Besides the fact that Microsoft uses an obfuscator, you can't really use Reflector to decompile things. I hooked up a plugin to it once that would dump out complete source code files and visual studio projects for things you were reflecting. What you wind up with is a bunch of code which doesn't quite compile. It has lots of things which flat out don't work. The amount of effort to go in and fix tons of things that don't compile in complex and diffuclt to read code that you didn't write is mostly not worth it.
Things were going along merrily, but, for some reason, Nintendo cut ties with Sony and changed to working with Phillips- and Sony didn't find out until Nintendo made a public announcement.
Wikipedia's PlayStation page has more info but one version of events I've heard went like this: Nintendo wanted the device to be a SNES CD-ROM drive addon, and Sony wanted it to be a from-the-ground-up 32-bit console with a cartridge slot that also allowed SNES games to be played on it - figuring that reverse compatibility with SNES games would be help get it into homes. Sony figures they'll just bully Nintendo into doing the SNES cartridge slot thing, Nintendo says hell no and does the bit with Phillips.
In production means nothing. It could still not make it through to gold, because, lets face it, no game can live up to expectations of a 10 year wait. Trying to make a game fun is the hard bit.
You're right, but consider this - they've restarted twice and this recent bit (and others) make it sound like this is a final push. Plus, go watch the 2001 Trailer (which represents a game they've since tossed and started over). Dated graphics aside, it does look like they're doing something pretty awesome there. I think that's going to be DNF's strong point - regardless of graphics, they're going to be doing things with a game which push the boundaries of what we've seen before.
Plus, for all the pissing and moaning about lame games pushed out for the wrong reasons, we have the potential here to see the game equivalent of a great novel that's not published until the writer thinks it's perfect (like Gone with the Wind, which also took ten years).
Oh but you see J2EE, Java, Eclipse, etc. - they're not obliterating.NET and Microsoft like Sun would have hoped. So instead of beefing up their offerings and maybe fixing whatever is keeping them from "taking down" Microsoft and.NET they're going to do something "new" - because otherwise, they'd have to explain why J2EE didn't do it.
I've got a DVD-ROM drive from 1999 - a Creative 6X Encore drive. Which is ironic since everything I've ever had from Creative that wasn't a sound card has been a short lived piece of shit. Of course it does have that hardware region locking crap, so whatever.
I have a friend who is very technically adept most of the time. He's a hell of a developer and he has tons of neat toys - like a gigantic HDTV from the "they were more expensive" days.
I can't seem to convince him though that DVD's aren't High Def.
It's one of those deals where you come to realize that you'll never convince them, they'll just think you're a wrong, stupid asshole when you're done arguing. I don't argue that the DVD's don't look better on an HDTV, but they're not Hi-Def.
Instead of trying to argue the point more, I'll just wait for HD-DVD and/or BlueRay to come out and his head to explode.
Have you ever had a myth or something you wanted to do, but the suits at the network said no? I know that you censored the materials for building the explosives in the Confederate Rocket myth but is there anything which you wanted to do but got cut off at the Discovery Channel level?
Also on the Confederate Rocket myth, were the materials censored because of the danger in people trying them at home, or because of fear of running afoul of that current ban on publishing books on how to make explosives?
Changes in billing and useage of Kari
on
Ask The Mythbusters
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I noticed that in the more recent episodes instead of just Jamie and Adam in the "Who are the Mythbusters?" section of the opening credits, you also have Grant, Kari and Tory listed. It's still the two of you who get the iconic billing, but why the change? Are they more than just "Mythterns" now? (i.e., permanent cast members)
Also my Wife noted "boy they don't really make any bones about using Kari for sex appeal" and not that I mind one bit but I did notice that even before changes in billing and the departure of other female Mythterns, Kari was pretty much like the third host of the show. Were I to guess I'd say her increased useage on the show was Discovery's idea (since the audience is probably mostly male) - is there any concern about using her too much?
