Tried pricing up a decent box for some heavy-lifting, there's just so much complexity out there! It's hard to figure out where the bleeding edge is and where the most effective bang for the buck zone is behind all the blood. 286, 386, 486, a man used to be able to tell where computers sat! And then all that Pentium bullshit started. I don't know what the fuck I'm looking at. I'm crossing my fingers and going with a Tom's Hardware recommended build list.
The Free Open Source Software community, that builds free, open source software, is complaining that they are not, in one way or another, being another compensated for their free software?
Compensation should be free, as in love. Send some marketing babes over.
Business managers don't want to pay for great when good will do. Have you gotten the beta to compile yet? Good, we're shipping. I don't care if it was a tech demo, I don't care if you said your plan was to figure out how to do it first, then go back through and do it right. We have a deadline, get your ass in gear.
Then the next release cycle comes around and they want more features, cram them in, or fuck it we'll just outsource it to India. We don't know how to write a decent design spec and so even if the Indians are good programmers, the language barrier and cluelessness will lead to disaster.
And here's the real kicker -- why bother to write better when people buy new computers every three years? We'll just throw hardware at the problem. == this is the factor that's likely to change the game.
If you look at consoles, games typically get better the longer it's on the market because programmers become more familiar with the platform and what it can do. You're not throwing more hardware at the problem, not until the new console ships. That could be years and years away, just for the shipping, and even more years until there's decent market penetration. No, you have to do something wonderful and new and it has to be done on the current hardware. You're forced to get creative.
With the push towards netbooks and relatively low-power systems (low-power by today's standards!), programmers won't be able to count on power outstripping bloat. They'll have to concentrate on efficiency or else they won't have a product.
There's also the question of how much the effort is worth. $5000 in damage to my current car totals it, even if it could be be repaired. I can go out and buy a new car. In Cuba, there's no such thing as a new car, there's only so many on the market. (are they able to import any these days?) Anyway, that explains why the 1950's disposable rustbuckets are still up and running. When no new cars are available for love or money, the effort in keeping an old one running pays for itself.
Excellence has to be a priority coming down from the top in a company. If cut-rate expediency is the order of the day, crap will be the result.
I hate to tell you this, but that was just a horse dildo. Funny, the things age does to memory: one minute you're looking at a horse dildo, the next minute, you're convinced that ancient instruments are hanging out in rural Tennessee.
[quote]Of course, the most popular music now is the 4-6 piece "rock" band. Drums, keyboard, and some number of guitars is the "standard" pop music right now. [much like violin, viola, cello, and bass in the 1600's][/quote]
Popular is a relative term. While I would agree that rock-style instrumentation is popular amongst those operating under the "alternative" label, and nothing but synthesizers and samples seems to suffice for hip-hop, there's still music produced today that requires more players, music that's even popular. Orchestral metal is fairly popular over in Europe.
Ignore any of their live stuff on youtube. They're more of a studio band -- they'd have to be given the range and complexity of the arrangements, and trying to translate it to stage can be problematic at times, even though they put together the full male and female choruses to try and pull it off.
I always thought after Cypher tried to make the deal with Agent Smith to get back to the Matrix that it would have been a damned cool twist if in the third one he went to the machine city and found out that...there simply was NO Zion.
Shit, that's what I thought I saw on-screen when Neo zapped the squiddies out there in the "real world." I thought "Holy shit, he never actually left the matrix!"
The Matrix really should never have had sequels. There simply wasn't any more story that needed telling. But if they had to make a sequel, that's the angle they should have gone with. The only thing that could have possibly been more entertaining would be for them to escape into the real real world and find out that the blackened skies and body farms was still part of the matrix and that the real world was actually quite nice and pleasant. Some machines decided to keep living in VR worlds because they felt it was real enough but others insisted on inhabiting physical bodies and living in physical space because it felt more real. And among these types you have Machines for the Ethical Treatment of People (pronounced meat-pee) and then the whole thing could be played for the social satire. That'd work better as a Mad TV sketch than a proper sequel but what the hey.
It strikes me that an online RPG might begin with a book: a three or four year story arc that has a clear beginning, a middle and an end.
It would be a particularly rewarding experience for those who came in and early and stayed the course.
But you could enter and exit at any point with some sense of achievement - and a unique experience of the game.
