Those guys just realised that storytelling in videogames is important, they must be genius !
They were actually surprised to see that people did react strongly when a seemingly important NPC gets killed. I guess they didn't play the original Half Life were people didn't want to get barney killed, even though the character has no consistence at all.
I can't believe it took all those measurements for game people to realise it, but it's still good news that someone is noticing.
I for one never ever liked the idea of a direct upgrade, whatever the OS. What i do for linux is a parallel install on another parition. I do keep some unpartionned space to be able to do it. I also have my home folder on a partition of its own.
If anything goes wrong, i just get back to my previous install.
While Windows (XP) will not have drivers for everything with the base install, it has never failed to install on whatever machine I've tried. It also BOOTS.
Man, you certainly didn't try to install XP on a SATA only machine. Don't know how SP3 goes but SP2 is a MAJOR PITA in this respect. Finding which SATA driver actually works for the windows installer can be quite a challenge.
After failing to install XP, i did try installing ubuntu and it installed without a hitch. That's when i realized that life can actually be easier by using linux. Quite a shocker when you haven't really made the jump yet.
That was like a year & a half ago. Today the linux side is even better, as installing from usb thumb drive is like a thousand time faster than from a CD. Still possible with xp, but much more complicated than the 2 or 3 clicks required for the just released intrepid ibex (and for previous releases/other distros, there's still unetbootin: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/).
But then again, i'm writing this from my macbook:) Only time i had to install osx was when i upgraded my HDD. Still sucks that installing from USB isn't an easy process though.
The thing is that 99% of iTunes users don't know, and don't want to know, exactly where in the filesystem their music is stored, they just want to click on iTunes and see it. So that option is on by default.
Being a recent mac convert (a year now), i'm now wondering why i should even know where those music files are stored (except for mass backup maybe).
I'm just happy to drag them in & out of itunes.
I'd like rhythmbox to handle files the same way on my ubuntu box at work, but there's not even an option for that.
I believe the article is refering to non scripting users. I also believe that you shouldn't have to script anything just to find files around. I myself am a programmer and i'd rather do something else. Not everyone can fluently write shell scripts.
This is largely the idea behind GoboLinux I think.
Well, it is not. GP is talking about moving a file around and having the system keep track of it none the less. Gobolinux redefines the standard file system hierarchy and moves away from traditionnal packaging system by allowing you to use multiple versions of a same package/program and using the filesystem as a database.
My guess is that they call everything "beta" so as to limit the amount of complaints they get when something breaks.
I'd rather say to limit the amount of complaints when something *changes*. I my eyes, beta means that the app is still subject to changes, even significantly.
Instant messengers, word processors, spreadsheets, etc. make no sense in the context of document retrieval or exchange. We are going down a fundamentally misguided path when we try to force those applications onto the web.
If the tool doesn't allow you to meet your requirements, then you should change the tool.
What's so wrong about trying to capitalize on the webapps advantages ? If our expectations reveal that HTML is no longer adequate, then let's make it evolve or create something else.
Or maybe let's keep everything as it is and see webapp development become even more of a pain than it already is.
I for one can't take it anymore, this endless tweaking of HTML and CSS to get a site to work on the major browsers (and i'm not even talking about js). I am now a happy flex developer.
So, Safari and Firefox will support native video. It should be trivial to write a script which detects a browser not supporting the video tag, and replaces it with some embedded Flash, for backwards compatibility -- and because we know it will take a decade or so for IE to support this.
Usually, people working on commercial projects will go for the easier way of doing it, which means going for the lowest common denominator that meets the requirements.
It might be easy to detect browser support, but it also means doubling the number of video files to store and that's quite a big deal.
The French Revolution was not so long ago that these "executive vice-presidents" can't learn a few lessons regarding what happens to people who oppress a working class. Hell, some of them must have seen V for Vendetta.
Reading this, i can't help but think about all the rage about terrorists and the ensuing surveiliance & control paranoia. As much as i'd like things to get better in a peaceful way, i sometimes wonder if it is possible.
Here in France, it really seems that the government is commited to go down this road. I feel powerless, i really have no idea about what i could do to push things in a better direction.
The problem with evoting is not about closed/open source, it's about being able to check if the result is correct. There is NO way (and i mean NO) to check without asking the machine itself, so you're basically asking the liar if he lied.
And the slashdot crowd certainly knows that even with the best intends, a bug can very easily slip through. In France, for the recent presidential elections, some machines reported more votes than manually registered, not a pleasing thought.
You are forgetting about authentication. Email is trivial to spoof. If you *always* sign your messages, then when some asshat, say, decides to send an explicitly detailed nastygram to your boss from 'you', it is easy to prove otherwise...
The only thing signed mails will do is prove that you are the actual sender, it does NOT prove that you're not the sender of an unsigned message.
I don't think there's any way to prove you didn't send an email, except maybe if someone else signed it with a private key...
