Dude, you're whining about virtual items in a virtual world. Get over it.
I played Diablo II (a _lot_), and I finally just kicked it. It was nothing but hunt for items, and make a character to exploit whatever new patch came out recently. I never hacked except for MapHack, which I got rid of after a few months. I picked up the game again about a year later, playing hardcore mode (1 death = character gone), and map hack kind of defeats the purpose there. That lasted about 3 months (felt carpal tunnel coming on, dropped the game again).
My point is: you're complaining about a bunch of 15 year olds cheating and using it as an excuse that you should. That's the equivalent of "But he started it!".
I like your idea, though it has a big problem. I'll take GBA games as an example. Nintendo ships demo roms of games. First level, or only one character selectable, however they want to cripple it.
In order for them to be accurate representations of the game, they either have to
a) give you read-only cartridges as demos. No electronic delivery, high-cost for them. b) provide an emulator + rom download, thus expediting one of the two roadblocks to pure piracy (the emulator). c) Give you a read-write cartridge, and a rom download. You play it in your GBA. This is effectively b, but it plays on the console instead of on your computer.
There is no cheap solution that does not encourage piracy in the case of the GBA.
For optical media, it's a bit easier. They can put demos on other game discs in the extra space, or ship whole demo discs (PS2 does this - the JamPack demo discs. Xbox has these too). These tend to runabout 9$ a pop.
But, they still won't let you download and burn demos to disc and run them. That would be one step closer to letting you download illegally ripped roms and playing them on unmodded hardware.
FWIW, I bet Xbox will be the first succesful case of electronically delivered console game demos. Live + hard drive means they can give you a game demo in a controlled manner that doesn't contribute to piracy. That's a good thing.
PS2 could do the same, provided they get a network set up. They have the hard-disk add on.
Nintendo could have done this with the GBA player. A Flash memory unit in the player, and a hook into the broadband adapter to populate it, then customers could download GBA-cart demos and play them on the tv.
I guess the point is use the trusted hardware that your target market already has to deliver the demos.
IANAL, but I think you're misinterpreting this. If I sell a box running a linux kernel plus my own binary, which was compiled with gcc and uses libc, I do NOT have to distribute source code to my binary.
Now, if I had rolled my own kernel, then I would have to release source for those changes. But so long as I use something stock, it's no big deal.
After all, how many companies sell proprietary software for Linux? Oracle, IBM, Tibco, Mathematica. Enough that we've all heard of them and know that they make money doing it. You DO NOT have to GPL your code just because it runs on linux. You have to GPL your changes to GPL code though - which is why most black-box vendors will NOT alter the kernel or GPL'ed libraries at all. It makes their job tougher, as they don't have the flexibility to alter/strip down the low level pieces, but they don't help out their competitors either.
And the telecoms want money. If the government and industry have a common interest in screwing over consumers/citizens, then they will do it.
The stupid thing is that VOIP is essentially nothing but another addressing system for "voice chats". I can use iChat or AIM with sound, and it's just like VOIP except that the addressing is done by AOL instead of a telecom. In the end, they'll have regulations set up on technologies that the criminals they want to catch can get around easy.
I have a 30GB iPod that is full, as well as a 30 GB disk on my powerbook, which is also full. If I were to rip everything I _want_ to have available, I think it would be around 50 GB. Everything I own, around 70 GB (guessing - it's off of 570 CD's).
None of this 30 GB is downloaded stuff, with exception of about 10 tracks from iTunes Music Store. I own all of it, and it's all in rotation (thanks to ratings + smart playlists.
So yes, there is a small but existent market for mp3 players with 40+GB on them.
I'd like to see TakeTwo sue the killer's parents for negligence, or better yet, try the stupid little kids as adults and make an example out of them.
And to echo everyone else's sentiments: If a kid is going to grab a gun and go around killing/shooting for not motive and as if there are no consequences, he/she is impressionable enough for movies to give the same result, and has clueless parents to boot.
And for heaven sakes, how do these 15 year olds keep getting their hands on guns? Maybe THAT is a problem too?
