"There are too many interacting elements, too much information, for the human mind to perceive and consider simultaneously. Thus nobody can hope to think about all of game design at once"
This is wrong. Nobody can analytically examine all of the game design at once. All the rest is possible. Not as business, science, engineering. But as art, pretty pure at that. And like any art, game design has some prerequisites that are hard to put in words, impossible to purchase, difficult to understand. Things like talent and inspiration, letting the ideas "click into place", a rough sketch taking shape as it grows, gaps getting filled by good ideas that come at the right time. Ability to turn your thoughts into words, images, code, action. System way too complex to be understood or analysed by any scientific method just works fine connected by genius of a talented artist. You can't engineer a good poem, a good movie, a good song. The idea of "good" is too complex and too abstract to be understood by science and all attempts to approximate it by ballancing slightly less abstract ideas like "style and content" is bound to fail. With some luck you'll be able to engineer a product that sells well, but it will NOT be a GOOD product, because it will be just it, a product. Maybe with certain "wow" factor. But it won't be a piece of art, something the author put a part of his soul into. Something to make you laugh or cry. There's no chance for good games without talent of the creator. And no amount of methodical analysis of the market can replace that.
One thing you must remember about, when considering MySQL. It's a relational database, all right, but it doesn't really support SQL. It supports most of SQL syntax, so SQL gurus will find it easy to learn. Most of basic SQL stuff works. But more advanced constructs like nested queries are either unsupported or terribly unoptimal, and some SQL features are there just for compatiblity sake but shouldn't be used at all. Instead you should learn and use a bunch of MySQLisms that aren't found anywhere else and do the same thing, much better (faster, safer, bug-free). So if you have a database app and ponder what database to integrate it with, choosing MySQL means more than plain tweaks. It may mean deep hacks. MySQL is devilishly fast when it comes to simple queries. Few databases can beat it in this domain. But it comes with a cost, shortcuts taken prolonging/breaking many other tasks. So choosing MySQL is a dangerous choice - it's a lock-in.
The article tries to draw a clear line between substance (mechanics/rules) and style (look/feel/story) of a game - but the story itself has very little of either. In terms of style it sounds a bit like a lecture for a school of game developers. Readable but boring. The examples are dull or oversimplified. FPS gamers concentrating on Substance, The Sims concentrating on Style? I wouldn't be so sure players of Half-Life 2 are all about substance... In terms of substance... actually I'm not really sure what the article tries to achieve at all, because it first defines a sharp border between the two and then methodically expresses that the border isn't really important at all, because both are just as important, and by emphacising one or the other you change the style of the game, not whether it's good or if it sells well. I don't think I've learned a thing from the article, because all the info it presents seems pretty much as completely useless analysis. Like analysing structure of a sentence in a poem won't help you writing better poetry, analising whether your game has enough substance or better style won't make better games. And the article doesn't write neither how to improve the style nor how to create better substance...
There's very few web features that aren't available as a way of delivering user content. WWW - everyone can have a webpage. FTP, all of the P2P - everyone can host files they have made themselves. Forums, BBS, Message Boards, Mailing Lists - based on user content. IRC, chats - nothing more pathetic than a dead chat without users. Banner ads - all the "banner exchange" style stuff brings it into users' hands. Blogs - user-content journalism. eBay - user-content e-commerce. Development sites like SourceForge - user-content software development;) del.icio.us - hell if I know what it is, but it's all user-content.
Think of mostly any service or feature of the online world and you'll find user-content counterpart easily. I'd be hard-pressed to find domains without user-content. Ones I could think of... reserved for corporate customers - say, "Microsoft Channel Bar", mostly dead by now, or Windows Update... no, nope. The user-content counterpart for this is called malware.
Well, on my 486DX66 with 16MB of RAM Screen was running like a snail (as opposed to the "poor man's tools" above). Somehow I doubt your Commodore 128 running Lunix can handle real Gnu Screen.
jobs: list jobs ctrl-z: detach job bg: bring the job into backgroung fg: bring the job into foreground nohup: job won't be killed when you quit &: start in background.
