I can’t remember who said it, but a committee opinion is the softest/lowest kind of “evidence” there is in science. The hardest obviously is hard mathematics, then comes raw and pure empirical proof. And only then, a long way down the road, comes committee views. It’s usually what only a marketing department would use to advertise with as having “scientific proof”.
I am not saying that they are right or wrong. I am saying that a committee opinion is worth just about nothing to me. It’s way too much down in the truthiness world. If I’d wanted that, I’d go to FOX News, or read locked articles on Wikipedia.
And you can thank your processed food industry for that.
(This reminded me of how the children in that school where Jamie Oliver was always fell asleep and were always so apathetic and tired... which went away as soon as they started to eat actual food. The same thing happened in Super-Size Me. And the same thing is true in my personal experience. Bad food, and you’re a sloth bear.;) Which is quite obvious, as you wouldn’t expect a gasoline car to run good on diesel with two-stroke oil or something like that, would you?)
But if you sign up with a publisher, you usually might as well sell out your soul. Since the only thing you will be left it, will be money. It won’t either be art nor something made with fun and love. Which your clients will definitely notice. (Example: EA.) So you won’t get respect for it. At least for me, I do it for the respect. Not for the money. Which sure is nice too, but I prefer respect without money over money without respect. I’m rather poor in money than in freedom. Currently being rather poor, but doing what I love, should be the best proof for this.:)
Even more obligatory book (the best one I know) to get new game designers started: Jesse Schell — The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses (Game designers. Not developers. That can even mean theme park ride designers. The principles are the same. Also: Jesse Schell should be well known to anyone who is serious about game design business.:)
Why would he want to develop for such a tiny market? You can develop for all Symbian phones for free. And you can develop for pretty much all phones for free, except for a few lock-in ones which are such a small market share that it’s not relevant anyway. Also, it is very risky to develop for the iPhone. First of all you have to use their language. (WTF?) And then they can just reject it because after the drug they tried today, they feel like it. Show even a single boob in it, and goodbye. (Which may fir US morality, but is an insane concept in every European country.)
In short: No thanks! (I’m in the business, and I refuse to develop for the iPhone. I don’t support totalitarianism.)
First of all: I know this seems normal to you, but actually it is a completely absurd concept to sell a software game. Why? Because that software is information. And in the bitspace that information exists in, there is no concept of ownership. Asking who owns information, is like asking what happened before time. We being able to ask it, does not mean it makes any sense.:) In bitspace, you can pass information on. But when you do that, you also give up any control over it. If you want to keep control, you can only do that by not passing it on. But then how do you even prove it exists at all? (You can’t.)
Which makes it clear that if you want something in return for information, you have to demand it at the first time you pass it on. Because later, it’s already way too late. Yes, you can demand money for the physical container for that information. Because everyone else would also have to, since producing a equivalent copy is not cheaper to him. But you can also see it like this: The information is just the product of a service. And that service is what you can demand money for. Since reproducing it is not going to be available for free elsewhere. In your case you even got a monopoly on your exact game. Which is great!
Now being a game designer myself, working on my first independent project, I did not want to live in the same delusional imaginary world as the old media reproduction and artist extortion industries. (EA would have offered me 10-15 million, but I would have lost everything else. [It would definitely not have been art, or made with love, or given me any respect from players.] Which is not what I do all this for!!) So I decided to accept the actual physical reality, and build a business model, that acknowledges it.
And what came out, is that you have to see your clients as your investor (which before was the distributor / business angel / venture capitalist). You pitch your ideas to the investor, get him all wooed up. Your investor pays you, IF you deliver what is written in the deal. And if you are done, and you get paid, the game belongs to your investor. Which means: You clients!! But this rule is KEY: They (the ones who paid) are only ones who will get the game.
And now for the insanely great part of that concept: You do not need ANY DRM or copy protection. You do not need ANY laws or law changes. Your customers can legally pass your game on, and even demand money for it (since everyone else who has the information, also has paid good money, and will have lost money if he passes it on for free). You can do it in parallel with the current situation. And hence, you can start doing it that way right now.
