No shit. The arseholes running Midway have no idea at all when it comes to games. LA Rush anyone? These guys think that if you shovel shit down people's throats by marketing it on MTV, they'll lap it up and ask for more.
When was the last time Midway actually turned a profit?
Am I bitter because I worked for a studio that Midway bought then shutdown a few months later, despite the fact the game we were making for them was shaping up to be kick-ass? You fucking bet I am, but mostly my anger and bitterness is because of the way they treated us. I wouldn't piss on David Zucker, Matt Booty, Steve Allison and all the other cocksuckers running that company if they were on fire.
Oh please. I live in the only capital city in Australia that has decent public transport.
I know you've said you're in Brisbane, but I think that Perth takes the crown for public transport. Check out the fancy new rail system they've been pouring billions into upgrading, expanding and modernising.
For example, imagine writing a few lines of code or even using a graphical IDE to create a bouncing ball with collision detection, perspective, with video playing on the Ball and live Text RSS feeds as well displaying on the ball. Now imagine that to create this application, it takes less that 5 to 10 minutes and even the generated code is 5 - 10 lines. Not only are the features impressive for an 'active' UI (meaning the ball is a control), but when you factor in the speed of its creation, it is astounding.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. But if you do, it sounds like something you could have done yesterday with Quartz Composer.
Because if it doesn't, employees have to be retrained, and retraining incurs significant costs. You have to pay the salaries of both the trainer and the trainees. You have to be accept the decreased productivity of those workers, both during the actual training and for some period after, while they feel their way around the new software.
For that to be true, you have to assume that public servants are actually productive in the first place.
Wake up. You lack discipline, which means that you are lazy and have no respect for yourself. Exceptions are made for people in wheelchairs because they have physical disabilities that cannot be repaired. With a bit of effort on your part you can burn off that fat.
Every thing you said is nothing but a cop-out. The sorts of things you expect to hear from a druggie or alcoholic. Restaurants are a luxury. It's not hard to make a sandwich or roll for lunch or a stew or soup or pasta or stir-fry for dinner. You don't have to stuff your gut full of food everytime you eat. You don't have to eat fattening fast food. You don't have to work an unpaid job. You don't have to drive everywhere or take the lift.
You don't have to change much at all. Make change gradual. If you have to go up or down a floor or two, take the stairs. Go for a walk around the block at lunch, the sunlight will also do you good. Don't drive to the shop that's a five minute walk away. Spend 30 minutes to make up enough of a healthy meal that you can keep in the fridge for a few days so you only have to microwave a bowl or plate of it the next few nights. Not only do you know what's going into it, but it's healthier and cheaper than eating junk food all the time and cooking is fun and a skill that impresses the ladies. Try doing a few sit-ups or push-ups when you wake up or are watching TV at night. Drink water instead of soft-drinks and eat a banana or apple or some grapes or nuts for a snack instead of a chocolate bar.
You don't have to go cold-turkey and go on some bullshit 'detox' thing or crash diet or exercise binge to lose weight. In fact, people who do that stuff mostly get sick of it and give up and end up getting fatter than they were beforehand. The trick is to make gradual changes to your behaviour. A few minutes here and a few minutes there of physical activity every day soon adds up to a non-trivial amount of exercise. Make no mistake, it takes effort to change, but don't you owe it to yourself to be healthy so you can enjoy life, or do you think that God wants you live a miserable, sick, tired and short life?
TFA is about a study which says there might be a viral pathology which is contributing to obesity, if not outright causing it in some cases. Since this shakes up the world-view of some of you, you're stamping your feet and throwing a tantrum over it.
You can't argue with physics. Energy just doesn't appear from nowhere. Maybe this virus just causes your metabolism to slow down, so like it always has been you'll only put on weight if you're consuming more energy than you're expending.
This virus (if it's for real) is not the problem, the problem is that overweight people generally lack discipline and have a weak will. I.e. to eat a balanced diet in moderation and exercise regularly.
Per capita output is the biggest load of bollocks ever.
Greenies use that excuse to say that we in Australia are one of the top polluters in the world. That's bullshit, America has 300 million people and Australia only has 20 million. China and India have over a billion people so they can put out more than 20 times less per capita than Australia and still be bigger overall polluters, especially when you take into account population density.
Kyoto is fucked because of this. They should have set a kg/km^2 cap that is constant for everyone and allows for a decent standard of living. But then, if the world doubled the use of nuclear power and made a big effort to switch over to biofuels for transport we'd have the problem significantly licked.
