In my experience there are two different things people mean when they say that a requirement is for nothing to be installed.
Installation is too complicated for the user, so make it as easy as possible by not installing anything. This is the major reason that browser plugins don't really take off until they come as part of the standard browser install. But, there are ways around this -- like sending a tech to the client site to do the install for them, if necessary. Or sending an auto-boot CD. Or Java WebStart. Lots of options.
Security requires a "clean" machine.
Almost by definition you're never going to get a really clean machine,because you're adding an application to what is otherwise out of the box Windows. When I was working on a medical device years ago, our solution to this was to resell our own computers. We did all the installs and QA testing, handed it to them and said "Don't put anything *else* on it."
Have you considered Java Web Start? Basically you put a link on a web page, the client clicks it, and then everything installs automatically, AND keeps itself updated, AND can be run as a standalone app (not an applet).
44 333 22 999 88 11 999 00 00 11 22 333 44 1 33 22 1 99 22 111 000 111 33 2 00 999 11 2 4 11 000 *
NOTE: the above represents the keypad strokes I have to do to type on my phone.
There was such a game going around in 2001, sponsored by EA, but I forget the name. While playing you would get various emails and phone messages giving you clues about the game's progression. But I guess 9/11 had something to do with it's cancellation. I never got a chance to join.
Just found it, the game was called "Majestic" by Electronic Arts.
I didn't mean to sound discouraging to the idea, actually. I hope that it does work. I've just watched too many games fall victim to the committee syndrome where everybody has an idea for what they want, but don't want to code it..and don't want to code anybody else's idea, either, because hey screw em they didn't like my idea.
The developers will all pretty much have one motivation - to create good Linux games. That will be a good starting point.
I hope that this is enough. But I think it's too abstract. I remember a project I tried once a few years after I got out of college. I tried to deliberately stay up all night hacking. Couldn't do it. When I called my hacking buddy from college the next morning to tell him, he laughed and said "You didn't leave yourself a concrete enough plan, right?" And he was exactly right. Just saying "I will hack all night" couldn't get me over the hurdle, because I kept hitting these down periods of "All right, now what?" when the hacking stops. And I think that just saying "create a Linux game" might suffer the same fate. There's a certain critical mass you have to reach before people's passions will carry them over the finish line, and it's getting to this milestone that kills most committees for the reason I mentioned above. There's a catch 22 involved, absolutely -- I don't believe the game will exist until somebody can show me a concrete enough plan (or design, or requirements, or *something* to get it out in the open and agreed upon), but yet who wants to start a game if you don't believe it will exist?
I wish I knew how to phrase it, but it'd be something along the lines of "It's ok to make friends, too. You don't have to be in competition with everybody." As a 12yr old geek I had exactly one thing going for me, my brain, and as such I saw that as my only value. Ergo, if somebody was smarter than me, I was worth less. So I went into all of my interactions hoping to establish that I was the smartest, all the while fearing that I wouldn't be. Somewhere along the line I fell into a vicious cycle...I knew that scoring that best on all the tests would make the other kids hate me, but yet I couldn't *not* do it, because that's who I was. it wasn't long before I just accepted "other kids not liking me" as part of the deal.
I look back on that now and wonder how much of it I brought upon myself by always trying to compete with everyone I ever came in contact with - friends, teachers, brother, girls -- everyone.
To leave on a happy ending, that changed when I was 16, a junior in high school and running the computer lab (literally -- they paid me a salary). All the kids a year older than me (my brother's crowd) figured that they had to pass the computer requirement to graduate, so they all made friends with me. And not in a "do my homework for me" kind of way, but in a way that actually made me feel like they appreciated my help. Of course it also helped that all the hot girls knew how to work the situation, too. And my popularity with the older kids gave me confidence to face my peers and not be intimidated. In a way that too was competition, because I was basically exuding the vibe to kids my own age that I was better than them because all the other kids were talking about how important I was.
