But in the final battle it is really hard to run anywhere: the arena you are in is tiny, walled off on each side by transparent walls. And while running you can still be hit in the back, so you lose energy faster than that it regenerates.
The lone templars earlier in the game were fair game, quite easy to sneak up on and eliminate. But the big group at the end - well, I did beat them three times. But de Sable always got the better of me in the end.
First of all, no one knows how many people die from vCJD, and more importantly, no one knows how many people are going to die that were infected as much as 8 years ago, but simply haven't shown symptoms yet.
Secondly, food poisoning is not nearly as fatal as vCJD. Sure, there is a possibility of death, especially if you are already in a weakened condition, but a healthy individual can expect to survive just fine. That is _very_ different from a disease that has no known cure and is invariably deadly.
Thirdly, actual mortality rate has no bearing on anyones judgement. Just compare the relative risks of traffic and terrorism, and the effort and money spent on each.
And finally, maybe, just maybe, we should stop eating offal and brains. And maybe we should stop stuffing that material into our own foodchain. Well, at least I know _my_ common sense hasn't been destroyed by prions yet...
Eh? I loved the game, but it was easy as hell. Even the part you speak of. Just pary, instant kill. Oce I figured that out halfway through the game, fighting was almost pointless.
My experience was different: when you are fighting the templars, most of your parries only result in the templar being knocked down. As far as I can tell this doesn't do any damage to them. I counted how many of my parries actually resulted in a kill, and it was maybe one in 7. Once they start their "knock your blade away, guaranteed hit" routine, you are pretty much done for.
What system were you playing on? I was playing the PC version...
Too easy? I beg to differ (you insensitive clod!) Sure, the assassinations and missions in the cities aren't that hard. But then... You first get a big battle (the 9th assassination) that is incredibly hard to win and cannot be avoided. After playing through it two dozen times I've finally discovered a tactic that worked.
Then you get another big battle, with about twelve templars, that is nearly impossible to win. And after that, instead of a chance to catch your breath or a checkpoint, you immediately get to fight a mega-uber-baddy! WTF were they thinking? Why is there suddenly such an incredible focus on combat, and why does the difficulty curve has to rise so sharply!?
Besides... The game cheats. Examples:
1. During the battle with the dozen templars, when you perform a countermove, mostly you get your weakest countermove - the one that doesn't do any damage. In normal battles, you get the weakest countermove far less often.
2. The computer plain refuses to let you target an enemy that is on the floor and therefore vulnerable. Very noble of it, let them all just stand up so they can kill me instead! And even if you point him in the right direction, Altair will think nothing of it to target someone meters away and exactly the other direction instead.
3. Maybe you can drop out of combat mode, switch weapons, saunter over to the guy lying on the floor, and stick your blade into him at leasure. But not while you are surrounded by enemies you cannot. You'll be long dead before that happens.
4. If you have a lock on one enemy and decide to attack, quite often it will attack _another_ enemy that is much further away.
5. Halfway through the dozen-templars battle, they all suddenly switch to their "hit your sword up, unblockable strike" move. That _really_ sucks.
6. Not having a checkpoint at the end of that battle is just criminal.
7. Even if you see it coming, there is precisely nothing you can do to defend yourself from attacks from behind. Those occur with regular frequency when you are standing in a circle. It is hard to _not_ stand in a circle when there is a dozen opponents.
I've won that battle with the templars three times, only to be killed by Robert de Sable each time on his first attack. Then I went to GCW and installed a cheat. That worked great.
And don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved this game! I loved sneaking around, doing the missions (even if they repeated), just walking around town and enjoying the views (and finding flags and templars), the climbing, the chases, the assassinations. But I did not enjoy the string of battles at the end, and it would have been a better game without them.
Oh, and a quicker way to leave the game would have been nice (come on, it takes like two minutes!)... And non-skippable cutscenes? What is this, 1995?
Well, I'd better go and download some flame-retardant underwear from GCW so I can fight off the waves of 1337 gamers that are no doubt coming my way...
Testing 1 cow out of every 100 is not NEARLY good enough when there is a 100% fatal (to humans) disease running through the cow population. This is not about reducing the margin of error, this is about not killing other human beings for neglible profit.
