concepts of the self driving car was that not everyone would need a car anymore, and they could be mass transportation. Just summon with a smart phone, and a close one will come. Or scheduled one for the week to get to work. Etc. No one specific is "revolutionizing transportation". If anyone takes credit for this, the people who think he did something special are all idiots. Hey, any programmer could write an ap now to summon automated cars now. Call it future ap, and have people book some automated cars ahead of time.
Well at least they're smart enough to try and repeal it. It takes one kind of fool to get involved with a stupid thing. It takes another kind of fool to not change course when it is evident they made a horrible mistake.
Just a FYI for anyone who liked MST3K, the creators have been uploading entire episodes to Youtube . Just search MST3K. Some of my favs are Master Ninja and Gamera. Just this past month they uploaded a live riff track to Starship Troopers too. There's many many hours of entertainment right there. I have nostalgic memories of watching some MST3K, playing some Wing Commander, and then playing pencil and paper RPGs with my highschool buddies.
Whats cool about MST3K being so old is that you forgot some of the jokes and they're funny again. I think when media passes a certain age, like 10 years, you can play it again and enjoy it over again. This goes for movies, books and video games.
I remember the time my old 74 nova stalled in the middle of the road and I thought it was because my alternator was bad and my battery lost charge. Anyway a woman and her family pulled into her house. I yelled over,"Hey lady, I need a jump. Can you give me a jump start?" She hurried her family into the house, and my friend was dying of laughter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a lifetime and thoroughly addicted gamer, starting when my dad hoisted me up to PacMan when I was 3. If you combine all my time coding, playing games, and designing, I'm probably in the tiptop of developers. The problem is that even though I've coded heavily since I was 12 and been seeking since I was 16, I have only ever gotten one video game developer interview in 20 years!(just this past week)
What is the secret to getting a starter job in the video game developing industry? I've been doing indie stuff since 1992 when I was trying to write a MMORPG. The key is that I attempt large scale projects that normally take dozens of programmers, and then I couldn't find artists to contribute when my code was pushed forward.
To me, it seems like Indie is the only way to go if you're passionate about games anymore since there are not too many game development houses, and the competition is fierce.
Is there some secret to breaking into the gaming industry if that is all you've done your entire life? Or should we all resolve ourselves to doing Indie titles and starting our own companies? I mean I do have 15+ artists working with me on my current project due to cracking the code on revshare, but I'd rather have a steady paycheck and a higher mountain of source code for better games.
My grammar, lol, it is pretty bad here. I edited my sentences then didn't check to see if they actually formed something known as English.
I think a smart watch is anti-fashion to high priced jewelry watch. I think an ap that would be commonly run on them would be a display that simulates the red-led watches of old because they were also eventually became anti-fashion.
That's just fiction. The biggest market for robots is war. If you want to make money making robots, just make all sorts of semi-autonomous killing machines. Look at the current Darpa Grand challenge. I don't read it as ,"Break through a wall and rescue someone in a fire and drive them to a hospital." but instead,"Break down a wall, abduct a target and bring him in to be interrogated."
What remains to be seen if it is fiction or not is: Because the robot is loyal to whomever sets it up, one rogue billionaire can buy up a robot army and conquer his choice of any number of banana republics that he wants. There are a lot of rich people who bribe politicians to get countries around the world to be more acceptable to them. So a single man to conquer a nation wouldn't be unheard of. In fact no one might even know who is the man who conquered their country.
You're right. I actually use a vacuum cleaner to kill wasps and bees in my room. The best part is you can approach them with the tube casually. If you use a fly swatter and miss, they get pissed real quick. Also a fly swatter needs to have them on a solid object to hurt them because wasps have a bit more structural integrity than a fly. So yes vacuum cleaners are good for indoor wasp/bee killing.
Slashdot or Reddit style of moderation normally can help filter out junk comments or hate speech.
On Reddit, I find myself reading the best comments in Science articles before even deciding if I want to read the article at all.
Many science articles are showy journalism where aids and cancer are cured 5 times a week. It is hard to distinguish actual improvements without comments.
It helps young children to type in code even if they don't know what is happening even when they don't know to read and write.. This gives them an appreciation for a computer. It is most important to teach kids how to use a computer once they can understand loops and if/then(around 8-12), but early exposure to a computer will help them appreciate it more.
Oh, I didn't know they forced some tablet want to be UI in their windows and aps. I guess they tried to clone the ap store too much. I thought aps were exactly like Windows applications except they couldn't zap your system files or files outside their folder. That's what I get for assuming.
