I saw a HARO request on this 11 days ago asking for, "Query:I'm looking for programmers who are willing to share any rituals or habits
they have that help them code better -- whether by improving concentration
or warding off buggy code or what have you. Email responses please."
That being said, not to dismiss the article, they were intentionally looking online for people that fit this category. Of course anything can be found online, and this leads toward a self-selecting population.
The first class addon system is what seems to make Firefox slow most of the time! I only have minimal Firefox Add-Ons installed, and yet it gets crashy even with those few. (Firebug, CoolIris, Alexa Sparky, Delicious) Yea, its a fun idea to have all these extensions, but I'll tell you that the debug window in Safari is a LOT more stable than Firebug (although not quite as full featured)
That doesn't explain why Firefox is so slow compared to Camino, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc. If you were Microsoft and had a browser, you'd try to ship it with your OS too. Last I checked all popular linux distros ship with a browser (generally Firefox being the default) and OS X ships with Safari.
The problem historically hasn't been that Microsoft ships IE, but that its very difficult, if not nearly impossible to separate it from the OS completely.
Additionally, this isn't the 'problem' that the article talks about, its talking about it being slow. Tighter integration with the OS should make it faster, not slower. You're mixing up the real problems at hand here.
Features create popularity, and popularity pushes for more features as users cry that the next browser over has something it doesn't. This create bloat.
Then again, over time, isn't this what happens with almost all software? They get more and more features as time goes by, and get bigger and consume more resources. Look at the size/requirements of any linux distro with a graphical system over the past 10 years.
No one wants to lose features, and users complain too much, so the only way to get a faster thing with less features is to fork it, or start anew (which is what the lesser popular browsers have often done).
By the time most of these games hit Public Beta it's really just stress testing the servers a bit (but never enough) and working on some tuning stuff. Mainly I've seen this by this stage it's really just about getting a solid buzz going around the game. Most users will have broken their NDAs by this point (as we saw happen recently in WotLK), but the entire point is just to get hype going for the game.
Until recently I was working for a game-industry related company, and we had a lot of close interaction with gamers and the game companies. I'm reading the article fully right now for some more of the developer/publisher-perspective details however.
Half the problem is that most of these gamers suck at betatesting. They don't want to file bug reports, they want to play the game free/early so that their guild can get a head start on others. the number of users that I've seen rant about a game having downtime turning beta, doing server wipes, etc... They weren't complaining because they couldn't get enough bug reports in, but because they couldn't get into their Raid.
Because of pressure on various fronts, most of these games are released with insufficient server architecture, horrid bugs, and critical balance issues. This is the stuff that should be stomped out during beta, but it isn't. Beta isn't about testing, its about PR and hype. Wish it was some other way. If i was developing an MMO I'd want to disable users accounts that didn't file bug reports properly, but I know that doesn't do well for the PR side.
People feel entitled to their games, and even more entitled to a chance to play for free. As expected, its not uncommon for some big players in the game industry to give beta accounts to people who run big guilds, but don't necessarily put in bug reports.
Yea, and it makes sense too on the player's end. I'd rather pay $15 for some more really fun experiences in a game that I already know I like, than waste $50 on a game that I might not really enjoy all that much.
One of my friends here in Boston/Cambridge did this. He went to Harvard and hold a PhD in Political Science. I'd say that's pretty far from a programming-related field.
Then one day he thought that he wanted to be a developer instead. He taught himself Ruby and Rails and started hanging out with the right people (this is a really key part of things). He makes continuous learning a priority. In a relatively short period of time he turned himself into a wonderful developer. I've had some people do code review of his stuff and its apparent that he's not a CS major, but he does a good job nontheless and commands a decent hourly rate.
One other thing he did that was pretty important was just jumping in and started making sites and contributing to things that people around him cared about. This got him pretty far quickly.
I've considered doing similar, but I'm headed more into project/product management side of it I think as there continues to be something about programming that I'm just 'not getting' overall (I used to be good at C++ but Rails hurts my head for other reasons).
