Re:this is killing Linux, OSD in general
on
Today's SCO News
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Interesting how your CIO is putting on hold all "open-source materials," especially considering how there is no 'ongoing legal concerns' about OSS, just about the Linux kernel and certain unnamed components of the Linux operating system.
Your corporation would be completely in the clear if they chose to implement Apache on an OpenBSD platform. Yes, it can be scary for a CIO to transition to a product that isn't "owned" by any one group, and there is no particular place where the buck stops. It's CYA, and it's sad when an obviously inferior and more expensive product is chosen because the blame when something goes wrong can be put on someone else. Will SUN patch your webserver right away if something goes wrong? Only if it happens to everyone. Think your $50,000 license entitles you to singlehandedly choose the direction of the product?
The two things management cares about is money and minimizing risk. Unfortunately, because they aren't familiar with Apache (due to a combination of a lack of advertising and that apache vulnerability bulletins aren't released every day) and because they can't hold anyone else accountable for any potential failure, it seems like too big of a career risk for them. They're probably not familiar with the fact that Apache runs more than 1/2 of the websites in the world, and is one of the most stable, solid pieces of code around. They know what they read in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, and Sun, Microsoft, and IBM's advertisements there can be quite enticing.
It's a lack of exposure that leads to logical fallacies such as equating Linux and all Open Source Software. Hopefully through your efforts you will be able to educate your management team a bit, but don't get your hopes up. Some types of managers just require a person they can point a finger at, and OSS doesn't provide that.
That's the problem with relying on other people's engines in long development cycles... When you have been in development since 1997, you either have to dump your engine repeatedly, or ship before you get stale with an under-polished game. Either way your engine will be behind the engine of your competition, whose last iteration will be competing with your next release... a tough act to follow for a AAA title.
Doom 3 has an excellent engine (judging by the leaked alphas), and HalfLife 2 will probably just rock too. For years to come games will be based upon these engines. Whatever the Duke kiddies have up their sleves, it had better be slick or else they are going to have a hard time competing with them.
Of course, after 6 years of active development and the somewhat unenthusiastic comments of those working on the project, I would be willing to wager this is one project stuck in the bad type of development hell, and whose eventual release will not be met with much acclaim.
As a member of that community (under the name seishino) during the early closed beta the game, for example, didn't have magic. Or NPC's. There were three towns, one of which was devoid of anything more than an inn. Two of the six stat points didn't do anything. Two of four character classes didn't actually do anything, and it was impossible to switch between them.
The community at the time seemed fine to me. I used to organize footraces and run hunting parties for ugly, bigugly, and superbig ugly (the three implemented bosses). We had occasional people behaving badly, but a team could usually quickly outrun a leach, leaving them alone to die in a cavern they couldn't handle. It was actually fun.
But I wouldn't have paid for it. The fact of the matter is that the game *really* wasn't finished. It didn't have many crash issues and the developers didn't have to do a single rollback in the time I was on, but as it stood it was just a chat room attached to a pretty implementation of adventure. No magic, no special weapons, no story, no significant character interactions, no friends list...
I realize that Demand for X implies that one can charge Y for X, but remember, we are in an entertainment industry. The Wachoskis could have re-released Speed 2 as The Matrix Reloaded and people would have gone to see it on the strength of The Matrix, but they would have no market to sell The Matrix Revolutions. If you charge someone to play a game in January and they have a horrible experience, they won't pay to play it again in February. If you make them wait until June when the game is polished and they will have a good time, they may pay to play for two years. That's 240 dollars vs 10, along with all of the people they might bring on board.
It's not the possibilities of the next experience that gets people paying, it is the strength of the last experience. That's why sequals sell so well. Give people a good experience, or give up making games.
And when you know what you have on your hands isn't ready, limit your audience and don't charge them.
The computer game industry has been earning a reputation for releasing buggy code these past few years, and now it has come to a situation where what should be an internal release now costs money. Unlike retail games where occasionally Beta testers are charged, but given the full retail game later, Beta testers on MMPORPG's are not given additional months of play for the priviledge of paying to be guinea pigs. They are not compensated with reduced pay rates or additional in-game powers. In short, they pay to fill a necessary position in the production cycle, then they pay again for the retail product. Many, of course, don't pay for the retail product, and go on diatribes about how unplayable and unbalanced the game (they paid for) is.
How has it gotten so bad that we now release not only buggy games and expect to patch them later, but charge for development releases in addition to charging for final retail releases? We're giving ourselves a bad name here.
If your game is unfinished but in need of stress testing, don't charge for it or you will alienate your potential best customers. If you *must* charge for bandwidth because your manager didn't budget for such costs (and should be rightly as fired as if s/he forgot to budget for artists), then charge a bare minimum until the game is ready for prime time. Don't develop the game on the dime of your testers, or you will find that once you are ready to ship you don't have any customers.
10 dollars a month for our volunteers to do our jobs? We should be ashamed.
Claiming ownership of the Linux source is no longer Novell.
(Sorry, bad pun. But about a million kudos to Novell for the helping hand when needed. That kind of goodwill is a good way to build up your company to survive for a long time.)
BTW, I claim one of the aeron chairs when SCO folds!
Can anyone explain to me what a "real-time OS" is? Is the current playstation OS pre-generated? Are there programmers creating routines in the box as you play?
The issue with low FPS is a game problem 9 out of 10 times. The faster the video card, the less the game development houses work to streamline and improve their framerate.