Checkpoints? ***Checkpoints***? You really believe they were invented by Halo?
I take it back what I said earlier: the worst problem with Halo is it fanboys who, never having played any games before, now think Halo is the be all, end all of games. Checkpoints, recharging health, and limited choice of weapon were all features of 2D shoot'em ups a decade or more earlier. First person shooters had been done _far_ better before Halo ever came along.
You may like it, nothing wrong with that, but the only thing special about Halo is the unbelievable hype it received. That was significant alright. It's just that I buy my games for enjoyment, not for being part of the Microsoft hype machine.
And as I said, it was ok. Just not quite as special as everyone made it out to be.
Well, major hype is part of the market isn't it? I had the same reaction with Halo: "it's ok". Not a bad game by any means, but not a revolution either. The level design was pretty crappy with its endlessly repeating identical corridors and floors. The two-weapon system was in my opinion just a workaround for not having a lot of keyboard keys to easily select weapons, rather than a wicked strategic choice. The enemy AI didn't really seem all that much smarter than that in other contemporary games.
So, not a bad game, but just one of a great many similar games, with no particular outstanding features. The thing I enjoyed most was driving the warthogs. But it is way, way overhyped...
In the Netherlands, the public administration, one of the most modern in the world, has decided to forbid the use of proprietary software in the public sector."
Yeah, that's no doubt why project "goud" (Dutch for "gold"!) has been given to Getronics with their "Future Ready Workspace" concept. Reading in one of the whitepapers, I found this gem: "Getronics is committed to its adoption of Microsoft and Cisco technologies as the core platform of its Future-Ready Workspace."
Open Source? No, right now they are just _thinking_ about it. And maybe that way, they can mentally prepare for the _next_ round of software changes - you know, ten years from now.
I was already saying this when the news first broke, but it is all words and nothing but words. In reality it is business as usual. And that means "Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft".
In my experience there is no virtually no relationship between the price of a PC and the quality thereof. Very expensive machines fail just as quickly as very cheap ones. So instead of investing in an incredibly expensive piece of hardware, you'd better spend a bit of money on a working backup solution. Nothing fancy, just a tapedrive plus a box of tapes will work fine.
And yes, I'll happily put my sourcecode on that. As long as the backup works everything is fine.
Make it fail. Make it fail spectacularly, to the tune of millions of dollars. That will certainly get the CEO's attention, and he will be sure to take measures that will stop such failure in the future. Of course, I can pretty much guarantee that you will not like his solution, but software development will be much more professional afterward.
If this is not what you want, ask yourself what you actually want to change. You do know what you want to change, right? Discuss those things with colleagues and managers, then formally propose doing them.
I'm guessing you probably want a more structured development process, with better-organized change requests, and at least some semblance of formal testing. That is very, very hard to set up, because it also requires the help of your users, and they don't care about software, they just want to have their problem solved. If this is the case, always remember that you are there to solve their problems, but they are not there to solve your problems. In other words, don't force them into a process they don't like. You might do better if you can show an advantage other than "it makes my life a little easier".
If all you want is a bugtracker and a version control tool, just request a budget of about $2000, then buy a Dell PC with Linux and install Bugzilla and SVN on it. That will set you back $400 or so, the rest of the $2000 is to show that you are a business thinker and did not forget to include installation time;-)
If you want to institute Methodologies (like extreme programming or similar), good luck with that. It will probably end in your colleagues defenestrating you...
I don't have a complete answer for you, but somewhere in there, there must be something about "use competent people that actually give a damn". Don't just bring in warm bodies so that all the chairs are filled.
All of the other stuff (documentation standards, design methodology, programming methodology, choice of tools, choice of reporting method, working environment, etc.) can be varied greatly without much impact on the overal result. But competent people is the one thing you cannot do without.
I realize this will not go down very well with managers that prefer to think of programmers as interchangeable units, but this is the truth. Prove me wrong if you can...
Hey, nothing personal! I didn't really have time to respond to the earlier article, and I wanted to express my disgust at the C++-hatred on Slashdot in general, and your statement of "taking months longer" made for an easy enough target (months longer than what, anyway?).
So why is it taking you so much longer to write something in C++? Is the problem with the syntax? Standard libraries? Built environments? Something else altogether?
