I can't agree enough. Spring is a pleasure to program with because it makes any Java project easier and because it's great inspiration for how to write great code.
It's not the game, it's the community part. Have the online connection part connect right into community run sites, as opposed to the official "channels." Then let the community update the rosters, run the leagues, etc.
Admittedly, if the console is never plugged into the internet, this doesn't help anyone. But considering increasingly more of them are, and online play is increasingly more important, just let people update their rosters from non-official sites. Let the communities run with open protocols, if not open source.
This is a great opportunity for Take Two (or frankly any game developer) to open up the community aspect of their games to open source development. Take your code, release it, and sponsor some development. Encourage moving the platform to a more P2P based, rather than centralized, service. Allow roster upgrades to come from the community instead of from the company. Let community members have full control over how they see leagues, reputations, and rank policy should work. Only good can come from it.
If the company isn't officially sponsoring the roster updates, it creates a legal shield. The community code and backend can't possibly be a moneymaker, as almost no one picks their sports games based on which online community features work best (the actual online connection is a different story). And imagine the goodwill generated by bringing a whole boatload of geeks (many of whom are gamers) onto your side. People already work terrible hours for unfair compensation just to be a part of gaming, why not pay them nothing, still reap the benefits, and screw EA out of the money they paid for official licensing?
Some portion of the gameplay would suffer as I imagine you couldn't have the play-by-play announcers saying guys names (though even that has possible solutions). The positives, as I see them, more than outweigh the negatives, however.
Maybe Apple should hire him to work on the next version tweak of their DRM so that its less easy for someone else to crack. That would kill two birds with one stone.
There's is a small chance that the puppy in question just thinks that chewing cables is fun and it has nothing to do with a behaviour disorder. Our puppy has rubber-type toys and rope bones. How is she really supposed to know the different between ethernet cables and toys?
Sure, she can be taught (if you can catch her), and sure boredom might have a bit to do with it, but there's a lot of posts (like your very informative, descriptive, and good one above) that say something to the effect of neglect, get another pet, too small environment, etc without acknowledging the chance that... it's just odd chance that your pet has a thing for cables.
I'd tend toward the trap and yell or hot sauce methods myself. I just keep waiting for the day our puppy gets herself a live wire instead of an ethernet one and then I won't need to set a trap. In the meantime, I believe that's what they really invented wireless for.
with every new version of wine or winex that comes out, i check to see if worms armageddon will work. unfortunately, i've never gotten even to the game selection screen. it's honestly the only app (or game) i've ever missed since switching to linux 4 years ago.
of course, i don't think there's all that much effort toward trying to make many year old games work.
you need to introduce rep. boucher to rms? or do you mean that you did introduce rep. boucher to rms?
i'd like to know 'cause rep. boucher would need a running mate when the geek party decides to nominate him for president. i can see it now, "libertarians blame geeks for stealing their votes!"
ah, if only this were a democratic country where we all realised that one party cannot begin to speak for 250 million people.
i have found that weirdx works quicker and better than cygwin. weirdx supports rootless mode (such that x windows look just like regular windows windows, without having to have a separate canvas), alpha transparency (i believe this is why it was mentioned on slashdot years ago), and is written in java. in fact, it's the fastest java app i've ever used.
microsoft's pr department was quick to point out that, "we didn't want a rehearing anyways," and stated further, "this is a huge win for innovation, consumers, and, of course, microsoft."
does this mean an end to the days where 2,000 families in iowa determine what programming gets kept and what goes because of our culture's weird worship of nielson numbers?
what does sourcesafe buy you that cvs doesn't? last i checked (which could have been a version ago at this point), sourcesafe did the exact same thing with binaries (word documents) that cvs did.
the problem with schemas is that just because a customer id is 14 digits long does not mean it is a valid id. just because someone's last name is an uppercase character, followed by less than 20 lowercase characters does not make it a valid customer. while schemas solve the problem of specifying the formatting of the field, this syntactic problem is only half the necessary information needed to exchange data. this doesn't solve the semantic problem, and therefore it's still just as easy to get bad data in your database.
anticryptography - sending messages which are easy to understand rather than the reverse. This is something which has applications in communicating both extraterrestrially and on Earth.
the point of the business model is making people pay to play on their servers. they are assuming that to really have a hugely, massive, multiplayer game, people are not going to be able to set up their own servers. they won't have the bandwidth or the machines necessary.
but you just heard it on the radio. you don't want to hear it again, do you? besides, if you think radio sounds crappy, imagine how bad a song would sound on your cell phone.
