They *could* work in another business that doesn't make games, you know.
Yes, in theory developers are perfectly capable of jumping from writing games to writing business applications. However, when it comes down to it, they likely haven't been writing business-type applications for quite some time (if ever), and will have a lot more competition looking for the same jobs. At least they've recently worked on a successful game project recently, which makes them strong candidates for a position in the game industry.
DirectX and game engine development experience doesn't exactly come in handy in most business environments. Just like I wouldn't be a prime candidate to a game development studio, a game developer is unlikely to be a prime candidate for a business looking for someone to help develop their new document management back-end or their Access database. I'm not saying that these people couldn't do the job, simply that their recent experience obviously more directly relates to certain kinds of work, and makes them better candidates in that field.
Just like there are two China's: the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China. One is just called China, typically (or rarely Red China or Mainland China) and the other is called Taiwan.
and no one confuses these, either, because they refer to Taiwan as Taiwan. The country hasn't been part of China (recently) long enough for there to be much confusion there.
Of course, I tend to agree with calling South Korea 'South Korea', but generally when I read anything about any kind of economy in Korea, I take it to be South Korea. That being said, being nitpicky about it is like being nitpicky about people outside the UK referring to it as England, the UK, Britain, etc., even though there are some differences there.
Then again, I don't like being called a 'yank' for being a US citizen, either, especially given the connotation for those of us living in the South (though I was raised in neither the South nor the North; I recently found out that a certain holiday is called (Robert E.) Lee (Stonewall) Jackson (Martin Luther) King Day in this part of the US and found it to be a rather interesting choice).
Sadly it became to the point that by the time I drove around to find one, and paid the ever-increasing coinage, it made it very easy to justify the switch to a cell phone.
Oh yes, that's another point. I only recently got my phone back from repair, but I had to make a call and actually found a pay phone. Not only was the ear piece missing from the phone, but the cost of a call was 50 cents. Before that, the last time I made a call from a pay phone it was 35 cents, but then there was an additional charge for connecting to the cell network (because I was calling a cell phone) that made the call something like $1.45.
Yes, I realize this, and I do turn it off if I really don't want to be disturbed (at least I sometimes remember to turn it off). I don't leave it at home for the simple fact that pay phones are becoming quite rare around here, and if I do need it for some reason, it's good to have it there in my pocket.
All of that being said, since I do carry it in my pocket, most of the time the signal isn't very good anyway, so I only find out someone called when I pull it out to make a call or play a game and see that I have a voicemail or missed call.
I have a dirt-cheap Ericsson phone that does the same thing. That being said, all of my calls are free anyway (well, $50/month, unlimited calls in the US as long as I'm physically in my area code, no fees for incoming calls, 300 minutes of outgoing calls when roaming). I just don't like getting calls on my cell phone from anyone I don't know (and I really don't like people being able to call me whenever they damned well please anyway, it's just a better deal, since I do a lot of long-distance calling, than a landline).
Of course, the cost of sending these messages means that you don't get many, and they won't come with a 150KB attachment for no good reason.
Interesting enough, you can send messages to anyone for free from my phone company's website, as long as their phone is through the company.
Then again, I get unlimited calls anywhere in the US as long as I'm within my local area code, and don't get charged for receiving anything (though sending text messages is done at 10 cents per message unless I spend an extra $5/month for unlimited text messages, which I'll probably never do since I don't need it).
All of that being said, if I get one telemarketing call on my cell the number will hit the DNC list. I don't want to have to screen my calls, as these people shouldn't be calling me in the first place.
Oh, and FYI, putting an 80mm audio CD-R in a GameCube also does nothing. The GC refuses to read it.
This is because the GC's discs have their 'tracks' starting at the outer edge of the disc, rather than the inner edge of the disc (the way every other optical disc is done). Even if you filled an 80mm disc (so that the outer tracks were written), the wrong data would be at the outside edge of the disc, so it wouldn't be able to read it.
If someone does find a way to write 80mm discs with standard hardware that work in the Cube, it will most likely involve creating a disc image that is completely full, yet has the TOC data on the outer edge of the disc, and empty space on the inner edge of the disc to fill it (unless the game itself takes up the entire disc).
If we don't want people covering games such as GTA and Postal, don't buy (hence ceasing production of) these games.