Part of the problem is epeen stroking. People want to have something to show for their time in the game, more levels and greater loot, etc.
I know I'm personally sick of mmorpg's because of the content recycling. I play a stand-alone game, there's 20 hours worth of material and then I'm done. I play an mmorpg, the devs only have the budget for 20 hours worth of material so it ends up getting recycled to make four the thousands of hours of lifesucking gameplay. A mechanic that was fun the first time gets old when you have to grind for gold, grind for xp, and then you go into pvp and lose it all.
Resetting the game world and starting a new story would appeal to the causal gamers but the hardcore would be up in arms. While they are a smaller percentage of your total playerbase, they're also going to be the ones who are spending the most money like with a dozen alt accounts.
I think that the one innovation that might get more people playing would be to make new mmo's more like the old BBS door games. For those who don't know, door games were games on the old dial-up bulletin boards that predated the internet for most of us. Because access was limited to phone lines, a bbs couldn't allow people to hog the connection all day so games were limited to an hour a day, maybe less. The computer stored a persistent world but it was only shared amongst other users on the same BBS.
So my thinking is that they can create a game where there's a limited amount of time you can play in a day to dissuade gamers from power-grinding and where you can select who your other players would be. For something the equivalent of Trade Wars, it would effectively be a turn-based multiplayer game where each turn occurs on a day by day basis. A full game may take a month or two from start to finish.
The other alternative I can think of is for serious PVP action. Games like EVE boast that their pvp is serious and has consequences. And this is true. It takes a lot of time and effort to scrape together the isk to build your kewl battleship and it can be lost in 30 seconds. That's a pretty big penalty when you realize that it's going to take another two weeks of solid play to get another one of those. But perhaps instead of requiring grinding, make it be more like a time-out in a death match game. You earn the right to a certain class of ship, fine. You lose it, you have to wait a day to take it out again. So there's the sense of risk and fear in taking out the cool toy but not the same amount of lost time replacing it. Then again, the masochistic types who like this play dynamic might demand to keep the pain.
American comic shops are fairly embarrassing places to be. I personally love the comic medium, think it's fabu, but there's a lot of crap out there. Because comics are expensive and are no longer casual purchases for kids, the publishers have to cater to the disposable income market. That's teens and young adults. Sex and violence are to entertainment what salt, sugar and fat is to food. The fanboys are the ones who want big-titted heroines in fighting crime in lingerie. They want the edgier and darker crap with violence and 'slosions.
It's like what we're seeing with the Republican party. The GOP isn't all that popular right now and so the party leaders are trying to play to their base, drum up support. But the very act of playing to that base alienates people who only have a weak inclination to the party. So you end up having loyalty tests, demanding candidates meet ridiculous standards, purges to ensure ideological purity. Specter is as loyal a Republican as you could possibly hope for and disagrees with the Dems on virtually everything. No Dem in the world would want him in the party. But one vote in favor of Obama on an economics bill and boom, he's effectively booted from the party. It was seen as a great victory.
Web comics have been fairly popular and we've seen some breakouts get picked up in the big bookstores. Manga has exploded among teen girls, a segment no American comic company would have even dreamed breaking into. Why, that's as ridiculous as girl gamers, right? No American comic book writer would want to be involved in turning out bishonen and yaoi comics but it turns out that's what the girls are into. Nobody wanted to make the Sims and it took arm-twisting to get it published and now it's the biggest girl game series ever.
Of course, the stereotypes also come from trendy writers who try to live the vapid, trendy lives of the characters they write about and hold in disdain social groups they perceive as lower on the totem pole than themselves. That's classic high school clique behavior.
Docs has been having problems recently with syncing. The biggest caveat of the whole cloud concept is "What do you do if you lose your connection to the cloud?" (Ok, one of the big caveats. The other is not having access to your data. If Microsoft went under tomorrow, your SQL Server won't disappear. Office will still run on the desktop. If a cloud company goes under, you may have a backup of the data from the app but who will be hosting it? They had code escrow back in the day, the company that wrote your app goes under, the source code is held in escrow and will be released to you at that time. You can hire people to perform maintenance.) Really, big business has seen this problem for decades. When offices are connected to centralized servers over frame relay and there's nothing at the remote locations but dumb terminals, losing the connection leaves you just as dead in the water as losing your internet today. Google's answer was the local cache. It works great for gmail, I can see them saying it's no longer beta.
