Intellectually our nation is more based on French thinkers than British. (And we can't forget to give a big hello and "thank you very much" to Lafayette).
Yeah, no shit? Afghanistan must have been pretty convincing for everyone. "Holy shit, Afghanistan and Ethiopia? This war is a great idea!"
Give me a break, 33 meaningless countries that won't contribute 2 shits to either the war effort (oh yeah, Spain is sending some nurses and a big boat) or the cleanup. What will they do? Show up with up with their hands out waiting for a payment, thank you very much. I guess Rummy had something when he said that the Coalition of the Billing is larger than the original Gulf Coalition. Only, those were countries that mattered.
Well, lets start with the dossier that Powell submitted to the U.N., it's a fake.
Remember that bit of evidence linking Iraq to nuclear weapons, oh yeah, it's a fake as well.
Those "great" tips our folks have been giving the inspection team? All that cool intel we have about trucks with mobile labs and sneaky shit going down, ummmm, it's garbage.
Shit, I could spend all day doing this. Our government has been busted time after time. They are liars. Period. However, now that we're at war, I support our folks over there fighting. Our president is a complete bullshit artist and his team of jackasses will, hopefully, go far far away after the next election. But I hope the people on the ground and in the air do what they have to do and get home safely.
As a developer the PS2 blows the XBox out of the water because I have over 50 MILLION customers to sell to. That being said, I agree that EA and online gaming is like oil and water. They just don't seem to get it. THey have amazing franchises that sell like mad. But they can't seem to let a developer have enough freedom to build a good online game.
"A couple of sports titles" WTF? Those couple of sports titles are the biggest selling console games year after year. Madden is a license to print money. FIFA 2002? NBA Live? Tiger Woods? Not to mention Medal of Honor Frontline, LOTR, Harry Potter... EA is a juggernaut who no console vendor can ignore. MS can't make it without EA. XBox live might currently have more games (which I'm not sure about) but they only have 5 or 6 million boxes sold. Compare that to over 50 million PS2s + over a million network adaptors for the PS2. That's in less than a year of selling network adaptors. Plus at this point the PS2 is massively profitable while the XBox will never be at this rate.
EA might not be a great company to work for (I've heard they don't give royalties to employees) or whatever. But they have the #1 sports titles. Madden is an unstoppable sports behemoth right now (and has been for years). Sony hasn't been able to make a decent competitive football title since the ps1. Without EA Microsoft isn't going anywhere.
Sweet, I'm not super interested in putting out there where I work as I'm kind of disgruntled as you might read from my email.
As far as problems with Neverwinter Nights and Baldurs Gate. I got a little carried away, sorry. Didn't mean to harsh on your mellow. I played BG and BG2 and had a fair number of crashes. They were good roleplaying games. They weren't great software. BG1 had patches that invalidated old save files, crap like that. But I was overly harsh. Put it down to a crap ass morning due to general incompetence in the software engineering field here at ye olde game studio
As far as unreal2? The sheer monotony of the level design, ugh. It's pretty, yes, but boring as shit. I don't think Unreal (which was fun as hell)or Unreal 2 are bad as far as crashing and bugs go. I've just heard (and seen) the engine code that licensees get isn't so hot.
That being said, I stand by my comments on software engineering in the game industry. Hell, at GDC when the software engineering shit comes round, everyone is hot in the pants about windows debugging hooks! WTF? Unit testing, all of the crap, no interest. But debugging hooks, hell everyone is all over that. I don't know your project. I'm assuming you work at Bioware, I have no direct experience with anyone who works there. I can say that most studios I've been involved with aren't real pinnacles of solid engineering. And while game programmers think they're the bomb, they're usually a bit behind the curve. This is IMNSHO.:)
Well curmudgeon dude. I agree to some extent. Managers who flit between software design principles suck. But I think that there's always room to improve the process. Right now software engineering isn't really working. Software is coming out failure prone and behind schedule. So, no I don't think that long time software engineers know what they're doing. So, no, we don't understand what's worked and we haven't figured out how to manage software projects. The field is not fairly well researched. Nice try though.