You do realise that modern flourescents operate at KHz frequencies? Compact flourescents are instant-on and don't flicker. Sure, some take a minute or two to warm up to full brightness, but in an area where you have the lights on for hours at a time, is that really an issue?
Furthermore, I'd wager that getting everyone to switch from incandescent globes to compact flourescent would be cheaper and make a dramatically larger savings in power consumption, substantially faster to boot.
In this house we replaced ten 80W incandescent globes with 12W compact flourescents. (We've had toroidal flourescents in some rooms for as long as I can remember.) Half of those lights are in the main living area and as such are on for quite a few hours each day. I would say that saves more than what it costs to run this mac mini 24/7. (Which also consumes substantially less power than the obnoxiously noisy PC I used to run 24/7) Hell, it probably pays for that and running the ducted evaporative cooling! (God knows we needed that the last few days... four days of >40c !)
Actually there is. Paralana(sp?) near Arkaroola in the Gammon Ranges is a volcanic spring. I believe it's the only volcanic activity in Australia and is in the general vicinity (give or take a few hundred KM's) of where Geodynamics are drilling.
When I used to do homebrew I'd wash the bottles in a tub of water with detergent to get rid of any crud/sediment, then soak in a hot tub of that sodium metabisulphate stuff (I'm pretty sure that's what it was called) for a while, give them a rinse and then bake in the oven for 30 mins. Always worked a treat!
It was either in an episode of the "Lost Worlds - Ancient Discoveriers" or "Light Fantastic" series. Both series are excellent BBC productions, and for all my fellow Aussies, they were shown recently on SBS on Sunday nights.
And...you emited a crapload of CO2, a ridiculously large amount of particulate pollutant and made a bunch of stink.
Modern common-rail turbocharged diesel engines are not only very efficient, they are very clean running.
Using B20 also means that the car polluted less than your average petrol engine and even the same engine if it was running straight petrodiesel. Biodiesel not only closes the carbon cycle, it burns cleaner and makes engines run better.
I just want to know where the diesel-electric cars are? The tech has been around for years and is used in trains and large earthmoving equipment - why can't it be scaled down to work with cars?
Well yes, Windows applications do behave like that now. But originally they didn't and what I said above is still generally true.
If Windows was a document-centric UI, why did they invent the horrible kludge that is MDI? What is the point of having document windows that are inside and clipped by the application window?
Running two instances of an application is the difference between Mac OS and Windows. Mac OS is document-centric, Windows is application-centric. Application windows in Mac OS ideally represent a document, while application windows in Windows represent the application. That is why Windows features the MDI, where multiple documents exist inside the application window.
If there is a reason you want to run two instances of an application, then there should be a menu option or key modifier to do so. The default action should always be to start an instance of the application if it is not already running or bring the existing instance to focus. Dialogue boxes would just become bloody annoying.
Uhm, console players do not play on servers now all of a sudden? I do not know how it works, but in the CS world people setup FFA servers to play on, i do not own a console, and never will so i do not know about how it is done there, but having 200.000 people hosted by Microsoft or Valve servers seems kinda crazy..
I don't know how it works with CS, but with most console games someone hosts the game. Companies can also run dedicated servers via Live. Either way, the percentage of console players who play online is rather small.
Uhm, all consoles are the same? Arnt Microsoft pushing two versions, which happens to be one of the things Gabe is annoyed with?
They both have the same hardware. One comes with a detachable HDD and the other doesn't. Microsoft have been saying to develop games bearing in mind that the HDD won't always be there because it's detachable. I would say that it's most definately in the TRC.
It's pretty simple to deal with really, just do a check on startup for the presence of the HDD and if it's there then you can use it as a cache. Of course, that implies that you have designed a half-way decent file I/O system for your game.
Gabe is just whingeing that he's invested millions of dollars into developing highly PC-centric game tech. (slow & memory hungry) If he had ensured that they developed their tech so that it was cross-platform then I bet he wouldn't be spitting the dummy. Remember, he made his millions at Microsoft.
You have a computer capable of playing it that doesn't have a DVD drive? (I thought it came on CD's anyway)
i didn't have to leave my room, i ordered it via steam with my creditcard, preloaded the content, and played at the day of release.
Most people actually like to go outside. Wouldn't it have been faster to go to a shop and buy it rather than waiting for a download?
I enjoy being able to setup a dedicated server simply by running a simple commandline steam tool on my linux server
You might, but millions of console players don't.
