To add to this, in many US locations public transportation simply is not an option. I live about 30 miles north of Downtown Dallas. Public buses and rail lines don't even run up here, which means I would have to drive a decent clip just to get to a public transport station. And then I'm not even guaranteed that my destination is reachable.
I have several expatriate friends from Australia, New Zealand and Europe. All of them say the same thing : you don't realize how much Americans truly NEED their cars until you move to a location like Texas where public transportation doesn't cut it.
If you want to see new NES-generation games, go to your local super store like Target or Wal-Mart (if you're in the U.S.) and pick up one of those 10-Star-Wars-games-inside-an-R2D2-controller gadgets. Those types of all-in-one handhelds tend to run on NES emulation chips (or something similar).
I sometimes wonder if OSS wouldn't be taken more seriously if the names were more...grown up. It might be hard to convince your manager that you need to use open source software that tips its hat to the Egyptian Lord of the Dead.
What's next? Releases of Linux codenamed "Gozer" and "Zuul".
I mean it would be like the music industry giving a "best innovator" award to Beck or Radiohead or something and then giving "artist of the year" to Britney Spears.
Isn't that what happens when someone(s) like Beck or Radiohead win "Best Alternative Album" and someone(s) like Brittney Spears wins "Artist of the Year"?
Out of the millions of brands in the world, Apple is #43 and you think that's not "one of the world's top brands"? Does that mean that #43 on the list of the world's richest people isn't really one of the world's richest people because he/she isn't in the top 5 (or whatever your arbitrary cut-off point)?
He just said "one of the world's top brands". I would say anyone in the top 100 at least qualifies for that distinction.
Since the game is rated "M for Mature", this means that you should have to be at least 17 or older to even purchase the game
This is a frequent misconception of the "M" rating, much like there is misunderstanding regarding the "R" rating of movies.
"M" -- "We don't think you should play this game unless you are at least 17 years of age".
"AO -- "You can't even purchase this game unless you are at least 18 years of age"
And its movie parallel:
"R" -- "We don't think you should see this movie without a parent present unless you are at least 17 years of age."
"NC-17" -- "You can't even get in the theater unless you are at least 17 years of age."
Like theaters, some game retailers take their ratings more seriously. There are legal ramifications for selling underage content, so the "AO" and "NC-17" ratings are generally avoided unless you're creating niche content for a niche market. Most companies will completely avoid these ratings since it is too much hassle to police both employees and customers.
When you've used some GPL code to make your development time shorter, and you and your boss realize that the code you just used is under a license that requires you to make your WHOLE application open source, not just the part you used or modified, then I'd say the teeth are pretty sharp as they bite you in the ass.
ESR is right. The GPL holds developers back. Every place I've ever worked has shied away from GPL code because they don't want EVERYTHING that they write to be open source.
I'll tell you how you deal with code like that. You don't write it. Meyers talks about this in his books : mean what you say and say what you mean. Just because C++ ALLOWS something doesn't mean you should write code like that. At ANY C++ shop I've worked at in the last several years, code like you listed would get you cock-punched in a hurry.
There's no reason to be cute just to write hard-to-read code, and it pisses me off to no end when people use examples like the above on why C++ is a bad programming language (not saying that was the OP's intent). You can write clean, easy to read, easy to maintain C++ if you just take the time to do it. I've been doing it for years and so have millions of other developers out there.
It's not lack of DirectX that's screwing us, it's the simple fact that there are multiple APIs that a developer has to contend with. I seriously, seriously doubt that the problem with developing games on both Mac and Windows has to do with the small parts of assembly code. From what I understand, endianess issues are easily taken care of as well.
It's simply the lack of time, possibly talent and most likely desire to get the games done simultaneously. Cross-platform development is not hard, just time consuming. OS X will still have the same API interface that will need to be dealt with differently from DirectX, and I think it's too soon to outright say that it will be simple to develop games on both platforms at the same time. After all, if it really were that easy, there would be more Linux games out there now.