You know, I don't think this idea will work, and already posted why. Having said that, it did give me a reason to brainstorm about the "new kind of game" concept and I can't let a good idea go to waste...:)
What I want is a game that follows me places. Sometimes I'm at a terminal, sometimes I have a laptop (wired or not), sometimes a PDA, sometimes a cell phone. I want a game that takes advantage of as many of those as possible. A game that, when I'm not at one of those gadgets, has me thinking about what to do next time I am. A game that I can talk to my friends about, not in the past tense of "Dude, so I was playing Unreal last night..." but rather in the present, because the game is constantly going on and I'm using my friends' input as part of my strategy toward winning.
There was such a game going around in 2001, sponsored by EA, but I forget the name. While playing you would get various emails and phone messages giving you clues about the game's progression. But I guess 9/11 had something to do with it's cancellation. I never got a chance to join.
Anyway, that's the kind of game I'd be pushing were I to join this project. After all, where is Linux big? Servers, and embedded devices. If you go straight for the userinterface / graphics route, and don't end up at Windows, you're gonna die in the market. Come up with an innovative reason for why your game is a Linux game in the first place, and help the long term cause (getting more people onto Linux) rather than just providing a toy to the people who already have Linux (and know where to get all the free stuff anyway).
This sounds like the worst kind of project management, honestly. Take a random sampling of developers, all with their own attitudes, skill sets, and motivations. It's like herding cats by default. Now choose a leader. How? During the first meeting? To steal from Cory Doctorow, what's the dude's whuffie? I don't know him from a hole in the wall. So the minute that I disagree with him I'm gonna get all tense and no longer be into it with the same passion that I would normally be. Sure, maybe there's a protocol for changing leaders, but all that means to me is that somebody in the group is going to want to change the leader *every single meeting*.
And what role does LGP play as far as leadership goes? If they see the team, leader and all, going down a path they don't like, can they pull rank? Then what? At any time can they keep the idea for the game, toss all 8 programmers, and bring in a fresh batch?
As I apply for jobs I find myself writing several times a day that a hacker who is passionate about what he's doing is 100x more productive than an average schmoe looking for a paycheck. Figure out a way to get a bunch of hackers together who are passionate about an idea *first*, and *then* keep them glued together with the paycheck. Not the other way around.
I think that if you want to do this, then find 8 friends that you trust and respect and then do the exact same thing -- name a company, think of an idea, and code the hell out of it. THEN, maybe, once you've got a demo, go talk to LGP.
Actually what turned me off is I sat there for a little while with no help, then a woman and her son came in and looked at the one next to me, and somebody came over and said "Can I help you?" to her. If he had recognized me as a geek and was just giving me space to play, then I would have appreciated at least some eye contact or a "How's it goin?" when I came into the store so I knew that he wasn't just ignoring me.
I love questions that are timed to my life. Just on Tuesday I was down the mall playing with a 12" iBook because I am in the market for an ultra light "developers" portable. And basically, I didnt like it. It's heavier than I expected. I don't like A mac geek friend tells me that it is limited to 640Meg ram for some reason. the touch pad (I prefer the little thumb joystick). And worst of all I hate this WindowsXP-like concept of "Hello I am a home user who only wants to do multimedia things." I sat there trying to find a terminal window and couldn't. I can edit my home movies on my PC, I dont need to do that on the fly.
I just want a Unix-friendly developers box that will be networked wherever I go, basically -- wireless or other. With killer battery life.
Having said that, the fact is that I could go and see and touch an iBook, type a few things, move the mouse around, give it a test drive. I don't think I'll be able to do that with a Lindows notebook, will I? Will they be at Walmart?
Dean Kamen did not suddenly appear out of nowhere with the Segway. He's been around for years inventing some amazing things that have helped mankind. He's damned near a modern Thomas Edison (go look at some of his patents for real inventions, not just algorithms like us software geeks have to worry about). But for the most part his press was substantially limited. If you didn't have a medical problem that required one of his devices, or a kid that was part of his FIRST competition, odds are you never heard of him.
