Nothing. It would raise a syntax error. You've forgotten a semicolon.
Fix that, and it returns hello1.0. Calling a variable "myInt" doesn't make it an integer -- it was a float from the second you added a dot.
You haven't actually shown a case where '+' is more confusing than any other character for concatenation -- and your confusion seems to be more with the nature of dynamic typing than with that particular operator.
(For what it's worth, almost all dynamic languages will cast integers into floats when you combine the two in an operation -- for example, 2 * 1.2 will do what you expect, whereas 5 / 2 won't round properly -- you'd want 5 / 2.0)
Not that '+' is entirely intuitive. A better example might be:
var a = 1; var b = 1; var c = 'hello'; alert(a + b + c); alert(c + b + a);
The second alert is probably what you were expecting: 'hello11'. The first, however, is '2hello'.
But that's pretty contrived -- after all, how often do you really want to concatenate two numbers as strings, with absolutely no text (even whitespace) between them?
I have to think about that arithmetic gotcha above a lot more often than numbers vs strings.
In any case, I don't find concatenation nearly as useful as interpolation, most of the time. In Ruby, at least, interpolation is known to execute faster than concatenation. But that doesn't help you if you're using JavaScript.
And Apple has pulled how many plugs now out of close to ten thousand?
More than zero.
It really doesn't seem like a good idea to base your business model on complete, unconditional trust of a third-party.
It has several excellent network APIs available at its disposal.
That really doesn't matter, in the long run.
For an example, take what you're reading this on right now: A web browser. Have you seen the DOM APIs? Or all the other hacked-together Javascript APIs?
At the end of the day, no one uses raw XHR. We use jQuery, we use Dojo, we use Prototype. We build good APIs on top of bad ones -- as long as all the functionality is there, it doesn't matter if it's clumsy to use.
Given that.NET has been targeted by a few dynamic languages, it should be trivial to build appropriate wrappers, if those don't exist already. Given that Apple actually forbids interpreters on the iPhone, you're stuck with Objective C.
if you want to sell your work
OP was looking to write software for personal use. I'm not sure selling it was ever part of the question.
Assuming its a modern console, that's at a minimum $199/person.
Minimum wage is still going to be over $10k/year. Developers don't work minimum wage.
I've had a company laptop that was easily $1-2k. Conservatively, a decent beige-box workstation is still going to be around $500.
If a company is balking at spending an additional $200/person, that company needs to have its priorities examined, and very likely, some heads need to roll. Even if you consider the games, warranty, etc, there's no way it's going to add up to any significant fraction of the money spent on a good employee, or the value derived from a good employee -- especially a happy employee.
That said...
How about you buy one console and put it in a common area, and maybe give the "blue collar" guys one in their lunchroom, too? If someone is gone from their cubicle for 4 hours a day, should be obvious, right? Less money spent, more accountability.
That is, in every way, a good idea. Maybe more than one, maybe more than one common area, depending on the size of the company, but the principle is the same.
I'm the last person to be advocating nose to the grindstone blah blah get your work done, Cratchet behavior.
I should start by saying that this is exactly what's going on where I work, right now. It's Saturday, and I'm stealing a few moments before I get to work again.
That being said, what's the possible point of having gaming consoles in the office?
First and foremost: Morale. It's kind of fun reading these comments that say things like "Are you hiring"?
We've got one Xbox 360, and one Wii, both hooked up to an HDTV, in a room with comfortable chairs (no couch yet). We have less than 10 employees, most of whom aren't avid gamers, but at the very least, it's a way to celebrate a major milestone.
More recently, we've got beer fridays. I stick to root beer, but I appreciate the sentiment -- we aren't just a bunch of people thrown into an office by chance or by cruel HR decision. We are human beings, working on something we believe in, and we genuinely like working with each other.
Time spent at home with family is worth more than any sort of office camaraderie, fakey or othewise.
First: You assume there's a family involved.
That said, some do have families. It's not the point. If the work is important, then the people you work with are also important.
Personally, I think goofing off for a coffee break on slashdot is great. Checking the news while waiting for a report to generate/program to compile/etc is perfectly acceptable.
Which is something you can't do as well with coworkers.
I should also point out:
Do NOT rigidly monitor its use. Just make it conspicuous enough that if someone's on it, you know about it. Wait for a problem before you start that...
