Then the gigantic illogical leap: "Thus any alternative hypothesis I propose is equally viable."
Thats disingenuous. The beliefs of people you or I may disagree with are not formed in any more of a vacuum than our own. In general. Anybody who you believe to be absolutely wrong should never be 'credited' with coming up with a hypothesis you deem incorrect anymore than you should be credited with knowing the right answer. You turn it into a one person versus many issue. The reality of such disagreements is usually just one mass consensus versus another, and that person is just telling you what information they've been handed just the same as you are telling them what information you've been handed.
And then the 'reveal' which is: "So I bet my spiritual guide book could serve as a physics textbook if you interpreted it literally!"
That's just silly. Of course people exist who interpret things that way, but lets not cut off the nose to spite the face. I'm 110% atheist, but the vast majority of those people who pull that 'reveal' have devolved into a kind of detachment from reality that is no different than brilliant disbelievers who fall off the other end, whether it be through political, sexual, or scientific channels. You don't have to believe in God or disbelieve in God to think its counter productive to attempt to portray a weakness for critical thought as being unique to a particular theocracy.
People are a product of what they've been exposed to. Unfortunately, you can't really tell the difference between a normal reasonable person (whatever that means) and somebody you disagree with until you talk to them. Is that any surprise?
Are you suggesting that this is a serious obstacle? Have you never researched a topic before? You discern good information from bad by applying critical thinking and by checking multiple sources and by using some good old-fashioned common sense.
Therein lies your hubris. I'm in your shoes. I know what to look for, I know how to cross reference, I know how to consider the source, etc. What you describe as 'common sense' is a skill, whether you think you learned it or were born with it. Many people don't have it, and won't have it. Many people were not born into a family or environment that can supply it. When you say, in so many words, "Know what you don't know," that in and of itself is knowledge that some people don't have. You want to look down on them for that? Its rather cyclical. What if they don't know how to know what they don't know? That is a way of looking at things that is taught, not simply inherent.
You really seem to have no idea what an even slightly determined human being can do. I assure you, if people wanted to educate themselves and take responsibility for their own actions, they would do it and nothing would stop them.
I know very well what determined people can do. They can be very intelligent, capable human beings like you who are totally naive and honestly believe that thousands of years of people going, "C'mon folks, pull yourselves up by your bootstraps!" just needs another decade of repetition until people stop acting like you think they shouldn't.
I also know that determined people can also be compassionate and realistic and realize that from spreading AIDS to spreading computer viruses, from building cars to crashing them while drunk, the solution isn't simply to proclaim that people choose to end up in the situation they're in.
Your calc teacher is also aware that he doesn't know how to configure the firewall.
You're stupid for even claiming that without knowing if it's true. If his network was ever compromised, would your brain explode, or would you have to fall back and say that hes obviously not smart and probably a shitty calc teacher? My dad has a PHD in atomic physics, and his machine has been blown up a few times. You're making a huge mistake. I have no doubts that you're an intelligent guy, but your approach to your fellow human being is more costly to society than your contribution by virtue of your breadth of knowledge.
How is this a cultural issue? This is life. 600 years ago, you were still dependent on whatever the best information was available on how to spread your sickness or how to build a house without it collapsing on your visitors, or what-have you.
Technology has made it easier to go out and self-educate; it hasn't changed the facts that:
a) you have to be able to discern what is 'correct' information versus 'false' information, even if there is often no actual basis for proving which is which unless you're fairly familiar with the subject matter to begin with b) if you spent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week reading, until you died, you still wouldn't have learned absolutely everything about every subject which directly affects your life and your interactions with society and nature
One would argue that one of the many triumphs of modern democracy and western institutions is acknowledging the 'general will' of society. This permits organized and hopefully representative bodies such as government and private industry to centralize and specialize in the kinds of information and services we apparently (or more like are forced to) depend on. Of course its not perfect, but that is technology. We have better tools for spreading the word, we have better tools for spreading spam. I really don't understand the desire to paint users as people who should know better. It's not a cultural problem, its simply a matter of practicality. I bet my calc teacher didn't know how to properly firewall his computer off; he was just a little too busy learning and teaching calculus, you dig? Education goes hand in hand with preventing fraud, spam, exploitation, etc, but its rather misguided to blame it on some perception that we're in some golden age of consumers being lulled into technocratic submission.