Officials in the heavily Democratic Palm Beach County said 19,120 ballots in the
presidential race were thrown out before they were counted because more than one
candidate was picked; only 3,783 voters made that mistake on the U.S. Senate
portion of the ballot.
here's a right on article. not only did they (ron harris, associated press writer) explain the news, but they also spent the last half on the fact that freenet was available, worked as well, and was "inpenetrable" to court orders (well... close enough).
They include Freenet, an anarchic network created by Irish-born Ian Clarke that doesn't rely on central servers, like Napster does to function as a clearinghouse. With Freenet, each user exposes his or her computer to the Internet, making each participating computer a file-sharing server.
Since it was released last year, 110,000 copies of Freenet have been downloaded, said Clarke, 10,000 of them since Wednesday's Napster ruling.
Clarke designed Freenet to distribute all kinds of information via the Internet without fear of censorship. He said he wasn't even thinking about copyrighted music files.
Unlike Napster, Freenet is invulnerable to any attack, be it from cyberspace or corporate lawyers, Clarke said.
"Freenet has been designed so that even one of its developers - I would have no idea how to go about shutting it down," he said.
point is, they managed to give some good press to freenet while still covering the story.
another poorly finished osopinion article
on
X Windows Must Die!
·
· Score: 1
like most other osopinion articles, this one doesn't back up any of the interesting opinions with evidence or proof.
Well, I hate to burst your bubble, folks: Linux (and even the FreeBSD to a lesser extent) is just as overweight as most other operating systems these days. The kernel alone (when compiled), can take up anywhere from 700K to 1.2MB, depending on the configuration and whether drivers are compiled in. The GNU C library is likewise huge, nearly twice the size of the comparable BSD C library.
first of all, the writer doesn't compare these sizes to any other operating systems. i don't know if this is big or small. what's the size of the nt kernel, the 2000 kernel (one in the same?), the solaris kernel? secondly, the author completely ignores things like micro-linux for embedded devices. there have been a spat of articles recently on people using linux in embedded devices. clearly this isn't because it's bloated. while it's true that desktop features can be compiled into the kernel that add size, it's not an inherent "feature" of the operating system. is comparing linux (not micro-linux) to qnx any more fair then comparing solaris or 2000 to qnx?
More millions of lines of code, layered on top of an already overweight system. GNOME, KDE, even Motif exact a huge performance hit and add further complexity. Worse yet, no one in the Unix community seems to be able to agree on any kind of GUI standard, so you have an explosion of window managers, desktops, file managers, and widget toolkits which are mostly inoperable with each other.
once again, while the point doesn't lack merit (there is no standard look and feel), the facts don't support it. widget toolkits and window managers aren't interoperable. they don't have common apis but i certainly run gnome apps under different window managers alongside motif ones.
I had high hopes for GnuStep, an Open Source port of NeXT's OpenStep environment; it built on the excellent and coherent NeXT interface. However, it seems like this project (like Gnu's HURD kernel) is stuck in eternal limbo. GNOME and KDE are now fighting for primacy and neither GUI really addresses X's weaknesses.
last i checked GnuStep wasn't trying to rewrite X, it was just another "bloated, interoperable layer." moving on...
The phrase "user testing" is unknown to Open Source coders, who will pick gee-whiz graphics over usability any day. Apple has spent millions over the years in focus groups, user meetings, and biometrics studies to figure out exactly how GUIs should look and behave. They don't always succeed (just look at the QuickTime Player 4 for a lousy interface), but in many ways the Mac is still the gold standard for GUIs.