Of course you can later still offer it for money. But so can everyone else. You all kinda “own” in now. And nobody does. The market will then decide, what price people are willing to pay to get it from the first buyers (including you), or who of those first buyers will give it away for free anyway (thereby destroying the market, just as much as giving away free great hamburgers may destroy McDonalds).
The only thing that is any problem or hard in this whole concept, and I acknowledge that, is to make people sign that they will pay when what you promised is going to be delivered. But how is that different from a pre-order? And those are not a problem, as far as I know. from your clients’ perspective, it could just as well be the case that they only see the following change: “If you pre-order the game, you will get the right, to resell it yourself!!”
You have obviously never worked in UI design! (though in this area I don't know who/what they would be trying to fool or how they would be trying to fool them/it so your response is probably quite right)
And apparently you have never worked in sentence design.;)
Well, what I find very stupid, is that we programmers always preach modularity, but we still use mostly huge monolithic apps on the graphical desktop.
I’d prefer the following: Imagine Photoshop. Or an office program. Now imagine everyone of those tools in the palette, buttons in the button bar, and menu items, becoming a completely separate program. With them all interacting trough a standardized interface, as an analogy to piping in shell scripting. And the property sidebars become the properties of those tools/wizards and of the document itself. Or actually also of any part (XML element, selection, etc) of the documents. Then you could just as easily use your Photoshop brush in your word processor or your word processing (or programmer’s editor) functionality to edit this very textarea that I’m typing in right now.
And as a positive side-effect, if done right, multi-threading would not be an issue anymore.
How about a small daemon that at intervals re-assigns the running processes to the cores in a balanced way (or one of your choice), and also sets the affinity for new processes. Should be about 30 minutes with any fast language of your choice that can call the appropriate commands.
I think you could even do it with bash, although it would not be very resource-saving. (Hey, everything is a file even those settings! If not, then they did UNIX wrong.;)
Remember: You are using a computer. Not an appl(e)iance. You can automate whatever you wish yourselves. And usually pretty quickly too.:)
Actually, that’s pretty easy to do with Linux right now. Just choose any ACPI button (you at least have a power button, often more), and in your/etc/acpi/ directory, modify the scripts so they call “cpufreq-set -f $freq” on the right events. (You may need a state file in your/var/state/ dir, to remember which mode you are in. But you can also toggle a keyboard led that you don’t use much.)
And this is why I love Linux. If you can think of it, and it’s physically possible... you can do it.:)
Next: Using the graphics ram that is unused while in 2D mode, as a fast swap/tmpfs/cache.;)
First of all: There are still 6.1 million Mayans around. Mostly in Yucatán, Guatemala (40% of the population!), Belize (10%), and Honduras.
Second: Hmm... there was this pretty big thing around 1492, wasn’t there? I think they “discovered” something. What was it again? India? Antarctica? I know it started with A... And then someone wanted lots of gold or something, and paid with, I guess mostly with diseases... Hmm... somehow I can’t remember it... <:-[[ Do you?
Well, the old Greeks already knew about atoms (that’s where the name comes from, after all), and also about steam engines.
But you can thank mostly the churches for going back to bullshit magic and being unable to write (except for the privileged) in what is called “the dark ages” for a reason...
But since the average amount of registry entries is around 100,000 and the average amount of files is around what, 50,000? (Not even counting different versions and different configuration file entries), wouldn’t that mean
230 * 100,000 * 50,000 = 150 trillion "different platforms" or 25 * 150 trillion = 3,75 quadrillion different configurations?;)
Or is it just, that when you make not really different setups count (like languages, which are not part of the code to test in such multilingual apps, or not actually different versions of Windows or Linux), that you can come up with whatever insane number you want?;)
For the same reason that people who voted for a party that then did not hold a single promise, but did the worst things possible, will get voted again by the very same people, as soon as “the other party” is in power, and the lie-machine of pre-election promises has started again.