Its a rough industry. 70 hour weeks are no fun only to have somebody say its really simple to make an inventory system.
I agree, his response was rather rude. However, the nut graf of it was correct; everything in games looks easy until you understand that you're trying to fit everything into a fixed amount of ram, with competing systems, long work hours, in an architecture that whoever did the inventory system in didn't design. It wouldn't be a stretch to guess that the inventory screen was so simplistic because they simply budgeted so much memory to the game play that they couldn't afford the additional hit on RAM on a more complex inventory. I've worked on several projects where you need to make ridiculous technical decisions simply because politically, the resources are being politically assigned to better textures, or different loading schemes. The key issue here is you *never* get to page memory to disk in a game, so budgeting your memory use is decided early on, and its a very political affair that involves all departments of a game staff. Combine this with the kind of software you can never release a patch for once you've pressed a zillion DVDs for, feature creep and feature scoping suddenly become a much larger political issue in the development of a game.
All in all, I guess what I'm saying is that its complicated to make a very robust inventory system, and unless it's part of the plans early on, its not the sort of thing you can say, "Oh shit, lets redo that whole thing" 3 months before you release. I'm guessing thats what happened with Mass Effect, especially given the clear focus on interactive cut scenes, audio, and the quality of the graphical presentation. Its the dirty secret of Mass Effect; the actual combat system, and by virtue of that, the inventory management, is not as tight as one would hope.
I've played mass effect, I've coded games, and I can promise you that such a structure would be at least three times as large.
Description, cost, icon, colour (since items with the same skin are colour shaded differently).. and thats just to display the damn thing. Internally, there'd be a lot more simply because items would be a specialized form of a larger abstraction of game assets. Not many games these days are written out of pure C and no abstraction of game asset data structures.
However.. what the hell does any of this have to do with an inventory screen? The complaints were about usability. It doesn't matter how complicated/simple the data is, the issue is that the UI to equip/unequip and manage your items was too simplistic given that as a player, you're switching your inventory items in and out relatively often.
I think they missed out big time on not allowing you to build preset load outs you could switch between, and the button mapping for the control of the inventory screen was unintuitive at best. That has nothing to do with coding; thats an interface design (or possibly just a feature scope) issue.
BTW, you'd be shot on sight for using a character buffer to represent any form of id outside of a debug name for debug builds around here. Why use ("character.weapon.mod1"), a 20 byte string in presumably a 32 byte string buffer for an id?!? It's easy to hand wave, but the devil is in the details, and the same goes for interface design.
The point is not that you can always predict the future, the point is that its grossly erroneous not to get people together who *may* need to become involved as soon as possible. Just because you can't predict the future requirements of a system, are you going to willfully attempt to avoid making a reasonable guess? What company gets away without at least making reasonable educated guesses on the future of their business?
I know a lot of those kinds of posts come off as so much whining, but the reality is that, if and IT dept or a programmer can provide a system 100 times more scalable for only twice or thrice the effort required to create the 'non tech' process, then it is probably worth doing now before the process is outgrown - as it often is, usually at the most inconvenient time. (Usually, when systems are outgrown, they are because you're growing or undergoing change.. possibly the worst time in a company life cycle to be forced to be reactive.)
I'm not so down with the righteous tones many programmers/IT folks make regarding the above point, but it doesn't invalidate the validity of it.
Its easy as fuck not to fall into that trap. Your salary is no place for an ultimatum. Delivering the products and services that do, thats a great place. If what you believe in is true, than being unwilling, too scared, or simply unable to communicate it to your decision makers either makes you a liability, or your management.
If its you, then no worries. If its your management, find another company. Yes, I realize that changing jobs is not always possible, but thats outside the scope of the unrealistic expectations department.
If your deadlines are being created by marketing, I think you're probably misunderstanding something. Marketing has bosses, and their bosses are whoever runs the company, be it a board or a person. Marketing doesn't give a shit when anything comes out. Their dates are provided to them by higher ups. At some point, the folks that run your department and their department meet. Find that source. The marketing department couldn't give less of a shit when something comes out. They just need to know as soon as possible, because.. well, marketing depends on building up interest. If you're having this problem, go to somebody at tell them not to make up dates, but my experience tells me that when engineers or programmers like me are asked to place a date on something, they refuse. So there you have it. Eventually, somebody higher up will try and make an educated decision. It is a good idea to be friends with the folks at your company who are likely to put themselves in the line of fire to provide this date.
