But then again, have you ever bought an indie game for $19.99 to $24.99?
Yeah. Indie games usually don't cost $*.99, but a simple $10 or $45, or something like that.
Depends on what you call 'indie' ofcourse. Shareware games tend to go for $10 to $20, whereas games with real publishers, like Galactic Civilizations 2 and Dominions 3, tend to go for the same price as the big-name games. I've got the feeling some people are talking about the first category when they say 'indie', and others are talking about the second.
Drug dealers in South America also benefit the poor peasants. I guess the end do justify the means:)
Funny that you mention that. Did you know the US is destroying the livelihood of Afghani farmers? Problem is, their most promising source of income is growing poppy, so by combining their wars on terrorism and drugs, the US is destroying the economy of the country they're trying to rebuild.
Ofcourse the Taliban want to help those poor farmers (although they weren't too happy about drugs before the US got involved).
Now how did this discussion suddenly turn from Gates' retirement to the US' foreign policy?
You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s.
Actually there are a lot more pirates now than there were in the 1800s. Only they use speedboats and SMGs instead of schooners and cutlasses.
Apples to oranges. Google.org is the philanthropic arm of Google the corperation, and uses the resources of Google the corporation. The Gates Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Bill and Melinda Gates, two people who got rich off of computers, not Microsoft the corporation.
So Bill is better than the Google guys, but Google is better than MS. Is that what you're saying?
On the other hand, Gates wasn't such a big time philantropist right after he made his fortune, which was 15-20 years ago. Now he gives away billions. Who knows, perhaps the other computer moguls will do the same in 5 or 10 years.
My city in particular (Windsor, ON, Canada) has benefitted from the B&MG foundation with new computers in our library for public use.
The charity that the B&MG foundation does is sending PCs to Canada? Wouldn't it be better to send those to less developed regions? I thought Canada was rich enough to take care of itself.
Why not pay for those $100 laptops for Africa, for example?
Thing is, the Slashdot-crowd is becoming increasingly singleminded when it comes to issues such as Copyright Infringment, Micro$oft (never forget the dollar sign, or you'll never blend in!) and the Bush Administration.
Actually, I think the Slashdot-crowd consists mostly of people complaining about the Slashdot-crowd.
And now I'm one of them.
As for Bill, I'll never agree with his business practices, and I suspect that there may be a PR element to his charity work, but there's no denying that he puts a lot of money into charity nowadays, and I'm glad he does. His "with great wealth comes great responsibility" may be the first thing he's ever said that I wholeheartedly agree with.
I won't hate Windows any less because of it, though.
And to those who are just looking for an excuse to spout anti-Republican diatribes, don't bother. We are all aware that Slashdot is a bastion of liberalism who loves nothing more than a good Republican bashing, but nowadays there is really nothing that separates the two parties. They're all the same except for their extremist fringes.
The difference is that in the Republican party, the extremist fringe is in charge.
But other than that, I agree; there's not much difference. US politics seems to be locked down by a ruling elite that's just interested in power, and is controlling both parties. And the way the system works, new parties don't stand a chance of being elected.
as the owner of game company, i would hire a modder that has actually 'created' content or worked on a game engine over a qa tester that 'thinks' they know how to make games any day of the week.
Still, many game developers could really use some good testers, if you look at the state of games being published these days.
Seriously, a good tester is worth his weight in gold.
Here in the great US of A we're not allowed to touch booze until a full 3 years after we're allowed to shoot others in the name of the goverment, vote, and buy porn.
And it's even a full 5 years after you're allowed to drive a car. Over here, on the other hand, you can buy alcohol 2 years before you can drive a car. And most youth start quite a lot earlier than that. (Buying alcohol, that is. Driving cars is easily postponed a bit. Or even a lot, like in my case.)
nstead of fixing our problems and looking for solutions, lets go into space to get away from it all.
some how this seems like a bad idea, or atleast a bad reason.
The real problem with this planet is that other people are always fucking it up. But wiping out those other people would be unethical, so we have to go into space so we can be nice to each other and they can kill each other without upsetting us.
This is a game that will appeal to FPS fans first, and Shadowrun fans second.
Apparently the goal was not to make a Shadowrun game, the goal was to make a shooter, and they (ab)used their Shadowrun IP for it. And although I'm not at all a FPS fan, this combination of guns and magic could turn out to be a very interesting, or at least original, shooter.
