The biggest problem with rpgs, really, is the advancement of the action-rpg (Zelda being the primary example of this). There are generally so many more action-rpgs made these days, it's easy to get confused as to what a real traditional rpg is.
If it doesn't have stats and random encounters, it's not a real rpg.
There's another strange kind of rpg as well, the drying-up rpg. Dungeon Siege is an excellent example of what I'm referring to here. In this rpg, the world is finite. There are a fixed number of enemies, and therefore a fixed number of objects in the world, fixed amount of advancement, fixed amount of wealth, etc. This kind of game is ultimately unsatisfying, because if you blow your advancement or wealth early on, it's pretty easy to screw yourself over later in the game.
All that being said, though, it's really really difficult to make a really great rpg these days. Balancing all the play mechanics, creating interesting stories, all the thousands of details that go into these things I would assume generally try on the patience of game developers. And given the popularity of the true-rpg nowadays, how many people actually would go out and buy your product given how long and how many resources it took to make?
The last true-rpg I had a lot of fun with was Wizards and Warriors. I have Wizardry 8 (for over a year now) but just haven't had any time to start and get into it, which is another problem of the genre. Really good rpgs require quite a lot of time.
As for the article, maybe you had to grow up playing the Ultimas, or the Bard's Tales, or something. I love civ and all, but all that micromanagement can get to you after awhile. And no FPS has done squat for me recently. I guess if you just aren't introduced to the genre (it was more or less a big accident that I was), you don't get it.
Well, I've been brought out of my 2+ year shirking of/. because of this article. Hope you all are satisfied!
The "designer" the pinball news article is referring to is the PLAYFIELD designer. I'm not a mechanical guy, though there's really no reason that I couldn't draw a playfield some day as plenty of other programmers have gone that route.
I consider myself to be the game designer, or experience designer, or whatever, since I'm pretty much in charge of coordinating what's on the display, sounds, music, speech, writing the rules, etc. etc.
It just depends on who's working on the game who the designer is. With other teams, the playfield designer is also the rules designer, and the programmer is just a code monkey. I'd sooner quit before that happened to me though.
I've had my ReplayTV for, oh, 6-8 months now I think. Maybe a bit more. Anyway, I noticed the ads during pause myself. Kind of annoying, but it was just a static image of Santa drinking a Coke. Big deal.
A couple months ago, however, the ads went away. I haven't seen an ad (be it a placeholder like they had, or Santa drinking Coke, or whatever) during pause or anything else for quite a long time. I can't explain it, but I'm not sure what this guy is complaining about nowadays.
It's been slow to start, but a few of us that used to be at Williams are here now, and things are picking up. Given enough time, and a real chance, you'll see some very good things coming out of here, I feel.
Someone else already pointed out some info, but as another former pinball 2000 programmer, I'll add a bit more...
The default webserver in a p2k machine only displays the pinball 2000 logo and the current high scores on the machine. Of course, those were just hacked in there in a couple days to show that http was working. All kinds of stuff could've continued to go into it, eventually you could wire it up online and get updates, tournament results, etc. etc.
There was unbelievable potential for everything that was going on at Williams Pinball at the time it shut down, it's most unfortunate that it'll never see the light of day. But life goes on.
keith
Finally, a topic I am an expert on :P
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Is Pinball Dying?
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Those games you list were the "old" Stern from the late 70s/early 80s. The "new" Stern was bought by Gary Stern in Sept 1999 I believe. That company was formerly Sega Pinball, and that was formerly Data East Pinball. They have been in operation since mid-late 80s.
Williams died on Oct. 25, 1999 (if that hasn't been covered yet). I was a programmer there (worked on Revenge From Mars), and am now a programmer at Stern. (Me and one other programmer went there after Wms closed.)
Does this mean that the Gnu Public License, and everyone that uses it, actually DOESN'T have a right to prevent me from distributing binaries without source, whether I'm making money off of it or not? Just wondering where exactly you want the line in the sand drawn here.
My personal biggest beef with the web today is the need for so many sites to force their webpages to be 600 pixels wide, 720 pixels wide, whatever. I have a 3200x1200 desktop available to me, and it's really stupid to see sites like Daily Radar, almost any newspaper site, etc. take up a teeny teeny portion of the page. What can be done to move away from the fixed-width mentality that so many people have today? Why do they do it, even? Because they are not capable of coming up with a "relative" design? What can be done to educate people on the merits of relative sizing? Don't you think that relativity is good, vs. "stylized" fixed-width pages?
