Not only gish, the whole incredible machine series was developed around physics, also some of the games on garage games are developed around that concept.
Looking glass relied heavily on physics in most of their games, also did origin in some Ultimas.
Physics allow often some kind of freeform adventure style of gameplay where the developer only sets the problem but leaves it up entirely to the player on how to solve it.
Perfect examples for this are the Thief games.
Well it is not that rare, if you go out of the shooter field.
Following titles instantly come to my mind.
The Ultima Underworlds
Both System Shocks
Deus Ex 1,2
Both Gothics
Arx Fatalis
The Thief Series as a classical example of
Also add to that most flight, car and whatever simulations
gameplay relying on physics in gameplay is harder, because it opens the path to a freeform style of play. But the results for the player are much more rewarding in the sense, that the player does not feel locked in anymore.
That is just from a players perspective not from a designers.
The problem with those memory dumps (have been there on a smaller scale) or call it object serialisation, is the missing abstraction layer between the data and the objects.
Over time, call it years the internal data structures of programs change a lot, new features are added old ones removed and voila you have a totally different object tree.
Now you have a weird binary format of an object representation long ago, nobody really knows anymore what is going on in there (and nobody even knew if it was a plain bytestream dump of the data)
Even if you are the developer of this, you basically can count on having nightmares of trying to migrate this mess into your current data structures.
Microsoft probably had so many internal problems keeping the compatiblity of those files on a sane usable level between the versions, that they now are opting for a more abstracted human readable format (probably they got the idea directly from OpenOffice)
Look into scripting interface. There might be a refresh timer on embedded objects possible.
As far as I know, the star division had an object embedding interface already working way before Microsoft had something crashing.
They added OLE below this interface and abstracted it.
The probably easiest solution is to have a refresh timer if this is possible otherwise load it from a database.
Depends, I havent had any single problem by sending out PDF resumes so far.
I also refused to apply for a job online where the webpage said, only doc format. Instead I printed my pdfs out and sent it via snail mail.
Actually the funny thing is there are several alternatives which suck as much as Word, but there are alternatives which are much better but basically kept out of the market by the proprietary file format.
A while ago (about 4-5 months) german Ct magazine stress tested a bunch of word processors on their capability of being able to handle documents which are typical master or PHd size. Aka 100-200 pages, lots of images references, a bibliography and so on.
They tested them the standard way and were not using workarounds like splitting the word document into smaller units.
What happened, was follwing.
Word, Wordperfect and Wordpro pretty much equally sucked at the task and basically the bottom line was, without any workarounds by the Author you have to face a tough task to get this through with one of these word processors. You have to face serious problems.
What happened was that some smaller programs worked quite well and didnt give any significant problems.
OpenOffice was one of them. A DTP program the other AFAIR and a small office package by a german company the third one.
So what is keeping OpenOffice away. First the not to 100% compatiblity, which also exists between Microsoft offices (but users seem to forgive Microsoft everything)
That things dont work exactly the same way they are used to, but users forgive Microsoft altering the user interface in between major versions to almost 100%.
And some of them dont even know that alternatives exist. For them it means Office=Microsoft. The brand probably is branded into their brains although Microsoft never was the first one with any of their office products.
It is like some people who buy a Porsche, no matter how good the car is or how it sucks, they still buy the next one (despite the fact that Porsche cars are good, the MSO is more on the usable for certain tasks side)
Well for instance, there are documents, which basically crash Microsoft office. Most of them have a few bytes broken or some kind of weird OLE stream. I have encountered more than once, that these broken documents could be loaded by OO alone and saved back.
If you move back and from the various office versions and you have some weird layouting stuff going on you can bet on having the same problems.
The same goes for really big documents, I am speaking of documents with a few hundred pages. MSO simply begins to choke after a while on those things, kills layouts starts to act weirdly, you have a chance to save the content by loading it into openoffice which handles big documents of booksize quite nicely without any problems.
(Btw. the german Ct magazine ran a stress test on modern word processors which included to handle a typical book size or PHd size situation. The result was devastating. Word, Ami/Word Pro, and Wordperfect failed totally at the task, with various problems, like killing the document, starting to act weirdly and so on. Wheres OpenOffice/StarOffice, Framemaker, and a bunch of smaller office suites and DTP Programs handled the task without any problem.