I really like to see someone talking about storytelling in video games since I've thought for a long while that it's still horribly lacking. I'm a bit disappointed though, not only because it's one of those "X things that...", but also because the author doesn't even take time to define what he's talking about, like it's a given. And i feel that sometimes, storytelling is mixed/confused with just story.
Story is about what you say, storytelling is about how you say it. What happens at the end of Fallout is pure story, but the way you live the events in half-life is storytelling. Giving a meaning to what the player do is obviously a good technique, even if it's only about getting your ass out of this crazy lab!
The author could have mentioned ICO, almost without standard narrative process, almost without music, and with only a few phrases pronounced in the whole game, and still, the simple fact of helping this girl, Yorda, and even feeling her through the pad while you hold her hand creates some kind of attachment (i know it did that to me:) that shows toward the end of the game. Man, THAT is something.
I'd say that good storytelling in video game is all about player's involvement in the game, making it want to see what's next, and not just navigate through gameplay mechanics. It's about emotions. Something that i often found lacking in (story based) games i've seen (but that is also true for a lot of movies).
I can only hope that more people will tackle the subject.
Knowing if someone else would take a price cut for a more interesting job will not help you in any way. It doesn't say anything about the current job or the potential "more interesting" new job.
If you want to know if someone is ready to do it i can awnser shortly: yes.
If you want to know if you should quit your job and take this new opportunity, that's a decision you'll have to make for yourself.
To sum up i'd say that java brought us cross platform capability with a single language, when.net brought us cross language capability on a single platform.
Next step is both at the same time, cross platform, cross language. It's already started since other languages generating bytecode have appeared but as you point out, the JVM wasn't designed with that in mind.
Probably things are gonna evolve from the java platform i'd say.
Slashdot Mirror
Those guys just realised that storytelling in videogames is important, they must be genius !
They were actually surprised to see that people did react strongly when a seemingly important NPC gets killed. I guess they didn't play the original Half Life were people didn't want to get barney killed, even though the character has no consistence at all.
I can't believe it took all those measurements for game people to realise it, but it's still good news that someone is noticing.
I for one never ever liked the idea of a direct upgrade, whatever the OS.
What i do for linux is a parallel install on another parition.
I do keep some unpartionned space to be able to do it. I also have my home folder on a partition of its own.
If anything goes wrong, i just get back to my previous install.
While Windows (XP) will not have drivers for everything with the base install, it has never failed to install on whatever machine I've tried. It also BOOTS.
Man, you certainly didn't try to install XP on a SATA only machine.
Don't know how SP3 goes but SP2 is a MAJOR PITA in this respect. Finding which SATA driver actually works for the windows installer can be quite a challenge.
After failing to install XP, i did try installing ubuntu and it installed without a hitch.
That's when i realized that life can actually be easier by using linux. Quite a shocker when you haven't really made the jump yet.
That was like a year & a half ago.
Today the linux side is even better, as installing from usb thumb drive is like a thousand time faster than from a CD. Still possible with xp, but much more complicated than the 2 or 3 clicks required for the just released intrepid ibex (and for previous releases/other distros, there's still unetbootin: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/).
But then again, i'm writing this from my macbook :)
Only time i had to install osx was when i upgraded my HDD.
Still sucks that installing from USB isn't an easy process though.
Yet another abstraction layer.
That's not a problem if you don't have to use any other one at the same time.
The thing is that 99% of iTunes users don't know, and don't want to know, exactly where in the filesystem their music is stored, they just want to click on iTunes and see it. So that option is on by default.
Being a recent mac convert (a year now), i'm now wondering why i should even know where those music files are stored (except for mass backup maybe).
I'm just happy to drag them in & out of itunes.
I'd like rhythmbox to handle files the same way on my ubuntu box at work, but there's not even an option for that.
Less than a minute of Bash scripting.
I believe the article is refering to non scripting users.
I also believe that you shouldn't have to script anything just to find files around.
I myself am a programmer and i'd rather do something else. Not everyone can fluently write shell scripts.
But yeah, linux is not for everyone, or is it ?
This is largely the idea behind GoboLinux I think.
Well, it is not.
GP is talking about moving a file around and having the system keep track of it none the less.
Gobolinux redefines the standard file system hierarchy and moves away from traditionnal packaging system by allowing you to use multiple versions of a same package/program and using the filesystem as a database.
In my experience, eclipse 64 (both 3.3 & 3.4) is so buggy and crashy that i reverted back to using 32 bit eclipse on a 32 bit jdk.
Glad to hear that it works for somebody.
BTW what jdk are you running it onto ?
My guess is that they call everything "beta" so as to limit the amount of complaints they get when something breaks.
I'd rather say to limit the amount of complaints when something *changes*.
I my eyes, beta means that the app is still subject to changes, even significantly.
Not only did this ship with XP, as others have noted, but you couldn't remove it.
Well, actually you can, but you have to fiddle with some obscure (and hidden) inf file in order to do so.
As i'm a really nice guy, i found a ms kb about it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223182
Talk about informative (nudge, nudge)...
"If it doesn't have to produce correct results, I can make my version use no memory and run in zero time."