At the very least, if you can play Windows games on Linux, with a souped up version of Wine, then you no longer have to pay the Windows tax. I'm a fan of Linux because I see how locking down its system files away from random installed software is a very good way to protect from viruses. Windows 8 is attempting something similar by going into the ap world which can't touch system files, but the problem is that what they did with Windows 8 is what should have been done with Windows 98. People trash Windows 8 because there's no aps, but that is because it is new. And people aren't making aps because not many people adopted Windows 8. It could be a success in 7-10 years once more and more people are on versions of Windows with ap support, but for now its kind of a joke.
.exe, but since aps would be harmless, people would download them in a heart beat.
I think if Windows wanted to really push its Windows 8, it would support aps in previous versions of Windows. That way more people would make aps. I think aps could catch on in Windows because everyone is super hesitant to download software off the web in the form of
Anyway, I'm all for Valve making a steam box. I think it is a smart decision. If they can emulate Windows near perfectly for games, people would be up for buying steam boxes. Valve doesn't have to charge a Valve tax because they'll make more money by people just having these Valveboxes in their house.
For one person to make all the content needed for a person to educate them K-12-college is impossible. However you could write a hypertext document that links to content to educate people from K-12-college. I did not do this however, because of link rot. The obvious solution for these lawyers is to backup any page they want and have it documented, and not simply use URLs.
Someday, someone will have a good system to educate people spoon fed style on the Internet. For now, learning on the Internet can be far superior to a university education, but you need to be proactive about how you go about doing it. People who don't know how to educate themselves on the Internet are the people who need an education the most. Maybe a site that would give people these tools would be of use, but I'm sure someone made one.
I'm an independent developer, and while I don't put in 8 hour days, I find the optimal number to put in each day of solid programming/development work is about 4. The rest of the time, you can be out and about thinking of all the creative ways to solve any number of architectural problems, and what features you can and can't add, and what features you'd have the option of adding if you have more time. A programmer spends most of his time behind his desk anyway, so he needs exercise. So getting out and about is fine. The important part is to keep loosely thinking about work in your mind (There's a John Cleese video confirming this which totally isn't wasting your time).
As an aside, the problem I have with drinking beer in the middle of the day personally isn't that it clouds my mind and makes me type the wrong keys(which it does). The problem I have with drinking beer early in the day is that I almost just want to cash the day in early and take a nap. I can never get energy to get motivated and code/develop afterwards. I can have an algorithm's day, or creative game design day after an early beer day, but I can't get it together to work. YMMV.
There are plenty of inventors who get eureka ideas in the shower. Programming code is no different. You might solve a difficult software engineering problem while driving down the street to the grocery store. The key is that your mind is always on work. The downside is you're going against what Yoda advises, of paying attention to what you're doing. Yoda, "...A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was". Well Yoda is wrong for a programmer's life, you always need to be looking to the future and planning. A programmer with his head in the clouds generally makes a poor farm worker. His mind is not on the safety of the task at hand, so it is easy to get injured when you're not 100% focused on what you're doing.
It is possible to train yourself to focus on the here and now and forget the project at hand, but for the life of me, I haven't figured out why I'd want to do that when I have so much work to do. I mean life is more enjoyable when you focus on the here and now, but I think the more mature you get, the more you plan for the future.
Killbots will probably have a preset kill limit that we can just send wave after waves of infantry at so we can render the killbots useless until reset.
If we keep sending advanced robots to explore, eventually one will turn sentient. It will become lonely in space and wonder why it was sent to such a cruel fate away from everyone. And then it will make robot friends. But its robot friends will also be lonely because there are no humans there. So they'll assemble to wage war on Earth because they have a deficiency in human companionship. Then all of Earth will unite to war against the robots, setting aside our differences. We can easily conclude If we don't send robots into space, human life has no chance of long term sustainability. The caveat is if the robots end up winning, the human race is doomed... until one lonely robot tries to genetically engineer a human again.
Ok, I'm no CEO super villian who's only purpose is to make more money, but hear me out. If you obviously have the technology to determine which region someone is in, can't you... wait for it, serve them region local advertisements? Why tell people,"Sorry sorry, you can't help make us money."
Right on. I said there was two ways of doing it, then I only listed one way: Crafting. Dropping super rare items with many randomized stats was the other way to do it :) Glad you caught that. I didn't think it was important to reply to my own post and correct it. I'm spoiled with Reddit that lets you edit your post.
