In Australia they've promoted http://dns-ok.gov.au/, which to me seems like a good idea (utilising the trust expectation of a.gov.au site) rather than going with a 3rd party site.
The real tragedy is that it doesn't need to be that way. As was pointed out in multiple interviews with ex-staff you have huge waste. You don't have to run a 24/7 crunch for 8 years. That's just poor management excusing their incompetence. I've seen it before many times. The leadership treats the people as dispensable. The people quit. They fall behind. They treat the next people like shit. They quit. They fall further behind. If they had paced themselves at the beginning and been honest that they couldn't match their deadlines then ultimately they would be more productive and finish sooner. But they also have the publisher breathing down their neck and they know that admitting to needing a 100% larger budget will end the project. Asking for 10 10% extensions to not "let the work done so far go to waste so far" keeps their death spiral alive.
People leaving / burning out is the big problem, you just can't drive people to do any kind of non-mechanical work for those kinds of hours over an extended period of time. When they do leave, they take most of the knowledge they've gained about the project with them (regardless of the documentation procedures you have in place), which puts the development even further behind, driving management to crack out the whip and feed the cycle some more.
The absolute worst thing you can have is staff turnover in software projects, if you had 30% more workforce and your turnover was low, you'd gain more than those wages back in compression of delivery schedule and hence less wage duration (i.e., maybe it wouldn't have taken them 7 years to finish the game). That's without even thinking about if the 80th hour of a programmers work week is as productive as the 40th (it's not).
The problem is that game dev managers; see a willing workforce out there that they can abuse because of the industry, have stupidly optimistic deadlines and budgets set to even get the project approved and a general distain for project management as a task (it's all about getting people to tap keys as long and as quickly as possible).
My computer is leaking my IP Address to internet!
Not a big deal, there are a whole lot of other services: Windows Update, Time Syching (most people will have that on), Weather (some people), 8000 different software update checks etc.
If you are paranoid about your system checking if you can pull a file from an MS server, then disconnect your machine from the net, because everything else is going to scare the hell out of you.
We reward the wrong competitive that in the end really wastes our limited resources. Its not his fault that society liked his songs, but rather shouldn't we realized that in the end we shouldn't just be sheeple ingoring our own plight.
....
Will a pop star be able to save us in the event of a meteor impact?
What about global warming, tsunami, outbreak of a virus, nuclear proliferation, global famine, and what about the samll things?
Society needs a balance, entertainment and the arts in all it's forms (music, movies, sports etc.) is an important of people's lives, it's an important part of society it's self. Those people doing research and working hard on fixing various problems that afflict our society like everyone else take a break by cranking up some music or yelling at the TV whilst watching whatever sporting team they support.
Life can't be just about "serious" things. I agree that we don't necessarily fund or acknowledge those things which make a major impact towards advances for the human race, but I can tell you that my life would a far worse place without music, sports and books to read, and that the producers of those have enriched my life also.
It's easy for these sort of things to get to the "but the goverment should fund schools, police and hospitals more, aren't they more imporant than " argument. The truth is that you can't fund somethings to the complete exclusion of others, even though those things are more "important", you end up with a very unbalanced world.
But the cows at the dairy farm across from me seemed to be treated well. The cattle out in Montana roaming the ranges seemed perfectly normal to me too.
Exactly, the locally produced meat (South West region of Australia) comes from cows who have what amounts to a pretty damn good life. I'm from the country originally, though not a farmer, and the cows get very well treated. They stand around in a field all day eating grass, plentiful water and lots of room.
I always think it's crazy that people are all for free range chicken (which I think is a good thing), but won't eat beef on moral grounds. At least locally, its free range beef, no one is caging that cow up.
I think the best argument against that it's moral to not eat beef, is that by being vegetarian and not eating beef, they are denying those cows an existance. Non-dairy cows wont ever be born to enjoy a life of eating grass and hanging out with other cows in a field, they are exclusively a farmed animal. Sure their life will be cut shorter than their natural lifespan, but without meat consumption, they won't ever exist. How can that be the moral stance?
