I don't play WOW or any other MMORPG. I don't buy most PC games because I find them dull beyond belief. Thumb-twitchers for the most part, or lame Diablo inspired RPGs. The stuff I like, adventure games, is getting harder and harder for me to find on the shelves so I'll soon be buying them exclusively on-line.
How about instead of chasing the 60% of the market, cater to the rest of us who do play games that don't neccessarily require Alienware or some juiced-up PC game station (although Dreamfall did require some serious 3D hardware). It doesn't take much to please me; nice looking relatively static graphics (e.g., background paintings) and a good story. I know it can't be costing that much to make my favorite adventure games because they are typically half the cost of the average thumb-twitcher PC game, and with the smaller sales volume, it's gotta be cheaper than the multi-million dollar budgets of WoW or they couldn't keep putting out these games.
I was taken aback by this. Something tells me they won't be allowed to succede, but it reminds of when WB tried selling a DVD without copy protection and discovered a) it was cheaper for them, and b) made no difference to their sales.
But when I clicked on the link, it took me to a Jessica Simpson page. MINE EYES!!! *clutches eyes and runs away*
I like the fact you attributed a made up quote to the parent post. You're talking about something completely different than he was. He was talking about input checking to check for injection attacks via escape attempts. Not about good old fashioned constraint checking. Do you actually read & understand posts before slagging them?
We hav Zip.ca up here in Canada. It's kind of interesting to hear about this because I have a different approach to how I do things, and Zip's somewhat *ahem* silly queing system does have an option to make it useful: Park.
What I do is arrange on my active "Can send" list (Normal priority in Zip speak) the stuff I know I would watch, and then use ASAP priority to move up things I definitely will watch if I receive it. Anything else I feel I wouldn't watch, I send to the Parking lot (Park priotiy).
Arbitrarily ranking the queue (which I understand Netflix allows) is handy if you know you're going to watch things, but maybe they need to ask the user: I REALLY want to watch this, I wouldn't mind watching this, and "Eh, a friend told me i should watch it".
That said, I've found the hardest part of the process to be finding a client who is willing to put up with the constant back-&-forth and interminable beta testing.
That's funny (in an amusing, obersvational way) because I work in a large company and the clients in the company actually like to see early versions, provide feedback & testing and then sent back for another quick iteration. They absolutely hate not seeing something for 6 months and discovering it doesn't do what they hoped for. Every company's different. It's important to adapt your methodology to the reality your project lives in.
When I was in the game industry, this was how we always did it, even EA does it to an extent. Why? Because the publishers want results. Usually every month or you won't get paid. So as a result we had incremental releases with more and more features added in, and as a bonus, sometimes working. X-D
P.S. With few exceptions, most game teams do NOT have specs or docs. If they're lucky, they have concept art and some clue what the game is supposed to be. I remember having to code up front-end screens and the artist & I had to figure out what they were supposed to do because the game designer was still writing the specs for the screen we finished last week.
both have their places, but I guess I miss how UML is more than a complicated flowchart. (and, again, I'm probably woefully misinformed.....)
UML is a consistent diagramming practice for all parts of the system. You can use as little or much as you want. Generally speaking, you only need to go to insane details when using a CASE tool like Rational Rose, or you have a need to really define something to the letter (like a real-time system). The best part of UML is clearly showing how classes are related to each other. I don't use UML down to the lines of code, but I do use UML to describe high-level architecture and deployment (which bits run on which server and what is that server anyway?). Sometimes I use the activity diagram to help with me see complicated interactions.
But if no one takes you through the steps of learning UML and how to use it properly, it can seem like a useless, over-complex mess.:-)
No rootkits. Ever. Prevent at the file-system level any attempts to modify the core OS files. It needs updating? Make sure the file is digitally signed by MS before allowing to replace a core OS file.
User mode. Not this weird confusing version MS offers in Vista, but proper user mode. No installations into the/Windows folder from a USER mode application. Someone wants to put something there? Prompt for the admin password and run as an admin. And if they want to fiddle with the core files, see rule #1 about rootkits.