There's one big problem with this theory: neither of the Postal games sold all that well (though obviously the first game sold well enough to justify a sequel, at least to their publisher). Some games just seem to keep getting made regardless of whether or not people want to play them, and the press doesn't care if people are actually playing the games or not.
The press was always all over Doom for satanic imagery and violence, but they always seemed to forget that the purpose of Doom was to fight against the satanic legions. They're all over the GTA games (they were all over the first one when the violence was seen from 20 miles up and barely more than a cartoon), but they always forget to mention that there is some form of punishment for the actions they take offense to. They're all over Postal, and there's no real defense for that game (except that people have a right to make the game and play it).
When people start locking up their Sims in Sims 2 just to see them waste away and die, will the press be all over it? No, because the Sims are the media's darling. The mainstream press are the ones that hyped the Sims Online like mad, yet they conveniently forgot to cover the post-launch, when no one was playing.
I'm in my mid-20s and I'd have to say that free time has little to do with it. Sure, over time you can gain an advantage in a particular game through practice, but overall someone that's played games most of their lives will have an advantage in any given game. I've played many different games against people younger than myself (anywhere from 10 to early-20s), and even with games I had never played before I tended to have an advantage over the other players, because games were a much bigger part of my life, throughout my life.
Of course, being in my mid-20s, it may have helped that the majority of the main genres of games today started or were refined while I was in my teens. The fact that I'm still fairly young may also help, as I adapt fairly quickly to new games (and even genres that I was never really exposed to before, such as in games like Amplitude and Frequency).
All of that being said, the average age of members of the TFC clan I played in tended to be in the late-20s or early-30s. It was only when Counterstrike started taking over the lives of key players that we even lost a match (and, as you said, having family and such limits the time people have, so most of those players couldn't put in the time on both CS and TFC).
The point of the game, if one chooses not to do the missions, is to kill everyone in sight via the most awesomest way possible.
Not everyone chooses to play the game the same way. Once you choose not to do the missions, there is not point to the game, you just do whatever you want to do. There are people out there that will drive around the city obeying traffic laws or looking for places to pull stunts. On the other hand people will put in a weapons cheat and go on a shooting spree.
That's because the surviving Ion Storm was not the same division of Ion Storm that developed Daikatana. I don't think anyone was interested in saving that particular division after the mess they made.
Re:Keep putting it off. Please !
on
Longhorn in 2006
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· Score: 1
We had procedures to mark all copied or printed pages with the rev number and date (most of our manuals already contained this in the footer) and label the first page of the packet with "One time use only, $date"
That's exactly what we do with time-sensitive documents (notably ISO-related documents).
Unfortunately, it doesn't actually solve the problem, nor do I think that DRM is necessarily the solution (a better system of permissions in the OS would be a better solution, IMO, than application-specific DRM that ties a document to an application). Even as it stands, the date stamps are handled by Excel or Word (and believe me, most of these Word documents are reason enough for ditching Word, given the mess it takes to update them, but it practically takes an act of god for me to stop them from opening web pages in Word for editing, let alone using it for everything else).
Re:Keep putting it off. Please !
on
Longhorn in 2006
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· Score: 1
Since their main customer is the mass-market, why don't they spend more time protecting the mass market and less protecting the professional artists with DRM? There are more of us than them.
With the exception of say the items aimed specifically at professional (or otherwise) artists, I would have to say that most of Microsoft's work on DRM points at specific requests from mass-market and/or business customers. The problem is that most people don't realize that when they want to protect their own documents, it also means that they won't have as much access to other people's documents. A great deal of Office 2k3's feature list has to do with DRM, but for the most part no one will notice, and it remains to be seen how much they will advertise it. Things that people in my office have asked about numerous times (like, for instance, making a document read-only with *no* print capabilities, very important to people that need to make sure out-of-date printed copies aren't laying on people's desks during an audit) are part of the DRM functions, yet people freak out not because of DRM itself, but because they believe that it somehow means they can't access their own work (when in reality DRM doesn't mean that you can't put your own data into more portable formats)....however, I am an even bigger supporter of the monopoly supplier's responsibility to its customers. If they were not a monopoly I, frankly, would not care, and would let the market decide. Them being a court-verified monopoly places certain resonsibilities on them)
Any given court-decided monopoly only has the additional responsibilities said court has placed on them. Many corporations take on additional responsibilities to try to avoid court mandates, but in reality there is no responsibility outside of this limited scope. At the very least, given that Microsoft is not a true monopoly, you have the choice to go somewhere else, and probably should if you don't like their products.