From the same site:
I'm actually selling up my Shadowrun books since I'm playing less RPGs nowadays. If anyone is interested please email me. I'll cut you a special deal if you work for FASA (I'll even through in a receipt so you can expense it).
I think the special deal for FASA people is a good idea. They need to read what Shadowrun is actually about.
Actually I'd claim both parties are extremely liberal. With conservatives being those who support the ideals upon which America was founded. I'd have to look up quotes to be certain, but I'd say one of the founding principles upon with the USA was founded was the government not being a nanny state (otherwise why wouldn't they have just stuck with England?), with the "right to privacy" a strong indicator of this.
I thought the ideals the US was originally founded upon were mostly about freedom, and IMO neither of those parties really cares much about freedom anymore. So I agree with the grandparent that neither party is very "liberal" (which, as you all should know, comes from the Latin "liber", which means "free", the non-beer kind).
The US isn't the only country where the meaning of "liberal" has been corrupted. The biggest Dutch party that calls itself "liberal" (their full name translates as "People's party for Freedom and Democracy") is a bunch of scary tight-ass authoritarian conservatives, mostly caring about freedom for rich people and corporations. The smaller progressive liberals aren't a whole lot better. Only the Greens really care about privacy, civil rights and that sort of libertarian ideals.
I was watching my stepson play Thief 2 on Xbox last night and I knew I couldn't play the game. The thief comes across a guard who is directly in front of a burning torch. So, shoot a water arrow (yes a water arrow, there's also a noisemaker and moss arrow- which already strained my credulity) at the torch and put it out. Does the guard even notice that he's now in total darkness? No. Does he try to re-light the torch? Nope. Does he continue walking in the same pattern as if nothing as happened? Yep.
A few months ago I played a really cute game from totalgaming.net: Robin Hood - The Legend of Sherwood. The greatest feature of this game is that guards, stupid as they are (this is Robin Hood, after all), still respond reasonably intelligently to changes in their environment. When they think they see something suspicious, they start to pay better attention, when they see a dead body, they warn their commander, who then organises a search for the culprit, when they discover somebody is not of his post, they try to figure out what happened to him. Make a few mistakes, and the entire castle is on alert (although you can also make use of this by drawing guards away from a certain location).
No-one knows the true pronunciation of this elder god's name,
You're a bit closer than TFA, but Cthulhu is neither the name of a race, nor an elder god (although he is very old and worshipped). According to Cthulhu Mythos, Great Old Ones are a race or group of very powerful, godlike beings distinct from elder gods or outer gods, and Cthulhu is one of them. Lovecraft himself was a bit more fuzzy on the subject, and in most stories Cthulhu is the only one who gets called "the Great Old One". General "Old Ones" are mentioned a couple of times, but I think those live in the hills near Dunwich.
I'd like to encourage everyone to trademark other overused buzzwords and start suing people. Soon, we just might be living in a completely buzzword-free world!
I mean building the XML in the first place. If you've got a 20,000 line document, DOM can get pretty slow.
Ah, yes. It's definitely worth it to avoid files that big. Transporting them from one server to the next is also kindof expensive.
We use Slide for our repository and DASL+Lucene to query it (we clearly like apache a lot). In the past, due to limitations in Slide, DASL or Lucene, we tended to just grab everything that fit our search query and port-process in XSL, but our resident Slide expert pointed out that it would be much faster on all sides if we limited the number of results. So he added some extra functionality to Slide, so we can get exactly the 10 results that we actually need and don't need any additonal processing in XSLs or anything.
It's not about "being sexy", but about succesfully reproducing (and having that offspring succesfully reproduce)
But in order to reproduce, you need to have a mate. Preferably the mate with the best genes, and not the leftovers. And to get him/her, it helps to be attractive to him/her.
Even being strong enough to survive childhood doesn't guarantee first choice in mating, unfortunately.
Are they? I never really mastered Perl and never tried to master JSP and PHP, but if you know XML and functional programming, XSL is pretty trivial. It's a bit wordy because it's XML, but an editor with code completion can help.
2) If you don't want your program to be slow, you have to generate your XML serially. This is harder than dumping data into variables and maps and referencing them from the content renderer.
Not sure what you mean by this. I use Cocoon to aggregate the XML, and then have an XSL turn it into HTML. Use eventcaching in every step of the process, and the end result is lightning fast, most of the time.
