Would you pay the additional R&D costs associated with game-development on two platforms?
I mean, there would be 3 parts in the costs: 1. General development of the Game 2. Implementation for windows 3. Implementation for Linux
Now costs for #1 would be devided over all sales. Costs for #2 would be devided over all sales for Windows. Costs for #3 would be devided over all sales for Linux (being... whell... a few thousand?)
A realistic price for the game on windows would be 50 or 60 euro's (forgive me, I am in euroland). A realistic price for linux would be 250 - 350 euro's.
Now, it's very nice of those folks at ID et al that are pretty much helping out Linux-users by taking Linux R&D costs and include them in the windows-variant. But would you, Linux ubergeek, *want* those darn windowsusers to pay for your product?
Now, why did they *blow up* the power plant, but *hack into* the backup-grid??? It seems to me that it would be much easier to *hack into* the power plant and -if necessary- *blow up* the backup-grid???
They wouldn't even need to use Un*x hacking-techniques, just take a wormed laptop, plug it into the lan and wait for half the east/westcoast to come to a halt.
Protecting your way of life is not always an easy job.
The US, IMHO, is flushing it's way of life down the drains by turning itself into a police state. Don't you see? Americans have allways (and still are) been so proud of their constitution. Now, what's left of it? It gets violated daily and no one cares. No one fights because the only way to avoid the death-penalty is to throw the towel in the ring. (Aren't those punishments like the death penalty and very-severe sentencing just meant to scare a suspect from fighting in trial??)
A constitution is -again IMO- meant for 2 things:
1. To ensure that a just government can perform it's tasks
2. To ensure that a unjust government cannot perform -or is severely hampered in performing- it's task.
Now, you are loosing #2!! This means that any unjust government can take all the power that is trusted in her and convert your country in a dictatorship within a term. How is that with your way-of-life?
I used to help administer a hospital-informationsystem.
This was a unix-alike system (although the OS was *proprietary*). Users used terminals/terminal-emulators.
It had a appliction for writing letters about the patients. This application was only used by secretaries. The firm that made it also had a plugin for MSword. Using this plugin users didn't need to use the terminal-based application, but they could write their letters in Word, fill in some database form-fields and send it over to the system.
So the users could choose between: - terminal-based word-processor and - MS-Word-with-plugin.
Our experiences were: - New end/or temporary staff liked to use Word, since everyone knows word so training-time is shorter (and thus you get more productive hours from those people that only stay for a week). - Experienced staff *liked* and *chose* to use the terminal-based version. Reasons: it was more responsive, less error-prone, no need to use the mouse (switching left hand keys->mouse->keys->mouse->....), more productivity (it took less time to initiate a new letter, to save it).
Secretaries and non-IT-skilled staff have for long been able to use all kinds of IT-systems (with proper training). I was surprised to see that they sometimes actually chose to use a unix-alike when there was also Word. So here you have it: what counts in the long run is functionality. Does the application do what you want from it, does it do it effectively, efficiently and reliably? GIU is a plus, but no more than that.
Or, it comes in a "package" together with something else.
For example: I have leaded the implementation of a IS that came with a complete set of laboratory equipment. When it came ot choosing the software: There were 2 competitors to choose from. They both deliverd both lab-equipment and software. Product 1 had good lab equipment and lousy software. Product 2 had good software, but the lab-equipment was frail and needed a lot of maintenance.
Result: product 1 was chosen. Software bought on the merits of the "whole" product.
I used to be an applicationmanager for a few Hospital-Information-System applications. A few years ago there was a large news-item about a hospital administrering blood of the wrong blood-type to a patient, killing him.
The cause of it was a software-flaw: the bloodbank-software had a duplicate-entry system. Analyst A enters the bloodtype, analyst B enters the bloodtype. If the two matches then we are satisfied. The checking-system did not check. The analysts entered different values but no alarm-bells were ringing.
This did not happen at the hospital where I worked, but we also used the same software.
I checked the buglists... and there it was... bug # 12345 date: half-a-year-ago. Bug: application does nog check inconsistent entries. Stunning... absolutely stunning.
