www.gamemaker.nl
Granted, I'm just a QA and stuff, but I also code when I have to... anyway, QA's get computer burnout, too.
So what I do is make twiddly little weird arcade games where I get immediate satisfaction & results. Hell, even on my lunch hour, I hammer out little proof of concept doodle games.
Computers are toys. Play!
You know, there's this kid I work with... the first day he came on board and met all of us, we on QA Team were all about ready to kill him. He was obnoxious, insulting and constantly name-dropping about "friends" with different companies of high-standing.
I finally took the time to actually talk to him about his interests, and once he'd actually warmed up to me, he really settled down, seemed self-conscious about the same faults I had noticed. It was then that I realized he wasn't an asshole, just a nervous dork... kind of like me, except I'm more cynical.
The poor bastard was being such a jerk-off, because he wanted to be liked. He was just being desperate.
Now I know that even though this cat has more experience in QA than me and has worked in the industry longer than I have, he's actually more clueless and fucked up than I've been since my balls dropped.
I still think he's a jackass, but he's my friend the jackass.:'(
Volunteer for a local charity, church, library, civic organization or grass roots group that needs a sysadmin or a webmonkey. You won't get paid, but you will get your work experience. If you work with them for half of a year, then put down on your resume just the year that you worked for them, not the exact dates.
Maintain a relationship with these groups, get letters of recommendation, ???, Profit.
No one says that you have to get paid for racking up those years of experience, as any intern will tell you.
green tea contains a chemical cousin to caffeine that is not nearly as harmful to your body, so you can switch to this in small doses during withdrawal
So, if you selectively remove sentences, you get this:
New York-based Take-Two Interactive is a Nasdaq-traded company in the video game business.
Over the last couple of years, the company has been one of Wall Street's hottest stocks, climbing by more than 500 percent to a high of nearly $42 per share earlier this year.
The latest installment in the company's best-selling "Grand Theft Auto" series - "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" - has been on the market for a little over a year now and has already sold more than 5 million copies.
In fact, "whatever you want" is what the game is all about. Thanks to its artful and complex programming and its incredibly realistic graphics, the game creates the impression of being inside a totally unscripted, live-action drama in which you can manufacture your mayhem as you go along. Next year the company will even be introducing a Gameboy version of the thing, so that kids can carry it around with them wherever they go.
There... by selective vision, I've turned his invective into a review that would sell the &%*# out of that Take-Two stock.
I work for a game company, and I get to talk to developers. It's the marketing people. They are usually neither engineers nor gamers, and all they want is a marketing "product". They think of the game in the same terms as concept art and feature lists, some negotiable tangible item that can be used to gen up customers.
Since they don't actually "play" the games, they don't really know what they're doing, but they have enough power (especially if they are in-house) to demand most everything they want.
The developers have a difficult time convincing their bosses that this is a bad idea because they are very talented at software and content development, not negotiation and public speaking. The bosses are sometimes engineers, but often they are MBAs who may also not actually "play" the game.
Believe me, as a QA, I have screamed and screeched for this or that and gotten no response, but one jackass from outside the company asks for a preview of some new app and it gets sent off... regardless of whether it has been finished, and it may in fact be the wrong release or a version that has not been properly tested.
Yeah, well http://www.two-degrees.com/ is a product I checked out at the Austin Game Conference and convinced my company to license for distributing large game files. While it won't allow people to share non-approved files, it does provide really fast and easy downloads of legitimate releases. It's supposed to be even better than BitTorrent, but we'll see about that when we actually begin distributing through it in October.
While it is possible that all of China, or even the Chinese government (fractionated as it is), is sponsoring or willfully allowing these attacks, I honestly doubt it.
While it is also possible that these attacks are being perpetrated to kill MS Windows in order to improve dissemination of the Red (as in Army) Linuxes, I honestly doubt it.
Is it honestly surprising that a group of pissed-off geeks could rally together, perhaps using some sort of Internet Forum of BBS, to give a big "f*** you" to Taiwan and whoever else is being hit (just because Taipei is reporting this doesn't mean China (As in "we didn't mention SARS for a little while; is that all right?" China) or other countries aren't being hit.)?