Therefore, here is how that plays out. First, I create everything procedurally, one huge page, HTML & PHP & CSS & JavaScript all mixed in together. Then, once I am no longer iterating through revisions frequently, I start to pull out the non-HTML bits.
Is this really the easiest way to work with PHP? It sounds pretty awful. I go exactly the opposite direction: First, I get the exact content I need in XML, then I pass it through an XSL for that specific page type, which imports an XSL with generic code for that specific site, and that imports various files with site-independent XSL code. Together, these generate exactly the html that I need. This keeps everything modular and flexible, with lots of easy code reuse.
All javascript is in.js files, all css in.css files. The
css is always custom, the javascript often has one file with project-independent functions (validating an email address is always the same) and one with functions custom made for this site.
So when I need to make a new site, I first design the CMS templates so the content is in the form specified by the FO. Then I take a bunch of XSLs from another project, change the frame.xsl (which does the html layout), write the page-specific XSLs, add the css thatthe designer wrote, and i'm done. This is a fast, modular way to work, and it's very maintainable. If I need complex functionality that I already wrote for another site, I can easily paste it into the project and it works.
Ofcourse I work for a company that makes big, complex sites with tons of content, which makes this approach a necessity. For someone with fewer, simpler or smaller sites, setting up the basics for this approach may not be worth it.
(You should see the first few sites we did; the code is truly awful, and hard to maintain, as I discovered when I had to migrate them to a new platform.)
And this ain't a joke. My introduction to templates went pretty much like this. In order to deal with a designer who kept removing PHP because of the design program she used I had to learn a new "language" wich didn't help since she still kept deleting it.
The solution is really simple: don't let non-coders work on code. Especially idiots like the one above.
My designer keeps all her stuff neatly in the CSS. If she needs to do something in html, she writes the html and gives it to me, so I make sure my code generates that html.
We work on large websites and have our own heavy duty CMS, so there is no other choice than seperation of content, code and presentation. The code generates XML with all the right content taken from the CMS-controlled repository, a database or whatever we need, and only in the last step is all the xml turned into html by an xsl. If my designer wants different html, I change the xsl that generates it so she gets what she wants. The css is all hers.
The long and short is this. Evolution occurs through one of two means. It is either a means of survival where the parent species is forced to adapt or die. Or evolution occurs through random mutations being passed on.
I'm afraid evolution is a lot more complex than that, but what you mention aren't two different means; they're part of the same process. Evolution does indeed occur through random mutations being passed on, and that is how the parent species adapts. Mutation is blind and random: usually it changes a gene that wasn't doing anything meaningful anyway, sometimes it breaks something, occasionally it changes something without breaking it, and very rarely it improves something or adds something new.
What happens then depends on natural selection: creatures with mutations that help them reproduce, spread their genes among a larger part of the next generation than creatures with harmful mutations. Basically that's it, but reality is a whole lot more complicated than that. If a species gets seperated into two groups, just the accumulation of different sets of new mutations without exchanging them between the groups, will, even without any evolutionary pressure, eventually cause them to be unable to interbreed, and therefore become two species.
Ofcourse if they're living in different environments, natural selection will be selecting for different traits, and they'll diverge faster. If a species is well adapted to its environment, most mutations will be bad and it won't evolve much. But if it's badly adapted, more subtle mutations will be somewhat beneficial, and evolution can go pretty fast.
And then there's the fact that a species is part of its own environment. The most important factor here is sexual selection: female peacocks like men with big, colourful tails, so male peacocks end up with ridiculous tails. Human men like women with big breasts, and there you go.
If you look at the traits that are unique to humans, you're hard pressed to make the arguement of how and when these traits developed via evolution, and didn't develop in other primates.
Why should they develop in other primates? They're not us, and they're obviously not selecting for those traits. The big question is, why are we? It doesn't look like it nowadays, but there may have been a time during our evolution where being smart was sexy. In fact, rock stars and poets are still sexy, so there's your sexual selection for culture. We also apparently had the right raw materials to work with (ants probably don't), and although chimps started out with those same resources, perhaps life on the savannah offered challenges that life in the forest didn't.
Exactly how unlikely our evolution is, we really don't know. And we probably won't know until we find extraterrestrial life. It's also definitely possible that God meddled a bit (or a lot), steering the subtle random processes of our evolution, and personally I believe that "God's image" in which we are created refers to Reason, to the fact that we (and God, presumably) can reason in ways other animals can't, but there's no scientific necessity for all of this. No evidence whatsoever. As far as we know, evolution is an excellent explanation of how we came to be.