The problem I've encountered with docs is that "docs list" window as they call it is having trouble syncing. You create a document on one computer, it should be visible on the other within a few minutes. You can see it if you do a page refresh. The problem is the local copy doesn't sync automatically anymore. You can make that happen by syncing manually or by opening the file up while connected to the net -- it will display the old version and then flash over to the new one as it downloads.
The problem arises when you think you're synced up and open an older document and start working on it. You last worked on it on Computer A yesterday. Computer B's copy is from four days ago. If you're away from a net connection when you open it on Computer B, you won't get a refresh and the automatic refresh you thought already happened didn't. So when you get back home you fire up Computer B so you can make sure it syncs back to the cloud, it will now try to reconcile two different versions. If you were working in separate parts of the document, you might get lucky. if any of your changes were made to the same paragraph, last edit wins.
These sorts of problems will be esoteric to the typical end user. I can see what's going on because I'm geeky. The end user is just going to get upset because something that "just works" no longer does.
You can't really complain about getting this kind of functionality for free but people will really start bitching if they have to pay for it.
Why do I suspect that this "czar" will spend about 10% of his time dealing with security issues and 90% of his time finding ways to help big media companies protect their IP from evil pirates, teenagers, and Youtube?
So would this make pirate bay be the internet Bolsheviks? Or would that only be the case if they had real guns and actually killed people?
Your successor will never find any documentation that you leave behind (or if you show it to them they won't bother with reading it) and by the time they notice it they'll have already screwed things up to the point where the documentation will be obsolete. This means you can save yourself the trouble of doing the documentation unless that documentation is going to make you more effective while you're there.
It's just like documenting code -- even if nobody else ever reads it, you're doing this to help your own ass out! Spend six months away from something you did and come back to it without any documentation, you'd swear drunken gnomes were at it. I'd look at something old I did, grimace at what looked like a mistake only to realize no, that was the right way, it wouldn't have been working if it was a mistake, why didn't I document the damn thing?
I have a spreadsheet called master list and it has the keys to the kingdom. It's on a share only IT can access and has info for absolutely everything we touch. Url and admin passwords for websites, local servers, ip's and other configuration info for our routers so we can rebuild the vpn in a pinch, it's got everything. I couldn't even imagine the hell of trying to rebuild this stuff.
I've heard horror tales of stuff like consultants coming in to work on some cisco routers and wiping the config by accident. Whoops, where's the config file backups? We don't know. Another tale I heard is of a guy putting on the CTO hat for a government agency and trying to build a network map like the previous CTO didn't. He had servers scattered everywhere. There's an old bash post about "I lost a server. I mean, it's in my house and pings fine, I just can't physically locate it." As I remember the story, machines were not assigned to subnets in a clueful fashion and servers he couldn't find locally ended up being in a government server farm hundreds of miles away. Long story short, things were working at the moment but done in such a haphazard way that troubleshooting would be impeded when something broke. In order to put things into a more sensible fashion, he ran the risk of breaking things in order to fix them. And given that nothing was documented, it took a lot of trial and error and working on weekends to make sure that if he did break anything, nobody would be there to notice before he fixed it.
We've already seen this years ago, user-edited WAD files with Doom. It's all about letting the customer start hacking on the product. Palms were never meant to be word-processing tools but inventive users started dicking around with the memo fields and eventually hacked one together. This sort of thing was not envisioned by the original engineers but are embraced by smart companies. Enthusiastic users put their own time and effort in free of charge so that they can get exactly the product or specs they want, the company caters to those interests because it makes them money. There's always the danger of satisfying the vocal yet tiny niche at the expense of the silent, broader market but that's why the executives are paid to think even though they don't too often.
When it comes to games, it's about keeping the idea fresh and interesting between releases. A year is a decade in the gaming world and tastes can change. I play games slowly and it amazes me how people are over and done with something I feel like I'm still scratching the surface on. I don't like how much they're charging for DLC but this is the sort of thing that keeps the games off the used market, keeps people playing. Someone I know who'd already played through Fallout and moved on said the DLC looked so good he might have to buy it again. Sheesh! With the cost of games these days, I treat 'em like college textbooks -- I'll be damned before I sell them back to the store for pennies on the dollar just to see them put back on the shelf, used 5% off from new price. Fuck 'em!