If most of your employees would always rather be playing games than working, it can't be very interesting work.
It's a bit like monitoring Internet usage at work -- if an employee is really spending all day on Slashdot, that's a problem which should be addressed separately. If you're worried about them doing something illegal, make that their own responsibility. But if you're firewalling and logging everything pre-emptively, you're punishing those of us who are otherwise honest employees, and are probably more productive when we can get our Slashdot coffee break.
The difference is that my experience of that genuinely new thing is informed by all my previous experience.
If I hadn't seen (or couldn't remember) Star Trek and Star Wars, I'm not sure I'd realize just how good Firefly was. And if I hadn't seen Star Wars, I'd completely miss the contractor rant in Clerks.
That leaves aside the issue of whether I would rather know or not know, even if knowing is less pleasant.
And it's almost certaily infringing copyright, so comes under the "pirating stuff" category.
Usually much more of a gray area.
For example, I could make an argument that the US Presidential Debates are something I have a right to see, as a citizen. But take the situation where they were on TV, and weren't DVR'd properly, so we go to YouTube -- legally, maybe it is piracy, but I won't call it that.
If not then most YouTube videos aren't that huge.
True enough, but they're going to be pretty constant as far as bandwidth per minute. And you can certainly sit down and watch one video, then another, then another, for hours, without hitting any sort of copyright infringement.
Surely it's more sensible in terms of time, if nothing else, to just download the much smaller Live CDs and just get a DVD the odd time that you think it's worth a fuller install.
Perhaps, but given that I'm on fiber, and I have BitTorrent, the DVD isn't going to take that long to download. Given that I actually have more blank DVDs than blank CDs, I may as well -- I realize the LiveCD will work on a blank DVD, but it seems such a waste.
Besides which, take something like Knoppix -- you may well want a huge install on the DVD. Or any LiveCD that doesn't include everything you need -- if it's built properly (with UnionFS), you can "install" the rest to RAM, but that's obviously one download per LiveCD boot.
My point is that it's not difficult to come up with legitimate uses for bandwidth -- and, in particular, that the more bandwidth that's available, the more uses people will find. We should encourage that.
Actually, he said "You can target the iPod touch as well as the iPhone" -- and how many of the other toys (GPS, etc) are available on the touch as well?
But it doesn't exist on *every* other phone. One of the huge advantages of targeting the iPhone is that you are guaranteed to have a specific feature set that you can rely on.
That is, it's one of the huge advantages of targeting one specific machine.
That's like claiming Apple's homogeneous hardware is a good reason to target Mac instead of PC. Leaving aside the possibility that you might want to actually avoid vendor lock-in, and be able to choose a different manufacturer... If you really want to use exactly one line of computers, you can just buy a Dell.
Or, put another way: Take each J2ME phone individually. You've got tens, probably hundreds of possible targets to choose from, and it's probably trivial to port between them. Or you could go with the iPhone, which you can't even develop for in the same language.
J2ME ain't that great to develop for, because you have no idea what sort of hardware you're targeting.
Again: Why not? Pick one. Keep in mind, this is for a single person.
Non-tech-savvy consumers don't like trying to figure out which software they can run, or which software will run well.
...and I'll stop you right there. Non-tech-savvy consumers don't build home automation suites, and then write custom software to run on their phone to control it.
Regardless, most services come with some sort of store in which you can buy (or download free) software which has been tested on your phone. My current $1 phone can download from something called EasyEDGE. Android has an App Store, just like the iPhone.
Some types of apps so far have been completely safe, and only a few have been outright rejected.
That's a bit like saying "It's OK to have a dictator who can rape me anytime. I don't think he's gay, so my ass is safe..."
One: You don't know that.
Two: It's absurd that you should be asked to give away that right in the first place.
There's a lot of non-tech-savvy people who would never consider ever getting any other smartphone that would love to have an iPhone.
I'm not sure about that. I would guess a lot of tech-savvy people already have a "smartphone" of sorts, one which is ready to run J2ME apps. They didn't set out to buy a smartphone, and they certainly didn't pay hundreds of dollars (plus a contract!) for it. They just picked up whatever came free with a contract.
You can target the iPod touch as well as the iPhone, and can develop on the iPod touch as well as the iPhone ($220 development platforms with no per-month cost).
Excluding, of course, the per-month AT&T contract.