Been using these for some 5 years before I actually forced myself to run Screen. Actually, these are much lighter on the CPU and memory, so if you want to launch a download overnight, do wget -b and not screen -> wget
well, what I meant was "any modern day big software vendor." They are all proprietary and they have heads too high up their asses about remaining such to ever agree for producing open-source. Thing is, if you write a program, then sell it, source and all, you get money for what you did, hard-earned and honest. But if you write a program, then license it out, money keep coming and you don't do any real work anymore to deserve them - well, that's a parasitic hole in the network of mutual dependencies of the society. It's the easiest profit though. So no wonder companies start kicking and screaming "But now we won't be able to keep sitting on our asses and count the money coming, we will have to keep working, competing, improving, for real!" Luckily it seems these that don't evolve are on the best way to extinction.
Yes. And they did. The governments of several South American governments have realized this already, that software used for all the government purposes should follow these guidelines: - Be transparent to the government. The government MUST have a way to verify if no malicious code, country-hostile elements, backdoors or other such insecurities exist. Without source - impossible. - Be transparent to the citizens; any citizen of the country should be able to analyse and examine how the government handles the data, verify that no illegal activity is being performed using the software. Required: Access to sources, access to specifications. - Countrywide Integration: Any citizen should be able to integrate systems used in government with systems they use privately, (e.g. in private business - taxes) to increase efficiency, removing need of manual conversion between two closed standards or such. Req: Open standards, access to hooks/API. - Free access for citizens to the software. No need to sign NDAs, no fees to access the sources, freedom to use and examine the software at will. If they pay taxes to fund the software for government, they shouldn't be forced to pay again to use it themselves. Req: Free as a beer, no "don't copy" style licenses. - Indepence from vendors. The country can't be held hostage by any vendor because they are the only entity that can implement/change/fix some essential feature. Any developer should be able to come along the way and continue the work, where the previous one left it. Req: Access to sources. - Supporting local economy: Making development of software for government, easy for local businesses, no matter what their size. Because anyone can develop the software, the government isn't tied to a single corporation creating the subsystems and won't be locked with expanding underperforming system because cost of total replacement is too high and there's nobody else besides the corporation that could fix the software (and the corporation lacks skill/resources to do this). Req: Access to sources for everyone.
As for now, Open Source/Free Software fulfills all these requirements "out of the box". Getting them all from any commercial vendor would be near-impossible, or at least a true torment in the means of negotiations. Also note it doesn't lock out any commercial vendors. It just changes what the government buys: They buy THE software (binaries+sources+specs+IP) and not just license to use the "borrowed" binaries which they wouldn't really own. What the government does with the purchased software shouldn't be your concern, you got paid for selling all rights to it to them. Well, they open-source it. For the better of the nation.
Edit as HTML: IE only. Want POP3? Send me spam. (luckily you can set it to send spam to other address than Yahoo, say admin@microsoft.com) Sending mail from Yahoo? Have spam attached as sig. Reply doesn't >quote. No way to see message source e.g for reporting scammers. (localized header names in "full header" view) Poor localisation (sometimes encoding header missing, encoding has to be changed manually, sometimes (within the same page) some strings are localized to Unicode and some approximated with ISO-8859-1. Sometimes whole long bodies of text is just approximated with ISO-8859-1. Help not fully localized. Localization breaks layout (same as in Gmail;) - columns designed to fit english "add-edit" don't fit "dodaj - modyfikuj". Slower.
Don't like GMail's interface? Use pop3 and YOUR desktop client. In this matter Google whips Yahoo's ass. No spam attached in sig, no spam received from mail service.
Some major sites (Yahoo, Tripod, Hotmail, Netscape, and quite a few) seem to reserve ALL common words and mostly all "all-letter" derivatives, and generally anything that wouldn't pass as secure PASSWORD. They claim given name "is unavailable" or "is already in use" or such, but if you send email to any of these, it will bounce. They are just reserved so nobody. I can't have my username composed from my first.last name (I actually -KNOW- it's world-unique), I can't have any of 10 or so variations of my nick, and unless I stick at least two digits into the username, I won't get any, and a hour of trying, with some REALLY wild variations that are plain impossible to have been all taken, all resulted in "is unavailable".
I definitely refuse to have address Sh4rpf4ng@... or Sharp77@...
Google luckily doesn't put any of this kind of bullshit. If someone else doesn't use your login, it's free.