I've tried noodling around with CSS but it's not quite gelling with me yet. I did web dev back in the table days and know my approach is outdated. Haven't had to touch much web stuff but it looks like I'm going to have to get back into that game at work. Is that book a good intro? I've poked around at garden of css and am amazed I'm not seeing those tricks applied anywhere other than demo sites.
It's gonna stink on ice. It's going to feel like Star Trek and Indy IV, actors we love and respect acting like paunchy, 45 yr old high school football stars trying to hit on hot young thangs at the bar. Jesus, you were good twenty years ago but it's over now, show some fucking dignity and let it rest. But no, they won't. Even if I don't see the movie I'll be traumatized just from the sheer weight of hype out there.
You know what the sad thing is? Ghostbusters 2 was an awful movie but, honestly, the first one wasn't very good either. The premise is still great, that holds up all these years later, but the damn thing was just so underwritten. As a first draft it's fine but there needed to be more punch in the dialog, more oomph per minute. I saw it about six months back after not having seen it since it first came out, my strongest memories from the cartoon. (Collect Call of Cthulhu? You guys rawked). While I missed out on all the sexual subtext as a kid (and didn't realize Akroyd was getting a spectral blowjob), I also didn't realize just how creepy Murray came across. He's the skeezy sexual harassment guy.
Ah, well. It's not like common sense or good taste has ever turned Hollywood off from a project.
Slashdot Mirror
What's a latino female? Is that a codename for hispanic shemales?
Would that be a cockerhispaniel? (I'm gonna be so downmodded for this.)
Tried pricing up a decent box for some heavy-lifting, there's just so much complexity out there! It's hard to figure out where the bleeding edge is and where the most effective bang for the buck zone is behind all the blood. 286, 386, 486, a man used to be able to tell where computers sat! And then all that Pentium bullshit started. I don't know what the fuck I'm looking at. I'm crossing my fingers and going with a Tom's Hardware recommended build list.
The Free Open Source Software community, that builds free, open source software, is complaining that they are not, in one way or another, being another compensated for their free software?
Compensation should be free, as in love. Send some marketing babes over.
I checked my submissions. I have a pending submission that turned a year old last month and crap like this makes it through. Good QC, /.
Business managers don't want to pay for great when good will do. Have you gotten the beta to compile yet? Good, we're shipping. I don't care if it was a tech demo, I don't care if you said your plan was to figure out how to do it first, then go back through and do it right. We have a deadline, get your ass in gear.
Then the next release cycle comes around and they want more features, cram them in, or fuck it we'll just outsource it to India. We don't know how to write a decent design spec and so even if the Indians are good programmers, the language barrier and cluelessness will lead to disaster.
And here's the real kicker -- why bother to write better when people buy new computers every three years? We'll just throw hardware at the problem. == this is the factor that's likely to change the game.
If you look at consoles, games typically get better the longer it's on the market because programmers become more familiar with the platform and what it can do. You're not throwing more hardware at the problem, not until the new console ships. That could be years and years away, just for the shipping, and even more years until there's decent market penetration. No, you have to do something wonderful and new and it has to be done on the current hardware. You're forced to get creative.
With the push towards netbooks and relatively low-power systems (low-power by today's standards!), programmers won't be able to count on power outstripping bloat. They'll have to concentrate on efficiency or else they won't have a product.
There's also the question of how much the effort is worth. $5000 in damage to my current car totals it, even if it could be be repaired. I can go out and buy a new car. In Cuba, there's no such thing as a new car, there's only so many on the market. (are they able to import any these days?) Anyway, that explains why the 1950's disposable rustbuckets are still up and running. When no new cars are available for love or money, the effort in keeping an old one running pays for itself.
Excellence has to be a priority coming down from the top in a company. If cut-rate expediency is the order of the day, crap will be the result.
I hate to tell you this, but that was just a horse dildo. Funny, the things age does to memory: one minute you're looking at a horse dildo, the next minute, you're convinced that ancient instruments are hanging out in rural Tennessee.
I wonder if Catherine the Great was a relative.
[quote]Of course, the most popular music now is the 4-6 piece "rock" band. Drums, keyboard, and some number of guitars is the "standard" pop music right now. [much like violin, viola, cello, and bass in the 1600's][/quote]
Popular is a relative term. While I would agree that rock-style instrumentation is popular amongst those operating under the "alternative" label, and nothing but synthesizers and samples seems to suffice for hip-hop, there's still music produced today that requires more players, music that's even popular. Orchestral metal is fairly popular over in Europe.