You have some very interesting features (accelerometer, GPS, camera) which make for some particularly interesting ideas
All of which exist on other phones.
You have a large installed base thats still growing rapidly.
vs, say, J2ME, which has a huge install base that shows no signs of collapsing.
And apple takes only a 30% cut of revenue, in exchange for a nice distribution mechanism.
"Only" 30%? And they can pull the plug on your app any time they want.
All you've managed to do so far is to show that it could work, not why it's better than anything else.
enough demos that you're better off buying a gaming magazine (which also include some of the large patches)
...so, I should pay more for a hard copy, which is going to be less convenient to use, even slower -- aside from the issue of snail mail, there's the issue that CDs are simply slower than my current Internet service, and DVDs aren't much faster -- and a far, far more limited selection (exactly what the magazine decided to bundle)...
Let's see... NO. I pay for "unlimited", I get unlimited. And I get to download whateven the fsck I want, including all kinds of indie stuff which hasn't had the chance of getting into that mag yet -- people like me have to download it first, and make it popular...
The only exception is people who use the "watch anytime" TV services, but given the quality of content on TV when it's first broadcast, why would you want to watch it later?
Have you seen YouTube? Quality hardly matters. It matters more that I'm hanging out with some people, and I mention a scene from Office Space, which someone hasn't seen, or doesn't remember -- in a few seconds, I've searched for it, and I'm playing it.
If I care about quality, there's Vimeo, which does 720p, and that's without the irritations you'd get from broadcast TV -- no ads floating in and taking a quarter of the screen (and sound!) in the middle of the show, usually no ads period, and no chance that the broadcast will be "cut off", or even censored much, as I can just download it.
There's also the other exception you mentioned -- ISOs for Linux distros. You seem to be casually implying that it's OK for ISPs to discriminate against curious Linux users. Is that really what you want to say?
And because it's a whitelist, rather than a blacklist, it's not that they've "forbidden" something so much as that they haven't explicitly allowed it, or even thought of it.
Which means, of course, it's going to be incompatible with anything really new and innovative.
If an ISP has you capped at 20 gigs a month, switch.
Unfortunately, that may not be an option, depending on where you live...
It's my hope that things like MMOs, voice communication (and videoconferencing), YouTube, etc, will all drive ordinary users to use more bandwidth. Hopefully a lot more.
And that these applications will appear too fast and too varied for the ISPs to attempt to make deals with them.
This would force ISPs to stop focusing on bandwidth leeches (and specifically targeting BitTorrent), and actually start increasing their bandwidth to match the very real demand.
I could be entirely wrong, though. All of the above rests on the assumption that MMO companies ultimately have more power than ISPs.
The cost of putting more transistors has started going up, thus ending Moore's law.
Only if the price remains constant.
Moore's Law could well continue, as these things get cheaper and cheaper to build, and thus we have more and more cores for the same price.
That wouldn't be the "extension of Moore's law" that lets you ignore the issue of concurrency and just keep throwing more cycles at the problem, but it would be entirely within Moore's law.
like you said, it was player-driven. And that's different than story-driven.
I don't think this is necessarily the case. I do realize that it hasn't really been done before, though -- at least, the "story" in question has to be either completely spontaneous, or flexible enough to allow for changes like that.
I mean, there are the meta-stories -- Leeroy Jenkins wasn't exactly a roleplay story, but it was a story. But the real trick would be to make an actual plot that players can influence, without going OOC.
Assuming you meant 'port install git-core', that produces a version of git that doesn't interface properly with the Eclipse git plugins on my machine, although it mostly seems to work on the command line.
I've only used a Mac recently for a little over a week, so I'll assume you're right.
I only ever used it from the commandline, and I don't remember it "mostly" working there. I remember it simply working, without exception.
And the commandline actually isn't bad, when you don't have to consider #5.
I remember one event where the devs tried to get a big bunch of casual players together to go fight a big scary ship that they'd never expect to be in combat with otherwise. But players of a large and powerful corporation accidently stumbled upon the target ship before the casual group could get there, and destroyed it first. When the casual group arrived and the ship was already dead, they turned against the dev characters' ships.
That, to me, is a sign of a good game.
In larger games like WoW, Final Fantasy, etc, the game's own "plot" is completely replayable, and applies directly to players and groups.