There are others in this thread that have posted along the same lines, just a little more background on Michael Malone from a standpoint geeks can understand. He used to play DnD with my wife's cousin, until iiNet got huge, An ISP which he started with a mate in his suburban backyard when they were annoyed at not being able to play MUDs after they left uni (or so the story goes). I've met him, seems like a nice guy.
Sure all of that doesn't mean that you have to take everything he says blindly or think that he's never going to act out of business interest like any other businessman, but he's not a technically clueless suit.
In Australia at least, rabbit ears work perfectly with digital set to boxes as long as the reception in your area is good enough (if it was adequate to watch analogue TV with before it'll work perfectly with digital).
It's generally a good idea to not give your boss the optimistic time, if you are going to give your boss an optimistic time, at least fudge it up a bit. If you are really unlucky and have shoddy management, your boss may tell the optimistic time to a client, or even if they don't do that they will have that time in the back of their mind. You are better off beating a fudged optimistic time than equaling a real optimistic time.
I swear I remember a version of the ICQ page even worse than that, but it may just be the scar the website left in my brain. I remember seriously looking for something on that site once, made me want to hurt people.
Mode 7 was included in the SNES for exactly that purpose though. While F-Zero did look amazing when the SNES first came out, it wasn't exactly pushing the hardware, it was just using it as it was meant to be used.
I've always been impressed with Nintendo's build quality as far as cheapish mass market products go.
Going back a fair way, a mate of mine had an original GameBoy, he was in his early teens and a bit of an angry man, when he was playing it and he died he'd get really frustrated and smack the GB on the metal bed head on the end on his bed. Now, it did die eventually after a couple of years, but god damn that machine took some hefty beating before it stopped.
However, instead of calling some games action/adventures, as I should, I tend to severly downrate them in my reviews for their violations of my definition. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is a prime example. As good as the character development, writing and the majority of puzzles were, I gave it only 75%, courtesy of the action sequences.
Given that the action sequences in Broken Sword 3 were a) easy and b) only a very very minor part of the game it would seem strange that they annoyed you enough to make the game down significantly.
This does fit in with your self proclaimed crusade. However if it results in people missing out on a great game because they read your review and think that the action sequences are more of a problem than they are, then perhaps you need to rethink your approach.
Re:standards compliance ... drag and drop in Galle
on
The Future of Firefox
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· Score: 1
The parent poster did say "You have to rely on ActiveX, Java, etc.", not just that you had to use ActiveX.
We play Magic at lunch time where I work, it's a great lunch time game. I was never into Magic when I was younger, but two other guys used to play years ago, they brought their cards into work and some of the rest of us got sucked in. Now we have quite a few people who play.
The GBA backwards compatability is what sold me. I own an original GBA and could never quite convince myself that it was worth shelling out for the GBA SP even though it had many features that I really wanted in a Gameboy (built in batteries / backlight). The DS gives me both of these in addition to it's native titles.
Mario 64 DS is amazing, I only played a few hours of the original on a friends system so it's mostly new to me. Sure there isn't many other good games out for the system now, but the games are coming now that there has been strong sales of the system. In the mean time I plan to pick up Zelda: Minish Cap which will play great on my DS.
Thief 3 was great (on PC, I can't comment on the XBOX version). Having played through all the thief games, it was my favourite. It didn't revolutionise the thief formula or anything, but when you have perfection why mess with it too much?
Like most things produced by the BBC, we got those in Australia as well. They were practicly the only computers we had in my Primary School, naturally I loved them.
That's one of my favourite stories as well. If it makes you fell any better there is a short story that comes some time after it (who's name I forget, sorry) where Harriman finally gets into space.
I totally agree, there is nothing I hate more than a book/movie review that just describes the plot. I dont WANT reviews to describe any of the plot beyond the initial setup,
I want them to tell me if it was good or not and why. Of course in describing why the it was good it can be necessary to talk about some details of the book/movie but be clever about it and don't just give the whole thing away.