This tendency of Open Source programmers to copy or re-engineer rather than invent is a good thing overall (it saves a lot of wasted effort and traveling down blind alleys), but it does have a downside: the codebase of such programs, unless carefully controlled, rapidly degenerate into huge piles of spaghetti code.
another very interesting point about open source not lending itself to r&d (and something that has been discussed and i'm sure will be discussed more in the future). but there's a couple of flaws here. it's not that "user testing" is unknown to open source coders. i would argue that open source coders do a lot more of it. they just have different users for the most part. when you release your code with your software, and give an email address, you can expect to get feedback about said code from your users. the problem for monty manley is that there is no "user testing" to joe schmoe software user. but, joe schmoe software user isn't using the open source stuff yet, and hence isn't a user. it will be the responsibility of players like corel and red hat to do new usability testing with desktop people they hope to reach, but "user testing" certainly hasn't been ignored.
the worst, though, is the last statement. it plain old doesn't make sense. the argument is that if you reengineer someone else's visual designs your code will be bad? give me a break.
osopinion articles are quite often written this way, which is extremely conterproductive. i think the author has some really good points. i wish there weren't so many throw away, unproven, useless statements sprinkled throughout that do nothing more than enflame dissenters and confuse people unaware of the issues.
is extra overhead really an issue? compared to the amount of data, the overhead of the protocol is minimal (in terms of both processing time and connection speed). on top of that, as we move to broadband for the web, the protocol size and complexity becomes even more insignificant.
so what immediately caught my eye about this story was the fact that you could peer ricochet modems. assuming this is the case, what's to stop me from putting a ricochet modem in (connected to) my firewall/gateway machine and connect another one to my laptop for local wireless access?
i haven't heard of doing this kind of this before. in some preliminary searching through the web i've found these articles of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't agree enough. Spring is a pleasure to program with because it makes any Java project easier and because it's great inspiration for how to write great code.
-matt
It's not the game, it's the community part. Have the online connection part connect right into community run sites, as opposed to the official "channels." Then let the community update the rosters, run the leagues, etc.
Admittedly, if the console is never plugged into the internet, this doesn't help anyone. But considering increasingly more of them are, and online play is increasingly more important, just let people update their rosters from non-official sites. Let the communities run with open protocols, if not open source.
This is a great opportunity for Take Two (or frankly any game developer) to open up the community aspect of their games to open source development. Take your code, release it, and sponsor some development. Encourage moving the platform to a more P2P based, rather than centralized, service. Allow roster upgrades to come from the community instead of from the company. Let community members have full control over how they see leagues, reputations, and rank policy should work. Only good can come from it.
If the company isn't officially sponsoring the roster updates, it creates a legal shield. The community code and backend can't possibly be a moneymaker, as almost no one picks their sports games based on which online community features work best (the actual online connection is a different story). And imagine the goodwill generated by bringing a whole boatload of geeks (many of whom are gamers) onto your side. People already work terrible hours for unfair compensation just to be a part of gaming, why not pay them nothing, still reap the benefits, and screw EA out of the money they paid for official licensing?
Some portion of the gameplay would suffer as I imagine you couldn't have the play-by-play announcers saying guys names (though even that has possible solutions). The positives, as I see them, more than outweigh the negatives, however.
Maybe Apple should hire him to work on the next version tweak of their DRM so that its less easy for someone else to crack. That would kill two birds with one stone.
There's is a small chance that the puppy in question just thinks that chewing cables is fun and it has nothing to do with a behaviour disorder. Our puppy has rubber-type toys and rope bones. How is she really supposed to know the different between ethernet cables and toys?
... it's just odd chance that your pet has a thing for cables.
Sure, she can be taught (if you can catch her), and sure boredom might have a bit to do with it, but there's a lot of posts (like your very informative, descriptive, and good one above) that say something to the effect of neglect, get another pet, too small environment, etc without acknowledging the chance that
I'd tend toward the trap and yell or hot sauce methods myself. I just keep waiting for the day our puppy gets herself a live wire instead of an ethernet one and then I won't need to set a trap. In the meantime, I believe that's what they really invented wireless for.
