The foam was technically always a risk, but it became a significantly greater one once it was determined that the old foam was environmentally unfriendly (damaged the ozone layer I think), and then it was replaced with a more "green" version that chipped apart much more readily.
Hey, it worked for killing off funding for stem cell research, so they're just following the same principle and saving our Tax Dollars for things much more important than fundamental scientific research.
I really shouldn't feed the trolls... Especially after someone so much more well informed than you responded above me... But riddle me this: Which President was the first President to provide Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research?
Yes but the person I was responding to was referencing a fictional character on a fictional television show as if it had something to do with reality. I wasn't debating that the FCC director referring to it as a New York court wasn't an attempt to colour the ruling. "New York" and "San Francisco" equate with "liberal", due to no small part some of the crazy rulings that come out of the federal courts near there (I'm looking at you, Ninth Circuit). In this case I think the judge's ruling was pretty much spot on. If you have rules regarding "decency" they should be applied consistently (regardless of whether you SHOULD have such rules). I'm just questioning the value (and indeed the sanity) of bringing up the FICTIONAL behavior of a FICTIONAL character on a FICTIONAL television show in regards to real life politics.
It's kinda funny, actually, since many people accuse WizKids of just being some legal hocus pocus to keep FASA's IP away from their creditors when they folded. Their entire existence is kinda based on the idea of "1) Former employee of another company brings us IP 2) ??? 3) PROFIT!". That's not to say they don't do some interesting things from time to time... But since they axed Mage Knight I've been pretty much finished with the company. This latest bit really doesn't come as any surprise.
All in all, despite it's faults, I still absolutely ADORE my PSP. If not for the games, at least for everything else I can use it for.
And yet only the games help Sony, since they lose money selling you the hardware in hopes of you buying games for them to receive licensing fees on. You and every person like you who only uses their PSP for non-game related stuff is a Sony exec's nightmare. You're the reason their games division is hemorrhaging billions of dollars as we speak. (Well, you and Ken Kutaragi... But I digress...)
I don't know the details of Shell Solar or BP Solor, but their existence doesn't by itself show that the oil companies are not holding the industry back.
Actually in the case of BP, they pretty much are the industry. I think you're trying a little too hard to stick to your "OMG TEH EVIL O1L!!1!!1!!" conspiracy.
Remember, the phone companies fight tooth and nail to keep high speed data lines out of the publics hands. It wasn't until other options started popping up that they got in the game.
How the hell does that apply here? In this case the oil companies ARE the other options popping up. They're the number one investors in this type of technology and they're delivering real world, usable solutions TODAY. It wouldn't be smart business to do otherwise--they know oil will eventually become infeasible and they want to be ahead of the game when that day comes.
But please don't say that writing a game is completely unrelated to writing an engine.
I understand your position here, and I respect what you're trying to get at, but at the end of the day you're developing an engine, not a game. There are plenty of people in the industry who do engine development and not game development (the entire team at id is accused of this, funnily enough) and significantly more people who do game development and never touch engine code. They are related in that they kind of depend on each other to function, but engine development != game development. The same way that working on Apache != web site development.
See, here's the problem with that. There's a big difference between "graphics programming" and "making a game". If you take your approach, you'd spend years just implementing last generation's tech and never get a chance to actually work on your game. Yes you'd learn boatloads about graphics, but you won't be any better off in the "game development" department. If you want to make a game, use someone else's engine. If you want to write graphics code (or can't find an engine that does what you want), write your own engine. Don't assume the two endeavors have much (if anything) to do with each other.
And before someone just assumes I can't hack it... I've spent the last two years of my life developing OpenGL code for realtime scientific visualization/virtual reality, (Yes, I reference the Red Book, as well as ARB docs) so I'm pretty familiar with what goes into writing graphics code. Don't reinvent the wheel if all you need is a wheel.
This was my problem w/ Oblivion. I tried playing it and realized it was like I was playing an MMO that no one played anymore. Kind of like when I tried DAoC and everyone on the server was already level 50, so I never saw another soul. I have plenty of games where I can be antisocial... I don't need an open ended RPG to be anti-social in, as well.
If you can't initialize all variables to known values and set your pointers back to NULL when you're done with them, give it up already.
Wait... What does this have to do with concurrency, exactly? That sounds more like a prescription for function call etiquette, not avoiding concurrency problems...
Say, you spend 8 hours a day working as a worker on a construction yard. And to escape this boring, hard reality, you pick a job of a security guard, watching over a corner of a building for another 8 hours, and additionally paying someone to be able to do so, instead of getting paid for the job.