Nothing annoys me more than seeing a preview for a movie that summarises the first 3/4 of the movie and then flicks up a scene from the end of the movie which allows you to work out what happens in the end. What's the point of going to see it after that.
Blurbs on books are just as bad sometimes, the first part of the book carries no tension because you know roughly where the characters end up once the meat of the story starts because it's written on the back of the book. At least it it's easy to avoid reading the back of books, there isn't much you can do when sitting in the cinema and another poorly done preview starts up.
Re:5 megs.. that actually means a lot of things..
on
Windows 95 in 4.47MB
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· Score: 1
I guess by trial and error.. delete a file, see if solitair runs, delete a file, etc
Seriously, this is pretty much what we did when trying to reduce win95 to run on a small drive in an embedded environment (fortunately the application was not really uptime critical, but it's surprising how stable you can make win95b when it isn't doing much and on running stable hardware). We left the programs we wanted to use running and trolled through the system directory deleting files that weren't in use. There were a few that you needed to put back, but it worked fairly well.
I dont think they make the videos available for download. By the sounds of it they are actually on physical videos, not in any digital form. I'm sure they could also do without the bandwidth bills from people downloading 2 hours worth of someone playing Metroid, not to mention 33 hours of someone playing Asteroids on the 2600!
Maybe, just maybe, American children don't know who Tintin is. Maybe hes big in Europe (where we bought a half dozen Tintin books for the first time). Maybe Tintin isn't an American thing, so perhaps you've just got yourself a terribly narrow outlook on the world. Maybe.
The poster of the comment you replied to is Australian, not American. It's funny that perhaps you have such a terribly narrow outlook on the world that you assumed the poster was American.
That being said (anti-flamebait!) I'm amazed you mentioned ASP, not because of of its flamebait value, but because, um, it sucks. I swear to God, there must be "if(client != "IEWin"){slow_down(); crash_unpredictably();}" in the source somewhere.
In defense of ASP, it is strictly a server side language. Although it does interact with the browser (through cookies, forms etc.) none of these should cause the problems you are talking about. Most likely the person who designed the asp page only checked it with IE or used a heap of IE specific code, but that is not ASP's fault. From my (admittedly limited) experience in using ASP I've never had a problem with its pages working in Mozilla.
Slashdot Mirror
In Australia they've promoted http://dns-ok.gov.au/, which to me seems like a good idea (utilising the trust expectation of a .gov.au site) rather than going with a 3rd party site.
The real tragedy is that it doesn't need to be that way. As was pointed out in multiple interviews with ex-staff you have huge waste. You don't have to run a 24/7 crunch for 8 years. That's just poor management excusing their incompetence. I've seen it before many times. The leadership treats the people as dispensable. The people quit. They fall behind. They treat the next people like shit. They quit. They fall further behind. If they had paced themselves at the beginning and been honest that they couldn't match their deadlines then ultimately they would be more productive and finish sooner. But they also have the publisher breathing down their neck and they know that admitting to needing a 100% larger budget will end the project. Asking for 10 10% extensions to not "let the work done so far go to waste so far" keeps their death spiral alive.
People leaving / burning out is the big problem, you just can't drive people to do any kind of non-mechanical work for those kinds of hours over an extended period of time. When they do leave, they take most of the knowledge they've gained about the project with them (regardless of the documentation procedures you have in place), which puts the development even further behind, driving management to crack out the whip and feed the cycle some more.
The absolute worst thing you can have is staff turnover in software projects, if you had 30% more workforce and your turnover was low, you'd gain more than those wages back in compression of delivery schedule and hence less wage duration (i.e., maybe it wouldn't have taken them 7 years to finish the game). That's without even thinking about if the 80th hour of a programmers work week is as productive as the 40th (it's not).
The problem is that game dev managers; see a willing workforce out there that they can abuse because of the industry, have stupidly optimistic deadlines and budgets set to even get the project approved and a general distain for project management as a task (it's all about getting people to tap keys as long and as quickly as possible).
