I DID like that. because it killed off a character who's actor made comments to the effect that he didn't really care about the role. He committed the cardinal sin of sci-fi: He admitted he had no idea what the buttons did. He was proud of it.
I don't see what's so sinful about that. He didn't say it during an episode. Does it really matter what all the buttons and displays in Star Trek do? Or are you like that guy from Galaxy Quest knows all the technology inside-out and acts as an advisor by phone to the crew?
More importantly though, it showed that the deep magick that typically protects the protagonists had failed. It made the rest of the film much more exciting.
I agree there. I was certain nobody was going to survive. This wouldn't have happened if Josh hadn't killed a central crew member already (because let's face it, Book was more an outsider than anyone else on the crew).
Actually, before I'd seen the film, I half expected Zoe to be killed. Mainly because her death would add the most drama: she's Mal's warbuddy, best friend and first mate, but also married to Wash. And besides, Wash seems to be the most human element in the crew, and it's a shame to kill that. So actually Josh killed the wrong character. But other than that, it worked.
And so the problem with killing Wash to me was that it DIDN'T help immerse me in the world. We've already seen one village decimated by reavers, the recording of another woman raped to death by reavers, AN ENTIRE F***ING PLANET where everyone's dead, every one the crew has ever met has died, one of the crew die, a lot of extra people die, and we're about to see Mr. Universe die. Oh and by the way the captain has threatened to start shooting his own crew. So for me, anyway, the whole "dangerous world" point had already been made.
"Dangerous world" was not the point. "Everybody is going to die" was. Because of Wash's death, I realised that even crewmembers could die, and when the fight turned really bad, I was absolutely certain that nobody was going to survive. (Well, maybe Jayne.) Had Wash not died, that scene probably wouldn't have been nearly as intense.
Ofcourse I will miss Wash (and everybody else, now the plug has been pulled, but Wash was one of my favourite characters), and I'm not sure if the film really needed that much more additional intensity (because it was pretty intense already), but the death certainly had a very real effect on the way the movie was experienced. Much more so than the death of the village, the planet, and even the death of a relatively minor crew member like Book.
By the way, I really object to the phrase in the article: "despite Universal's best marketing efforts". They did a lot to cuddle fans and exploit word-of-mouth, but I saw very little real marketing. It's that I'd remembered the date when the film would appear in cinema, otherwise I wouldn't even have noticed. And I think a lot of people who would have liked this film didn't notice. Why did The Island (which everybody admitted was crap) get so much attention, and Serenity (which everybody was raving about) get so little?
You're basically right, but saying that fascism is a hyper-repressive form of capitalism is a much better summary than alot of people know.
Not really. Fascism is pretty orthogonal to capitalism. Stalinism was also a form a fascism (and some people consider it a better example of it than nazism). Fascism is first and foremost about a Great Leader (Bush isn't exactly a great leader, although some like to see him that way). Then the inner circle that's still above the law (that would probably be his gang of advisors and supporters who helped him into office and have been rewarded by him with various important functions that they're really not all that suitable for, or with big benefits for their companies). After that, the government, and its need to control society (homeland security anyone?). Then there is the nation itself, and its obvious importance above all other nations in the world, its destiny as leader of blah. You get the idea.
So has Bush turned the US into a fascist state? Not really -- not completely, at least -- but it certainly has some tendencies in that direction. Capitalism has nothing to do with it, however. It's just that much of his inner circle comes from a Big Oil background or other big corporations.
It can actually save quite a lot of bandwidth, since you only have to send the page and every bit of data once, whereas the traditional approach would require the server to send a complete page every time the user does something.
AOL and MS's Search are places you're directed to by your OS or ISP. Google is independent, so going there requires a bit more independent thought.
Actually, Yahoo! is also independent, so apparently there's a hole in my theory. Can anyone explain why Yahoo! users are less intelligent than Google users? Has it something to do with that exclamation mark?
According to this list, I would get Splintercell: Chaos Theory, despite never having played Splintercell. I have the game because it was amazingly cheap somewhere and I figured I might want to give it a try one day, but haven't gotten around to it.
If I hadn't bought it, according to this article, I'd have no real sense of taste and any game would be fine. Nothing could be farther from the truth: I have a very strong sense of taste, and most of the games on this list just aren't my taste. Games that suit my taste are rare, although Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance would be very well accepted. No idea how good it is, but BG1 was okay.