I will never ever register with a site that provides anything similar to the above. Once upon a time I had an email @netscape.net, and used it as my primary. A neat 4-letter login. One day they introduced the new policy and wrote me a not-quite-polite letter that "they are integrating their services and someone else on some other service is using this name already, so please choose another". And then a hour of trying available ones till I came up with one composed of 8 chars including 2 digits. So why is it me who has to change the login and not "that someone"? And now "that someone" will start receiving my mail too? Fuck you assholes. As I understand all the sites that do this now, underwent this kind of change sometime, so fuck you Hotmail, fuck you Yahoo, fuck you Netscape... Google rules.
http://www.ibutton.com/ - free samples available. 2.6.13 kernel has already some very decent support for it (.12 - sorry, not so decent...;.14-rc? seems even more promising, this is a very actively developed area) - now just wait for good userspace support software. It's in/sys already.
iButtons are way more rugged than USB stick (think surviving in pockets of Indiana Jones, Gordon Freeman and Lara Croft), smaller and more comfortable in use and some are designed to be unlockable only with a password;) One problem is the biggest one is 8 kilobytes, so if you plan using them to store MP3s, sorry. But PGP keys, password lists etc - why not? And if you're a Java freak, there's a java-based minicomputer in one of them:)
IE bugs and relative positioning. While Gecko was built on the standards, where EVERYTHING is in fact a DIV or SPAN of some kind, with certain CSS properties, the IE rendering engine had the box model added as an afterthought, hacked into existing code that had little in common with modern day DOM. No wonder it's slow. Instead of rendering the whole page at once, and then scrolling the gfx, it modifies position of the DIVs relative to the viewport and re-renders them all.
Well, theoretically true, the door to the safe are locked, you can't forge the key and the only key is in manager's pocket. You still don't count that the manager can be pickpocketed. Someone hacks into MS network, steals the original key used to sign original games, and all you have to do to run your own app is to sign it with the key you've downloaded from the net. There's no way they could allow for new games to show up and work on the console without having some way to sign them - and if you can lay your hands on their signature system (pickpocket the manager), you're in.
Not necessarily. Run the motherboard project through autorouter 10 times, changing "forbidden" zones each time, so you have 10 XBoxes that are just the same machine in 10 different layouts, making it impossible to use a single, unique modchip (it just won't fit everywhere), making them need to include 10 different modding manuals instead of one, and finally instead of buying 1-2 XBoxes to develop the hack, they would have to buy about 50 (so they get at least one of each kind...), $14.000 instead of $299...
All they wanted to do was trying to see if they can still score a point in the expensive hardware lobbing contest, while actually crashing a spacecraft.
Supposedly, this one gives unique feel to each key group, so you should know when you reach with wrong finger to a key that belongs to a different finger. In reality though, they are pretty much indistinguishable, so just take spray or acetone...
Well, what IMHO would make this a truly 1337 keyboard: Have the letter caps printed in UV color. Then install a blacklight light source (preferably a point one, directed at the keyboard) and be able to type in complete darkness, with only keys glowing dimly:)
Small, single-row enter, big backslash above enter, I thought that was the idea for making typing MS-DOS paths easier, and we have left that behind already, but seems they still live in early nineties...
Wrong. You don't need anything extra to start gathering money for charity - be it a paypal account, your personal account, your pocket etc. And if, and only if you DON'T give the money to the charity, then they can sue your ass and punish you. Pre-emptive strike is NOT an allowed strategy. Assuming you won't donate the money you gathered and freezing them is just that: Robbing the victims, those who the money were designated for, from the donations. A thug taking the donation box from a kid, saying "It's not safe with you".
In this case the "buyers" are the victims of the hurricane. PayPal concluded they are moving en masse as if trying to escape from something (debts maybe?). They are under the army's supervision. They move in large organized groups (mobs?), they leave their workplaces and take as much property as they can (definitely, running with stolen goods), some of them died (gang wars?), drowned (certainly by Mafia), some lost all their property (possibly in gang wars again), some are now located in hospitals (certainly after brawls), not to mention cases of arson and robbery reported by the Police. Definitely suspicious behaviour, and certainly explaining it with bad weather won't help.
Slashdot Mirror
"There are too many interacting elements, too much information, for the human mind to perceive and consider simultaneously. Thus nobody can hope to think about all of game design at once"
This is wrong.
Nobody can analytically examine all of the game design at once.