Why don't they just make GM nets that catch all the carp? Then you don't have a problem with interspecies this or that or migrating fish populations.
with every new version of wine or winex that comes out, i check to see if worms armageddon will work. unfortunately, i've never gotten even to the game selection screen. it's honestly the only app (or game) i've ever missed since switching to linux 4 years ago.
of course, i don't think there's all that much effort toward trying to make many year old games work.
you need to introduce rep. boucher to rms? or do you mean that you did introduce rep. boucher to rms?
i'd like to know 'cause rep. boucher would need a running mate when the geek party decides to nominate him for president. i can see it now, "libertarians blame geeks for stealing their votes!"
ah, if only this were a democratic country where we all realised that one party cannot begin to speak for 250 million people.
i have found that weirdx works quicker and better than cygwin. weirdx supports rootless mode (such that x windows look just like regular windows windows, without having to have a separate canvas), alpha transparency (i believe this is why it was mentioned on slashdot years ago), and is written in java. in fact, it's the fastest java app i've ever used.
microsoft's pr department was quick to point out that, "we didn't want a rehearing anyways," and stated further, "this is a huge win for innovation, consumers, and, of course, microsoft."
does this mean an end to the days where 2,000 families in iowa determine what programming gets kept and what goes because of our culture's weird worship of nielson numbers?
what does sourcesafe buy you that cvs doesn't? last i checked (which could have been a version ago at this point), sourcesafe did the exact same thing with binaries (word documents) that cvs did.
if only lynx had dhtml/javascript support ...
the problem with schemas is that just because a customer id is 14 digits long does not mean it is a valid id. just because someone's last name is an uppercase character, followed by less than 20 lowercase characters does not make it a valid customer. while schemas solve the problem of specifying the formatting of the field, this syntactic problem is only half the necessary information needed to exchange data. this doesn't solve the semantic problem, and therefore it's still just as easy to get bad data in your database.
the point of the business model is making people pay to play on their servers. they are assuming that to really have a hugely, massive, multiplayer game, people are not going to be able to set up their own servers. they won't have the bandwidth or the machines necessary.
but you just heard it on the radio. you don't want to hear it again, do you? besides, if you think radio sounds crappy, imagine how bad a song would sound on your cell phone.
Officials in the heavily Democratic Palm Beach County said 19,120 ballots in the presidential race were thrown out before they were counted because more than one candidate was picked; only 3,783 voters made that mistake on the U.S. Senate portion of the ballot.
... at the bottom of the letter to the candidates?
*grin*
either way, vote nader!
here's a right on article. not only did they (ron harris, associated press writer) explain the news, but they also spent the last half on the fact that freenet was available, worked as well, and was "inpenetrable" to court orders (well ... close enough).
point is, they managed to give some good press to freenet while still covering the story.
another very interesting point about open source not lending itself to r&d (and something that has been discussed and i'm sure will be discussed more in the future). but there's a couple of flaws here. it's not that "user testing" is unknown to open source coders. i would argue that open source coders do a lot more of it. they just have different users for the most part. when you release your code with your software, and give an email address, you can expect to get feedback about said code from your users. the problem for monty manley is that there is no "user testing" to joe schmoe software user. but, joe schmoe software user isn't using the open source stuff yet, and hence isn't a user. it will be the responsibility of players like corel and red hat to do new usability testing with desktop people they hope to reach, but "user testing" certainly hasn't been ignored.
the worst, though, is the last statement. it plain old doesn't make sense. the argument is that if you reengineer someone else's visual designs your code will be bad? give me a break.
osopinion articles are quite often written this way, which is extremely conterproductive. i think the author has some really good points. i wish there weren't so many throw away, unproven, useless statements sprinkled throughout that do nothing more than enflame dissenters and confuse people unaware of the issues.
This is the correct link to Ingo's informative post.
is extra overhead really an issue? compared to the amount of data, the overhead of the protocol is minimal (in terms of both processing time and connection speed). on top of that, as we move to broadband for the web, the protocol size and complexity becomes even more insignificant.
so what immediately caught my eye about this story was the fact that you could peer ricochet modems. assuming this is the case, what's to stop me from putting a ricochet modem in (connected to) my firewall/gateway machine and connect another one to my laptop for local wireless access?
i haven't heard of doing this kind of this before. in some preliminary searching through the web i've found these articles of interest.
on deja:
from ricochet:
the basic linux ppp-howto (which might have all the info needed in it)
has anyone done this?