But if you really wanted to make me happy, you should give me a serious, hard turn-based strategy game, a category that's completely ignored by this article. How in heaven's name is it possible that it doesn't even mention Civilization 4?
Fortunately it doesn't matter for me; we don't give gifts at Christmas but at Saint Nicholas (December 5), and my sister knew my taste in music well enough to get me an excellent CD from Tristania.
It certainly gives me the impression that filing for patent is especially popular with nutcases. If it's not a overabundance of trivial or incomprehensible, it's complete science fiction like that magical universal translator somebody mentioned. Or double clicks and virtual shopping carts.
Actually, being able to look up the lyrics to a song has often resulted in me buying an album.
The record companies aren't interested in selling more albums. Well, they are, but not as much as in power and control. They want to make sure everybody knows that they control everything music related, and once that's been accomplished, they'll start worrying again about how they wanted to make money.
Personally I think it's a crappy business model, but it's the only one that explains their recent behaviour.
It's hard to deny some of the points the article makes, yet I like Ajax a whole lot more than I ever liked frames. I hated frames. Still do. There's not much you can do with frames that you can't also do without. The onlly frame-based site I really like is Sun's Java Docs, and even that could have been done without frames.
Ajax, however, lets you do things you really cannot do without it. Can you imagine Google Maps without Ajax? Or all those spiffy desktop-in-your-browser sites? The company I work for has written and sells a (Open Source, btw) CMS that runs mostly in Ajax, because we want it to work in a normal browser instead of requiring customers to install a special piece of software, and a heavy overdose of javascript is the only way to get all the stuff done that the CMS has to do.
In fact, it was Ajax that actually convinced me that javascript wasn't really all that bad. I used to hate it, because too many websites used javascript mostly for frivolous junk, messing with my browser, and replacing perfectly good html functionality with something that doesn't work in half of the browsers. So I'd like to propose two ground rules for the use of Ajax. (And they go for regular javascript too.)
Do not use frivolously.
Only use it when nothing else will do.
Absolutely never ever use it because it's "hip" and "cool".
It's plenty. When I tried the editor yesterday, I thought it was 4 areas, 2x2. No idea why I thought that, but, while tiny, it's still big enough for a 4-character story without combat.
Now I have to think about what to do with the other 12 areas.
260 is still pretty big in my book. I currently work at a company of 15 people (no games, though), and I know of successful games written by teams of only two developers. But those are probably not in the million-dollar business that Bioware is probably in.
I notice that you're not offering any positions for writers
Not? I thought the whole point is that they are.
since I was put off computerised RPGs by the poor righting long ago, I probably won't be buying NWN just to enter a contest.
NWN is a very nice example of bad CRPG writing. Expansions are slightly better, but still nothing special. It's no Baldur's Gate, and certainly no Planescape: Torment (the pinacle of good CRPG writing).
But I happen to have NWN, so I might as well enter.
Someone from Bioware (anonymously, so I'm quoting a lot) posted: BioWare is one of Canda's Top 100 employers for the 3rd straight year now, and no - we're definitely not desperate.
So it's a really big corporation? I'd love to work in the gaming industry, but I prefer smaller companies.
The problem is that it is quite challenging to find writers that are capable of writing for a computer game. (...) BioWare is one of a handful of companies in the gaming industry that employs dedicated writers for their games. Most companies have a single programmer, designer or producer create the stories for their games - Our projects are story driven games that require between 3+ full time writers per game.
I think it's great that Bioware takes writing so seriously, because it's downright terrible in most games. Planescape: Torment (wasn't that by bioware) is my all-time favourite CRPG (mostly because of the excellent writing), and IMO the only CRPG that deserves the name RPG. I haven't seen many other games with that level of writing, though. So what happened to those writers?
In any case, unlike some of the more skeptical slashdotters, I think it's great when a company looks to its fans for new employees. They're the people who really care about the quality, and are bound to have a lot of good ideas. You just need a way to weed the real loonies out, because there's a lot of those too.
I might give this contest a try, but I'd have to figure out that NWN editor first, and I'm not sure if I really want to move to Canada. Any chance of being able to telecommute from Europe?
Then a renewal contract should be given. Like good old Trumpy does to his apprentices. Get the psycho/incomptent out quick so they can't do much damage,
But if I were to relocate to a different hemisphere, I'd really appreciate if I didn't have to move back after a month. I'd rather just get rejected at the interview.