Sure this is not the standard office type situation where you handle mostly documents of a few pages, but, there are situations were authors and students forced into using unsuitable programs for such bigger tasks and then have to loose months because a word processor goes haywire under them.
Not from the outside, after all a.doc is still a.doc?
No seriously, nobody really knows if the internal data structures of doc files have not been altered.
There often are cases where a word 2000 file or wordxp file crashes office 97 and vice versa.
It is even worse if you convert between office windows and office mac. A single embedded OLE stream can kill your entired document.
As far as I know the XML storage patent
was granted to Microsoft this year.
Now think that Star Office introduced XML based fileformats around 2000 or even before.
Not only Pharma, the biggest ones are banks and their supply industry.
I once worked for a software company which went into banking business, they had the ISO9000 certificate was mandatory to get even as a software supplier into that business.
The interesting thing is on how that will work out if Microsoft looses several big banks and pharma businesses at least partially (probably somebody will develop a doc2oasis conversion server for long time storage)
because they refuse to implement oasis, unlike StarOffice, WordPro and Wordperfect, which currently are all migrating.
I was asking that myself. 1.3 mio loks of system code in a low level language in 1-2 years of development.
This is close to impossible unless you have a code monkey factory and lousy code, or you use some kinde of code generator, who does that job and you just alter the thing.
The founding fathers had two reasons to reject it.
They basically learned the idea from the indigenic tribes of their area which have been democratic until the independence war (funny America got their independence back then, the Northeast American tribes lost it and their democracy back then)
Back then there was no reasonable way to do a nationwide voting because the only communication was the horse.
Later theories suggest that it also prevents dictatorships, which given the current circumstances, I rather doubt. Indirect vote is not really a safety net, since dictators are seldom dictators at a election, they kill off democracy at once slice at the other. Often they use some kind of terrorist attack (fakt or real to do that).
What happens usually is that those people use the anxiete of the common people to bring their opressive ideas through and remove one slice of the democracy after another over a longer time, so that nobody really notices.
Perfect examples on how this works is Germany between 32-34 or modern day Russia. Also the US can run into this cycle if things dont make any turn to the better.
Rome would be an excellent example in ancient history. A country which already again was a monarchy when the people in congress still thought they had power.
At least they do vote on those laws in Swizerland with direct majority votes of the people.
Yes in Swizerland they not only vote on governments (the funny thing is in swizerland the government stays the same no matter how the votes are)
but they vote on laws, which seems to work quite well. Swizerland is probably the most stable democracy of the world.
Sorry I notice the communist link after I posted it.
See my other post with a direct quote from the Reuters agency, and the answer with direct links to the BBC and other sites.
The problem is there, and if you want to ignore it you can.
Jimmy Carter and others dont (see the BBC article)
Freeform 3d play on 8 bit computers, a true milestone and the base of all trade freeform space games.
The basic gaming conepts are still used up to nowadays.
The problem was the later Elites which were bug ridden and error prone and sometimes outright horrible.
I hope the new one will not have these problems, since it faces a tough competition of really good games which already have used the same playstyle over and over again.
First of all an extended version of the format is bound to become a defacto standard in non Microsoft offices anyway.
IBM, Corel and others already have formed a group. The open source offices are moving towards it already.
And last but not least at least it used to be, that many governments if they have public business deals, often have, if there is an iso implementation of something we are going that way clause in their contracts.
It is just that the Microsoft format ist not really a standard. Face it the MSO formats are all undocumented, the Star division did several manyears of reverse engineering of the formats to achieve the results which exist now. And there is no alternative office product currently in existence than the ones from Microsoft which are able to handle the undocumented Microsoft formats better.
OOO sometimes handles these formats even better than various office versions in between, which are prone to crash if the document has an error or some weird ole stream within the document cannot be found.
The whole file format situation of MSO is a huge mess which Microsoft tries to get away from as well. (hence the move to a documenten but with patents plastered xml baseds office format)
Btw. yes I know there exists an official specification to the old office formats, but face it they are nothing more than a nice fairytale contentwise.