Which is preferable depends on your listening habits. Personally, I like to put huge playlists on shuffle and have my own radio station (iPod + Smart Playlists rock for this). I may not listen to the same song twice in a month, and I go through about 70 a _day_. So, that's over 2000 songs a month. Microsoft's plan would suck for me.
Unless I exploit what I believe is a whole in MS's plan. I could trade in song N-1 for song N+1 while I play song N. Voila, I can listen to every song in their library, with no stops, as long as I am connected.
But anyways: if you tend to stick to a few albums for a short time then completely forget them, MS's deal isn't bad. If you come back to albums or want a really broad selection, ITMS is a better deal.
Me, I just buy CD's. They look pretty on the shelf, and I _own_ them no matter what happens to my computer or the distributor.
Also, both Rendezvous's use UDP multicast on the network. In fact, you can write Rendezvous (Tibco) apps and run them on disparate platforms on the same network with 'Zero Configuration'. There is enough gray area that this will go to court unless Apple settles.
I have a feeling that a) the Judge will be telling Apple to pay a lot of money b) Apple will pony up some cash.
I think you could argue Deus Ex (from Ion Storm) as a low-budget hit. It saved the studio, and nobody expected it to do well. And it was pretty original - an FPS that's not really a shooter.
But seriously, if you want to see original games, you can't look to consoles. The licensing and publishing costs are basically fixed (except for per-unit costs), so only games that are expected to profit will be made. Only the big studios can afford to make original games without risking the company on it.
The PC game market, on the other hand, can produce some original hits. You can do electronic distribution, don't pay a thing for licensing. You just need developers/artists and a business unit.
Go get Ikaruga for GameCube. Best shooter I've played in years, and it's top-down to boot. You have a control stick and three buttons, the gameplay is simple in description (shoot, dodge/block shots) but VERY difficult in practice.
Best of all, you'll start cursing the game once you get to the high levels, it gets so hard.
If they limit search-inside to logged-in users, then this becomes more difficult. You'd need an amazon account (1:1 with email address) for each set of pages that you view. If it's 10 or so pages per account, then a 300 page book means you need 30 accounts.
Except shrink the minimum install size and memory overhead by a large factor. The amount of work they put into code refactoring to produce firebird's current release is nothing short of amazin, no matter what the product is.
Of course, by supporting the WebServices interface to access the parts of the data you really care about (search, reviews, descriptions), you get that data easier, and Amazon doesn't have to serve up all the other shit on the page as well. And your session doesn't get tagged as a robot and sent off to the humor-the-script-kiddy boxes.
Amazon looks good for providing this, but it gets rid of the legitimate-use scripted site access killing any trend analysis they do, and reduces the load for parts of the page that your script would never use (recommendations, listmania, etc). And thats good for their operations.
While I basically agree with everything the parent poster said, the last statement really struck me. We are kicking butt to have anything working, but at the same time there's more than a few companies that really should write-off their current systems and start over from scratch. You can't keep retro-fitting that '69 VW Bug with new engine, transmission, etc. At some point you should give up on something and rewrite it.
And keep in mind Fred Brooks' famous line: expect to throw the first version away. That almost never gets followed, unless you wrote the first version strictly as a prototype for marketing to sell. If at all possible, make sure the same team builds v.2. If they can't/won't, at least make sure the team that DOES build v.2 knows how v.1 works and doesn't work, and has made parts of it work again. You don't learn from other people's mistakes unless you pay for them.
Parent post is the honest to god truth. It does't happen because the market doesn't want it.
I'm in an interesting job position - I maintain/develop libraries at a company with a large software presence. My customers are other developers. I also deal directly with third-party software vendors. In other words, I have developers as customers, and I as a developer am also a customer.
The overwhelming concern in everyone's mind is deadlines. Management in the software side is fighting for more time and less features, but the business side of the company (or any company) wants to make money, and if pestering vendor X to provide feature Y means that his development team can launch on time, then you can be sure that pestering will occur. I see this on a regular basis - about once a week I'm asked when feature X can be ready, or if we have feature Y at all. I'm also guilty of it myself, since it's the best way to keep my workload light and is less stuff for me to have to maintain.
