No, it creates a blank window that you can move, resize, close, etc, but it displays no text. In order to display the text, you'd have to either rename the window, put a text controller into the window and modify the properties of that, or display a dialog with the text of your choice. The easiest is to change the text of the window.
If he's just playing around, it's not surprising that he's having trouble. XCode and Cocoa are extremely easy to learn and use, but you actually have to do a bit of work to learn to use them. I would suggest looking at this article from O'Reilly on the subject. It's a basic text editor, which is more complex than Hello World, but should get him in the right direction.
So Kim's parents, nor her grandparents, were ever able to go anywhere for the weekend? How in the hell did we as a species ever get this far, that we can suddenly become a bunch of helpless twits?
There's a couple of things going on here. The first is that the Internet has eliminated or severely reduced a number of other services, such as travel agents. There are a few travel agents left, but by and large people use the internet for their travel planning. Similarly, if you are used to checking news and movie times on the internet, you may not have a newspaper subscription, so you would be down one of the major sources of information on local events. Plus, you might not have a stockpile of maps, since you could always use mapquest. Etc. If it were a last minute weekend trip they wanted to plan, they couldn't really use AAA, because AAA often requires 10 days ahead of time to set up triptiks, at least in my area. If there is a plane fight , the recent difficulties in airline travel after 9/11 and the previously mentioned Internet cause phone support to be limited and slow.
The internet is a whole informational infrastructure that has made life significantly less expensive for many businesses. If you can't access it, and you're not used to the alternatives, it's going to be more difficult to use the alternate services.
Also, that quote may have been taken out of context or the tone might have been somewhat exaggerative. She might not actually had been a real prisoner in her own house.
Getting along wiht people online is much easier than in person
I'm not sure which internet you belong to, but my internet has invented new phrases for different ways that you can actively not get along with people. Flaming, trolling, Godwin's Law, these things are all indicative that it's really easy to treat someone as if they don't exist on the internet. My opening sentence wasn't phrased as well as it might be for demonstration purposes, but many people would have just used abusive language for its ironic power.
If you can get along with people you disagree with on the internet, you're going to go a long way towards social skills in real life.
That's the problem with this psychologist's study--it doesn't say whether or not they learned larger numbers and applied them effectively.
Gah! No, it's not "the problem". It's an opportunity for future research. You don't try to answer every question that might be posed in a psychological experiment, just like you don't try to change more than one variable at a time when you're debugging.
In the future, experimenters can take the knowledge they've gained from this and try a new study where you teach higher numbers. Then someone can do yet another study that answers the next obvious question based on the results of that study, and so on.
It appears that ZabU-VWX-Y doesn't know that re-education is done with high-powered lasers and explosives. He is obviously a Commie Traitor Spy and must be executed immediately!
The reason it's so popular is because it's really, really easy to port. You need large storage, the ability to stream video, the most basic of branching logic and a few inputs. That's about it. That's why, as the article points out, it's been ported to just about everything. And most of those versions are completely free. Manufacturers would include a copy as an incentive to buy the system and to show that you could even play games on it, so I don't know that most of the money that the game brought in was from players, per se.
=Brian
Re:McLuhan wasn't exactly right.
on
We the Media
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This was reinforced recently by the blogsters at the Democratic Convention. Few said anything of consequence. That what they transmitted was using new media didn't matter. Crap is crap.
Okay, so what did the professionals say that was of consequence? Was there any consequential news that came out of the DNC? Were there earth-shattering announcements that were overlooked by the bloggers that people with a professional mindset managed to convey?
If so, then there is some support for your position, though the fact that it's posted to slashdot gives it a Moderation of Ironic +/- 1. I do agree that the medium is less important than the message, but your arguments about the DNC don't support that proposition. At least, not without additional supporting details.
And as such, I don't think I can agree with Gilmour; while September 11 showed that personal media could be an important infotransmission tool, July 2004 showed that it's overrated, and that we still need professionals.