People speak in run-ons quite often, especially in interview situations. The only major purpose of the focus in writing on not creating run-on sentences is to make it easier for the reader.
In other words, while that paragraph-length sentence is somewhat of a pain in the ass to read, it's not unthinkable that someone might say something like that, especially when they're uncomfortable with the position in which they find themselves (some people can't deal with attention very well).
Yes, I write run-on sentences, too, but only on Slashdot.
There are a handful of other companies that do this as well, and many more or less contract out the localization (for better or worse) to companies that normally do English-language games.
I noticed once that Namco, for instance, was hiring people for translation/localization work in California.
I've never really understood why people would go through the trouble of localization for a major market without bothering to actually get people from that market that speak the language as their native language to do the translation. The only real reason to do it would be due to cost concerns, and at that point you usually get what you pay for.
However, how much programming style was absorbed by the community with K&R's C book?
The problem is that people who learn C++ probably never read "The C++ Programming Language." They might have read K&R, then picked up some "C++ in 21 Days" book.
Exactly. This is almost the way it was taught when I was in college (not quite C++ in 21 Days, but still basically use C and this, this, and that).
In fact, I found the K&R book so good for a straight C reference that I bought the 2nd edition (I was forced to sell the one I had in college back to the book store when I was in dire need of a book for my English course) at the same time that I finally picked up "The C++ Programming Language". If there's one thing the newer editions of the latter title do well, it's point out that C++ is not C, and shouldn't be treated as such.
I had one teacher that almost got it right, but probably made the mistake mentioned in the interview of treating everything as an object, when it's not really needed.
It made sense at the time;) In fact, as long as people keep producing multi-console games for it, it'll continue to be worthwhile, since most of them look better on it (than the PS2 at least, and occasionally than the GC). Other than that, I've got Halo and KOTOR, and Project Gotham's decent in the long stretch between GT3 and GT4. Oddworld's a fun game, too.
For the most part, I use my PS2 for RPGs, my GC for the exclusive titles, and the XBox for multi-platform titles. I also like the original XBox controller (as opposed to the S controller) better than the others, though the Wavebird is a great wireless controller (and Nintendo's layout makes a lot of sense to me for most games).
Sure, it's a short term gain, but the real question is how much is it going to taper off. No one really expects it to stay ahead of the PS2, except in short bursts as new 'must-have' titles come out, possibly. A 20% drop from the current rate is not a big deal, but puts them behind the PS2. On the other hand, is it really likely that GC sales will cut in half and then some before XMas? That's what it'll take for the XBox to come back (and it's unlikely that XBox sales will increase without GC sales decreasing).
As for $50 per game, that's probably one of the additional benefits of coming into the system later: there are plenty of low-priced games worth buying, whether new or used. Sure, people will want some of the newest games, but there are still plenty of top-notch games in the $20-30 range (and I have seen Eternal Darkness lower than that quite a bit lately, ~$12-16).
Right now, my PS2's getting most of the play because I recently picked up Amplitude. Before that, I hadn't played it much at all in a few months (and then mostly PS1 games). Of course, who really cares how many of the people now buying Cubes have PS2s? They're buying Cubes, it must mean they see something worthwhile, even if it's just a small number of titles and the price of the system. If they already have a PS2 and they're buying a Cube, there must be a reason for that purchase, because it's not like they don't already have a console (hell, I have a DC, PS2, XBox, and Cube, what does it really matter?).
heh, I blame it on being over-worked, I don't know where the words I had previously typed came from;) Staring at binary streams all day has warped my brain.
Not intresting at all. Tells me your either naive , can't tell when your anti virus has cleaned up after Outlook, or that you simply have not had the same email address long enough to arrouse a spammer.
I never let anti-virus software run in the background on my machines, it has detrimental effects on the stability of some other software, and isn't necessary when you (as the user) and anyone else that might use your computer knows how to avoid viruses. Outlook itself prevents most executable file formats from even getting to the inbox in the first place (to the point that I have to use rar files to send myself executables, or for other people to send executables to me). I've had the same email address for almost a year. Prior to that I had the same email address for almost 4 years and still had very few problems with spammers, and no problems with viruses.
"Junk mail/spam simply isn't a problem on my accounts."