Allow admins to easily see what's getting loaded at startup and from where so they can easily delete or remove it.
Kill ActiveX on the web. Just nuke the damned thing.
Do not even offer the ability for Office, Outlook or IE to automatically do anything ever with executable code (even VBscript). In fact, Outlook should have the ability to connect to a service to find out if the message looks like any active worms & viruses and warn the user appropriately. A good virus checker would also be nice.
Try coordinating a large activity with cell phones. It's not easy. Ever try to coordinate the cell phone numbers of bunch of volunteers?
I should have been more specific. There are now cell phones with walkie-talkie like features including the ability to connect a group of cell phone users in to a single walkie-talkie "frequency". The commercials for that feature up here in Canada are hilarious.
The point is that commercial off-the-shelf technology is taking over the features that ham analog has always had. In a later post, I did suggest maybe ham's future could be encouraging computer users to explore digital radio.
The idea of simply communicating with people without wires is so banal I doubt you could get anyone under the age of 30 to think it cool. And talking to people in far away places? Internet. But I notice some talk in the comments about what could bring people back.
IP over radio. I mean, sure, we have wi-fi repeaters, etc., but there are so many other cool things to do with IP over radio. And considering the fun (and interest) people have in hacking wi-fi, it reminds me of the fun ham operators had. Maybe it's time to create a pure digital license? Create a low-cost digital packet radio that some one could build at home for a $100 worth of parts or less.
When the corporations start locking down the Internet, IP-Ham could become the next big thing for geeks. Heh, makes the idea of getting SPAM over an IP-Ham connection sound even funnier.:-)
t's neither hard nor expensive to get started. Just get your license and go on the air with a handy-talky. I bought my first one for less than $200. No big antennas or investmens are necessary.
I see licensing requirements have radically changed since 1990, esp. in Canada. Before it was such a pain in the ass. Learn to send & receive morse code (which isn't trivial, but not super hard either), study like hell for the tests, pay the test fee and hope you pass the first time, then get to spend your first year restricted to CW bands and having your logs checked by an accredited official (for what reason I have no idea!!). Now it's just a single test, thank goodness.
But I see there's still a big study test and paying $200 for great that amounts to a walkie-talkie. What is the draw anymore when people these days have cell phones and the internet?
So it's apparently legal to shoot polar bears in Canada, despite the fact that they're considered one of the animals facing increasing threats in the future from withdrawing sea ice?
Polar Bears around that area are so numerous they're getting to be a big problem and they have to be culled. Mostly because Polars like to supplement their diet of seals, fish and walrus with fresh dump pickings. I've heard stories of smoldering polar bears wandering through the dump at Churchil Manitoba.
And it's also legal to shoot a half-grizzly, even though shooting grizzlies is illegal?
Apparently. But I guess the F&W folks felt it was sufficiently polar bear to count as a polar bear.
What a waste of a magnificent (and apparently rare) animal.
Understandable, but from TFA, they've created the exact same hybrid in captivity and even gotten them to breed. Which, to me, completely goes against the definition of species I learned in school. Go figure.
But these wealthy big-game trophy hunters, who look for rare and wondrous animals only to shoot them and turn them into rugs or wall ornaments, make me sick.
Yeah, but since Jimmy the Toucan went out of business, what else are you going to do with them?:-)
Imagine if some guy wandering around the Antarctic finds a meteorite with evidence of Martian life in it, and whacks it with a sledgehammer...
As I understand it, that's what scientist do until they find out AFTER they whacked it open.:-)
I do feel sorry for TiVO, but on the other hand, can anyone read the TiVO patents and explain in plain english was exactly they patented? Even if it is just a "method and system" for digitizing video onto a hard-disk for random-access playback by the user, it would qualify as a novel invention in my books. It's just that, well... didn't the broadcast industry have that LONG before we did? And the basic idea of pausing live television was also used by television networks for instant replay which even used a hard-disk (but an analog one, if memory serves).
I just hope TiVO doesn't get greedy and either tries to become a) an honest corporate citizen and tries to make win-win licensing deals with their competitors, or b) realise that the money is in the "bits about bits" and that their real cash cow is the recommendation service and TV guide.
