Just because somebody invests a lot of time and money into something doesn't mean he should get anything for it, especially if he didn't create any new ideas.
At my office, the IT guys told me a few months ago that pretty much every DeathStar the company got died eventually. We run our drives very hard and they are constantly working because we are building huge applications with huge data. My drive death rate at the office is something like 60%, maybe more. And these are stock Dell machines.
Why does the iPhone software need a driver? Why don't they make it an application? Just about any standard Win32 app will work on Win64. Why do drivers need to be involved? Mozilla doesn't need a driver, why should iPhone?
Much of the underlying code for Spore runs on any platform. It is developed and tested for Windows, XBox 360, PS3, Wii, OS X, and Linux. This is not to say that Spore is targeted at all these platforms, it is merely to say that the underlying code supports those platforms.
It is untrue that Maxis gave little support or financing for the game. It had as many developers on it as any game done at the time and was given much more time to be done than any other game by Maxis. The Sims was 90% done by the time EA bought Maxis, and EA wasn't terribly enthusiastic about it. The fact that EA moved The Sims to a back room at E3 that year ought to vouch for that. I don't blame anybody for being uncertain about The Sims; it's an unusual game.
I know this because I was there; I wrote a decent chunk of the source code for The Sims.
And programmers, as I quote Larry Constantine in my book,
programmers are programmers because they like to code --
given a choice between learning someone else's code and
just sitting down and writing their own, they will always
do the latter.
I disagree. Only bad programmers do this. If you have programmers that do this they should be fired. We have in fact dumped a number of these people.
Rosenberg then says:
And the programmer who says, it will be faster for me
to write it, rather than to learn it, is usually correct.
Wrong. The programmer who says this is almost never correct. Rosenberg somewhat vaguely implies so in the following sentences but words it poorly.
I am a programmer at EA and in fact what spiritman77 is saying is actually correct, except he means NVidia instead of ATI and he means cell processors instead of Blueray. But otherwise everything he says is correct. I wouldn't say the PS3 sucks, though.
Those graphics glitches you refer to are due to a bug in the video card drivers. And they aren't easy at all to work around. I know because I personally wrote much of the SC4000 graphics engine. These video card companies are much more reponsive to bug fixing if your company's name is "Id" or "Valve". We found during development, in fact, that everything we did graphics-wise which was just like what Quake or Unreal did happened to work fine. But if we did anything kinds of graphics operations which those games didn't do then we had about a 50% chance of the driver functionality being broken. I am not kidding.
People are talking about how Microsoft gave IE away for free. Wrong. They simply raised the price of Windows to pay for its development. Surely the Microsoft IE programmers were paid money, and that money has to come from somewhere.
The problem with everything Microsoft gives away for "free" is that all Windows users have to pay for it whether they like it or not. Give me a version of Windows that has nothing but the kernel, UI, and drivers for $50 instead of $300 and let me buy my own software to run on it.
Sorry, your explanation doesn't work. Especially with respect to a modern machine like the XBox 360. I program game text and nobody with half a brain does it like this. The representative from Capcom saying there is too much game text is either lying or their programmers are unbelievably bad.
You are just about completely wrong. Management, marketing, and PR have an important place, especially for a company like Rockstar. But they don't do the things you say. They don't do it at Rockstar and they don't do it any other game company in the industry, including the large ones (of which I work for).
The core of a development team is programmers, artists, designers, producers, and testers. None of these people have anything to do with management, marketing, and PR. 80% of what a game is comes from these people. It works this way at every game company of significance and has so for the last ten years.
I might mention that the Sims game you refer to was not developed nor designed by EA. It was an out-of-house job done by an independent developer.
I'm thinking of contributing to GCC...
on
GCC 4.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I love GCC, but I lament that its ability to do inlining is rather bad. I'm wondering how hard it would be join the project and work on rectifying this.
What makes you so sure the PS3 will be an improvement? The PS3 uses a graphics processor that is very similar to the XBox 360; the PS3 uses a primary processor that's similar to the XBox 360 except it's slower and there's only one instead of three; the PS3 has about the same amount of RAM as the XBox 360; the compiler for the PS3 generates significantly worse code than the compiler for the XBox 360.
The only thing that can possibly save the PS3 is the cell procesors, and they are hard to program and not very flexible.
So I ask again, what makes you so sure the PS3 will be an improvement?
I wish OpenOffice would increase their row limit. I can't use Excel because it can do only 65535 rows and OpenOffice has the same limitation. Geez, my home brew spreadsheet app could do far more than that. FWIW, yes, there are applications that legitimately require more than 65535 rows.
Mozilla works great. Open Office works great. Apache works great (at least on its own).