Actually the OSCE is an international organisation which the is PART OF!!!!
The OSCE only works if they are invited in those cases, this is only probably a preparation of the elections in Iraq.
Secondly about the European US critizism. Face it we dont critizice the US which we still see as brothers. But having a brother who basically does laws which threatens to bomb the international court in The Haque Netherlands, who invades a country based on blatant lies which most people knew before that they were lies. Who basically triggers an atomic program in several absolutist countries by calling them axis of evil. Who basically drowns international environmental treaties while the environment goes haywire already and lots of other things. And calls ever form of friendly critizism (anti whatever, a thing first used by Goebbels to drown critizism in the third reich), makes it really hard to love the US-government.
Well a more modern example is probably modern Iraq, also Afghanistan, if you go after international law.
The invasion in Afghanistan was and still is backed by the international community.
The key person in the Weapons of Mass Destruction argument, Hans Blix stated already way before the invasion that there were none, several others also did.
The invasion of Iraq was based upon blatant lies, international warnings about the chaos which already is there now, and a blatand ignorance of the US government regarding the whole middle east and worldwide solution.
The invasion according to Annan still was/is illegal if you go after strict international law.
Actually the mother of the US government os the roman Capitol (hence the name of Capitol Hill, Senators, Congress and so on)
The funny thing is that the current form of US democracy (if you remove all the legalized bribery aka donation system and lobbyists) is a mixture of the best of the romand democratic government and several aspects of north american tribal democracies Washington still could visit before the independence war broke out.
The indirect voting system probably came from the tribal system which had this kind of system to manage the distances and different tribes forming a common government.
It is funny that the current US democracy seems to repeat the same mistakes the romand democracy did in its heydey which indirectly led to its downfall.
Well, Swizerland since 1848 at that time it got its official status, but Swizerland has had an electorial system since its first attempts of independence of the Habsburgs which goes way back into the 14th century.
Swizerland was not even touched by the last two world wars.
England perfect example which roots back to Cromwell in its stability of its eleoctorial system.
Somebody mentioned already New Zealand, also some norhtern european countries if you allow kings as country leaders have fairly old democratic systems, Sweden comes to my mind. (Probably Norway and Denmark as well)
Also some north american indian east coast tribes had stable democratic systems for ceveral hundred years until the US independence war broke out.
Last but not least good ole rome, which had a slowly degenerating democrary for several hundred years after they kicked the kings and before becoming a monarchy again (without noticing it)
As for a clean electorial process and the least influence on money on the politics (bribe hidden or allowed - like in the US the campaign donations)
Probably swizerland, holland, and the northern european countries have the best traditions in it.
The US is pretty lousy in this regard, as well as the upper EU government. Both basically are run by direct or indirect lobbyists.
I think the longest running democracy, if you cound electorial gonvernmental forms with a king/queen on top of it, is england.
England has had an electorial system way back into the 17th century.
Older democracies, well, Athens comes to my mind.
Also Rome, which resembles lots of similarities to modern day america in its last days of democracy.
(In Rome the democratic parties basically were at the end only a closed circle of pseudo aristocrats which slowly drifted into a civil war and then into the monarchy, without recognizing it.
And also some east coast tribes of north america had a democratic electorial system which lasted for several hundred years.
(Forgive me if i am wrong I am european), to my knowledge the system broke down in those tribes during the american independence war. The Founding fathers got many ideas of their kind of system from the triebs, but also from rome.
It is kind of a joke of history that the currenty US democratic system resembles more the foul last days of roman democracy than anything else, given all the simbols the US government erected itself to resemble rome.
The US is not a democracy anymore, neither is the EU one.
The EU one is basically a combination of countries governed by a class of Bureaucrats which are not directly elected and also governed by thousands of lobbyists not even remotely elected.
The US is basically a goverened by a bunch of millionaires and billionaires directly and indirectly elected and thousands of lobbyists not even remotely elected.
A democracy per se is a government formed by directly or indirectly elected representatives of the people who work for the people.
The situation in the EU and in the US is, that the government is somewhat a closed higher class and a bunch of companies who basically rule the people to enrich themselves and a bunch of companies.