All the rest is possible. Not as business, science, engineering. But as art, pretty pure at that. And like any art, game design has some prerequisites that are hard to put in words, impossible to purchase, difficult to understand. Things like talent and inspiration, letting the ideas "click into place", a rough sketch taking shape as it grows, gaps getting filled by good ideas that come at the right time. Ability to turn your thoughts into words, images, code, action. System way too complex to be understood or analysed by any scientific method just works fine connected by genius of a talented artist. You can't engineer a good poem, a good movie, a good song. The idea of "good" is too complex and too abstract to be understood by science and all attempts to approximate it by ballancing slightly less abstract ideas like "style and content" is bound to fail. With some luck you'll be able to engineer a product that sells well, but it will NOT be a GOOD product, because it will be just it, a product. Maybe with certain "wow" factor. But it won't be a piece of art, something the author put a part of his soul into. Something to make you laugh or cry.
There's no chance for good games without talent of the creator. And no amount of methodical analysis of the market can replace that.
One thing you must remember about, when considering MySQL. It's a relational database, all right, but it doesn't really support SQL.
It supports most of SQL syntax, so SQL gurus will find it easy to learn. Most of basic SQL stuff works. But more advanced constructs like nested queries are either unsupported or terribly unoptimal, and some SQL features are there just for compatiblity sake but shouldn't be used at all. Instead you should learn and use a bunch of MySQLisms that aren't found anywhere else and do the same thing, much better (faster, safer, bug-free). So if you have a database app and ponder what database to integrate it with, choosing MySQL means more than plain tweaks. It may mean deep hacks. MySQL is devilishly fast when it comes to simple queries. Few databases can beat it in this domain. But it comes with a cost, shortcuts taken prolonging/breaking many other tasks. So choosing MySQL is a dangerous choice - it's a lock-in.
The article tries to draw a clear line between substance (mechanics/rules) and style (look/feel/story) of a game - but the story itself has very little of either.
In terms of style it sounds a bit like a lecture for a school of game developers. Readable but boring. The examples are dull or oversimplified. FPS gamers concentrating on Substance, The Sims concentrating on Style? I wouldn't be so sure players of Half-Life 2 are all about substance...
In terms of substance... actually I'm not really sure what the article tries to achieve at all, because it first defines a sharp border between the two and then methodically expresses that the border isn't really important at all, because both are just as important, and by emphacising one or the other you change the style of the game, not whether it's good or if it sells well. I don't think I've learned a thing from the article, because all the info it presents seems pretty much as completely useless analysis. Like analysing structure of a sentence in a poem won't help you writing better poetry, analising whether your game has enough substance or better style won't make better games. And the article doesn't write neither how to improve the style nor how to create better substance...
How long till people port Linux to it?
There's very few web features that aren't available as a way of delivering user content. ;)
WWW - everyone can have a webpage.
FTP, all of the P2P - everyone can host files they have made themselves.
Forums, BBS, Message Boards, Mailing Lists - based on user content.
IRC, chats - nothing more pathetic than a dead chat without users.
Banner ads - all the "banner exchange" style stuff brings it into users' hands.
Blogs - user-content journalism.
eBay - user-content e-commerce.
Development sites like SourceForge - user-content software development
del.icio.us - hell if I know what it is, but it's all user-content.
Think of mostly any service or feature of the online world and you'll find user-content counterpart easily. I'd be hard-pressed to find domains without user-content. Ones I could think of... reserved for corporate customers - say, "Microsoft Channel Bar", mostly dead by now, or Windows Update... no, nope. The user-content counterpart for this is called malware.
Well, on my 486DX66 with 16MB of RAM Screen was running like a snail (as opposed to the "poor man's tools" above).
Somehow I doubt your Commodore 128 running Lunix can handle real Gnu Screen.
Screen for the poor
jobs: list jobs
ctrl-z: detach job
bg: bring the job into backgroung
fg: bring the job into foreground
nohup: job won't be killed when you quit
&: start in background.
