This may come off as a flame bait or a rant, but the fact of the matter is...
When I was at the GDC in San Jose this year, as always they have a section dedicated to small independant game development companies. Usually these are games for the PC, but they could be for any console that would really want to fund there project.
After playing several of the games, it occured to me that these games sucked. I'm sorry, i'm sure the kids (and they were kids) that worked on these put a lot of time and effort into there creation, but when you have a game that looks choppy, skips, is about a remote control throwing food at the tv, or some side scrolling realtime rpg where you dont level up and dont gain new abilities, you have to kinda wonder - why the hell would I play this game? If it looks like crap and plays like crap and doesn't have any story whatsoever to it how would you expect it to compete with games made by ID, Blizzard, Bioware, Square-Enix, etc...
I have a friend who at one point wanted to get into game programming and he started making little tetris like apps and whatnot - although that takes a skill and talent that I don't have - I know enough to say that unless he went to work FOR a game company he would never be able to create a whole new game engine that would compete with the Unreal or Quake engine by himself and be able to make a "good" enough game that someone like EA or Sierra would want to publish.
Basically I don't see the technology being developed any faster than 3-4 years because as it stands, home main stream still opperates at DSL connections of 10mb and home networks run at 100mbs. As far as the business world goes, the majority of companies I have had the opportunity of working at run only 100mb networks with IT "thinking/testing" going 1gb.
In short - there is NO demand for 10gb networks currently and especially NO demand for 100gb let alone a freakin terrabyte pipe. Although those things are "nice" and very "cool", there is not a big enough demand/NEED for this kind of transfer - YET.
You could also use the analogy of the current PC market. There is not a big demand for new systems right now because even for business use a P4 1.6ghz with 512mb of mem runs everything work and game related fine. As soon as something comes out that REQUIRES/needs more power THEN you will see a rise in pc sales.
I'm so glad I didn't buy any of the DVD's for the LOTR trilogy, just because I feel really bad for all the fans who have a "sucky" version or have spent tons of cash on all the different versions of the dvd's. Because of this i'm just gonna wait till the summer after ROTK to buy whatever becomes the "almost-most-fulfilling-3-dvd-set-of-themoment" then at least i'll have all 3 and of only paid one price instead of owning 6 versions of each of the first movies AND the trilogy as a set.
Granted there are all kinds of linux flavors and distro under the sun, but walking down the street in anytown USA you ask any given person "hay you ever heard of linux?" or "could you tell us the name of a linux distribution/company you have heard of?" and most common answers will be Redhat, Suse, and Mandrake - in that order.
Red Hat has pushed Linux into the spot light more than any other company has - ok this is where I get flamed - but honestly what companies other than Red Hat have targeted more than the fat-guru-programmer stereotype nix user. Gentoo and Slackware definaetly don't expect anyone but a power user to even touch there distros. Mandrake trys to be a friendly nix distro, but they constantly beg their users to donate money and can barely keep from going bankrupt. Red Hat and Suse are the only 2 companies that have successfully made money selling linux to both corporations and home users, and of the 2 Red Hat is by far more "KNOWN"
I agree. Our email/web servers were shut down for 3 hours while our IT dept scanned/cleaned the systems, at the same time each person in the office was contacted via phone about scanning their individual systems. We have an office with about 40 members + 5 IT people, so thats 45 people. our salaries range from 40,000/yr (+/-$20/hr) to 100,000/yr (+/-$50/hr) the average employee salary is then +/-$35/hr if we were down for 3 hours we spent from +/-$60 to +/-$150 per machine to fix or an average of +/-$105 a system.
Although to any companies out there disregard my logic and I will gladly offer my services to you for the low low price of $500 a machine:)
From my understanding of it (at least according to how our IT dept. explained it to us) is that the virus uses the "reply address" of everyone in the infected users address book. So in this case if it was an online merchant or even a coworker or friend who was infected and had you in there address book you would possibly start getting peole replying to you or failed sent email responces from random servers.
umm... everyone who has a Hotmail account. Since having a hotmail/passport account also gives you an MSN account. Although it's really just a matter if you use that service or not - much like my GF who has a hotmail account, but opts to use AIM because thats what most of her friends use.
didn't AOL try to blobk trillian as well.... look how well that worked:) I use trillian to talk on ICQ, AOL, Yahoo, and MSN - I feel no need to run ALL those proggys - in fact I wish I only used 1, but some friends absolutely refuse to switch to anything other than - whatever happened to the days when everyone I knew was using ICQ and occassionally meeting up with eachother in an IRC room or web forum?
i'm all about building a USEFULL robot that can do things like FETCH ME A FUCKING BEER FROM THE FRIDGE WHILE I'M WATCHING TV - Damn if only the Real Doll makers could make there dolls "alive" that would be the shit really.
