Congratulations! As a convicted copyright-violations felon (file-swapping on Kazaa, et al), you are sentenced to have this tracker implanted, which will keep you away from Tower Records forevermore.
I was on the dev team for this game, and I nearly blew a gasket when I saw that intro movie... to me, it said, "diplomacy is for chumps; the only thing that matters is the ability to blow the hell out of the other guy."
While this may be an unfortunately-accurate protrayal of how the world actually works, it's also not the message that seems desirable to convey to the target audience.
I tried pointing this out to the producers, but they didn't really give a shit... I guess they figured it made the game more "edgy" or something. (You should have seen the stuff that was going to go into the game but ended up being cut at the last minute... there was a GLA mission where your objective was to massacre 300 civilians. No, really.)
And yes, I feel a nice dose of poetic justice that it's been banned. No, I don't work for EA anymore.:-)
BART also bans all gasoline-powered devices, period, so motorizing a "scooter" won't work either, unless you were planning on making it battery powered.
(By "scooter" here, I presume you mean a Razor-like scooter, not a Vespa-like scooter...)
They are still taking orders for them; actually building them is a different story. Many people have waited 9-12 months for theirs, only to receive a nonfunctional (or hopelessly unreliable) vehicle that had to go back to the factory for another 9-12 months. Corbin seems to be in deep trouble.
Actually, Corbin is in deep, deep trouble; they are unable to produce their vehicles profitably; they have massive reliability flaws (3/4 of them have been recalled, literally); and they have at least four lawsuits pending against them that I'm aware of.
"I've talked with seveal women who found out that their husbands were using, or even addicted to, pornography. To the person, they felt that they were not attractive enough to please their husbands, that they had done something wrong, that they couldn't trust their spouse... pornography has the potential to do great harm to an otherwise healthy marriage."
You're assuming that the marriage is, in fact, otherwise healthy. It's quite possible that the issue here is not one of addiction per se, but rather, that the porn-viewing spouse has sexual needs that can't (or won't) be fulfilled otherwise. (Barring outright infidelity, that is, which I'm presuming you'd consider to be an even worse scenario...)
Make that 0.6GB per day, not 0.6MB; this obviously would eat into one's quota rather quickly.
BUT... say you limit yourself to 20 hours a week of gaming. (Hey, you're supposed to be studying sometime... so no complaints that's not enough.:-)
The 56K estimate above works out to basically 24MB or so per hour, or 492MB per week. Multiply by 4 weeks, and voila, 1968MB... just enough remaining bandwidth to check email and read slashdot.
OK, reality check. Let's say you were playing a PC game that maxed out the bandwidth of a 56K modem (which is still pretty much the lowest common denominator that any commerical game will be written to).
At 7KBps (== 56Kbps/8), you could play every second of the day and still use only 0.6MB of bandwidth... leaving you 65.4 or so for other purposes.
Even if the game required DSL-equivalent bandwidth, you'd still have an order of magnitude more than you needed.
(And if the game requires more bandwidth than that, it must have one hellaciously inefficient network transport layer...)
It's more likely the producers/managers/execs did a poor job, by deciding to release the product before it was ready:
either they knew it was buggy & incomplete, and decided to ship it anyway, rather than slip the schedule;
or, they didn't know, in which case they are clueless idiots who clearly aren't capable of doing what their main job function is.
granted, it's certainly possible that engineering & qa may have done poor jobs, but that's no excuse for shipping a poor product, just to make the arbitrary deadline.
For those of you contemplating a Glamorous Career In The Game Industry.... consider carefully if you're willing to making the extreme levels of personal sacrifice necessary.
I left a game company for similar reasons to Mr. Anonymous Coward, above, and he's not exaggerating.
I'm not saying you shouldn't work on 'em.... just be prepared for conditions that are far worse than you would have thought possible in a theoretically "professional" organization.
You forgot the part where you don't actually get paid "overtime" for all that overtime.
Oh, and being treated like bottom-of-the-food-chain crap by the producers.
And, of course, consider that you may well end up having to test, say, "Britney's Dance Beat," or some similar B-grade title...
Or, if you're lucky enough to get to work on a title you're actually interested in, you'll be so sick of it by the time it ships, that you'll quite likely never actually want to play it (or even look at it).
This is what I have arguing for a while: it's not a technical issue; it's a social issue.
Consider this: when was the last time you stiffed a waiter/waitress on a tip? You could easily do it most of the time, but most people don't, because they know that: (1) in the long run, they'll get better service by maintaining the tipping tradition, and (2) it's just part of the "social contract" (in the USA, anyway).
Interestingly, a top producer at my former employer (a game studio) told me explicitly that he didn't believe the whole "mythical man month thing" (his words, not mine).
Also, why exactly can't you reveal who your employer is? Do they chain you to the radiator and beat you for talking to strangers?
Probably not literally, but at at least one "rather large game company" that I know of (hint: first letter "E", second letter "A"), it would definitely be bad for your career to make public comments that might displease an exec or producer somewhere. (And what might displease them? Ah, there's the rub! No one can know in advance.)
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations! As a convicted copyright-violations felon (file-swapping on Kazaa, et al), you are sentenced to have this tracker implanted, which will keep you away from Tower Records forevermore.
Um, and this is better than using a C++ reference... how?
Man: "When I started, we didn't have these sissy windows and icons. All we had was ones and zeroes. And sometimes we didn't even have ones."
Man: "I wrote an entire database just using zeroes."