But do I get to shoot people who wander into my view as this security guard? Do my actions now matter? Instead of being a nameless, faceless cog in a machine built up in a world of false goals and empty societal constructs, might I be capable of accomplishing something important? Can billions of lives now be affected by my decisions?
Seriously, read some Faulkner.:) This life of a "security guard" as you call it can be much more epic than you seem to believe. Yes, 8 hours of numbing boredom awaits you... But what about those short bursts of stark terror when facing a new opponent? No, it's not for everyone, but it is what some people are looking for.
I'm already an adrenaline junkie in WoW, where I purposely take on foes who should outmatch me to defend lowbie areas. And PvP in WoW is like playing cards with your opponent compared to EVE...
a government can print money (though they usually choose not to to maintain trust)
But doing so devalues all other money already printed, not getting them much in the end.
a government can imprison or kill anyone they want (though they usually choose not to to maintain trust)
But to do so requires sending big men with guns to accomplish it. They can't simply kill you with a wave of their hand. A physical process has to unfold in realtime that can be observed and even stopped.
at least the us government has very strong control over an american citizen's finances (on the lighter side, they can freeze accounts, on the heavier side they can fine people).
But doing such things creates a paper trail. They can't do such a thing and then "ban" the person from reality. They can lock them up, yes, but they can't lock up everyone who questions what's happened. Such a thing is not true of a game developer. They can make the entirety of reality disappear if they so choose.
Games are meant to be fun, an escape from reality.
And in this case, the approach is to come up with an entirely new reality. There's nothing inherent to the game that requires this sort of commitment or mistreatment of players. That comes entirely from the human nature of those playing it (or in this case, those supposedly responsible for running it).
Also it seems if you try and type 'peons4hire' in any communication, the server just drops your message. Fiance was trying to tell guildmates about the lawsuit and was confused why none of her messages were getting through...
I'd certainly agree that movies to games (or vise-versa)are all bad.
Goldeneye was arguably better than the movie it was based on... The Riddick game was also supposedly surprisingly good. There are others if I take the time to remember them. Important thing is, they're not all crap.
I can't think of anything spectacular going in the other direction, however... Resident Evil made a lot of money, I guess. If you like anime, there's some good translations from cart to screen on the other side of the pond, but that's about it.
I'll give you a dollar if you can find me ONE SINGLE deployment of mainframe COBOL that is being used for business that is not in the process of being phased out and redeveloped. Also, find me one person that knows and writes COBOL that doesn't hate his/her job. Worst language EVER. (Hollerith cards aside)
You owe me a dollar. The IT department I used to work at runs most of the organization-wide stuff on an IBM OS/390 monolith, written in legacy COBOL code. Any of the programmers that worked there that did hate their job didn't hate it because of COBOL, believe me. Instead of "phasing out" the system, they got a nice new flashy IBM server to run a virtualized version of the mainframe seamlessly. Will the code be phased out one day? Probably. Not because of the language, but because the size of the organization has scaled so much and the increase in communication capacity available to them has grown exponentially, so problems like this can be approached from new directions. Plus, COBOL coders are getting harder to find. But any COBOL gurus could probably eat very well for the next 10 years there, since that's probably the earliest that system will be "phased out".
And calling it the worst language EVAR is a bit disingenuous... It's very very good at what it does: business logic. I wouldn't want to write an operating system or a thermonuclear explosion simulation in it, but I wouldn't want to write check printing routines in C, either.:)
I'd rather have a controller design that doesn't even have to force the developer to even consider it,
Wait, "forces the developer to even consider it"? How do you FORCE freedom of choice onto someone? An easy retort is other controller designs FORCE the game designer to use them the way the hardware designer originally intended. So you're saying you'd rather a design that purposely limits its functionality and/or requires buying of seperate controllers/peripherals to support other play styles?
The primary design motivator behind the N64 controller was Mario 64. In that respect, it was the perfect controller. Playing Mario 64 with any other input is just suboptimal. But it was also designed with the intention of allowing "old" control styles to be used (by gripping the outside handles). It was a bridge between generations and it works at that job extremely well.
than one that forces the choice between abandoning controls or moving your hand. So no, this is the controller designer fault as much or more than the game designers.
And as far as abandoning controls and having to move your hand... That sounds like most PS2 games I know. Especially the ones that use both analog sticks--my favorite example being SW: Battlefront. In Battlefront I have to give up aiming to access other interface features, or give up running to access command/communication features. In Ace Combat, the designers originally gave up on the D-pad (reducing it to autopilot activation, implicitly acknowledging that using the D-pad means giving up control of your aircraft) and eventually started using it for communication as well. Which can get annoying on higher difficulties where I'm too busy dodging missiles to respond to my wingmates/commanders with the D-pad controls and therefore I get to listen to them whine about me not answering.