I enjoy valve doing hardware surveys to make it easier for everyone developing games, since you will get an idea of what the average gamer has in his machine
Meanwhile, console developers just code to the spec because millions of potential customers all have exactly the same hardware.
I enjoy valve releasing new models, maps and hotfixes on the run wihtout having to wait to gather it all in one patch.
Whereas console gamers enjoy popping the disc in and turning the machine on. They enjoy playing a FINISHED game that doesn't crash.
And what i really enjoy? Valve getting my money when i buy their games, and no Vivendi, EA or whoever publish their games
Valve could make their own console games if they want and get a good deal because they can fund development, unlike most 3rd party developers who are financed by publishers. Anyway, no-one gives a shit about which company gets the money, they just enjoy playing the game. You appear to enjoy knowing who gets what rather than the game itself.
Is it just me, or do game programmers seem to be the only group of coders who get away with flaunting their apparent inability to write portable, flexible code?
No, it's not you. It's also not all game programmers - just the PC and Xbox developers. PS2 devs have been doing parallel code for a while and us cross-platform developers know how to architect a good abstraction layer to build the game on top of.
Can they seriously not fit all their games' data in a Dual-layered DVD?
You can read data off the outer edge faster than you can near the inner edge. If you increase the data density, like Blu-Ray does, then even if it spins at the same speed as DVD, you end up with faster data transer rates because the data is more densely packed. Denser data should also help to reduce seek times too. Also, layer transitions are rather costly.
Seek time and read rate are the two crucial things in console games that utilise streaming. We try to pack all time-critical data on the edge of the disc so you don't wait that long during load screens and you don't get any stalling or audio drop-outs whilst you're playing the game.
With next gen platforms we have at least an order of magnitude more power, and with that comes increased data - bigger textures with deeper colour depths, bigger models and bigger sounds - so not only do we need more space, we need more I/O bandwidth!
Slashdot Mirror
No shit. The arseholes running Midway have no idea at all when it comes to games. LA Rush anyone? These guys think that if you shovel shit down people's throats by marketing it on MTV, they'll lap it up and ask for more.
When was the last time Midway actually turned a profit?
Am I bitter because I worked for a studio that Midway bought then shutdown a few months later, despite the fact the game we were making for them was shaping up to be kick-ass? You fucking bet I am, but mostly my anger and bitterness is because of the way they treated us. I wouldn't piss on David Zucker, Matt Booty, Steve Allison and all the other cocksuckers running that company if they were on fire.
Yes, they are indeed tasty!
Roo meat is also better for you than beef.
Oh please. I live in the only capital city in Australia that has decent public transport.
I know you've said you're in Brisbane, but I think that Perth takes the crown for public transport. Check out the fancy new rail system they've been pouring billions into upgrading, expanding and modernising.
For example, imagine writing a few lines of code or even using a graphical IDE to create a bouncing ball with collision detection, perspective, with video playing on the Ball and live Text RSS feeds as well displaying on the ball. Now imagine that to create this application, it takes less that 5 to 10 minutes and even the generated code is 5 - 10 lines. Not only are the features impressive for an 'active' UI (meaning the ball is a control), but when you factor in the speed of its creation, it is astounding.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. But if you do, it sounds like something you could have done yesterday with Quartz Composer.
Great, just what developers need... more SKU's to test and ship.
Almost every enterprise level, and every gaming company release buggy packages.
I presume that when you say gaming company you mean PC gaming companies and not console gaming companies.
Because if it doesn't, employees have to be retrained, and retraining incurs significant costs. You have to pay the salaries of both the trainer and the trainees. You have to be accept the decreased productivity of those workers, both during the actual training and for some period after, while they feel their way around the new software.
For that to be true, you have to assume that public servants are actually productive in the first place.
Fished sez: "I'm fat. It's all society's fault. Wah, wah, wah."
Wake up. You lack discipline, which means that you are lazy and have no respect for yourself. Exceptions are made for people in wheelchairs because they have physical disabilities that cannot be repaired. With a bit of effort on your part you can burn off that fat.
Every thing you said is nothing but a cop-out. The sorts of things you expect to hear from a druggie or alcoholic. Restaurants are a luxury. It's not hard to make a sandwich or roll for lunch or a stew or soup or pasta or stir-fry for dinner. You don't have to stuff your gut full of food everytime you eat. You don't have to eat fattening fast food. You don't have to work an unpaid job. You don't have to drive everywhere or take the lift.