I've also seen this done in a smaller game (Nexus TK), in which major plot points do happen, but they are entirely GM-run -- just throw up a few barriers and make it physically impossible for players to interfere. And thus boring -- you may as well be watching a movie. Hell, the movie would probably be better written, and in the case of Nexus, any movie is going to have better graphics.
But to me, this is exactly what makes an MMO interesting -- for it to be player-driven, and for something entirely unexpected to happen.
Unexpected doesn't necessarily involve things like killing bosses. Think of all the WoW machinima movies. Think of Leeroy Jenkins. Or, in Nexus, people have figured out how to play checkers, dodgeball, etc, using mechanics already in the game -- they have essentially invented new minigames.
Another example: EverQuest had a boss (The Sleeper) which, to this day, you will find sites claiming has never been killed. These sites will also claim that, should you read on other sites that it's been killed, they are lying. Indeed, the developers obviously never intended for it to die.
But rather than make it invincible, they just gave it ten billion hit points, and a few one-hit-kill-a-player or one-hit-kill-a-bunch-of-player attacks.
So a few clans massed together and took it down.
Otherwise a small group of hardcore players will dominate the storyline, and leave nothing for the rest
That's tricky, but to a certain extent, I think that's deserved. People who can put more into a game should get more out of it.
Otherwise, how would you determine who "wins", or who gets to participate? Skill? (Hint: more hours means more practice, so you're back to square 1.) And if you let everyone get their fun, then we're back to a completely boring story -- either the same one over and over, or completely non-interactive, GM-run events.
Or massive all-out war, which would kind of exclude the majority from playing any kind of major part (by definition).
it has exhibited recovery for me across a few different hilarious network failures, which caused me difficulties (and delta corruptions) on the commercial products i'd used previously.
Probably not as easy, but I would imagine git is much less susceptible to that kind of problem. For one, every file, every commit, everything has a SHA-1 hash, and these are actually used internally to refer to things.
1. It's been working for a while, the last thing I need to do with my copious spare time is switch over to a new VCS mid-project.
Do it in stages. Our developers are slowly switching over to git-svn.
2. MacOSX version that works without having to deal with endless recompile/experimentation. Right now, it's a PITA to get git working under MacOSX.
Erm, WTF?
sudo port install git
That wasn't so hard, was it?
3. It's easier to back up a central server than it is to get developers to back up their machines on a regular basis.
Every checkout is a backup. As long as you don't have a simultaneous failure of your central server and every single development machine you have, you're fine. Not that it's any more difficult to backup a central server -- in fact, it's easier (git-clone to a remote backup server, or to a USB drive).
5. Good tools exist that non-technical people can use to check things in and out of SVN on a variety of platforms.
We don't have a problem where non-technical people are expected to directly check anything into the repository.
Git doesn't imply that you can't use a central server. It just makes it possible to not need a central server.
What happens to your productivity when your SVN server goes down? What if you want to take a laptop somewhere without ready Internet access?
and I just have to keep that backed up.
That is simply not a concern with Git. Every checkout contains the project's entire history -- yet manages to take up less space than a single Subversion checkout.
In other words: As a side effect of simply using Git, you have one full backup of your repository per developer.
If your central server goes down, it's simply a matter of throwing up a new server and having everyone push. And until the new server comes up, you can share directly with each other, over whatever network's available.
it's easier to manage subversion with the one main server.
It sounds very much like you haven't tried with Git. Play around a bit on Github and see what it's like.
Slashdot Mirror
What should that return?
Nothing. It would raise a syntax error. You've forgotten a semicolon.
Fix that, and it returns hello1.0. Calling a variable "myInt" doesn't make it an integer -- it was a float from the second you added a dot.
You haven't actually shown a case where '+' is more confusing than any other character for concatenation -- and your confusion seems to be more with the nature of dynamic typing than with that particular operator.
(For what it's worth, almost all dynamic languages will cast integers into floats when you combine the two in an operation -- for example, 2 * 1.2 will do what you expect, whereas 5 / 2 won't round properly -- you'd want 5 / 2.0)
Not that '+' is entirely intuitive. A better example might be:
var a = 1;
var b = 1;
var c = 'hello';
alert(a + b + c);
alert(c + b + a);
The second alert is probably what you were expecting: 'hello11'. The first, however, is '2hello'.