Dilbert: "You had zeroes? We had to use the letter "o"."
And here I thought it was pronounced "luxury yacht"...
No shit.
:-)
I was on the dev team for this game, and I nearly blew a gasket when I saw that intro movie... to me, it said, "diplomacy is for chumps; the only thing that matters is the ability to blow the hell out of the other guy."
While this may be an unfortunately-accurate protrayal of how the world actually works, it's also not the message that seems desirable to convey to the target audience.
I tried pointing this out to the producers, but they didn't really give a shit... I guess they figured it made the game more "edgy" or something. (You should have seen the stuff that was going to go into the game but ended up being cut at the last minute... there was a GLA mission where your objective was to massacre 300 civilians. No, really.)
And yes, I feel a nice dose of poetic justice that it's been banned. No, I don't work for EA anymore.
BART also bans all gasoline-powered devices, period, so motorizing a "scooter" won't work either, unless you were planning on making it battery powered.
(By "scooter" here, I presume you mean a Razor-like scooter, not a Vespa-like scooter...)
Vespa sells a two-stroke scooter right now (the ET2)... even in California, as far as I know.
s pe cs.cfm
http://www.vespausa.com/HTML_Brochure/printable
Same reason you'd want to do anything in a GUI: because, for most people, it's an easier and more efficient way to work with a computer.
They are still taking orders for them; actually building them is a different story. Many people have waited 9-12 months for theirs, only to receive a nonfunctional (or hopelessly unreliable) vehicle that had to go back to the factory for another 9-12 months. Corbin seems to be in deep trouble.
Actually, Corbin is in deep, deep trouble; they are unable to produce their vehicles profitably; they have massive reliability flaws (3/4 of them have been recalled, literally); and they have at least four lawsuits pending against them that I'm aware of.
"Just Say No"
You're assuming that the marriage is, in fact, otherwise healthy. It's quite possible that the issue here is not one of addiction per se, but rather, that the porn-viewing spouse has sexual needs that can't (or won't) be fulfilled otherwise. (Barring outright infidelity, that is, which I'm presuming you'd consider to be an even worse scenario...)
"Once rockets go up,
who cares where they come down?
That's not my department,"
says Werner von Braun.
Posting to correct myself:
:-)
Oops... I'm an idiot.
Make that 0.6GB per day, not 0.6MB; this obviously would eat into one's quota rather quickly.
BUT... say you limit yourself to 20 hours a week of gaming. (Hey, you're supposed to be studying sometime... so no complaints that's not enough.
The 56K estimate above works out to basically 24MB or so per hour, or 492MB per week. Multiply by 4 weeks, and voila, 1968MB... just enough remaining bandwidth to check email and read slashdot.
OK, reality check. Let's say you were playing a PC game that maxed out the bandwidth of a 56K modem (which is still pretty much the lowest common denominator that any commerical game will be written to).
At 7KBps (== 56Kbps/8), you could play every second of the day and still use only 0.6MB of bandwidth... leaving you 65.4 or so for other purposes.
Even if the game required DSL-equivalent bandwidth, you'd still have an order of magnitude more than you needed.
(And if the game requires more bandwidth than that, it must have one hellaciously inefficient network transport layer...)
No, but I do like to capitalize the first word in a sentence.
It's more likely the producers/managers/execs did a poor job, by deciding to release the product before it was ready:
either they knew it was buggy & incomplete, and decided to ship it anyway, rather than slip the schedule;
or, they didn't know, in which case they are clueless idiots who clearly aren't capable of doing what their main job function is.
granted, it's certainly possible that engineering & qa may have done poor jobs, but that's no excuse for shipping a poor product, just to make the arbitrary deadline.
Oh yeah. It's all true.
For those of you contemplating a Glamorous Career In The Game Industry.... consider carefully if you're willing to making the extreme levels of personal sacrifice necessary.
I left a game company for similar reasons to Mr. Anonymous Coward, above, and he's not exaggerating.
I'm not saying you shouldn't work on 'em.... just be prepared for conditions that are far worse than you would have thought possible in a theoretically "professional" organization.
You forgot the part where you don't actually get paid "overtime" for all that overtime.
Oh, and being treated like bottom-of-the-food-chain crap by the producers.
And, of course, consider that you may well end up having to test, say, "Britney's Dance Beat," or some similar B-grade title...
Or, if you're lucky enough to get to work on a title you're actually interested in, you'll be so sick of it by the time it ships, that you'll quite likely never actually want to play it (or even look at it).
This is what I have arguing for a while: it's not a technical issue; it's a social issue.
Consider this: when was the last time you stiffed a waiter/waitress on a tip? You could easily do it most of the time, but most people don't, because they know that: (1) in the long run, they'll get better service by maintaining the tipping tradition, and (2) it's just part of the "social contract" (in the USA, anyway).
We thought about that.
But they have a *lot* more lawyers than we do.
Interestingly, a top producer at my former employer (a game studio) told me explicitly that he didn't believe the whole "mythical man month thing" (his words, not mine).
Would you consider the refusal to pay overtime (as mandated by various U.S. labor laws) as "major immorality/illegality"?
Such refusal is common practice in the industry.
And no wonder I got the hell out of there...
Probably not literally, but at at least one "rather large game company" that I know of (hint: first letter "E", second letter "A"), it would definitely be bad for your career to make public comments that might displease an exec or producer somewhere. (And what might displease them? Ah, there's the rub! No one can know in advance.)