...and roll on the C++-hatred! Second C++ article in a short time, and again lots of venom and anger. "Months saved in development"? Really? What are you doing, implementing your own OS before you start application development? Here's a newsflash: C++ also has support libraries, just like Java, Perl, Python and Ruby. They may not be part of the language specification (and I still think that's a weird idea to begin with, but I'm old-fashioned that way), but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Anything you could want for in a modern language is there. And nobody is holding a gun to your head and making you write those scary templates if you don't want to.
I'm just positively amazed that Slashdot, in theory home of programmer geeks anywhere, should have such a violent dislike of C++. Not that there is nothing to criticize about it, but it is still an amazingly powerful, versatile tool that programmers anywhere would do well to learn.
Sure, it is not very private, nor can it be considered to be self-cleaning. But they aren't very attractive hideouts for prostitution and drug use either.
Haha! As if Amsterdam had any prostitution or drug use going!
There are only two IT solutions out there in the minds of too many people: Microsoft, and non-Microsoft.
To go with Microsoft is the easy, sure road. It is the standard. It is what is expected, what is known to be safe, what will always work. Any problems you encounter here are met with "well, computers always have problems don't they?"
To go with non-Microsoft is hard and uncertain. It is not expected, nor "the standard", and suspected to be extremely unsafe. The smallest problem will be countered with "you and your stupid ideas. Now go and call LocalRetailerInc for a certified Microsoft solution, and be glad I don't fire your ass over this fiasco!"
Google is not Microsoft, so according to the business logic described above, if it doesn't work the only possible alternative is to use Microsoft.
Wanna code? Great, go for it. But consider this: what Open Source really needs is more people who can write decent documentation, create user interfaces that actually work, and draw pretty icons.
How many Open Source projects are there with a homepage that doesn't even bother to tell you what the project does? If the first words on your homepage are not the name of your project, followed by about three lines of very clear descriptive text, you have lost most of your prospective users already - they will never figure out what your great project is in the first place. And if you have a user interface of any kind, stick a screenshot or two in there already.
Next, documentation. There are some really, really great Open Source projects out there that I'm sure I could get much more out of, if only I could figure out how. This is true for API's and for complete applications.
And some existing applications would be more pleasant to work with, if only someone did some prettification on the user interface. I cannot understand why noone has gone and drawn good-looking OpenOffice.org icons yet - or why the OOo team hasn't paid someone to do it.
If you want to see a project that gets it absolutely right, go over to http://www.postgresql.org./ The name is at the top. Directly next to it is a 7-word description of what it is. The documentation is available for current and older versions, and is top-notch. Really, this is what we need far more of.
Incidentally, does anyone know a place where I can order custom-drawn icons and bitmaps at cost? I'm looking for "good-looking" and "repeatability": if I need ten extra icons next year I want to be able to get them in the same style.
More business running on Linux --> more software needed on Linux. Development on the kernel will be more the concern of those that need new kernel functionality, like hardware builders.
Frankly, were I in charge when the masses came to my palace chanting "FREE ENTERTAINMENT" at the tops of their lungs, I would order my forces to shoot into the crowd indiscriminately on principle.
Really? I would just give it to them. It is much easier to rule a bunch of pathetic couch potatoes who cannot live without their daily fix of celebrities / sports / comedy / whatever.
I wonder what the real world would look like if our rulers did something like that. Oh, wait...
But older stuff is there as well, and you can always choose not to download the newer stuff. When I was young and had no money I didn't buy any games; now that I'm older, have a job, more money, and less time to play games, if something comes out that I want to play I buy it.
But at the same time I'm not paying for 10 or 20 year old games to run under emulation. And those are pretty easy to find as well on torrent sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Besides, that 4 billion could be spent on extending the war in Iraq by another 1.6667 weeks!
But in the final battle it is really hard to run anywhere: the arena you are in is tiny, walled off on each side by transparent walls. And while running you can still be hit in the back, so you lose energy faster than that it regenerates.
The lone templars earlier in the game were fair game, quite easy to sneak up on and eliminate. But the big group at the end - well, I did beat them three times. But de Sable always got the better of me in the end.