But that's pretty contrived -- after all, how often do you really want to concatenate two numbers as strings, with absolutely no text (even whitespace) between them?
I have to think about that arithmetic gotcha above a lot more often than numbers vs strings.
In any case, I don't find concatenation nearly as useful as interpolation, most of the time. In Ruby, at least, interpolation is known to execute faster than concatenation. But that doesn't help you if you're using JavaScript.
And Apple has pulled how many plugs now out of close to ten thousand?
More than zero.
It really doesn't seem like a good idea to base your business model on complete, unconditional trust of a third-party.
It has several excellent network APIs available at its disposal.
That really doesn't matter, in the long run.
For an example, take what you're reading this on right now: A web browser. Have you seen the DOM APIs? Or all the other hacked-together Javascript APIs?
At the end of the day, no one uses raw XHR. We use jQuery, we use Dojo, we use Prototype. We build good APIs on top of bad ones -- as long as all the functionality is there, it doesn't matter if it's clumsy to use.
Given that .NET has been targeted by a few dynamic languages, it should be trivial to build appropriate wrappers, if those don't exist already. Given that Apple actually forbids interpreters on the iPhone, you're stuck with Objective C.
if you want to sell your work
OP was looking to write software for personal use. I'm not sure selling it was ever part of the question.
Assuming its a modern console, that's at a minimum $199/person.
Minimum wage is still going to be over $10k/year. Developers don't work minimum wage.
I've had a company laptop that was easily $1-2k. Conservatively, a decent beige-box workstation is still going to be around $500.
If a company is balking at spending an additional $200/person, that company needs to have its priorities examined, and very likely, some heads need to roll. Even if you consider the games, warranty, etc, there's no way it's going to add up to any significant fraction of the money spent on a good employee, or the value derived from a good employee -- especially a happy employee.
That said...
How about you buy one console and put it in a common area, and maybe give the "blue collar" guys one in their lunchroom, too? If someone is gone from their cubicle for 4 hours a day, should be obvious, right? Less money spent, more accountability.
That is, in every way, a good idea. Maybe more than one, maybe more than one common area, depending on the size of the company, but the principle is the same.
But in no way should price even enter into this.
I'm the last person to be advocating nose to the grindstone blah blah get your work done, Cratchet behavior.
I should start by saying that this is exactly what's going on where I work, right now. It's Saturday, and I'm stealing a few moments before I get to work again.
That being said, what's the possible point of having gaming consoles in the office?
First and foremost: Morale. It's kind of fun reading these comments that say things like "Are you hiring"?
We've got one Xbox 360, and one Wii, both hooked up to an HDTV, in a room with comfortable chairs (no couch yet). We have less than 10 employees, most of whom aren't avid gamers, but at the very least, it's a way to celebrate a major milestone.
More recently, we've got beer fridays. I stick to root beer, but I appreciate the sentiment -- we aren't just a bunch of people thrown into an office by chance or by cruel HR decision. We are human beings, working on something we believe in, and we genuinely like working with each other.
Time spent at home with family is worth more than any sort of office camaraderie, fakey or othewise.
First: You assume there's a family involved.
That said, some do have families. It's not the point. If the work is important, then the people you work with are also important.
Personally, I think goofing off for a coffee break on slashdot is great. Checking the news while waiting for a report to generate/program to compile/etc is perfectly acceptable.
Which is something you can't do as well with coworkers.
I should also point out:
Do NOT rigidly monitor its use. Just make it conspicuous enough that if someone's on it, you know about it. Wait for a problem before you start that...
If most of your employees would always rather be playing games than working, it can't be very interesting work.
It's a bit like monitoring Internet usage at work -- if an employee is really spending all day on Slashdot, that's a problem which should be addressed separately. If you're worried about them doing something illegal, make that their own responsibility. But if you're firewalling and logging everything pre-emptively, you're punishing those of us who are otherwise honest employees, and are probably more productive when we can get our Slashdot coffee break.
Now, back to work...
The difference is that my experience of that genuinely new thing is informed by all my previous experience.
If I hadn't seen (or couldn't remember) Star Trek and Star Wars, I'm not sure I'd realize just how good Firefly was. And if I hadn't seen Star Wars, I'd completely miss the contractor rant in Clerks.
That leaves aside the issue of whether I would rather know or not know, even if knowing is less pleasant.