50 lines? Long ago I decided that a good function should be at most 10 lines, preferably containing 1 loop, 2 if-statements and/or 3 calls to functions that handle the details of what needs to be done. It rarely works out that way, though.
But yes, if a function is long enough that it has different parts requiring comments, give each part its own function. If code it unreadable enough to warrant a comment, make the code more readable. I think the only things that really should be explained in comments are pre and post conditions and the reason why it's being done this way and not in some other way.
And ofcourse thousands of//TODO:s pointing out where you forgot to program that vital check that's now causing another part of the code to crash.
When there aren't comments, it is hard to figure out what parts of what do which.
What parts do what should be clear from the names of function calls and variables, but whenever a function becomes longer than something really short, yes, it needs comments describing what happens where. If a function does something complicated, it's worth starting with a comment describing pre- and post conditions.
That said, before you add a comment, first check if you can make the various identifiers any clearer. And then still add the comment, unless it's suddenly become really stupid.
Phrases like: "failure by the EU Parliament this summer to pass patent legislation" (which I would formulate as "success by the EP to block patent legislation) show just how biased this article is.
And then she jumps straight from open standards (who could possibly object to that?) to piracy and the threat to copyrights and that sort of crap. Even open source software is still copyrighted (which is why Sony's use of it is illegal).
Slashdot Mirror
If you ask me, most CRPGs aren't real RPGs either.
Baldur's Gate and especially Planescape:Torment got me doubting, but realy, nothing beats the real thing. (Ew! meeting real people!)
I DID like that. because it killed off a character who's actor made comments to the effect that he didn't really care about the role. He committed the cardinal sin of sci-fi: He admitted he had no idea what the buttons did. He was proud of it.
I don't see what's so sinful about that. He didn't say it during an episode. Does it really matter what all the buttons and displays in Star Trek do? Or are you like that guy from Galaxy Quest knows all the technology inside-out and acts as an advisor by phone to the crew?
More importantly though, it showed that the deep magick that typically protects the protagonists had failed. It made the rest of the film much more exciting.
I agree there. I was certain nobody was going to survive. This wouldn't have happened if Josh hadn't killed a central crew member already (because let's face it, Book was more an outsider than anyone else on the crew).
Actually, before I'd seen the film, I half expected Zoe to be killed. Mainly because her death would add the most drama: she's Mal's warbuddy, best friend and first mate, but also married to Wash. And besides, Wash seems to be the most human element in the crew, and it's a shame to kill that. So actually Josh killed the wrong character. But other than that, it worked.
And so the problem with killing Wash to me was that it DIDN'T help immerse me in the world. We've already seen one village decimated by reavers, the recording of another woman raped to death by reavers, AN ENTIRE F***ING PLANET where everyone's dead, every one the crew has ever met has died, one of the crew die, a lot of extra people die, and we're about to see Mr. Universe die. Oh and by the way the captain has threatened to start shooting his own crew. So for me, anyway, the whole "dangerous world" point had already been made.
"Dangerous world" was not the point. "Everybody is going to die" was. Because of Wash's death, I realised that even crewmembers could die, and when the fight turned really bad, I was absolutely certain that nobody was going to survive. (Well, maybe Jayne.) Had Wash not died, that scene probably wouldn't have been nearly as intense.
Ofcourse I will miss Wash (and everybody else, now the plug has been pulled, but Wash was one of my favourite characters), and I'm not sure if the film really needed that much more additional intensity (because it was pretty intense already), but the death certainly had a very real effect on the way the movie was experienced. Much more so than the death of the village, the planet, and even the death of a relatively minor crew member like Book.
By the way, I really object to the phrase in the article: "despite Universal's best marketing efforts". They did a lot to cuddle fans and exploit word-of-mouth, but I saw very little real marketing. It's that I'd remembered the date when the film would appear in cinema, otherwise I wouldn't even have noticed. And I think a lot of people who would have liked this film didn't notice. Why did The Island (which everybody admitted was crap) get so much attention, and Serenity (which everybody was raving about) get so little?
You're basically right, but saying that fascism is a hyper-repressive form of capitalism is a much better summary than alot of people know.