I didn't get the sense from the review that he was saying there will be no more need for Professional journalists. Rather, I was getting the sense that Big Media can no longer make proclamations from the top of the mountain and just let them flow through uncontested. Instead, it's an increasingly 2-way communication, and the smarter professionals will pay attention.
Nah, I understand the difference. The reason I bring it up is because it was mentioned explicitly with regards to concerns similar to yours on Surfin' Safari. The point being that the native code is contained in the plugins, rather than just being located arbitrarily on your computer or the internet.
I also suspect that the plugins for Dashboard items will be bundled all together, much as Applications are in OS X, so that other webkit applications can't access random Dashboard plugins. But that's just a guess.
I don't think it will, but I haven't done complete reading on the subject. Check out the Mozilla Foundation Announcement on the new plugin architecture that will be shared between Safari, Opera, etc.
I think that because it's because it's a plugin architecture rather than a dynamically loaded code that the means of exploitation are less. However, poorly designed plugins will likely still be a problem.
Sadly, this article: not so funny. However, since we're talking about Dashboard, I recommend going to Surfin' Safari, the weblog of Dave Hyatt, lead programmer of Safari. Since WWDC, he's been talking about Dashboard, what it really is, and the development path they're taking.
Dashboard is actually going to be a WebKit application, with some HTML Extensions to let you do things like put a transparent mask over the window and call local code. He's discussing putting the HTML extensions into their own default namespace right now, as well as submitting them for standards approval (well, some of them). It's a very interesting weblog, and certainly worth having on the RSS feed if you're at all interested in the development of Safari and webkit.
=Brian
Re:Wish parents posted with real-world anecdotes
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not a parent, but I'm remembering when I was a kid, and how my parents were. They could have just gotten me a 2600, but they got me a TI-994. It had some games, but they encouraged the programming aspect as well. When they bought a macintosh, they got MS Basic, which certainly wasn't included, so I could keep up with that. So I have hope.
There's also a program here in Charlottesville called Computers for Kids, which gets kids in low-income or similar situations teamed up with volunteers in the computer industries. You meet with the kids once a week, and teach them and lead them to do the things that they are interested in. If they lean towards programming, you can help them in that way. If they stick with it for the appropriate amount of time, the kids get a free computer out of the deal. So there are ways to help out even if you have no kids of your own.
I see the decline in CS majors as more the lack of Making Money Fast than in lack of initial programming interest. I think a lot of people got into CS who probably shouldn't have, or at least many of those people who did will not be ultimately satisfied by a career in programming or Comp Sci. I am hoping that the future generations of programmers and computer scientists will be a higher percentage of people who are keen on programming, and not just doing it because that's where the venture capital lies.
=Brian
Re:More power but how many know it's there?
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think the hurdle is as high as you make it out to be. I'll grant you, nobody's spoon-feeding every kid with a computer on how to program it, as it was in my day. On the other hand, there are far more kids who are using computers than did in the old days.
I suspect a larger problem, if you want to call it that, is that computers do so much more than they used to. It's harder to find something that isn't already written, at least for the beginning programmer. On the other hand, the people who want to program computers tend to have a greater calling to it than just the users. They see the box, they see the potential, and they want to reach out and use that potential. That's what really drew me into programming, not the fact that there was BASIC right there, but that I saw the potential and wanted to exploit it.
Okay, let's take an example. AIM bots. Kids these days will chat with people over AIM, and they'll run across a bot. Some kids will get annoyed, some won't realize they're talking to a bot, and some will see the limitations of the bot and want to make their own. Once you see that a bot can be made and used by normal people, then the people who are going to want to program them will figure it out. They'll hit google and type "how to program aim bot" or simialar, and poof! The world is their mollusc.
Parents are also likely to help with this, hopefully. All the parents have to do is say, "You know, you could write programs, too." Even if the parents don't know how, I would be very surprised if some quick work on Google won't reveal answers. I'd also be surprised if kids today don't look up most of their facts on Google. It's easy, it's everywhere, and it's something they are growing up with.