That was actually the starting point of XP.
Surprisingly enough, there isn't much reference of it around but it was well described in the XP book i read.
Found one over at ibm:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-beck/ (read "creation").
Instant messengers, word processors, spreadsheets, etc. make no sense in the context of document retrieval or exchange. We are going down a fundamentally misguided path when we try to force those applications onto the web.
If the tool doesn't allow you to meet your requirements, then you should change the tool.
What's so wrong about trying to capitalize on the webapps advantages ?
If our expectations reveal that HTML is no longer adequate, then let's make it evolve or create something else.
Or maybe let's keep everything as it is and see webapp development become even more of a pain than it already is.
I for one can't take it anymore, this endless tweaking of HTML and CSS to get a site to work on the major browsers (and i'm not even talking about js).
I am now a happy flex developer.
A friend of mine just contacted MS to trade his bundled vista license for an XP one and they actually did it. No questions asked.
Now that you mention it, it was for a small business though.
Vista does a lot of things right, and improves on XP
Well, i've used windows since version 2 and vista is the first one that has ever confused me when trying to do any kind of configuration.
That said, it is however a bit difficult to go back to the XP interface after getting used to the visual nicities of vista.
Anyway, i'm now using ubuntu at work and osx at home so i don't really care, except while trying to help the windows users.
Funny thing is, the mac got from the very confusing os9 to the up to speed osx, but somehow windows did it backwards. Go figure.
So, Safari and Firefox will support native video. It should be trivial to write a script which detects a browser not supporting the video tag, and replaces it with some embedded Flash, for backwards compatibility -- and because we know it will take a decade or so for IE to support this.
Usually, people working on commercial projects will go for the easier way of doing it, which means going for the lowest common denominator that meets the requirements.
It might be easy to detect browser support, but it also means doubling the number of video files to store and that's quite a big deal.
Somehow this really is some ego problem.
Man it's so simply handled in Adium, why can't it be the same with pidgin ?
I'm still using pidgin at my workplace (with ubuntu, not osx) but i'd love to see another bird in town.
Reading this, i can't help but think about all the rage about terrorists and the ensuing surveiliance & control paranoia. As much as i'd like things to get better in a peaceful way, i sometimes wonder if it is possible.
Here in France, it really seems that the government is commited to go down this road. I feel powerless, i really have no idea about what i could do to push things in a better direction.
...not for the technological reasons that they should be concerned with.For what i know, when a deal gets this big, politics wheigh much more than any technical issue you may think of.
I think you're missing a point, Apple has never been about choice as far a gui is concerned, especially about features present in another os.
Using a Mac is done the Mac way.
The problem with evoting is not about closed/open source, it's about being able to check if the result is correct.
There is NO way (and i mean NO) to check without asking the machine itself, so you're basically asking the liar if he lied.
And the slashdot crowd certainly knows that even with the best intends, a bug can very easily slip through.
In France, for the recent presidential elections, some machines reported more votes than manually registered, not a pleasing thought.
The only thing signed mails will do is prove that you are the actual sender, it does NOT prove that you're not the sender of an unsigned message.
I don't think there's any way to prove you didn't send an email, except maybe if someone else signed it with a private key...
I really like to see someone talking about storytelling in video games since I've thought for a long while that it's still horribly lacking. I'm a bit disappointed though, not only because it's one of those "X things that ...", but also because the author doesn't even take time to define what he's talking about, like it's a given. And i feel that sometimes, storytelling is mixed/confused with just story.
Story is about what you say, storytelling is about how you say it. What happens at the end of Fallout is pure story, but the way you live the events in half-life is storytelling. Giving a meaning to what the player do is obviously a good technique, even if it's only about getting your ass out of this crazy lab!
The author could have mentioned ICO, almost without standard narrative process, almost without music, and with only a few phrases pronounced in the whole game, and still, the simple fact of helping this girl, Yorda, and even feeling her through the pad while you hold her hand creates some kind of attachment (i know it did that to me :) that shows toward the end of the game. Man, THAT is something.
I'd say that good storytelling in video game is all about player's involvement in the game, making it want to see what's next, and not just navigate through gameplay mechanics. It's about emotions. Something that i often found lacking in (story based) games i've seen (but that is also true for a lot of movies).
I can only hope that more people will tackle the subject.
Knowing if someone else would take a price cut for a more interesting job will not help you in any way. It doesn't say anything about the current job or the potential "more interesting" new job.
If you want to know if someone is ready to do it i can awnser shortly: yes.
If you want to know if you should quit your job and take this new opportunity, that's a decision you'll have to make for yourself.
Let us at least hope we learned a few things from the last bubble.
You can certainly hope so, but i would advice not to count on it.
To sum up i'd say that java brought us cross platform capability with a single language, when .net brought us cross language capability on a single platform.
Next step is both at the same time, cross platform, cross language. It's already started since other languages generating bytecode have appeared but as you point out, the JVM wasn't designed with that in mind.
Probably things are gonna evolve from the java platform i'd say.