Actually in all honesty why hasn't anyone built an R2D2 yet? I'm not talking about a remote control one, I mean why havent we made a "robot" that can move around and fetch me items based on my voice AND that is affordable by the working class of society?
I fully agree - most of those questions have no bearing on what is important for the next Gov. of CA to do. It may have been better to ask questions dealing with actual CA issues like the deficit, the unemployment rate, gov funded institutes and education, etc... and then maybe throw in a question about vi and emacs as a last question leave on a funny note kinda thing.
If I was to interview Arnold or Larry Flint I wouldn't ask them about pointers on body building or fondling hot women.
The ANTIAMEN bill past resently outlaws all "Word of Mouth" and "Opinion" against the MPAA with members in TV, Radio, Movie, and Music. The new bill will also remove the "Freedom of Speach" from the constitution since it was found UN-constitutional.
but does anyone else find the design monsterously ugly. It seems like a decent device - although I'll stick with my Zaurus, but unlike any of the other PDA's on the market this one just LOOKS ugly. I know that this could seem like a troll post, but honestly i'm sure there is others like me who don't like using ugly things - similar to my complaint with the Xbox Giganta controller - which was quickly replaced with a smaller one.
piece of flame-bait bull-shit I have ever read. The fact that pc's have somewhat of a domination in the corporate-office-user world is that when you have to buy 10,000 machines at a time you want the most cost efficient systems available, and currently, Apple makes some of the most expensive personal computers on the market currently.
The other thing is that although Apples are great for design, they lack a lot of the inhouse-homebrewn software that a lot of companies use.
Lets look at a real-world situation. I work for a Realestate firm with about 100 employees. Everyone in the sales dept. uses a windows machine. Why? because we got a really good pricing from Dell (below $500 a System+Monitor, you cannot get a new G4-G5 with monitor for that). The sales staff, although not the most technically savy, require (read: use) a program called PhotoMapper which is a great yet simple program for aerial mapping and copying pasting into MS Word. Photomapper is NOT available for Apple, and without going into it, there is not another simple program that does what this one does as cleanly on a mac. sorry.
Now our Graphics and Marketing dept. uses macs. Why? Because we work with apps like photoshop, illustrator, quark, etc... we have a printer. However we also have a couple pc's for when we need to work with the CAD files we recieve for different buildings. for some reason the CAD programs just seem to run better on the pc's we have so we just kept it that way.
Maybe our IT dept. is just on the ball, but they don't care whether you have a PC or a MAC - they support and maintain both. Each system has its place and people always go with what they are comfortable with (sorry linux no one in the business world wants you for word processing or graphic design).
Any pc vendor with the exception of MS Henchman Dell will sell you a non-windows box, whether or not they will put linux on it is another question all together, but you can always buy a system with NO-OS.
If Windows doesn't install the pc user just returns the software purchase - are Apple customers too stupid to do that? Or maybe they just want to support Apple so much they will buy a new software title regardless if it runs on their machine or not?
Microsoft is already considered a monopoly for some reason - selling computers would make them get sued even more. You probably don;t remember but their was this company called IBM who made pc's AND sold an OS called OS2/Warp and they got sued left and right for being a monopoly. Of course when you have more money than god I guess getting sued doesn't matter.
I like to use Outlook Express just cause it comes with Windows and I don't have to buy any other email program. It's simple in that I use it to check my email - I don't have/need a Calenda and I don't need to connect to an exchange server since my emails are pop3 accounts.
However I could see why MS would get tired of making BOTH Outlook and Outlook Express, where if I just used Outlook I could do everything. Of course i'm sure they will charge for it instead of bundling it for free - but it's not like Outlook Express is going away anytime soon (read: if they don't include it in the next version of Windows X - that still won't be for another 1-2years 2004-2005)
i'd hope we would all become more intelligent - with an average lifespan of 200yrs - I would assume it would be the "norm" to have a doctorates degree (much like having a highschool degree is)
of course it would become VERY easy to overpopulate the world so I would hope that people would stop making so many god damn babies - or at least only make babies they could afford.
another plus tho is that we would eventually have more money/wealth since your retirement age would double - instead of 65 it would become around 130+
Ok so there has been tons of stories recently about SCO vs. IBM, SCO vs. RedHat, SCO vs. SUSE, SCO vs. the fucking planet, and although this is tech news and definately "News for Nerds." I fail to see it as "Stuff that matters" anymore until it is resolved. So far its just company after company sueing eachother and quite frankly it's getting redundant - along with the posts below each article, by now thousands of people have posted the same thing of "SCO is so dumb, SCO is gonna get bought out, SCO is gonna be sued into oblivion, etc"
Unless something major happens like - A VERDICT - could we maybe do SCO updates in the Slashback section and save the main story headers for News rather than updates on Smear campaigns....?