As for hosting web apps, though it's not a perfect solution, and not as easy to show the entire world as I made out before, it's really easy to do out of the box in OS X. Turn on personal web hosting, drop in some CGI, and play around.
So: not the same, absolutely, but it's not a wasteland for potential programmers. The soil is fertile, the seeds just need to be dropped in.
=Brian
Difficulties for beginning programmers
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
He mentions that it's more difficult for beginning programmers to get a start, as compared to the old days. Partially because software companies have tried to hide everything, and partially because it's so much more difficult to write a small amount of code that will do something exciting.
I disagree. Those points were more true a few years ago, but, at least with OS X, you have plenty of potential. First of all, there's Applescript and Applescript Studio. It's really easy to get a program started that does far more than in the old days, since most of your basic user interface work is done for you, and you can draw on the power of every installed application on your computer. Mind you, learning how to program Applescript is not like learning to program most languages, but it's a really good test of your problem-solving skills.
The other part is web programming. Nowadays, if you can get a computer that's visible to the internet, or an account on a web server that allows custom CGIs, you can make custom programs that will not only be cool to you, but potentially cool to the entire world. That's a lot more incentive than you had in the old days, or at least a different kind of incentive. It might even make for more solid coders in the future, since hobbyist and learning programmers nowadays get to see people trashing their programs repeatedly, so there's good reason to make them work properly.
No, it's not the same, and it's may not be particularly easy to get started in the windows world, but for the rest of us, there are plenty of good opportunities for the beginning programmers.
You can stream from multiple instances of itunes using Fast User Switching, but using AirTunes, there doesn't seem to be a way to send the same signal to multiple sources.
The point is that kids willingly and knowingly subject themselves to harsh working conditions precisely for the love of the work and the prestige of working on the games.
Yes, I know that was the point. The reason I know is because I made it originally.
Incidentally, unions don't have to be a bad thing. Yes, they can certainly get out of hand, and most of us have experienced situations in which this happens. However, unions are not the universally bad things you make them out to be. There are plenty of good unions existing even today in the US.
Game companies will have to hire more programmers to get less work done at a much greater expense, with crappier, more expensive, non-innovative games.
That seems unlikely. It would take far too much work to dip lower in the barrel than we are now. Zing!
I didn't see anything in IGDA's charter that said anything about keeping businesses in line, which is more what I was looking for than a trade organization.
As for the release titles thing, yeah, that helps. My own portfolio was tainted by releasing a bunch of licensed titles for Mattel, which is certain death when trying to find a job making games for hardcore gamers. That and I just don't care enough to go through the pain of the industry any more without awfully good reason. But I think it's fine advice for others.
Incidentally, Superliminal, check out the URL of my web site. Heh.
Oh, no need to apologize. It makes for a difficult industry, but it's the way life is. Just try not to burn yourself out, and when you have the opportunity, get a job in a proper company that doesn't mistreat its employees.
=Brian
P.S. I have no idea why you were moderated troll for that, btw.
Personally, I think there needs to be a union for video game professionals
No way! Game developers are treated the way they are because there are way more would-be game developers than there are jobs. Simple market dynamic
Um, you did read the very next sentence, which said, 'Unfortunately, too many college kids are happy to "live the dream" of working in video games, so it would be very difficult to start one; you'd always have some punk kid ready to take your place and put in 80-100 hour weeks for at least 3 years before becoming a shell of his former self.'
Firing generally means 'with cause', usually because of breaking company policy/laws, inability to perform one's job, or just generally being a big jerk. Letting someone go, or laying them off, generally means there was no cause, so you tend to get more perks like severance. I know, those perks aren't much, but they sure beat not getting them.
I know, it's easier to stir up the revolution by saying they were fired, but that implies poor performance on the part of the workers, and that seems uncalled for.
I lived the dream for, oh, 9 years. I'm plenty happy doing things that aren't in the game industry now, though I know some people who are still enjoying themselves, in varying degrees.