There is a programmer / accountmanager who has now found out (the hard way) that programming medical applications is a serious business. And that if he scaled the priority of this bug up, a life would have been saved. This company was quite sluggish in it's reactions to bugs and it took quite something to get a bug classified as top-priority. I don't know what the priority of this bug was, but it was too low.
Nice detail is that the hospital was found to be the responsible party, because the bug was known and they did not implement temporary manual/alternative checks into their process.
Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? Just Ask Them By PETER WAYNER
HE Sims Online is a clean, well-lighted corner of the Internet where people work to build an elaborately decorated, chat-filled virtual world. But if playing by the rules in this realm isn't entertaining enough, there are after-hours joints where rogues and grifters gather to swap schemes for gaming the game and growing rich.
The chatter at TSOExtreme.com, for example, is a mix of simple tips for guiding the characters known as Sims and elaborate strategies for earning millions of the online currency known as simoleans. Recently much of the talk has centered on using extra software, known as a bot, to automate the most tiresome clicking so players can rack up hundreds of thousands of simoleans in their sleep.
One of the players engaging in this automated counterfeiting, a 29-year-old financial planner from Texas, said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name). "I think the bots actually level the playing field for people who have day jobs," he said. "When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
Web sites like TSOExtreme.com are a challenge for the rapidly growing world of interactive games. While breaking the rules or using secret "cheat codes" has always been an accepted, even treasured part of single-player games, new online games match competitors, often strangers, remotely, which changes the dynamic. No one likes to lose unfairly, and those who play by the rules often struggle against schemers who believe that all is fair in love and simulated war.
For their part, many of the cheats say that bending the game's rules is part of the fun. It is only a game, and when it becomes boring it is time to turn to the greater game of beating the system, they argue.
Brian Reynolds, a designer of a new online game, Rise of Nations, likes to joke that he was "the guy who put 'Cheat' on the main menu" when he developed games like Civilization II. A player could use the menu at any time to create new assets like warriors or defenses for a city.
In his new game, however, in which players meet and battle for ratings over the Internet, that option is gone. Mr. Reynolds and his team try to ensure that people who buy the game have a pleasant and balanced experience when battling others to dominate a virtual world. They fear that people would stop playing if those who cheated held all the power.
Haden Blackman, the producer at LucasArts responsible for Star Wars Galaxies, an online game now being tested by 5,000 users, said that preventing cheating was one of the biggest challenges of creating a virtual world.
One lesson the game industry learned the hard way is that dedicated cheats will rewrite software to give themselves an advantage. "There are a lot of great ideas we come up with and skip because there's going to be 1 percent who will abuse them," Mr. Blackman said.
Designers of the new Star Wars game initially planned to let players communicate in strange languages that would be translated by other players' computers, he said. But the developers soon realized that cheats would find a way to break into the hidden dictionary, gaining the ability to speak the various languages and negotiate with aliens from other planets - a skill that would normally develop only over time.
Bots like the ones discussed on TSOExtreme.com are just the beginning. Some players of games with a shooter, like Quake or Counter-Strike, have automated aiming tools that target an opponent more rapidly than the quickest of fingers.
Others reprogram their video cards to hide the elaborate textured walls in a game. All that is left is a wire-frame outline, allowing a player to see through walls and track those hiding behind them.
All of these techniques depend on users' having full control of the software running on their home machines. Adept programmers can rewrite the game or insert new instructi
Unusual gravitational effects of LCD-screens
on
LCD Overtaking CRT
·
· Score: 0
At my work we are experiencing unusual effects of replacing CRT's with LCDs: The LCD-displays seem to magically attract street-tiles and bricks. Especially when there's a windows between the LCD and the original location of the Brick. Also, these fenomenen are mostly appearing at night. And, even more strangely; after the brick has reached the direct vicinity of the LCD, the LCD is repulsed by the presence of the brick, causing it to magically leave the room. The result is that the Brick is at the original location of the LCD-display: inside my office and the LCD is at the original position of the brick: outside.
To prevent these strange fenomenon we have installed make-it-unbreakable foil at our windows, making them able to even resist "AK-47 fire". The result were street-tiles that traveled with even more kenetic energy thereby completely dismanteling the window-post.
The fenomenon has left us startled, but for now we would advise everyone to rethink their display-choise as long as these particular type of monitors are much more often disappearing then CRT's.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you pay the additional R&D costs associated with game-development on two platforms?