It's not always that simple, many ISP's change bandwidth caps behind their users backs and without their consent.
And if they do that, sue, and then switch.
When did this get so complicated?
And it's almost certaily infringing copyright, so comes under the "pirating stuff" category.
Usually much more of a gray area.
For example, I could make an argument that the US Presidential Debates are something I have a right to see, as a citizen. But take the situation where they were on TV, and weren't DVR'd properly, so we go to YouTube -- legally, maybe it is piracy, but I won't call it that.
If not then most YouTube videos aren't that huge.
True enough, but they're going to be pretty constant as far as bandwidth per minute. And you can certainly sit down and watch one video, then another, then another, for hours, without hitting any sort of copyright infringement.
Surely it's more sensible in terms of time, if nothing else, to just download the much smaller Live CDs and just get a DVD the odd time that you think it's worth a fuller install.
Perhaps, but given that I'm on fiber, and I have BitTorrent, the DVD isn't going to take that long to download. Given that I actually have more blank DVDs than blank CDs, I may as well -- I realize the LiveCD will work on a blank DVD, but it seems such a waste.
Besides which, take something like Knoppix -- you may well want a huge install on the DVD. Or any LiveCD that doesn't include everything you need -- if it's built properly (with UnionFS), you can "install" the rest to RAM, but that's obviously one download per LiveCD boot.
My point is that it's not difficult to come up with legitimate uses for bandwidth -- and, in particular, that the more bandwidth that's available, the more uses people will find. We should encourage that.
That's why he said to develop on the iPod Touch.
Actually, he said "You can target the iPod touch as well as the iPhone" -- and how many of the other toys (GPS, etc) are available on the touch as well?
But it doesn't exist on *every* other phone. One of the huge advantages of targeting the iPhone is that you are guaranteed to have a specific feature set that you can rely on.
That is, it's one of the huge advantages of targeting one specific machine.
That's like claiming Apple's homogeneous hardware is a good reason to target Mac instead of PC. Leaving aside the possibility that you might want to actually avoid vendor lock-in, and be able to choose a different manufacturer... If you really want to use exactly one line of computers, you can just buy a Dell.
Or, put another way: Take each J2ME phone individually. You've got tens, probably hundreds of possible targets to choose from, and it's probably trivial to port between them. Or you could go with the iPhone, which you can't even develop for in the same language.
J2ME ain't that great to develop for, because you have no idea what sort of hardware you're targeting.
Again: Why not? Pick one. Keep in mind, this is for a single person.
Non-tech-savvy consumers don't like trying to figure out which software they can run, or which software will run well.
...and I'll stop you right there. Non-tech-savvy consumers don't build home automation suites, and then write custom software to run on their phone to control it.
Regardless, most services come with some sort of store in which you can buy (or download free) software which has been tested on your phone. My current $1 phone can download from something called EasyEDGE. Android has an App Store, just like the iPhone.
Some types of apps so far have been completely safe, and only a few have been outright rejected.
That's a bit like saying "It's OK to have a dictator who can rape me anytime. I don't think he's gay, so my ass is safe..."
One: You don't know that.
Two: It's absurd that you should be asked to give away that right in the first place.
There's a lot of non-tech-savvy people who would never consider ever getting any other smartphone that would love to have an iPhone.
I'm not sure about that. I would guess a lot of tech-savvy people already have a "smartphone" of sorts, one which is ready to run J2ME apps. They didn't set out to buy a smartphone, and they certainly didn't pay hundreds of dollars (plus a contract!) for it. They just picked up whatever came free with a contract.
You're practically self-parodying here...
You can target the iPod touch as well as the iPhone, and can develop on the iPod touch as well as the iPhone ($220 development platforms with no per-month cost).
Excluding, of course, the per-month AT&T contract.
You have some very interesting features (accelerometer, GPS, camera) which make for some particularly interesting ideas
All of which exist on other phones.
You have a large installed base thats still growing rapidly.
vs, say, J2ME, which has a huge install base that shows no signs of collapsing.
And apple takes only a 30% cut of revenue, in exchange for a nice distribution mechanism.
"Only" 30%? And they can pull the plug on your app any time they want.
All you've managed to do so far is to show that it could work, not why it's better than anything else.