I gotta say, I checked out the Dilberito, and it looks fairly disgusting to me. Haven't bought one yet, but by those pictures, I probably never will.
What this is is more like California-style burritos I think (think of the way California Pizza Kitchen bastardized the food we all know and love). Living in Chicago, there are many places that serve "authentic" burritos, and none of them look like that. And, they're quite tasty.
Really, to be the ultimate geek food, a geek-burrito would have to comprise:
Pizza (this would be the outside that you roll up, cheese, sauce, and all), (diet) coke, potato chips, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. Roll THAT up, and you truly have a geek burrito. Probably pretty tasty, too.
Thank you for the informative post, but what I personally think would be greatly appreciated is perhaps more information on the Cybersquatting act.
You make good points about what SHOULD be common sense cases, i.e. people using their own names in businesses, businesses or websites formed way before a company even existed, etc. But there IS in fact a problem out there. It is easily illustrated by checking out this yahoo link. These are all domain name brokers, where you can go to buy or sell domain names.
There are literally thousands, maybe even 10s of thousands of domain names just sitting there by people speculating that someday they'll be useful. A quick check at the domainmart on that yahoo page shows e-businesstv.com available for US$1,000,000! eJobSeeker is a relative bargain for only $1,795.
Big clue: No one on any of those domain-name-for-sale registrars ever has any intention of ever using them. To me, that is what the cybersquatting rule should really enforce, because I agree that trademark rule should apply to cases where it is generally obvious the name in question has nothing to do with the owner of the name.
In my personal perfect world, owning a domain name would be like owning a patent (yes, I know patents don't work like this now, that's part of my point): You should be actively engaging in using your IP or domain name or whatever for it to really be enforceable. Companies I have worked for have been stymied by people that own patents, despite the fact that no product has ever been produced by them utilizing said patent. If you're not using it, and we come up with this idea, and it turns out some schmoe has a patent on it, we can't do it.
I feel that trademarks, patent law, all that stuff does in fact have its place. To me, it seems obvious that etoy was clearly in the right, having existed long before etoys came into being. But the world is driven by lawyers, not by logic. So any light you could shed into this murky bog would be greatly appreciated.
You are correct, it is nearly impossible to make a television guide these days and not have Gemstar put the smack down on you. However, one company recently did (where a friend of mine works), called Diva.
For those that don't know and are jumping the gun blaming open source for this patent, their patents basically cover receiving a guide electronically, then rendering it on some piece of equipment, i.e. something the cable company has, your TiVo or ReplayTV box, etc. (I assume ReplayTV is a licensee.) Diva got around this by doing their own rendering and sending the guide as VIDEO. They probably have a patent on this, so I don't know what other course of action you have to transmit guides at this point.
Basically, any schmoe could figure out that TiVo was patenting on Gemstar's technology. I doubt very much the guide rendering they do is the open source part anyway (I've not been following that).
Well I guess you haven't been exposed to very many of these kinds of people then. I know plenty without a clue, too, but I also know some pretty damn amazingly smart people who went for thsoe kinds of exams because their bosses wanted them to, it meant a raise, etc.
These tests are a real double-edged sword. On the one hand, they provide a basis of what people should know, and employers (PHBs in particular) enjoy that. On the other hand, once they become popular and people realize that just by having this little piece of certification they can make X dollars a year or Y dollars more, it all starts falling to shit.
Back when I was more of a Microsoft Whore, I passed like 5 exams I think. They were:
- Access 2.0 - VB 3.0 - Win95 - WOSA I - WOSA II
Some of those are outdated now, and I've not bothered to keep up with them because the last couple jobs I've had it doesn't really matter. I wouldn't have gotten those, but when I was at a consulting company, my boss liked to show off that he had MCSD(s) working for him. Looked good no the sell sheets, company info, etc.
When I took those exams, I never failed a single one. All of the preparation I did involved buying one single book that talked about the kind of stuff that was on the WOSA tests. I expect that many/.'ers would fall into a similar category when it comes to various Linux tests.
Why am I, or others, able to do such a thing? Because I did MS stuff every day, my experience was in playing with stuff all the time.
My theory on what happens with all of these tests in general follows: When tests or new certifications are announced, people that actually know the stuff take them right away and have no problems. Eventually curricula are produced, and people start having classes for the exams. Then people see it as a career advancement, pay their $1000s for a course in some certification, be it CNE, MCSE, MCSD, etc. etc., learn EXACTLY the questions that are on the test (the randomness isn't all THAT random, I'd imagine), pass, get their certification, and their extra bucks.