Who is QS? What does the quality of an University have to do with what some random group defines as good and bad? It depends entirely on your own ideals, if you consider an university a good place of learning. (Ok, most cattl^H^H^H^H^Hpeople get their ideals from TV pseudo-morality and old church dogmas. But I don’t.)
I think he meant that they have Facebook accounts in the first place. Facebook is like prostitution. But of your bitspace existence instead of your meatspace one. Oh, and you don’t even get paid, but get, what you get elsewhere too, except that there are others that care for your privacy.
Why do people use it at all then? Simple: Because others do. Which of course is circular logic, and obviously plain stupid cattle behavior. But hey, that’s what most people act like all day long. Sadly.:( Just look at the elections. The same two “parties” for the last how many years?
In 1933 Germany, there also was such a avalance of cattle behavior. It was called the NSDAP. Look how well that turned out for all of us.:/ I’m not saying that it will become just as bad. But it’s the same basic behavior. The “I do X because others do X too” excuse is the exact same that did prevent the Nazis from being stopped.
Well, you can, but you would not define them as SSDs anymore, because they would not work at all, so they are not sold. Just go to search the trash cans of the SSD companies. ^^
Frankly, I don’t care about high performance or size. I still prefer big tower cases. (And yes, I can still fill them completely.;) What I care for is: 1. My data fits on there (everything above 1-2 TB). 2. It is 100% reliable. I don’t even touch any file system that isn’t a triple-mirrored ZFS with constant scrubbing, S.M.A.R.T. surveillance/testing and GIT-like “infinite undo” backup. I have lost half my data five years ago, and am still in the process of restoring it. Some of it will even never come back. Ever. Because it was so rare. (Vinyls that only 7 people on this planet ever had.) And: Yes, I already had a mirrored RAID and a reliable backup back then. But that won’t help you a bit with a controller that quietly writes data to the wrong sectors of your archive. Or degrading data, like with SSDs. So I won’t touch a SSD at all, until its degradation is like that of HDDs without all the trickery and magic that is required nowadays, to even get in the same league. 3. I can afford it. I don’t have much money, and making money equals lots of real pain and horrors for me at this time. So it’s either worth its price, or not. SSDs are not. Not even remotely. You pay 10 times more, but get 10 times less. No thanks.
See, how I got moderated, was exactly what I criticized. I couldn’t have wished for a better way to show how much of a problem this is.
First of all: I am included in the ‘western world’, so keep your assumptions of me being “some America-hating foreigner” away from me, OK?
But most importantly: Would I have said something like “Now I’m not the most intelligent guy, but I hate those arrogant smartasses!” I would have gotten a “+5, Insightful” But since dumb people are by definition dumb, they read my comment up to the part where I say that I am intelligent, and then they flip out and mod me to hell. Which sooomehow ist totally allright. Or even worse: When they get to the part, where I am basically just saying “dumb people are dumb”, they think they are entitled to special care and social padding in a way that it is taboo to call out their disadvantages, and flip out even more.
Man, the world is fucked up... In today’s world they’d chase Einstein, Heisenberg and Feynman from Slashdot into Troll oblivion, faster than they could defend themselves from the idiot shitstorm.:((
I think if they can hate me so much, I am just as much entitled to hate those fucking retards back!
Slashdot Mirror
I can’t remember who said it, but a committee opinion is the softest/lowest kind of “evidence” there is in science. The hardest obviously is hard mathematics, then comes raw and pure empirical proof. And only then, a long way down the road, comes committee views. It’s usually what only a marketing department would use to advertise with as having “scientific proof”.
I am not saying that they are right or wrong. I am saying that a committee opinion is worth just about nothing to me. It’s way too much down in the truthiness world. If I’d wanted that, I’d go to FOX News, or read locked articles on Wikipedia.