Word.
Lots of development houses are focusing exclusively on the high-high end graphics card market and are forgetting that their LOD rendering engine *could* display the characters as a virtua-fighters esque 50 shaded polygon mess. I was personally blown away when the Half-Life 2 development team decided that the onboard i-810 would be a low-end target: these people really know that not all gamers bought 9700 Pros. As an 8500/128 owner, I appreciate the added bonuses of a videocard, but quite frankly the difference in image quality between what is available in Warcraft 3 (which my card runs quite well) and what is being offered by Doom 3 (which my card probably won't run) is negligable. Look at screenshots for the upcoming Age of Empires, and compare them to the screenshots of the 3 year old Empire Earth. Graphics are fine, and have been so for quite some time. Let's focus on something else, like gameplay, shall we?
Reviewers won't run a game on the minimum system specs and then complain about the graphics. Why not put that LOD system to good use and drop down to lower poly models for those of us with older machines? Can't write a script to shave off vertices? Artistic vision snobbery?
In addition to the other comments people here have made, people seem to be skirting one big issue.
I'm sorry to have to say this, because he's probably a very nice guy but your singer is flat. Totally, completely, almost painfully flat. This wouldn't be as bad but his voice is also too loud on most (though not all) of the MP3's. Re-balancing the songs would be a good start, but quite frankly as I listen to "Reluctance" in the background (one of the few well-equalized songs in the bunch) it does not seem to break any new musical ground. Piano-heavy light pop jazz enjoyed much success in years past, and the progressions and melodies in the MP3's feel almost representative of what came in the late 80's / early 90's. Add into that a generalized lack of bridges and other techniques to spice up the vanilla dish and the music you have made available, quite frankly, doesn't taste very good to this listener. I'm sure an anonymous coward will use more colorful terms.
In short, MP3's are a good way to give people a sample of your music. But if that doesn't leave a positive impression, your sales will not go up.
This is one artist. If you are serious about becoming a real distribution company, you need a network of artists, and a network of friends in high places. This artist needs some work, but that should be up to the artist to work on. He's probably a great live act, but recorded he needs a lot of work (is he singing in the right octave?). Instead of trying to squeeze water from this stone, promote other acts of yours, or go out looking for talent. There are lots of great indie artists out there, but that doesn't mean most indie artists are great. You have to do a lot of digging to find the good ones. Get digging.
I admire Blizzard's dedication to making games highly polished and playable before release. But never, ever expect them to hit a ship date, even if it is next week.
I've always thought they should write their release date in an automatically self-incrementing javascript. It would save them some trouble, so that they could spend more time focusing on finishing.
I too like Opera a lot, and have always promoted their use. I have also registered for two windows versions (older and newer). Does that mean I don't use their Linux and Mac versions too? Of course not.
We register software to support the companies that produce them, not because we are forced to. In the case of Opera, Rijk and the rest of the developers have created a wonderful product that deserves our recognition and our financial support. Now there are whole mythologies about licenses following users not O.S.es and the morality of pirating bug-fix releases, but the fact of the matter is either the guys from Norway get your 40 dollars or they don't. To them, if you use Linux, Windows, or a Mac, they have no additional expenses, but could really use the cash. Multiplatform pricing is a way of getting additional funding from those who can afford to pay for multiple computing environments, but for those students who may have inherited a Mac and built a combo wintel / linux box out of spare parts your payment schedule should vary.
Support Opera. Register the software on your platform of choice, and find codes for the rest. It may not be %100 on the up-and-up, but it is far better for the developer than the alternative. Or be on the up-and-up by purchasing student-discounted versions (20 dollars per OS) based on the adult education cooking course you took last summer.
(Frankly, Opera's payment scheme has always been a bit futzy. Occasionally you get stuck paying for bug-fix releases, or upgrading within too short of a timeframe. If you get stuck paying for something you feel they should have provided anyway, such as promised features or bug fixes, just help yourself to the upgrade and pay next time. Be on the honor system.)
*Note: the opinions expressed here are those of a longstanding Opera user and most certainly do not represent those of Opera Software or its employees. Or its lawyers. Or the judge.
**Note Note: Blizzard can confidently supply Mac and PC versions on the same CD because the CD is required to run, and the key you purchase is required as your unique identifier when you go online for multiplayer. Perhaps if Opera validated the uniqueness of your license code each time you went online and periodically thereafter, they could be confident that only one person was using your multi-OS registration. But such a thing would be a PR nightmare.
I thought the reason people went with proprietary standards for gaming disks were to head off piracy. Preventing compatibility is the reason to introduce a new format with each and every console system. Just look at the extensive copying Sony and Microsoft face for going with a very vanilla DVD standard on their consoles. The gamecube is safe for now, at least until Mini DVD-Rs are released or people buy aftermarket GC clamshells.
Dual-layer is wise, as consumer level dual-layer DVD writers seem to be a bit off, and jerry-rigging one to write PSP disks would be even more difficult.
Standards prolifiration is a bad thing on computers, but it is a necessary thing on consoles.
Arcades have traditionally been a distribution medium for new software, not a cultural medium facilitating communication. While there were cultures of PacMan, Super Mario Brothers, and Q-bert players, the games were very solitary in nature. The lone guy with a row of quarters playing space invaders is a perfect example of this. Games in those days were single-player affairs on jamma-compatible boards, utilizing a 4 position joystick and two or (gasp) three buttons. Because such hardware was so expensive to own personally, people needed to go to the arcades to have the best play experience, and to play a wider variety of games.