Well, you can start with the Apple people themselves. Dig for some old QuickTime movies of old Keynotes from both WWDC and Macworld. You'll find Apple executives running slideshows poo-pooing the pipelines on Pentium processors, poo-pooing the heat dissipation issues and lifting up the PPC. Most of us knew it was mostly marketing cruft, but hey, ya gotta sell boxes somehow, right?
On a side note, I remember being at the WWDC back in 2000, eating with some other Mac developers and a few guys from Apple. I had just gotten back from a Carbon Kitchen-type meeting and asked a question about some code. Why were there "#ifdef __X86__" (or something similar) directives all through the code? The Apple guys just smiled and said, in theory, OS X could run on x86 hardware, but only IN THEORY. Yeah right. I think a lot of people who have had their heads deep in OS X code for a while probably figured this would come eventually.
I think it is fairly prevalent, which is why sites like http://www.bensbargains.net/ exist. An example I found a couple of years ago : I ordered a flat panel from Dell. When I shopped on their "Home User" site, I got a price that was $300 more than if I put in some bogus corporation name and shopped the "Small Business" site. Guess which one I ended up using? To me, it is repugnant that I had to even go through all of those steps. Volume deals for corporate customers I can understand, but blatant price discrepancies just because you browse a site differently than another single customer is bad business. I don't know if I would consider it illegal, but it is definitely unethical.
Then again, so is lying to get a better deal on computer hardware.:^)
Maybe, but to a 3-year-old, it's the most wonderous thing ever seen. Which I suppose is the point of the ride to begin with, to instill that sense of wonderment in little children.
I think it's more time and copyright issues, at least that's what I've always assumed. Movie and television studios probably don't want to pay big bucks to computer companies, and they probably don't want to be seen as indirectly endorsing one company over another. This attitude can be seen other places, in television especially. You don't see characters drinking Coke or Pepsi or Tropicana Orange Juice. You don't see them using Crest toothpaste or Pantene shampoo. They might use containers that IMPLY a product, but never the product itself (unless endorsement money has been paid). After all, why give a huge multi-billion dollar free advertisement when everyone else needs to pay for commercial time and product placements.
I've read that a lot of computer access scenes are rendered using video editing software, Flash/Director, and other similar products. It's easier on the actors (they don't need to learn how to ACT like they're really using Photoshop), it's cheaper than paying a ton of money to a company for the rights to use their products, it keeps the show/movie flowing without stopping for complex computer tasks, and it can easily be reset/replayed when trying to shoot a scene.
Also, think of all of the specialty software a movie might need, costing a lot of money. It's just easier to have a production department contrive something that's played back for the actors than to try to buy all of the hardware and software needed to perform a few scenes.
Even more, my mother is an elementary school teacher, and she has been telling me how they are phasing cursive out of the cirriculum. Laptops are now issued to many students starting as soon as first grade (they get iBooks, I think). She marvels at how well kids can use a computer at such a young age, but it's is the Information Age in which they are growing up.
I have 2 sons, 4th and 2nd grade, and their school doesn't teach cursive either. I expressed my concern over this at a PTA meeting when I asked how my kids were ever going to learn how to sign their name. I suppose this generation and others after will sign documents in block print.
My point in all of this? If this trend is exhibited outside of these 2 school districts, then who will use Tablet PCs? I know cursive but write in all caps, engineering style. It's not efficient for me to write on a Tablet PC when I can just type! I think the same will be said of future generations...
Hence the snide comment from Ed Harris' character, Gene Krantz, that it must be a government operation if one craft had square canisters and the other had round ones.
You also have to think, it's not like these 2 engineering teams e-mailed each other daily and sat in on video conferences and such. Phone calls probably could have been made, but I doubt that they did much more than discuss the manner in which the 2 craft would be docked together. And I seriously doubt that either company flew their engineers out to the other's site to view what was going on. All of these things take place in our world, but back then they probably operated mostly in their own vacuums.