The change has to start with upper management. We have to convince them that it's worth the time to go about proper engineering, and start working in real-time instead of internet-time. Unfortunately, the market has shown that the short-term winner stays for the next round and the long-term planner runs out of money. And we have no proof that real engineering concepts apply for all solutions - there may truly be some applications that evolve so fast that a true engineering process will always be playing catch-up.
If things are going to pick up, then someone has to show that slow and steady wins the race. And they'll need to be mostly-privately-owned, or have very understanding shareholders.
Are we seeing movie rentals or sales of DVD/VHS climbing? If we are, you have a point.
If not, I guess we blame it on lack-of-quality from Hollywood's offerings.
Re:Young coders have no life
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
Parent comment hit the nail on the head. If you keep good employees, they become senior employees (over time). Replace/grow with younger employees, and you can bleed them dry.
Young coders have flexible lives, and the _good_ young coders enjoy coding enough that they don't mind dumping 60+ hours a week into it. It's not until you get a history of code to support and butt-loads of meetings that you start to not-like your job, usually because it's not giving you enough time to code after all the support and meetings.
Another thought is that most companies have horrible and incredibly varied development practices. If you hire straight-from-college, you can train them to be what you want. They haven't learned any bad habits that can't be broken (yet).
Of course, if a great number of salaried employees weren't required to work crazy overtime hours, and instead took slight pay cuts so the company could hire sufficient new employees to take on the load, maybe there would be more jobs to go around.
Or something like that. We (the US) have high unemployment yet our employed work harder (read: more hours per week) than most, if not all, European countries. We're building our own unemployment by trading long work weeks for raises. We even creat our own inflation with these high salaries to justify working harder for the high salaries.
Did I mention we have fewer National holidays than most other first-world countries?
Your fictitious email address gives me an idea. We have top-level domains that are safe for parents to let their kids visit -.kids, websites with safe content opt-in. Why not declare the.kids domain to be unfit for "adult" spam, and crucify any spammer that violates this? There's no reason this should apply to websites and not to email.
I know that if I were a parent, I'd gladly pay a good sum of money to get my 12-year old a _safe_ email account. I don't want to have to read all his/her mail before they can see it - I just want to know it's safe.
That's because they add the new API's under a new package name when they realize the old API/implementation is broken. There's a reason that many 1.1 default API's are deprecated now.
Aside from deprecation, Java does remove interfaces. For example, System.getenv is now gone in Java 1.4.1 - it is flagged as deprecated only, and you will compile with just a warning. But if you run, it will give you a runtime exception. I bet there's more than a few apps out there on 1.3 or lower that rely on getenv, and now they'll have to go to JNI to do it.
However, Java is more stable and less problematic than (for example) C/C++. You don't have to rebuild for platform, and you are portable across a large number of platforms. But it's probably not as tight and consistent as the.NET CLR just because Java tries to support all platforms, and.NET was aimed at a hand-picked set, thus it can rely on certain things that Java can't - like pids, or the fork() command.
I had the original Nomad Jukebox (silver/blue, 6GB) and I think it was a piece of shite. The UI wasn't terrible, but the software clearly sucked. Battery life wasn't great at all, and to top it off the firmware/hardware was totally retarded with regards to re-charging the batteries.
Most of the time when I'd plug it in, it would refuse to charge the batteries. Occasionally this could be solved by leaving the unit on/plugged in, and taking out / re-inserting one of the four (4!) AA rechargeables. But that quit working, and I gave up on the unit.
The size (dimensions and storage), I could live with. But the poor battery life AND not being able to recharge, that was the final straw.
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Dude, you're whining about virtual items in a virtual world. Get over it.
