I feel the same way about people that say that not voting is like votin for Bush. I don't get it, in one case I am supporting someone I don't like in the other i support no one. An enemies enemy is not neccesarily my friend.
I remember reading the posts of all the excited/.ers that were going to finally get to play one of the favorites in a new version, MOO3. I think I saw if for $9.99 on the shelf the other day. I didn't buy it. It really is a shame. I did play MOO2 and thought it was pretty cool. I gotta be honest though StarControl is by far my favorite space style game.:)
The more annoying parts of porting tend to be things like UV mapping and how different engines deal with texture space. A good model with good topology (I.E. NO unnecessary star-junctions and absolutely no non-manifold geometry) should carry over just fine with most engines as long as the poly count is low enough and you have it split into quads or triangles depending on the engine. (N-gons can be a bitch, they are generally considered amateurish.)
Being a developer and not the businessman, I cant really tell you if Sony gets pissed if an Xbox game comes out first. All I can tell you for sure is that if a platform co. (MS, Sony, Nintendo, etc.) show interest in a game you are making they may cut you special deals on licensing, invest in your little company, or in the case of MS and Halo, simply buy out the company producing the product to prevent it from reaching other platforms and turn it into a flagship game.
I personally won't work on Xbox projects, my employer knows how I feel about microsfot and doesn't want me putting obscene comments in the maya binary. heh.
Chalk up Ultima 9 and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. I have noticed that EA tends to buy up the small little game companies that have a nice niche of customers, then fire half the develpers and cut the release date in half. As far as I am concerned EA ruined Ultima 9 and I was REALLY looking forward to it.
BTW- it shipped out of the box unwinnable. The game was 100% broken. Worse than that: When they finally released the patch to fix it, some 4 or 6 months after it's release date, the patch only affected NEW games. So therefore the game you have poured all that time into in the meantime was completely fscked and you had to start over. Having read the forums at Origin, it became widely known the EA buying the company had everything to do with the state it was in. I will never buy another EA game again. They ruined something that was truly unique to catch a quick buck on the Holidays. YOu can't even say the development costs were too high because they bought them out in the middle of the project after the engine and many other issues were already past proto.
There are plenty of patents and trade secrets also associated with art. (See Pixar.) However, one could argue that art is simply somthing that stirs an emotion in someone. While music and literature are certainly art, so is the ascii matrix. What if comments in the code contained ascii art. Just little things here and there, would it then be ok to look at GPL code then?
I find Wikipedia's information interesting and thought provoking. The primary use of language is to commuicate something. If I type something in English it is protected speech. If I type it in in a programming language to say, appear on a screen and move around, that is somehow not protected speech. I honestly don't understand how that can be. Perhaps we should amend the constitution to say that all speech is protected as long as a computer isn't interpreting it. What if I type in 1337? Is it code? Is it English? Is it protected speech? If I use a paragraph tag in my post, am I protected under the first amendment? It's HTML. It's... code. What happens if I use the mailto: link in an office document? Is my speech free?
I honestly cannot fathom how code isn't considered free speach. I am not saying it shouldn't be copyrightable or protecable. All I am saying is that is has to be speech if the author intends it to be. Last question. What if I write out code in a notebook? It's not being interpreted by a machine, but it's code. Is it protected? Where can we possibly draw the line of this?
If that is the case, perhaps the next president will see to it that the software industry gets regulated. This is long overdue in my opinion. I'm sure the insurance companies agree with me.
Im gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the research isn't free, as it has already been done. It's not like these guys are creating new functions in software, just turning on and off certain values. The auto makers already know the system, they made it. What if the difference between certain "engines" was the software setting on fuel effeciency, rpm, etc etc. If that is the case then these modders are getting something for nothing, and no business likes that. (Unless its promotional.) It's likely that changing a 0 to a 1 is in reality simple, but to the dealers its a "2000 dollar upgrade". I can't say I know this for sure, but it seems very likely in my life experience.
If I can build the super and the premium widgets for the same cost, yet sell them for different amounts I am doing very well. Typically the 'premium' widget costs so much to manufacture that it is seldom worth building and selling, except for bragging rights. (Anyone remember the 512 MB Voodoo?) If these car compaines can turn the Super into the Premium by flipping a switch rather than remanufacturing... well, that's just smart business.