Personally, I hate the Chinese government, but I wouldn't go so far as "'If there's any lesson from this experience, it is not to use software developed in China or hire Chinese computer programmers, because you're running the risk of having the software you use implanted with the Trojan-horse program,' he said.". Especially since the most famous recent Blaster epidemic came from a geek in the US. Does that mean that "'If there's any lesson from this experience, it is not to use software developed in US or hire American computer programmers, because you're running the risk of having the software you use implanted with the Blaster Worm.'"?
...but in the US, it is considered fair use to make backups of any medium you legally purchase. This does not include the sale of the medium or distribution thereof, wherein "piracy" DOES come into question. If I own a CD, I can legally create any copy of that CD in any form (MP, Ogg, BMP, anything...), but I do NOT have the right to redistribute it without authorization of the license holder. It doesn't matter what the medium is, I can produce copies for my own use.
My tactic whenever my boss (past, present, or future) or client or whatever simply refuses to listen to the logic coming out of my mouth is to give a good hearty laugh, slap them playfully on the back or shoulder, and then walk away, shaking my head and still chuckling as if they had said the funniest thing ever.
I don't know about IT, but it usually seemed to work whenever a former boss o' mine repeatedly asked me to risk my life to do menial shit like change light bulbs on the ceiling of the garage.
Boss: "No, Andrew, we don't have one of those light-bulb changing sticks. We want you to climb up the 30-ft ladder... AND THEN STAND ON THE VERY TOP TO REACH THE LIGHT BULB!"
Me: "Hahahahahahhaahhaaaahaaha!!! WHACK! , heh, aheh, heh, haaahaa!"
I remember seeing this glove on TV when I was a kid. Back then, all it could do was spell in sign language, so this is a definite step up. As far as *gaming* goes, don't tell me that y'all have forgotten the Nintendo Powerglove!
Well, no, publishers are not inherently responsible for QA. Quality Assurance should be in place from the very beginning within the development house. Don't believe me? I work within a marketing company that localizes and markets South Korean Games throughout the Americas and Europe. The games we hawk have already been fully completed without a publisher even getting involved. It's our job to involve a publisher simply to get boxed copies in the store. However, given the overly competitive nature of boxed-in-store copies of games (given the limited shelf space of any store without a transdimensional shelf space), we are going to probably end up using an online purchasing system for our titles.
I grew up in a household that was rather casual about nudity, but I still get a stiffy when in the presence of a live, nude boobie.
I also grew up in an area where brandishing and using firearms was very casual, but I still get very nervous when somebody is "playing" with a gun near me.
However, after playing Tony Hawk and Jet Set Radio Future, I constantly envision grind/jump combos wherever I go...
It's free, supported, works on most platforms without rewriting the code, and has simple wrappers/interfaces for all kinds of programming languages, so you can still use those DLL's.
A lot of people will bitch and moan about security features being like an Orwellian nightmare... but mass, random worldwide surveillance like this is actually IN the book 1984. I'm sure it will be effective, but should we implement it knowing full well the consequences of its misuse?
Okay, the punter quoted this at me: "... because there are better alternative technologies out there... it's an antique technology. At some point, you've got to draw the line. You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago. They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
But I have a CD-RW drive... and it doesn't work. It's an "antique" Oak Tech Socrates... and the bleeding thing coughed, shat, and died over a period of several months. Moreover, OTI is no longer in the CD-drive business, so I can't even get archived drivers for my Socrates.
On top of that, my other CD drive operates rather well as a regular CD drive except when the process takes a long time, so any games with FMVs or lengthy installations like for OSes are right out. Which was a real bit of bother recently when I was installing Red Hat 8.0 on my machine... and the CD seemed a bit crappy... and my hard drive was left half-installed and basically useless. So, I took my MAC POWERPC 7100/66 and mounted bootnet.img on a FLOPPY and was able to successfully run a remote installation on my PC, because the floppy drive doesn't require any drivers or what-not.
If I were to replace my reliable, old floppy drives with anything, it would be a portable Flash memory device that I could move from PC to PC, but CD burners aren't perfect, they are relatively expensive, and burnt CDs are just not the best for archiving (They are easily damaged, and the backing has a tendency to degrade).
Hi, I just wanted to reply to this in case you read replies to your own posts. I recently got a Vic-20 as a portable, inexpensive interface device/hobby toy. I'm going to use it to make some electronic music soon. I believe it uses either a VIC or a SID for audio. Either way, the SID is still in use as a commercial sound chip, and it was essentially the first really good sound chip available to the public and hobbyist. My VIC-20 works almost as good now as it did coming out of the factory. Rock-on! Besides, I only ever use simple console text editors regardless of OS, so you're right on the money about performance vs. appearance.