Byte alignment is important to debug software.. I'd hate to think of a business software programmer who is unfamiliar with packing, endianess, etc.
Incidentally, high performance software generally has to be maintained a lot less. I'd say a hefty chunk of software refactoring involves having to change a system because some component of the system does not scale. Like going from performing a certain transaction in real time to having to batch operations, cache data, blah blah. I don't know how many times I've come across software where its obvious that the programmer never believed that the code/feature would be used on the scale it is required at the present day.
Thats why I don't have much respect for programmers who completely disregard the performance of their design/software. If their software is part of a particular success story, then its bound to get used much more than it is when they initially design it, so why not design for that success story instead of something that only works right now?
Emotionally underdeveloped. What part of that term implies you're speaking *with* emotion?
I'm saying you're as bad as Zen because you're responses to him seemed to contain about the same amount of maturity. A third party interjecting on a pissing match between emotionally underdeveloped human beings doesn't implicitly descend to their level of immaturity because he chooses to voice his opinion.
So I'll quit when I'm done. I certainly ain't relying on your supposed mastery of circular logic to tell me when that is. I never stated that you were emotional in your post, nor did I say that somebody responding to you is a nitwit, only somebody responding to him. Maybe you can take some consolation from that.
I only said it is of my opinion that you're emotionally undeveloped. You're the one that took the shovel and kept digging.
As far as I can tell, all you demonstrated is that you're emotionally as underdeveloped as Zed is.
Anybody that responds to that nitwit has some issues. According to his own post, I'm happy to see that most employers, from desperate start-ups to Google, are eagerly standing to ignore or low ball his job inquiries.
I'm wondering what kind of person hangs his dirty laundry in a public place, and a good chunk of it revolves around his inability to find work.
You know what I think makes a good coder? Somebody who can work with the way things are, not they way they think they should be.
I don't doubt there are some massive tools in the Ruby community, but there are some massive tools in life. What kind of person wastes so much of their energy and life fighting elements that they clearly can't change? It's a waste of a brain, and to wit, maybe not as brilliant a brain as it imagines itself to be.
What kind of thankless nitwit turns down a junior job at Google and bemoans giving cut rate deals to nobodies under the condition that the money is payed ASAP?
Eat some humble pie, kiddo, and get a hobby that doesn't involve trying to be awesome. Maybe, like.. programming for somebody at a company? What a thankless twit.. the best revenge is to live well, not to program for 21 years before dropping a missive that sounds like it was written by a 21 year old to be dropped on XBoxLive voice chat at 3am.
Cripes, I can hear folks tremble at the thought of him becoming more active in some of the other communities.
You dumbass, the link you pointed at is making use of the accelerometers, not the IR cam. It must rock to be too stupid to know how pointless your input is.
Just to expand on that a little. As you point out, everyone knows Coke exists and has probably tried one, so touting competitive advantages Coke has against competing products is marketing dollars not so well spent. So they engage in branding. That is the goal of imprinting some sort of emotional association on somebody, usually targeted towards a particular scenario.
For instance, the "3 Hour Meeting" ad is an attempt to create an associating between the work place and ones enjoyment of a Coke. The goal of branding is generally to influence the ways people relate or associate in a positive manner with a product or brand, with the goal of, as you stated, increasing the consumption of a product or utilization of a service.
What you have describe is "game design". You design a game, and it has X gameplay mechnics by the time you have access to them all.
Level design is a separate discipline entirely. It's about taking the game design, and crafting progression within those limitations.
These cliches you're talking about are more along the lines of game design cliches, which forces the land of level design to introduce gameplay elements at a rate which feels challenging, but not overwhelming, impossibly, or narratively nonsensical to the gamer.
The best level designers can take a game with a very very small set of mechanics, such as portal, and turn it into a set of puzzles that are fun to play while you learn to exploit the gameplay mechanics.
In platformers (which is really the genre you're talking about), there are usually a ton of mechanics, and so its also quite tricky to present them in a way where you don't blow you're entire budget on creating levels that simply bring the player up to speed.