I sit down on a bus bench near a flourishing Starbucks. The incredibly gorgeous girl next to me is telling her friend how the most important thing in her world right now is getting a nipple shield like JJ. She holds two or three Sak's Fifth Avenue bags in her left hand. Her right hand is positioned so the forefinger and the thumb form a circle, and she has it over her nipple under her shirt. I avert my gaze and look the other way. Just on the other side of the homeless person reading Shakespeare next to me, I see an HP recycles campaign ad on the bus stop window, then a cleverly placed OBEY sticker catches my eye near the vomit and the urine on the sidewalk.
The topic of conversation from the hottie next to me has changed during my musings. Apparently, oxycontin is her new favorite drug, but every time she does it she wakes up someplace she doesn't recognize. For some reason this makes me think of the game Final Fantasy and my eyes glaze over as I am thinking about the game. I get up to go to Egghead and check out new games.
As I walk into the store, I notice right away that the man behind the counter has no forehead. Years of skinless exposure to the open air had turned his skull slightly green, at least in the parts that showed. Most of his nose was also gone, but he had a good half a nostril at least. In a disturbingly nasal voice he advised me that there is a 25% off sale on some game with naked biker chicks, or something like that. For some reason this makes me think of Shakespeare.
I walk out of the store empty handed and strangely hungry. I look for a spot that's cheap, without resorting to fast food. "Tuna pita sounds good", I think to myself as I grab a small bag of cornnuts in the 7-11.
The man behind the counter says that I can't purchase items there the way I am dressed. I asked him if my skull was showing, he said no.
The company, who shall remain nameless, was based in the East Coast and dealt strictly with fortune 500 companies. My coworkers and I were working on 'content' CD's for these companies. We had two delivery methods historically, that was paper and standup. With the rush of the Internet came a nice little VC nestegg of cashola toward brining our company online.
The company did 85% business paper and standup, and 15% online. Dazzled by the online potential, the company severed the 85% part and went fully to online. We hired a flash in the pants new Director of Marketing, who was your typical soccer style guy, but very nice in his defense. He was not necessarily rooted in reality however, and decided that Flash was going to really get this company the attention it deserved.
So they took the new VC money and bought up like 100 employees from all aspects of the business. We had such culture shock that the management team was ineffective at best. I get pissed thinking about it sometimes because I was there before the hiring rush, and once they got the employees they didn't have the work for the new guys yet because of the process. So all these fresh young new faces played Quake 3 Arena from 9 to 5 for $1000 a week. This lasted for about 4 months. I had to work the whole time, and I really really love Quake. Sigh.
So it is decided by the Marketing Director that we are going to use flash for the front end of the "content" (I am being cryptic to protect the peoples I am speaking of.) Because of the sheer complexity of what we were doing, we had a lot of issues to solve. We were constantly trying to figure out how to store varialbes from flash into ram to the database, etc etc. (This was around version 4 of flash, so not as easy as today.) We suggested using Director to really make things stand out, but the MD said no, and had us install Flash Program Main on his computer so he could figure out things like passing variables and other such Marketing mystique.
The main problem here was that the MD and the Art Director (AD) just about hated eachother. The marketing guy had seen some really cool things and wanted to represent them in his product, but the art guy had done so much acid at a Floyd show 20 years ago that he wasn't going to abandon the rainbow idea he had now matter what. (God, it was awful. He literally justified every color of the almost-exact ripoff of Dark Side of the Moon cd cover. And I quote, "The yellow symbolizes the freedom in all of us. It pours freely from the main collective and makes us feel at ease." Jesus H Christ where do they find these people?
The CEO trusted his man the AD, rainbows and all, and told the MD to stick to his shtick, which was of course Marketing. The MD laid down the law during a quarterly company meeting. The Deadhead goes or he goes! Well the CEO told him to STFU and sit the fsck down or else, and the MD just picked up a chair and hucked it at the CEO with all his might. His brother also worked with us as a VP and he stood up to help increase the momentum of the chair on it's way to the CEO. CEO grabs the nearest object (a stapler, not red though) and gives the MD a few good staples to the chin and neck area. I sat nearby and filed doughnut after doughnut into my empty laptop case.
6 months later they laid off everyone they hired plus another 50%. I am not sure how they are now.
That is not my job. That is the job of a secretary.
You only have to train upper management where the templates are. A monkey could do it. I have never heard to a macro using CEO. I don't see how that is relevant. (And you can bet his secretary DOES have the templates.)
I never said that there is no such thing as poorly written and unresponsive software. I did say that I had to use Truespace, in order to demonstrate that point actually. (Which really is a piece of crap compared to other packages.) But I got the job done.