As one example, Therion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZtCRJld08c
Ignore any of their live stuff on youtube. They're more of a studio band -- they'd have to be given the range and complexity of the arrangements, and trying to translate it to stage can be problematic at times, even though they put together the full male and female choruses to try and pull it off.
"Charging for stuff" is not "a" business model, it's business. What's not a business model is giving free rides. Something's gotta give.
I give mustache rides but times are tough. Where's my government bailout?
I always thought after Cypher tried to make the deal with Agent Smith to get back to the Matrix that it would have been a damned cool twist if in the third one he went to the machine city and found out that...there simply was NO Zion.
Shit, that's what I thought I saw on-screen when Neo zapped the squiddies out there in the "real world." I thought "Holy shit, he never actually left the matrix!"
The Matrix really should never have had sequels. There simply wasn't any more story that needed telling. But if they had to make a sequel, that's the angle they should have gone with. The only thing that could have possibly been more entertaining would be for them to escape into the real real world and find out that the blackened skies and body farms was still part of the matrix and that the real world was actually quite nice and pleasant. Some machines decided to keep living in VR worlds because they felt it was real enough but others insisted on inhabiting physical bodies and living in physical space because it felt more real. And among these types you have Machines for the Ethical Treatment of People (pronounced meat-pee) and then the whole thing could be played for the social satire. That'd work better as a Mad TV sketch than a proper sequel but what the hey.
It strikes me that an online RPG might begin with a book: a three or four year story arc that has a clear beginning, a middle and an end.
It would be a particularly rewarding experience for those who came in and early and stayed the course.
But you could enter and exit at any point with some sense of achievement - and a unique experience of the game.
Part of the problem is epeen stroking. People want to have something to show for their time in the game, more levels and greater loot, etc.
I know I'm personally sick of mmorpg's because of the content recycling. I play a stand-alone game, there's 20 hours worth of material and then I'm done. I play an mmorpg, the devs only have the budget for 20 hours worth of material so it ends up getting recycled to make four the thousands of hours of lifesucking gameplay. A mechanic that was fun the first time gets old when you have to grind for gold, grind for xp, and then you go into pvp and lose it all.
Resetting the game world and starting a new story would appeal to the causal gamers but the hardcore would be up in arms. While they are a smaller percentage of your total playerbase, they're also going to be the ones who are spending the most money like with a dozen alt accounts.
I think that the one innovation that might get more people playing would be to make new mmo's more like the old BBS door games. For those who don't know, door games were games on the old dial-up bulletin boards that predated the internet for most of us. Because access was limited to phone lines, a bbs couldn't allow people to hog the connection all day so games were limited to an hour a day, maybe less. The computer stored a persistent world but it was only shared amongst other users on the same BBS.
So my thinking is that they can create a game where there's a limited amount of time you can play in a day to dissuade gamers from power-grinding and where you can select who your other players would be. For something the equivalent of Trade Wars, it would effectively be a turn-based multiplayer game where each turn occurs on a day by day basis. A full game may take a month or two from start to finish.
The other alternative I can think of is for serious PVP action. Games like EVE boast that their pvp is serious and has consequences. And this is true. It takes a lot of time and effort to scrape together the isk to build your kewl battleship and it can be lost in 30 seconds. That's a pretty big penalty when you realize that it's going to take another two weeks of solid play to get another one of those. But perhaps instead of requiring grinding, make it be more like a time-out in a death match game. You earn the right to a certain class of ship, fine. You lose it, you have to wait a day to take it out again. So there's the sense of risk and fear in taking out the cool toy but not the same amount of lost time replacing it. Then again, the masochistic types who like this play dynamic might demand to keep the pain.
girls?
in a comic book shop?
pfft, yeah right
It happens. My sister was into DBZ and Sailor Moon when she was younger and became a huge fan of anime and manga.
AFAIK, I'm still banned from the Laughing Dragon in Dallas because when I was 12 years old, I suggested that I liked DBZ better than Akira.
No, you were banned for liking DBZ. I assure you, the same thing happened to girls who were into Sailor Moon.