Been using these for some 5 years before I actually forced myself to run Screen. Actually, these are much lighter on the CPU and memory, so if you want to launch a download overnight, do wget -b and not screen -> wget
Come on. It lights up "scroll lock" on your keyboard. Pressing "scroll lock" then does the same as ctrl+Q
well, what I meant was "any modern day big software vendor." They are all proprietary and they have heads too high up their asses about remaining such to ever agree for producing open-source. Thing is, if you write a program, then sell it, source and all, you get money for what you did, hard-earned and honest. But if you write a program, then license it out, money keep coming and you don't do any real work anymore to deserve them - well, that's a parasitic hole in the network of mutual dependencies of the society. It's the easiest profit though. So no wonder companies start kicking and screaming "But now we won't be able to keep sitting on our asses and count the money coming, we will have to keep working, competing, improving, for real!"
Luckily it seems these that don't evolve are on the best way to extinction.
Yes. And they did.
The governments of several South American governments have realized this already, that software used for all the government purposes should follow these guidelines:
- Be transparent to the government. The government MUST have a way to verify if no malicious code, country-hostile elements, backdoors or other such insecurities exist. Without source - impossible.
- Be transparent to the citizens; any citizen of the country should be able to analyse and examine how the government handles the data, verify that no illegal activity is being performed using the software. Required: Access to sources, access to specifications.
- Countrywide Integration: Any citizen should be able to integrate systems used in government with systems they use privately, (e.g. in private business - taxes) to increase efficiency, removing need of manual conversion between two closed standards or such. Req: Open standards, access to hooks/API.
- Free access for citizens to the software. No need to sign NDAs, no fees to access the sources, freedom to use and examine the software at will. If they pay taxes to fund the software for government, they shouldn't be forced to pay again to use it themselves. Req: Free as a beer, no "don't copy" style licenses.
- Indepence from vendors. The country can't be held hostage by any vendor because they are the only entity that can implement/change/fix some essential feature. Any developer should be able to come along the way and continue the work, where the previous one left it. Req: Access to sources.
- Supporting local economy: Making development of software for government, easy for local businesses, no matter what their size. Because anyone can develop the software, the government isn't tied to a single corporation creating the subsystems and won't be locked with expanding underperforming system because cost of total replacement is too high and there's nobody else besides the corporation that could fix the software (and the corporation lacks skill/resources to do this). Req: Access to sources for everyone.
As for now, Open Source/Free Software fulfills all these requirements "out of the box". Getting them all from any commercial vendor would be near-impossible, or at least a true torment in the means of negotiations.
Also note it doesn't lock out any commercial vendors. It just changes what the government buys: They buy THE software (binaries+sources+specs+IP) and not just license to use the "borrowed" binaries which they wouldn't really own.
What the government does with the purchased software shouldn't be your concern, you got paid for selling all rights to it to them. Well, they open-source it. For the better of the nation.
Edit as HTML: IE only. ;) - columns designed to fit english "add-edit" don't fit "dodaj - modyfikuj".
Want POP3? Send me spam. (luckily you can set it to send spam to other address than Yahoo, say admin@microsoft.com)
Sending mail from Yahoo? Have spam attached as sig.
Reply doesn't >quote.
No way to see message source e.g for reporting scammers. (localized header names in "full header" view)
Poor localisation (sometimes encoding header missing, encoding has to be changed manually, sometimes (within the same page) some strings are localized to Unicode and some approximated with ISO-8859-1. Sometimes whole long bodies of text is just approximated with ISO-8859-1. Help not fully localized. Localization breaks layout (same as in Gmail
Slower.
Don't like GMail's interface? Use pop3 and YOUR desktop client. In this matter Google whips Yahoo's ass. No spam attached in sig, no spam received from mail service.
Some major sites (Yahoo, Tripod, Hotmail, Netscape, and quite a few) seem to reserve ALL common words and mostly all "all-letter" derivatives, and generally anything that wouldn't pass as secure PASSWORD. They claim given name "is unavailable" or "is already in use" or such, but if you send email to any of these, it will bounce. They are just reserved so nobody. I can't have my username composed from my first.last name (I actually -KNOW- it's world-unique), I can't have any of 10 or so variations of my nick, and unless I stick at least two digits into the username, I won't get any, and a hour of trying, with some REALLY wild variations that are plain impossible to have been all taken, all resulted in "is unavailable".
I definitely refuse to have address Sh4rpf4ng@... or Sharp77@...
Google luckily doesn't put any of this kind of bullshit. If someone else doesn't use your login, it's free.