Mainly because they used this prank to do something productive. Centennial Plaza had been altered without approval. These students essentially used their vandalism as a form of protest and *successfully returned the plaza to the form in which it had been originally designed*! The Physical Plant was being lazy and f'ed-up the plans. Everyone complained, but no one but Stealth Team Beta did anything about it. This isn't destruction for just fun and burning some professor you don't like. This is destruction for great justice!
All information gathered is suspect. Philosophy 101 teaches us that our sensorium and interpreters are imperfect. Even the news on TV and in the news is full of bias and inaccuracies. That is the nature of any medium, though, so this concept doesn't introduce any real new trust issues.
As with the source that cannot be identified, trust is again necessary. Do you really KNOW who's writing the stories for TV/Radio? Probably not, and even if the reporter reading the story actually wrote it, you have no way of knowing immediately whether or not they speak the truth.
You can, however, research their information for inconsistencies and what-not.
Back to the issue of unidentified sources, if someone using a handle gains a reputation for accurate reportage, they might become thought of as a reliable source. This is entirely based on perception, as we have no real determination for the credibility of an academic journal versus a tabloid.
Finally, this can be likened to any Newsgroup service, only with P2P format, advanced preferences, and alternate media streams. Do you trust your Newsgroup? Do you trust the opinions of particular people due to the consistency and accuracy of their posts? If so, then this technology may be useful to you. If not, then you are well off without it. For that matter, do you implicitly trust Slashdot without research and consistency of journalism?:D
Ultimately, though, no distribution medium is without error. However, this broadcast medium excites me a great deal.
Yar, let's see, I can (depending on the system) type '?' or "help", and then when I'm done, I can type "man" for any topic I run across... hmmm... except for installing, why would I need a physical book? And if I have a Mac, a browser, and an ISP, I don't even need a book for help in installation, do I?
Slashdot Mirror
Especially considering that I can get a PC for about a hundred bucks or so...
www.gamemaker.nl Granted, I'm just a QA and stuff, but I also code when I have to... anyway, QA's get computer burnout, too. So what I do is make twiddly little weird arcade games where I get immediate satisfaction & results. Hell, even on my lunch hour, I hammer out little proof of concept doodle games. Computers are toys. Play!
You know, there's this kid I work with... the first day he came on board and met all of us, we on QA Team were all about ready to kill him. He was obnoxious, insulting and constantly name-dropping about "friends" with different companies of high-standing.
:'(
I finally took the time to actually talk to him about his interests, and once he'd actually warmed up to me, he really settled down, seemed self-conscious about the same faults I had noticed. It was then that I realized he wasn't an asshole, just a nervous dork... kind of like me, except I'm more cynical.
The poor bastard was being such a jerk-off, because he wanted to be liked. He was just being desperate.
Now I know that even though this cat has more experience in QA than me and has worked in the industry longer than I have, he's actually more clueless and fucked up than I've been since my balls dropped.
I still think he's a jackass, but he's my friend the jackass.
Volunteer for a local charity, church, library, civic organization or grass roots group that needs a sysadmin or a webmonkey. You won't get paid, but you will get your work experience. If you work with them for half of a year, then put down on your resume just the year that you worked for them, not the exact dates. Maintain a relationship with these groups, get letters of recommendation, ???, Profit. No one says that you have to get paid for racking up those years of experience, as any intern will tell you.
green tea contains a chemical cousin to caffeine that is not nearly as harmful to your body, so you can switch to this in small doses during withdrawal
So, if you selectively remove sentences, you get this: New York-based Take-Two Interactive is a Nasdaq-traded company in the video game business. Over the last couple of years, the company has been one of Wall Street's hottest stocks, climbing by more than 500 percent to a high of nearly $42 per share earlier this year. The latest installment in the company's best-selling "Grand Theft Auto" series - "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" - has been on the market for a little over a year now and has already sold more than 5 million copies. In fact, "whatever you want" is what the game is all about. Thanks to its artful and complex programming and its incredibly realistic graphics, the game creates the impression of being inside a totally unscripted, live-action drama in which you can manufacture your mayhem as you go along. Next year the company will even be introducing a Gameboy version of the thing, so that kids can carry it around with them wherever they go. There... by selective vision, I've turned his invective into a review that would sell the &%*# out of that Take-Two stock.