That is no longer the case.
During the NES / SNES period, arcade conversions were getting to be "good enough" that one didn't really need to go to the arcade to play excellent games. While the 2600 may have choked on Pac Man (and don't even bring up Q-bert), the Genesis could reasonably approximate NARC, and the SNES did a great job with Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles. It was during this time that arcades transitioned from distribution centers to competition centers, thanks in no small part to the phenomenon of fighting games. The 4-player TMNT: Turtles in Time and the 6-player X-Men were all hits in the arcade, as were a plethora of multiplayer shooting games, fighting games, and car racing games (polygons were an arcade-exclusive back then).
But that changed with the Voodoo 3dfx and the rise of the computer as a competitor to the console, as well as the coming of networked gaming. Not only were computers capable of delivering compelling realtime 3D to rival (though not, at the time, beat) arcade gaming, but it also could connect separate players to people across physical boundaries. At first this led to neighborhood games of Bolo, later to direct dial-up competitions, and finally to the remote multiplayer frag-fests and Massively Multiplayer Role Playing worlds we see today. The anonymous instant competition with strangers of similar skill levels previously provided by arcades is now available right at your desk. Likewise, the graphical advantage once held by arcade machines has eroded to nothingness... To reduce overhead the machines are based heavily on existing console and computer equipment, which in turn leads to low acquisition costs and very low porting expenses, but leaves little to differentiate the two platforms. Add in direct competition with rental industries, and you have very little reason to go to the arcade.
The arcade does remain, however, and with one last, best reason. Hardware. Light-gun games, dance mats, digital batting cages, etc are prohibitively expensive for the average person to afford, yet can provide fun and unique experiences. Likewise, they are intuitive enough to be picked up and used without instruction by the casual or incidental gamer, the kind that is not likely to have access to many other distribution options at home (consoles or up-to-date graphics cards).
Sadly, as a distribution medium the arcade is faltering badly, in no small part due to the inefficient economic model behind it. 'Core gamers often go to the arcade looking for the "latest and greatest" in entertainment, but find perhaps one or two first run games, with a smattering of older games they don't wish to play. This would be like a movie-goer wanting to see Die Another Day, but only being able to watch Tomorrow Never Dies because the movie house couldn't afford to buy a new reel of tape from the studios. Game distributers still sell boards to the arcade owners, who in turn try to recoup their investment from the gaming public. This is a very inefficient way of going about making the highest profit, as the distributers feed from the arcade owners, who (in their financially weakened state) attempt to feed upon the customers. But it is the customers who bring money into the system as a whole, and it is they whom both the producers and the providers should be focusing upon.
For example, a Capcom vs. SNK machine may lay dormant in an
Many of the kinks and problems have been ironed out.
Evidence indicates that several kinks and problems remain.
Think of it in terms of software, which do you think works better: version 1.0 or version 9?
In terms of software, we're on space shuttle version 1.99.99.99. We have tremendously smothed the wrinkles in an existing design, but the specifications at creation and the current necessary specifications and available technologies are radically different. This is not as simple as saving space and weight by using LCD moniters instead of CRT's... Could shuttle subsystems communicate more efficiently over 802.11b? Should liquid, nuclear, or ElectroMagnetic accelerants be used in place of solid fuel boosters? Should the shuttle carry less weight in order to carry payload to a higher orbit? Escape pod?
For crying out loud NASA engineers still scour Ebay looking for parts to keep the shuttle fleet up in the air. Isn't it about time we put a PowerPC or a P4 up in the air?
Maturity of a technology involves both incremental and radical redesigns... Such a process brought Win95, NT, XP, and someday a mature Windows OS. Mac OS9 was a very mature OS (based off of an OS7 lineage), but it was just too old and, in some ways, too mature to jerry rig preemptive multitasking into it.
Now that the shuttle has followed its natural lifecycle we are in the enviable position of looking at its role in the larger world and saying what is it being used for and, using our experience, how can we better design it to serve that need?
I am not saying a new design is a bad idea, just that we have a significant investment in our current shuttle and thats why it has been around so long.
Sadly, pouring good money after bad isn't going to help our prospects long-term. The costs are sunk, and can't be recouped. If designing and implementing a new shuttle costs 50 billion dollars, but the per-launch costs can be reduced from 450 million to 100 million, then assuming an acellerated launch schedule of one flight every two weeks (the original estimates for the original shuttle), we will have a net financial gain after less than 5 years. And besides the financial gain, who knows what the value of the scientific gain by having a shuttle capable of such frequent voyages.
(Yes the above numbers are somewhat spurious, but they also don't take into account the 2-4 billion dollars per current shuttle with a 50 flight lifespan, the cost of investigation of a shuttle disaster, the potential for reduced personnel in a more modern system, etc)
Re:now, i dont get this...
on
P2P Meets Push
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· Score: 1
Essentially, Java's garbage collection throws things out when it thinks it needs to be thrown out, not when you do.
For example, a function that says [in non-pseudocode]
do { new variable = random();
manipulate( variable );
delete variable; }while( keystate.escape() != DOWN )
could exist happily in C++, but an equivalent Java program would likely not be able to delete allocated memory until exiting the called function. Or maybe it will. But not controlling when the memory is managed can be difficult on a programmer, and can be difficult for a consumer program that intends to run for a very long time.