Not really. Fascism is pretty orthogonal to capitalism. Stalinism was also a form a fascism (and some people consider it a better example of it than nazism). Fascism is first and foremost about a Great Leader (Bush isn't exactly a great leader, although some like to see him that way). Then the inner circle that's still above the law (that would probably be his gang of advisors and supporters who helped him into office and have been rewarded by him with various important functions that they're really not all that suitable for, or with big benefits for their companies). After that, the government, and its need to control society (homeland security anyone?). Then there is the nation itself, and its obvious importance above all other nations in the world, its destiny as leader of blah. You get the idea.
So has Bush turned the US into a fascist state? Not really -- not completely, at least -- but it certainly has some tendencies in that direction. Capitalism has nothing to do with it, however. It's just that much of his inner circle comes from a Big Oil background or other big corporations.
I planned to look into RoR (I still haven't), but a comparison with hibernate+struts seriously dampens my enthousiasm.
In my experience, Cocoon is good enough for the vast majority of web aplications.
We are virtually identical to mice in every detail but stature.
We also have some extra bits in our brain that seem to make a lot of difference.
In fact, those differences in our brains are probably the reason why they need to put human brain cells in mice in order to study Parkinson.
Ok, one day Ajax is crap, next day its gold.. which is it?
It can be either, depending on how it's used. And why, especially. There are good, valid reasons to use Ajax, and there are very, very bad reasons.
It can actually save quite a lot of bandwidth, since you only have to send the page and every bit of data once, whereas the traditional approach would require the server to send a complete page every time the user does something.
AOL and MS's Search are places you're directed to by your OS or ISP. Google is independent, so going there requires a bit more independent thought.
Actually, Yahoo! is also independent, so apparently there's a hole in my theory. Can anyone explain why Yahoo! users are less intelligent than Google users? Has it something to do with that exclamation mark?
According to this list, I would get Splintercell: Chaos Theory, despite never having played Splintercell. I have the game because it was amazingly cheap somewhere and I figured I might want to give it a try one day, but haven't gotten around to it.
If I hadn't bought it, according to this article, I'd have no real sense of taste and any game would be fine. Nothing could be farther from the truth: I have a very strong sense of taste, and most of the games on this list just aren't my taste. Games that suit my taste are rare, although Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance would be very well accepted. No idea how good it is, but BG1 was okay.
But if you really wanted to make me happy, you should give me a serious, hard turn-based strategy game, a category that's completely ignored by this article. How in heaven's name is it possible that it doesn't even mention Civilization 4?
Fortunately it doesn't matter for me; we don't give gifts at Christmas but at Saint Nicholas (December 5), and my sister knew my taste in music well enough to get me an excellent CD from Tristania.
It certainly gives me the impression that filing for patent is especially popular with nutcases. If it's not a overabundance of trivial or incomprehensible, it's complete science fiction like that magical universal translator somebody mentioned. Or double clicks and virtual shopping carts.
Actually, being able to look up the lyrics to a song has often resulted in me buying an album.
The record companies aren't interested in selling more albums. Well, they are, but not as much as in power and control. They want to make sure everybody knows that they control everything music related, and once that's been accomplished, they'll start worrying again about how they wanted to make money.
Personally I think it's a crappy business model, but it's the only one that explains their recent behaviour.
It's hard to deny some of the points the article makes, yet I like Ajax a whole lot more than I ever liked frames. I hated frames. Still do. There's not much you can do with frames that you can't also do without. The onlly frame-based site I really like is Sun's Java Docs, and even that could have been done without frames.
Ajax, however, lets you do things you really cannot do without it. Can you imagine Google Maps without Ajax? Or all those spiffy desktop-in-your-browser sites? The company I work for has written and sells a (Open Source, btw) CMS that runs mostly in Ajax, because we want it to work in a normal browser instead of requiring customers to install a special piece of software, and a heavy overdose of javascript is the only way to get all the stuff done that the CMS has to do.
In fact, it was Ajax that actually convinced me that javascript wasn't really all that bad. I used to hate it, because too many websites used javascript mostly for frivolous junk, messing with my browser, and replacing perfectly good html functionality with something that doesn't work in half of the browsers. So I'd like to propose two ground rules for the use of Ajax. (And they go for regular javascript too.)
4x4 area. That's tiny.
It's plenty. When I tried the editor yesterday, I thought it was 4 areas, 2x2. No idea why I thought that, but, while tiny, it's still big enough for a 4-character story without combat.