First of all, no one knows how many people die from vCJD, and more importantly, no one knows how many people are going to die that were infected as much as 8 years ago, but simply haven't shown symptoms yet.
Secondly, food poisoning is not nearly as fatal as vCJD. Sure, there is a possibility of death, especially if you are already in a weakened condition, but a healthy individual can expect to survive just fine. That is _very_ different from a disease that has no known cure and is invariably deadly.
Thirdly, actual mortality rate has no bearing on anyones judgement. Just compare the relative risks of traffic and terrorism, and the effort and money spent on each.
And finally, maybe, just maybe, we should stop eating offal and brains. And maybe we should stop stuffing that material into our own foodchain. Well, at least I know _my_ common sense hasn't been destroyed by prions yet...
Eh? I loved the game, but it was easy as hell. Even the part you speak of. Just pary, instant kill. Oce I figured that out halfway through the game, fighting was almost pointless.
My experience was different: when you are fighting the templars, most of your parries only result in the templar being knocked down. As far as I can tell this doesn't do any damage to them. I counted how many of my parries actually resulted in a kill, and it was maybe one in 7. Once they start their "knock your blade away, guaranteed hit" routine, you are pretty much done for.
What system were you playing on? I was playing the PC version...
Too easy? I beg to differ (you insensitive clod!) Sure, the assassinations and missions in the cities aren't that hard. But then... You first get a big battle (the 9th assassination) that is incredibly hard to win and cannot be avoided. After playing through it two dozen times I've finally discovered a tactic that worked.
Then you get another big battle, with about twelve templars, that is nearly impossible to win. And after that, instead of a chance to catch your breath or a checkpoint, you immediately get to fight a mega-uber-baddy! WTF were they thinking? Why is there suddenly such an incredible focus on combat, and why does the difficulty curve has to rise so sharply!?
Besides... The game cheats. Examples:
1. During the battle with the dozen templars, when you perform a countermove, mostly you get your weakest countermove - the one that doesn't do any damage. In normal battles, you get the weakest countermove far less often.
2. The computer plain refuses to let you target an enemy that is on the floor and therefore vulnerable. Very noble of it, let them all just stand up so they can kill me instead! And even if you point him in the right direction, Altair will think nothing of it to target someone meters away and exactly the other direction instead.
3. Maybe you can drop out of combat mode, switch weapons, saunter over to the guy lying on the floor, and stick your blade into him at leasure. But not while you are surrounded by enemies you cannot. You'll be long dead before that happens.
4. If you have a lock on one enemy and decide to attack, quite often it will attack _another_ enemy that is much further away.
5. Halfway through the dozen-templars battle, they all suddenly switch to their "hit your sword up, unblockable strike" move. That _really_ sucks.
6. Not having a checkpoint at the end of that battle is just criminal.
7. Even if you see it coming, there is precisely nothing you can do to defend yourself from attacks from behind. Those occur with regular frequency when you are standing in a circle. It is hard to _not_ stand in a circle when there is a dozen opponents.
I've won that battle with the templars three times, only to be killed by Robert de Sable each time on his first attack. Then I went to GCW and installed a cheat. That worked great.
And don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved this game! I loved sneaking around, doing the missions (even if they repeated), just walking around town and enjoying the views (and finding flags and templars), the climbing, the chases, the assassinations. But I did not enjoy the string of battles at the end, and it would have been a better game without them.
Oh, and a quicker way to leave the game would have been nice (come on, it takes like two minutes!)... And non-skippable cutscenes? What is this, 1995?
Well, I'd better go and download some flame-retardant underwear from GCW so I can fight off the waves of 1337 gamers that are no doubt coming my way...
Testing 1 cow out of every 100 is not NEARLY good enough when there is a 100% fatal (to humans) disease running through the cow population. This is not about reducing the margin of error, this is about not killing other human beings for neglible profit.
Checkpoints? ***Checkpoints***? You really believe they were invented by Halo?
I take it back what I said earlier: the worst problem with Halo is it fanboys who, never having played any games before, now think Halo is the be all, end all of games. Checkpoints, recharging health, and limited choice of weapon were all features of 2D shoot'em ups a decade or more earlier. First person shooters had been done _far_ better before Halo ever came along.