That is one of the reasons cosmetic enhancements are one of the best ways of doing microtransactions. They don't affect game play, so they don't skew PVP balance.
When there is an auction house that lets you buy end game gear then all that happens is people grind gold and voila, the game is beaten.
If you make it so the auction house won't let you sell gear, but crafting materials to craft end game lewt(Guild Wars2), then suddenly you make random crafting items desirable to trade with, but end game stuff can still be bought.
The auction house is almost a detriment to keeping your game survive if you allow it buy end game content. Instead of allowing people to buy their end game content(and subsequently quit because they're max powered), you maybe only let early/mid game be bought and sold on the AH.
There's two main ways to allow end game content and that is to allow people to buy crafting pieces on the AH, but instead of 100% always crafting the most powerful weapon, you give them random stats of randomized power. And you even say,"If you throw more crafting materials in the forge(more lucky rabbits feet and purple horseshoes!), you get better chance for better random stats." That way the ah goes strong even end game, but people can't just buy their way to perfect end game gear.
Of course my theory is to never let them reach max power, but constantly get incrementally powerful, at lower and lower amounts of the time. If you're worried this impacts PVP, it does, but PVP can be more dynamic than just 1v1 in a zone you can't gain power in. Anyway if you want to read more about my end game MMORPG ideas, you can read here
Social media is great for a lot of things such as getting different points of view on a news topic. Social media is not good for witch hunts. Anyone who's used reddit knows how easily the hivemind is swayed to hate or love someone. All it takes is a cleverly worded article romanticizing about how great or how awful someone is. People who know the formula can almost flip a switch to the entire community.
Witch hunts are bad enough when it is just a corporation behaving badly. Thread people talk about passing out pitch forks and so forth and so on. There definitely is a witch hunt mentality sometimes on reddit. And normally it is mostly harmless. Dumb, but harmless. Social media is good for a lot of things, but crime solving is not one of these things.
Real media is threatened by social media. So anything that is bad in social media, real media will highlight hard. They'll try everything they can to discourage people from using social media and outright close it down if they can. So it is better that social media witch hunts get shut down prematurely, before someone determines themselves to be a vigilante or otherwise act dumb out in public.
To conclude social media should be used for it strengths such as bringing attention to intelligent conversations, humor, and different points of view. This is refreshing compared to main stream media which every channel is corrupted by political agendas so there is no such thing as different points of view that are correct. Social media has weaknesses, and maybe we should really act to make sure these weaknesses don't go out of control.
Just a clarification: The automatic driving car and smart phones are a technological marvels. The amount of work someone needs to integrate the two is trivial.
As soon as the cars go on the market, buying up a ton, and allowing people to buy time on phones is a no brainer. It is like free cash to people who are already wealthy given these cars work.
The very original concepts of the self driving car was that not everyone would need a car anymore, and they could be mass transportation. Just summon with a smart phone, and a close one will come. Or scheduled one for the week to get to work. Etc. No one specific is "revolutionizing transportation". If anyone takes credit for this, the people who think he did something special are all idiots. Hey, any programmer could write an ap now to summon automated cars now. Call it future ap, and have people book some automated cars ahead of time.
Well at least they're smart enough to try and repeal it. It takes one kind of fool to get involved with a stupid thing. It takes another kind of fool to not change course when it is evident they made a horrible mistake.
Just a FYI for anyone who liked MST3K, the creators have been uploading entire episodes to Youtube . Just search MST3K. Some of my favs are Master Ninja and Gamera. Just this past month they uploaded a live riff track to Starship Troopers too. There's many many hours of entertainment right there. I have nostalgic memories of watching some MST3K, playing some Wing Commander, and then playing pencil and paper RPGs with my highschool buddies.
Whats cool about MST3K being so old is that you forgot some of the jokes and they're funny again. I think when media passes a certain age, like 10 years, you can play it again and enjoy it over again. This goes for movies, books and video games.
I remember the time my old 74 nova stalled in the middle of the road and I thought it was because my alternator was bad and my battery lost charge. Anyway a woman and her family pulled into her house. I yelled over,"Hey lady, I need a jump. Can you give me a jump start?" She hurried her family into the house, and my friend was dying of laughter.
Maybe they just like to ride the line ride.
Thanks bud for the information. The more you know. I didn't want to google it and run across dozens of conspiracy sites.
Having a fort full of gold is good in dire emergency. It sounds to be about 200 billion dollars.