American comic shops are fairly embarrassing places to be. I personally love the comic medium, think it's fabu, but there's a lot of crap out there. Because comics are expensive and are no longer casual purchases for kids, the publishers have to cater to the disposable income market. That's teens and young adults. Sex and violence are to entertainment what salt, sugar and fat is to food. The fanboys are the ones who want big-titted heroines in fighting crime in lingerie. They want the edgier and darker crap with violence and 'slosions.
It's like what we're seeing with the Republican party. The GOP isn't all that popular right now and so the party leaders are trying to play to their base, drum up support. But the very act of playing to that base alienates people who only have a weak inclination to the party. So you end up having loyalty tests, demanding candidates meet ridiculous standards, purges to ensure ideological purity. Specter is as loyal a Republican as you could possibly hope for and disagrees with the Dems on virtually everything. No Dem in the world would want him in the party. But one vote in favor of Obama on an economics bill and boom, he's effectively booted from the party. It was seen as a great victory.
Web comics have been fairly popular and we've seen some breakouts get picked up in the big bookstores. Manga has exploded among teen girls, a segment no American comic company would have even dreamed breaking into. Why, that's as ridiculous as girl gamers, right? No American comic book writer would want to be involved in turning out bishonen and yaoi comics but it turns out that's what the girls are into. Nobody wanted to make the Sims and it took arm-twisting to get it published and now it's the biggest girl game series ever.
Of course, the stereotypes also come from trendy writers who try to live the vapid, trendy lives of the characters they write about and hold in disdain social groups they perceive as lower on the totem pole than themselves. That's classic high school clique behavior.
Docs has been having problems recently with syncing. The biggest caveat of the whole cloud concept is "What do you do if you lose your connection to the cloud?" (Ok, one of the big caveats. The other is not having access to your data. If Microsoft went under tomorrow, your SQL Server won't disappear. Office will still run on the desktop. If a cloud company goes under, you may have a backup of the data from the app but who will be hosting it? They had code escrow back in the day, the company that wrote your app goes under, the source code is held in escrow and will be released to you at that time. You can hire people to perform maintenance.) Really, big business has seen this problem for decades. When offices are connected to centralized servers over frame relay and there's nothing at the remote locations but dumb terminals, losing the connection leaves you just as dead in the water as losing your internet today. Google's answer was the local cache. It works great for gmail, I can see them saying it's no longer beta.
The problem I've encountered with docs is that "docs list" window as they call it is having trouble syncing. You create a document on one computer, it should be visible on the other within a few minutes. You can see it if you do a page refresh. The problem is the local copy doesn't sync automatically anymore. You can make that happen by syncing manually or by opening the file up while connected to the net -- it will display the old version and then flash over to the new one as it downloads.
The problem arises when you think you're synced up and open an older document and start working on it. You last worked on it on Computer A yesterday. Computer B's copy is from four days ago. If you're away from a net connection when you open it on Computer B, you won't get a refresh and the automatic refresh you thought already happened didn't. So when you get back home you fire up Computer B so you can make sure it syncs back to the cloud, it will now try to reconcile two different versions. If you were working in separate parts of the document, you might get lucky. if any of your changes were made to the same paragraph, last edit wins.
These sorts of problems will be esoteric to the typical end user. I can see what's going on because I'm geeky. The end user is just going to get upset because something that "just works" no longer does.
You can't really complain about getting this kind of functionality for free but people will really start bitching if they have to pay for it.
This will make 7 Vista SP3, then.
Good Luck finding virgins in North Carolina!
Look for girls who can run faster than their brothers.
Why do I suspect that this "czar" will spend about 10% of his time dealing with security issues and 90% of his time finding ways to help big media companies protect their IP from evil pirates, teenagers, and Youtube?
So would this make pirate bay be the internet Bolsheviks? Or would that only be the case if they had real guns and actually killed people?
Would he be the Russian czar? Condi Rice was an alleged expert on the topic, would that make her the Russian czarina?
Your successor will never find any documentation that you leave behind (or if you show it to them they won't bother with reading it) and by the time they notice it they'll have already screwed things up to the point where the documentation will be obsolete. This means you can save yourself the trouble of doing the documentation unless that documentation is going to make you more effective while you're there.