So where does democracy fit into this scheme? Nowhere this system is called plutocracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only gish, the whole incredible machine series was developed around physics, also some of the games on garage games are developed around that concept. Looking glass relied heavily on physics in most of their games, also did origin in some Ultimas. Physics allow often some kind of freeform adventure style of gameplay where the developer only sets the problem but leaves it up entirely to the player on how to solve it. Perfect examples for this are the Thief games.
- The Ultima Underworlds
- Both System Shocks
- Deus Ex 1,2
- Both Gothics
- Arx Fatalis
- The Thief Series as a classical example of
- Also add to that most flight, car and whatever simulations
gameplay relying on physics in gameplay is harder, because it opens the path to a freeform style of play. But the results for the player are much more rewarding in the sense, that the player does not feel locked in anymore. That is just from a players perspective not from a designers.The problem with those memory dumps (have been there on a smaller scale) or call it object serialisation, is the missing abstraction layer between the data and the objects. Over time, call it years the internal data structures of programs change a lot, new features are added old ones removed and voila you have a totally different object tree. Now you have a weird binary format of an object representation long ago, nobody really knows anymore what is going on in there (and nobody even knew if it was a plain bytestream dump of the data)
Even if you are the developer of this, you basically can count on having nightmares of trying to migrate this mess into your current data structures.
Microsoft probably had so many internal problems keeping the compatiblity of those files on a sane usable level between the versions, that they now are opting for a more abstracted human readable format (probably they got the idea directly from OpenOffice)
Look into scripting interface. There might be a refresh timer on embedded objects possible. As far as I know, the star division had an object embedding interface already working way before Microsoft had something crashing. They added OLE below this interface and abstracted it. The probably easiest solution is to have a refresh timer if this is possible otherwise load it from a database.
Depends, I havent had any single problem by sending out PDF resumes so far. I also refused to apply for a job online where the webpage said, only doc format. Instead I printed my pdfs out and sent it via snail mail.
Actually the funny thing is there are several alternatives which suck as much as Word, but there are alternatives which are much better but basically kept out of the market by the proprietary file format.
A while ago (about 4-5 months) german Ct magazine stress tested a bunch of word processors on their capability of being able to handle documents which are typical master or PHd size. Aka 100-200 pages, lots of images references, a bibliography and so on. They tested them the standard way and were not using workarounds like splitting the word document into smaller units.
What happened, was follwing.
Word, Wordperfect and Wordpro pretty much equally sucked at the task and basically the bottom line was, without any workarounds by the Author you have to face a tough task to get this through with one of these word processors. You have to face serious problems.
What happened was that some smaller programs worked quite well and didnt give any significant problems. OpenOffice was one of them. A DTP program the other AFAIR and a small office package by a german company the third one.
So what is keeping OpenOffice away. First the not to 100% compatiblity, which also exists between Microsoft offices (but users seem to forgive Microsoft everything) That things dont work exactly the same way they are used to, but users forgive Microsoft altering the user interface in between major versions to almost 100%. And some of them dont even know that alternatives exist. For them it means Office=Microsoft. The brand probably is branded into their brains although Microsoft never was the first one with any of their office products. It is like some people who buy a Porsche, no matter how good the car is or how it sucks, they still buy the next one (despite the fact that Porsche cars are good, the MSO is more on the usable for certain tasks side)
Well for instance, there are documents, which basically crash Microsoft office. Most of them have a few bytes broken or some kind of weird OLE stream. I have encountered more than once, that these broken documents could be loaded by OO alone and saved back.
If you move back and from the various office versions and you have some weird layouting stuff going on you can bet on having the same problems.
The same goes for really big documents, I am speaking of documents with a few hundred pages. MSO simply begins to choke after a while on those things, kills layouts starts to act weirdly, you have a chance to save the content by loading it into openoffice which handles big documents of booksize quite nicely without any problems.
(Btw. the german Ct magazine ran a stress test on modern word processors which included to handle a typical book size or PHd size situation. The result was devastating. Word, Ami/Word Pro, and Wordperfect failed totally at the task, with various problems, like killing the document, starting to act weirdly and so on. Wheres OpenOffice/StarOffice, Framemaker, and a bunch of smaller office suites and DTP Programs handled the task without any problem.