We used to all think that Yahoo! was going away soon. Now they're pretty much safe.
We used to all think that AOL was going away soon. Now they're pretty much safe.
We used to all think that Apple was going away soon. Now they're pretty much safe.
We all think TiVo is going away soon, but they've partnered with Netflix, Yahoo, Comcast, etc. They're inking deals and still quite active. I think people would like them to die based off of their courting of the industries through DRM but perhaps that's a false sense of security for the networks?
If TiVo keeps it going at this rate for a few more years, will they ever be considered "safe"?
Re:Government ideas to counter terror
on
Google Terror Threat
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Obviously MS should bug their Flight simulator to contact the government by the Internet if anyone crashes a plane into a building.
I know you're kidding but Dr. Bob Arnot of NBC, in the wake of 9/11, said that perhaps Flight Simulator was indeed part of the problem when he showed the "shocking" images of how you could use it to fly into the WTC.
In the ensuing weeks after 9/11 my then-coworkers (who at that job tended to be old - like 50's to 60's old) looked at me in shock when I told them that I've flown my plane into a building in Flight Simulator pretty much every single time. When they asked why I just told them "because landing is hard"
We used to lament how lame it was that Flight Simulator didn't have "cool crashes" - after 9/11, we were glad it didn't.
If iTunes, with it's $0.99/song, $9.99/album model isn't good enough for the music industry, then how exactly is the Napster "as much as you can eat for $9.99" model producing enough money? Or will that be summarily executed next?
I guess one could argue that iTMS underscores music piracy ($10K to fill this thing? Fuck that, I'll just steal it) but isn't it better than the iPod just being an MP3 player?
He had a great idea - the developers were working late hours, so why not give them laptops so they can take them home and work more? Slow-assed laptops, considerably worse than the desktop machines we had, but portable. Yeah, the answer to programmer productivity is slower computers (these were to be our new main machines).
While Activsion and others had a shouting match over who had the rights to the "Civilization" name, you went off and made Alpha Centauri which bore many similarities to the Civilization line of games but then took a hard left with regard to the mechanics and setting. To this day I see and hear of people who talk about this game in hushed tones, as if it was a great cinematic or literary masterpiece. Many of these went on to express disappointment with Civilization III and are leery of the 3-D approach it appears Civilization IV has adopted. Since it's apparent that the Civilization line is the focus these days, what's your take on the devout following this one-off game of yours produced? And do you ever plan on revisiting the Alpha Centauri universe?
Good point, but MCSE is not aimed at programmers. There is a cert, the MCSD I think, that's aimed at developers. It's difficult and it's rare, so it's still somewhat valuable.
But the sorts of people who tend to go for MCSE also tend to be the "piece of paper entitles me" types. The glut of these types is why MCSE is a joke nowadays. But MS made their money off of the test and the "sanctioned" materials they sell.
Once during an interview I was asked "why don't you have any certs?" I responded that, perhaps it was coincidence but most of the programmers I knew with certs weren't any good and most developers who were good didn't bother with certs. The interviewer grinned and responded "oh, it's no coincidence..."
Another point worth mentioning - a major university that graduates nothing but idiots and/or people who cannot find work gets a bad reputation, which in turn makes people less likely to go to that university, and so the college suffers since, in theory, that's all they do.
But, for example, it doesn't really hurt Microsoft all that much if a bunch of "Paper MCSEs" don't get a job as a result of their certification. They have other huge venues and it's not like it's MS' job to get you a job. They could stop offering certs tommorow and be fine.
I'm not sure if this is the same title Mr. Carmack is referring to but the one that I can remember offhand is 2000's Laser Arena from Trainwreck Studios. Their website is dead, so presumably they are too at this point.
I remember at the time this game was released being impressed, both at the fact that they had taken Quake source and done so much with it (added a whole lot of features, it was probably a Quake 2-level engine or better now) and with the fact that at the time the traditional logic was to go license some expensive game engine, but that they probably got a good deal on the Quake engine.