As for a poor craftsman that can't pick his tools, I would say unlucky too. But in reality, seldom do my employers give me the freedom to use whatever I want in projects. (Ok, never is more like it.)
I once had a Marketing Manager who was totally convinced that Flash was going to save our company. Apparently he went to newgrounds.com and thought it was hilarious, so wanted us to switch to using flash to present company products as the front end. He insisted we install the flash program (not plugin) on his machine so he could get inside it right away. For three months he typed his emails up, then pasted them into flash and sent attachments as flash movies for his normal email.
You'd get an email with an attachment that had a 15 second long bouncing ball intro that you couldn't skip, only to be told that you had a meeting in 20 minutes. It was interesting times. Coincidentally, he and his brother got fired after they threw a chair at the CEO during a company meeting, who then in turn stapled one of them 10 or so times in the chest and face. Good times, good times.
There must be some sort of conflict between some drivers or processes in your machine. OO does indeed open slow for today's speed capabilities, but it's still under 4 seconds.
It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools. When I show up for work if the boss says I am working in Maya this week, I work in maya. If it's Studio Max that next week, I work in Max. (Hell, I had to work in TrueSpace once, not so bad once you learn it.) Yeah, they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but the important thing is that I am still able to get the job done, regardless of the renderer/3d engine. If I am able to handle working in different 3d platforms, why is it that 'normal' office users can't do the stupid TPS report in whatever is placed in front of them. It really pisses me off. I have to take college level physics and learn some fundamental AI as an artist, but some business guy can't even learn OO? It's truly a shame.
I am glad I am not the boss of someone who can't handle a different software package. I would be forced to fire them because they are clearly not able to 'grow' on the job. It's my opinion that the first priority is that the job gets done, how it gets done falls in second.
With all due respect, how hard could it be to do "word processor for letters, invoices, fax cover sheets, the occasional mailing label"? It's not rocket science, and doesn't require a huge amount of macros to do. If you can't work in multiple/different softwares, I am sure there is a new-comer college grad who would love your job for less that CAN do it, and will get a kick out of using something that is not the norm.
Wouldn't reverse engineering the virus be illegal under the DMCA? Aren't all antivirus companies technically in violation of DMCA for reverse engineering viruses (virii, whatever) to begin with?
I have actually read the DMCA, but I found it confusing as IANAL. I'm pretty sure thought that reverse engineering is not ok under DMCA. (Or perhaps that was only for copy protection circumvention.)
I wonder how much situations like these have on open source. Seems the obvious thing to do if you love to code and can't do it for money. (And help the world in the process.)
Personally I prefer popups to the evil crap they are pusing at me nowadays. Alpha channeled flash ads that annoyingly cover just what you want to read and most of the time don't have a close box. So many of my old news site have been removed from my bookmarks because of this new trend. At least with a popup I can click the page I wanted and send the bugger to the back, now I actually have to WATCH this crap. Bleh.
That has become standard operating procedure for just about all the games I buy anymore. This SafeDisc protection really hates my system. I don't mind going to game copy world to get the patch though as I legally bought the game as well. Kinda makes the eperience more fun knowing that I have to 'crack' the stupid thing to play it. I know some people get annoying but I think it's funny. I can make the game work ok but the people who make it can't. Asshats.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel the same way about people that say that not voting is like votin for Bush. I don't get it, in one case I am supporting someone I don't like in the other i support no one. An enemies enemy is not neccesarily my friend.
Doesn't an Opera have to be in Italian? WTF?
I remember reading the posts of all the excited /.ers that were going to finally get to play one of the favorites in a new version, MOO3. I think I saw if for $9.99 on the shelf the other day. I didn't buy it. It really is a shame. I did play MOO2 and thought it was pretty cool. I gotta be honest though StarControl is by far my favorite space style game. :)
Being a developer and not the businessman, I cant really tell you if Sony gets pissed if an Xbox game comes out first. All I can tell you for sure is that if a platform co. (MS, Sony, Nintendo, etc.) show interest in a game you are making they may cut you special deals on licensing, invest in your little company, or in the case of MS and Halo, simply buy out the company producing the product to prevent it from reaching other platforms and turn it into a flagship game.
I personally won't work on Xbox projects, my employer knows how I feel about microsfot and doesn't want me putting obscene comments in the maya binary. heh.