Until I saw the $4,000 price tag on Amazon. I don't understand why it is so expensive. It's a simple slow motorized stand with wheels. I bought a Gas Powered Go-Ped and a larger Carb for it allowing me to travel at about 40-45mph (stock was 30-35mph). The Go-Ped cost me $500 (Including extra parts otherwise it would have been $450). They even make models that can have seats on them if you want to sit instead of stand for an extra $75-$100. Currently in San Jose you are allowed to ride Go-Peds legally in the bike lane, someone told me that the Segway was not allowed on side walks because it moved to slow? I don't know if that is true or not, but I don't know nor have seen anyone who owns one. With so many other less expensive (and better IMHO) alternatives I don't see the point in getting a Segway. Even for older people the price of a decent Bicycle can be found in the $400-$600 range.
Crappy processor maker buys a division of shitty processor maker.
Mark me down - but I like things that WORK without having to mess with them. Intels and G4's seem to work fine right out of the box - why can't AMD, VIA, Cyrix, whatever else - do the same?
Slashdot Mirror
This may come off as a flame bait or a rant, but the fact of the matter is...
When I was at the GDC in San Jose this year, as always they have a section dedicated to small independant game development companies. Usually these are games for the PC, but they could be for any console that would really want to fund there project.
After playing several of the games, it occured to me that these games sucked. I'm sorry, i'm sure the kids (and they were kids) that worked on these put a lot of time and effort into there creation, but when you have a game that looks choppy, skips, is about a remote control throwing food at the tv, or some side scrolling realtime rpg where you dont level up and dont gain new abilities, you have to kinda wonder - why the hell would I play this game? If it looks like crap and plays like crap and doesn't have any story whatsoever to it how would you expect it to compete with games made by ID, Blizzard, Bioware, Square-Enix, etc...
I have a friend who at one point wanted to get into game programming and he started making little tetris like apps and whatnot - although that takes a skill and talent that I don't have - I know enough to say that unless he went to work FOR a game company he would never be able to create a whole new game engine that would compete with the Unreal or Quake engine by himself and be able to make a "good" enough game that someone like EA or Sierra would want to publish.
And IMHO - NO we don't need more of Yak's games.
From the article they have a snippet at the top that goes like this - i've added the years in between on my own:
10 Megabit Ethernet 1990*
(5 years)
* 100 Megabit Ethernet 1995
(3 years)
* 1 Gigabit Ethernet 1998
(4 years)
* 10 Gigabit Ethernet 2002
(4 years)
* 100 Gigabit Ethernet 2006**
(2 years)
* 1 Terabit Ethernet 2008**
(2 years)
* 10 Terabit Ethernet 2010**
I think this would be more accurate though:
* 100 Gigabit Ethernet 2006**
(3 years)
* 1 Terabit Ethernet 2009**
(3 years)
* 10 Terabit Ethernet 2012**
Basically I don't see the technology being developed any faster than 3-4 years because as it stands, home main stream still opperates at DSL connections of 10mb and home networks run at 100mbs. As far as the business world goes, the majority of companies I have had the opportunity of working at run only 100mb networks with IT "thinking/testing" going 1gb.
In short - there is NO demand for 10gb networks currently and especially NO demand for 100gb let alone a freakin terrabyte pipe. Although those things are "nice" and very "cool", there is not a big enough demand/NEED for this kind of transfer - YET.
You could also use the analogy of the current PC market. There is not a big demand for new systems right now because even for business use a P4 1.6ghz with 512mb of mem runs everything work and game related fine. As soon as something comes out that REQUIRES/needs more power THEN you will see a rise in pc sales.
ou left out the 10 yr anniversary edition digitally remastered in THX :)
I'm so glad I didn't buy any of the DVD's for the LOTR trilogy, just because I feel really bad for all the fans who have a "sucky" version or have spent tons of cash on all the different versions of the dvd's. Because of this i'm just gonna wait till the summer after ROTK to buy whatever becomes the "almost-most-fulfilling-3-dvd-set-of-themoment" then at least i'll have all 3 and of only paid one price instead of owning 6 versions of each of the first movies AND the trilogy as a set.