Play the lottery! You must know something the rest of us don't. Please tell us good sir, how does one avoid spam problems with just Outlook? The world could be enlightened by your knowledge of spam dodgeing.
Very simple: don't publish your email address. Do you see my address here? Hell, even when I had a fairly well published email address running tech support for TFC through planetfortress or running a TFC league (profortress, no longer running) those addresses didn't have problems with spam. The biggest spam problems I've ever had were when @Home was selling their email addresses and on hotmail accounts (where hotmail generates most of the spam).
Viruses? NOT a problem just use outlook! Whatever guy, its missinformation like this that keeps the vulnerablities in place. Id bet money valve was useing outlook.
Valve already said they were using Outlook, that doesn't mean they were using a recent version of it or keeping it up to date. They even mentioned an exploit which may have been used which doesn't exist on the current (2003) or previous (XP) versions of Outlook, or on any service pack to the version before that (2000) within the last 2 years.
The true key to keeping away from viruses is a mixture of user education (don't open attachments), keeping things up to date (because believe it or not most worms and viruses do use patched exploits), and keeping a good firewall in place. Other than that, keep web servers and client machines seperate, because web servers are targets regardless of what server you run (though obviously using IIS is problematic, to understate the matter).
Seriously, a low-poly engine can make up for a lot of missing detail by using well designed textures and a few cheap tricks that mask the sharp edges, especially now that many 3d accelerators support pixel shaders where you can post-process the everything with a minimal performance hit. Another fine example of clever thinking beating out brute force.
Except, of course, that the HL engine wasn't originally designed to do most of that (pixel shaders and mask sharp edges). I don't know what level of upgrading they've done on CZ, but for the most part they've simply upgraded the quality of their models, skins, and textures over the last few years in parallel with the brute force capabilities of new graphics cards (as older graphics cards can handle them). In fact, the HL engine last time I played wouldn't even display the newer textures at full resolution without a few changes to the cfg files because many older graphics cards couldn't support the full-sized textures.
As you alluded to in the first place, though, you can do a lot to make a game look detailed with good textures, and well-designed maps and models.
If you run and anti virus server it is to monitor and upgrade its clients, which ARE running AV monitors.
This is essentially what I meant, though my wording was completely wrong.
Obviously, the idea is that the network administrator can trigger the scan for the computers in the network. If they can't trigger scans and force upgrades than there's little point to even having AV software, because most users won't do it themselves.
In general, the client can handle most of the work, but the user on the client shouldn't even have to know that a scan is in progress (especially if, for instance, the virus was introduced to the network by one of the users).
) If everyone in the environment was behaving like you, it wouldn't be GTA anymore, it'd be a demolition derby with bystanders - a DeathRace 2000 with missions. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, I would tend to believe that it's going to pall a lot faster than the secret joy of running over that old lady while chasing down a hooker for a little of the old bouncy-bouncy life renewal.
The key is to keep the number of NPCs fairly high, even if their interaction with the players remains fairly limited (like in the single player game itself). It would probably also require the ability for players to give missions to other players, not to mention, as I said in another post, having players on both sides of the law. Even then, with players on either side, you could probably maintain the cab and ambulance missions, as well as the vigilante missions.
The game could maintain a handful of stock NPC-based missions and gangs, across the spectrum in terms of difficulty (of the missions) and diversity of locations. The only thing it would really need beyond the stock GTA3/VC worlds is a little more diversification of the starting locations of players (at least a few more places for new players to start out), or you may end up with these areas being particularly crowded.
I think most of the single player game holds up pretty well if you could move it to a persistant online world, it just needs some additions to make the experience a little more unique (though not much more), and probably a change from the system of requiring certain missions for advancement (you should be able to advance after performing a certain number of NPC missions at a certain level of difficulty (maybe 5-10% of the available missions at that level), and maybe a handful of player missions, rather than having to perform every mission or certain very specific missions.
As for vehicular weapons, yeah I like Car Wars, too, but I don't think GTA's quite the right game for it (unless you add characteristics for armour on the cars that would permit them to be a little less fragile).
Remember that Media Player upgrade a while back whose license agreement gave Microsoft the right to install software on your machine without your permission? I imagine that clause was included in the WinXP license from the beginning.
Remember the upgrades not too long ago that changed the wording of all of those licenses so that they couldn't do that without your permission any more?