Vox
BTW- it shipped out of the box unwinnable. The game was 100% broken. Worse than that: When they finally released the patch to fix it, some 4 or 6 months after it's release date, the patch only affected NEW games. So therefore the game you have poured all that time into in the meantime was completely fscked and you had to start over. Having read the forums at Origin, it became widely known the EA buying the company had everything to do with the state it was in. I will never buy another EA game again. They ruined something that was truly unique to catch a quick buck on the Holidays. YOu can't even say the development costs were too high because they bought them out in the middle of the project after the engine and many other issues were already past proto.
EA is a disgrace.
I find Wikipedia's information interesting and thought provoking. The primary use of language is to commuicate something. If I type something in English it is protected speech. If I type it in in a programming language to say, appear on a screen and move around, that is somehow not protected speech. I honestly don't understand how that can be. Perhaps we should amend the constitution to say that all speech is protected as long as a computer isn't interpreting it. What if I type in 1337? Is it code? Is it English? Is it protected speech? If I use a paragraph tag in my post, am I protected under the first amendment? It's HTML. It's... code. What happens if I use the mailto: link in an office document? Is my speech free?
I honestly cannot fathom how code isn't considered free speach. I am not saying it shouldn't be copyrightable or protecable. All I am saying is that is has to be speech if the author intends it to be. Last question. What if I write out code in a notebook? It's not being interpreted by a machine, but it's code. Is it protected? Where can we possibly draw the line of this?
If that is the case, perhaps the next president will see to it that the software industry gets regulated. This is long overdue in my opinion. I'm sure the insurance companies agree with me.
If I can build the super and the premium widgets for the same cost, yet sell them for different amounts I am doing very well. Typically the 'premium' widget costs so much to manufacture that it is seldom worth building and selling, except for bragging rights. (Anyone remember the 512 MB Voodoo?) If these car compaines can turn the Super into the Premium by flipping a switch rather than remanufacturing... well, that's just smart business.
The topic of conversation from the hottie next to me has changed during my musings. Apparently, oxycontin is her new favorite drug, but every time she does it she wakes up someplace she doesn't recognize. For some reason this makes me think of the game Final Fantasy and my eyes glaze over as I am thinking about the game. I get up to go to Egghead and check out new games.
As I walk into the store, I notice right away that the man behind the counter has no forehead. Years of skinless exposure to the open air had turned his skull slightly green, at least in the parts that showed. Most of his nose was also gone, but he had a good half a nostril at least. In a disturbingly nasal voice he advised me that there is a 25% off sale on some game with naked biker chicks, or something like that. For some reason this makes me think of Shakespeare.
I walk out of the store empty handed and strangely hungry. I look for a spot that's cheap, without resorting to fast food. "Tuna pita sounds good", I think to myself as I grab a small bag of cornnuts in the 7-11. The man behind the counter says that I can't purchase items there the way I am dressed. I asked him if my skull was showing, he said no.
MAC used to use SCSI. Now you can use any old Western Digital type IDE in a MAC np. (SCSI still supported.)
Vox
The company, who shall remain nameless, was based in the East Coast and dealt strictly with fortune 500 companies. My coworkers and I were working on 'content' CD's for these companies. We had two delivery methods historically, that was paper and standup. With the rush of the Internet came a nice little VC nestegg of cashola toward brining our company online.
The company did 85% business paper and standup, and 15% online. Dazzled by the online potential, the company severed the 85% part and went fully to online. We hired a flash in the pants new Director of Marketing, who was your typical soccer style guy, but very nice in his defense. He was not necessarily rooted in reality however, and decided that Flash was going to really get this company the attention it deserved.
So they took the new VC money and bought up like 100 employees from all aspects of the business. We had such culture shock that the management team was ineffective at best. I get pissed thinking about it sometimes because I was there before the hiring rush, and once they got the employees they didn't have the work for the new guys yet because of the process. So all these fresh young new faces played Quake 3 Arena from 9 to 5 for $1000 a week. This lasted for about 4 months. I had to work the whole time, and I really really love Quake. Sigh.
So it is decided by the Marketing Director that we are going to use flash for the front end of the "content" (I am being cryptic to protect the peoples I am speaking of.) Because of the sheer complexity of what we were doing, we had a lot of issues to solve. We were constantly trying to figure out how to store varialbes from flash into ram to the database, etc etc. (This was around version 4 of flash, so not as easy as today.) We suggested using Director to really make things stand out, but the MD said no, and had us install Flash Program Main on his computer so he could figure out things like passing variables and other such Marketing mystique.