I played Diablo II (a _lot_), and I finally just kicked it. It was nothing but hunt for items, and make a character to exploit whatever new patch came out recently. I never hacked except for MapHack, which I got rid of after a few months. I picked up the game again about a year later, playing hardcore mode (1 death = character gone), and map hack kind of defeats the purpose there. That lasted about 3 months (felt carpal tunnel coming on, dropped the game again).
My point is: you're complaining about a bunch of 15 year olds cheating and using it as an excuse that you should. That's the equivalent of "But he started it!".
I like your idea, though it has a big problem. I'll take GBA games as an example. Nintendo ships demo roms of games. First level, or only one character selectable, however they want to cripple it.
In order for them to be accurate representations of the game, they either have to
a) give you read-only cartridges as demos. No electronic delivery, high-cost for them.
b) provide an emulator + rom download, thus expediting one of the two roadblocks to pure piracy (the emulator).
c) Give you a read-write cartridge, and a rom download. You play it in your GBA. This is effectively b, but it plays on the console instead of on your computer.
There is no cheap solution that does not encourage piracy in the case of the GBA.
For optical media, it's a bit easier. They can put demos on other game discs in the extra space, or ship whole demo discs (PS2 does this - the JamPack demo discs. Xbox has these too). These tend to runabout 9$ a pop.
But, they still won't let you download and burn demos to disc and run them. That would be one step closer to letting you download illegally ripped roms and playing them on unmodded hardware.
FWIW, I bet Xbox will be the first succesful case of electronically delivered console game demos. Live + hard drive means they can give you a game demo in a controlled manner that doesn't contribute to piracy. That's a good thing.
PS2 could do the same, provided they get a network set up. They have the hard-disk add on.
Nintendo could have done this with the GBA player. A Flash memory unit in the player, and a hook into the broadband adapter to populate it, then customers could download GBA-cart demos and play them on the tv.
I guess the point is use the trusted hardware that your target market already has to deliver the demos.
IANAL, but I think you're misinterpreting this. If I sell a box running a linux kernel plus my own binary, which was compiled with gcc and uses libc, I do NOT have to distribute source code to my binary.
Now, if I had rolled my own kernel, then I would have to release source for those changes. But so long as I use something stock, it's no big deal.
After all, how many companies sell proprietary software for Linux? Oracle, IBM, Tibco, Mathematica. Enough that we've all heard of them and know that they make money doing it. You DO NOT have to GPL your code just because it runs on linux. You have to GPL your changes to GPL code though - which is why most black-box vendors will NOT alter the kernel or GPL'ed libraries at all. It makes their job tougher, as they don't have the flexibility to alter/strip down the low level pieces, but they don't help out their competitors either.
RPG = Rocket Propelled Grenades
They're one-time-use weapons, and I hear they go for about 40$ each on the world market.
That's weapon number 5 on your keyboard, kiddies.
You haven't seen the new PowerMacs G5500? I hear it knocks you clear across the world, instead of just into your front yard.
And the telecoms want money. If the government and industry have a common interest in screwing over consumers/citizens, then they will do it.
The stupid thing is that VOIP is essentially nothing but another addressing system for "voice chats". I can use iChat or AIM with sound, and it's just like VOIP except that the addressing is done by AOL instead of a telecom. In the end, they'll have regulations set up on technologies that the criminals they want to catch can get around easy.
I have a 30GB iPod that is full, as well as a 30 GB disk on my powerbook, which is also full. If I were to rip everything I _want_ to have available, I think it would be around 50 GB. Everything I own, around 70 GB (guessing - it's off of 570 CD's).
None of this 30 GB is downloaded stuff, with exception of about 10 tracks from iTunes Music Store. I own all of it, and it's all in rotation (thanks to ratings + smart playlists.
So yes, there is a small but existent market for mp3 players with 40+GB on them.
I'd like to see TakeTwo sue the killer's parents for negligence, or better yet, try the stupid little kids as adults and make an example out of them.
And to echo everyone else's sentiments: If a kid is going to grab a gun and go around killing/shooting for not motive and as if there are no consequences, he/she is impressionable enough for movies to give the same result, and has clueless parents to boot.