Sure this is not the standard office type situation where you handle mostly documents of a few pages, but, there are situations were authors and students forced into using unsuitable programs for such bigger tasks and then have to loose months because a word processor goes haywire under them.
Not from the outside, after all a .doc is still a .doc?
No seriously, nobody really knows if the internal data structures of doc files have not been altered.
There often are cases where a word 2000 file or wordxp file crashes office 97 and vice versa.
It is even worse if you convert between office windows and office mac. A single embedded OLE stream can kill your entired document.
As far as I know the XML storage patent was granted to Microsoft this year. Now think that Star Office introduced XML based fileformats around 2000 or even before.
Not only Pharma, the biggest ones are banks and their supply industry. I once worked for a software company which went into banking business, they had the ISO9000 certificate was mandatory to get even as a software supplier into that business. The interesting thing is on how that will work out if Microsoft looses several big banks and pharma businesses at least partially (probably somebody will develop a doc2oasis conversion server for long time storage) because they refuse to implement oasis, unlike StarOffice, WordPro and Wordperfect, which currently are all migrating.
I was asking that myself. 1.3 mio loks of system code in a low level language in 1-2 years of development. This is close to impossible unless you have a code monkey factory and lousy code, or you use some kinde of code generator, who does that job and you just alter the thing.
The founding fathers had two reasons to reject it. They basically learned the idea from the indigenic tribes of their area which have been democratic until the independence war (funny America got their independence back then, the Northeast American tribes lost it and their democracy back then) Back then there was no reasonable way to do a nationwide voting because the only communication was the horse. Later theories suggest that it also prevents dictatorships, which given the current circumstances, I rather doubt. Indirect vote is not really a safety net, since dictators are seldom dictators at a election, they kill off democracy at once slice at the other. Often they use some kind of terrorist attack (fakt or real to do that). What happens usually is that those people use the anxiete of the common people to bring their opressive ideas through and remove one slice of the democracy after another over a longer time, so that nobody really notices. Perfect examples on how this works is Germany between 32-34 or modern day Russia. Also the US can run into this cycle if things dont make any turn to the better. Rome would be an excellent example in ancient history. A country which already again was a monarchy when the people in congress still thought they had power.
At least they do vote on those laws in Swizerland with direct majority votes of the people. Yes in Swizerland they not only vote on governments (the funny thing is in swizerland the government stays the same no matter how the votes are) but they vote on laws, which seems to work quite well. Swizerland is probably the most stable democracy of the world.
Sorry I notice the communist link after I posted it. See my other post with a direct quote from the Reuters agency, and the answer with direct links to the BBC and other sites. The problem is there, and if you want to ignore it you can. Jimmy Carter and others dont (see the BBC article)
Freeform 3d play on 8 bit computers, a true milestone and the base of all trade freeform space games. The basic gaming conepts are still used up to nowadays. The problem was the later Elites which were bug ridden and error prone and sometimes outright horrible. I hope the new one will not have these problems, since it faces a tough competition of really good games which already have used the same playstyle over and over again.
Yes they do but, the openoffice is the prior art to this. The openoffice file format existed long before Microsoft even applied for the patent.
First of all an extended version of the format is bound to become a defacto standard in non Microsoft offices anyway. IBM, Corel and others already have formed a group. The open source offices are moving towards it already. And last but not least at least it used to be, that many governments if they have public business deals, often have, if there is an iso implementation of something we are going that way clause in their contracts.
It is just that the Microsoft format ist not really a standard. Face it the MSO formats are all undocumented, the Star division did several manyears of reverse engineering of the formats to achieve the results which exist now. And there is no alternative office product currently in existence than the ones from Microsoft which are able to handle the undocumented Microsoft formats better. OOO sometimes handles these formats even better than various office versions in between, which are prone to crash if the document has an error or some weird ole stream within the document cannot be found. The whole file format situation of MSO is a huge mess which Microsoft tries to get away from as well. (hence the move to a documenten but with patents plastered xml baseds office format) Btw. yes I know there exists an official specification to the old office formats, but face it they are nothing more than a nice fairytale contentwise.