Brian Jepson lives in RI. O'Reilly has offices in Cambridge. There's a new hacker space beside the MIT mueseam and also one now in Davis Sq. While the make-style hacker culture has been a little slow to take off in Boston, it's definitely growing and here.
One thing that holds me personally back in Boston is a lack of space. I have a 180sq foot apartment. There is little room for make stuff, but I still try to make due with the space I have as much as possible. Also that its hard for me to get to places to buy hardware stuff is a bitch. Its growing. Keep your eyes out. Contact me.
Tried the demo, felt like I had a frontal lobotomy
on
Review: Halo Wars
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I tried the demo on Xbox 360 when it came out. I realize that not all demos are indicative of the quality of the overall game. I have not played the full version.
From my experience, the game is like playing Starcraft, while drunk, with your toes, after a frontal lobotomy. The controls are dumbed down, as is the general gameplay overall. The "pretty graphics and sound" didn't really add that much compelling to the gameplay. Any Command and Conquer game, Warcraft 1-3 or Starcraft had much deeper gameplay. For the $60 you could spend on this game, you could probably find ALL of these other games in bargain bins, or on eBay.
I fail to see why in the world consoles have the inability to use keyboard and mouse at least as an option. The 360 has USB ports, the PS3 has Bluetooth and USB. Why can't I just take my keyboard and mouse combo and use it for these systems as an option?
Some people have given me the excuse that MSFT/Sony/Nintendo want 'consistent gameplay' with the controllers that people will already have. If that's the case though, why do we have things like weird huge joysticks for mech games (360), Rockband kits, the Wii-Fit board, or the Duck Hunt stype zapper for the Wii??? These aren't your standard controllers, but are more than fine. I'm guessing that 'most' households with a game system have a USB keyboard and mouse laying around somewhere.
For me, this would make the consoles perfectly equal gaming systems for me that I'd be totally happy with for RTS and FPS genres.
(Most) browser based games aren't tracked currently. This will likely change in the future, but for the moment most MMO tracking comes from data feeds from the companies (WoW Armory) and Xfire data. Other sources such as Xbox Live and Steam are also supported.
Your account isn't counted twice. Blizzard might count your account twice (I still wonder about that 11.5M 'users'), but not GamerDNA. These numbers are mostly counted from Xfire data, and partially from WoW Armory data. Its counting if you actually played, not if you registered an account.
Also, all numbers are from 'actual' measurement, not estimates of what the larger population is doing. You can potentially make assumptions about what the larger population is doing, but there is little/no error in the measurement of what is actually happening here among GamerDNA users. As there are more, and more diverse, GamerDNA users then there will be more accurate data.
iTunes takes care of my iPhone, remote speakers, play (most) formats, show rentals, buying music, streaming music from my shared server, and managing my library just fine. Does it do that? If not, no thanks.
While (mostly) joking, we should simply say that we're going to treat spammers as some of the most vile people in society and punish them accordingly. No 3-5 years in jail or a fine. You spam, you go to jail for life. If somehow you get out and do it (again), then second offense is a capital punishment. Either that, or treat them as 'terrorists' against the Interwebs, and allow police/military to shoot them on sight as combatants.
Yes, I am mostly joking, but we need to let these people know that having any involvement in spam will have the most dire of conseqences. I'm more effected daily by spammers than terrorists.
I know you could disable the UAC, but it wasn't as simple as typing 'su' and entering your root password.
If I'm root I want to be able to do ANYTHING with no questions asked. Kill the filesystem with one commandline? Sure. Kill my databases? Sure. Change settings of anything? Sure.
Yet the Administrator accounts in Windows get just as many annoying prompts (if not more) than the standard users. I should be able to configure rights below me easily to allow my standard user to not get bothered by prompts that they can just click through. br
I see it as a huge issue because is faux security with the UAC mostly. It creates warnings basically, but doesn't prevent action (mostly again).
In making an MMORPG you've either got to decide to have an economy that can work with a worldwide populace and economy openly (Eve and Secondlife), or you really need to do something about it and close it up. When you think about it though, Goldfarming is simply someone forcing outsourcing of your leisure time for you. You don't want it to happen, they undercut you (as their time is nearly worthless) and they screw up the economy.