ATI RAGE 64 and a VIC-20
I work for a game company, and I get to talk to developers. It's the marketing people. They are usually neither engineers nor gamers, and all they want is a marketing "product". They think of the game in the same terms as concept art and feature lists, some negotiable tangible item that can be used to gen up customers.
Since they don't actually "play" the games, they don't really know what they're doing, but they have enough power (especially if they are in-house) to demand most everything they want.
The developers have a difficult time convincing their bosses that this is a bad idea because they are very talented at software and content development, not negotiation and public speaking. The bosses are sometimes engineers, but often they are MBAs who may also not actually "play" the game.
Believe me, as a QA, I have screamed and screeched for this or that and gotten no response, but one jackass from outside the company asks for a preview of some new app and it gets sent off... regardless of whether it has been finished, and it may in fact be the wrong release or a version that has not been properly tested.
Well, geez, not long now that you gave them the idea
Yeah, well http://www.two-degrees.com/ is a product I checked out at the Austin Game Conference and convinced my company to license for distributing large game files. While it won't allow people to share non-approved files, it does provide really fast and easy downloads of legitimate releases. It's supposed to be even better than BitTorrent, but we'll see about that when we actually begin distributing through it in October.
While it is possible that all of China, or even the Chinese government (fractionated as it is), is sponsoring or willfully allowing these attacks, I honestly doubt it.
While it is also possible that these attacks are being perpetrated to kill MS Windows in order to improve dissemination of the Red (as in Army) Linuxes, I honestly doubt it.
Is it honestly surprising that a group of pissed-off geeks could rally together, perhaps using some sort of Internet Forum of BBS, to give a big "f*** you" to Taiwan and whoever else is being hit (just because Taipei is reporting this doesn't mean China (As in "we didn't mention SARS for a little while; is that all right?" China) or other countries aren't being hit.)?
Personally, I hate the Chinese government, but I wouldn't go so far as "'If there's any lesson from this experience, it is not to use software developed in China or hire Chinese computer programmers, because you're running the risk of having the software you use implanted with the Trojan-horse program,' he said.". Especially since the most famous recent Blaster epidemic came from a geek in the US. Does that mean that "'If there's any lesson from this experience, it is not to use software developed in US or hire American computer programmers, because you're running the risk of having the software you use implanted with the Blaster Worm.'"?
...but in the US, it is considered fair use to make backups of any medium you legally purchase. This does not include the sale of the medium or distribution thereof, wherein "piracy" DOES come into question. If I own a CD, I can legally create any copy of that CD in any form (MP, Ogg, BMP, anything...), but I do NOT have the right to redistribute it without authorization of the license holder. It doesn't matter what the medium is, I can produce copies for my own use.
Back in the 90s, Sega had a game download service with a special cartridge modem. It failed.
My tactic whenever my boss (past, present, or future) or client or whatever simply refuses to listen to the logic coming out of my mouth is to give a good hearty laugh, slap them playfully on the back or shoulder, and then walk away, shaking my head and still chuckling as if they had said the funniest thing ever. I don't know about IT, but it usually seemed to work whenever a former boss o' mine repeatedly asked me to risk my life to do menial shit like change light bulbs on the ceiling of the garage. Boss: "No, Andrew, we don't have one of those light-bulb changing sticks. We want you to climb up the 30-ft ladder... AND THEN STAND ON THE VERY TOP TO REACH THE LIGHT BULB!" Me: "Hahahahahahhaahhaaaahaaha!!! WHACK! , heh, aheh, heh, haaahaa!"
I remember seeing this glove on TV when I was a kid. Back then, all it could do was spell in sign language, so this is a definite step up. As far as *gaming* goes, don't tell me that y'all have forgotten the Nintendo Powerglove!
Well, no, publishers are not inherently responsible for QA. Quality Assurance should be in place from the very beginning within the development house. Don't believe me? I work within a marketing company that localizes and markets South Korean Games throughout the Americas and Europe. The games we hawk have already been fully completed without a publisher even getting involved. It's our job to involve a publisher simply to get boxed copies in the store. However, given the overly competitive nature of boxed-in-store copies of games (given the limited shelf space of any store without a transdimensional shelf space), we are going to probably end up using an online purchasing system for our titles.