Granted there are all kinds of linux flavors and distro under the sun, but walking down the street in anytown USA you ask any given person "hay you ever heard of linux?" or "could you tell us the name of a linux distribution/company you have heard of?" and most common answers will be Redhat, Suse, and Mandrake - in that order.
Red Hat has pushed Linux into the spot light more than any other company has - ok this is where I get flamed - but honestly what companies other than Red Hat have targeted more than the fat-guru-programmer stereotype nix user. Gentoo and Slackware definaetly don't expect anyone but a power user to even touch there distros. Mandrake trys to be a friendly nix distro, but they constantly beg their users to donate money and can barely keep from going bankrupt. Red Hat and Suse are the only 2 companies that have successfully made money selling linux to both corporations and home users, and of the 2 Red Hat is by far more "KNOWN"
I agree. Our email/web servers were shut down for 3 hours while our IT dept scanned/cleaned the systems, at the same time each person in the office was contacted via phone about scanning their individual systems. We have an office with about 40 members + 5 IT people, so thats 45 people. our salaries range from 40,000/yr (+/-$20/hr) to 100,000/yr (+/-$50/hr) the average employee salary is then +/-$35/hr if we were down for 3 hours we spent from +/-$60 to +/-$150 per machine to fix or an average of +/-$105 a system.
:)
Although to any companies out there disregard my logic and I will gladly offer my services to you for the low low price of $500 a machine
From my understanding of it (at least according to how our IT dept. explained it to us) is that the virus uses the "reply address" of everyone in the infected users address book. So in this case if it was an online merchant or even a coworker or friend who was infected and had you in there address book you would possibly start getting peole replying to you or failed sent email responces from random servers.
why not just use a fucking cell phone?
oh wait what about the deaf people - DOH
GAIM on linux just connects to AIM and on OSX there is ICHAT which is built in and connects to AIM as well.
umm... everyone who has a Hotmail account. Since having a hotmail/passport account also gives you an MSN account. Although it's really just a matter if you use that service or not - much like my GF who has a hotmail account, but opts to use AIM because thats what most of her friends use.
didn't AOL try to blobk trillian as well.... look how well that worked :) I use trillian to talk on ICQ, AOL, Yahoo, and MSN - I feel no need to run ALL those proggys - in fact I wish I only used 1, but some friends absolutely refuse to switch to anything other than - whatever happened to the days when everyone I knew was using ICQ and occassionally meeting up with eachother in an IRC room or web forum?
i'm all about building a USEFULL robot that can do things like FETCH ME A FUCKING BEER FROM THE FRIDGE WHILE I'M WATCHING TV - Damn if only the Real Doll makers could make there dolls "alive" that would be the shit really.
Actually in all honesty why hasn't anyone built an R2D2 yet? I'm not talking about a remote control one, I mean why havent we made a "robot" that can move around and fetch me items based on my voice AND that is affordable by the working class of society?
I fully agree - most of those questions have no bearing on what is important for the next Gov. of CA to do. It may have been better to ask questions dealing with actual CA issues like the deficit, the unemployment rate, gov funded institutes and education, etc... and then maybe throw in a question about vi and emacs as a last question leave on a funny note kinda thing.
If I was to interview Arnold or Larry Flint I wouldn't ask them about pointers on body building or fondling hot women.
The ANTIAMEN bill past resently outlaws all "Word of Mouth" and "Opinion" against the MPAA with members in TV, Radio, Movie, and Music. The new bill will also remove the "Freedom of Speach" from the constitution since it was found UN-constitutional.
but does anyone else find the design monsterously ugly. It seems like a decent device - although I'll stick with my Zaurus, but unlike any of the other PDA's on the market this one just LOOKS ugly. I know that this could seem like a troll post, but honestly i'm sure there is others like me who don't like using ugly things - similar to my complaint with the Xbox Giganta controller - which was quickly replaced with a smaller one.
piece of flame-bait bull-shit I have ever read. The fact that pc's have somewhat of a domination in the corporate-office-user world is that when you have to buy 10,000 machines at a time you want the most cost efficient systems available, and currently, Apple makes some of the most expensive personal computers on the market currently.
The other thing is that although Apples are great for design, they lack a lot of the inhouse-homebrewn software that a lot of companies use.