So basically, the tests are useful at the start, because the people that already know everything pass easily and quickly. Then eventually you fall into the CNE syndrome where everyone can become one, and the tests essentially become meaningless for everyone involved, except as CYA material (that's Cover-Your-Ass for those unfamiliar).
A far far better metric would be to see things like "GPAs" for the classes, test pass/fail rate, etc., but I don't think anyone involved would let that happen.
If it's so simple to patent, how come no one did it BEFORE?
There was no grafitti, no unistroke, no anything that does all of this quick information entry you hold so close to your heart. It was some new concept they came up with. That is EXACTLY the purpose of a patent.
This isn't a language. It's a form of data entry. I guarantee you as soon as someone comes up with a way to type just by thinking it, that's going to get patented. Should other technologies, such as the retinal scanning type stuff that enables people to look at letters in order to "type" not be patentable either? That's obvious, I just look at letters!
The most patentable things, indeed, are things that make you think "Wow, this is so cool, and it makes my life a lot easier!" It's an "Aha!" to paraphrase Martin Gartner.
I think the biggest problem is that anytime/.'ers see the word "patent" their guard immediately goes up. There's a kind of subculture that thinks anything involving a patent is wrong. Well guess what. A lot of you are just going through school now, and are in your idealistic forming years. When you get into the real world, and come up with some cool idea, you're going to be damn glad that your company gave you the opportunity to research it and gave you the means to patent it.
ARE there problems with patents? I would most definitely agree. Patenting a circle-drawing algorithm that one would likely come up with on their own after being in graphical programming for more than a few months seems pretty ludicrous to me. However, Xerox's grafitti patent (did you even read it?) is EXACTLY the kind of cool idea I'd want to try and protect.
Re:More like Y2K Scam, Y2K Fraud, etc...
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You don't even really need code... I assume it's a registry entry, so all you would have to do is save the relevant entries to a.reg file, then at some point, say a login script, do a "start fixdate.reg" and everything's hunky-dory.
A friend told me about FatBrain quite awhile ago. I don't buy books online in general, because I don't buy many books. I've not bought from Amazon or B&N or any of those.
Now, I don't know how much FatBrain spams you if you're a customer, but I will point out that I got what is likely a generic usenet-ripped spam from FatBrain a few months ago. So I mentioned that to my friend (not a usenet poster) and swore FatBrain off forever, because I'm fairly sensitive to that kind of thing as well.
This may get nuked for being off-topic, but I'm going to say it anyway. Are we really at the point where even slashdotters don't know who Kibo is??
Admittedly I've not followed the Kibo scene for quite some time, but there was once, way back when, where any mention of Kibo, at any time, in any newsgroup, summoned the Great One. There are probably FAQs on him still, and alt.religion.kibo or something probably still is around, too. But that's who Kibo is.
And he came unto the masses, armed with the power of `grep`!
Back when I read alt.hackers on a regular basis (early 90s) the general consensus seemed to be that it involved not necessarily programming, but pretty much any clever solution to a given problem. Sometimes it might involve rewiring power tools, sometimes writing/changing code, maybe even just pounding pieces of wood together...
So basically, are we changing the definition of "hacker" again? Or was it always meant to just relate to programming? One thing is for sure, the denizens of alt.hackers certainly agreed that any negative connotation it had was the fault of the press, and wasn't what they were about.
As for myself, I rather like the inclusive definition of doing something clever.
I probably should've elaborated more in my previous posting (see first thread), but there are a couple of factors here.
The technical explanation is the "stage" byte keeps getting incremented until it hits 0. When the game goes to look up settings for stage 0, it reads garbage and goes haywire. Nice table.;)
(For those that aren't aware, a similar thing happens in Galaga. After Stage 255, comes Stage 0. Except in Galaga, you can still move and shoot, the starfield still moves, but Stage 0 never disappears and no enemies ever show up. This is a feat I personally actually managed to accomplish on a "fast-fire" Galaga. I believe I wound up with something in the 3M range. It would be a significant exercise, but you can compute the theoretical maximum of Galaga, too.)
Anyhoo, the score will in fact wrap at 1M. There's not really any way to know, except that someone witnesses the fact that it did, each time. If they have it on tape, I'm sure you can see each time it rolled. The high score stops counting, since your score is now "below" the new high score. I rolled a Pac-Man once using patterns found in video game books back then, but I was never good enough or cared enough to play to the "end." I assume the scores were kept in BCD, but I don't know for sure. I am aware of similar circumstances in solid-state pinball games (it's pretty obvious what it takes to roll an electro-mechanical game).