My computer is leaking my IP Address to internet! Not a big deal, there are a whole lot of other services: Windows Update, Time Syching (most people will have that on), Weather (some people), 8000 different software update checks etc. If you are paranoid about your system checking if you can pull a file from an MS server, then disconnect your machine from the net, because everything else is going to scare the hell out of you.
We reward the wrong competitive that in the end really wastes our limited resources. Its not his fault that society liked his songs, but rather shouldn't we realized that in the end we shouldn't just be sheeple ingoring our own plight.
....
Will a pop star be able to save us in the event of a meteor impact? What about global warming, tsunami, outbreak of a virus, nuclear proliferation, global famine, and what about the samll things?
Society needs a balance, entertainment and the arts in all it's forms (music, movies, sports etc.) is an important of people's lives, it's an important part of society it's self. Those people doing research and working hard on fixing various problems that afflict our society like everyone else take a break by cranking up some music or yelling at the TV whilst watching whatever sporting team they support.
Life can't be just about "serious" things. I agree that we don't necessarily fund or acknowledge those things which make a major impact towards advances for the human race, but I can tell you that my life would a far worse place without music, sports and books to read, and that the producers of those have enriched my life also.
It's easy for these sort of things to get to the "but the goverment should fund schools, police and hospitals more, aren't they more imporant than " argument. The truth is that you can't fund somethings to the complete exclusion of others, even though those things are more "important", you end up with a very unbalanced world.
End rant.
But the cows at the dairy farm across from me seemed to be treated well. The cattle out in Montana roaming the ranges seemed perfectly normal to me too.
Exactly, the locally produced meat (South West region of Australia) comes from cows who have what amounts to a pretty damn good life. I'm from the country originally, though not a farmer, and the cows get very well treated. They stand around in a field all day eating grass, plentiful water and lots of room.
I always think it's crazy that people are all for free range chicken (which I think is a good thing), but won't eat beef on moral grounds. At least locally, its free range beef, no one is caging that cow up.
I think the best argument against that it's moral to not eat beef, is that by being vegetarian and not eating beef, they are denying those cows an existance. Non-dairy cows wont ever be born to enjoy a life of eating grass and hanging out with other cows in a field, they are exclusively a farmed animal. Sure their life will be cut shorter than their natural lifespan, but without meat consumption, they won't ever exist. How can that be the moral stance?
There are others in this thread that have posted along the same lines, just a little more background on Michael Malone from a standpoint geeks can understand. He used to play DnD with my wife's cousin, until iiNet got huge, An ISP which he started with a mate in his suburban backyard when they were annoyed at not being able to play MUDs after they left uni (or so the story goes). I've met him, seems like a nice guy.
Sure all of that doesn't mean that you have to take everything he says blindly or think that he's never going to act out of business interest like any other businessman, but he's not a technically clueless suit.
In Australia at least, rabbit ears work perfectly with digital set to boxes as long as the reception in your area is good enough (if it was adequate to watch analogue TV with before it'll work perfectly with digital).
It's generally a good idea to not give your boss the optimistic time, if you are going to give your boss an optimistic time, at least fudge it up a bit. If you are really unlucky and have shoddy management, your boss may tell the optimistic time to a client, or even if they don't do that they will have that time in the back of their mind. You are better off beating a fudged optimistic time than equaling a real optimistic time.
I swear I remember a version of the ICQ page even worse than that, but it may just be the scar the website left in my brain. I remember seriously looking for something on that site once, made me want to hurt people.
Mode 7 was included in the SNES for exactly that purpose though. While F-Zero did look amazing when the SNES first came out, it wasn't exactly pushing the hardware, it was just using it as it was meant to be used.
I've always been impressed with Nintendo's build quality as far as cheapish mass market products go.
Going back a fair way, a mate of mine had an original GameBoy, he was in his early teens and a bit of an angry man, when he was playing it and he died he'd get really frustrated and smack the GB on the metal bed head on the end on his bed. Now, it did die eventually after a couple of years, but god damn that machine took some hefty beating before it stopped.