It's just like documenting code -- even if nobody else ever reads it, you're doing this to help your own ass out! Spend six months away from something you did and come back to it without any documentation, you'd swear drunken gnomes were at it. I'd look at something old I did, grimace at what looked like a mistake only to realize no, that was the right way, it wouldn't have been working if it was a mistake, why didn't I document the damn thing?
I have a spreadsheet called master list and it has the keys to the kingdom. It's on a share only IT can access and has info for absolutely everything we touch. Url and admin passwords for websites, local servers, ip's and other configuration info for our routers so we can rebuild the vpn in a pinch, it's got everything. I couldn't even imagine the hell of trying to rebuild this stuff.
I've heard horror tales of stuff like consultants coming in to work on some cisco routers and wiping the config by accident. Whoops, where's the config file backups? We don't know. Another tale I heard is of a guy putting on the CTO hat for a government agency and trying to build a network map like the previous CTO didn't. He had servers scattered everywhere. There's an old bash post about "I lost a server. I mean, it's in my house and pings fine, I just can't physically locate it." As I remember the story, machines were not assigned to subnets in a clueful fashion and servers he couldn't find locally ended up being in a government server farm hundreds of miles away. Long story short, things were working at the moment but done in such a haphazard way that troubleshooting would be impeded when something broke. In order to put things into a more sensible fashion, he ran the risk of breaking things in order to fix them. And given that nothing was documented, it took a lot of trial and error and working on weekends to make sure that if he did break anything, nobody would be there to notice before he fixed it.
Not fun.
We've already seen this years ago, user-edited WAD files with Doom. It's all about letting the customer start hacking on the product. Palms were never meant to be word-processing tools but inventive users started dicking around with the memo fields and eventually hacked one together. This sort of thing was not envisioned by the original engineers but are embraced by smart companies. Enthusiastic users put their own time and effort in free of charge so that they can get exactly the product or specs they want, the company caters to those interests because it makes them money. There's always the danger of satisfying the vocal yet tiny niche at the expense of the silent, broader market but that's why the executives are paid to think even though they don't too often.
When it comes to games, it's about keeping the idea fresh and interesting between releases. A year is a decade in the gaming world and tastes can change. I play games slowly and it amazes me how people are over and done with something I feel like I'm still scratching the surface on. I don't like how much they're charging for DLC but this is the sort of thing that keeps the games off the used market, keeps people playing. Someone I know who'd already played through Fallout and moved on said the DLC looked so good he might have to buy it again. Sheesh! With the cost of games these days, I treat 'em like college textbooks -- I'll be damned before I sell them back to the store for pennies on the dollar just to see them put back on the shelf, used 5% off from new price. Fuck 'em!
The reason people do this is is to stop you from right clicking on the image and saving it.
Printscreen > paste into gimp > crop and save, mofo's! Feels good every time I do it.
I've tried noodling around with CSS but it's not quite gelling with me yet. I did web dev back in the table days and know my approach is outdated. Haven't had to touch much web stuff but it looks like I'm going to have to get back into that game at work. Is that book a good intro? I've poked around at garden of css and am amazed I'm not seeing those tricks applied anywhere other than demo sites.
It's gonna stink on ice. It's going to feel like Star Trek and Indy IV, actors we love and respect acting like paunchy, 45 yr old high school football stars trying to hit on hot young thangs at the bar. Jesus, you were good twenty years ago but it's over now, show some fucking dignity and let it rest. But no, they won't. Even if I don't see the movie I'll be traumatized just from the sheer weight of hype out there.
You know what the sad thing is? Ghostbusters 2 was an awful movie but, honestly, the first one wasn't very good either. The premise is still great, that holds up all these years later, but the damn thing was just so underwritten. As a first draft it's fine but there needed to be more punch in the dialog, more oomph per minute. I saw it about six months back after not having seen it since it first came out, my strongest memories from the cartoon. (Collect Call of Cthulhu? You guys rawked). While I missed out on all the sexual subtext as a kid (and didn't realize Akroyd was getting a spectral blowjob), I also didn't realize just how creepy Murray came across. He's the skeezy sexual harassment guy.
Ah, well. It's not like common sense or good taste has ever turned Hollywood off from a project.
I mean, it sounds like an Onion story but none of the links are going to the Onion.
www.data.gov gets slashdotted in 3...2...1...
But it isn't! Haven't looked at much of it but that's the first thing they got right. :)