Now I have to think about what to do with the other 12 areas.
260 is still pretty big in my book. I currently work at a company of 15 people (no games, though), and I know of successful games written by teams of only two developers. But those are probably not in the million-dollar business that Bioware is probably in.
I notice that you're not offering any positions for writers
Not? I thought the whole point is that they are.
since I was put off computerised RPGs by the poor righting long ago, I probably won't be buying NWN just to enter a contest.
NWN is a very nice example of bad CRPG writing. Expansions are slightly better, but still nothing special. It's no Baldur's Gate, and certainly no Planescape: Torment (the pinacle of good CRPG writing).
But I happen to have NWN, so I might as well enter.
What happens in the method discussed, the two parties, i.e. employer and applicant do not have the same status.
There is no equality as in 'I got something, you are interested, lets discuss'.
The problem here is that they don't know you have something they're interested in. They want to see your work first.
Any idiot can say he can do something. I like companies that only hire people who can actually do it.
Someone from Bioware (anonymously, so I'm quoting a lot) posted: BioWare is one of Canda's Top 100 employers for the 3rd straight year now, and no - we're definitely not desperate.
So it's a really big corporation? I'd love to work in the gaming industry, but I prefer smaller companies.
The problem is that it is quite challenging to find writers that are capable of writing for a computer game. (...) BioWare is one of a handful of companies in the gaming industry that employs dedicated writers for their games. Most companies have a single programmer, designer or producer create the stories for their games - Our projects are story driven games that require between 3+ full time writers per game.
I think it's great that Bioware takes writing so seriously, because it's downright terrible in most games. Planescape: Torment (wasn't that by bioware) is my all-time favourite CRPG (mostly because of the excellent writing), and IMO the only CRPG that deserves the name RPG. I haven't seen many other games with that level of writing, though. So what happened to those writers?
In any case, unlike some of the more skeptical slashdotters, I think it's great when a company looks to its fans for new employees. They're the people who really care about the quality, and are bound to have a lot of good ideas. You just need a way to weed the real loonies out, because there's a lot of those too.
I might give this contest a try, but I'd have to figure out that NWN editor first, and I'm not sure if I really want to move to Canada. Any chance of being able to telecommute from Europe?
Then a renewal contract should be given. Like good old Trumpy does to his apprentices. Get the psycho/incomptent out quick so they can't do much damage,
But if I were to relocate to a different hemisphere, I'd really appreciate if I didn't have to move back after a month. I'd rather just get rejected at the interview.
50 lines? Long ago I decided that a good function should be at most 10 lines, preferably containing 1 loop, 2 if-statements and/or 3 calls to functions that handle the details of what needs to be done. It rarely works out that way, though.
//TODO:s pointing out where you forgot to program that vital check that's now causing another part of the code to crash.
But yes, if a function is long enough that it has different parts requiring comments, give each part its own function. If code it unreadable enough to warrant a comment, make the code more readable. I think the only things that really should be explained in comments are pre and post conditions and the reason why it's being done this way and not in some other way.
And ofcourse thousands of
When there aren't comments, it is hard to figure out what parts of what do which.
What parts do what should be clear from the names of function calls and variables, but whenever a function becomes longer than something really short, yes, it needs comments describing what happens where. If a function does something complicated, it's worth starting with a comment describing pre- and post conditions.
That said, before you add a comment, first check if you can make the various identifiers any clearer. And then still add the comment, unless it's suddenly become really stupid.
oh, sure it's not piracy if it is sharing with friends. I don't believe that any of the P2P people you share with are your friends though,
Actually, the people I share with are my friends. But I'm not using p2p.
Piracy is stealing if you sell illegal copies for money that would otherwise have gone to the record companies and artists.
But I wouldn't call sharing music with friends "piracy".
Phrases like: "failure by the EU Parliament this summer to pass patent legislation" (which I would formulate as "success by the EP to block patent legislation) show just how biased this article is.
And then she jumps straight from open standards (who could possibly object to that?) to piracy and the threat to copyrights and that sort of crap. Even open source software is still copyrighted (which is why Sony's use of it is illegal).
A head as disproportionately large as you suggest would suggest that these apes were very bright - so why do we rule the world?
Since when is intelligence necessary to rule the world? Have you ever seen the current US government?
Aggression is clearly all that really matters.