And for heaven sakes, how do these 15 year olds keep getting their hands on guns? Maybe THAT is a problem too?
Which is preferable depends on your listening habits. Personally, I like to put huge playlists on shuffle and have my own radio station (iPod + Smart Playlists rock for this). I may not listen to the same song twice in a month, and I go through about 70 a _day_. So, that's over 2000 songs a month. Microsoft's plan would suck for me.
Unless I exploit what I believe is a whole in MS's plan. I could trade in song N-1 for song N+1 while I play song N. Voila, I can listen to every song in their library, with no stops, as long as I am connected.
But anyways: if you tend to stick to a few albums for a short time then completely forget them, MS's deal isn't bad. If you come back to albums or want a really broad selection, ITMS is a better deal.
Me, I just buy CD's. They look pretty on the shelf, and I _own_ them no matter what happens to my computer or the distributor.
Also, both Rendezvous's use UDP multicast on the network. In fact, you can write Rendezvous (Tibco) apps and run them on disparate platforms on the same network with 'Zero Configuration'. There is enough gray area that this will go to court unless Apple settles.
I have a feeling that
a) the Judge will be telling Apple to pay a lot of money
b) Apple will pony up some cash.
Would you look at that unnecessary include. I bet all your software is as bloated as can be.
I think you could argue Deus Ex (from Ion Storm) as a low-budget hit. It saved the studio, and nobody expected it to do well. And it was pretty original - an FPS that's not really a shooter.
But seriously, if you want to see original games, you can't look to consoles. The licensing and publishing costs are basically fixed (except for per-unit costs), so only games that are expected to profit will be made. Only the big studios can afford to make original games without risking the company on it.
The PC game market, on the other hand, can produce some original hits. You can do electronic distribution, don't pay a thing for licensing. You just need developers/artists and a business unit.
Go get Ikaruga for GameCube. Best shooter I've played in years, and it's top-down to boot. You have a control stick and three buttons, the gameplay is simple in description (shoot, dodge/block shots) but VERY difficult in practice.
Best of all, you'll start cursing the game once you get to the high levels, it gets so hard.
If they limit search-inside to logged-in users, then this becomes more difficult. You'd need an amazon account (1:1 with email address) for each set of pages that you view. If it's 10 or so pages per account, then a 300 page book means you need 30 accounts.
Except shrink the minimum install size and memory overhead by a large factor. The amount of work they put into code refactoring to produce firebird's current release is nothing short of amazin, no matter what the product is.
The lesson that java preaches here is "don't overload/override operators".
Seriously, you can write a function that does that as efficiently as you're describing. Do you really need the operator syntax in every case?
Of course, by supporting the WebServices interface to access the parts of the data you really care about (search, reviews, descriptions), you get that data easier, and Amazon doesn't have to serve up all the other shit on the page as well. And your session doesn't get tagged as a robot and sent off to the humor-the-script-kiddy boxes.
Amazon looks good for providing this, but it gets rid of the legitimate-use scripted site access killing any trend analysis they do, and reduces the load for parts of the page that your script would never use (recommendations, listmania, etc). And thats good for their operations.
While I basically agree with everything the parent poster said, the last statement really struck me. We are kicking butt to have anything working, but at the same time there's more than a few companies that really should write-off their current systems and start over from scratch. You can't keep retro-fitting that '69 VW Bug with new engine, transmission, etc. At some point you should give up on something and rewrite it.
And keep in mind Fred Brooks' famous line: expect to throw the first version away. That almost never gets followed, unless you wrote the first version strictly as a prototype for marketing to sell. If at all possible, make sure the same team builds v.2. If they can't/won't, at least make sure the team that DOES build v.2 knows how v.1 works and doesn't work, and has made parts of it work again. You don't learn from other people's mistakes unless you pay for them.
Parent post is the honest to god truth. It does't happen because the market doesn't want it.
I'm in an interesting job position - I maintain/develop libraries at a company with a large software presence. My customers are other developers. I also deal directly with third-party software vendors. In other words, I have developers as customers, and I as a developer am also a customer.