Best of luck to them on this. Blizzard has completely failed in this aspect and their economy and absurd quests at times show it.
Oh I think that Ralph Koster (Designer Dragon?) had some killer ideas. I really loved playing in the Alpha and early beta stages of UO. Not all of these ideas were in there, but at least you could tell that the free-flowing sprirt of it was there. I loved that it was very no-holds-bar. There were no PVP flags. You could attack anyone and suffer the consequences. I've always been upset that Ralph's ideas never came to fruition. I do wonder where he's at now. Off to Google.
Not that anyone is under the illusion that actual Role Playing was ever strong in MMOs, but the fact that the world is mostly static really has always killed it for me. There's never any tension that the armies will fall, towns will be taken over, or some epic thing will happen. Even in the upcoming WotLK, surely the Lich King himself will be defeated time and time again (with no worries to the storyline) by several groups of players.
How could a bard sing a song about great conquests done if everyone has done the same thing, and nothing ever changes?
I'm a hardcore mac user, but yet I realize that sometimes not all technologies that are barely out of beta (and have no monetization method) to run cross platform out of the gate. Just us VMWare Fusion and call it a day. Or bootcamp at worst..
I dunno about you guys, but I'm pretty stoked that this technology has come to see the light of day for people to input their own photos. It's like Google Street View, but with anywhere and any camera.
My main concern is that MSFT has stated that they'd love to basically stitch every photo together into a virtual world nearly (not quite, but close). I don't normally have privacy concerns and issues, but this 'could' potentially get a little funny. Do I really want to photosynth my apartment or desk at work and then have that linked locationally to the rest of the world? I'm not so sure.
So its obvious that these cards could have been working together now for some time. They aren't as incompatible as AMD and NVidia would like us to think. Of course this leaves only one course of action; they must immediately do something "weird" in their next releases to make them no longer compatible.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw a HARO request on this 11 days ago asking for, "Query:I'm looking for programmers who are willing to share any rituals or habits they have that help them code better -- whether by improving concentration or warding off buggy code or what have you. Email responses please."
That being said, not to dismiss the article, they were intentionally looking online for people that fit this category. Of course anything can be found online, and this leads toward a self-selecting population.
Just saying..
The first class addon system is what seems to make Firefox slow most of the time! I only have minimal Firefox Add-Ons installed, and yet it gets crashy even with those few. (Firebug, CoolIris, Alexa Sparky, Delicious) Yea, its a fun idea to have all these extensions, but I'll tell you that the debug window in Safari is a LOT more stable than Firebug (although not quite as full featured)
That doesn't explain why Firefox is so slow compared to Camino, Chrome, Safari, Opera, etc. If you were Microsoft and had a browser, you'd try to ship it with your OS too. Last I checked all popular linux distros ship with a browser (generally Firefox being the default) and OS X ships with Safari.
The problem historically hasn't been that Microsoft ships IE, but that its very difficult, if not nearly impossible to separate it from the OS completely.
Additionally, this isn't the 'problem' that the article talks about, its talking about it being slow. Tighter integration with the OS should make it faster, not slower. You're mixing up the real problems at hand here.
Features create popularity, and popularity pushes for more features as users cry that the next browser over has something it doesn't. This create bloat.
Then again, over time, isn't this what happens with almost all software? They get more and more features as time goes by, and get bigger and consume more resources. Look at the size/requirements of any linux distro with a graphical system over the past 10 years.
No one wants to lose features, and users complain too much, so the only way to get a faster thing with less features is to fork it, or start anew (which is what the lesser popular browsers have often done).
By the time most of these games hit Public Beta it's really just stress testing the servers a bit (but never enough) and working on some tuning stuff. Mainly I've seen this by this stage it's really just about getting a solid buzz going around the game. Most users will have broken their NDAs by this point (as we saw happen recently in WotLK), but the entire point is just to get hype going for the game.
Until recently I was working for a game-industry related company, and we had a lot of close interaction with gamers and the game companies. I'm reading the article fully right now for some more of the developer/publisher-perspective details however.