Oh wait, I forgot where I was, carry on, ignore that something may have changed.
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They *could* work in another business that doesn't make games, you know.
Yes, in theory developers are perfectly capable of jumping from writing games to writing business applications. However, when it comes down to it, they likely haven't been writing business-type applications for quite some time (if ever), and will have a lot more competition looking for the same jobs. At least they've recently worked on a successful game project recently, which makes them strong candidates for a position in the game industry.
DirectX and game engine development experience doesn't exactly come in handy in most business environments. Just like I wouldn't be a prime candidate to a game development studio, a game developer is unlikely to be a prime candidate for a business looking for someone to help develop their new document management back-end or their Access database. I'm not saying that these people couldn't do the job, simply that their recent experience obviously more directly relates to certain kinds of work, and makes them better candidates in that field.
I agree, my post was a reply to an AC post rather than to your post.
Just like there are two China's: the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China. One is just called China, typically (or rarely Red China or Mainland China) and the other is called Taiwan.
and no one confuses these, either, because they refer to Taiwan as Taiwan. The country hasn't been part of China (recently) long enough for there to be much confusion there.
Of course, I tend to agree with calling South Korea 'South Korea', but generally when I read anything about any kind of economy in Korea, I take it to be South Korea. That being said, being nitpicky about it is like being nitpicky about people outside the UK referring to it as England, the UK, Britain, etc., even though there are some differences there.
Then again, I don't like being called a 'yank' for being a US citizen, either, especially given the connotation for those of us living in the South (though I was raised in neither the South nor the North; I recently found out that a certain holiday is called (Robert E.) Lee (Stonewall) Jackson (Martin Luther) King Day in this part of the US and found it to be a rather interesting choice).
Sadly it became to the point that by the time I drove around to find one, and paid the ever-increasing coinage, it made it very easy to justify the switch to a cell phone.
Oh yes, that's another point. I only recently got my phone back from repair, but I had to make a call and actually found a pay phone. Not only was the ear piece missing from the phone, but the cost of a call was 50 cents. Before that, the last time I made a call from a pay phone it was 35 cents, but then there was an additional charge for connecting to the cell network (because I was calling a cell phone) that made the call something like $1.45.
Yes, I realize this, and I do turn it off if I really don't want to be disturbed (at least I sometimes remember to turn it off). I don't leave it at home for the simple fact that pay phones are becoming quite rare around here, and if I do need it for some reason, it's good to have it there in my pocket.
All of that being said, since I do carry it in my pocket, most of the time the signal isn't very good anyway, so I only find out someone called when I pull it out to make a call or play a game and see that I have a voicemail or missed call.
I have a dirt-cheap Ericsson phone that does the same thing. That being said, all of my calls are free anyway (well, $50/month, unlimited calls in the US as long as I'm physically in my area code, no fees for incoming calls, 300 minutes of outgoing calls when roaming). I just don't like getting calls on my cell phone from anyone I don't know (and I really don't like people being able to call me whenever they damned well please anyway, it's just a better deal, since I do a lot of long-distance calling, than a landline).
Of course, the cost of sending these messages means that you don't get many, and they won't come with a 150KB attachment for no good reason.
Interesting enough, you can send messages to anyone for free from my phone company's website, as long as their phone is through the company.
Then again, I get unlimited calls anywhere in the US as long as I'm within my local area code, and don't get charged for receiving anything (though sending text messages is done at 10 cents per message unless I spend an extra $5/month for unlimited text messages, which I'll probably never do since I don't need it).
All of that being said, if I get one telemarketing call on my cell the number will hit the DNC list. I don't want to have to screen my calls, as these people shouldn't be calling me in the first place.
Oh, and FYI, putting an 80mm audio CD-R in a GameCube also does nothing. The GC refuses to read it.
This is because the GC's discs have their 'tracks' starting at the outer edge of the disc, rather than the inner edge of the disc (the way every other optical disc is done). Even if you filled an 80mm disc (so that the outer tracks were written), the wrong data would be at the outside edge of the disc, so it wouldn't be able to read it.
If someone does find a way to write 80mm discs with standard hardware that work in the Cube, it will most likely involve creating a disc image that is completely full, yet has the TOC data on the outer edge of the disc, and empty space on the inner edge of the disc to fill it (unless the game itself takes up the entire disc).
If we don't want people covering games such as GTA and Postal, don't buy (hence ceasing production of) these games.