Simplest example:
enough demos that you're better off buying a gaming magazine (which also include some of the large patches)
...so, I should pay more for a hard copy, which is going to be less convenient to use, even slower -- aside from the issue of snail mail, there's the issue that CDs are simply slower than my current Internet service, and DVDs aren't much faster -- and a far, far more limited selection (exactly what the magazine decided to bundle)...
Let's see... NO. I pay for "unlimited", I get unlimited. And I get to download whateven the fsck I want, including all kinds of indie stuff which hasn't had the chance of getting into that mag yet -- people like me have to download it first, and make it popular...
The only exception is people who use the "watch anytime" TV services, but given the quality of content on TV when it's first broadcast, why would you want to watch it later?
Have you seen YouTube? Quality hardly matters. It matters more that I'm hanging out with some people, and I mention a scene from Office Space, which someone hasn't seen, or doesn't remember -- in a few seconds, I've searched for it, and I'm playing it.
If I care about quality, there's Vimeo, which does 720p, and that's without the irritations you'd get from broadcast TV -- no ads floating in and taking a quarter of the screen (and sound!) in the middle of the show, usually no ads period, and no chance that the broadcast will be "cut off", or even censored much, as I can just download it.
There's also the other exception you mentioned -- ISOs for Linux distros. You seem to be casually implying that it's OK for ISPs to discriminate against curious Linux users. Is that really what you want to say?
And because it's a whitelist, rather than a blacklist, it's not that they've "forbidden" something so much as that they haven't explicitly allowed it, or even thought of it.
Which means, of course, it's going to be incompatible with anything really new and innovative.
I would love to be able to re-experience the magic of reading some of my favorite fiction as if for the first time.
I'd much rather experience the magic of something genuinely new.
If an ISP has you capped at 20 gigs a month, switch.
Unfortunately, that may not be an option, depending on where you live...
It's my hope that things like MMOs, voice communication (and videoconferencing), YouTube, etc, will all drive ordinary users to use more bandwidth. Hopefully a lot more.
And that these applications will appear too fast and too varied for the ISPs to attempt to make deals with them.
This would force ISPs to stop focusing on bandwidth leeches (and specifically targeting BitTorrent), and actually start increasing their bandwidth to match the very real demand.
I could be entirely wrong, though. All of the above rests on the assumption that MMO companies ultimately have more power than ISPs.
And of course, it intrinsically works with any VCS that can version the files, not just git.
Of course. A DVCS is what makes it really shine, though.
Thanks for the link to Ditz though, I'm reviewing these things at the moment for an internal project.
I'd be interested to know what you find out. I didn't look beyond Ditz, because I didn't really know what was out there.
The cost of putting more transistors has started going up, thus ending Moore's law.
Only if the price remains constant.
Moore's Law could well continue, as these things get cheaper and cheaper to build, and thus we have more and more cores for the same price.
That wouldn't be the "extension of Moore's law" that lets you ignore the issue of concurrency and just keep throwing more cycles at the problem, but it would be entirely within Moore's law.
An event which prepares for (and deflects) every possibility of screwing it up is going to be a boring, scripted event.
like you said, it was player-driven. And that's different than story-driven.
I don't think this is necessarily the case. I do realize that it hasn't really been done before, though -- at least, the "story" in question has to be either completely spontaneous, or flexible enough to allow for changes like that.
I mean, there are the meta-stories -- Leeroy Jenkins wasn't exactly a roleplay story, but it was a story. But the real trick would be to make an actual plot that players can influence, without going OOC.
Assuming you meant 'port install git-core', that produces a version of git that doesn't interface properly with the Eclipse git plugins on my machine, although it mostly seems to work on the command line.
I've only used a Mac recently for a little over a week, so I'll assume you're right.
I only ever used it from the commandline, and I don't remember it "mostly" working there. I remember it simply working, without exception.
And the commandline actually isn't bad, when you don't have to consider #5.
I remember one event where the devs tried to get a big bunch of casual players together to go fight a big scary ship that they'd never expect to be in combat with otherwise. But players of a large and powerful corporation accidently stumbled upon the target ship before the casual group could get there, and destroyed it first. When the casual group arrived and the ship was already dead, they turned against the dev characters' ships.
That, to me, is a sign of a good game.
In larger games like WoW, Final Fantasy, etc, the game's own "plot" is completely replayable, and applies directly to players and groups.