But I also remember at the time reading about a lot a flak they recieved - their developers had followed a lot of those "tutorials" people had assembled on the Internet and through binary comparison, these sites figured out that Trainwreck had followed their tutorials. Trainwreck admitted to following the tutorials but did not admit to doing anything wrong. This led to the practice of designating that the tutorials were under GPL as well. Trainwreck could indeed have avoided the problems and saved money had they used the GPL for Laser Arena.
The one argument I can see for keeping the source closed is to limit or eliminate cheating. Granted, a budget title with limited popularity isn't really all that prone to cheating but even today the commercial release of Quake 3: Arena has Punkbuster to keep it "safe", which I imagine is outside the realm of most online game developers.
Any ideas on how to prevent this sort of thing in a GPL'd game?
Right but I would imagine you would do a lot of investigation (or at least *some*) to figure out if the thing had really been pirated.
Whether or not this is really what happened, the original poster at least walked away with the impression that a person in tech support, on the first support call, accused the person calling of piracy and demanded money or else they were to be sued. This is while the original poster was standing there. If they really did do this then this is what they deserve. But the original poster's fear was that this person calling might have been legit and was suddenly being accused of being a pirate.
In your situation it would just be easier to figure out if the company that called in was on your list at all.
It gets worse. Over and over you will hear gamers saying "wait it's ok to carjack and shoot and (etc.) but sex is bad and wrong?!?!?". Our defense is to point out the other bad shit in the game? Maybe we should just bow out gracefully and hope Rockstar just reissues the game, it gets the M back, and this all dies away.
Recently, I went to see Batman Begins in the theater, and the movie didn't start until 32 minutes after the posted time. What was keeping it? Ads, ads, and more ads! They even had a really irritating commercial for Fanta. Two families in the front of the theater basically said "screw this" after about 20 minutes, and walked out.
Seriously? Left over ads? I hope they never plan to see a movie again because this concept is never going away. Methinks perhaps they went to go get a coke and you didn't see them come back in.
I can imagine their irritation trying to get their money back, but it's just easier to pirate the movie and watch it on the computer than it is to sit through a half-hour of ads after paying out the nose for the chance to see the movie
It's easier to spend the umpteen hours to download a shitty quality video of a movie from a theater than it is to ignore the ads for a half hour or, better yet, just show up late?
Some DVDs are trying to force me to watch the previews on the disk before I can get to the menu now! I will not purchase a disk that does that, and if I have paid money for it, I ask for a refund.
If you've seen that recently, it won't last. Disney did it on the initial print runs of Tarzan and got so many complaints that they vowed never to do it again. That pretty much set the precedent for "make sure they can skip the ads". Now sometimes you'll get a DVD for free (like when Pizza Hut was offering movies with a pizza) and you can't always skip the commercials on those (depends on the player I found). In that case you get what you pay for.
laser printer usually spit out about 500-1000 pages of "error" text before the job got cancelled by an operator.
um...wow. I didn't know what kind of scale you were talking, but that's um, BIG.
My personal record was 12 boxes of paper, but a coworker did 30 once. We're talking the boxes that hold a dozen reams of paper or more.
This was at my last gig, a MVS programmer at a University, so the operator manning the thing was some minimum wage overnight college kid who would randomly look up from sleeping or studying or whatever to see that yes the output doesn't seem to be ending and is in fact random characters. The best part was when they wrote evil notes on the boxes to say that you weren't doing your job which was ironic as they fed Box #11 of paper before thinking perhaps there was an infinite loop involved.
or have JCL spit out a bunch of random nonsense because you didn't allocate the correct blocksize for your file you'll hate your job too.
That's all it takes to hate your job? Ever get an error compiling a C++ app using templates, or a highly abstracted java class with an error generated somewhere, causing a problem somewhere else? These don't exactly put the joy *into* programming.