I still wonder, what changed? What caused him to suddenly try to take over the world like this? I prefer to think that it was just the pressure of the dotcom boom that got to him. Too many venture capitalists whispering in his ear that he was missing out on the big picture. It's a shame, really. If this thing came out with about a hundredth of the fan fare, then he'd probably be doing fine, and none of us would be looking at him like a crackpot -- and a few years from now we'd all have one. But this nonsense about hiring thousands of lobbyists and such was really pretty ridiculous. He knows full well that "good for you" technology cannot be shoved down the public's throats. I just don't understand what he was thinking.
Well if you have to write its plugins in C, though, I'm not sure it's the same thing. I was under the impression that this Konfabulator thing allowed you to whip stuff up in an XML/scripty sort of language. The compile phase of C alone puts it in a different category than scripting languages.
I'll tell you why this sounds interesting to me. We're in the middle of a massive hardware project at work that is going to multiply the number of servers by something like 16. The operations guys are going bananas trying to get their heads around it. The most useful tools to them right now are things that make monitoring, resetting, alerts and other "simple" operations like that easier. WITHOUT programming, if they can help it. Building their own tools easily slips into the development realm, and they're less likely to get significant resources approved to do that.
So if this tool allows them to easily whip up things like server or load monitors, then it's a good thing. Of course, we don't use Macs though:), which is why the title of my post is what it is. I'm going to take a quick skim through the site and see if there's any potential (stated or implied) that says that the engine could be ported to traditional Xwindow, which would make it the most generic for them.
XML. I was never happy with the XML modes I could find for Emacs. And, as a Java geek, I'm doing alot with XML these days. So I decided to give JEdit a try when I heard that it had good plugin extendability. It's XML support is quite nice.
But! That's the only reason I use it. When I need to write Java code I still go with Emacs and the JDEE package from Paul Kinnucan which gives me everythign IDE-like I could ever want.
For those that are interested, Michael Crichton's new book "Prey" uses this idea as a significant plot point. I'm not plugging the book one way or another, it just happens that I listened to that section this morning on the treadmill and I'm a firm believer in encouraging such cosmic coincidency thingies.
Jokes that have several different endings are geeky, in their own way...
New prisoner is in the cafeteria having lunch. Occasionally somebody shouts out "12!" or "97!" and the rest of the inmates burst into laughter. He asks what's going on, and one of the older inmates explains that they've all be around so long, they've told each other all the jokes so many times that they just numbered them all.
After listening for awhile, the new prisoner decides to try it. "57!" he yells.
Ending 1....
Nothing happens. He asks the old inmate what he did wrong and the older inmate says, "Eh. Some guys just can't tell a joke."
Ending 2...
There is a pause, and then the place explodes in a roar of laughter. Prisoners are falling off their seats clutching at their sides, tears pouring down their faces. After a few minutes of this the older inmate pulls himself back onto his bench, wipes a tear from his eye, catches his breath and says "Jesus, we never heard that one before!"
My faulty memory tells me that there's a third ending as well, but I can never remember it.
Two statisticians are out hunting for deer. They see one, they both fire! One shot goes a foot high, one a foot low. They shake hands and say, "We got him!"
Oh, good. Coincidentally I was away this weekend without a book and bought Count Zero used for $1. I opened to the first page and read "They set a slamhound on Turner's trail..." and was like, Wow. I don't have any idea what that means, and yet, I think I do.
That's gotta be up there with "A screaming comes across the sky" in terms of outstanding opening lines.
Duane, who must be geeking out because he just read his own preview, saw $1, and thought "Now, what variable goes there?"
My baby was hiccuping the day she was born. The doctor said that hiccups in babies are very common and not the same frustrating thing they are in adults. On the contrary it's the cutest darned thing since the little darling never stops staring at you all the while hiccuping like a crazy person. (As a new parent you learn to distinguish the cute harmless hiccups from the..ahem...juicier sounding ones that signify you'd better get yourself a burp cloth in a hurry.)
The doctor also said that they have no clue why it happens, and that at least one study had shown that if you bring a baby out into bright light they will often start hiccuping. I keep pointing my daughter at the sun, but so far, nuthin.:)
Well, then, sometimes it's just *fun*. Did you ever fix a broken appliance even though it would have cost you less time and money to just go buy a new one? I don't think that professional programmers for the most part engage in such personal challenges. I can't really see anybody making money from selling new 2600 cartridges. But if you look at it and it's a personal itch, then go ahead and scratch it.