Flash forward to today, and you see Thief 3 (albeit a fine, fine title) obviously rushed out the door, and most of the dev team laid off. What is it with this industries self destructive tendancies? I mean, really. Isnt the goal to make money? And isnt that a product of producing a good game?
Sadly, no. The current tactic is to keep from losing money, which means optimizing the development cycle to a minimum amount of time, thus reducing overhead such as rent, by employing far more people at any given time than are necessary. Then, when the game is done, you don't want to keep paying salary for all the extra people, so you let them go. This also has the benefit of reducing the amount of vacation time you need to give people, and it keeps you from continuing to employ burnt-out people. Because everyone will be burnt out, since there's been mandatory overtime for 3 months, forcing people to work 70-80 hour weeks to get the game done.
It is very sad, and it will eventually change, but not immediately by any means. Personally, I think there needs to be a union for video game professionals. Unfortunately, too many college kids are happy to "live the dream" of working in video games, so it would be very difficult to start one; you'd always have some punk kid ready to take your place and put in 80-100 hour weeks for at least 3 years before becoming a shell of his former self. I've seen it happen far too often.
That's cool. No, I didn't bother looking closely at the pretty picture, though I saw it enough to get the idea of the size and form factor.
I would modify the table so that there were three lines, one LAN, one WAN, and one LAN/WAN. Not really that important to the discussion, but a good lesson if you're making tables for this sort of thing.
will it be able to stream to multiple locations at once?
Doesn't look like it from the screen shots. It appears to be a drop-down menu, not checkboxes, so I would imagine one at a time.
It looks like you can also use this in a wired fashion, where you connect this device to your wired network, and it will do the audio out as well.
Nope. Check the comparison chart on Apple's site, and you'll see that it doesn't connect to the LAN, just to the Internet.
One thing this is missing is a way to control iTunes remotely.
Just a guess, but I'd say there will be several products announced in July or thereabouts that will allow you to control all of this through the AirTunes network.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it creates a blank window that you can move, resize, close, etc, but it displays no text. In order to display the text, you'd have to either rename the window, put a text controller into the window and modify the properties of that, or display a dialog with the text of your choice. The easiest is to change the text of the window.
If he's just playing around, it's not surprising that he's having trouble. XCode and Cocoa are extremely easy to learn and use, but you actually have to do a bit of work to learn to use them. I would suggest looking at this article from O'Reilly on the subject. It's a basic text editor, which is more complex than Hello World, but should get him in the right direction.
=Brian
I think it's the one where's he's a 40 year old overweight male pretending to be a teenage girl in a Yahoo chat room. ;)
Ohh, right. That's a good internet.
So Kim's parents, nor her grandparents, were ever able to go anywhere for the weekend? How in the hell did we as a species ever get this far, that we can suddenly become a bunch of helpless twits?
There's a couple of things going on here. The first is that the Internet has eliminated or severely reduced a number of other services, such as travel agents. There are a few travel agents left, but by and large people use the internet for their travel planning. Similarly, if you are used to checking news and movie times on the internet, you may not have a newspaper subscription, so you would be down one of the major sources of information on local events. Plus, you might not have a stockpile of maps, since you could always use mapquest. Etc. If it were a last minute weekend trip they wanted to plan, they couldn't really use AAA, because AAA often requires 10 days ahead of time to set up triptiks, at least in my area. If there is a plane fight , the recent difficulties in airline travel after 9/11 and the previously mentioned Internet cause phone support to be limited and slow.
The internet is a whole informational infrastructure that has made life significantly less expensive for many businesses. If you can't access it, and you're not used to the alternatives, it's going to be more difficult to use the alternate services.
Also, that quote may have been taken out of context or the tone might have been somewhat exaggerative. She might not actually had been a real prisoner in her own house.
=Brian
Getting along wiht people online is much easier than in person
I'm not sure which internet you belong to, but my internet has invented new phrases for different ways that you can actively not get along with people. Flaming, trolling, Godwin's Law, these things are all indicative that it's really easy to treat someone as if they don't exist on the internet. My opening sentence wasn't phrased as well as it might be for demonstration purposes, but many people would have just used abusive language for its ironic power.