Actually the OSCE is an international organisation which the is PART OF!!!! The OSCE only works if they are invited in those cases, this is only probably a preparation of the elections in Iraq. Secondly about the European US critizism. Face it we dont critizice the US which we still see as brothers. But having a brother who basically does laws which threatens to bomb the international court in The Haque Netherlands, who invades a country based on blatant lies which most people knew before that they were lies. Who basically triggers an atomic program in several absolutist countries by calling them axis of evil. Who basically drowns international environmental treaties while the environment goes haywire already and lots of other things. And calls ever form of friendly critizism (anti whatever, a thing first used by Goebbels to drown critizism in the third reich), makes it really hard to love the US-government.
Well a more modern example is probably modern Iraq, also Afghanistan, if you go after international law. The invasion in Afghanistan was and still is backed by the international community. The key person in the Weapons of Mass Destruction argument, Hans Blix stated already way before the invasion that there were none, several others also did.
The invasion of Iraq was based upon blatant lies, international warnings about the chaos which already is there now, and a blatand ignorance of the US government regarding the whole middle east and worldwide solution. The invasion according to Annan still was/is illegal if you go after strict international law.
Actually the mother of the US government os the roman Capitol (hence the name of Capitol Hill, Senators, Congress and so on) The funny thing is that the current form of US democracy (if you remove all the legalized bribery aka donation system and lobbyists) is a mixture of the best of the romand democratic government and several aspects of north american tribal democracies Washington still could visit before the independence war broke out. The indirect voting system probably came from the tribal system which had this kind of system to manage the distances and different tribes forming a common government.
It is funny that the current US democracy seems to repeat the same mistakes the romand democracy did in its heydey which indirectly led to its downfall.
Well, Swizerland since 1848 at that time it got its official status, but Swizerland has had an electorial system since its first attempts of independence of the Habsburgs which goes way back into the 14th century. Swizerland was not even touched by the last two world wars.
England perfect example which roots back to Cromwell in its stability of its eleoctorial system. Somebody mentioned already New Zealand, also some norhtern european countries if you allow kings as country leaders have fairly old democratic systems, Sweden comes to my mind. (Probably Norway and Denmark as well)
Also some north american indian east coast tribes had stable democratic systems for ceveral hundred years until the US independence war broke out.
Last but not least good ole rome, which had a slowly degenerating democrary for several hundred years after they kicked the kings and before becoming a monarchy again (without noticing it)
As for a clean electorial process and the least influence on money on the politics (bribe hidden or allowed - like in the US the campaign donations) Probably swizerland, holland, and the northern european countries have the best traditions in it. The US is pretty lousy in this regard, as well as the upper EU government. Both basically are run by direct or indirect lobbyists.
Well if you go after measures which prevented black to vote, then the US also had problems in 2000 in Florida. So basically the US still is not there.
I think the longest running democracy, if you cound electorial gonvernmental forms with a king/queen on top of it, is england. England has had an electorial system way back into the 17th century.
Older democracies, well, Athens comes to my mind. Also Rome, which resembles lots of similarities to modern day america in its last days of democracy. (In Rome the democratic parties basically were at the end only a closed circle of pseudo aristocrats which slowly drifted into a civil war and then into the monarchy, without recognizing it.
And also some east coast tribes of north america had a democratic electorial system which lasted for several hundred years.
(Forgive me if i am wrong I am european), to my knowledge the system broke down in those tribes during the american independence war. The Founding fathers got many ideas of their kind of system from the triebs, but also from rome.
It is kind of a joke of history that the currenty US democratic system resembles more the foul last days of roman democracy than anything else, given all the simbols the US government erected itself to resemble rome.
The US is not a democracy anymore, neither is the EU one. The EU one is basically a combination of countries governed by a class of Bureaucrats which are not directly elected and also governed by thousands of lobbyists not even remotely elected. The US is basically a goverened by a bunch of millionaires and billionaires directly and indirectly elected and thousands of lobbyists not even remotely elected. A democracy per se is a government formed by directly or indirectly elected representatives of the people who work for the people. The situation in the EU and in the US is, that the government is somewhat a closed higher class and a bunch of companies who basically rule the people to enrich themselves and a bunch of companies. So where does democracy fit into this scheme? Nowhere this system is called plutocracy.