Here's another working definition of hacker -- when you can't NOT solve a problem that's been placed in front of you. You have to solve it because damnit, it has to be solved. Maybe somebody else asked you the question, maybe you just saw a piece of code and wondered "Can I make this faster/smaller/cooler"? Once the challenge is extended it can't be undone.
It's this latter reason that managers often wouldnt want to hire hackers because they would create their own requirements, ignore the real ones, and not give up the code because they wanted to add just one more feature. I personally think that all coders should go through such a phase so that they know how to grow out of it and turn it back on when it's useful to them.
The domain you program for brings out different skills. If you get into the mindset of using as few bytes as possible and bumming everything you can, then you can do what appears to be magic. of course, you won't be good for much else:), but one thing at a time. There are tradeoffs, always, such as time/space. But I expect that readability and maintenance are in there somewhere, too.:)
Last week over lunch a developer posed a programming problem he'd been given on a job assignment. We all suggested a similar algorithm..then I went home and coded it. Then coded a more optimized one. And said I wanted to optimize it more. They asked me why it mattered that in one iteration I had two multiplication operations, and in the second version I had one. Why, because it's faster, of course. That's the sort of thing that's meaningless to an enterprise middleware programmer (for the most part), but everything to a game designer. Maybe you're doing this operation 10 million times a second, and every nanosecond you shave counts.
Hacking means working with the resources you have in the constraints you've been given. It's a shame that so many developers now would look at challenge like that and just dismiss it rather than seeing it as an opportunity to wake up some parts of your brain you don't normally get to use. Why must "solve it" mean "solve it once" instead of "give me the best solution"? It's a pretty safe bet that if you stop at one solution you haven't found the best one. Why be pleased with that?
Duane
"256 bytes? It's impossible to write a game in 256 bytes! I need over 100 bytes just to pull the A20 line high and enable extended memory!!"
- badly remembered quote from a rec.games.programmer who just didn't get it
This is true for people who get started on the right track early and never get derailed. But what happens when you're doing what you *think* you love for 10 years, you find yourself making $200k a year, have a house worth a million dollars, a wife, 3 cars, 2 kids and a third on the way, and then suddenly a layoff hits and you choose now to say "You know, I don't love it like I used to?" Is it really just that simple to chuck it all, sell the house and the cars, move the kids to Montana, and open up a general store where you might take in $50k if you're lucky? How do your wife, kids, family, friends feel about it? Surely some of them will have an effect on your decision.
People hate risk. But the longer you wait to take the risk, the more you have to gamble with, thus making it harder to take the risk.
I was once in a meeting where I watched 2 managers agree that when a post was made to a team newsgroup (this was years ago before blog was the popular buzzword), the posting person would be expected to send an email to everybody he thought would be interested in his post letting them know that he had posted something.
Slashdot Mirror
Check it out
Your cell phone has a space bar? Lucky.
:)
Just found it, the game was called "Majestic" by Electronic Arts.
I didn't mean to sound discouraging to the idea, actually. I hope that it does work. I've just watched too many games fall victim to the committee syndrome where everybody has an idea for what they want, but don't want to code it..and don't want to code anybody else's idea, either, because hey screw em they didn't like my idea.
The developers will all pretty much have one motivation - to create good Linux games. That will be a good starting point.
I hope that this is enough. But I think it's too abstract. I remember a project I tried once a few years after I got out of college. I tried to deliberately stay up all night hacking. Couldn't do it. When I called my hacking buddy from college the next morning to tell him, he laughed and said "You didn't leave yourself a concrete enough plan, right?" And he was exactly right. Just saying "I will hack all night" couldn't get me over the hurdle, because I kept hitting these down periods of "All right, now what?" when the hacking stops. And I think that just saying "create a Linux game" might suffer the same fate. There's a certain critical mass you have to reach before people's passions will carry them over the finish line, and it's getting to this milestone that kills most committees for the reason I mentioned above. There's a catch 22 involved, absolutely -- I don't believe the game will exist until somebody can show me a concrete enough plan (or design, or requirements, or *something* to get it out in the open and agreed upon), but yet who wants to start a game if you don't believe it will exist?