The only things that are decent are things that add to the game, such as actual restaraunts in Crazy Taxi, or EA's use of actual songs for their soundtracks (in Burnout for example).
A couple of years ago I had an idea for a bicylce simulator where you'd be a bike courier racing through the streets of Amsterdam. Had to make money in order to fix your bike and all that. Which meant bicycle shops. So why not use real bicycle shops? And why not ask them for money for such a promiment role in the game? And while I'm at it, since it's a real city, why not shop other real shops too? And sights; if the graphics are done right, it might even draw a few tourists to the city.
It was a nice idea, with lots of opportunity for advertising that really belonged in the game, but it's probably never going to happen. Not by me, anyway.
[quote]The real question is: what do we gain from moving to Java?[/quote]
About a gig of memory use.
Not if you write your code well. IMO C++ is obsolete for enterprise applications. Java is just as fast, more flexible, and there are tons of good frameworks for all sorts of things.
The question is, can you afford to switch to Java? Can you afford the redesign, rewriting that much code, retraining the programmers? Then again, can you afford not to? If you've got a huge, complex framework that's hard to work with, and there's an easier Java framework that fits your current needs perfectly, a switch could be a really good idea.
It depends entirely on the situation. I wouldn't trust managers and offshore consultants to make this decision, but if the programmers say the current situation is unworkable, and a switch to Java will help solve your problems, then it may be a good idea. Have your best architect delve into the possibilities of Java frameworks, and listen to him. Or hire a new architect with more Java experience, if your architect doesn't know enough about Java.
There's no simple yes or no answer to the question. I really love Java, and I think C++ for enterprise applications is obsolete, but there are still many situations where a switch is going to be a really bad idea.
On heavily content managment based sites, it's virtally impossible to guarantee the pages will pass the validator tests if you allow the owner/users to add content with e WYSIWYG editor in the backend. They'll always find some way of screwing it up, no matter how many safeguards are in place.
The trick is to use a good CMS with a good editor. If the backend XML has to adhere to correct schemas, and the frontend translates it correctly to HTML, nothing can go wrong.
Ofcourse fulfilling these requirements isn't trivial. But it's possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on what you call 'indie' ofcourse. Shareware games tend to go for $10 to $20, whereas games with real publishers, like Galactic Civilizations 2 and Dominions 3, tend to go for the same price as the big-name games. I've got the feeling some people are talking about the first category when they say 'indie', and others are talking about the second.
Ofcourse the Taliban want to help those poor farmers (although they weren't too happy about drugs before the US got involved).
Now how did this discussion suddenly turn from Gates' retirement to the US' foreign policy?
On the other hand, Gates wasn't such a big time philantropist right after he made his fortune, which was 15-20 years ago. Now he gives away billions. Who knows, perhaps the other computer moguls will do the same in 5 or 10 years.
Why not pay for those $100 laptops for Africa, for example?
And now I'm one of them.
As for Bill, I'll never agree with his business practices, and I suspect that there may be a PR element to his charity work, but there's no denying that he puts a lot of money into charity nowadays, and I'm glad he does. His "with great wealth comes great responsibility" may be the first thing he's ever said that I wholeheartedly agree with.
I won't hate Windows any less because of it, though.
But other than that, I agree; there's not much difference. US politics seems to be locked down by a ruling elite that's just interested in power, and is controlling both parties. And the way the system works, new parties don't stand a chance of being elected.
Seriously, a good tester is worth his weight in gold.
No wait, I'm not adicted. From the article:
But I still have my goed friends at slashdot, so I'm okay.From the same site:
I think the special deal for FASA people is a good idea. They need to read what Shadowrun is actually about.The US isn't the only country where the meaning of "liberal" has been corrupted. The biggest Dutch party that calls itself "liberal" (their full name translates as "People's party for Freedom and Democracy") is a bunch of scary tight-ass authoritarian conservatives, mostly caring about freedom for rich people and corporations. The smaller progressive liberals aren't a whole lot better. Only the Greens really care about privacy, civil rights and that sort of libertarian ideals.
I'd like to encourage everyone to trademark other overused buzzwords and start suing people. Soon, we just might be living in a completely buzzword-free world!