With this in mind, you sound like someone who never played much in the way of N64 games. The controller excelled at what it was intended for, and allowed very creative uses of its ample feature set (8-player Micro Machines comes to mind).
Blaming a hardware developer for giving a game designer too many options is ridiculous.
I also don't like the 4-button diamond layout that started with the SNES controller and has persisted. The thumb has one comfortable axis to play with and keep uniform button-pressing movement - side to side. Thus the three-buttons-in-a-row structure is far better.
Errr.. I disagree. You can use the joint in your thumb to control whether you're pressing the top or bottom button in the "diamond" layout, which also allows for two buttons to be pressed simultaneously more easily (like run+jump in Super Mario World, for instance.) Controllers that lack this annoy me... I wanna be able to roll in KoF.:P
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The foam was technically always a risk, but it became a significantly greater one once it was determined that the old foam was environmentally unfriendly (damaged the ozone layer I think), and then it was replaced with a more "green" version that chipped apart much more readily.
None of that has anything to do with Vista, however...
I really shouldn't feed the trolls... Especially after someone so much more well informed than you responded above me... But riddle me this: Which President was the first President to provide Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research?
You know, after the awards show at GDC even the Bethesda guys I saw/spoke with didn't seem to think Oblivion was so great...
Yes but the person I was responding to was referencing a fictional character on a fictional television show as if it had something to do with reality. I wasn't debating that the FCC director referring to it as a New York court wasn't an attempt to colour the ruling. "New York" and "San Francisco" equate with "liberal", due to no small part some of the crazy rulings that come out of the federal courts near there (I'm looking at you, Ninth Circuit). In this case I think the judge's ruling was pretty much spot on. If you have rules regarding "decency" they should be applied consistently (regardless of whether you SHOULD have such rules). I'm just questioning the value (and indeed the sanity) of bringing up the FICTIONAL behavior of a FICTIONAL character on a FICTIONAL television show in regards to real life politics.
It's kinda funny, actually, since many people accuse WizKids of just being some legal hocus pocus to keep FASA's IP away from their creditors when they folded. Their entire existence is kinda based on the idea of "1) Former employee of another company brings us IP 2) ??? 3) PROFIT!". That's not to say they don't do some interesting things from time to time... But since they axed Mage Knight I've been pretty much finished with the company. This latest bit really doesn't come as any surprise.
And yet only the games help Sony, since they lose money selling you the hardware in hopes of you buying games for them to receive licensing fees on. You and every person like you who only uses their PSP for non-game related stuff is a Sony exec's nightmare. You're the reason their games division is hemorrhaging billions of dollars as we speak. (Well, you and Ken Kutaragi... But I digress...)
Errr.... which has what to do with anything here?
Actually in the case of BP, they pretty much are the industry. I think you're trying a little too hard to stick to your "OMG TEH EVIL O1L!!1!!1!!" conspiracy.
How the hell does that apply here? In this case the oil companies ARE the other options popping up. They're the number one investors in this type of technology and they're delivering real world, usable solutions TODAY. It wouldn't be smart business to do otherwise--they know oil will eventually become infeasible and they want to be ahead of the game when that day comes.
I understand your position here, and I respect what you're trying to get at, but at the end of the day you're developing an engine, not a game. There are plenty of people in the industry who do engine development and not game development (the entire team at id is accused of this, funnily enough) and significantly more people who do game development and never touch engine code. They are related in that they kind of depend on each other to function, but engine development != game development. The same way that working on Apache != web site development.
See, here's the problem with that. There's a big difference between "graphics programming" and "making a game". If you take your approach, you'd spend years just implementing last generation's tech and never get a chance to actually work on your game. Yes you'd learn boatloads about graphics, but you won't be any better off in the "game development" department. If you want to make a game, use someone else's engine. If you want to write graphics code (or can't find an engine that does what you want), write your own engine. Don't assume the two endeavors have much (if anything) to do with each other.
And before someone just assumes I can't hack it... I've spent the last two years of my life developing OpenGL code for realtime scientific visualization/virtual reality, (Yes, I reference the Red Book, as well as ARB docs) so I'm pretty familiar with what goes into writing graphics code. Don't reinvent the wheel if all you need is a wheel.
This was my problem w/ Oblivion. I tried playing it and realized it was like I was playing an MMO that no one played anymore. Kind of like when I tried DAoC and everyone on the server was already level 50, so I never saw another soul. I have plenty of games where I can be antisocial... I don't need an open ended RPG to be anti-social in, as well.