As far as scores/level, it will tend towards 13000 or so. Say ~200 dots (2000) 4 energizers (200), 2 keys (10,000) for 12,200/level. Figure out how many dots there are, and you can figure it out for sure. I think keys start at about the 20th level or so, and ghosts won't turn blue after 25-30, so at least 200 levels will be as I described above. On levels you can eat monsters, there are 12000 points there (200+400+800+1600)*4. So the scores will vary early on from 12000-14000/level up to 25000/level, but most levels will be 12000-13000 or whatever the number is.
Keith Johnson Game Programmer Williams Electronics Games, Inc.;) (I played Pac-Man when I was 8-9 or so)
I do not believe this to be a hoax for a variety of reasons.
First of all, I know the book exists. I saw it in a bookstore once and was amused to see scores of mine from recent pinball tournaments in it.;)
Secondly, there was much hoopla, at least in rec.games.pinball about this event (probably in other groups like rec.games.video.arcade* too). One such message from one of the organizers is hopefully at http://x21.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=472947745.1&CONTE XT=931240958.1977679960&hitnum=13 . (I'm not sure how to get a more specific ref from deja, forgiveness if that breaks.)
Thirdly, there most certainly is a maximum score to Pac-Man. The game crashes at Stage 256 (if you didn't know that by now, what kind of nerd are you??), so there is a finite end. I don't know the exact numbers involved offhand, but with a little knowledge (dots*10 + 4*50 for energizers) * 255, that's the basic eating score. Add to that 2 cherries * 100, 2 strawberries * 200, 4 oranges * 400, etc. for all of the fruits. For all boards where the energizers actually turn the monsters blue (they stop after awhile), add (200+400+800+1600)*4*(number-of-boards-with-blueab le-monsters).
The only hard part after awhile would be setting up the monsters for the perfect kill every time. Clearing the boards is simple rote, as has been demonstrated years ago, as the first Pac-Man ROMs didn't have randomness or anything. So after the last working-energizer board, the game is essentially DONE except for the sheer work involved.
There is one muddy point, and that is the settings or ROMs of the games. The original game, for example, had long blue periods for the first 3 boards, whereas the newer ones were long-medium-short-longish. The first game would obviously have a higher top score, as there would be more available blue boards.
Anyway, hopefully this mostly debunkified this as being a hoax. I for one am pretty convinced it is legit.
Actually, this kind of touches on an interesting point. A while ago, someone (O'Riley?) was upset about Microsoft's licensing agreement for NT Server vs. Workstation (i.e. for workstation, you can only legally have 10 connections at a time, thereby making it useless as a commercial webserver). This was enforced by the system, and to counter MS' claims that it was for technical reasons, O'Riley (or whoever) found out how to change the system "type" (simply a registry entry) by disabling the 2 watcher threads that kept an eye on if you tried to change it yourself with regedit or some other means. They then proceeded to use the Workstation installation as a Server with no problems, and performance was probably equivalent.
When video-type operations moved to the kernel (as the AC above noted was a MAJOR change from NT3), it became a MAJOR reason why many people did NOT upgrade from NT 3.51, and why MS still supports it (since I guess they recognize the increased instability of NT 4).
IMO, what MS should've done (and may do in the future, I dunno, I've been out-of-touch with the MS "scene" for about 1.5 years now), is really made a technical difference between Server and Workstation. I.e. Server should retain slow video (it's a server for God's sake, why the hell does it need faster video) for increased stability, and leave faster video to Workstation. Makes perfect sense to me. And there's no reason why similar optimizations (performance vs. stability for everyday vs. server use) couldn't be done in almost any OS.
Well, that's not necessarily true. Civ:CTP is not a very fun game (IMO), and it certainly doesn't have much to do with its namesake (i.e. the Civilization series). I honestly don't know exactly how well it's doing right now, but when after I bought it and found I rather hated it, I checked out some of the gaming sites and many other people were feeling the same way.
I seriously don't mean this to sound like flamebait, but I do wonder if they might not sell a decent amount just because of the general lack of games available for the OS? C.f. many mediocre (at best) games selling extremely well for the N64 because of the sheer lack of numbers of different games available at and shortly after release.
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The biggest problem with rpgs, really, is the advancement of the action-rpg (Zelda being the primary example of this). There are generally so many more action-rpgs made these days, it's easy to get confused as to what a real traditional rpg is.