OK, my attempt to explain from what little legal knowledge I have.
Ex parte orders mean that you're asking for something in your benefit without the other party consenting or defending the decision. Restraining orders, protective orders, etc. are generally ex parte decisions. In other words, the judge hears one side of the arguments and makes a decision for that one side.
I would imagine that SCO is asking for an adjournment without IBM's consent and without first consulting IBM's attorneys. He must feel that they don't have enough reason to do so without some other kind of trial.
A rating system no matter how good it is, is not an excuse for poor parenting.
True, but parents need a guide. We can't possibly know everything about every game out there, so we need to make quick decision for our children when we're renting and purchasing games. Cartoonish games like Jak 2 and 3, Ratchet & Clank, etc. all carry "T" ratings, but otherwise how would we know about all of the violence in those games? The covers look innocent enough. Some are obvious, like GTA, Halo, war simulations. Others like the aforementioned titles are not. Without these ratings, parents are stuck guessing at the content based on the cover.
It also helps when your child is out of your reach, such as at a friend's house. We just tell other parents that there are no "T" or "M" rated games for our kids, and we expect them to honor that. Despite what all of the naysayers around here want to cry, a parent can't be everywhere at once.
I don't know what's worse -- the fact that the parent went and found a two-week old post to cut & paste or that you recognized it and new how to link to it.
Yeesh. Someone needs to step outside and take a bio-break.
The designer of the Nintendo Virtual Boy would have shown up
Actually, he's dead. But he did manage to leave us the Game Boy and the Metroid series. Thank you, Gumpei Yokoi! My parents, on the other hand, despise you.;^)
Slashdot Mirror
To add to this, in many US locations public transportation simply is not an option. I live about 30 miles north of Downtown Dallas. Public buses and rail lines don't even run up here, which means I would have to drive a decent clip just to get to a public transport station. And then I'm not even guaranteed that my destination is reachable.
I have several expatriate friends from Australia, New Zealand and Europe. All of them say the same thing : you don't realize how much Americans truly NEED their cars until you move to a location like Texas where public transportation doesn't cut it.
If you want to see new NES-generation games, go to your local super store like Target or Wal-Mart (if you're in the U.S.) and pick up one of those 10-Star-Wars-games-inside-an-R2D2-controller gadgets. Those types of all-in-one handhelds tend to run on NES emulation chips (or something similar).
I sometimes wonder if OSS wouldn't be taken more seriously if the names were more...grown up. It might be hard to convince your manager that you need to use open source software that tips its hat to the Egyptian Lord of the Dead.
What's next? Releases of Linux codenamed "Gozer" and "Zuul".
I mean it would be like the music industry giving a "best innovator" award to Beck or Radiohead or something and then giving "artist of the year" to Britney Spears.
Isn't that what happens when someone(s) like Beck or Radiohead win "Best Alternative Album" and someone(s) like Brittney Spears wins "Artist of the Year"?
Out of the millions of brands in the world, Apple is #43 and you think that's not "one of the world's top brands"? Does that mean that #43 on the list of the world's richest people isn't really one of the world's richest people because he/she isn't in the top 5 (or whatever your arbitrary cut-off point)?
He just said "one of the world's top brands". I would say anyone in the top 100 at least qualifies for that distinction.
Since the game is rated "M for Mature", this means that you should have to be at least 17 or older to even purchase the game
:
This is a frequent misconception of the "M" rating, much like there is misunderstanding regarding the "R" rating of movies.
"M" -- "We don't think you should play this game unless you are at least 17 years of age".
"AO -- "You can't even purchase this game unless you are at least 18 years of age"
And its movie parallel
"R" -- "We don't think you should see this movie without a parent present unless you are at least 17 years of age."
"NC-17" -- "You can't even get in the theater unless you are at least 17 years of age."
Like theaters, some game retailers take their ratings more seriously. There are legal ramifications for selling underage content, so the "AO" and "NC-17" ratings are generally avoided unless you're creating niche content for a niche market. Most companies will completely avoid these ratings since it is too much hassle to police both employees and customers.