However, last month I tried to set up the WordPress Blog, and it was an utter failure. It required PHP, MySQL, and Apache, and I for the life of me could not get through the WordPress install. It crashed in MySQL and others have had similar problems. From the looks of it, These four systems are all highly sensitive to the particular versions of each other. MySQL in particular seems to have little concern for backward compability between versions. To this day I do not have WordPress working. Makes me wish I could get something from Microsoft that "just works".
People like you scare me. You want to force your bit-head thinking on the rest of the world, all because of some personal programming issues. You probably also think we should do away with GUIs and all go back to the command line, right?
I would agree that Word 5.1 might have been the best word processor ever, but only for people who don't want or need too much out of a word processor. On the other hand, what Word 5.1 did was about all 95% of the public needed, and it did that 95% pretty well. Still, other word processors such as Ami (PC-only) did was 5.1 did but perhaps even better.
The fact that Perl was recognized as good by this system proves that the metrics are broken. Perl is impossible to read and is unscalable. We have banned it because it results in unmaintainable code.
SimCity 3000 was in fact ported by a group called MacKiev. I know because I was the SimCity 3000 lead programmer and I personally worked with them. Let me summarize that they were rather poor programmers but it probably wouldn't have made a difference because the SC3000 design was very memory-, thread- and disk-intensive and Macintosh port was for Pre-OSX. Mac OS9 is *so* bad at memory management and disk IO that a line for line port to the Macintosh ran at about a third the speed on the Macintosh as an equivalent PC. The SC3000 code was fairly portable but it assumed that the system was decent at memory management and was reasonably capable of multithreading, which the Mac was not. SC3000 for PC ran perfectly fine unless you created some gargantuan city. SimCity 4 was ported by a small team hired by Aspyr. I worked with them as well and they were smart and the port went smoother and the app was OSX - only. We got the deal with MacKiev real cheap but their programming skills were pretty feeble and I had to go help them at one point.
I remember laughing at how they changed the in-game asserts. Asserts were defined by a macro called RZ_ASSERT which in the assert.cpp file called Win32 MessageBox and OutputDebugString. So to port it to Macintosh you'd think they'd change this messagebox and output code to call a Mac function. Nope. They went through the entire source code and manually edited every single line of RZ_ASSERT and changed them to mac-specific calls.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because somebody invests a lot of time and money into something doesn't mean he should get anything for it, especially if he didn't create any new ideas.
I want to cure my Alzheimer's, but I keep forgetting to wear my helmet.
At my office, the IT guys told me a few months ago that pretty much every DeathStar the company got died eventually. We run our drives very hard and they are constantly working because we are building huge applications with huge data. My drive death rate at the office is something like 60%, maybe more. And these are stock Dell machines.
I want more reliability. Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.
Why does the iPhone software need a driver? Why don't they make it an application? Just about any standard Win32 app will work on Win64. Why do drivers need to be involved? Mozilla doesn't need a driver, why should iPhone?
Much of the underlying code for Spore runs on any platform. It is developed and tested for Windows, XBox 360, PS3, Wii, OS X, and Linux. This is not to say that Spore is targeted at all these platforms, it is merely to say that the underlying code supports those platforms.
It is untrue that Maxis gave little support or financing for the game. It had as many developers on it as any game done at the time and was given much more time to be done than any other game by Maxis. The Sims was 90% done by the time EA bought Maxis, and EA wasn't terribly enthusiastic about it. The fact that EA moved The Sims to a back room at E3 that year ought to vouch for that. I don't blame anybody for being uncertain about The Sims; it's an unusual game.
I know this because I was there; I wrote a decent chunk of the source code for The Sims.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f0/Spli t_Screen_in_Pac_Man.gif
Rosenberg says:
And programmers, as I quote Larry Constantine in my book,
programmers are programmers because they like to code --
given a choice between learning someone else's code and
just sitting down and writing their own, they will always
do the latter.
I disagree. Only bad programmers do this. If you have programmers that do this they should be fired. We have in fact dumped a number of these people.
Rosenberg then says:
And the programmer who says, it will be faster for me
to write it, rather than to learn it, is usually correct.
Wrong. The programmer who says this is almost never correct. Rosenberg somewhat vaguely implies so in the following sentences but words it poorly.
I am a programmer at EA and in fact what spiritman77 is saying is actually correct, except he means NVidia instead of ATI and he means cell processors instead of Blueray. But otherwise everything he says is correct. I wouldn't say the PS3 sucks, though.
Those graphics glitches you refer to are due to a bug in the video card drivers. And they aren't easy at all to work around. I know because I personally wrote much of the SC4000 graphics engine. These video card companies are much more reponsive to bug fixing if your company's name is "Id" or "Valve". We found during development, in fact, that everything we did graphics-wise which was just like what Quake or Unreal did happened to work fine. But if we did anything kinds of graphics operations which those games didn't do then we had about a 50% chance of the driver functionality being broken. I am not kidding.