There's one big problem with this theory: neither of the Postal games sold all that well (though obviously the first game sold well enough to justify a sequel, at least to their publisher). Some games just seem to keep getting made regardless of whether or not people want to play them, and the press doesn't care if people are actually playing the games or not.
The press was always all over Doom for satanic imagery and violence, but they always seemed to forget that the purpose of Doom was to fight against the satanic legions. They're all over the GTA games (they were all over the first one when the violence was seen from 20 miles up and barely more than a cartoon), but they always forget to mention that there is some form of punishment for the actions they take offense to. They're all over Postal, and there's no real defense for that game (except that people have a right to make the game and play it).
When people start locking up their Sims in Sims 2 just to see them waste away and die, will the press be all over it? No, because the Sims are the media's darling. The mainstream press are the ones that hyped the Sims Online like mad, yet they conveniently forgot to cover the post-launch, when no one was playing.
I'm in my mid-20s and I'd have to say that free time has little to do with it. Sure, over time you can gain an advantage in a particular game through practice, but overall someone that's played games most of their lives will have an advantage in any given game. I've played many different games against people younger than myself (anywhere from 10 to early-20s), and even with games I had never played before I tended to have an advantage over the other players, because games were a much bigger part of my life, throughout my life.
Of course, being in my mid-20s, it may have helped that the majority of the main genres of games today started or were refined while I was in my teens. The fact that I'm still fairly young may also help, as I adapt fairly quickly to new games (and even genres that I was never really exposed to before, such as in games like Amplitude and Frequency).
All of that being said, the average age of members of the TFC clan I played in tended to be in the late-20s or early-30s. It was only when Counterstrike started taking over the lives of key players that we even lost a match (and, as you said, having family and such limits the time people have, so most of those players couldn't put in the time on both CS and TFC).
The point of the game, if one chooses not to do the missions, is to kill everyone in sight via the most awesomest way possible.
Not everyone chooses to play the game the same way. Once you choose not to do the missions, there is not point to the game, you just do whatever you want to do. There are people out there that will drive around the city obeying traffic laws or looking for places to pull stunts. On the other hand people will put in a weapons cheat and go on a shooting spree.
That's because the surviving Ion Storm was not the same division of Ion Storm that developed Daikatana. I don't think anyone was interested in saving that particular division after the mess they made.
We had procedures to mark all copied or printed pages with the rev number and date (most of our manuals already contained this in the footer) and label the first page of the packet with "One time use only, $date"
That's exactly what we do with time-sensitive documents (notably ISO-related documents).
Unfortunately, it doesn't actually solve the problem, nor do I think that DRM is necessarily the solution (a better system of permissions in the OS would be a better solution, IMO, than application-specific DRM that ties a document to an application). Even as it stands, the date stamps are handled by Excel or Word (and believe me, most of these Word documents are reason enough for ditching Word, given the mess it takes to update them, but it practically takes an act of god for me to stop them from opening web pages in Word for editing, let alone using it for everything else).
Since their main customer is the mass-market, why don't they spend more time protecting the mass market and less protecting the professional artists with DRM? There are more of us than them.
...however, I am an even bigger supporter of the monopoly supplier's responsibility to its customers. If they were not a monopoly I, frankly, would not care, and would let the market decide. Them being a court-verified monopoly places certain resonsibilities on them)
With the exception of say the items aimed specifically at professional (or otherwise) artists, I would have to say that most of Microsoft's work on DRM points at specific requests from mass-market and/or business customers. The problem is that most people don't realize that when they want to protect their own documents, it also means that they won't have as much access to other people's documents. A great deal of Office 2k3's feature list has to do with DRM, but for the most part no one will notice, and it remains to be seen how much they will advertise it. Things that people in my office have asked about numerous times (like, for instance, making a document read-only with *no* print capabilities, very important to people that need to make sure out-of-date printed copies aren't laying on people's desks during an audit) are part of the DRM functions, yet people freak out not because of DRM itself, but because they believe that it somehow means they can't access their own work (when in reality DRM doesn't mean that you can't put your own data into more portable formats).
Any given court-decided monopoly only has the additional responsibilities said court has placed on them. Many corporations take on additional responsibilities to try to avoid court mandates, but in reality there is no responsibility outside of this limited scope. At the very least, given that Microsoft is not a true monopoly, you have the choice to go somewhere else, and probably should if you don't like their products.