And you can thank your processed food industry for that.
(This reminded me of how the children in that school where Jamie Oliver was always fell asleep and were always so apathetic and tired... which went away as soon as they started to eat actual food. The same thing happened in Super-Size Me. And the same thing is true in my personal experience. Bad food, and you’re a sloth bear. ;) Which is quite obvious, as you wouldn’t expect a gasoline car to run good on diesel with two-stroke oil or something like that, would you?)
Sounds like the definition of a government agency to me. ;)
But if you sign up with a publisher, you usually might as well sell out your soul. Since the only thing you will be left it, will be money. It won’t either be art nor something made with fun and love. Which your clients will definitely notice. (Example: EA.) So you won’t get respect for it. :)
At least for me, I do it for the respect. Not for the money. Which sure is nice too, but I prefer respect without money over money without respect. I’m rather poor in money than in freedom. Currently being rather poor, but doing what I love, should be the best proof for this.
It’s actually not me claiming that. It’s the German Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya#Die_Maya_heute
I basically just quoted the first sentence of that section.
Which itself does have the information from here: http://www.ethnologue.com/15/show_family.asp?subid=90711
The links an square brackets contain the population counts.
Where do you have your numbers from?
Even more obligatory book (the best one I know) to get new game designers started: :)
Jesse Schell — The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses
(Game designers. Not developers. That can even mean theme park ride designers. The principles are the same. Also: Jesse Schell should be well known to anyone who is serious about game design business.
Why would he want to develop for such a tiny market?
You can develop for all Symbian phones for free. And you can develop for pretty much all phones for free, except for a few lock-in ones which are such a small market share that it’s not relevant anyway.
Also, it is very risky to develop for the iPhone. First of all you have to use their language. (WTF?) And then they can just reject it because after the drug they tried today, they feel like it. Show even a single boob in it, and goodbye. (Which may fir US morality, but is an insane concept in every European country.)
In short: No thanks!
(I’m in the business, and I refuse to develop for the iPhone. I don’t support totalitarianism.)
First of all: I know this seems normal to you, but actually it is a completely absurd concept to sell a software game. :)
Why? Because that software is information. And in the bitspace that information exists in, there is no concept of ownership. Asking who owns information, is like asking what happened before time. We being able to ask it, does not mean it makes any sense.
In bitspace, you can pass information on. But when you do that, you also give up any control over it. If you want to keep control, you can only do that by not passing it on. But then how do you even prove it exists at all? (You can’t.)
Which makes it clear that if you want something in return for information, you have to demand it at the first time you pass it on. Because later, it’s already way too late.
Yes, you can demand money for the physical container for that information. Because everyone else would also have to, since producing a equivalent copy is not cheaper to him.
But you can also see it like this:
The information is just the product of a service. And that service is what you can demand money for. Since reproducing it is not going to be available for free elsewhere. In your case you even got a monopoly on your exact game. Which is great!
Now being a game designer myself, working on my first independent project, I did not want to live in the same delusional imaginary world as the old media reproduction and artist extortion industries. (EA would have offered me 10-15 million, but I would have lost everything else. [It would definitely not have been art, or made with love, or given me any respect from players.] Which is not what I do all this for!!)
So I decided to accept the actual physical reality, and build a business model, that acknowledges it.
And what came out, is that you have to see your clients as your investor (which before was the distributor / business angel / venture capitalist). You pitch your ideas to the investor, get him all wooed up. Your investor pays you, IF you deliver what is written in the deal. And if you are done, and you get paid, the game belongs to your investor. Which means: You clients!!
But this rule is KEY: They (the ones who paid) are only ones who will get the game.
And now for the insanely great part of that concept:
You do not need ANY DRM or copy protection. You do not need ANY laws or law changes. Your customers can legally pass your game on, and even demand money for it (since everyone else who has the information, also has paid good money, and will have lost money if he passes it on for free). You can do it in parallel with the current situation. And hence, you can start doing it that way right now.
