I disagree. Even slapping a supercharger on your car will not decrease the life of your engine if you keep on top of the maintenance. Some jokers will reduce the pully size on the supercharger to max the boost, and at some point they can cross the threshold that can eat your engine.
Nowadays mfrs like http://kenne-bell.com have supercharging down to a sweet science. Stick with one of their kits and in 8 hours you will have +100 hp on your car and you can drive it daily for its normal lifespan.
Of course, if the added hp turns you into an idiot on the road and you are ragging your car out everywhere you go then that in itself will decrease the lifespan of your vehicle.
This thread is stale, but since you ask questions I will answer:
There are plenty of indie game developers with teams of three (or less) who are making great games for less than 1/3 of the figure I threw out there. Look at MoonPod. Read their forum - all of your "How" questions are answered there. Who needs an office? Outsource the art and sound, etc.
Download the demo and play it. Starscape is a great game, and those guys are likely set for life, or at least wont have to work for "the man" ever again. You could write 15 Starscapes for what the guys in the article blew. The fact that those mistakes have been made many times before (as you said) just makes it all the more shameful.
As for what "we" do all day, I coded in the game industry for several years and made more money then than I have at any position since. The royalties were huge for those projects that sold big. The hours didn't jive with raising a family, though, so I had to move on. The reason I got feisty with my post is that I'd love to go back to games if I had the money to start my own crew.
The tone of the article is kinda "we had bad circumstances and bad luck" but you read it and it's like "who the hell gave these bufoons 3M to write a game?!?!". Yeesh, give me 600K and I'll hire some Russian artists and one or two top notch U.S. coder buddies and give you something that you can sell like hotcakes in half the time. It makes me cry how shoddy the common U.S. developer is, especially in the gaming industry.
This is easy. Sign up at rentacoder.com and put your job out there. Dozens of software teams from South America, Russia, Romania, India, etc. will bid competitively for your work, offering to do it for a pennies on the dollar. rentacoder holds your money in escrow until the job is done according to your spec. rentacoder manages any arbitration should things go wrong. I've been very happy with rentacoder and the talent I've found out there, and no I dont work for them.
Try stalking through real woods wearing real camo armed with the paintball equivalent of Tommy guns loaded with 150 round drum clips. After picking up this hobby, playing UT (or whatever) online has paled for me. Price of entry: $110 in used equipment, plus the weekly assortment of bruises. Paintball rocks.
I solved this problem by putting on my earphones and playing music. Initially this was to drown out the kestrokes so that I could sleep. Incidentally I was playing it just loud enough that my roomate could hear it. He was unable to concentrate enough to write his paper, so he ended up going to the computer lab. Problem solved for that particular roomate.
One of those little routers uses up a lot less juice than your old Pentium I. My electric bill skyrocketed when I started leaving an old PC running 24/7. Stick with the router.
Class action suits are worthless. I participated in one against Iomega for the "clicking death" problem that I and so many others had with their early production Zip drives. What was my reward? A whopping $10 certificate towards a new Iomega Zip drive. Worthless!!! I'm sure the lawyers on both sides made millions and had a good laughing time doing it [insert favorite lawyer slur here].
If you do a good job and get repeat calls from the same businesses, offer to let them keep you on call 24/7 for a moderate montly retainer. Then, if you continue to do a good job you will be raking in big bucks from multiple customers for little actual work.
Make agreements with other quality people doing the same work in your area to cover for each other. Then if several of your customers have problems at the same time you can take care of them all with the extra sets of hands. And you will be able to go on vacation without losing customers due to bad timing of the latest worm release.
Im sitting here reading this while I wait for Win 2000 SP4 to install, which takes forever. This is the 34th computer I've had to do this to today. Why? Because every person in my company who knows anything about computers has been drafted into Helpdesk today to fight Nachi and Welchia viruses that have brought our mega-corportation to its knees. My whole development team is on this today - that's a lot of 70-80K people being paid to run patches. Not like we aren't days behind schedule on our real life projects. Happy happy joy joy!
That would have been an obvious ripoff of that classic star trek episode when Kirk shot that nasty Gorn with a bamboo gun stuffed with a giant diamond bullet.
The coolest part was when Kirk pulled out his pocket version of tha Anarchists Cookbook to get the correct ratio of charcoal, duck poop and fruit loops to make the gun powder.
> the ridiculous requirements on these lists are there for a reason
Yes they are. Said company is in the process of hiring an H1B and they need to show (for legal reasons) that there are no American citizens who match the job. So they asked their H1B for his entire skill set and put that out there in the job description. Then, when nobody applies with that exact resume, they can keep the H1B.