While I agree with everything else you said, surely you don't mean CMM (the ancient water-fall-method 'certification' thing) has anything to do with success? I assume you must be referring to something else here.;-)
I understand your concern, but that's because a lot of people when describing CMM do so poorly. It's a meta development methodology. CMM is wrapped around however you do your development and forces the company to learn from one's mistakes. I know originally it was very bureaucratic, but the key idea is this: Do you know what you did right last time? Can you make it happen again next time? Those are the 2 key questions CMM makes teams ask themselves to improve. Obviously, there's no need for game companies to certify or implement the whole thing, but the basic ideas of knowing how you make games and constantly fixing the process is a good one.
I only worked for a (small) games company for a year, but with that experience (and 10 years at other places, enterprise+server, desktop publishing, university) I would be very surprised if games companies (or most other comps for that matter) would find rigid, inflexible and fundamentally flawed "fragile programming" model tempting.
Fundamentally flawed "fragile programming" model? CMM is not supposed to be rigid and inflexible, and it's not a programming model. It's a process for making sure your actual software process gets better. It only works because your process CAN change and adapt. The specific system may be ignored or loosely followed, but the core idea is to stop and ask yourself what are you doing, and if it works.
... of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase
One study compared to dozens of other methods using widely varying methodologies that reached opposite conclusions. Then the article you pointed to quotes the same canard that the "hockey stick" was a "hoax" (in the word of one congressman). When in fact McIntyre massaged the methodology to remove the fluctuation (see the website I linked to below).
For those interested in what the climate researchers actually have to say (and not afraid of hard math thrown in), try Mann's website Real Climate for their responses to their critics.
As my profile states, I'm a reformed game programmer. I've written a couple of bitter posts on Slashdot about working in the game industry. I'm better now.:-)
But the stress caused by poor quality architecture and code cannot be understated. Coders begin to hate the designers and artists after awhile and that, as you can guess, really causes problems. If the designer wants that really cool scene or feature or art, but the coder is stressed out the kazoo with debugging the last 3 new features and hasn't seen his new born child awake since it was born, you can imagine how he would react to the new feature.
The solution is a self-learning development process. A.k.a., CMM.
I met some game developers who've only worked in Game Companies who sneer at that kind of talk, but the more seasoned veterans (working 10+ years) actually liked the idea. When you reduce the stress on the developers, and improve productivity, they can spend time making stable code that can be used to build cool, new features on it.
More importantly, it will rebuild the relationship between coder and artists, designers. That is the single most important relationship in the game process, IMHO.
I don't have a lot of respect for gamers. They have a very narrow view of the world, and seem unaware that there is a larger world that doesn't care about games. If the author had just checked the two companies' respective balance sheets, he could see that Sony has twice the gross revenue of Microsoft. Also, it would require taking on a lot of industries completely unrelated to their core business. Although it was interesting to compare their respective market caps.
Also, he forgets that Sony is a Japanese company. Foreign takeovers of a Japanese company are extremely rare, especially for a major one like Sony. Bill and Balmer would have to spend a lot of time in Japan sucking ass to a lot of old Japanese politicians to make that happen.
After studying it for 4 years (and counting), I've learned the following are lies people tell about the language. Some people here had some good advice, including this post
Japanese is Hard. No, it isn't. It's just different from your everyday life. People learn to speak and listen to the language without writing it and without classes in Japan. Most famous examples are the Iranians in the Tokyo area who teach each other Japanese and they get quite good.
Never use anime or manga. The better advice is "use anime and manga set in normal everyday life". There are lots of shows that are set in everyday life and have everyday conversations. Use those.
Formal Japanese is all you need to know. This is such bullshit. I've read posts from fresh graduates with Japanese degrees getting baffled at a KFC in Japan. Normal, everyday Japanese is not the polite, grammatically correct version you learn in school or from books. After you learn basic Japanese, buy this book. Then you'll understand what normal Japanese people say.:-)
Kanji is impossibly hard. No, not if you use the right book. Most kanji are composites and this book helps you see that.
Now some truths...