Of course you can later still offer it for money. But so can everyone else. You all kinda “own” in now. And nobody does.
The market will then decide, what price people are willing to pay to get it from the first buyers (including you), or who of those first buyers will give it away for free anyway (thereby destroying the market, just as much as giving away free great hamburgers may destroy McDonalds).
The only thing that is any problem or hard in this whole concept, and I acknowledge that, is to make people sign that they will pay when what you promised is going to be delivered. But how is that different from a pre-order? And those are not a problem, as far as I know. from your clients’ perspective, it could just as well be the case that they only see the following change:
“If you pre-order the game, you will get the right, to resell it yourself!!”
Now tell me that’s not great!
You know that you can buy hardware elsewhere, and software too, right? Also you’re a smart grownup. You don’t need the Apple “’tardpadding”. ^^
You have obviously never worked in UI design! (though in this area I don't know who/what they would be trying to fool or how they would be trying to fool them/it so your response is probably quite right)
And apparently you have never worked in sentence design. ;)
Well, what I find very stupid, is that we programmers always preach modularity, but we still use mostly huge monolithic apps on the graphical desktop.
I’d prefer the following:
Imagine Photoshop. Or an office program. Now imagine everyone of those tools in the palette, buttons in the button bar, and menu items, becoming a completely separate program. With them all interacting trough a standardized interface, as an analogy to piping in shell scripting. And the property sidebars become the properties of those tools/wizards and of the document itself. Or actually also of any part (XML element, selection, etc) of the documents. Then you could just as easily use your Photoshop brush in your word processor or your word processing (or programmer’s editor) functionality to edit this very textarea that I’m typing in right now.
And as a positive side-effect, if done right, multi-threading would not be an issue anymore.
How about a small daemon that at intervals re-assigns the running processes to the cores in a balanced way (or one of your choice), and also sets the affinity for new processes. Should be about 30 minutes with any fast language of your choice that can call the appropriate commands.
I think you could even do it with bash, although it would not be very resource-saving. (Hey, everything is a file even those settings! If not, then they did UNIX wrong. ;)
Remember: You are using a computer. Not an appl(e)iance. You can automate whatever you wish yourselves. And usually pretty quickly too. :)
Actually, that’s pretty easy to do with Linux right now. /etc/acpi/ directory, modify the scripts so they call “cpufreq-set -f $freq” on the right events. (You may need a state file in your /var/state/ dir, to remember which mode you are in. But you can also toggle a keyboard led that you don’t use much.)
Just choose any ACPI button (you at least have a power button, often more), and in your
And this is why I love Linux. If you can think of it, and it’s physically possible... you can do it. :)
Next: Using the graphics ram that is unused while in 2D mode, as a fast swap/tmpfs/cache. ;)
why did their civilization suddenly die out?
Are you actually serious with that question???
First of all: There are still 6.1 million Mayans around. Mostly in Yucatán, Guatemala (40% of the population!), Belize (10%), and Honduras.
Second: Hmm... there was this pretty big thing around 1492, wasn’t there? I think they “discovered” something. What was it again? India? Antarctica? I know it started with A... And then someone wanted lots of gold or something, and paid with, I guess mostly with diseases... Hmm... somehow I can’t remember it... <:-[[ Do you?
Is it just coincidence that advanced cultures tend to go under within a couple of centuries after they invent plumbing?
I’ll make it short:
Yes.
Well, the old Greeks already knew about atoms (that’s where the name comes from, after all), and also about steam engines.
But you can thank mostly the churches for going back to bullshit magic and being unable to write (except for the privileged) in what is called “the dark ages” for a reason...