I think Galaxies did a marvelous job of that. The "this is how you do that" moments of the game are absolutely minute compared to the, "oh sweet, I can apply that knowledge in this non-obvious obstacle puzzle" moments. Sure there are fire levels, ice levels, yadda yadda, but game design is building the car. Level design is presenting you with fun places to drive it.
No, because even games with awesome stories and plots with really overt political overtones make super shitty sources of brain food. If you really care about games, who cares about the plot?
This is an industry which requires a certain buy in to the concept of, "Our enemies must be killed, but only if you're having fun doing it."
Call me when a game puts you in the shoes of a poor arabic boy who kills the shit out of those Americans. A game possibly critical of western civilization? It won't sell, and not because you can't make a kick ass game with an equally derivative plotline.
But you can't produce something meant specifically for entertainment and then balk when people don't "get it".
Sure you can. Being brainlessly entertained is just accepting the subtext of the setting of the game as a cultural truth. Take any brainless game when you were an American soldier ripping the shit out of nazis, and just flip the narrative to be sympathetic to nazis. The game would be equally fun, from a gameplay perspective, but suddenly, you'd experience massive congitive dissonance based on a plot you would perceive as being political.
Suddenly, the game would be trying to hammer you over the head with the fact that the Nazis were so awesome, and yet, so many games are set in a situation where you already implicitly agree with the political context that you just don't react to it.
Lets be honest here; games are a visualization of some kind of button pushing reflex game. Its dressed up to suit the axioms of its consumers to sell more games. It's no wonder that if you want to sell a videogame in Germany you can't have dialog that says "Nazi". Suddenly, a brainless game would have politically overt overtones to them.
If you wan't to stop thinking, stop thinking. If a videogame pisses you off because you feel its being too 'preachy' then keep playing, and ignore the preaching. Like you imply, its a game. I'd hate to think what you do when you do try and so things that make you think if a videogame plot or dialog pisses you off.
I've been to New Zealand, and it is a beautiful country filled with awesome people.
That having been said, the website you quote in your sig is so full of poor spelling that by the time I got to "You don't need to be a climate scientist to understand what is happening," I started to feel sorry for whoever was maintaining the site. Its a site that refutes the overwhelming conclusions of the entire branch of climatology and it says, "Hey, you don't have to be an expert on this stuff to realize its a total sham."
I suppose you don't have to be an expert on the conspiracy of global warming to understand what is happening with respect to that as well, right? Forget the blog, forget the inability to spell by its maintainer(s).. you should try and avoid being an expert in anything! More taxes are evil, less taxes are awesome. Thats all you have to believe in if you choose to be a complete tool.
Jesus Christ, what kind of person would choose to link to a site about a topic unrelated to taxes that references taxes in its masthead?
What are you talking about? Nukes dont exist to kill people, they exist to destroy infrastructure. The nuclear threat, as it was used was to destroy tactical military targets, not cause maximal human casualty lists.
Unmanned drones don't do that unless they can deliver a nuke payload. If you want them to selectively take out individual targets, which seems way more feasible in the short term, you're not doing anything to destroy an enemy's capacity to keep fighting. You're just building resentment against folks who are being killed by proxy aggression.
Replace Norton AV with any OS/firewall/etc on the planet. Software packages have bugs. The original poster was saying its stupid to trust a website supplying executable code, implying that the executable code could contain a Trojan in a way that software you run on internet connected machines could not. You think you're smart for pointing out that virtually any software package on the planet is exploitable? Thats not smart, thats obvious. Hell, thats the point of my post. The obvious thing that seems to elude your grasp is that the parent poster wasn't willing to concede is that by the same token, everything you run is exploitable as soon as you plug the cable in, and that certain software is more trustworthy by way of the source. You use the software you think is best intentioned, and best written, but suggesting that downloading executables from the internet is inherently more dangerous than using your browser or email client online is tantamount to saying, "Hello, I don't understand how computers work."
In a way, you proved my point. Norton AV is a pile of shit as an anti-virus package, but the virus didn't come *from* the executable; it was a vector in the same way Firefox and IE has been, never mind operating systems and their packaged daemons. My point was, counter to what the gp suggested, you are FORCED to trust suppliers of code and data if you connect to the internet, in so far as you're forced to trust a hell of a lot more things in life than who writes the software for your PC.