We use Slide for our repository and DASL+Lucene to query it (we clearly like apache a lot). In the past, due to limitations in Slide, DASL or Lucene, we tended to just grab everything that fit our search query and port-process in XSL, but our resident Slide expert pointed out that it would be much faster on all sides if we limited the number of results. So he added some extra functionality to Slide, so we can get exactly the 10 results that we actually need and don't need any additonal processing in XSLs or anything.
Complex searches are much faster now.
Even being strong enough to survive childhood doesn't guarantee first choice in mating, unfortunately.
All javascript is in .js files, all css in .css files. The
css is always custom, the javascript often has one file with project-independent functions (validating an email address is always the same) and one with functions custom made for this site.
So when I need to make a new site, I first design the CMS templates so the content is in the form specified by the FO. Then I take a bunch of XSLs from another project, change the frame.xsl (which does the html layout), write the page-specific XSLs, add the css thatthe designer wrote, and i'm done. This is a fast, modular way to work, and it's very maintainable. If I need complex functionality that I already wrote for another site, I can easily paste it into the project and it works.
Ofcourse I work for a company that makes big, complex sites with tons of content, which makes this approach a necessity. For someone with fewer, simpler or smaller sites, setting up the basics for this approach may not be worth it.
(You should see the first few sites we did; the code is truly awful, and hard to maintain, as I discovered when I had to migrate them to a new platform.)
My designer keeps all her stuff neatly in the CSS. If she needs to do something in html, she writes the html and gives it to me, so I make sure my code generates that html.
We work on large websites and have our own heavy duty CMS, so there is no other choice than seperation of content, code and presentation. The code generates XML with all the right content taken from the CMS-controlled repository, a database or whatever we need, and only in the last step is all the xml turned into html by an xsl. If my designer wants different html, I change the xsl that generates it so she gets what she wants. The css is all hers.
What happens then depends on natural selection: creatures with mutations that help them reproduce, spread their genes among a larger part of the next generation than creatures with harmful mutations. Basically that's it, but reality is a whole lot more complicated than that. If a species gets seperated into two groups, just the accumulation of different sets of new mutations without exchanging them between the groups, will, even without any evolutionary pressure, eventually cause them to be unable to interbreed, and therefore become two species.
Ofcourse if they're living in different environments, natural selection will be selecting for different traits, and they'll diverge faster. If a species is well adapted to its environment, most mutations will be bad and it won't evolve much. But if it's badly adapted, more subtle mutations will be somewhat beneficial, and evolution can go pretty fast.
And then there's the fact that a species is part of its own environment. The most important factor here is sexual selection: female peacocks like men with big, colourful tails, so male peacocks end up with ridiculous tails. Human men like women with big breasts, and there you go.
Why should they develop in other primates? They're not us, and they're obviously not selecting for those traits. The big question is, why are we? It doesn't look like it nowadays, but there may have been a time during our evolution where being smart was sexy. In fact, rock stars and poets are still sexy, so there's your sexual selection for culture. We also apparently had the right raw materials to work with (ants probably don't), and although chimps started out with those same resources, perhaps life on the savannah offered challenges that life in the forest didn't.Exactly how unlikely our evolution is, we really don't know. And we probably won't know until we find extraterrestrial life. It's also definitely possible that God meddled a bit (or a lot), steering the subtle random processes of our evolution, and personally I believe that "God's image" in which we are created refers to Reason, to the fact that we (and God, presumably) can reason in ways other animals can't, but there's no scientific necessity for all of this. No evidence whatsoever. As far as we know, evolution is an excellent explanation of how we came to be.
It was a nice idea, with lots of opportunity for advertising that really belonged in the game, but it's probably never going to happen. Not by me, anyway.
The question is, can you afford to switch to Java? Can you afford the redesign, rewriting that much code, retraining the programmers? Then again, can you afford not to? If you've got a huge, complex framework that's hard to work with, and there's an easier Java framework that fits your current needs perfectly, a switch could be a really good idea.
It depends entirely on the situation. I wouldn't trust managers and offshore consultants to make this decision, but if the programmers say the current situation is unworkable, and a switch to Java will help solve your problems, then it may be a good idea. Have your best architect delve into the possibilities of Java frameworks, and listen to him. Or hire a new architect with more Java experience, if your architect doesn't know enough about Java.
There's no simple yes or no answer to the question. I really love Java, and I think C++ for enterprise applications is obsolete, but there are still many situations where a switch is going to be a really bad idea.
Ofcourse fulfilling these requirements isn't trivial. But it's possible.