Wait... What does this have to do with concurrency, exactly? That sounds more like a prescription for function call etiquette, not avoiding concurrency problems...
So's baseball. But somehow cheating there warrants congressional investigations.
(And no, I'm not saying congress should investigate EVE, I'm saying they had no business investigating baseball.)
But do I get to shoot people who wander into my view as this security guard? Do my actions now matter? Instead of being a nameless, faceless cog in a machine built up in a world of false goals and empty societal constructs, might I be capable of accomplishing something important? Can billions of lives now be affected by my decisions?
Seriously, read some Faulkner.
I'm already an adrenaline junkie in WoW, where I purposely take on foes who should outmatch me to defend lowbie areas. And PvP in WoW is like playing cards with your opponent compared to EVE...
But doing so devalues all other money already printed, not getting them much in the end.
But to do so requires sending big men with guns to accomplish it. They can't simply kill you with a wave of their hand. A physical process has to unfold in realtime that can be observed and even stopped.
But doing such things creates a paper trail. They can't do such a thing and then "ban" the person from reality. They can lock them up, yes, but they can't lock up everyone who questions what's happened. Such a thing is not true of a game developer. They can make the entirety of reality disappear if they so choose.
And in this case, the approach is to come up with an entirely new reality. There's nothing inherent to the game that requires this sort of commitment or mistreatment of players. That comes entirely from the human nature of those playing it (or in this case, those supposedly responsible for running it).
Also it seems if you try and type 'peons4hire' in any communication, the server just drops your message. Fiance was trying to tell guildmates about the lawsuit and was confused why none of her messages were getting through...
Goldeneye was arguably better than the movie it was based on... The Riddick game was also supposedly surprisingly good. There are others if I take the time to remember them. Important thing is, they're not all crap.
I can't think of anything spectacular going in the other direction, however... Resident Evil made a lot of money, I guess. If you like anime, there's some good translations from cart to screen on the other side of the pond, but that's about it.
although if I was forced to I'd look into something like the GNU Scientific Library
You had me excited... For the whole thirty seconds it took to realize it's not released as Library GPL... Argh...
You owe me a dollar. The IT department I used to work at runs most of the organization-wide stuff on an IBM OS/390 monolith, written in legacy COBOL code. Any of the programmers that worked there that did hate their job didn't hate it because of COBOL, believe me. Instead of "phasing out" the system, they got a nice new flashy IBM server to run a virtualized version of the mainframe seamlessly. Will the code be phased out one day? Probably. Not because of the language, but because the size of the organization has scaled so much and the increase in communication capacity available to them has grown exponentially, so problems like this can be approached from new directions. Plus, COBOL coders are getting harder to find. But any COBOL gurus could probably eat very well for the next 10 years there, since that's probably the earliest that system will be "phased out".
And calling it the worst language EVAR is a bit disingenuous... It's very very good at what it does: business logic. I wouldn't want to write an operating system or a thermonuclear explosion simulation in it, but I wouldn't want to write check printing routines in C, either.
And a modern C program is quite incomprehensible except to the guy who wrote it. :)
Wait, "forces the developer to even consider it"? How do you FORCE freedom of choice onto someone? An easy retort is other controller designs FORCE the game designer to use them the way the hardware designer originally intended.
So you're saying you'd rather a design that purposely limits its functionality and/or requires buying of seperate controllers/peripherals to support other play styles?
The primary design motivator behind the N64 controller was Mario 64. In that respect, it was the perfect controller. Playing Mario 64 with any other input is just suboptimal. But it was also designed with the intention of allowing "old" control styles to be used (by gripping the outside handles). It was a bridge between generations and it works at that job extremely well.
And as far as abandoning controls and having to move your hand... That sounds like most PS2 games I know. Especially the ones that use both analog sticks--my favorite example being SW: Battlefront. In Battlefront I have to give up aiming to access other interface features, or give up running to access command/communication features. In Ace Combat, the designers originally gave up on the D-pad (reducing it to autopilot activation, implicitly acknowledging that using the D-pad means giving up control of your aircraft) and eventually started using it for communication as well. Which can get annoying on higher difficulties where I'm too busy dodging missiles to respond to my wingmates/commanders with the D-pad controls and therefore I get to listen to them whine about me not answering.
With this in mind, you sound like someone who never played much in the way of N64 games. The controller excelled at what it was intended for, and allowed very creative uses of its ample feature set (8-player Micro Machines comes to mind).
Blaming a hardware developer for giving a game designer too many options is ridiculous.
. A good controller should never force you to move your hand
If you ever had to move your hand, that was the fault of a game designer, not the controller designer.