Get a penpal! Use the Pen Pal depot to find a friend that you want to talk with. Use MSN, Skype, whatever to have voice-video chats. I found a pen-pal this way and we use Skype to practice every week, and it really, really works.
Start reading/watching real material early. Don't wait until you get super proficient to start reading manga, short stories and novels. Push yourself because learning vocabulary from flashcards is hard, but learning a new word in context from a Japanese drama/anime or manga is a lot easier.
Buy dictionaries and grammar guides. You'll need them!
Buy an electronic dictionary. It's easier and portable.
Sasuga Bookstore.Sasuga Bookstore is your friend. Learn to buy from them early and often.:-) (I don't work for them, just a fan).
Ganbatte, kudasai! Hang in there, please. Have faith that you are progressing when all else says otherwise. EVERYONE who has studied any language can struggle, for years even, but they eventually get good.
I still love the quest in Ultima IV. It was such a strange set of conditions to become an avatar which included how you reacted in battle (never start a battle, but allow non-evil creatures to retreat is showing justice & compassion).
As for Infocom games, I can think of several. THHGTTG game was evil, but good. The Spellbreaker trilogy was mind-bendingly hard but very poetic. And another good one based on the Infocom engine, but not by Infocom, was "So Far". That was a marathon of a text-adventure game!
Slashdot Mirror
... and cutting Shuttle flights and ISS funding and space telescope funding ...
I predict we will get some nice, new expensive exhibits for Space Camp and not much else.
I don't play WOW or any other MMORPG. I don't buy most PC games because I find them dull beyond belief. Thumb-twitchers for the most part, or lame Diablo inspired RPGs. The stuff I like, adventure games, is getting harder and harder for me to find on the shelves so I'll soon be buying them exclusively on-line.
How about instead of chasing the 60% of the market, cater to the rest of us who do play games that don't neccessarily require Alienware or some juiced-up PC game station (although Dreamfall did require some serious 3D hardware). It doesn't take much to please me; nice looking relatively static graphics (e.g., background paintings) and a good story. I know it can't be costing that much to make my favorite adventure games because they are typically half the cost of the average thumb-twitcher PC game, and with the smaller sales volume, it's gotta be cheaper than the multi-million dollar budgets of WoW or they couldn't keep putting out these games.
I was taken aback by this. Something tells me they won't be allowed to succede, but it reminds of when WB tried selling a DVD without copy protection and discovered a) it was cheaper for them, and b) made no difference to their sales.
But when I clicked on the link, it took me to a Jessica Simpson page. MINE EYES!!! *clutches eyes and runs away*
And I want it to look like Chii dang it! :-P
I like the fact you attributed a made up quote to the parent post. You're talking about something completely different than he was. He was talking about input checking to check for injection attacks via escape attempts. Not about good old fashioned constraint checking. Do you actually read & understand posts before slagging them?
We hav Zip.ca up here in Canada. It's kind of interesting to hear about this because I have a different approach to how I do things, and Zip's somewhat *ahem* silly queing system does have an option to make it useful: Park.
What I do is arrange on my active "Can send" list (Normal priority in Zip speak) the stuff I know I would watch, and then use ASAP priority to move up things I definitely will watch if I receive it. Anything else I feel I wouldn't watch, I send to the Parking lot (Park priotiy).
Arbitrarily ranking the queue (which I understand Netflix allows) is handy if you know you're going to watch things, but maybe they need to ask the user: I REALLY want to watch this, I wouldn't mind watching this, and "Eh, a friend told me i should watch it".
Nah, you're just a guy. ;-)
That's funny (in an amusing, obersvational way) because I work in a large company and the clients in the company actually like to see early versions, provide feedback & testing and then sent back for another quick iteration. They absolutely hate not seeing something for 6 months and discovering it doesn't do what they hoped for. Every company's different. It's important to adapt your methodology to the reality your project lives in.