I've read that the second bomb was dropped to give the impression that the U.S. had a supply of such weapons.
If you think island fighting with the Japanese was a walk in the park, read "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge. Just because our kill ratios were high in comparison doesn't mean our boys were having any fun.
If I was president at the time, and new anything of the horrors of fighting the Japanese, I would have signed my name to the order to drop those bombs and slept like a baby that very night. The hindsight we have changes nothing in my eyes.
I've been brewing for years now and have only had one batch go bad. This happened when the kids (or dog?) knocked the airlock off my fermenter and I didn't notice it for a few days because we went out of town. That batch was poison. Everything else has been creamy smooth. What a great hobby. Just be reasonably careful about sanitization and home-brewing is a breeze.
One of my favorite brews is Mead. 16% alchohol - four beers in one! This is great if you have a wife who counts the empty bottles on the counter like mine. Yup, honey, just had one tonight [hic].
The holy grail of homebrewing is having your own keg system. This cuts the time down per batch from 6 hours to about 4 1/2. I have "black and tan" on tap for my poker nights. Wheel that puppy right up to the table. Now if I put a piss bucket under the table nobody ever has to get up.
"Microsoft loses around 6% share this month, as register.com continues to fluctuate between using a Windows and Linux front end, and homestead.com , which originally based its business model on support from advertising, cleared away over a million sites. Homestead recently raised $5M from its investors to assist its transition to a paid for serivces model. To complete a bad news month for Microsoft's share of the survey, Reuters reports that the Federal Trade Commission will investigate the relationship between Verisign and Interland with respect to marketing domain names. The NSI domain parking system hosted at Interland is the other large repository of parked sites on the Microsoft platform. Earlier in the year large numbers of sites were reaped at Namezero, which had a controversial relationship with NSI regarding reselling domain names."
1) Get a fake ID so you can get into bars. 2) Dont dress like you are trying to 'get some'. 3) Go to crowded collegetown bars on Thursdays and Fridays. I'm talking about the kind of bars where it is packed, wall-to-wall beer swilling. 4) Find a decent looking girl at the bar who is obviously consuming. 5) Go stand next to her to buy your next drink. 6) Strike up a conversation while waiting forever for service. Don't be pushy about the drink - you WANT to wait. 7) Ask her about her name, major, etc... your arent trying to pick her up, you are just waiting for your drink. Dont talk much about yourself, ask her about her. Use NO cheesy lines or moves. 8) If the conversation goes well for awhile, tell her you will be leaving soon as it is getting late. If she is leaving soon too, does she want you to walk her back to her place, just to make sure she gets home safe? 9) Walk her back to her room. 10) If you made it this far, she's going to invite you in for a coke or for coffee. 11) There wont be any coke or coffee - the making out starts once you get in the door. 12) You get to walk back to your place the next morning with a big ass smile on your face.
You see, with the above you never presented yourself as someone trying to get into her pants. You were just a nice guy at the bar. You never "conquered" her, things just happened! That's what a girl likes, to feel like it was all natural and there was no point where she bent to your will.
Gary Stern was president of Data East Pinball and then SEGA Pinball, so the Stern family was making pinballs through all that period - they were just doing it on someone else's dime.
I would guess that one of the target switches was flakey and the vibrations caused by the flipper action caused the switch to close, making the machine think you were hitting the target with the ball. You probably could have gotten the same effect by slapping the side of the machine with the palm of your hand at that point.
Assuming you are using multiple web servers, and that your app is complex enough to require a session data management scheme (rather than just passing vars from page to page in the query strings), I recommend using cookies for session data. Naturally this only applies IF you don't mind requiring your clients have cookies enabled, IF you don't need to store anything more complex than strings, and IF the total amount of data you need to store is small.
Another option is to store session data the your top level frame on the client, but this can be messy and hard to debug. Storing session in your database is elegant and easy to debug but can increase the hits on your database to a prohibitive degree. Adding database bandwidth in the future is difficult and expensive. Adding web servers to your system is comparatively cheap and easy.
Slashdot Mirror
... will be screen caps of his high scores and favorite frag moments. If his scores suxxor (or are for pokemon) then you know to run away screaming.
I disagree. Even slapping a supercharger on your car will not decrease the life of your engine if you keep on top of the maintenance. Some jokers will reduce the pully size on the supercharger to max the boost, and at some point they can cross the threshold that can eat your engine.