It's not a particularly strong point in why you wouldn't use Java, it's just a point.
Parent is modded funny, but there is a large grain of truth in what he says. After rock climbing, everything you see looks like a handhold or toehold. After playing Warcraft 3, I keep trying to move the cars on the freeway out of my way by selecting them and telling them to attack the ground off to the side of the road. After playing the latest Capcom brawler, I spar in my martial arts class trying to get the joystick to respond to the forward-down-downforward punch command.
In short, what videogames train you to do is not the action being depicted, but the method of interaction required for it. If killing a police officer ever involved scrolling around using the trackball and a keyboard, and clicking the right mouse button to unleash a BFG9000, then yes, videogames are training you to kill. Otherwise, they are training you to use the mouse and keyboard.
The military conditions you to kill by simulating it hundreds and hundreds of times... But their simulation is always real-life, involving actually running around with a gun loaded with blanks, and hunting people. Paintball is far, far more dangerous in this way than Quake.
Action games do and have always relied upon violence because violence is far easier to simulate than creation, and the need for action is a repressed desire to be exploited. This is not necessarily a failure of imagination (it can be quite creative), but a reality of the current market. For every tetris that made it into public consciousness, there are about a hundred that were ignored in droves because the public doesn't find abstract gaming to be particularly gripping.
Since the introduction of Chun-Li in Street Fighter 2 (a reasonably endowed female, at least compared to some ofthe othercharacters in the game) fighting females have been getting more and more popular. Before then, women were largely reduced to the role of helpless princess to be rescued, medic, or very occasionally villaness (whose attempt to actualize was a defining factor in her evilness). Now they can shape their environment, go toe-to-toe with the 900 lb walking dumptrucks that pass as men in videogames and can do anything that men can do. With the general lack of women as leading action-hero roles (except in terrible game-to-movie conversions) strangely a large cultural spearhead of this has come from, well, videogames.
Does violence happen against protagonist women in videogames? Yes, but the depiction of violence against women has so often been against helpless women that the two separate concepts have become intrinsically linked. It is almost assumed in this culture that *any* violence against women will expose fragility, which is not the case (come out to boston for a women's football match sometime). The problem is the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and falling down crying, not the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and who in turn beats him to a bloody pulp. All protaganists in videogames hit back, and eventually win. That's empowering.
What's disempowering and what you touched upon was the hypersexualization of the female figure in videogames, which is a real problem. Videogaming is probably not the arena to fight this larger societal problem, however. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the characters need gross anatomical differences with wildly differing dress styles to be able to tell the two apart. And with men and women's violation of the age old long-hair-is-woman, short-hair-is-man code, there is very little to be able to distinguish between 32 pixel by 32 pixel male and female characters besides huge hips and big breasts vs giant shoulders and stunted legs. That part probably can't be stopped any time soon. The role variation needs to be upped, as does the number of female characters whose sexuality or sex life just doesn't come up, but arguing against oversized breasts in a medium whose plumber posterboy features a nose the size of his head is like shouting at the wind.
Either way, with female empowerment but continued female sexualization we've taken one step forward and no steps back. That doesn't mean that there is no ground left to cover. That means demonizing a medium which has overall improved the perception of women in our culture is shooting your friends.
If you want a target, start with those aformentioned magazine shops, preferably "YM" and "Cosmo Girl."
reporter: Will you not present some of your evidence?
The power of our evidence is so strong that it can only be withstood by a hand picked group of analists while firmly sheilded behind Non-disclosure agreements. Our intentionally vague and broadly damning statements are to protect you from the horrible truths your minds are not yet ready to comprehend. X-Windows, Vim, Samba... The list of software that might contain infringing code is infinite. Can your mind grasp the infinite?
No one has ever held onto the #1 spot in the graphics card industry. No one.
Perhaps it is because you are competing against a monolith that the up-and-comers can convince their engineers to give up hobbies and work 12 hour days. Perhaps it is because the leader of a #1 must be conservative in its movements to please the shareholders. Perhaps it is because with 10 other companies gunning for your head, one of them will be gambling on the right combination of technologies to mature in time for them to release their winning card.
Anyone remember when the Hercules was the be-all-end-all? Where are they now?
nVidia will go down. ATI will go down. What will not go down is the graphics card industry. Despite our multi-hundred dollar investment in one particular company, our allegiance should be to good gaming in general, and not to any specific manufacturer.
And yes, I'm sick of synthetic benchmarking. We should find ways to compare across games... for example running two graphics cards simultaneously in a system on retail games, and slowly upping the framerate until one then the other cannot keep up.
I bought a Radeon 8500 128 two weeks ago. It took me one week to discover that the latest drivers conflicted with an obscure windows cache setting (prioritizing system cache over program cache). What did this error cause, you ask? It overwrote random blocks of my hard disk with random data.
So yes, there are still problems out there. Perhaps not with the latest ATI cards, but certainly with cards ATI still sells (the 8500 is currently sold under the name 9100).
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting how your CIO is putting on hold all "open-source materials," especially considering how there is no 'ongoing legal concerns' about OSS, just about the Linux kernel and certain unnamed components of the Linux operating system.