When I was in the game industry, this was how we always did it, even EA does it to an extent. Why? Because the publishers want results. Usually every month or you won't get paid. So as a result we had incremental releases with more and more features added in, and as a bonus, sometimes working. X-D
P.S. With few exceptions, most game teams do NOT have specs or docs. If they're lucky, they have concept art and some clue what the game is supposed to be. I remember having to code up front-end screens and the artist & I had to figure out what they were supposed to do because the game designer was still writing the specs for the screen we finished last week.
UML is a consistent diagramming practice for all parts of the system. You can use as little or much as you want. Generally speaking, you only need to go to insane details when using a CASE tool like Rational Rose, or you have a need to really define something to the letter (like a real-time system). The best part of UML is clearly showing how classes are related to each other. I don't use UML down to the lines of code, but I do use UML to describe high-level architecture and deployment (which bits run on which server and what is that server anyway?). Sometimes I use the activity diagram to help with me see complicated interactions.
But if no one takes you through the steps of learning UML and how to use it properly, it can seem like a useless, over-complex mess. :-)
Seriously. Why?
MagikSlinger's good lessons for Microsoft:
I should have been more specific. There are now cell phones with walkie-talkie like features including the ability to connect a group of cell phone users in to a single walkie-talkie "frequency". The commercials for that feature up here in Canada are hilarious.
The point is that commercial off-the-shelf technology is taking over the features that ham analog has always had. In a later post, I did suggest maybe ham's future could be encouraging computer users to explore digital radio.
The idea of simply communicating with people without wires is so banal I doubt you could get anyone under the age of 30 to think it cool. And talking to people in far away places? Internet. But I notice some talk in the comments about what could bring people back.
:-)
IP over radio. I mean, sure, we have wi-fi repeaters, etc., but there are so many other cool things to do with IP over radio. And considering the fun (and interest) people have in hacking wi-fi, it reminds me of the fun ham operators had. Maybe it's time to create a pure digital license? Create a low-cost digital packet radio that some one could build at home for a $100 worth of parts or less.
When the corporations start locking down the Internet, IP-Ham could become the next big thing for geeks. Heh, makes the idea of getting SPAM over an IP-Ham connection sound even funnier.
I see licensing requirements have radically changed since 1990, esp. in Canada. Before it was such a pain in the ass. Learn to send & receive morse code (which isn't trivial, but not super hard either), study like hell for the tests, pay the test fee and hope you pass the first time, then get to spend your first year restricted to CW bands and having your logs checked by an accredited official (for what reason I have no idea!!). Now it's just a single test, thank goodness.
But I see there's still a big study test and paying $200 for great that amounts to a walkie-talkie. What is the draw anymore when people these days have cell phones and the internet?
Polar Bears around that area are so numerous they're getting to be a big problem and they have to be culled. Mostly because Polars like to supplement their diet of seals, fish and walrus with fresh dump pickings. I've heard stories of smoldering polar bears wandering through the dump at Churchil Manitoba.
Apparently. But I guess the F&W folks felt it was sufficiently polar bear to count as a polar bear.
Understandable, but from TFA, they've created the exact same hybrid in captivity and even gotten them to breed. Which, to me, completely goes against the definition of species I learned in school. Go figure.
Yeah, but since Jimmy the Toucan went out of business, what else are you going to do with them? :-)
As I understand it, that's what scientist do until they find out AFTER they whacked it open. :-)
I do feel sorry for TiVO, but on the other hand, can anyone read the TiVO patents and explain in plain english was exactly they patented? Even if it is just a "method and system" for digitizing video onto a hard-disk for random-access playback by the user, it would qualify as a novel invention in my books. It's just that, well... didn't the broadcast industry have that LONG before we did? And the basic idea of pausing live television was also used by television networks for instant replay which even used a hard-disk (but an analog one, if memory serves).
I just hope TiVO doesn't get greedy and either tries to become a) an honest corporate citizen and tries to make win-win licensing deals with their competitors, or b) realise that the money is in the "bits about bits" and that their real cash cow is the recommendation service and TV guide.
One study compared to dozens of other methods using widely varying methodologies that reached opposite conclusions. Then the article you pointed to quotes the same canard that the "hockey stick" was a "hoax" (in the word of one congressman). When in fact McIntyre massaged the methodology to remove the fluctuation (see the website I linked to below).