Nowadays mfrs like http://kenne-bell.com have supercharging down to a sweet science. Stick with one of their kits and in 8 hours you will have +100 hp on your car and you can drive it daily for its normal lifespan.
Of course, if the added hp turns you into an idiot on the road and you are ragging your car out everywhere you go then that in itself will decrease the lifespan of your vehicle.
This thread is stale, but since you ask questions I will answer:
There are plenty of indie game developers with teams of three (or less) who are making great games for less than 1/3 of the figure I threw out there. Look at MoonPod. Read their forum - all of your "How" questions are answered there. Who needs an office? Outsource the art and sound, etc.
Download the demo and play it. Starscape is a great game, and those guys are likely set for life, or at least wont have to work for "the man" ever again. You could write 15 Starscapes for what the guys in the article blew. The fact that those mistakes have been made many times before (as you said) just makes it all the more shameful.
As for what "we" do all day, I coded in the game industry for several years and made more money then than I have at any position since. The royalties were huge for those projects that sold big. The hours didn't jive with raising a family, though, so I had to move on. The reason I got feisty with my post is that I'd love to go back to games if I had the money to start my own crew.
The tone of the article is kinda "we had bad circumstances and bad luck" but you read it and it's like "who the hell gave these bufoons 3M to write a game?!?!". Yeesh, give me 600K and I'll hire some Russian artists and one or two top notch U.S. coder buddies and give you something that you can sell like hotcakes in half the time. It makes me cry how shoddy the common U.S. developer is, especially in the gaming industry.
This rocks! Now I will be able to sue my ISP in addition to the power company for that pesky third nipple!!!
This is easy. Sign up at rentacoder.com and put your job out there. Dozens of software teams from South America, Russia, Romania, India, etc. will bid competitively for your work, offering to do it for a pennies on the dollar. rentacoder holds your money in escrow until the job is done according to your spec. rentacoder manages any arbitration should things go wrong. I've been very happy with rentacoder and the talent I've found out there, and no I dont work for them.
Try stalking through real woods wearing real camo armed with the paintball equivalent of Tommy guns loaded with 150 round drum clips. After picking up this hobby, playing UT (or whatever) online has paled for me. Price of entry: $110 in used equipment, plus the weekly assortment of bruises. Paintball rocks.
I solved this problem by putting on my earphones and playing music. Initially this was to drown out the kestrokes so that I could sleep. Incidentally I was playing it just loud enough that my roomate could hear it. He was unable to concentrate enough to write his paper, so he ended up going to the computer lab. Problem solved for that particular roomate.
One of those little routers uses up a lot less juice than your old Pentium I. My electric bill skyrocketed when I started leaving an old PC running 24/7. Stick with the router.
Class action suits are worthless. I participated in one against Iomega for the "clicking death" problem that I and so many others had with their early production Zip drives. What was my reward? A whopping $10 certificate towards a new Iomega Zip drive. Worthless!!! I'm sure the lawyers on both sides made millions and had a good laughing time doing it [insert favorite lawyer slur here].
If you do a good job and get repeat calls from the same businesses, offer to let them keep you on call 24/7 for a moderate montly retainer. Then, if you continue to do a good job you will be raking in big bucks from multiple customers for little actual work.
Make agreements with other quality people doing the same work in your area to cover for each other. Then if several of your customers have problems at the same time you can take care of them all with the extra sets of hands. And you will be able to go on vacation without losing customers due to bad timing of the latest worm release.
Glad I checked to see if someone else posted this first. Amen, brother. Where are my mod points when I need them.
Im sitting here reading this while I wait for Win 2000 SP4 to install, which takes forever. This is the 34th computer I've had to do this to today. Why? Because every person in my company who knows anything about computers has been drafted into Helpdesk today to fight Nachi and Welchia viruses that have brought our mega-corportation to its knees. My whole development team is on this today - that's a lot of 70-80K people being paid to run patches. Not like we aren't days behind schedule on our real life projects. Happy happy joy joy!
That would have been an obvious ripoff of that classic star trek episode when Kirk shot that nasty Gorn with a bamboo gun stuffed with a giant diamond bullet.
The coolest part was when Kirk pulled out his pocket version of tha Anarchists Cookbook to get the correct ratio of charcoal, duck poop and fruit loops to make the gun powder.
If only Data East had went into production with this genius work, Fakuda would be right up there with Master Gates:
http://www.bunnyears.net/tattoo
(just a wee little bit of sarcasm)
We moved from AIM to Jabber at work because it can be secured via SSL. Problem is the server goes off the air several times a day. Grrr.