I mean, there would be 3 parts in the costs:
1. General development of the Game
2. Implementation for windows
3. Implementation for Linux
Now costs for #1 would be devided over all sales.
Costs for #2 would be devided over all sales for Windows.
Costs for #3 would be devided over all sales for Linux (being... whell... a few thousand?)
A realistic price for the game on windows would be 50 or 60 euro's (forgive me, I am in euroland). A realistic price for linux would be 250 - 350 euro's.
Now, it's very nice of those folks at ID et al that are pretty much helping out Linux-users by taking Linux R&D costs and include them in the windows-variant. But would you, Linux ubergeek, *want* those darn windowsusers to pay for your product?
Dumb question. I know.
SiggyRadiation.
Now, why did they *blow up* the power plant, but *hack into* the backup-grid??? It seems to me that it would be much easier to *hack into* the power plant and -if necessary- *blow up* the backup-grid???
They wouldn't even need to use Un*x hacking-techniques, just take a wormed laptop, plug it into the lan and wait for half the east/westcoast to come to a halt.
The US, IMHO, is flushing it's way of life down the drains by turning itself into a police state. Don't you see? Americans have allways (and still are) been so proud of their constitution. Now, what's left of it? It gets violated daily and no one cares. No one fights because the only way to avoid the death-penalty is to throw the towel in the ring. (Aren't those punishments like the death penalty and very-severe sentencing just meant to scare a suspect from fighting in trial??)
A constitution is -again IMO- meant for 2 things:
1. To ensure that a just government can perform it's tasks
2. To ensure that a unjust government cannot perform -or is severely hampered in performing- it's task.
Now, you are loosing #2!! This means that any unjust government can take all the power that is trusted in her and convert your country in a dictatorship within a term. How is that with your way-of-life?
Siggy
I used to help administer a hospital-informationsystem.
This was a unix-alike system (although the OS was *proprietary*). Users used terminals/terminal-emulators.
It had a appliction for writing letters about the patients. This application was only used by secretaries. The firm that made it also had a plugin for MSword. Using this plugin users didn't need to use the terminal-based application, but they could write their letters in Word, fill in some database form-fields and send it over to the system.
So the users could choose between:
- terminal-based word-processor
and
- MS-Word-with-plugin.
Our experiences were:
- New end/or temporary staff liked to use Word, since everyone knows word so training-time is shorter (and thus you get more productive hours from those people that only stay for a week).
- Experienced staff *liked* and *chose* to use the terminal-based version. Reasons: it was more responsive, less error-prone, no need to use the mouse (switching left hand keys->mouse->keys->mouse->....), more productivity (it took less time to initiate a new letter, to save it).
Secretaries and non-IT-skilled staff have for long been able to use all kinds of IT-systems (with proper training). I was surprised to see that they sometimes actually chose to use a unix-alike when there was also Word. So here you have it: what counts in the long run is functionality. Does the application do what you want from it, does it do it effectively, efficiently and reliably? GIU is a plus, but no more than that.
MrPrince.
Or, it comes in a "package" together with something else.
For example: I have leaded the implementation of a IS that came with a complete set of laboratory equipment. When it came ot choosing the software: There were 2 competitors to choose from. They both deliverd both lab-equipment and software.
Product 1 had good lab equipment and lousy software.
Product 2 had good software, but the lab-equipment was frail and needed a lot of maintenance.
Result: product 1 was chosen. Software bought on the merits of the "whole" product.
I used to be an applicationmanager for a few Hospital-Information-System applications. A few years ago there was a large news-item about a hospital administrering blood of the wrong blood-type to a patient, killing him.
The cause of it was a software-flaw: the bloodbank-software had a duplicate-entry system. Analyst A enters the bloodtype, analyst B enters the bloodtype. If the two matches then we are satisfied.
The checking-system did not check. The analysts entered different values but no alarm-bells were ringing.
This did not happen at the hospital where I worked, but we also used the same software.
I checked the buglists... and there it was... bug # 12345 date: half-a-year-ago. Bug: application does nog check inconsistent entries. Stunning... absolutely stunning.