Good luck. I hope it works out.
To leave on a happy ending, that changed when I was 16, a junior in high school and running the computer lab (literally -- they paid me a salary). All the kids a year older than me (my brother's crowd) figured that they had to pass the computer requirement to graduate, so they all made friends with me. And not in a "do my homework for me" kind of way, but in a way that actually made me feel like they appreciated my help. Of course it also helped that all the hot girls knew how to work the situation, too. And my popularity with the older kids gave me confidence to face my peers and not be intimidated. In a way that too was competition, because I was basically exuding the vibe to kids my own age that I was better than them because all the other kids were talking about how important I was.
What I want is a game that follows me places. Sometimes I'm at a terminal, sometimes I have a laptop (wired or not), sometimes a PDA, sometimes a cell phone. I want a game that takes advantage of as many of those as possible. A game that, when I'm not at one of those gadgets, has me thinking about what to do next time I am. A game that I can talk to my friends about, not in the past tense of "Dude, so I was playing Unreal last night..." but rather in the present, because the game is constantly going on and I'm using my friends' input as part of my strategy toward winning.
There was such a game going around in 2001, sponsored by EA, but I forget the name. While playing you would get various emails and phone messages giving you clues about the game's progression. But I guess 9/11 had something to do with it's cancellation. I never got a chance to join.
Anyway, that's the kind of game I'd be pushing were I to join this project. After all, where is Linux big? Servers, and embedded devices. If you go straight for the userinterface / graphics route, and don't end up at Windows, you're gonna die in the market. Come up with an innovative reason for why your game is a Linux game in the first place, and help the long term cause (getting more people onto Linux) rather than just providing a toy to the people who already have Linux (and know where to get all the free stuff anyway).
And what role does LGP play as far as leadership goes? If they see the team, leader and all, going down a path they don't like, can they pull rank? Then what? At any time can they keep the idea for the game, toss all 8 programmers, and bring in a fresh batch?
As I apply for jobs I find myself writing several times a day that a hacker who is passionate about what he's doing is 100x more productive than an average schmoe looking for a paycheck. Figure out a way to get a bunch of hackers together who are passionate about an idea *first*, and *then* keep them glued together with the paycheck. Not the other way around.
I think that if you want to do this, then find 8 friends that you trust and respect and then do the exact same thing -- name a company, think of an idea, and code the hell out of it. THEN, maybe, once you've got a demo, go talk to LGP.
Hire me.
:)
Actually what turned me off is I sat there for a little while with no help, then a woman and her son came in and looked at the one next to me, and somebody came over and said "Can I help you?" to her. If he had recognized me as a geek and was just giving me space to play, then I would have appreciated at least some eye contact or a "How's it goin?" when I came into the store so I knew that he wasn't just ignoring me.
Having said that, the fact is that I could go and see and touch an iBook, type a few things, move the mouse around, give it a test drive. I don't think I'll be able to do that with a Lindows notebook, will I? Will they be at Walmart?
I still wonder, what changed? What caused him to suddenly try to take over the world like this? I prefer to think that it was just the pressure of the dotcom boom that got to him. Too many venture capitalists whispering in his ear that he was missing out on the big picture. It's a shame, really. If this thing came out with about a hundredth of the fan fare, then he'd probably be doing fine, and none of us would be looking at him like a crackpot -- and a few years from now we'd all have one. But this nonsense about hiring thousands of lobbyists and such was really pretty ridiculous. He knows full well that "good for you" technology cannot be shoved down the public's throats. I just don't understand what he was thinking.
Well if you have to write its plugins in C, though, I'm not sure it's the same thing. I was under the impression that this Konfabulator thing allowed you to whip stuff up in an XML/scripty sort of language. The compile phase of C alone puts it in a different category than scripting languages.