I call bullshit on this. I work for and have worked for game companies. Producing AAA titles. For consoles and PC. Game companies are some of the best examples of what NOT to do in software development. Project management is non-existent, any kind of thought towards software architecture doesn't exist, rewriting every possible goddamn wheel they can is par for the course. Blizzard is the exception! Neverwinter Nights was a buggy piece of shit. All of the Bioware games have had significant crash problems in fact. Epic? WTF? Are you high? Unreal2 sucks. Not to mention the source code. Anyone who has bought the engine can tell you, its terrible. Not 3d Studio terrible, but not good. Blizzard is the only thing you got right there. They're big winners (for real).
Most game companies are concerned with getting shit out the door. If your entire company depends on 1 title being released every 2 or 3 years and selling like crazy you want to release. Plus after 2 or 3 years no one cares. Especially, since most games end up in some inane death march due to the aforementioned lack of project management or any sane person with a clue as to how software design should take place.
Note to all, if you want some beautiful examples of how a software project can totally be fucked up by lack of coders turned managers without any clue what their doing, look at the game industry.
Wow, in college. That must have been some serious research you did. You and Doogie Howser must have been up doing your titrations in to the wee hours to get the data for your journal article.
And your dad a contractor? Jesus, you're all over that shit. How could anyone possibly refute contractor Dad and an undergrad paper.
New Jersey sucks balls anyway so I can't see why he wouldn't do this right away anyway. Hell, New York, Pensylvania or Maryland is better than the cesspool of NJ.
IAAPGD. I don't see the indie innovation. I wish it was there but I have yet to see it. Can you point me to the indie games that are making these innovations?
The biggest pain in the ass about cell phone development is that number of different SDKs and crap you have to put up with. Different resolutions and different capabilies. It's a nightmare of cross platform development.
It seems like an interesting product. Doesn't seem overly useful for environments where folks are installing lots of new stuff. But for a production server environment where stuff doesn't change without multiple levels of approval it seems like a cool product. I don't believe the "virtually eliminates false positives" stuff, but I haven't used the product. Just a lot of other IDS' and they all claim to reduce false positives.
It appears to still have the fundamental problem with all IDS' (see this). In summary, without the IDS being aware of minutae of the protocol stack of the target machine, it can't actually detect intrusions, not to mention IDS' can easily be overwhelmed. IMHO IDS' are dangerous, IT folks develop a sense of invulnerability. While they're useful for the run of the mill crap that most kids spew, someone who's committed can open a can and the IDS will just stand around and look dumb. If you're the IT guy who told everyone that they could sleep at night because the IDS was taking care of business, then you look dumb.
Lose vs Loose drives me nuts. If I could shoot everyone who typed loose when they meant lose we would have 1) half as many internet users and 2) I wouldn't get irritated by every retard who thinks Loose and Lose are the same goddamn word. Man, when can I be one of the ruling class. BTW Lose and Loose sound nothing alike. I can't see how anyone can make that mistake. Hooked on Phonics isn't the problem here. Their vs. There I can understand.
Your company issues you a credit card where, at the end of the day, they're responsible? I've worked for a number of small and large companies and had company credit cards. Not one of those worked like that. It is always the employee who is responsible for the credit card. All the company card gets you is 1) the card and 2) the company name on the card. If the card isn't paid or the company goes tits up, you're the one on the hook.
If you want good ammunition to take on the "all-in-the-genes", dawkins folks read Richard Lewontin (Stephen Jay Gould helps as well). For a take on where Lewontin is coming from read "Biology As Ideology" and "It Ain't Necessarily So."
Anyone who thinks a cloned animal will in any way be identical to the original isn't thinking.
Because it'd be astronomically expensive to convert every CO in the U.S. Hell, most phone companies can't even move away from NANPA. It'd be pretty much impossible without tearing down the telecom infrastructure and rebuilding.