Your corporation would be completely in the clear if they chose to implement Apache on an OpenBSD platform. Yes, it can be scary for a CIO to transition to a product that isn't "owned" by any one group, and there is no particular place where the buck stops. It's CYA, and it's sad when an obviously inferior and more expensive product is chosen because the blame when something goes wrong can be put on someone else. Will SUN patch your webserver right away if something goes wrong? Only if it happens to everyone. Think your $50,000 license entitles you to singlehandedly choose the direction of the product?
The two things management cares about is money and minimizing risk. Unfortunately, because they aren't familiar with Apache (due to a combination of a lack of advertising and that apache vulnerability bulletins aren't released every day) and because they can't hold anyone else accountable for any potential failure, it seems like too big of a career risk for them. They're probably not familiar with the fact that Apache runs more than 1/2 of the websites in the world, and is one of the most stable, solid pieces of code around. They know what they read in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, and Sun, Microsoft, and IBM's advertisements there can be quite enticing.
It's a lack of exposure that leads to logical fallacies such as equating Linux and all Open Source Software. Hopefully through your efforts you will be able to educate your management team a bit, but don't get your hopes up. Some types of managers just require a person they can point a finger at, and OSS doesn't provide that.
That's the problem with relying on other people's engines in long development cycles... When you have been in development since 1997, you either have to dump your engine repeatedly, or ship before you get stale with an under-polished game. Either way your engine will be behind the engine of your competition, whose last iteration will be competing with your next release... a tough act to follow for a AAA title.
Doom 3 has an excellent engine (judging by the leaked alphas), and HalfLife 2 will probably just rock too. For years to come games will be based upon these engines. Whatever the Duke kiddies have up their sleves, it had better be slick or else they are going to have a hard time competing with them.
Of course, after 6 years of active development and the somewhat unenthusiastic comments of those working on the project, I would be willing to wager this is one project stuck in the bad type of development hell, and whose eventual release will not be met with much acclaim.
Next big thing, please.
http://www.mycreditcarddetails.co.uk/
Not only is there no magnetic stripe to swipe, but they are animated to the theme song from Magnum P.I.
"If you don't buy our IP, we'll kill this Geek"
Ragnarok online also lost me.
As a member of that community (under the name seishino) during the early closed beta the game, for example, didn't have magic. Or NPC's. There were three towns, one of which was devoid of anything more than an inn. Two of the six stat points didn't do anything. Two of four character classes didn't actually do anything, and it was impossible to switch between them.
The community at the time seemed fine to me. I used to organize footraces and run hunting parties for ugly, bigugly, and superbig ugly (the three implemented bosses). We had occasional people behaving badly, but a team could usually quickly outrun a leach, leaving them alone to die in a cavern they couldn't handle. It was actually fun.
But I wouldn't have paid for it. The fact of the matter is that the game *really* wasn't finished. It didn't have many crash issues and the developers didn't have to do a single rollback in the time I was on, but as it stood it was just a chat room attached to a pretty implementation of adventure. No magic, no special weapons, no story, no significant character interactions, no friends list...
I realize that Demand for X implies that one can charge Y for X, but remember, we are in an entertainment industry. The Wachoskis could have re-released Speed 2 as The Matrix Reloaded and people would have gone to see it on the strength of The Matrix, but they would have no market to sell The Matrix Revolutions. If you charge someone to play a game in January and they have a horrible experience, they won't pay to play it again in February. If you make them wait until June when the game is polished and they will have a good time, they may pay to play for two years. That's 240 dollars vs 10, along with all of the people they might bring on board.
It's not the possibilities of the next experience that gets people paying, it is the strength of the last experience. That's why sequals sell so well. Give people a good experience, or give up making games.
And when you know what you have on your hands isn't ready, limit your audience and don't charge them.
The computer game industry has been earning a reputation for releasing buggy code these past few years, and now it has come to a situation where what should be an internal release now costs money. Unlike retail games where occasionally Beta testers are charged, but given the full retail game later, Beta testers on MMPORPG's are not given additional months of play for the priviledge of paying to be guinea pigs. They are not compensated with reduced pay rates or additional in-game powers. In short, they pay to fill a necessary position in the production cycle, then they pay again for the retail product. Many, of course, don't pay for the retail product, and go on diatribes about how unplayable and unbalanced the game (they paid for) is.
How has it gotten so bad that we now release not only buggy games and expect to patch them later, but charge for development releases in addition to charging for final retail releases? We're giving ourselves a bad name here.
If your game is unfinished but in need of stress testing, don't charge for it or you will alienate your potential best customers. If you *must* charge for bandwidth because your manager didn't budget for such costs (and should be rightly as fired as if s/he forgot to budget for artists), then charge a bare minimum until the game is ready for prime time. Don't develop the game on the dime of your testers, or you will find that once you are ready to ship you don't have any customers.
10 dollars a month for our volunteers to do our jobs? We should be ashamed.
Claiming ownership of the Linux source is no longer Novell.
(Sorry, bad pun. But about a million kudos to Novell for the helping hand when needed. That kind of goodwill is a good way to build up your company to survive for a long time.)
BTW, I claim one of the aeron chairs when SCO folds!
Can anyone explain to me what a "real-time OS" is? Is the current playstation OS pre-generated? Are there programmers creating routines in the box as you play?
"Controversial" was a nice term for universally panned.
The issue with low FPS is a game problem 9 out of 10 times. The faster the video card, the less the game development houses work to streamline and improve their framerate.