People speak in run-ons quite often, especially in interview situations. The only major purpose of the focus in writing on not creating run-on sentences is to make it easier for the reader.
In other words, while that paragraph-length sentence is somewhat of a pain in the ass to read, it's not unthinkable that someone might say something like that, especially when they're uncomfortable with the position in which they find themselves (some people can't deal with attention very well).
Yes, I write run-on sentences, too, but only on Slashdot.
There are a handful of other companies that do this as well, and many more or less contract out the localization (for better or worse) to companies that normally do English-language games.
I noticed once that Namco, for instance, was hiring people for translation/localization work in California.
I've never really understood why people would go through the trouble of localization for a major market without bothering to actually get people from that market that speak the language as their native language to do the translation. The only real reason to do it would be due to cost concerns, and at that point you usually get what you pay for.
However, how much programming style was absorbed by the community with K&R's C book?
The problem is that people who learn C++ probably never read "The C++ Programming Language." They might have read K&R, then picked up some "C++ in 21 Days" book.
Exactly. This is almost the way it was taught when I was in college (not quite C++ in 21 Days, but still basically use C and this, this, and that).
In fact, I found the K&R book so good for a straight C reference that I bought the 2nd edition (I was forced to sell the one I had in college back to the book store when I was in dire need of a book for my English course) at the same time that I finally picked up "The C++ Programming Language". If there's one thing the newer editions of the latter title do well, it's point out that C++ is not C, and shouldn't be treated as such.
I had one teacher that almost got it right, but probably made the mistake mentioned in the interview of treating everything as an object, when it's not really needed.
An XBox? Why?
;) In fact, as long as people keep producing multi-console games for it, it'll continue to be worthwhile, since most of them look better on it (than the PS2 at least, and occasionally than the GC). Other than that, I've got Halo and KOTOR, and Project Gotham's decent in the long stretch between GT3 and GT4. Oddworld's a fun game, too.
It made sense at the time
For the most part, I use my PS2 for RPGs, my GC for the exclusive titles, and the XBox for multi-platform titles. I also like the original XBox controller (as opposed to the S controller) better than the others, though the Wavebird is a great wireless controller (and Nintendo's layout makes a lot of sense to me for most games).
Sure, it's a short term gain, but the real question is how much is it going to taper off. No one really expects it to stay ahead of the PS2, except in short bursts as new 'must-have' titles come out, possibly. A 20% drop from the current rate is not a big deal, but puts them behind the PS2. On the other hand, is it really likely that GC sales will cut in half and then some before XMas? That's what it'll take for the XBox to come back (and it's unlikely that XBox sales will increase without GC sales decreasing).
As for $50 per game, that's probably one of the additional benefits of coming into the system later: there are plenty of low-priced games worth buying, whether new or used. Sure, people will want some of the newest games, but there are still plenty of top-notch games in the $20-30 range (and I have seen Eternal Darkness lower than that quite a bit lately, ~$12-16).
Right now, my PS2's getting most of the play because I recently picked up Amplitude. Before that, I hadn't played it much at all in a few months (and then mostly PS1 games). Of course, who really cares how many of the people now buying Cubes have PS2s? They're buying Cubes, it must mean they see something worthwhile, even if it's just a small number of titles and the price of the system. If they already have a PS2 and they're buying a Cube, there must be a reason for that purchase, because it's not like they don't already have a console (hell, I have a DC, PS2, XBox, and Cube, what does it really matter?).
heh, I blame it on being over-worked, I don't know where the words I had previously typed came from ;) Staring at binary streams all day has warped my brain.
Not intresting at all. Tells me your either naive , can't tell when your anti virus has cleaned up after Outlook, or that you simply have not had the same email address long enough to arrouse a spammer.
I never let anti-virus software run in the background on my machines, it has detrimental effects on the stability of some other software, and isn't necessary when you (as the user) and anyone else that might use your computer knows how to avoid viruses. Outlook itself prevents most executable file formats from even getting to the inbox in the first place (to the point that I have to use rar files to send myself executables, or for other people to send executables to me). I've had the same email address for almost a year. Prior to that I had the same email address for almost 4 years and still had very few problems with spammers, and no problems with viruses.
"Junk mail/spam simply isn't a problem on my accounts."
Play the lottery! You must know something the rest of us don't.