I grew up in a household that was rather casual about nudity, but I still get a stiffy when in the presence of a live, nude boobie. I also grew up in an area where brandishing and using firearms was very casual, but I still get very nervous when somebody is "playing" with a gun near me. However, after playing Tony Hawk and Jet Set Radio Future, I constantly envision grind/jump combos wherever I go...
I wondered about the future of fan-AGI, so I asked Ken Williams... Ken's Reply
It's free, supported, works on most platforms without rewriting the code, and has simple wrappers/interfaces for all kinds of programming languages, so you can still use those DLL's.
A lot of people will bitch and moan about security features being like an Orwellian nightmare... but mass, random worldwide surveillance like this is actually IN the book 1984. I'm sure it will be effective, but should we implement it knowing full well the consequences of its misuse?
Okay, the punter quoted this at me: "... because there are better alternative technologies out there ... it's an antique technology. At some point, you've got to draw the line. You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago. They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
But I have a CD-RW drive... and it doesn't work. It's an "antique" Oak Tech Socrates... and the bleeding thing coughed, shat, and died over a period of several months. Moreover, OTI is no longer in the CD-drive business, so I can't even get archived drivers for my Socrates.
On top of that, my other CD drive operates rather well as a regular CD drive except when the process takes a long time, so any games with FMVs or lengthy installations like for OSes are right out. Which was a real bit of bother recently when I was installing Red Hat 8.0 on my machine... and the CD seemed a bit crappy... and my hard drive was left half-installed and basically useless. So, I took my MAC POWERPC 7100/66 and mounted bootnet.img on a FLOPPY and was able to successfully run a remote installation on my PC, because the floppy drive doesn't require any drivers or what-not.
If I were to replace my reliable, old floppy drives with anything, it would be a portable Flash memory device that I could move from PC to PC, but CD burners aren't perfect, they are relatively expensive, and burnt CDs are just not the best for archiving (They are easily damaged, and the backing has a tendency to degrade).
Hi, I just wanted to reply to this in case you read replies to your own posts. I recently got a Vic-20 as a portable, inexpensive interface device/hobby toy. I'm going to use it to make some electronic music soon. I believe it uses either a VIC or a SID for audio. Either way, the SID is still in use as a commercial sound chip, and it was essentially the first really good sound chip available to the public and hobbyist. My VIC-20 works almost as good now as it did coming out of the factory. Rock-on! Besides, I only ever use simple console text editors regardless of OS, so you're right on the money about performance vs. appearance.
Mainly because they used this prank to do something productive. Centennial Plaza had been altered without approval. These students essentially used their vandalism as a form of protest and *successfully returned the plaza to the form in which it had been originally designed*! The Physical Plant was being lazy and f'ed-up the plans. Everyone complained, but no one but Stealth Team Beta did anything about it. This isn't destruction for just fun and burning some professor you don't like. This is destruction for great justice!
All information gathered is suspect. Philosophy 101 teaches us that our sensorium and interpreters are imperfect. Even the news on TV and in the news is full of bias and inaccuracies. That is the nature of any medium, though, so this concept doesn't introduce any real new trust issues.
:D
As with the source that cannot be identified, trust is again necessary. Do you really KNOW who's writing the stories for TV/Radio? Probably not, and even if the reporter reading the story actually wrote it, you have no way of knowing immediately whether or not they speak the truth.
You can, however, research their information for inconsistencies and what-not.
Back to the issue of unidentified sources, if someone using a handle gains a reputation for accurate reportage, they might become thought of as a reliable source. This is entirely based on perception, as we have no real determination for the credibility of an academic journal versus a tabloid.
Finally, this can be likened to any Newsgroup service, only with P2P format, advanced preferences, and alternate media streams. Do you trust your Newsgroup? Do you trust the opinions of particular people due to the consistency and accuracy of their posts? If so, then this technology may be useful to you. If not, then you are well off without it. For that matter, do you implicitly trust Slashdot without research and consistency of journalism?
Ultimately, though, no distribution medium is without error. However, this broadcast medium excites me a great deal.
Yar, let's see, I can (depending on the system) type '?' or "help", and then when I'm done, I can type "man" for any topic I run across... hmmm... except for installing, why would I need a physical book? And if I have a Mac, a browser, and an ISP, I don't even need a book for help in installation, do I?