If it doesn't have stats and random encounters, it's not a real rpg.
There's another strange kind of rpg as well, the drying-up rpg. Dungeon Siege is an excellent example of what I'm referring to here. In this rpg, the world is finite. There are a fixed number of enemies, and therefore a fixed number of objects in the world, fixed amount of advancement, fixed amount of wealth, etc. This kind of game is ultimately unsatisfying, because if you blow your advancement or wealth early on, it's pretty easy to screw yourself over later in the game.
All that being said, though, it's really really difficult to make a really great rpg these days. Balancing all the play mechanics, creating interesting stories, all the thousands of details that go into these things I would assume generally try on the patience of game developers. And given the popularity of the true-rpg nowadays, how many people actually would go out and buy your product given how long and how many resources it took to make?
The last true-rpg I had a lot of fun with was Wizards and Warriors. I have Wizardry 8 (for over a year now) but just haven't had any time to start and get into it, which is another problem of the genre. Really good rpgs require quite a lot of time.
As for the article, maybe you had to grow up playing the Ultimas, or the Bard's Tales, or something. I love civ and all, but all that micromanagement can get to you after awhile. And no FPS has done squat for me recently. I guess if you just aren't introduced to the genre (it was more or less a big accident that I was), you don't get it.
Board games rule! If you have other sufficiently geeky board game friends, it can be way more fulfilling than your usual FPS, racing game, etc.
I suggest checking out Board Game Geek, it's truly an awesome site. Of particular interest, the games considered the best by the BGGs are here.
There's also a German board game WORLD of sorts where you can play a heck of a lot of board games online. Check it out here.
Well, I've been brought out of my 2+ year shirking of /. because of this article. Hope you all are satisfied!
The "designer" the pinball news article is referring to is the PLAYFIELD designer. I'm not a mechanical guy, though there's really no reason that I couldn't draw a playfield some day as plenty of other programmers have gone that route.
I consider myself to be the game designer, or experience designer, or whatever, since I'm pretty much in charge of coordinating what's on the display, sounds, music, speech, writing the rules, etc. etc.
It just depends on who's working on the game who the designer is. With other teams, the playfield designer is also the rules designer, and the programmer is just a code monkey. I'd sooner quit before that happened to me though.
The HUMAN RACE IS INEFFICIENT, and therefore MUST BE DESTROYED.
I've had my ReplayTV for, oh, 6-8 months now I think. Maybe a bit more. Anyway, I noticed the ads during pause myself. Kind of annoying, but it was just a static image of Santa drinking a Coke. Big deal.
A couple months ago, however, the ads went away. I haven't seen an ad (be it a placeholder like they had, or Santa drinking Coke, or whatever) during pause or anything else for quite a long time. I can't explain it, but I'm not sure what this guy is complaining about nowadays.
It's been slow to start, but a few of us that used to be at Williams are here now, and things are picking up. Given enough time, and a real chance, you'll see some very good things coming out of here, I feel.
Someone else already pointed out some info, but as another former pinball 2000 programmer, I'll add a bit more...
The default webserver in a p2k machine only displays the pinball 2000 logo and the current high scores on the machine. Of course, those were just hacked in there in a couple days to show that http was working. All kinds of stuff could've continued to go into it, eventually you could wire it up online and get updates, tournament results, etc. etc.
There was unbelievable potential for everything that was going on at Williams Pinball at the time it shut down, it's most unfortunate that it'll never see the light of day. But life goes on.
keith
Those games you list were the "old" Stern from the late 70s/early 80s. The "new" Stern was bought by Gary Stern in Sept 1999 I believe. That company was formerly Sega Pinball, and that was formerly Data East Pinball. They have been in operation since mid-late 80s.
Williams died on Oct. 25, 1999 (if that hasn't been covered yet). I was a programmer there (worked on Revenge From Mars), and am now a programmer at Stern. (Me and one other programmer went there after Wms closed.)
keith
Does this mean that the Gnu Public License, and everyone that uses it, actually DOESN'T have a right to prevent me from distributing binaries without source, whether I'm making money off of it or not? Just wondering where exactly you want the line in the sand drawn here.
My personal biggest beef with the web today is the need for so many sites to force their webpages to be 600 pixels wide, 720 pixels wide, whatever. I have a 3200x1200 desktop available to me, and it's really stupid to see sites like Daily Radar, almost any newspaper site, etc. take up a teeny teeny portion of the page. What can be done to move away from the fixed-width mentality that so many people have today? Why do they do it, even? Because they are not capable of coming up with a "relative" design? What can be done to educate people on the merits of relative sizing? Don't you think that relativity is good, vs. "stylized" fixed-width pages?