So if this tool allows them to easily whip up things like server or load monitors, then it's a good thing. Of course, we don't use Macs though :), which is why the title of my post is what it is. I'm going to take a quick skim through the site and see if there's any potential (stated or implied) that says that the engine could be ported to traditional Xwindow, which would make it the most generic for them.
But! That's the only reason I use it. When I need to write Java code I still go with Emacs and the JDEE package from Paul Kinnucan which gives me everythign IDE-like I could ever want.
For those that are interested, Michael Crichton's new book "Prey" uses this idea as a significant plot point. I'm not plugging the book one way or another, it just happens that I listened to that section this morning on the treadmill and I'm a firm believer in encouraging such cosmic coincidency thingies.
New prisoner is in the cafeteria having lunch. Occasionally somebody shouts out "12!" or "97!" and the rest of the inmates burst into laughter. He asks what's going on, and one of the older inmates explains that they've all be around so long, they've told each other all the jokes so many times that they just numbered them all.
After listening for awhile, the new prisoner decides to try it. "57!" he yells.
Ending 1.... Nothing happens. He asks the old inmate what he did wrong and the older inmate says, "Eh. Some guys just can't tell a joke."
Ending 2... There is a pause, and then the place explodes in a roar of laughter. Prisoners are falling off their seats clutching at their sides, tears pouring down their faces. After a few minutes of this the older inmate pulls himself back onto his bench, wipes a tear from his eye, catches his breath and says "Jesus, we never heard that one before!"
My faulty memory tells me that there's a third ending as well, but I can never remember it.
Two statisticians are out hunting for deer. They see one, they both fire! One shot goes a foot high, one a foot low. They shake hands and say, "We got him!"
That's gotta be up there with "A screaming comes across the sky" in terms of outstanding opening lines.
Duane, who must be geeking out because he just read his own preview, saw $1, and thought "Now, what variable goes there?"
The doctor also said that they have no clue why it happens, and that at least one study had shown that if you bring a baby out into bright light they will often start hiccuping. I keep pointing my daughter at the sun, but so far, nuthin. :)
Here's another working definition of hacker -- when you can't NOT solve a problem that's been placed in front of you. You have to solve it because damnit, it has to be solved. Maybe somebody else asked you the question, maybe you just saw a piece of code and wondered "Can I make this faster/smaller/cooler"? Once the challenge is extended it can't be undone.
It's this latter reason that managers often wouldnt want to hire hackers because they would create their own requirements, ignore the real ones, and not give up the code because they wanted to add just one more feature. I personally think that all coders should go through such a phase so that they know how to grow out of it and turn it back on when it's useful to them.
Last week over lunch a developer posed a programming problem he'd been given on a job assignment. We all suggested a similar algorithm..then I went home and coded it. Then coded a more optimized one. And said I wanted to optimize it more. They asked me why it mattered that in one iteration I had two multiplication operations, and in the second version I had one. Why, because it's faster, of course. That's the sort of thing that's meaningless to an enterprise middleware programmer (for the most part), but everything to a game designer. Maybe you're doing this operation 10 million times a second, and every nanosecond you shave counts.
Hacking means working with the resources you have in the constraints you've been given. It's a shame that so many developers now would look at challenge like that and just dismiss it rather than seeing it as an opportunity to wake up some parts of your brain you don't normally get to use. Why must "solve it" mean "solve it once" instead of "give me the best solution"? It's a pretty safe bet that if you stop at one solution you haven't found the best one. Why be pleased with that?
Duane
"256 bytes? It's impossible to write a game in 256 bytes! I need over 100 bytes just to pull the A20 line high and enable extended memory!!"
- badly remembered quote from a rec.games.programmer who just didn't get it
People hate risk. But the longer you wait to take the risk, the more you have to gamble with, thus making it harder to take the risk.
Nonono, you see, it'll be a field goal in overtime, and the Patriots win.
Duane, living in the past....:)
I was once in a meeting where I watched 2 managers agree that when a post was made to a team newsgroup (this was years ago before blog was the popular buzzword), the posting person would be expected to send an email to everybody he thought would be interested in his post letting them know that he had posted something.