Please tell us good sir, how does one avoid spam problems with just Outlook?
The world could be enlightened by your knowledge of spam dodgeing.
Very simple: don't publish your email address. Do you see my address here? Hell, even when I had a fairly well published email address running tech support for TFC through planetfortress or running a TFC league (profortress, no longer running) those addresses didn't have problems with spam. The biggest spam problems I've ever had were when @Home was selling their email addresses and on hotmail accounts (where hotmail generates most of the spam).
Viruses? NOT a problem just use outlook! Whatever guy, its missinformation like this that keeps the vulnerablities in place.
Id bet money valve was useing outlook.
Valve already said they were using Outlook, that doesn't mean they were using a recent version of it or keeping it up to date. They even mentioned an exploit which may have been used which doesn't exist on the current (2003) or previous (XP) versions of Outlook, or on any service pack to the version before that (2000) within the last 2 years.
The true key to keeping away from viruses is a mixture of user education (don't open attachments), keeping things up to date (because believe it or not most worms and viruses do use patched exploits), and keeping a good firewall in place. Other than that, keep web servers and client machines seperate, because web servers are targets regardless of what server you run (though obviously using IIS is problematic, to understate the matter).
Seriously, a low-poly engine can make up for a lot of missing detail by using well designed textures and a few cheap tricks that mask the sharp edges, especially now that many 3d accelerators support pixel shaders where you can post-process the everything with a minimal performance hit. Another fine example of clever thinking beating out brute force.
Except, of course, that the HL engine wasn't originally designed to do most of that (pixel shaders and mask sharp edges). I don't know what level of upgrading they've done on CZ, but for the most part they've simply upgraded the quality of their models, skins, and textures over the last few years in parallel with the brute force capabilities of new graphics cards (as older graphics cards can handle them). In fact, the HL engine last time I played wouldn't even display the newer textures at full resolution without a few changes to the cfg files because many older graphics cards couldn't support the full-sized textures.
As you alluded to in the first place, though, you can do a lot to make a game look detailed with good textures, and well-designed maps and models.
If you run and anti virus server it is to monitor and upgrade its clients, which ARE running AV monitors.
This is essentially what I meant, though my wording was completely wrong.
Obviously, the idea is that the network administrator can trigger the scan for the computers in the network. If they can't trigger scans and force upgrades than there's little point to even having AV software, because most users won't do it themselves.
In general, the client can handle most of the work, but the user on the client shouldn't even have to know that a scan is in progress (especially if, for instance, the virus was introduced to the network by one of the users).
) If everyone in the environment was behaving like you, it wouldn't be GTA anymore, it'd be a demolition derby with bystanders - a DeathRace 2000 with missions. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing, I would tend to believe that it's going to pall a lot faster than the secret joy of running over that old lady while chasing down a hooker for a little of the old bouncy-bouncy life renewal.
The key is to keep the number of NPCs fairly high, even if their interaction with the players remains fairly limited (like in the single player game itself). It would probably also require the ability for players to give missions to other players, not to mention, as I said in another post, having players on both sides of the law. Even then, with players on either side, you could probably maintain the cab and ambulance missions, as well as the vigilante missions.
The game could maintain a handful of stock NPC-based missions and gangs, across the spectrum in terms of difficulty (of the missions) and diversity of locations. The only thing it would really need beyond the stock GTA3/VC worlds is a little more diversification of the starting locations of players (at least a few more places for new players to start out), or you may end up with these areas being particularly crowded.
I think most of the single player game holds up pretty well if you could move it to a persistant online world, it just needs some additions to make the experience a little more unique (though not much more), and probably a change from the system of requiring certain missions for advancement (you should be able to advance after performing a certain number of NPC missions at a certain level of difficulty (maybe 5-10% of the available missions at that level), and maybe a handful of player missions, rather than having to perform every mission or certain very specific missions.
As for vehicular weapons, yeah I like Car Wars, too, but I don't think GTA's quite the right game for it (unless you add characteristics for armour on the cars that would permit them to be a little less fragile).
Remember that Media Player upgrade a while back whose license agreement gave Microsoft the right to install software on your machine without your permission? I imagine that clause was included in the WinXP license from the beginning.
Remember the upgrades not too long ago that changed the wording of all of those licenses so that they couldn't do that without your permission any more?
Oh wait, I forgot where I was, carry on, ignore that something may have changed.