The main problem here was that the MD and the Art Director (AD) just about hated eachother. The marketing guy had seen some really cool things and wanted to represent them in his product, but the art guy had done so much acid at a Floyd show 20 years ago that he wasn't going to abandon the rainbow idea he had now matter what. (God, it was awful. He literally justified every color of the almost-exact ripoff of Dark Side of the Moon cd cover. And I quote, "The yellow symbolizes the freedom in all of us. It pours freely from the main collective and makes us feel at ease." Jesus H Christ where do they find these people?
The CEO trusted his man the AD, rainbows and all, and told the MD to stick to his shtick, which was of course Marketing. The MD laid down the law during a quarterly company meeting. The Deadhead goes or he goes! Well the CEO told him to STFU and sit the fsck down or else, and the MD just picked up a chair and hucked it at the CEO with all his might. His brother also worked with us as a VP and he stood up to help increase the momentum of the chair on it's way to the CEO. CEO grabs the nearest object (a stapler, not red though) and gives the MD a few good staples to the chin and neck area. I sat nearby and filed doughnut after doughnut into my empty laptop case.
6 months later they laid off everyone they hired plus another 50%. I am not sure how they are now.
You only have to train upper management where the templates are. A monkey could do it. I have never heard to a macro using CEO. I don't see how that is relevant. (And you can bet his secretary DOES have the templates.)
As for a poor craftsman that can't pick his tools, I would say unlucky too. But in reality, seldom do my employers give me the freedom to use whatever I want in projects. (Ok, never is more like it.)
I think you missed the point. The whole meaning is that a good craftsman can produce good results with a crappy tool. Thank you.
You'd get an email with an attachment that had a 15 second long bouncing ball intro that you couldn't skip, only to be told that you had a meeting in 20 minutes. It was interesting times. Coincidentally, he and his brother got fired after they threw a chair at the CEO during a company meeting, who then in turn stapled one of them 10 or so times in the chest and face. Good times, good times.
It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools. When I show up for work if the boss says I am working in Maya this week, I work in maya. If it's Studio Max that next week, I work in Max. (Hell, I had to work in TrueSpace once, not so bad once you learn it.) Yeah, they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but the important thing is that I am still able to get the job done, regardless of the renderer/3d engine. If I am able to handle working in different 3d platforms, why is it that 'normal' office users can't do the stupid TPS report in whatever is placed in front of them. It really pisses me off. I have to take college level physics and learn some fundamental AI as an artist, but some business guy can't even learn OO? It's truly a shame.
I am glad I am not the boss of someone who can't handle a different software package. I would be forced to fire them because they are clearly not able to 'grow' on the job. It's my opinion that the first priority is that the job gets done, how it gets done falls in second.
With all due respect, how hard could it be to do "word processor for letters, invoices, fax cover sheets, the occasional mailing label"? It's not rocket science, and doesn't require a huge amount of macros to do. If you can't work in multiple/different softwares, I am sure there is a new-comer college grad who would love your job for less that CAN do it, and will get a kick out of using something that is not the norm.
Signed, 24-bit Voxel
Hey thanks a lot! :) Ill look into this, and I do appreciate your reply.
When I uninstalled Norton System Works my kernel got corrupted somehow. I still don't understand why that happened.
I have actually read the DMCA, but I found it confusing as IANAL. I'm pretty sure thought that reverse engineering is not ok under DMCA. (Or perhaps that was only for copy protection circumvention.)
I wonder how much situations like these have on open source. Seems the obvious thing to do if you love to code and can't do it for money. (And help the world in the process.)
Personally I prefer popups to the evil crap they are pusing at me nowadays. Alpha channeled flash ads that annoyingly cover just what you want to read and most of the time don't have a close box. So many of my old news site have been removed from my bookmarks because of this new trend. At least with a popup I can click the page I wanted and send the bugger to the back, now I actually have to WATCH this crap. Bleh.
According to some middle eastern students I know, the porn industry is one of the main reasons that we are hated in the Middle East.
That has become standard operating procedure for just about all the games I buy anymore. This SafeDisc protection really hates my system. I don't mind going to game copy world to get the patch though as I legally bought the game as well. Kinda makes the eperience more fun knowing that I have to 'crack' the stupid thing to play it. I know some people get annoying but I think it's funny. I can make the game work ok but the people who make it can't. Asshats.
Easy there, Bill.