However, instead of calling some games action/adventures, as I should, I tend to severly downrate them in my reviews for their violations of my definition. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is a prime example. As good as the character development, writing and the majority of puzzles were, I gave it only 75%, courtesy of the action sequences. Given that the action sequences in Broken Sword 3 were a) easy and b) only a very very minor part of the game it would seem strange that they annoyed you enough to make the game down significantly. This does fit in with your self proclaimed crusade. However if it results in people missing out on a great game because they read your review and think that the action sequences are more of a problem than they are, then perhaps you need to rethink your approach.
The parent poster did say "You have to rely on ActiveX, Java, etc.", not just that you had to use ActiveX.
So his problem remains.
We play Magic at lunch time where I work, it's a great lunch time game. I was never into Magic when I was younger, but two other guys used to play years ago, they brought their cards into work and some of the rest of us got sucked in. Now we have quite a few people who play.
He needs something in return for the amount of time he's resuced her.
Yeah, they would never have done anything like tell Miramax that they couldn't distribute Dogma.
The GBA backwards compatability is what sold me. I own an original GBA and could never quite convince myself that it was worth shelling out for the GBA SP even though it had many features that I really wanted in a Gameboy (built in batteries / backlight). The DS gives me both of these in addition to it's native titles.
Mario 64 DS is amazing, I only played a few hours of the original on a friends system so it's mostly new to me. Sure there isn't many other good games out for the system now, but the games are coming now that there has been strong sales of the system. In the mean time I plan to pick up Zelda: Minish Cap which will play great on my DS.
Thief 3 was great (on PC, I can't comment on the XBOX version). Having played through all the thief games, it was my favourite. It didn't revolutionise the thief formula or anything, but when you have perfection why mess with it too much?
Like most things produced by the BBC, we got those in Australia as well. They were practicly the only computers we had in my Primary School, naturally I loved them.
That's one of my favourite stories as well. If it makes you fell any better there is a short story that comes some time after it (who's name I forget, sorry) where Harriman finally gets into space.
I totally agree, there is nothing I hate more than a book/movie review that just describes the plot. I dont WANT reviews to describe any of the plot beyond the initial setup,
I want them to tell me if it was good or not and why. Of course in describing why the it was good it can be necessary to talk about some details of the book/movie but be clever about it and don't just give the whole thing away.
Nothing annoys me more than seeing a preview for a movie that summarises the first 3/4 of the movie and then flicks up a scene from the end of the movie which allows you to work out what happens in the end. What's the point of going to see it after that.
Blurbs on books are just as bad sometimes, the first part of the book carries no tension because you know roughly where the characters end up once the meat of the story starts because it's written on the back of the book. At least it it's easy to avoid reading the back of books, there isn't much you can do when sitting in the cinema and another poorly done preview starts up.
I guess by trial and error.. delete a file, see if solitair runs, delete a file, etc
Seriously, this is pretty much what we did when trying to reduce win95 to run on a small drive in an embedded environment (fortunately the application was not really uptime critical, but it's surprising how stable you can make win95b when it isn't doing much and on running stable hardware). We left the programs we wanted to use running and trolled through the system directory deleting files that weren't in use. There were a few that you needed to put back, but it worked fairly well.
I dont think they make the videos available for download. By the sounds of it they are actually on physical videos, not in any digital form. I'm sure they could also do without the bandwidth bills from people downloading 2 hours worth of someone playing Metroid, not to mention 33 hours of someone playing Asteroids on the 2600!
Maybe, just maybe, American children don't know who Tintin is. Maybe hes big in Europe (where we bought a half dozen Tintin books for the first time). Maybe Tintin isn't an American thing, so perhaps you've just got yourself a terribly narrow outlook on the world. Maybe.
The poster of the comment you replied to is Australian, not American. It's funny that perhaps you have such a terribly narrow outlook on the world that you assumed the poster was American.
In defense of ASP, it is strictly a server side language. Although it does interact with the browser (through cookies, forms etc.) none of these should cause the problems you are talking about. Most likely the person who designed the asp page only checked it with IE or used a heap of IE specific code, but that is not ASP's fault. From my (admittedly limited) experience in using ASP I've never had a problem with its pages working in Mozilla.