If you can't trust anybody, you have to curl up in a corner and hope the people you don't trust don't bust through your door while you're busy trying to die.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had some friends with X-Arcade sticks. They told me they break way too easily if you're playing fighting games.
I just ordered this. I've been lead to believe its more durable. However, it does cost a little more.
that therefore they are just as capable of refining this skill as I am
Nope. Thats hubris, right there, defined.
I know what you mean but:
Then the gigantic illogical leap: "Thus any alternative hypothesis I propose is equally viable."
Thats disingenuous. The beliefs of people you or I may disagree with are not formed in any more of a vacuum than our own. In general. Anybody who you believe to be absolutely wrong should never be 'credited' with coming up with a hypothesis you deem incorrect anymore than you should be credited with knowing the right answer. You turn it into a one person versus many issue. The reality of such disagreements is usually just one mass consensus versus another, and that person is just telling you what information they've been handed just the same as you are telling them what information you've been handed.
And then the 'reveal' which is: "So I bet my spiritual guide book could serve as a physics textbook if you interpreted it literally!"
That's just silly. Of course people exist who interpret things that way, but lets not cut off the nose to spite the face. I'm 110% atheist, but the vast majority of those people who pull that 'reveal' have devolved into a kind of detachment from reality that is no different than brilliant disbelievers who fall off the other end, whether it be through political, sexual, or scientific channels. You don't have to believe in God or disbelieve in God to think its counter productive to attempt to portray a weakness for critical thought as being unique to a particular theocracy.
People are a product of what they've been exposed to. Unfortunately, you can't really tell the difference between a normal reasonable person (whatever that means) and somebody you disagree with until you talk to them. Is that any surprise?
Are you suggesting that this is a serious obstacle? Have you never researched a topic before? You discern good information from bad by applying critical thinking and by checking multiple sources and by using some good old-fashioned common sense.
Therein lies your hubris. I'm in your shoes. I know what to look for, I know how to cross reference, I know how to consider the source, etc. What you describe as 'common sense' is a skill, whether you think you learned it or were born with it. Many people don't have it, and won't have it. Many people were not born into a family or environment that can supply it. When you say, in so many words, "Know what you don't know," that in and of itself is knowledge that some people don't have. You want to look down on them for that? Its rather cyclical. What if they don't know how to know what they don't know? That is a way of looking at things that is taught, not simply inherent.
You really seem to have no idea what an even slightly determined human being can do. I assure you, if people wanted to educate themselves and take responsibility for their own actions, they would do it and nothing would stop them.
I know very well what determined people can do. They can be very intelligent, capable human beings like you who are totally naive and honestly believe that thousands of years of people going, "C'mon folks, pull yourselves up by your bootstraps!" just needs another decade of repetition until people stop acting like you think they shouldn't.
I also know that determined people can also be compassionate and realistic and realize that from spreading AIDS to spreading computer viruses, from building cars to crashing them while drunk, the solution isn't simply to proclaim that people choose to end up in the situation they're in.
Your calc teacher is also aware that he doesn't know how to configure the firewall.
You're stupid for even claiming that without knowing if it's true. If his network was ever compromised, would your brain explode, or would you have to fall back and say that hes obviously not smart and probably a shitty calc teacher? My dad has a PHD in atomic physics, and his machine has been blown up a few times. You're making a huge mistake. I have no doubts that you're an intelligent guy, but your approach to your fellow human being is more costly to society than your contribution by virtue of your breadth of knowledge.
How is this a cultural issue? This is life. 600 years ago, you were still dependent on whatever the best information was available on how to spread your sickness or how to build a house without it collapsing on your visitors, or what-have you.