Yeah, I'm thankful we have 3 branches in complete agreement about how to screw us. These checks and balances things work out great. Disney convinces Congress to make a law extending copyrights, the president signs it and the Supreme Court does it's part. Making sure that Congress can continue extending copyright everytime Disney is about to lose Steamboat Willy. Wow, this system really works. Everyone pulling together.
You must never have played bust-a-move in a arcade or bar against some poor fool. Watching the suckers line up as I guzzled cheap beer, man, it was the best. Carefully creating a huge chain to drop on your opponent, listening to their screams as an unstoppable flurry of bubbles come rushing up. It makes me a little nostalgic. Athough MK1 in the mall near CWRU was a good 2nd. Come to think of it Mario Kart in my friends suite was pretty killer as well and we had beer there as well (unlike the mall).
I highly recommend Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" for a 3rd approach. He states that with both theism and atheism there is a point at which you make a leap and state something. "There is a god" or "There is no god" and from that assumption there falls a series of logical conclusions. His approach is not to make that leap. It's a stance akin to zen buddhism. Essentially, I don't know, and have no means of knowing. This is where the absurd portion comes in. He compares existence as being like a man wielding a knife running in to a room full of men with machine guns. We are so obviously ill equiped to understand much of anything. So why not focus on the things that we can know. And that is (according to Camus) only what you believe (Sartre disagreed fairly strongly, another good read and essentially Camus busting on Sartre is The Rebel).
Wow, that quote really changed my mind. Holy shit, decades of evidence and work are now meaningless based on the word of Henry Morris. Who cares about proof. Those christians have this book which tells it like it is. Why have we been wasting our precious time on this stupid empirical evidence game, digging stuff up, trying to do some date matching, presenting hypothesis and seeing if they're good enough to become theories at some point. What the hell, all these evolutionists turned anti-evolutionists can't be wrong! Get thee to a nunnery!
Slashdot Mirror
Intellectually our nation is more based on French thinkers than British. (And we can't forget to give a big hello and "thank you very much" to Lafayette).
Yeah, no shit? Afghanistan must have been pretty convincing for everyone. "Holy shit, Afghanistan and Ethiopia? This war is a great idea!"
Give me a break, 33 meaningless countries that won't contribute 2 shits to either the war effort (oh yeah, Spain is sending some nurses and a big boat) or the cleanup. What will they do? Show up with up with their hands out waiting for a payment, thank you very much. I guess Rummy had something when he said that the Coalition of the Billing is larger than the original Gulf Coalition. Only, those were countries that mattered.
Well, lets start with the dossier that Powell submitted to the U.N., it's a fake.
Remember that bit of evidence linking Iraq to nuclear weapons, oh yeah, it's a fake as well.
Those "great" tips our folks have been giving the inspection team? All that cool intel we have about trucks with mobile labs and sneaky shit going down, ummmm, it's garbage.
Shit, I could spend all day doing this. Our government has been busted time after time. They are liars. Period. However, now that we're at war, I support our folks over there fighting. Our president is a complete bullshit artist and his team of jackasses will, hopefully, go far far away after the next election. But I hope the people on the ground and in the air do what they have to do and get home safely.
As a developer the PS2 blows the XBox out of the water because I have over 50 MILLION customers to sell to.
That being said, I agree that EA and online gaming is like oil and water. They just don't seem to get it. THey have amazing franchises that sell like mad. But they can't seem to let a developer have enough freedom to build a good online game.
"A couple of sports titles"
WTF? Those couple of sports titles are the biggest selling console games year after year. Madden is a license to print money. FIFA 2002? NBA Live? Tiger Woods? Not to mention Medal of Honor Frontline, LOTR, Harry Potter... EA is a juggernaut who no console vendor can ignore. MS can't make it without EA.
XBox live might currently have more games (which I'm not sure about) but they only have 5 or 6 million boxes sold. Compare that to over 50 million PS2s + over a million network adaptors for the PS2. That's in less than a year of selling network adaptors. Plus at this point the PS2 is massively profitable while the XBox will never be at this rate.