If you can get along with people you disagree with on the internet, you're going to go a long way towards social skills in real life.
=Brian
That's the problem with this psychologist's study--it doesn't say whether or not they learned larger numbers and applied them effectively.
Gah! No, it's not "the problem". It's an opportunity for future research. You don't try to answer every question that might be posed in a psychological experiment, just like you don't try to change more than one variable at a time when you're debugging.
In the future, experimenters can take the knowledge they've gained from this and try a new study where you teach higher numbers. Then someone can do yet another study that answers the next obvious question based on the results of that study, and so on.
=Brian
It appears that ZabU-VWX-Y doesn't know that re-education is done with high-powered lasers and explosives. He is obviously a Commie Traitor Spy and must be executed immediately!
The reason it's so popular is because it's really, really easy to port. You need large storage, the ability to stream video, the most basic of branching logic and a few inputs. That's about it. That's why, as the article points out, it's been ported to just about everything. And most of those versions are completely free. Manufacturers would include a copy as an incentive to buy the system and to show that you could even play games on it, so I don't know that most of the money that the game brought in was from players, per se.
=Brian
This was reinforced recently by the blogsters at the Democratic Convention. Few said anything of consequence. That what they transmitted was using new media didn't matter. Crap is crap.
Okay, so what did the professionals say that was of consequence? Was there any consequential news that came out of the DNC? Were there earth-shattering announcements that were overlooked by the bloggers that people with a professional mindset managed to convey?
If so, then there is some support for your position, though the fact that it's posted to slashdot gives it a Moderation of Ironic +/- 1. I do agree that the medium is less important than the message, but your arguments about the DNC don't support that proposition. At least, not without additional supporting details.
And as such, I don't think I can agree with Gilmour; while September 11 showed that personal media could be an important infotransmission tool, July 2004 showed that it's overrated, and that we still need professionals.
I didn't get the sense from the review that he was saying there will be no more need for Professional journalists. Rather, I was getting the sense that Big Media can no longer make proclamations from the top of the mountain and just let them flow through uncontested. Instead, it's an increasingly 2-way communication, and the smarter professionals will pay attention.
=Brian
Nah, I understand the difference. The reason I bring it up is because it was mentioned explicitly with regards to concerns similar to yours on Surfin' Safari. The point being that the native code is contained in the plugins, rather than just being located arbitrarily on your computer or the internet.
I also suspect that the plugins for Dashboard items will be bundled all together, much as Applications are in OS X, so that other webkit applications can't access random Dashboard plugins. But that's just a guess.
=Brian
I don't think it will, but I haven't done complete reading on the subject. Check out the Mozilla Foundation Announcement on the new plugin architecture that will be shared between Safari, Opera, etc.
I think that because it's because it's a plugin architecture rather than a dynamically loaded code that the means of exploitation are less. However, poorly designed plugins will likely still be a problem.
=Brian
Sadly, this article: not so funny. However, since we're talking about Dashboard, I recommend going to Surfin' Safari, the weblog of Dave Hyatt, lead programmer of Safari. Since WWDC, he's been talking about Dashboard, what it really is, and the development path they're taking.
Dashboard is actually going to be a WebKit application, with some HTML Extensions to let you do things like put a transparent mask over the window and call local code. He's discussing putting the HTML extensions into their own default namespace right now, as well as submitting them for standards approval (well, some of them). It's a very interesting weblog, and certainly worth having on the RSS feed if you're at all interested in the development of Safari and webkit.
=Brian
I'm not a parent, but I'm remembering when I was a kid, and how my parents were. They could have just gotten me a 2600, but they got me a TI-994. It had some games, but they encouraged the programming aspect as well. When they bought a macintosh, they got MS Basic, which certainly wasn't included, so I could keep up with that. So I have hope.