Half the problem is that most of these gamers suck at betatesting. They don't want to file bug reports, they want to play the game free/early so that their guild can get a head start on others. the number of users that I've seen rant about a game having downtime turning beta, doing server wipes, etc... They weren't complaining because they couldn't get enough bug reports in, but because they couldn't get into their Raid.
Because of pressure on various fronts, most of these games are released with insufficient server architecture, horrid bugs, and critical balance issues. This is the stuff that should be stomped out during beta, but it isn't. Beta isn't about testing, its about PR and hype. Wish it was some other way. If i was developing an MMO I'd want to disable users accounts that didn't file bug reports properly, but I know that doesn't do well for the PR side.
People feel entitled to their games, and even more entitled to a chance to play for free. As expected, its not uncommon for some big players in the game industry to give beta accounts to people who run big guilds, but don't necessarily put in bug reports.
Content Acquisition - $710,000
Revenue Sharing - $66,000
Administrative Costs - $252,000
Being the number 1 video site on the internet.... Priceless
Yea, and it makes sense too on the player's end. I'd rather pay $15 for some more really fun experiences in a game that I already know I like, than waste $50 on a game that I might not really enjoy all that much.
If they don't tap the phones, how will they know that we're getting the "Change we can believe in"?
One of my friends here in Boston/Cambridge did this. He went to Harvard and hold a PhD in Political Science. I'd say that's pretty far from a programming-related field.
Then one day he thought that he wanted to be a developer instead. He taught himself Ruby and Rails and started hanging out with the right people (this is a really key part of things). He makes continuous learning a priority. In a relatively short period of time he turned himself into a wonderful developer. I've had some people do code review of his stuff and its apparent that he's not a CS major, but he does a good job nontheless and commands a decent hourly rate.
One other thing he did that was pretty important was just jumping in and started making sites and contributing to things that people around him cared about. This got him pretty far quickly.
I've considered doing similar, but I'm headed more into project/product management side of it I think as there continues to be something about programming that I'm just 'not getting' overall (I used to be good at C++ but Rails hurts my head for other reasons).
Brian Jepson lives in RI. O'Reilly has offices in Cambridge. There's a new hacker space beside the MIT mueseam and also one now in Davis Sq. While the make-style hacker culture has been a little slow to take off in Boston, it's definitely growing and here.
One thing that holds me personally back in Boston is a lack of space. I have a 180sq foot apartment. There is little room for make stuff, but I still try to make due with the space I have as much as possible. Also that its hard for me to get to places to buy hardware stuff is a bitch. Its growing. Keep your eyes out. Contact me.
I tried the demo on Xbox 360 when it came out. I realize that not all demos are indicative of the quality of the overall game. I have not played the full version.
From my experience, the game is like playing Starcraft, while drunk, with your toes, after a frontal lobotomy. The controls are dumbed down, as is the general gameplay overall. The "pretty graphics and sound" didn't really add that much compelling to the gameplay. Any Command and Conquer game, Warcraft 1-3 or Starcraft had much deeper gameplay. For the $60 you could spend on this game, you could probably find ALL of these other games in bargain bins, or on eBay.
I fail to see why in the world consoles have the inability to use keyboard and mouse at least as an option. The 360 has USB ports, the PS3 has Bluetooth and USB. Why can't I just take my keyboard and mouse combo and use it for these systems as an option?
Some people have given me the excuse that MSFT/Sony/Nintendo want 'consistent gameplay' with the controllers that people will already have. If that's the case though, why do we have things like weird huge joysticks for mech games (360), Rockband kits, the Wii-Fit board, or the Duck Hunt stype zapper for the Wii??? These aren't your standard controllers, but are more than fine. I'm guessing that 'most' households with a game system have a USB keyboard and mouse laying around somewhere.
For me, this would make the consoles perfectly equal gaming systems for me that I'd be totally happy with for RTS and FPS genres.
No, seriously... can anything run it at full options yet?
(Most) browser based games aren't tracked currently. This will likely change in the future, but for the moment most MMO tracking comes from data feeds from the companies (WoW Armory) and Xfire data. Other sources such as Xbox Live and Steam are also supported.
Disclaimer:I work for GamerDNA.