For those interested in what the climate researchers actually have to say (and not afraid of hard math thrown in), try Mann's website Real Climate for their responses to their critics.
Here's a challenge: write and finish a game with a good graphics and game play as say, Starcraft, written in LISP. Otherwise, I call BS on you. :-)
As my profile states, I'm a reformed game programmer. I've written a couple of bitter posts on Slashdot about working in the game industry. I'm better now. :-)
But the stress caused by poor quality architecture and code cannot be understated. Coders begin to hate the designers and artists after awhile and that, as you can guess, really causes problems. If the designer wants that really cool scene or feature or art, but the coder is stressed out the kazoo with debugging the last 3 new features and hasn't seen his new born child awake since it was born, you can imagine how he would react to the new feature.
The solution is a self-learning development process. A.k.a., CMM. I met some game developers who've only worked in Game Companies who sneer at that kind of talk, but the more seasoned veterans (working 10+ years) actually liked the idea. When you reduce the stress on the developers, and improve productivity, they can spend time making stable code that can be used to build cool, new features on it.
More importantly, it will rebuild the relationship between coder and artists, designers. That is the single most important relationship in the game process, IMHO.
I don't have a lot of respect for gamers. They have a very narrow view of the world, and seem unaware that there is a larger world that doesn't care about games. If the author had just checked the two companies' respective balance sheets, he could see that Sony has twice the gross revenue of Microsoft. Also, it would require taking on a lot of industries completely unrelated to their core business. Although it was interesting to compare their respective market caps.
Also, he forgets that Sony is a Japanese company. Foreign takeovers of a Japanese company are extremely rare, especially for a major one like Sony. Bill and Balmer would have to spend a lot of time in Japan sucking ass to a lot of old Japanese politicians to make that happen.
After studying it for 4 years (and counting), I've learned the following are lies people tell about the language. Some people here had some good advice, including this post
Japanese is Hard. No, it isn't. It's just different from your everyday life. People learn to speak and listen to the language without writing it and without classes in Japan. Most famous examples are the Iranians in the Tokyo area who teach each other Japanese and they get quite good.
Never use anime or manga. The better advice is "use anime and manga set in normal everyday life". There are lots of shows that are set in everyday life and have everyday conversations. Use those.
Formal Japanese is all you need to know. This is such bullshit. I've read posts from fresh graduates with Japanese degrees getting baffled at a KFC in Japan. Normal, everyday Japanese is not the polite, grammatically correct version you learn in school or from books. After you learn basic Japanese, buy this book. Then you'll understand what normal Japanese people say. :-)
Kanji is impossibly hard. No, not if you use the right book. Most kanji are composites and this book helps you see that.
Now some truths...
Get a penpal! Use the Pen Pal depot to find a friend that you want to talk with. Use MSN, Skype, whatever to have voice-video chats. I found a pen-pal this way and we use Skype to practice every week, and it really, really works.
Start reading/watching real material early. Don't wait until you get super proficient to start reading manga, short stories and novels. Push yourself because learning vocabulary from flashcards is hard, but learning a new word in context from a Japanese drama/anime or manga is a lot easier.
Buy dictionaries and grammar guides. You'll need them!
Buy an electronic dictionary. It's easier and portable.
Sasuga Bookstore. Sasuga Bookstore is your friend. Learn to buy from them early and often. :-) (I don't work for them, just a fan).
Ganbatte, kudasai! Hang in there, please. Have faith that you are progressing when all else says otherwise. EVERYONE who has studied any language can struggle, for years even, but they eventually get good.
I still love the quest in Ultima IV. It was such a strange set of conditions to become an avatar which included how you reacted in battle (never start a battle, but allow non-evil creatures to retreat is showing justice & compassion).
As for Infocom games, I can think of several. THHGTTG game was evil, but good. The Spellbreaker trilogy was mind-bendingly hard but very poetic. And another good one based on the Infocom engine, but not by Infocom, was "So Far". That was a marathon of a text-adventure game!
No, they don't. It's owned by a French company called Business Objects. Microsoft just licensed a stripped down version of CR for VB6.