Except the people on Slashdot. Most of them are Unix.
2009 will be the perfect time to officially throw away your TV
:
I doubt it. I'm sure we'll see this in July of 2008
Broadcasters have recently accepted a deadline of January 2012 for the mandatory end of analog television signal broadcasts.
Add 3, wash, rinse, repeat.
Yet you SOMEHOW find time to read and post on Slashdot. :^)
When you've used some GPL code to make your development time shorter, and you and your boss realize that the code you just used is under a license that requires you to make your WHOLE application open source, not just the part you used or modified, then I'd say the teeth are pretty sharp as they bite you in the ass.
ESR is right. The GPL holds developers back. Every place I've ever worked has shied away from GPL code because they don't want EVERYTHING that they write to be open source.
I'll tell you how you deal with code like that. You don't write it. Meyers talks about this in his books : mean what you say and say what you mean. Just because C++ ALLOWS something doesn't mean you should write code like that. At ANY C++ shop I've worked at in the last several years, code like you listed would get you cock-punched in a hurry.
There's no reason to be cute just to write hard-to-read code, and it pisses me off to no end when people use examples like the above on why C++ is a bad programming language (not saying that was the OP's intent). You can write clean, easy to read, easy to maintain C++ if you just take the time to do it. I've been doing it for years and so have millions of other developers out there.
It's not lack of DirectX that's screwing us, it's the simple fact that there are multiple APIs that a developer has to contend with. I seriously, seriously doubt that the problem with developing games on both Mac and Windows has to do with the small parts of assembly code. From what I understand, endianess issues are easily taken care of as well.
It's simply the lack of time, possibly talent and most likely desire to get the games done simultaneously. Cross-platform development is not hard, just time consuming. OS X will still have the same API interface that will need to be dealt with differently from DirectX, and I think it's too soon to outright say that it will be simple to develop games on both platforms at the same time. After all, if it really were that easy, there would be more Linux games out there now.
Well, you can start with the Apple people themselves. Dig for some old QuickTime movies of old Keynotes from both WWDC and Macworld. You'll find Apple executives running slideshows poo-pooing the pipelines on Pentium processors, poo-pooing the heat dissipation issues and lifting up the PPC. Most of us knew it was mostly marketing cruft, but hey, ya gotta sell boxes somehow, right?
On a side note, I remember being at the WWDC back in 2000, eating with some other Mac developers and a few guys from Apple. I had just gotten back from a Carbon Kitchen-type meeting and asked a question about some code. Why were there "#ifdef __X86__" (or something similar) directives all through the code? The Apple guys just smiled and said, in theory, OS X could run on x86 hardware, but only IN THEORY. Yeah right. I think a lot of people who have had their heads deep in OS X code for a while probably figured this would come eventually.
I think it is fairly prevalent, which is why sites like http://www.bensbargains.net/ exist. An example I found a couple of years ago : I ordered a flat panel from Dell. When I shopped on their "Home User" site, I got a price that was $300 more than if I put in some bogus corporation name and shopped the "Small Business" site. Guess which one I ended up using? To me, it is repugnant that I had to even go through all of those steps. Volume deals for corporate customers I can understand, but blatant price discrepancies just because you browse a site differently than another single customer is bad business. I don't know if I would consider it illegal, but it is definitely unethical.
:^)
Then again, so is lying to get a better deal on computer hardware.
Maybe, but to a 3-year-old, it's the most wonderous thing ever seen. Which I suppose is the point of the ride to begin with, to instill that sense of wonderment in little children.
They are simulations, not all that different from the simulations used by the U.S. military in preparation for war.
We couldn't find the weapons of mass destruction because of bad war simulations. The Marines have been training by playing Lemmings!