I will never ever register with a site that provides anything similar to the above. Once upon a time I had an email @netscape.net, and used it as my primary. A neat 4-letter login. One day they introduced the new policy and wrote me a not-quite-polite letter that "they are integrating their services and someone else on some other service is using this name already, so please choose another". And then a hour of trying available ones till I came up with one composed of 8 chars including 2 digits. So why is it me who has to change the login and not "that someone"? And now "that someone" will start receiving my mail too? Fuck you assholes. As I understand all the sites that do this now, underwent this kind of change sometime, so fuck you Hotmail, fuck you Yahoo, fuck you Netscape... Google rules.
http://www.ibutton.com/ - free samples available. .14-rc? seems even more promising, this is a very actively developed area) - now just wait for good userspace support software. It's in /sys already.
;) One problem is the biggest one is 8 kilobytes, so if you plan using them to store MP3s, sorry. But PGP keys, password lists etc - why not? :)
2.6.13 kernel has already some very decent support for it (.12 - sorry, not so decent...;
iButtons are way more rugged than USB stick (think surviving in pockets of Indiana Jones, Gordon Freeman and Lara Croft), smaller and more comfortable in use and some are designed to be unlockable only with a password
And if you're a Java freak, there's a java-based minicomputer in one of them
IE bugs and relative positioning.
While Gecko was built on the standards, where EVERYTHING is in fact a DIV or SPAN of some kind, with certain CSS properties, the IE rendering engine had the box model added as an afterthought, hacked into existing code that had little in common with modern day DOM. No wonder it's slow. Instead of rendering the whole page at once, and then scrolling the gfx, it modifies position of the DIVs relative to the viewport and re-renders them all.
Yummy harddrive with chocolate topping :)
Then you can extract the whole system.
Well, theoretically true, the door to the safe are locked, you can't forge the key and the only key is in manager's pocket.
You still don't count that the manager can be pickpocketed. Someone hacks into MS network, steals the original key used to sign original games, and all you have to do to run your own app is to sign it with the key you've downloaded from the net. There's no way they could allow for new games to show up and work on the console without having some way to sign them - and if you can lay your hands on their signature system (pickpocket the manager), you're in.
Not necessarily. Run the motherboard project through autorouter 10 times, changing "forbidden" zones each time, so you have 10 XBoxes that are just the same machine in 10 different layouts, making it impossible to use a single, unique modchip (it just won't fit everywhere), making them need to include 10 different modding manuals instead of one, and finally instead of buying 1-2 XBoxes to develop the hack, they would have to buy about 50 (so they get at least one of each kind...), $14.000 instead of $299...
All they wanted to do was trying to see if they can still score a point in the expensive hardware lobbing contest, while actually crashing a spacecraft.
Supposedly, this one gives unique feel to each key group, so you should know when you reach with wrong finger to a key that belongs to a different finger. In reality though, they are pretty much indistinguishable, so just take spray or acetone...
:)
Well, what IMHO would make this a truly 1337 keyboard: Have the letter caps printed in UV color. Then install a blacklight light source (preferably a point one, directed at the keyboard) and be able to type in complete darkness, with only keys glowing dimly
Or just switches the caps? My keyboard has KW3R7Y layout.
Small, single-row enter, big backslash above enter, I thought that was the idea for making typing MS-DOS paths easier, and we have left that behind already, but seems they still live in early nineties...
http://mp3.baidu.com/ then select "MP3" checkbutton. Enter author or title, get direct links to MP3 downloads. Wish Google had something like this! :D
Wrong.
You don't need anything extra to start gathering money for charity - be it a paypal account, your personal account, your pocket etc. And if, and only if you DON'T give the money to the charity, then they can sue your ass and punish you. Pre-emptive strike is NOT an allowed strategy. Assuming you won't donate the money you gathered and freezing them is just that: Robbing the victims, those who the money were designated for, from the donations. A thug taking the donation box from a kid, saying "It's not safe with you".
In this case the "buyers" are the victims of the hurricane.
PayPal concluded they are moving en masse as if trying to escape from something (debts maybe?). They are under the army's supervision. They move in large organized groups (mobs?), they leave their workplaces and take as much property as they can (definitely, running with stolen goods), some of them died (gang wars?), drowned (certainly by Mafia), some lost all their property (possibly in gang wars again), some are now located in hospitals (certainly after brawls), not to mention cases of arson and robbery reported by the Police. Definitely suspicious behaviour, and certainly explaining it with bad weather won't help.