There's also a program here in Charlottesville called Computers for Kids, which gets kids in low-income or similar situations teamed up with volunteers in the computer industries. You meet with the kids once a week, and teach them and lead them to do the things that they are interested in. If they lean towards programming, you can help them in that way. If they stick with it for the appropriate amount of time, the kids get a free computer out of the deal. So there are ways to help out even if you have no kids of your own.
I see the decline in CS majors as more the lack of Making Money Fast than in lack of initial programming interest. I think a lot of people got into CS who probably shouldn't have, or at least many of those people who did will not be ultimately satisfied by a career in programming or Comp Sci. I am hoping that the future generations of programmers and computer scientists will be a higher percentage of people who are keen on programming, and not just doing it because that's where the venture capital lies.
=Brian
I don't think the hurdle is as high as you make it out to be. I'll grant you, nobody's spoon-feeding every kid with a computer on how to program it, as it was in my day. On the other hand, there are far more kids who are using computers than did in the old days.
I suspect a larger problem, if you want to call it that, is that computers do so much more than they used to. It's harder to find something that isn't already written, at least for the beginning programmer. On the other hand, the people who want to program computers tend to have a greater calling to it than just the users. They see the box, they see the potential, and they want to reach out and use that potential. That's what really drew me into programming, not the fact that there was BASIC right there, but that I saw the potential and wanted to exploit it.
Okay, let's take an example. AIM bots. Kids these days will chat with people over AIM, and they'll run across a bot. Some kids will get annoyed, some won't realize they're talking to a bot, and some will see the limitations of the bot and want to make their own. Once you see that a bot can be made and used by normal people, then the people who are going to want to program them will figure it out. They'll hit google and type "how to program aim bot" or simialar, and poof! The world is their mollusc.
Parents are also likely to help with this, hopefully. All the parents have to do is say, "You know, you could write programs, too." Even if the parents don't know how, I would be very surprised if some quick work on Google won't reveal answers. I'd also be surprised if kids today don't look up most of their facts on Google. It's easy, it's everywhere, and it's something they are growing up with.
As for hosting web apps, though it's not a perfect solution, and not as easy to show the entire world as I made out before, it's really easy to do out of the box in OS X. Turn on personal web hosting, drop in some CGI, and play around.
So: not the same, absolutely, but it's not a wasteland for potential programmers. The soil is fertile, the seeds just need to be dropped in.
=Brian
He mentions that it's more difficult for beginning programmers to get a start, as compared to the old days. Partially because software companies have tried to hide everything, and partially because it's so much more difficult to write a small amount of code that will do something exciting.
I disagree. Those points were more true a few years ago, but, at least with OS X, you have plenty of potential. First of all, there's Applescript and Applescript Studio. It's really easy to get a program started that does far more than in the old days, since most of your basic user interface work is done for you, and you can draw on the power of every installed application on your computer. Mind you, learning how to program Applescript is not like learning to program most languages, but it's a really good test of your problem-solving skills.
The other part is web programming. Nowadays, if you can get a computer that's visible to the internet, or an account on a web server that allows custom CGIs, you can make custom programs that will not only be cool to you, but potentially cool to the entire world. That's a lot more incentive than you had in the old days, or at least a different kind of incentive. It might even make for more solid coders in the future, since hobbyist and learning programmers nowadays get to see people trashing their programs repeatedly, so there's good reason to make them work properly.
No, it's not the same, and it's may not be particularly easy to get started in the windows world, but for the rest of us, there are plenty of good opportunities for the beginning programmers.
=Brian
You do not gain voters by spewing ludicrous hate like MM.
I don't see why not. You've gained plenty of voters by spewing ludicrous hate like Rush Limbaugh and BIll O'Reilly.
=Brian
You can stream from multiple instances of itunes using Fast User Switching, but using AirTunes, there doesn't seem to be a way to send the same signal to multiple sources.
=Brian
The point is that kids willingly and knowingly subject themselves to harsh working conditions precisely for the love of the work and the prestige of working on the games.
Yes, I know that was the point. The reason I know is because I made it originally.