Word.
Lots of development houses are focusing exclusively on the high-high end graphics card market and are forgetting that their LOD rendering engine *could* display the characters as a virtua-fighters esque 50 shaded polygon mess. I was personally blown away when the Half-Life 2 development team decided that the onboard i-810 would be a low-end target: these people really know that not all gamers bought 9700 Pros. As an 8500/128 owner, I appreciate the added bonuses of a videocard, but quite frankly the difference in image quality between what is available in Warcraft 3 (which my card runs quite well) and what is being offered by Doom 3 (which my card probably won't run) is negligable. Look at screenshots for the upcoming Age of Empires, and compare them to the screenshots of the 3 year old Empire Earth. Graphics are fine, and have been so for quite some time. Let's focus on something else, like gameplay, shall we?
Reviewers won't run a game on the minimum system specs and then complain about the graphics. Why not put that LOD system to good use and drop down to lower poly models for those of us with older machines? Can't write a script to shave off vertices? Artistic vision snobbery?
In addition to the other comments people here have made, people seem to be skirting one big issue.
I'm sorry to have to say this, because he's probably a very nice guy but your singer is flat. Totally, completely, almost painfully flat. This wouldn't be as bad but his voice is also too loud on most (though not all) of the MP3's. Re-balancing the songs would be a good start, but quite frankly as I listen to "Reluctance" in the background (one of the few well-equalized songs in the bunch) it does not seem to break any new musical ground. Piano-heavy light pop jazz enjoyed much success in years past, and the progressions and melodies in the MP3's feel almost representative of what came in the late 80's / early 90's. Add into that a generalized lack of bridges and other techniques to spice up the vanilla dish and the music you have made available, quite frankly, doesn't taste very good to this listener. I'm sure an anonymous coward will use more colorful terms.
In short, MP3's are a good way to give people a sample of your music. But if that doesn't leave a positive impression, your sales will not go up.
This is one artist. If you are serious about becoming a real distribution company, you need a network of artists, and a network of friends in high places. This artist needs some work, but that should be up to the artist to work on. He's probably a great live act, but recorded he needs a lot of work (is he singing in the right octave?). Instead of trying to squeeze water from this stone, promote other acts of yours, or go out looking for talent. There are lots of great indie artists out there, but that doesn't mean most indie artists are great. You have to do a lot of digging to find the good ones. Get digging.
See sarcastic subject line.
I admire Blizzard's dedication to making games highly polished and playable before release. But never, ever expect them to hit a ship date, even if it is next week.
I've always thought they should write their release date in an automatically self-incrementing javascript. It would save them some trouble, so that they could spend more time focusing on finishing.
I too like Opera a lot, and have always promoted their use. I have also registered for two windows versions (older and newer). Does that mean I don't use their Linux and Mac versions too? Of course not.
We register software to support the companies that produce them, not because we are forced to. In the case of Opera, Rijk and the rest of the developers have created a wonderful product that deserves our recognition and our financial support. Now there are whole mythologies about licenses following users not O.S.es and the morality of pirating bug-fix releases, but the fact of the matter is either the guys from Norway get your 40 dollars or they don't. To them, if you use Linux, Windows, or a Mac, they have no additional expenses, but could really use the cash. Multiplatform pricing is a way of getting additional funding from those who can afford to pay for multiple computing environments, but for those students who may have inherited a Mac and built a combo wintel / linux box out of spare parts your payment schedule should vary.
Support Opera. Register the software on your platform of choice, and find codes for the rest. It may not be %100 on the up-and-up, but it is far better for the developer than the alternative. Or be on the up-and-up by purchasing student-discounted versions (20 dollars per OS) based on the adult education cooking course you took last summer.
(Frankly, Opera's payment scheme has always been a bit futzy. Occasionally you get stuck paying for bug-fix releases, or upgrading within too short of a timeframe. If you get stuck paying for something you feel they should have provided anyway, such as promised features or bug fixes, just help yourself to the upgrade and pay next time. Be on the honor system.)
*Note: the opinions expressed here are those of a longstanding Opera user and most certainly do not represent those of Opera Software or its employees. Or its lawyers. Or the judge.
**Note Note: Blizzard can confidently supply Mac and PC versions on the same CD because the CD is required to run, and the key you purchase is required as your unique identifier when you go online for multiplayer. Perhaps if Opera validated the uniqueness of your license code each time you went online and periodically thereafter, they could be confident that only one person was using your multi-OS registration. But such a thing would be a PR nightmare.
I thought the reason people went with proprietary standards for gaming disks were to head off piracy. Preventing compatibility is the reason to introduce a new format with each and every console system. Just look at the extensive copying Sony and Microsoft face for going with a very vanilla DVD standard on their consoles. The gamecube is safe for now, at least until Mini DVD-Rs are released or people buy aftermarket GC clamshells.
Dual-layer is wise, as consumer level dual-layer DVD writers seem to be a bit off, and jerry-rigging one to write PSP disks would be even more difficult.
Standards prolifiration is a bad thing on computers, but it is a necessary thing on consoles.
Please, no more shitty Microsoft software.
You can try Open Loo, but there are privacy concerns.