> the ridiculous requirements on these lists are there for a reason
Yes they are. Said company is in the process of hiring an H1B and they need to show (for legal reasons) that there are no American citizens who match the job. So they asked their H1B for his entire skill set and put that out there in the job description. Then, when nobody applies with that exact resume, they can keep the H1B.
I've read that the second bomb was dropped to give the impression that the U.S. had a supply of such weapons.
If you think island fighting with the Japanese was a walk in the park, read "With the Old Breed" by E.B. Sledge. Just because our kill ratios were high in comparison doesn't mean our boys were having any fun.
If I was president at the time, and new anything of the horrors of fighting the Japanese, I would have signed my name to the order to drop those bombs and slept like a baby that very night. The hindsight we have changes nothing in my eyes.
I've been brewing for years now and have only had one batch go bad. This happened when the kids (or dog?) knocked the airlock off my fermenter and I didn't notice it for a few days because we went out of town. That batch was poison. Everything else has been creamy smooth. What a great hobby. Just be reasonably careful about sanitization and home-brewing is a breeze.
One of my favorite brews is Mead. 16% alchohol - four beers in one! This is great if you have a wife who counts the empty bottles on the counter like mine. Yup, honey, just had one tonight [hic].
The holy grail of homebrewing is having your own keg system. This cuts the time down per batch from 6 hours to about 4 1/2. I have "black and tan" on tap for my poker nights. Wheel that puppy right up to the table. Now if I put a piss bucket under the table nobody ever has to get up.
Read a little further into the article:
"Microsoft loses around 6% share this month, as register.com continues to fluctuate between using a Windows and Linux front end, and homestead.com , which originally based its business model on support from advertising, cleared away over a million sites. Homestead recently raised $5M from its investors to assist its transition to a paid for serivces model. To complete a bad news month for Microsoft's share of the survey, Reuters reports that the Federal Trade Commission will investigate the relationship between Verisign and Interland with respect to marketing domain names. The NSI domain parking system hosted at Interland is the other large repository of parked sites on the Microsoft platform. Earlier in the year large numbers of sites were reaped at Namezero, which had a controversial relationship with NSI regarding reselling domain names."
1) Get a fake ID so you can get into bars.
2) Dont dress like you are trying to 'get some'.
3) Go to crowded collegetown bars on Thursdays and Fridays. I'm talking about the kind of bars where it is packed, wall-to-wall beer swilling.
4) Find a decent looking girl at the bar who is obviously consuming.
5) Go stand next to her to buy your next drink.
6) Strike up a conversation while waiting forever for service. Don't be pushy about the drink - you WANT to wait.
7) Ask her about her name, major, etc... your arent trying to pick her up, you are just waiting for your drink. Dont talk much about yourself, ask her about her. Use NO cheesy lines or moves.
8) If the conversation goes well for awhile, tell her you will be leaving soon as it is getting late. If she is leaving soon too, does she want you to walk her back to her place, just to make sure she gets home safe?
9) Walk her back to her room.
10) If you made it this far, she's going to invite you in for a coke or for coffee.
11) There wont be any coke or coffee - the making out starts once you get in the door.
12) You get to walk back to your place the next morning with a big ass smile on your face.
You see, with the above you never presented yourself as someone trying to get into her pants. You were just a nice guy at the bar. You never "conquered" her, things just happened! That's what a girl likes, to feel like it was all natural and there was no point where she bent to your will.
This is for you, Squidboy!
Gary Stern was president of Data East Pinball and then SEGA Pinball, so the Stern family was making pinballs through all that period - they were just doing it on someone else's dime.
I would guess that one of the target switches was flakey and the vibrations caused by the flipper action caused the switch to close, making the machine think you were hitting the target with the ball. You probably could have gotten the same effect by slapping the side of the machine with the palm of your hand at that point.
Assuming you are using multiple web servers, and that your app is complex enough to require a session data management scheme (rather than just passing vars from page to page in the query strings), I recommend using cookies for session data. Naturally this only applies IF you don't mind requiring your clients have cookies enabled, IF you don't need to store anything more complex than strings, and IF the total amount of data you need to store is small.
Another option is to store session data the your top level frame on the client, but this can be messy and hard to debug. Storing session in your database is elegant and easy to debug but can increase the hits on your database to a prohibitive degree. Adding database bandwidth in the future is difficult and expensive. Adding web servers to your system is comparatively cheap and easy.