Yeah but JCL (Job Card Language) is different - it's basically the batch file that runs the program. It's not the program itself (usually, there is some scripting sometimes). It's like fighting to get the program done only to then fight to get the batch file written. An afterthought on, say, a DOS or Windows system where the batch file is literally just a series of commands. The JCL file has to tell how many blocks or cylinders the output files need, and it's sort of a crapshoot unless you have enough experience to guess properly. And when the job dies you get called at 3 AM.
At least with C++/Java debugging stuff it's what you signed up for. JCL's like spam.
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Besides the fact that Microsoft uses an obfuscator, you can't really use Reflector to decompile things. I hooked up a plugin to it once that would dump out complete source code files and visual studio projects for things you were reflecting. What you wind up with is a bunch of code which doesn't quite compile. It has lots of things which flat out don't work. The amount of effort to go in and fix tons of things that don't compile in complex and diffuclt to read code that you didn't write is mostly not worth it.
...no Recompiling the Colonel jokes?
Plus, for all the pissing and moaning about lame games pushed out for the wrong reasons, we have the potential here to see the game equivalent of a great novel that's not published until the writer thinks it's perfect (like Gone with the Wind, which also took ten years).
Oh but you see J2EE, Java, Eclipse, etc. - they're not obliterating .NET and Microsoft like Sun would have hoped. So instead of beefing up their offerings and maybe fixing whatever is keeping them from "taking down" Microsoft and .NET they're going to do something "new" - because otherwise, they'd have to explain why J2EE didn't do it.
I've got a DVD-ROM drive from 1999 - a Creative 6X Encore drive. Which is ironic since everything I've ever had from Creative that wasn't a sound card has been a short lived piece of shit. Of course it does have that hardware region locking crap, so whatever.
Google Cache of related article
Penny Arcade take at the time
So this isn't the newest sentiment in the world. Just further proof that the world doesn't understand video and computer games.
I can't seem to convince him though that DVD's aren't High Def.
It's one of those deals where you come to realize that you'll never convince them, they'll just think you're a wrong, stupid asshole when you're done arguing. I don't argue that the DVD's don't look better on an HDTV, but they're not Hi-Def.
Instead of trying to argue the point more, I'll just wait for HD-DVD and/or BlueRay to come out and his head to explode.
Also on the Confederate Rocket myth, were the materials censored because of the danger in people trying them at home, or because of fear of running afoul of that current ban on publishing books on how to make explosives?
Also my Wife noted "boy they don't really make any bones about using Kari for sex appeal" and not that I mind one bit but I did notice that even before changes in billing and the departure of other female Mythterns, Kari was pretty much like the third host of the show. Were I to guess I'd say her increased useage on the show was Discovery's idea (since the audience is probably mostly male) - is there any concern about using her too much?
We used to all think that Yahoo! was going away soon. Now they're pretty much safe.
We used to all think that AOL was going away soon. Now they're pretty much safe.
We used to all think that Apple was going away soon. Now they're pretty much safe.
We all think TiVo is going away soon, but they've partnered with Netflix, Yahoo, Comcast, etc. They're inking deals and still quite active. I think people would like them to die based off of their courting of the industries through DRM but perhaps that's a false sense of security for the networks?
If TiVo keeps it going at this rate for a few more years, will they ever be considered "safe"?
In the ensuing weeks after 9/11 my then-coworkers (who at that job tended to be old - like 50's to 60's old) looked at me in shock when I told them that I've flown my plane into a building in Flight Simulator pretty much every single time. When they asked why I just told them "because landing is hard"
We used to lament how lame it was that Flight Simulator didn't have "cool crashes" - after 9/11, we were glad it didn't.
I guess one could argue that iTMS underscores music piracy ($10K to fill this thing? Fuck that, I'll just steal it) but isn't it better than the iPod just being an MP3 player?