Arcades have traditionally been a distribution medium for new software, not a cultural medium facilitating communication. While there were cultures of PacMan, Super Mario Brothers, and Q-bert players, the games were very solitary in nature. The lone guy with a row of quarters playing space invaders is a perfect example of this. Games in those days were single-player affairs on jamma-compatible boards, utilizing a 4 position joystick and two or (gasp) three buttons. Because such hardware was so expensive to own personally, people needed to go to the arcades to have the best play experience, and to play a wider variety of games.
That is no longer the case.
During the NES / SNES period, arcade conversions were getting to be "good enough" that one didn't really need to go to the arcade to play excellent games. While the 2600 may have choked on Pac Man (and don't even bring up Q-bert), the Genesis could reasonably approximate NARC, and the SNES did a great job with Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles. It was during this time that arcades transitioned from distribution centers to competition centers, thanks in no small part to the phenomenon of fighting games. The 4-player TMNT: Turtles in Time and the 6-player X-Men were all hits in the arcade, as were a plethora of multiplayer shooting games, fighting games, and car racing games (polygons were an arcade-exclusive back then).
But that changed with the Voodoo 3dfx and the rise of the computer as a competitor to the console, as well as the coming of networked gaming. Not only were computers capable of delivering compelling realtime 3D to rival (though not, at the time, beat) arcade gaming, but it also could connect separate players to people across physical boundaries. At first this led to neighborhood games of Bolo, later to direct dial-up competitions, and finally to the remote multiplayer frag-fests and Massively Multiplayer Role Playing worlds we see today. The anonymous instant competition with strangers of similar skill levels previously provided by arcades is now available right at your desk. Likewise, the graphical advantage once held by arcade machines has eroded to nothingness... To reduce overhead the machines are based heavily on existing console and computer equipment, which in turn leads to low acquisition costs and very low porting expenses, but leaves little to differentiate the two platforms. Add in direct competition with rental industries, and you have very little reason to go to the arcade.
The arcade does remain, however, and with one last, best reason. Hardware. Light-gun games, dance mats, digital batting cages, etc are prohibitively expensive for the average person to afford, yet can provide fun and unique experiences. Likewise, they are intuitive enough to be picked up and used without instruction by the casual or incidental gamer, the kind that is not likely to have access to many other distribution options at home (consoles or up-to-date graphics cards).
Sadly, as a distribution medium the arcade is faltering badly, in no small part due to the inefficient economic model behind it. 'Core gamers often go to the arcade looking for the "latest and greatest" in entertainment, but find perhaps one or two first run games, with a smattering of older games they don't wish to play. This would be like a movie-goer wanting to see Die Another Day, but only being able to watch Tomorrow Never Dies because the movie house couldn't afford to buy a new reel of tape from the studios. Game distributers still sell boards to the arcade owners, who in turn try to recoup their investment from the gaming public. This is a very inefficient way of going about making the highest profit, as the distributers feed from the arcade owners, who (in their financially weakened state) attempt to feed upon the customers. But it is the customers who bring money into the system as a whole, and it is they whom both the producers and the providers should be focusing upon.
For example, a Capcom vs. SNK machine may lay dormant in an
Many of the kinks and problems have been ironed out.
Evidence indicates that several kinks and problems remain.
Think of it in terms of software, which do you think works better: version 1.0 or version 9?
In terms of software, we're on space shuttle version 1.99.99.99. We have tremendously smothed the wrinkles in an existing design, but the specifications at creation and the current necessary specifications and available technologies are radically different. This is not as simple as saving space and weight by using LCD moniters instead of CRT's... Could shuttle subsystems communicate more efficiently over 802.11b? Should liquid, nuclear, or ElectroMagnetic accelerants be used in place of solid fuel boosters? Should the shuttle carry less weight in order to carry payload to a higher orbit? Escape pod?
For crying out loud NASA engineers still scour Ebay looking for parts to keep the shuttle fleet up in the air. Isn't it about time we put a PowerPC or a P4 up in the air?
Maturity of a technology involves both incremental and radical redesigns... Such a process brought Win95, NT, XP, and someday a mature Windows OS. Mac OS9 was a very mature OS (based off of an OS7 lineage), but it was just too old and, in some ways, too mature to jerry rig preemptive multitasking into it.
Now that the shuttle has followed its natural lifecycle we are in the enviable position of looking at its role in the larger world and saying what is it being used for and, using our experience, how can we better design it to serve that need?
I am not saying a new design is a bad idea, just that we have a significant investment in our current shuttle and thats why it has been around so long.
Sadly, pouring good money after bad isn't going to help our prospects long-term. The costs are sunk, and can't be recouped. If designing and implementing a new shuttle costs 50 billion dollars, but the per-launch costs can be reduced from 450 million to 100 million, then assuming an acellerated launch schedule of one flight every two weeks (the original estimates for the original shuttle), we will have a net financial gain after less than 5 years. And besides the financial gain, who knows what the value of the scientific gain by having a shuttle capable of such frequent voyages.
(Yes the above numbers are somewhat spurious, but they also don't take into account the 2-4 billion dollars per current shuttle with a 50 flight lifespan, the cost of investigation of a shuttle disaster, the potential for reduced personnel in a more modern system, etc)
Essentially, Java's garbage collection throws things out when it thinks it needs to be thrown out, not when you do.
For example, a function that says [in non-pseudocode]
do
{ new variable = random();
manipulate( variable );
delete variable;
}while( keystate.escape() != DOWN )
could exist happily in C++, but an equivalent Java program would likely not be able to delete allocated memory until exiting the called function. Or maybe it will. But not controlling when the memory is managed can be difficult on a programmer, and can be difficult for a consumer program that intends to run for a very long time.