EA might not be a great company to work for (I've heard they don't give royalties to employees) or whatever. But they have the #1 sports titles. Madden is an unstoppable sports behemoth right now (and has been for years). Sony hasn't been able to make a decent competitive football title since the ps1. Without EA Microsoft isn't going anywhere.
That link doesn't mention the $43 million we paid them to declare opium anti-Islamic. Or that the Bush administration did this in May of 2001.
Sweet, I'm not super interested in putting out there where I work as I'm kind of disgruntled as you might read from my email.
:)
As far as problems with Neverwinter Nights and Baldurs Gate. I got a little carried away, sorry. Didn't mean to harsh on your mellow. I played BG and BG2 and had a fair number of crashes. They were good roleplaying games. They weren't great software. BG1 had patches that invalidated old save files, crap like that. But I was overly harsh. Put it down to a crap ass morning due to general incompetence in the software engineering field here at ye olde game studio
As far as unreal2? The sheer monotony of the level design, ugh. It's pretty, yes, but boring as shit. I don't think Unreal (which was fun as hell)or Unreal 2 are bad as far as crashing and bugs go. I've just heard (and seen) the engine code that licensees get isn't so hot.
That being said, I stand by my comments on software engineering in the game industry. Hell, at GDC when the software engineering shit comes round, everyone is hot in the pants about windows debugging hooks! WTF? Unit testing, all of the crap, no interest. But debugging hooks, hell everyone is all over that. I don't know your project. I'm assuming you work at Bioware, I have no direct experience with anyone who works there. I can say that most studios I've been involved with aren't real pinnacles of solid engineering. And while game programmers think they're the bomb, they're usually a bit behind the curve. This is IMNSHO.
Well curmudgeon dude. I agree to some extent. Managers who flit between software design principles suck. But I think that there's always room to improve the process. Right now software engineering isn't really working. Software is coming out failure prone and behind schedule. So, no I don't think that long time software engineers know what they're doing. So, no, we don't understand what's worked and we haven't figured out how to manage software projects. The field is not fairly well researched. Nice try though.
I call bullshit on this. I work for and have worked for game companies. Producing AAA titles. For consoles and PC. Game companies are some of the best examples of what NOT to do in software development. Project management is non-existent, any kind of thought towards software architecture doesn't exist, rewriting every possible goddamn wheel they can is par for the course. Blizzard is the exception! Neverwinter Nights was a buggy piece of shit. All of the Bioware games have had significant crash problems in fact. Epic? WTF? Are you high? Unreal2 sucks. Not to mention the source code. Anyone who has bought the engine can tell you, its terrible. Not 3d Studio terrible, but not good. Blizzard is the only thing you got right there. They're big winners (for real).
Most game companies are concerned with getting shit out the door. If your entire company depends on 1 title being released every 2 or 3 years and selling like crazy you want to release. Plus after 2 or 3 years no one cares. Especially, since most games end up in some inane death march due to the aforementioned lack of project management or any sane person with a clue as to how software design should take place.
Note to all, if you want some beautiful examples of how a software project can totally be fucked up by lack of coders turned managers without any clue what their doing, look at the game industry.
Wow, in college. That must have been some serious research you did. You and Doogie Howser must have been up doing your titrations in to the wee hours to get the data for your journal article.
And your dad a contractor? Jesus, you're all over that shit. How could anyone possibly refute contractor Dad and an undergrad paper.
New Jersey sucks balls anyway so I can't see why he wouldn't do this right away anyway. Hell, New York, Pensylvania or Maryland is better than the cesspool of NJ.
That's not true. It was thought to be the case until recently. Here's one of the first links I found: check it out.
IAAPGD.
I don't see the indie innovation. I wish it was there but I have yet to see it. Can you point me to the indie games that are making these innovations?
The biggest pain in the ass about cell phone development is that number of different SDKs and crap you have to put up with. Different resolutions and different capabilies. It's a nightmare of cross platform development.