I thought the -2 stuff was a joke. Well, the joke was on me!
You continue to earn my respect, trolls, and maybe it's just because I'm slaphappy at 4AM, but you are providing a valuable service!
Wow, how does someone get to -2? I am duly impressed.
I gotta say, I checked out the Dilberito, and it looks fairly disgusting to me. Haven't bought one yet, but by those pictures, I probably never will.
What this is is more like California-style burritos I think (think of the way California Pizza Kitchen bastardized the food we all know and love). Living in Chicago, there are many places that serve "authentic" burritos, and none of them look like that. And, they're quite tasty.
Really, to be the ultimate geek food, a geek-burrito would have to comprise:
Pizza (this would be the outside that you roll up, cheese, sauce, and all), (diet) coke, potato chips, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. Roll THAT up, and you truly have a geek burrito. Probably pretty tasty, too.
You make good points about what SHOULD be common sense cases, i.e. people using their own names in businesses, businesses or websites formed way before a company even existed, etc. But there IS in fact a problem out there. It is easily illustrated by checking out this yahoo link. These are all domain name brokers, where you can go to buy or sell domain names.
There are literally thousands, maybe even 10s of thousands of domain names just sitting there by people speculating that someday they'll be useful. A quick check at the domainmart on that yahoo page shows e-businesstv.com available for US$1,000,000! eJobSeeker is a relative bargain for only $1,795.
Big clue: No one on any of those domain-name-for-sale registrars ever has any intention of ever using them. To me, that is what the cybersquatting rule should really enforce, because I agree that trademark rule should apply to cases where it is generally obvious the name in question has nothing to do with the owner of the name.
In my personal perfect world, owning a domain name would be like owning a patent (yes, I know patents don't work like this now, that's part of my point): You should be actively engaging in using your IP or domain name or whatever for it to really be enforceable. Companies I have worked for have been stymied by people that own patents, despite the fact that no product has ever been produced by them utilizing said patent. If you're not using it, and we come up with this idea, and it turns out some schmoe has a patent on it, we can't do it.
I feel that trademarks, patent law, all that stuff does in fact have its place. To me, it seems obvious that etoy was clearly in the right, having existed long before etoys came into being. But the world is driven by lawyers, not by logic. So any light you could shed into this murky bog would be greatly appreciated.
For those that don't know and are jumping the gun blaming open source for this patent, their patents basically cover receiving a guide electronically, then rendering it on some piece of equipment, i.e. something the cable company has, your TiVo or ReplayTV box, etc. (I assume ReplayTV is a licensee.) Diva got around this by doing their own rendering and sending the guide as VIDEO. They probably have a patent on this, so I don't know what other course of action you have to transmit guides at this point.
Basically, any schmoe could figure out that TiVo was patenting on Gemstar's technology. I doubt very much the guide rendering they do is the open source part anyway (I've not been following that).
Well I guess you haven't been exposed to very many of these kinds of people then. I know plenty without a clue, too, but I also know some pretty damn amazingly smart people who went for thsoe kinds of exams because their bosses wanted them to, it meant a raise, etc.
/.'ers would fall into a similar category when it comes to various Linux tests.
These tests are a real double-edged sword. On the one hand, they provide a basis of what people should know, and employers (PHBs in particular) enjoy that. On the other hand, once they become popular and people realize that just by having this little piece of certification they can make X dollars a year or Y dollars more, it all starts falling to shit.
Back when I was more of a Microsoft Whore, I passed like 5 exams I think. They were:
- Access 2.0
- VB 3.0
- Win95
- WOSA I
- WOSA II
Some of those are outdated now, and I've not bothered to keep up with them because the last couple jobs I've had it doesn't really matter. I wouldn't have gotten those, but when I was at a consulting company, my boss liked to show off that he had MCSD(s) working for him. Looked good no the sell sheets, company info, etc.
When I took those exams, I never failed a single one. All of the preparation I did involved buying one single book that talked about the kind of stuff that was on the WOSA tests. I expect that many
Why am I, or others, able to do such a thing? Because I did MS stuff every day, my experience was in playing with stuff all the time.