People are talking about how Microsoft gave IE away for free. Wrong. They simply raised the price of Windows to pay for its development. Surely the Microsoft IE programmers were paid money, and that money has to come from somewhere.
The problem with everything Microsoft gives away for "free" is that all Windows users have to pay for it whether they like it or not. Give me a version of Windows that has nothing but the kernel, UI, and drivers for $50 instead of $300 and let me buy my own software to run on it.
Sorry, your explanation doesn't work. Especially with respect to a modern machine like the XBox 360. I program game text and nobody with half a brain does it like this. The representative from Capcom saying there is too much game text is either lying or their programmers are unbelievably bad.
It probably won't unless it is very popular. However, a large majority of the code compiles and runs on Linux and MacOSX now.
You are just about completely wrong. Management, marketing, and PR have an important place, especially for a company like Rockstar. But they don't do the things you say. They don't do it at Rockstar and they don't do it any other game company in the industry, including the large ones (of which I work for).
The core of a development team is programmers, artists, designers, producers, and testers. None of these people have anything to do with management, marketing, and PR. 80% of what a game is comes from these people. It works this way at every game company of significance and has so for the last ten years.
I might mention that the Sims game you refer to was not developed nor designed by EA. It was an out-of-house job done by an independent developer.
I love GCC, but I lament that its ability to do inlining is rather bad.
I'm wondering how hard it would be join the project and work on rectifying this.
What makes you so sure the PS3 will be an improvement? The PS3 uses a graphics processor that is very similar to the XBox 360; the PS3 uses a primary processor that's similar to the XBox 360 except it's slower and there's only one instead of three; the PS3 has about the same amount of RAM as the XBox 360; the compiler for the PS3 generates significantly worse code than the compiler for the XBox 360.
The only thing that can possibly save the PS3 is the cell procesors, and they are hard to program and not very flexible.
So I ask again, what makes you so sure the PS3 will be an improvement?
I wish OpenOffice would increase their row limit. I can't use Excel because it can do only 65535 rows and OpenOffice has the same limitation. Geez, my home brew spreadsheet app could do far more than that. FWIW, yes, there are applications that legitimately require more than 65535 rows.
Mozilla works great. Open Office works great. Apache works great (at least on its own).
However, last month I tried to set up the WordPress Blog, and it was an utter failure. It required PHP, MySQL, and Apache, and I for the life of me could not get through the WordPress install. It crashed in MySQL and others have had similar problems. From the looks of it, These four systems are all highly sensitive to the particular versions of each other. MySQL in particular seems to have little concern for backward compability between versions. To this day I do not have WordPress working. Makes me wish I could get something from Microsoft that "just works".
People like you scare me. You want to force your bit-head thinking on the rest of the world, all because of some personal programming issues. You probably also think we should do away with GUIs and all go back to the command line, right?
I would agree that Word 5.1 might have been the best word processor ever, but only for people who don't want or need too much out of a word processor. On the other hand, what Word 5.1 did was about all 95% of the public needed, and it did that 95% pretty well. Still, other word processors such as Ami (PC-only) did was 5.1 did but perhaps even better.
The fact that Perl was recognized as good by this system proves that the metrics are broken. Perl is impossible to read and is unscalable. We have banned it because it results in unmaintainable code.
SimCity 3000 was in fact ported by a group called MacKiev. I know because I was the SimCity 3000 lead programmer and I personally worked with them. Let me summarize that they were rather poor programmers but it probably wouldn't have made a difference because the SC3000 design was very memory-, thread- and disk-intensive and Macintosh port was for Pre-OSX. Mac OS9 is *so* bad at memory management and disk IO that a line for line port to the Macintosh ran at about a third the speed on the Macintosh as an equivalent PC. The SC3000 code was fairly portable but it assumed that the system was decent at memory management and was reasonably capable of multithreading, which the Mac was not. SC3000 for PC ran perfectly fine unless you created some gargantuan city. SimCity 4 was ported by a small team hired by Aspyr. I worked with them as well and they were smart and the port went smoother and the app was OSX - only. We got the deal with MacKiev real cheap but their programming skills were pretty feeble and I had to go help them at one point.
I remember laughing at how they changed the in-game asserts. Asserts were defined by a macro called RZ_ASSERT which in the assert.cpp file called Win32 MessageBox and OutputDebugString. So to port it to Macintosh you'd think they'd change this messagebox and output code to call a Mac function. Nope. They went through the entire source code and manually edited every single line of RZ_ASSERT and changed them to mac-specific calls.
http://ppedriana.homeip.net/blog/SpamScreensaver.h tml