You don't have to change much at all. Make change gradual. If you have to go up or down a floor or two, take the stairs. Go for a walk around the block at lunch, the sunlight will also do you good. Don't drive to the shop that's a five minute walk away. Spend 30 minutes to make up enough of a healthy meal that you can keep in the fridge for a few days so you only have to microwave a bowl or plate of it the next few nights. Not only do you know what's going into it, but it's healthier and cheaper than eating junk food all the time and cooking is fun and a skill that impresses the ladies. Try doing a few sit-ups or push-ups when you wake up or are watching TV at night. Drink water instead of soft-drinks and eat a banana or apple or some grapes or nuts for a snack instead of a chocolate bar.
You don't have to go cold-turkey and go on some bullshit 'detox' thing or crash diet or exercise binge to lose weight. In fact, people who do that stuff mostly get sick of it and give up and end up getting fatter than they were beforehand. The trick is to make gradual changes to your behaviour. A few minutes here and a few minutes there of physical activity every day soon adds up to a non-trivial amount of exercise. Make no mistake, it takes effort to change, but don't you owe it to yourself to be healthy so you can enjoy life, or do you think that God wants you live a miserable, sick, tired and short life?
TFA is about a study which says there might be a viral pathology which is contributing to obesity, if not outright causing it in some cases. Since this shakes up the world-view of some of you, you're stamping your feet and throwing a tantrum over it.
You can't argue with physics. Energy just doesn't appear from nowhere. Maybe this virus just causes your metabolism to slow down, so like it always has been you'll only put on weight if you're consuming more energy than you're expending.
This virus (if it's for real) is not the problem, the problem is that overweight people generally lack discipline and have a weak will. I.e. to eat a balanced diet in moderation and exercise regularly.
Per capita output is the biggest load of bollocks ever.
Greenies use that excuse to say that we in Australia are one of the top polluters in the world. That's bullshit, America has 300 million people and Australia only has 20 million. China and India have over a billion people so they can put out more than 20 times less per capita than Australia and still be bigger overall polluters, especially when you take into account population density.
Kyoto is fucked because of this. They should have set a kg/km^2 cap that is constant for everyone and allows for a decent standard of living. But then, if the world doubled the use of nuclear power and made a big effort to switch over to biofuels for transport we'd have the problem significantly licked.
You do realise that modern flourescents operate at KHz frequencies? Compact flourescents are instant-on and don't flicker. Sure, some take a minute or two to warm up to full brightness, but in an area where you have the lights on for hours at a time, is that really an issue?
Furthermore, I'd wager that getting everyone to switch from incandescent globes to compact flourescent would be cheaper and make a dramatically larger savings in power consumption, substantially faster to boot.
In this house we replaced ten 80W incandescent globes with 12W compact flourescents. (We've had toroidal flourescents in some rooms for as long as I can remember.) Half of those lights are in the main living area and as such are on for quite a few hours each day. I would say that saves more than what it costs to run this mac mini 24/7. (Which also consumes substantially less power than the obnoxiously noisy PC I used to run 24/7) Hell, it probably pays for that and running the ducted evaporative cooling! (God knows we needed that the last few days... four days of >40c !)
Uh oh! Sounds like someone's got a case of the Mondays! =]
Seriously, sounds like you need a holiday or to stop being a helpdesk monkey.
Actually there is. Paralana(sp?) near Arkaroola in the Gammon Ranges is a volcanic spring. I believe it's the only volcanic activity in Australia and is in the general vicinity (give or take a few hundred KM's) of where Geodynamics are drilling.
Crikey, you're out of control!
When I used to do homebrew I'd wash the bottles in a tub of water with detergent to get rid of any crud/sediment, then soak in a hot tub of that sodium metabisulphate stuff (I'm pretty sure that's what it was called) for a while, give them a rinse and then bake in the oven for 30 mins. Always worked a treat!
Yes! I saw footage of this on TV a few weeks ago!
It was either in an episode of the "Lost Worlds - Ancient Discoveriers" or "Light Fantastic" series. Both series are excellent BBC productions, and for all my fellow Aussies, they were shown recently on SBS on Sunday nights.
Because it allows them to use cheaper electronics. (see 'aliasing')
It probably would have been cheaper and definately less time consuming for you to get a xServe RAID and fibre channel card for the Mac.
And...you emited a crapload of CO2, a ridiculously large amount of particulate pollutant and made a bunch of stink.
Modern common-rail turbocharged diesel engines are not only very efficient, they are very clean running.