Incidentally, unions don't have to be a bad thing. Yes, they can certainly get out of hand, and most of us have experienced situations in which this happens. However, unions are not the universally bad things you make them out to be. There are plenty of good unions existing even today in the US.
Game companies will have to hire more programmers to get less work done at a much greater expense, with crappier, more expensive, non-innovative games.
That seems unlikely. It would take far too much work to dip lower in the barrel than we are now. Zing!
=Brian
I didn't see anything in IGDA's charter that said anything about keeping businesses in line, which is more what I was looking for than a trade organization.
As for the release titles thing, yeah, that helps. My own portfolio was tainted by releasing a bunch of licensed titles for Mattel, which is certain death when trying to find a job making games for hardcore gamers. That and I just don't care enough to go through the pain of the industry any more without awfully good reason. But I think it's fine advice for others.
Incidentally, Superliminal, check out the URL of my web site. Heh.
=Brian
Oh, no need to apologize. It makes for a difficult industry, but it's the way life is. Just try not to burn yourself out, and when you have the opportunity, get a job in a proper company that doesn't mistreat its employees.
=Brian
P.S. I have no idea why you were moderated troll for that, btw.
Um, you did read the very next sentence, which said, 'Unfortunately, too many college kids are happy to "live the dream" of working in video games, so it would be very difficult to start one; you'd always have some punk kid ready to take your place and put in 80-100 hour weeks for at least 3 years before becoming a shell of his former self.'
=Brian
Firing generally means 'with cause', usually because of breaking company policy/laws, inability to perform one's job, or just generally being a big jerk. Letting someone go, or laying them off, generally means there was no cause, so you tend to get more perks like severance. I know, those perks aren't much, but they sure beat not getting them.
I know, it's easier to stir up the revolution by saying they were fired, but that implies poor performance on the part of the workers, and that seems uncalled for.
=Brian
I lived the dream for, oh, 9 years. I'm plenty happy doing things that aren't in the game industry now, though I know some people who are still enjoying themselves, in varying degrees.
=Brian
Flash forward to today, and you see Thief 3 (albeit a fine, fine title) obviously rushed out the door, and most of the dev team laid off. What is it with this industries self destructive tendancies? I mean, really. Isnt the goal to make money? And isnt that a product of producing a good game?
Sadly, no. The current tactic is to keep from losing money, which means optimizing the development cycle to a minimum amount of time, thus reducing overhead such as rent, by employing far more people at any given time than are necessary. Then, when the game is done, you don't want to keep paying salary for all the extra people, so you let them go. This also has the benefit of reducing the amount of vacation time you need to give people, and it keeps you from continuing to employ burnt-out people. Because everyone will be burnt out, since there's been mandatory overtime for 3 months, forcing people to work 70-80 hour weeks to get the game done.
It is very sad, and it will eventually change, but not immediately by any means. Personally, I think there needs to be a union for video game professionals. Unfortunately, too many college kids are happy to "live the dream" of working in video games, so it would be very difficult to start one; you'd always have some punk kid ready to take your place and put in 80-100 hour weeks for at least 3 years before becoming a shell of his former self. I've seen it happen far too often.
=Brian
That's cool. No, I didn't bother looking closely at the pretty picture, though I saw it enough to get the idea of the size and form factor.
I would modify the table so that there were three lines, one LAN, one WAN, and one LAN/WAN. Not really that important to the discussion, but a good lesson if you're making tables for this sort of thing.
=Brian
will it be able to stream to multiple locations at once?
Doesn't look like it from the screen shots. It appears to be a drop-down menu, not checkboxes, so I would imagine one at a time.
It looks like you can also use this in a wired fashion, where you connect this device to your wired network, and it will do the audio out as well.
Nope. Check the comparison chart on Apple's site, and you'll see that it doesn't connect to the LAN, just to the Internet.
One thing this is missing is a way to control iTunes remotely.
Just a guess, but I'd say there will be several products announced in July or thereabouts that will allow you to control all of this through the AirTunes network.
=Brian