ASTRONAUT: "Mission Control: Please find me Sea of Tranquility"
MISSION CONTROL: "Cannot find Sea of Tranquility - did you mean Sea of Tranquility Drive ?"
He had a great idea - the developers were working late hours, so why not give them laptops so they can take them home and work more? Slow-assed laptops, considerably worse than the desktop machines we had, but portable. Yeah, the answer to programmer productivity is slower computers (these were to be our new main machines).
He got canned eventually.
While Activsion and others had a shouting match over who had the rights to the "Civilization" name, you went off and made Alpha Centauri which bore many similarities to the Civilization line of games but then took a hard left with regard to the mechanics and setting. To this day I see and hear of people who talk about this game in hushed tones, as if it was a great cinematic or literary masterpiece. Many of these went on to express disappointment with Civilization III and are leery of the 3-D approach it appears Civilization IV has adopted. Since it's apparent that the Civilization line is the focus these days, what's your take on the devout following this one-off game of yours produced? And do you ever plan on revisiting the Alpha Centauri universe?
But the sorts of people who tend to go for MCSE also tend to be the "piece of paper entitles me" types. The glut of these types is why MCSE is a joke nowadays. But MS made their money off of the test and the "sanctioned" materials they sell.
Once during an interview I was asked "why don't you have any certs?" I responded that, perhaps it was coincidence but most of the programmers I knew with certs weren't any good and most developers who were good didn't bother with certs. The interviewer grinned and responded "oh, it's no coincidence..."
But, for example, it doesn't really hurt Microsoft all that much if a bunch of "Paper MCSEs" don't get a job as a result of their certification. They have other huge venues and it's not like it's MS' job to get you a job. They could stop offering certs tommorow and be fine.
I remember at the time this game was released being impressed, both at the fact that they had taken Quake source and done so much with it (added a whole lot of features, it was probably a Quake 2-level engine or better now) and with the fact that at the time the traditional logic was to go license some expensive game engine, but that they probably got a good deal on the Quake engine.
But I also remember at the time reading about a lot a flak they recieved - their developers had followed a lot of those "tutorials" people had assembled on the Internet and through binary comparison, these sites figured out that Trainwreck had followed their tutorials. Trainwreck admitted to following the tutorials but did not admit to doing anything wrong. This led to the practice of designating that the tutorials were under GPL as well. Trainwreck could indeed have avoided the problems and saved money had they used the GPL for Laser Arena.
The one argument I can see for keeping the source closed is to limit or eliminate cheating. Granted, a budget title with limited popularity isn't really all that prone to cheating but even today the commercial release of Quake 3: Arena has Punkbuster to keep it "safe", which I imagine is outside the realm of most online game developers.
Any ideas on how to prevent this sort of thing in a GPL'd game?
Whether or not this is really what happened, the original poster at least walked away with the impression that a person in tech support, on the first support call, accused the person calling of piracy and demanded money or else they were to be sued. This is while the original poster was standing there. If they really did do this then this is what they deserve. But the original poster's fear was that this person calling might have been legit and was suddenly being accused of being a pirate.
In your situation it would just be easier to figure out if the company that called in was on your list at all.
It gets worse. Over and over you will hear gamers saying "wait it's ok to carjack and shoot and (etc.) but sex is bad and wrong?!?!?". Our defense is to point out the other bad shit in the game? Maybe we should just bow out gracefully and hope Rockstar just reissues the game, it gets the M back, and this all dies away.
This was at my last gig, a MVS programmer at a University, so the operator manning the thing was some minimum wage overnight college kid who would randomly look up from sleeping or studying or whatever to see that yes the output doesn't seem to be ending and is in fact random characters. The best part was when they wrote evil notes on the boxes to say that you weren't doing your job which was ironic as they fed Box #11 of paper before thinking perhaps there was an infinite loop involved.
At least with C++/Java debugging stuff it's what you signed up for. JCL's like spam.