My theory on what happens with all of these tests in general follows: When tests or new certifications are announced, people that actually know the stuff take them right away and have no problems. Eventually curricula are produced, and people start having classes for the exams. Then people see it as a career advancement, pay their $1000s for a course in some certification, be it CNE, MCSE, MCSD, etc. etc., learn EXACTLY the questions that are on the test (the randomness isn't all THAT random, I'd imagine), pass, get their certification, and their extra bucks.
So basically, the tests are useful at the start, because the people that already know everything pass easily and quickly. Then eventually you fall into the CNE syndrome where everyone can become one, and the tests essentially become meaningless for everyone involved, except as CYA material (that's Cover-Your-Ass for those unfamiliar).
A far far better metric would be to see things like "GPAs" for the classes, test pass/fail rate, etc., but I don't think anyone involved would let that happen.
If it's so simple to patent, how come no one did it BEFORE?
/.'ers see the word "patent" their guard immediately goes up. There's a kind of subculture that thinks anything involving a patent is wrong. Well guess what. A lot of you are just going through school now, and are in your idealistic forming years. When you get into the real world, and come up with some cool idea, you're going to be damn glad that your company gave you the opportunity to research it and gave you the means to patent it.
There was no grafitti, no unistroke, no anything that does all of this quick information entry you hold so close to your heart. It was some new concept they came up with. That is EXACTLY the purpose of a patent.
This isn't a language. It's a form of data entry. I guarantee you as soon as someone comes up with a way to type just by thinking it, that's going to get patented. Should other technologies, such as the retinal scanning type stuff that enables people to look at letters in order to "type" not be patentable either? That's obvious, I just look at letters!
The most patentable things, indeed, are things that make you think "Wow, this is so cool, and it makes my life a lot easier!" It's an "Aha!" to paraphrase Martin Gartner.
I think the biggest problem is that anytime
ARE there problems with patents? I would most definitely agree. Patenting a circle-drawing algorithm that one would likely come up with on their own after being in graphical programming for more than a few months seems pretty ludicrous to me. However, Xerox's grafitti patent (did you even read it?) is EXACTLY the kind of cool idea I'd want to try and protect.
You don't even really need code... I assume it's a registry entry, so all you would have to do is save the relevant entries to a .reg file, then at some point, say a login script, do a "start fixdate.reg" and everything's hunky-dory.
A friend told me about FatBrain quite awhile ago. I don't buy books online in general, because I don't buy many books. I've not bought from Amazon or B&N or any of those.
Now, I don't know how much FatBrain spams you if you're a customer, but I will point out that I got what is likely a generic usenet-ripped spam from FatBrain a few months ago. So I mentioned that to my friend (not a usenet poster) and swore FatBrain off forever, because I'm fairly sensitive to that kind of thing as well.
This may get nuked for being off-topic, but I'm going to say it anyway. Are we really at the point where even slashdotters don't know who Kibo is??
Admittedly I've not followed the Kibo scene for quite some time, but there was once, way back when, where any mention of Kibo, at any time, in any newsgroup, summoned the Great One. There are probably FAQs on him still, and alt.religion.kibo or something probably still is around, too. But that's who Kibo is.
And he came unto the masses, armed with the power of `grep`!
Back when I read alt.hackers on a regular basis (early 90s) the general consensus seemed to be that it involved not necessarily programming, but pretty much any clever solution to a given problem. Sometimes it might involve rewiring power tools, sometimes writing/changing code, maybe even just pounding pieces of wood together...
So basically, are we changing the definition of "hacker" again? Or was it always meant to just relate to programming? One thing is for sure, the denizens of alt.hackers certainly agreed that any negative connotation it had was the fault of the press, and wasn't what they were about.
As for myself, I rather like the inclusive definition of doing something clever.
I probably should've elaborated more in my previous posting (see first thread), but there are a couple of factors here.
;)
;)
The technical explanation is the "stage" byte keeps getting incremented until it hits 0. When the game goes to look up settings for stage 0, it reads garbage and goes haywire. Nice table.
(For those that aren't aware, a similar thing happens in Galaga. After Stage 255, comes Stage 0. Except in Galaga, you can still move and shoot, the starfield still moves, but Stage 0 never disappears and no enemies ever show up. This is a feat I personally actually managed to accomplish on a "fast-fire" Galaga. I believe I wound up with something in the 3M range. It would be a significant exercise, but you can compute the theoretical maximum of Galaga, too.)