The overwhelming concern in everyone's mind is deadlines. Management in the software side is fighting for more time and less features, but the business side of the company (or any company) wants to make money, and if pestering vendor X to provide feature Y means that his development team can launch on time, then you can be sure that pestering will occur. I see this on a regular basis - about once a week I'm asked when feature X can be ready, or if we have feature Y at all. I'm also guilty of it myself, since it's the best way to keep my workload light and is less stuff for me to have to maintain.
The change has to start with upper management. We have to convince them that it's worth the time to go about proper engineering, and start working in real-time instead of internet-time. Unfortunately, the market has shown that the short-term winner stays for the next round and the long-term planner runs out of money. And we have no proof that real engineering concepts apply for all solutions - there may truly be some applications that evolve so fast that a true engineering process will always be playing catch-up.
If things are going to pick up, then someone has to show that slow and steady wins the race. And they'll need to be mostly-privately-owned, or have very understanding shareholders.
Are we seeing movie rentals or sales of DVD/VHS climbing? If we are, you have a point.
If not, I guess we blame it on lack-of-quality from Hollywood's offerings.
Parent comment hit the nail on the head. If you keep good employees, they become senior employees (over time). Replace/grow with younger employees, and you can bleed them dry.
Young coders have flexible lives, and the _good_ young coders enjoy coding enough that they don't mind dumping 60+ hours a week into it. It's not until you get a history of code to support and butt-loads of meetings that you start to not-like your job, usually because it's not giving you enough time to code after all the support and meetings.
Another thought is that most companies have horrible and incredibly varied development practices. If you hire straight-from-college, you can train them to be what you want. They haven't learned any bad habits that can't be broken (yet).
Of course, if a great number of salaried employees weren't required to work crazy overtime hours, and instead took slight pay cuts so the company could hire sufficient new employees to take on the load, maybe there would be more jobs to go around.
Or something like that. We (the US) have high unemployment yet our employed work harder (read: more hours per week) than most, if not all, European countries. We're building our own unemployment by trading long work weeks for raises. We even creat our own inflation with these high salaries to justify working harder for the high salaries.
Did I mention we have fewer National holidays than most other first-world countries?
Your fictitious email address gives me an idea. We have top-level domains that are safe for parents to let their kids visit - .kids, websites with safe content opt-in. Why not declare the .kids domain to be unfit for "adult" spam, and crucify any spammer that violates this? There's no reason this should apply to websites and not to email.
I know that if I were a parent, I'd gladly pay a good sum of money to get my 12-year old a _safe_ email account. I don't want to have to read all his/her mail before they can see it - I just want to know it's safe.
That's because they add the new API's under a new package name when they realize the old API/implementation is broken. There's a reason that many 1.1 default API's are deprecated now.
.NET CLR just because Java tries to support all platforms, and .NET was aimed at a hand-picked set, thus it can rely on certain things that Java can't - like pids, or the fork() command.
Aside from deprecation, Java does remove interfaces. For example, System.getenv is now gone in Java 1.4.1 - it is flagged as deprecated only, and you will compile with just a warning. But if you run, it will give you a runtime exception. I bet there's more than a few apps out there on 1.3 or lower that rely on getenv, and now they'll have to go to JNI to do it.
However, Java is more stable and less problematic than (for example) C/C++. You don't have to rebuild for platform, and you are portable across a large number of platforms. But it's probably not as tight and consistent as the
I had the original Nomad Jukebox (silver/blue, 6GB) and I think it was a piece of shite. The UI wasn't terrible, but the software clearly sucked. Battery life wasn't great at all, and to top it off the firmware/hardware was totally retarded with regards to re-charging the batteries.
Most of the time when I'd plug it in, it would refuse to charge the batteries. Occasionally this could be solved by leaving the unit on/plugged in, and taking out / re-inserting one of the four (4!) AA rechargeables. But that quit working, and I gave up on the unit.
The size (dimensions and storage), I could live with. But the poor battery life AND not being able to recharge, that was the final straw.