It seems like an interesting product. Doesn't seem overly useful for environments where folks are installing lots of new stuff. But for a production server environment where stuff doesn't change without multiple levels of approval it seems like a cool product. I don't believe the "virtually eliminates false positives" stuff, but I haven't used the product. Just a lot of other IDS' and they all claim to reduce false positives.
It appears to still have the fundamental problem with all IDS' (see this). In summary, without the IDS being aware of minutae of the protocol stack of the target machine, it can't actually detect intrusions, not to mention IDS' can easily be overwhelmed. IMHO IDS' are dangerous, IT folks develop a sense of invulnerability. While they're useful for the run of the mill crap that most kids spew, someone who's committed can open a can and the IDS will just stand around and look dumb. If you're the IT guy who told everyone that they could sleep at night because the IDS was taking care of business, then you look dumb.
Lose vs Loose drives me nuts. If I could shoot everyone who typed loose when they meant lose we would have 1) half as many internet users and 2) I wouldn't get irritated by every retard who thinks Loose and Lose are the same goddamn word. Man, when can I be one of the ruling class. BTW Lose and Loose sound nothing alike. I can't see how anyone can make that mistake. Hooked on Phonics isn't the problem here. Their vs. There I can understand.
Your company issues you a credit card where, at the end of the day, they're responsible? I've worked for a number of small and large companies and had company credit cards. Not one of those worked like that. It is always the employee who is responsible for the credit card. All the company card gets you is 1) the card and 2) the company name on the card. If the card isn't paid or the company goes tits up, you're the one on the hook.
That's no longer true in the C 99 spec.
If you want good ammunition to take on the "all-in-the-genes", dawkins folks read Richard Lewontin (Stephen Jay Gould helps as well). For a take on where Lewontin is coming from read "Biology As Ideology" and "It Ain't Necessarily So."
Anyone who thinks a cloned animal will in any way be identical to the original isn't thinking.
Because it'd be astronomically expensive to convert every CO in the U.S. Hell, most phone companies can't even move away from NANPA. It'd be pretty much impossible without tearing down the telecom infrastructure and rebuilding.
Yeah, I'm thankful we have 3 branches in complete agreement about how to screw us. These checks and balances things work out great. Disney convinces Congress to make a law extending copyrights, the president signs it and the Supreme Court does it's part. Making sure that Congress can continue extending copyright everytime Disney is about to lose Steamboat Willy. Wow, this system really works. Everyone pulling together.
You must never have played bust-a-move in a arcade or bar against some poor fool. Watching the suckers line up as I guzzled cheap beer, man, it was the best. Carefully creating a huge chain to drop on your opponent, listening to their screams as an unstoppable flurry of bubbles come rushing up. It makes me a little nostalgic.
Athough MK1 in the mall near CWRU was a good 2nd. Come to think of it Mario Kart in my friends suite was pretty killer as well and we had beer there as well (unlike the mall).
I highly recommend Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" for a 3rd approach. He states that with both theism and atheism there is a point at which you make a leap and state something. "There is a god" or "There is no god" and from that assumption there falls a series of logical conclusions. His approach is not to make that leap. It's a stance akin to zen buddhism. Essentially, I don't know, and have no means of knowing. This is where the absurd portion comes in. He compares existence as being like a man wielding a knife running in to a room full of men with machine guns. We are so obviously ill equiped to understand much of anything. So why not focus on the things that we can know. And that is (according to Camus) only what you believe (Sartre disagreed fairly strongly, another good read and essentially Camus busting on Sartre is The Rebel).
Wow, that quote really changed my mind. Holy shit, decades of evidence and work are now meaningless based on the word of Henry Morris. Who cares about proof. Those christians have this book which tells it like it is. Why have we been wasting our precious time on this stupid empirical evidence game, digging stuff up, trying to do some date matching, presenting hypothesis and seeing if they're good enough to become theories at some point. What the hell, all these evolutionists turned anti-evolutionists can't be wrong! Get thee to a nunnery!