Anyhoo, the score will in fact wrap at 1M. There's not really any way to know, except that someone witnesses the fact that it did, each time. If they have it on tape, I'm sure you can see each time it rolled. The high score stops counting, since your score is now "below" the new high score. I rolled a Pac-Man once using patterns found in video game books back then, but I was never good enough or cared enough to play to the "end." I assume the scores were kept in BCD, but I don't know for sure. I am aware of similar circumstances in solid-state pinball games (it's pretty obvious what it takes to roll an electro-mechanical game).
As far as scores/level, it will tend towards 13000 or so. Say ~200 dots (2000) 4 energizers (200), 2 keys (10,000) for 12,200/level. Figure out how many dots there are, and you can figure it out for sure. I think keys start at about the 20th level or so, and ghosts won't turn blue after 25-30, so at least 200 levels will be as I described above. On levels you can eat monsters, there are 12000 points there (200+400+800+1600)*4. So the scores will vary early on from 12000-14000/level up to 25000/level, but most levels will be 12000-13000 or whatever the number is.
Keith Johnson
Game Programmer
Williams Electronics Games, Inc.
(I played Pac-Man when I was 8-9 or so)
I do not believe this to be a hoax for a variety of reasons.
;)
E XT=931240958.1977679960&hitnum=13 . (I'm not sure how to get a more specific ref from deja, forgiveness if that breaks.)
b le-monsters).
First of all, I know the book exists. I saw it in a bookstore once and was amused to see scores of mine from recent pinball tournaments in it.
Secondly, there was much hoopla, at least in rec.games.pinball about this event (probably in other groups like rec.games.video.arcade* too). One such message from one of the organizers is hopefully at http://x21.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=472947745.1&CONT
Thirdly, there most certainly is a maximum score to Pac-Man. The game crashes at Stage 256 (if you didn't know that by now, what kind of nerd are you??), so there is a finite end. I don't know the exact numbers involved offhand, but with a little knowledge (dots*10 + 4*50 for energizers) * 255, that's the basic eating score. Add to that 2 cherries * 100, 2 strawberries * 200, 4 oranges * 400, etc. for all of the fruits. For all boards where the energizers actually turn the monsters blue (they stop after awhile), add (200+400+800+1600)*4*(number-of-boards-with-bluea
The only hard part after awhile would be setting up the monsters for the perfect kill every time. Clearing the boards is simple rote, as has been demonstrated years ago, as the first Pac-Man ROMs didn't have randomness or anything. So after the last working-energizer board, the game is essentially DONE except for the sheer work involved.
There is one muddy point, and that is the settings or ROMs of the games. The original game, for example, had long blue periods for the first 3 boards, whereas the newer ones were long-medium-short-longish. The first game would obviously have a higher top score, as there would be more available blue boards.
Anyway, hopefully this mostly debunkified this as being a hoax. I for one am pretty convinced it is legit.
Actually, this kind of touches on an interesting point. A while ago, someone (O'Riley?) was upset about Microsoft's licensing agreement for NT Server vs. Workstation (i.e. for workstation, you can only legally have 10 connections at a time, thereby making it useless as a commercial webserver). This was enforced by the system, and to counter MS' claims that it was for technical reasons, O'Riley (or whoever) found out how to change the system "type" (simply a registry entry) by disabling the 2 watcher threads that kept an eye on if you tried to change it yourself with regedit or some other means. They then proceeded to use the Workstation installation as a Server with no problems, and performance was probably equivalent.
When video-type operations moved to the kernel (as the AC above noted was a MAJOR change from NT3), it became a MAJOR reason why many people did NOT upgrade from NT 3.51, and why MS still supports it (since I guess they recognize the increased instability of NT 4).
IMO, what MS should've done (and may do in the future, I dunno, I've been out-of-touch with the MS "scene" for about 1.5 years now), is really made a technical difference between Server and Workstation. I.e. Server should retain slow video (it's a server for God's sake, why the hell does it need faster video) for increased stability, and leave faster video to Workstation. Makes perfect sense to me. And there's no reason why similar optimizations (performance vs. stability for everyday vs. server use) couldn't be done in almost any OS.
Well, that's not necessarily true. Civ:CTP is not a very fun game (IMO), and it certainly doesn't have much to do with its namesake (i.e. the Civilization series). I honestly don't know exactly how well it's doing right now, but when after I bought it and found I rather hated it, I checked out some of the gaming sites and many other people were feeling the same way.
I seriously don't mean this to sound like flamebait, but I do wonder if they might not sell a decent amount just because of the general lack of games available for the OS? C.f. many mediocre (at best) games selling extremely well for the N64 because of the sheer lack of numbers of different games available at and shortly after release.