Using B20 also means that the car polluted less than your average petrol engine and even the same engine if it was running straight petrodiesel. Biodiesel not only closes the carbon cycle, it burns cleaner and makes engines run better.
I just want to know where the diesel-electric cars are? The tech has been around for years and is used in trains and large earthmoving equipment - why can't it be scaled down to work with cars?
Well yes, Windows applications do behave like that now. But originally they didn't and what I said above is still generally true.
If Windows was a document-centric UI, why did they invent the horrible kludge that is MDI? What is the point of having document windows that are inside and clipped by the application window?
Running two instances of an application is the difference between Mac OS and Windows. Mac OS is document-centric, Windows is application-centric. Application windows in Mac OS ideally represent a document, while application windows in Windows represent the application. That is why Windows features the MDI, where multiple documents exist inside the application window.
If there is a reason you want to run two instances of an application, then there should be a menu option or key modifier to do so. The default action should always be to start an instance of the application if it is not already running or bring the existing instance to focus. Dialogue boxes would just become bloody annoying.
Uhm, console players do not play on servers now all of a sudden? I do not know how it works, but in the CS world people setup FFA servers to play on, i do not own a console, and never will so i do not know about how it is done there, but having 200.000 people hosted by Microsoft or Valve servers seems kinda crazy..
I don't know how it works with CS, but with most console games someone hosts the game. Companies can also run dedicated servers via Live. Either way, the percentage of console players who play online is rather small.
Uhm, all consoles are the same? Arnt Microsoft pushing two versions, which happens to be one of the things Gabe is annoyed with?
They both have the same hardware. One comes with a detachable HDD and the other doesn't. Microsoft have been saying to develop games bearing in mind that the HDD won't always be there because it's detachable. I would say that it's most definately in the TRC.
It's pretty simple to deal with really, just do a check on startup for the presence of the HDD and if it's there then you can use it as a cache. Of course, that implies that you have designed a half-way decent file I/O system for your game.
Gabe is just whingeing that he's invested millions of dollars into developing highly PC-centric game tech. (slow & memory hungry) If he had ensured that they developed their tech so that it was cross-platform then I bet he wouldn't be spitting the dummy. Remember, he made his millions at Microsoft.
I didn't have to buy a DVD-drive
You have a computer capable of playing it that doesn't have a DVD drive? (I thought it came on CD's anyway)
i didn't have to leave my room, i ordered it via steam with my creditcard, preloaded the content, and played at the day of release.
Most people actually like to go outside. Wouldn't it have been faster to go to a shop and buy it rather than waiting for a download?
I enjoy being able to setup a dedicated server simply by running a simple commandline steam tool on my linux server
You might, but millions of console players don't.
I enjoy valve doing hardware surveys to make it easier for everyone developing games, since you will get an idea of what the average gamer has in his machine
Meanwhile, console developers just code to the spec because millions of potential customers all have exactly the same hardware.
I enjoy valve releasing new models, maps and hotfixes on the run wihtout having to wait to gather it all in one patch.
Whereas console gamers enjoy popping the disc in and turning the machine on. They enjoy playing a FINISHED game that doesn't crash.
And what i really enjoy? Valve getting my money when i buy their games, and no Vivendi, EA or whoever publish their games
Valve could make their own console games if they want and get a good deal because they can fund development, unlike most 3rd party developers who are financed by publishers. Anyway, no-one gives a shit about which company gets the money, they just enjoy playing the game. You appear to enjoy knowing who gets what rather than the game itself.
Is it just me, or do game programmers seem to be the only group of coders who get away with flaunting their apparent inability to write portable, flexible code?
No, it's not you. It's also not all game programmers - just the PC and Xbox developers. PS2 devs have been doing parallel code for a while and us cross-platform developers know how to architect a good abstraction layer to build the game on top of.
Can they seriously not fit all their games' data in a Dual-layered DVD?
You can read data off the outer edge faster than you can near the inner edge. If you increase the data density, like Blu-Ray does, then even if it spins at the same speed as DVD, you end up with faster data transer rates because the data is more densely packed. Denser data should also help to reduce seek times too. Also, layer transitions are rather costly.
Seek time and read rate are the two crucial things in console games that utilise streaming. We try to pack all time-critical data on the edge of the disc so you don't wait that long during load screens and you don't get any stalling or audio drop-outs whilst you're playing the game.
With next gen platforms we have at least an order of magnitude more power, and with that comes increased data - bigger textures with deeper colour depths, bigger models and bigger sounds - so not only do we need more space, we need more I/O bandwidth!