I think it's more time and copyright issues, at least that's what I've always assumed. Movie and television studios probably don't want to pay big bucks to computer companies, and they probably don't want to be seen as indirectly endorsing one company over another. This attitude can be seen other places, in television especially. You don't see characters drinking Coke or Pepsi or Tropicana Orange Juice. You don't see them using Crest toothpaste or Pantene shampoo. They might use containers that IMPLY a product, but never the product itself (unless endorsement money has been paid). After all, why give a huge multi-billion dollar free advertisement when everyone else needs to pay for commercial time and product placements.
I've read that a lot of computer access scenes are rendered using video editing software, Flash/Director, and other similar products. It's easier on the actors (they don't need to learn how to ACT like they're really using Photoshop), it's cheaper than paying a ton of money to a company for the rights to use their products, it keeps the show/movie flowing without stopping for complex computer tasks, and it can easily be reset/replayed when trying to shoot a scene.
Also, think of all of the specialty software a movie might need, costing a lot of money. It's just easier to have a production department contrive something that's played back for the actors than to try to buy all of the hardware and software needed to perform a few scenes.
We have enrolled them in a summer school program that teaches better reading skills and cursive to improve handwriting ability.
Even more, my mother is an elementary school teacher, and she has been telling me how they are phasing cursive out of the cirriculum. Laptops are now issued to many students starting as soon as first grade (they get iBooks, I think). She marvels at how well kids can use a computer at such a young age, but it's is the Information Age in which they are growing up.
I have 2 sons, 4th and 2nd grade, and their school doesn't teach cursive either. I expressed my concern over this at a PTA meeting when I asked how my kids were ever going to learn how to sign their name. I suppose this generation and others after will sign documents in block print.
My point in all of this? If this trend is exhibited outside of these 2 school districts, then who will use Tablet PCs? I know cursive but write in all caps, engineering style. It's not efficient for me to write on a Tablet PC when I can just type! I think the same will be said of future generations...
Hence the snide comment from Ed Harris' character, Gene Krantz, that it must be a government operation if one craft had square canisters and the other had round ones.
You also have to think, it's not like these 2 engineering teams e-mailed each other daily and sat in on video conferences and such. Phone calls probably could have been made, but I doubt that they did much more than discuss the manner in which the 2 craft would be docked together. And I seriously doubt that either company flew their engineers out to the other's site to view what was going on. All of these things take place in our world, but back then they probably operated mostly in their own vacuums.
OK, my attempt to explain from what little legal knowledge I have.
Ex parte orders mean that you're asking for something in your benefit without the other party consenting or defending the decision. Restraining orders, protective orders, etc. are generally ex parte decisions. In other words, the judge hears one side of the arguments and makes a decision for that one side.
I would imagine that SCO is asking for an adjournment without IBM's consent and without first consulting IBM's attorneys. He must feel that they don't have enough reason to do so without some other kind of trial.
A rating system no matter how good it is, is not an excuse for poor parenting.
True, but parents need a guide. We can't possibly know everything about every game out there, so we need to make quick decision for our children when we're renting and purchasing games. Cartoonish games like Jak 2 and 3, Ratchet & Clank, etc. all carry "T" ratings, but otherwise how would we know about all of the violence in those games? The covers look innocent enough. Some are obvious, like GTA, Halo, war simulations. Others like the aforementioned titles are not. Without these ratings, parents are stuck guessing at the content based on the cover.
It also helps when your child is out of your reach, such as at a friend's house. We just tell other parents that there are no "T" or "M" rated games for our kids, and we expect them to honor that. Despite what all of the naysayers around here want to cry, a parent can't be everywhere at once.
I don't know what's worse -- the fact that the parent went and found a two-week old post to cut & paste or that you recognized it and new how to link to it.
Yeesh. Someone needs to step outside and take a bio-break.
I'll just take that money from you now because we all know the Xbox gets a GSOD
The designer of the Nintendo Virtual Boy would have shown up
;^)
Actually, he's dead. But he did manage to leave us the Game Boy and the Metroid series. Thank you, Gumpei Yokoi! My parents, on the other hand, despise you.