But since the average amount of registry entries is around 100,000 and the average amount of files is around what, 50,000? (Not even counting different versions and different configuration file entries), wouldn’t that mean
230 * 100,000 * 50,000 = 150 trillion "different platforms" or 25 * 150 trillion = 3,75 quadrillion different configurations? ;)
Or is it just, that when you make not really different setups count (like languages, which are not part of the code to test in such multilingual apps, or not actually different versions of Windows or Linux), that you can come up with whatever insane number you want? ;)
She showed you her chromosomes? Kinky! ;)
For the same reason that people who voted for a party that then did not hold a single promise, but did the worst things possible, will get voted again by the very same people, as soon as “the other party” is in power, and the lie-machine of pre-election promises has started again.
99.999% of all people are fucking stupid cattle!
Well, actually, with his education and weapons being paid for by the US government, you already did exactly that. ^^
Who is QS? What does the quality of an University have to do with what some random group defines as good and bad?
It depends entirely on your own ideals, if you consider an university a good place of learning. (Ok, most cattl^H^H^H^H^Hpeople get their ideals from TV pseudo-morality and old church dogmas. But I don’t.)
I think he meant that they have Facebook accounts in the first place.
Facebook is like prostitution. But of your bitspace existence instead of your meatspace one.
Oh, and you don’t even get paid, but get, what you get elsewhere too, except that there are others that care for your privacy.
Why do people use it at all then? :( Just look at the elections. The same two “parties” for the last how many years?
Simple: Because others do.
Which of course is circular logic, and obviously plain stupid cattle behavior. But hey, that’s what most people act like all day long. Sadly.
In 1933 Germany, there also was such a avalance of cattle behavior. It was called the NSDAP. Look how well that turned out for all of us. :/ I’m not saying that it will become just as bad. But it’s the same basic behavior. The “I do X because others do X too” excuse is the exact same that did prevent the Nazis from being stopped.
Oh, and: Godwin’d. ;)
Well, you can, but you would not define them as SSDs anymore, because they would not work at all, so they are not sold. Just go to search the trash cans of the SSD companies. ^^
Frankly, I don’t care about high performance or size. I still prefer big tower cases. (And yes, I can still fill them completely. ;)
What I care for is:
1. My data fits on there (everything above 1-2 TB).
2. It is 100% reliable. I don’t even touch any file system that isn’t a triple-mirrored ZFS with constant scrubbing, S.M.A.R.T. surveillance/testing and GIT-like “infinite undo” backup. I have lost half my data five years ago, and am still in the process of restoring it. Some of it will even never come back. Ever. Because it was so rare. (Vinyls that only 7 people on this planet ever had.) And: Yes, I already had a mirrored RAID and a reliable backup back then. But that won’t help you a bit with a controller that quietly writes data to the wrong sectors of your archive. Or degrading data, like with SSDs. So I won’t touch a SSD at all, until its degradation is like that of HDDs without all the trickery and magic that is required nowadays, to even get in the same league.
3. I can afford it. I don’t have much money, and making money equals lots of real pain and horrors for me at this time. So it’s either worth its price, or not. SSDs are not. Not even remotely. You pay 10 times more, but get 10 times less. No thanks.
See, how I got moderated, was exactly what I criticized. I couldn’t have wished for a better way to show how much of a problem this is.
First of all: I am included in the ‘western world’, so keep your assumptions of me being “some America-hating foreigner” away from me, OK?
But most importantly: Would I have said something like “Now I’m not the most intelligent guy, but I hate those arrogant smartasses!” I would have gotten a “+5, Insightful” But since dumb people are by definition dumb, they read my comment up to the part where I say that I am intelligent, and then they flip out and mod me to hell. Which sooomehow ist totally allright. Or even worse: When they get to the part, where I am basically just saying “dumb people are dumb”, they think they are entitled to special care and social padding in a way that it is taboo to call out their disadvantages, and flip out even more.
Man, the world is fucked up... :((
In today’s world they’d chase Einstein, Heisenberg and Feynman from Slashdot into Troll oblivion, faster than they could defend themselves from the idiot shitstorm.
I think if they can hate me so much, I am just as much entitled to hate those fucking retards back!
Remember that this was likely to be a donation / split payment.