There is a programmer / accountmanager who has now found out (the hard way) that programming medical applications is a serious business. And that if he scaled the priority of this bug up, a life would have been saved. This company was quite sluggish in it's reactions to bugs and it took quite something to get a bug classified as top-priority. I don't know what the priority of this bug was, but it was too low.
Nice detail is that the hospital was found to be the responsible party, because the bug was known and they did not implement temporary manual/alternative checks into their process.
Siggy
5 years? That must be wrong. It's called MP3: M_aximum P_enalty 3 years!!
Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? Just Ask Them
By PETER WAYNER
HE Sims Online is a clean, well-lighted corner of the Internet where people work to build an elaborately decorated, chat-filled virtual world. But if playing by the rules in this realm isn't entertaining enough, there are after-hours joints where rogues and grifters gather to swap schemes for gaming the game and growing rich.
The chatter at TSOExtreme.com, for example, is a mix of simple tips for guiding the characters known as Sims and elaborate strategies for earning millions of the online currency known as simoleans. Recently much of the talk has centered on using extra software, known as a bot, to automate the most tiresome clicking so players can rack up hundreds of thousands of simoleans in their sleep.
One of the players engaging in this automated counterfeiting, a 29-year-old financial planner from Texas, said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name). "I think the bots actually level the playing field for people who have day jobs," he said. "When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."
Web sites like TSOExtreme.com are a challenge for the rapidly growing world of interactive games. While breaking the rules or using secret "cheat codes" has always been an accepted, even treasured part of single-player games, new online games match competitors, often strangers, remotely, which changes the dynamic. No one likes to lose unfairly, and those who play by the rules often struggle against schemers who believe that all is fair in love and simulated war.
For their part, many of the cheats say that bending the game's rules is part of the fun. It is only a game, and when it becomes boring it is time to turn to the greater game of beating the system, they argue.
Brian Reynolds, a designer of a new online game, Rise of Nations, likes to joke that he was "the guy who put 'Cheat' on the main menu" when he developed games like Civilization II. A player could use the menu at any time to create new assets like warriors or defenses for a city.
In his new game, however, in which players meet and battle for ratings over the Internet, that option is gone. Mr. Reynolds and his team try to ensure that people who buy the game have a pleasant and balanced experience when battling others to dominate a virtual world. They fear that people would stop playing if those who cheated held all the power.
Haden Blackman, the producer at LucasArts responsible for Star Wars Galaxies, an online game now being tested by 5,000 users, said that preventing cheating was one of the biggest challenges of creating a virtual world.
One lesson the game industry learned the hard way is that dedicated cheats will rewrite software to give themselves an advantage. "There are a lot of great ideas we come up with and skip because there's going to be 1 percent who will abuse them," Mr. Blackman said.
Designers of the new Star Wars game initially planned to let players communicate in strange languages that would be translated by other players' computers, he said. But the developers soon realized that cheats would find a way to break into the hidden dictionary, gaining the ability to speak the various languages and negotiate with aliens from other planets - a skill that would normally develop only over time.
Bots like the ones discussed on TSOExtreme.com are just the beginning. Some players of games with a shooter, like Quake or Counter-Strike, have automated aiming tools that target an opponent more rapidly than the quickest of fingers.
Others reprogram their video cards to hide the elaborate textured walls in a game. All that is left is a wire-frame outline, allowing a player to see through walls and track those hiding behind them.
All of these techniques depend on users' having full control of the software running on their home machines. Adept programmers can rewrite the game or insert new instructi
At my work we are experiencing unusual effects of replacing CRT's with LCDs: The LCD-displays seem to magically attract street-tiles and bricks. Especially when there's a windows between the LCD and the original location of the Brick. Also, these fenomenen are mostly appearing at night. And, even more strangely; after the brick has reached the direct vicinity of the LCD, the LCD is repulsed by the presence of the brick, causing it to magically leave the room. The result is that the Brick is at the original location of the LCD-display: inside my office and the LCD is at the original position of the brick: outside.
To prevent these strange fenomenon we have installed make-it-unbreakable foil at our windows, making them able to even resist "AK-47 fire". The result were street-tiles that traveled with even more kenetic energy thereby completely dismanteling the window-post.
The fenomenon has left us startled, but for now we would advise everyone to rethink their display-choise as long as these particular type of monitors are much more often disappearing then CRT's.