I've also seen this done in a smaller game (Nexus TK), in which major plot points do happen, but they are entirely GM-run -- just throw up a few barriers and make it physically impossible for players to interfere. And thus boring -- you may as well be watching a movie. Hell, the movie would probably be better written, and in the case of Nexus, any movie is going to have better graphics.
But to me, this is exactly what makes an MMO interesting -- for it to be player-driven, and for something entirely unexpected to happen.
Unexpected doesn't necessarily involve things like killing bosses. Think of all the WoW machinima movies. Think of Leeroy Jenkins. Or, in Nexus, people have figured out how to play checkers, dodgeball, etc, using mechanics already in the game -- they have essentially invented new minigames.
Another example: EverQuest had a boss (The Sleeper) which, to this day, you will find sites claiming has never been killed. These sites will also claim that, should you read on other sites that it's been killed, they are lying. Indeed, the developers obviously never intended for it to die.
But rather than make it invincible, they just gave it ten billion hit points, and a few one-hit-kill-a-player or one-hit-kill-a-bunch-of-player attacks.
So a few clans massed together and took it down.
Otherwise a small group of hardcore players will dominate the storyline, and leave nothing for the rest
That's tricky, but to a certain extent, I think that's deserved. People who can put more into a game should get more out of it.
Otherwise, how would you determine who "wins", or who gets to participate? Skill? (Hint: more hours means more practice, so you're back to square 1.) And if you let everyone get their fun, then we're back to a completely boring story -- either the same one over and over, or completely non-interactive, GM-run events.
Or massive all-out war, which would kind of exclude the majority from playing any kind of major part (by definition).
killing him... would ultimately be what's best for society.
And the gene pool.
Since no one else seems to have noticed... Wow, I must've been really tired when I posted this. (I'd say drunk, but that's impossible...)
No one can say for sure even whether adult human beings have a soul, much less a fetus. We cannot tell whether
I can't tell whether I intended to finish that sentence or not. Whoops.
We kill cows, chickens, turkeys, fish, and other things for no reason other than that we like the way we taste.
The way they taste!
IDEA allows me to navigate history to any depth.
I believe gitk does this.
I am typically the only developer on most of my projects.
Sounds like a perfect candidate for a DVCS.
I know that when I work on personal projects, I've been using bzr, or (more recently) git.
I don't even know how to setup a brand-new SVN repository anymore. But I do know this:
mkdir my_new_project
cd my_new_project
git init
And it's ready to go.
it has exhibited recovery for me across a few different hilarious network failures, which caused me difficulties (and delta corruptions) on the commercial products i'd used previously.
Probably not as easy, but I would imagine git is much less susceptible to that kind of problem. For one, every file, every commit, everything has a SHA-1 hash, and these are actually used internally to refer to things.
1. It's been working for a while, the last thing I need to do with my copious spare time is switch over to a new VCS mid-project.
Do it in stages. Our developers are slowly switching over to git-svn.
2. MacOSX version that works without having to deal with endless recompile/experimentation. Right now, it's a PITA to get git working under MacOSX.
Erm, WTF?
sudo port install git
That wasn't so hard, was it?
3. It's easier to back up a central server than it is to get developers to back up their machines on a regular basis.
Every checkout is a backup. As long as you don't have a simultaneous failure of your central server and every single development machine you have, you're fine. Not that it's any more difficult to backup a central server -- in fact, it's easier (git-clone to a remote backup server, or to a USB drive).
5. Good tools exist that non-technical people can use to check things in and out of SVN on a variety of platforms.
We don't have a problem where non-technical people are expected to directly check anything into the repository.
I also like the central server aspect,
Git doesn't imply that you can't use a central server. It just makes it possible to not need a central server.
What happens to your productivity when your SVN server goes down? What if you want to take a laptop somewhere without ready Internet access?
and I just have to keep that backed up.
That is simply not a concern with Git. Every checkout contains the project's entire history -- yet manages to take up less space than a single Subversion checkout.
In other words: As a side effect of simply using Git, you have one full backup of your repository per developer.
If your central server goes down, it's simply a matter of throwing up a new server and having everyone push. And until the new server comes up, you can share directly with each other, over whatever network's available.
it's easier to manage subversion with the one main server.
It sounds very much like you haven't tried with Git. Play around a bit on Github and see what it's like.