You may like it, nothing wrong with that, but the only thing special about Halo is the unbelievable hype it received. That was significant alright. It's just that I buy my games for enjoyment, not for being part of the Microsoft hype machine.
And as I said, it was ok. Just not quite as special as everyone made it out to be.
Well, major hype is part of the market isn't it? I had the same reaction with Halo: "it's ok". Not a bad game by any means, but not a revolution either. The level design was pretty crappy with its endlessly repeating identical corridors and floors. The two-weapon system was in my opinion just a workaround for not having a lot of keyboard keys to easily select weapons, rather than a wicked strategic choice. The enemy AI didn't really seem all that much smarter than that in other contemporary games.
So, not a bad game, but just one of a great many similar games, with no particular outstanding features. The thing I enjoyed most was driving the warthogs. But it is way, way overhyped...
In the Netherlands, the public administration, one of the most modern in the world, has decided to forbid the use of proprietary software in the public sector."
Yeah, that's no doubt why project "goud" (Dutch for "gold"!) has been given to Getronics with their "Future Ready Workspace" concept. Reading in one of the whitepapers, I found this gem: "Getronics is committed to its adoption of Microsoft and Cisco technologies as the core platform of its Future-Ready Workspace."
Open Source? No, right now they are just _thinking_ about it. And maybe that way, they can mentally prepare for the _next_ round of software changes - you know, ten years from now.
I was already saying this when the news first broke, but it is all words and nothing but words. In reality it is business as usual. And that means "Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft".
Looks more like a classic case of "let's slam the thing in question without even bothering to read the fine article" to me...
In my experience there is no virtually no relationship between the price of a PC and the quality thereof. Very expensive machines fail just as quickly as very cheap ones. So instead of investing in an incredibly expensive piece of hardware, you'd better spend a bit of money on a working backup solution. Nothing fancy, just a tapedrive plus a box of tapes will work fine.
And yes, I'll happily put my sourcecode on that. As long as the backup works everything is fine.
Make it fail. Make it fail spectacularly, to the tune of millions of dollars. That will certainly get the CEO's attention, and he will be sure to take measures that will stop such failure in the future. Of course, I can pretty much guarantee that you will not like his solution, but software development will be much more professional afterward.
If this is not what you want, ask yourself what you actually want to change. You do know what you want to change, right? Discuss those things with colleagues and managers, then formally propose doing them.
I'm guessing you probably want a more structured development process, with better-organized change requests, and at least some semblance of formal testing. That is very, very hard to set up, because it also requires the help of your users, and they don't care about software, they just want to have their problem solved. If this is the case, always remember that you are there to solve their problems, but they are not there to solve your problems. In other words, don't force them into a process they don't like. You might do better if you can show an advantage other than "it makes my life a little easier".
If all you want is a bugtracker and a version control tool, just request a budget of about $2000, then buy a Dell PC with Linux and install Bugzilla and SVN on it. That will set you back $400 or so, the rest of the $2000 is to show that you are a business thinker and did not forget to include installation time ;-)
If you want to institute Methodologies (like extreme programming or similar), good luck with that. It will probably end in your colleagues defenestrating you...
Alas... nobody knows what it is.
I don't have a complete answer for you, but somewhere in there, there must be something about "use competent people that actually give a damn". Don't just bring in warm bodies so that all the chairs are filled.
All of the other stuff (documentation standards, design methodology, programming methodology, choice of tools, choice of reporting method, working environment, etc.) can be varied greatly without much impact on the overal result. But competent people is the one thing you cannot do without.
I realize this will not go down very well with managers that prefer to think of programmers as interchangeable units, but this is the truth. Prove me wrong if you can...
C++ is a write-only language. That's why it receives so much hate.
Perl's getting plenty of love around here...
Hey, nothing personal! I didn't really have time to respond to the earlier article, and I wanted to express my disgust at the C++-hatred on Slashdot in general, and your statement of "taking months longer" made for an easy enough target (months longer than what, anyway?).
So why is it taking you so much longer to write something in C++? Is the problem with the syntax? Standard libraries? Built environments? Something else altogether?