Your account isn't counted twice. Blizzard might count your account twice (I still wonder about that 11.5M 'users'), but not GamerDNA. These numbers are mostly counted from Xfire data, and partially from WoW Armory data. Its counting if you actually played, not if you registered an account.
Also, all numbers are from 'actual' measurement, not estimates of what the larger population is doing. You can potentially make assumptions about what the larger population is doing, but there is little/no error in the measurement of what is actually happening here among GamerDNA users. As there are more, and more diverse, GamerDNA users then there will be more accurate data.
Disclaimer:I work for GamerDNA
iTunes takes care of my iPhone, remote speakers, play (most) formats, show rentals, buying music, streaming music from my shared server, and managing my library just fine. Does it do that? If not, no thanks.
While (mostly) joking, we should simply say that we're going to treat spammers as some of the most vile people in society and punish them accordingly. No 3-5 years in jail or a fine. You spam, you go to jail for life. If somehow you get out and do it (again), then second offense is a capital punishment. Either that, or treat them as 'terrorists' against the Interwebs, and allow police/military to shoot them on sight as combatants.
Yes, I am mostly joking, but we need to let these people know that having any involvement in spam will have the most dire of conseqences. I'm more effected daily by spammers than terrorists.
I know you could disable the UAC, but it wasn't as simple as typing 'su' and entering your root password.
If I'm root I want to be able to do ANYTHING with no questions asked. Kill the filesystem with one commandline? Sure. Kill my databases? Sure. Change settings of anything? Sure.
Yet the Administrator accounts in Windows get just as many annoying prompts (if not more) than the standard users. I should be able to configure rights below me easily to allow my standard user to not get bothered by prompts that they can just click through.
br I see it as a huge issue because is faux security with the UAC mostly. It creates warnings basically, but doesn't prevent action (mostly again).
In making an MMORPG you've either got to decide to have an economy that can work with a worldwide populace and economy openly (Eve and Secondlife), or you really need to do something about it and close it up.
When you think about it though, Goldfarming is simply someone forcing outsourcing of your leisure time for you. You don't want it to happen, they undercut you (as their time is nearly worthless) and they screw up the economy.
Best of luck to them on this. Blizzard has completely failed in this aspect and their economy and absurd quests at times show it.
Think of the children!
Oh I think that Ralph Koster (Designer Dragon?) had some killer ideas. I really loved playing in the Alpha and early beta stages of UO. Not all of these ideas were in there, but at least you could tell that the free-flowing sprirt of it was there. I loved that it was very no-holds-bar. There were no PVP flags. You could attack anyone and suffer the consequences.
I've always been upset that Ralph's ideas never came to fruition. I do wonder where he's at now. Off to Google.
Not that anyone is under the illusion that actual Role Playing was ever strong in MMOs, but the fact that the world is mostly static really has always killed it for me. There's never any tension that the armies will fall, towns will be taken over, or some epic thing will happen. Even in the upcoming WotLK, surely the Lich King himself will be defeated time and time again (with no worries to the storyline) by several groups of players. How could a bard sing a song about great conquests done if everyone has done the same thing, and nothing ever changes?
I'm a hardcore mac user, but yet I realize that sometimes not all technologies that are barely out of beta (and have no monetization method) to run cross platform out of the gate. Just us VMWare Fusion and call it a day. Or bootcamp at worst..
I dunno about you guys, but I'm pretty stoked that this technology has come to see the light of day for people to input their own photos. It's like Google Street View, but with anywhere and any camera.
My main concern is that MSFT has stated that they'd love to basically stitch every photo together into a virtual world nearly (not quite, but close). I don't normally have privacy concerns and issues, but this 'could' potentially get a little funny. Do I really want to photosynth my apartment or desk at work and then have that linked locationally to the rest of the world? I'm not so sure.
So its obvious that these cards could have been working together now for some time. They aren't as incompatible as AMD and NVidia would like us to think. Of course this leaves only one course of action; they must immediately do something "weird" in their next releases to make them no longer compatible.
You mean like the time I had a cop show me how to use a slimjim and told me where I could buy them?