It's not a particularly strong point in why you wouldn't use Java, it's just a point.
Parent is modded funny, but there is a large grain of truth in what he says. After rock climbing, everything you see looks like a handhold or toehold. After playing Warcraft 3, I keep trying to move the cars on the freeway out of my way by selecting them and telling them to attack the ground off to the side of the road. After playing the latest Capcom brawler, I spar in my martial arts class trying to get the joystick to respond to the forward-down-downforward punch command.
In short, what videogames train you to do is not the action being depicted, but the method of interaction required for it. If killing a police officer ever involved scrolling around using the trackball and a keyboard, and clicking the right mouse button to unleash a BFG9000, then yes, videogames are training you to kill. Otherwise, they are training you to use the mouse and keyboard.
The military conditions you to kill by simulating it hundreds and hundreds of times... But their simulation is always real-life, involving actually running around with a gun loaded with blanks, and hunting people. Paintball is far, far more dangerous in this way than Quake.
Why derive your key from the first 20 imputs? Why not continually re-derive the key from the last 20 imputs, to allow for typestyle drift over time?
-C
7th Guest the game was actually only 1 CD, with 1 music CD for, well...
Action games do and have always relied upon violence because violence is far easier to simulate than creation, and the need for action is a repressed desire to be exploited. This is not necessarily a failure of imagination (it can be quite creative), but a reality of the current market. For every tetris that made it into public consciousness, there are about a hundred that were ignored in droves because the public doesn't find abstract gaming to be particularly gripping.
Since the introduction of Chun-Li in Street Fighter 2 (a reasonably endowed female, at least compared to some of the other characters in the game) fighting females have been getting more and more popular. Before then, women were largely reduced to the role of helpless princess to be rescued, medic, or very occasionally villaness (whose attempt to actualize was a defining factor in her evilness). Now they can shape their environment, go toe-to-toe with the 900 lb walking dumptrucks that pass as men in videogames and can do anything that men can do. With the general lack of women as leading action-hero roles (except in terrible game-to-movie conversions) strangely a large cultural spearhead of this has come from, well, videogames.
Does violence happen against protagonist women in videogames? Yes, but the depiction of violence against women has so often been against helpless women that the two separate concepts have become intrinsically linked. It is almost assumed in this culture that *any* violence against women will expose fragility, which is not the case (come out to boston for a women's football match sometime). The problem is the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and falling down crying, not the depiction of women being hit by the enemy and who in turn beats him to a bloody pulp. All protaganists in videogames hit back, and eventually win. That's empowering.
What's disempowering and what you touched upon was the hypersexualization of the female figure in videogames, which is a real problem. Videogaming is probably not the arena to fight this larger societal problem, however. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the characters need gross anatomical differences with wildly differing dress styles to be able to tell the two apart. And with men and women's violation of the age old long-hair-is-woman, short-hair-is-man code, there is very little to be able to distinguish between 32 pixel by 32 pixel male and female characters besides huge hips and big breasts vs giant shoulders and stunted legs. That part probably can't be stopped any time soon. The role variation needs to be upped, as does the number of female characters whose sexuality or sex life just doesn't come up, but arguing against oversized breasts in a medium whose plumber posterboy features a nose the size of his head is like shouting at the wind.
Either way, with female empowerment but continued female sexualization we've taken one step forward and no steps back. That doesn't mean that there is no ground left to cover. That means demonizing a medium which has overall improved the perception of women in our culture is shooting your friends.
If you want a target, start with those aformentioned magazine shops, preferably "YM" and "Cosmo Girl."
reporter:
Will you not present some of your evidence?
The power of our evidence is so strong that it can only be withstood by a hand picked group of analists while firmly sheilded behind Non-disclosure agreements. Our intentionally vague and broadly damning statements are to protect you from the horrible truths your minds are not yet ready to comprehend. X-Windows, Vim, Samba... The list of software that might contain infringing code is infinite. Can your mind grasp the infinite?
This is for your own good. Infidels.
Good point, but I think the larger point is.
No one has ever held onto the #1 spot in the graphics card industry. No one.
Perhaps it is because you are competing against a monolith that the up-and-comers can convince their engineers to give up hobbies and work 12 hour days. Perhaps it is because the leader of a #1 must be conservative in its movements to please the shareholders. Perhaps it is because with 10 other companies gunning for your head, one of them will be gambling on the right combination of technologies to mature in time for them to release their winning card.
Anyone remember when the Hercules was the be-all-end-all? Where are they now?
nVidia will go down. ATI will go down. What will not go down is the graphics card industry. Despite our multi-hundred dollar investment in one particular company, our allegiance should be to good gaming in general, and not to any specific manufacturer.
And yes, I'm sick of synthetic benchmarking. We should find ways to compare across games... for example running two graphics cards simultaneously in a system on retail games, and slowly upping the framerate until one then the other cannot keep up.
Hi,
I bought a Radeon 8500 128 two weeks ago. It took me one week to discover that the latest drivers conflicted with an obscure windows cache setting (prioritizing system cache over program cache). What did this error cause, you ask? It overwrote random blocks of my hard disk with random data.
So yes, there are still problems out there. Perhaps not with the latest ATI cards, but certainly with cards ATI still sells (the 8500 is currently sold under the name 9100).