...and roll on the C++-hatred! Second C++ article in a short time, and again lots of venom and anger. "Months saved in development"? Really? What are you doing, implementing your own OS before you start application development? Here's a newsflash: C++ also has support libraries, just like Java, Perl, Python and Ruby. They may not be part of the language specification (and I still think that's a weird idea to begin with, but I'm old-fashioned that way), but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Anything you could want for in a modern language is there. And nobody is holding a gun to your head and making you write those scary templates if you don't want to.
I'm just positively amazed that Slashdot, in theory home of programmer geeks anywhere, should have such a violent dislike of C++. Not that there is nothing to criticize about it, but it is still an amazingly powerful, versatile tool that programmers anywhere would do well to learn.
This is why Amsterdam has public toilets that look like this: http://lh3.ggpht.com/_D4avj_GZuq4/SAsa2yTgvYI/AAAAAAAAB6E/ANS4tx2JuKc/toilet.jpg
Sure, it is not very private, nor can it be considered to be self-cleaning. But they aren't very attractive hideouts for prostitution and drug use either.
Haha! As if Amsterdam had any prostitution or drug use going!
There are only two IT solutions out there in the minds of too many people: Microsoft, and non-Microsoft.
To go with Microsoft is the easy, sure road. It is the standard. It is what is expected, what is known to be safe, what will always work. Any problems you encounter here are met with "well, computers always have problems don't they?"
To go with non-Microsoft is hard and uncertain. It is not expected, nor "the standard", and suspected to be extremely unsafe. The smallest problem will be countered with "you and your stupid ideas. Now go and call LocalRetailerInc for a certified Microsoft solution, and be glad I don't fire your ass over this fiasco!"
Google is not Microsoft, so according to the business logic described above, if it doesn't work the only possible alternative is to use Microsoft.
Wanna code? Great, go for it. But consider this: what Open Source really needs is more people who can write decent documentation, create user interfaces that actually work, and draw pretty icons.
How many Open Source projects are there with a homepage that doesn't even bother to tell you what the project does? If the first words on your homepage are not the name of your project, followed by about three lines of very clear descriptive text, you have lost most of your prospective users already - they will never figure out what your great project is in the first place. And if you have a user interface of any kind, stick a screenshot or two in there already.
Next, documentation. There are some really, really great Open Source projects out there that I'm sure I could get much more out of, if only I could figure out how. This is true for API's and for complete applications.
And some existing applications would be more pleasant to work with, if only someone did some prettification on the user interface. I cannot understand why noone has gone and drawn good-looking OpenOffice.org icons yet - or why the OOo team hasn't paid someone to do it.
If you want to see a project that gets it absolutely right, go over to http://www.postgresql.org./ The name is at the top. Directly next to it is a 7-word description of what it is. The documentation is available for current and older versions, and is top-notch. Really, this is what we need far more of.
Incidentally, does anyone know a place where I can order custom-drawn icons and bitmaps at cost? I'm looking for "good-looking" and "repeatability": if I need ten extra icons next year I want to be able to get them in the same style.
Wait, you actually need permission in the US to do things that are not "customary" in your home?
Is there a list of what is and what isn't customary? Is the list the same for the entire country, or does it differ from town to town?
Hahaha, "land of the free"!
And even birds create art
Are you talking about pigeons?
Hey Eliza, can I have some better porn, please? And stop talking to me about presidential elections, I'm sick and tired of the subject...
Oh, and *Australia*? Please, like you expect me to believe *that*...
More business running on Linux --> more software needed on Linux. Development on the kernel will be more the concern of those that need new kernel functionality, like hardware builders.
Frankly, were I in charge when the masses came to my palace chanting "FREE ENTERTAINMENT" at the tops of their lungs, I would order my forces to shoot into the crowd indiscriminately on principle.
Really? I would just give it to them. It is much easier to rule a bunch of pathetic couch potatoes who cannot live without their daily fix of celebrities / sports / comedy / whatever.
I wonder what the real world would look like if our rulers did something like that. Oh, wait...
But older stuff is there as well, and you can always choose not to download the newer stuff. When I was young and had no money I didn't buy any games; now that I'm older, have a job, more money, and less time to play games, if something comes out that I want to play I buy it.
But at the same time I'm not paying for 10 or 20 year old games to run under emulation. And those are pretty easy to find as well on torrent sites.