Lets look at a real-world situation. I work for a Realestate firm with about 100 employees. Everyone in the sales dept. uses a windows machine. Why? because we got a really good pricing from Dell (below $500 a System+Monitor, you cannot get a new G4-G5 with monitor for that). The sales staff, although not the most technically savy, require (read: use) a program called PhotoMapper which is a great yet simple program for aerial mapping and copying pasting into MS Word. Photomapper is NOT available for Apple, and without going into it, there is not another simple program that does what this one does as cleanly on a mac. sorry.
Now our Graphics and Marketing dept. uses macs. Why? Because we work with apps like photoshop, illustrator, quark, etc... we have a printer. However we also have a couple pc's for when we need to work with the CAD files we recieve for different buildings. for some reason the CAD programs just seem to run better on the pc's we have so we just kept it that way.
Maybe our IT dept. is just on the ball, but they don't care whether you have a PC or a MAC - they support and maintain both. Each system has its place and people always go with what they are comfortable with (sorry linux no one in the business world wants you for word processing or graphic design).
Any pc vendor with the exception of MS Henchman Dell will sell you a non-windows box, whether or not they will put linux on it is another question all together, but you can always buy a system with NO-OS.
If Windows doesn't install the pc user just returns the software purchase - are Apple customers too stupid to do that? Or maybe they just want to support Apple so much they will buy a new software title regardless if it runs on their machine or not?
Microsoft is already considered a monopoly for some reason - selling computers would make them get sued even more. You probably don;t remember but their was this company called IBM who made pc's AND sold an OS called OS2/Warp and they got sued left and right for being a monopoly. Of course when you have more money than god I guess getting sued doesn't matter.
I like to use Outlook Express just cause it comes with Windows and I don't have to buy any other email program. It's simple in that I use it to check my email - I don't have/need a Calenda and I don't need to connect to an exchange server since my emails are pop3 accounts.
However I could see why MS would get tired of making BOTH Outlook and Outlook Express, where if I just used Outlook I could do everything. Of course i'm sure they will charge for it instead of bundling it for free - but it's not like Outlook Express is going away anytime soon (read: if they don't include it in the next version of Windows X - that still won't be for another 1-2years 2004-2005)
i'd hope we would all become more intelligent - with an average lifespan of 200yrs - I would assume it would be the "norm" to have a doctorates degree (much like having a highschool degree is)
of course it would become VERY easy to overpopulate the world so I would hope that people would stop making so many god damn babies - or at least only make babies they could afford.
another plus tho is that we would eventually have more money/wealth since your retirement age would double - instead of 65 it would become around 130+
Ok so there has been tons of stories recently about SCO vs. IBM, SCO vs. RedHat, SCO vs. SUSE, SCO vs. the fucking planet, and although this is tech news and definately "News for Nerds." I fail to see it as "Stuff that matters" anymore until it is resolved. So far its just company after company sueing eachother and quite frankly it's getting redundant - along with the posts below each article, by now thousands of people have posted the same thing of "SCO is so dumb, SCO is gonna get bought out, SCO is gonna be sued into oblivion, etc"
Unless something major happens like - A VERDICT - could we maybe do SCO updates in the Slashback section and save the main story headers for News rather than updates on Smear campaigns....?
my 2.5 cents
"IBM is seeking unspecified monetary damages and an injunction to stop SCO from shipping its software."
Tranlated....
Your so stupid we won't buy you out - we'll just take 0WN you.
Thats Honda's version.
Until I saw the $4,000 price tag on Amazon. I don't understand why it is so expensive. It's a simple slow motorized stand with wheels. I bought a Gas Powered Go-Ped and a larger Carb for it allowing me to travel at about 40-45mph (stock was 30-35mph). The Go-Ped cost me $500 (Including extra parts otherwise it would have been $450). They even make models that can have seats on them if you want to sit instead of stand for an extra $75-$100. Currently in San Jose you are allowed to ride Go-Peds legally in the bike lane, someone told me that the Segway was not allowed on side walks because it moved to slow? I don't know if that is true or not, but I don't know nor have seen anyone who owns one. With so many other less expensive (and better IMHO) alternatives I don't see the point in getting a Segway. Even for older people the price of a decent Bicycle can be found in the $400-$600 range.
well i'm sure you'll have more hits than you ever imagined now.... Go slashdotting affect (or is it effect?)
Crappy processor maker buys a division of shitty processor maker.
Mark me down - but I like things that WORK without having to mess with them. Intels and G4's seem to work fine right out of the box - why can't AMD, VIA, Cyrix, whatever else - do the same?