Technology has made it easier to go out and self-educate; it hasn't changed the facts that:
a) you have to be able to discern what is 'correct' information versus 'false' information, even if there is often no actual basis for proving which is which unless you're fairly familiar with the subject matter to begin with
b) if you spent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week reading, until you died, you still wouldn't have learned absolutely everything about every subject which directly affects your life and your interactions with society and nature
One would argue that one of the many triumphs of modern democracy and western institutions is acknowledging the 'general will' of society. This permits organized and hopefully representative bodies such as government and private industry to centralize and specialize in the kinds of information and services we apparently (or more like are forced to) depend on. Of course its not perfect, but that is technology. We have better tools for spreading the word, we have better tools for spreading spam. I really don't understand the desire to paint users as people who should know better. It's not a cultural problem, its simply a matter of practicality. I bet my calc teacher didn't know how to properly firewall his computer off; he was just a little too busy learning and teaching calculus, you dig? Education goes hand in hand with preventing fraud, spam, exploitation, etc, but its rather misguided to blame it on some perception that we're in some golden age of consumers being lulled into technocratic submission.
Its a rough industry. 70 hour weeks are no fun only to have somebody say its really simple to make an inventory system.
I agree, his response was rather rude. However, the nut graf of it was correct; everything in games looks easy until you understand that you're trying to fit everything into a fixed amount of ram, with competing systems, long work hours, in an architecture that whoever did the inventory system in didn't design. It wouldn't be a stretch to guess that the inventory screen was so simplistic because they simply budgeted so much memory to the game play that they couldn't afford the additional hit on RAM on a more complex inventory. I've worked on several projects where you need to make ridiculous technical decisions simply because politically, the resources are being politically assigned to better textures, or different loading schemes. The key issue here is you *never* get to page memory to disk in a game, so budgeting your memory use is decided early on, and its a very political affair that involves all departments of a game staff. Combine this with the kind of software you can never release a patch for once you've pressed a zillion DVDs for, feature creep and feature scoping suddenly become a much larger political issue in the development of a game.
All in all, I guess what I'm saying is that its complicated to make a very robust inventory system, and unless it's part of the plans early on, its not the sort of thing you can say, "Oh shit, lets redo that whole thing" 3 months before you release. I'm guessing thats what happened with Mass Effect, especially given the clear focus on interactive cut scenes, audio, and the quality of the graphical presentation. Its the dirty secret of Mass Effect; the actual combat system, and by virtue of that, the inventory management, is not as tight as one would hope.
That and we sometimes wonder what it would be like to fling poo...
;)
Well, there's always the option of becoming a Perl developer.
I've played mass effect, I've coded games, and I can promise you that such a structure would be at least three times as large.
.. and thats just to display the damn thing. Internally, there'd be a lot more simply because items would be a specialized form of a larger abstraction of game assets. Not many games these days are written out of pure C and no abstraction of game asset data structures.
.. what the hell does any of this have to do with an inventory screen? The complaints were about usability. It doesn't matter how complicated/simple the data is, the issue is that the UI to equip/unequip and manage your items was too simplistic given that as a player, you're switching your inventory items in and out relatively often.
Description, cost, icon, colour (since items with the same skin are colour shaded differently)
However
I think they missed out big time on not allowing you to build preset load outs you could switch between, and the button mapping for the control of the inventory screen was unintuitive at best. That has nothing to do with coding; thats an interface design (or possibly just a feature scope) issue.
BTW, you'd be shot on sight for using a character buffer to represent any form of id outside of a debug name for debug builds around here. Why use ("character.weapon.mod1"), a 20 byte string in presumably a 32 byte string buffer for an id?!? It's easy to hand wave, but the devil is in the details, and the same goes for interface design.
The point is not that you can always predict the future, the point is that its grossly erroneous not to get people together who *may* need to become involved as soon as possible. Just because you can't predict the future requirements of a system, are you going to willfully attempt to avoid making a reasonable guess? What company gets away without at least making reasonable educated guesses on the future of their business?
.. possibly the worst time in a company life cycle to be forced to be reactive.)
I know a lot of those kinds of posts come off as so much whining, but the reality is that, if and IT dept or a programmer can provide a system 100 times more scalable for only twice or thrice the effort required to create the 'non tech' process, then it is probably worth doing now before the process is outgrown - as it often is, usually at the most inconvenient time. (Usually, when systems are outgrown, they are because you're growing or undergoing change
I'm not so down with the righteous tones many programmers/IT folks make regarding the above point, but it doesn't invalidate the validity of it.
Its easy as fuck not to fall into that trap. Your salary is no place for an ultimatum. Delivering the products and services that do, thats a great place. If what you believe in is true, than being unwilling, too scared, or simply unable to communicate it to your decision makers either makes you a liability, or your management.
.. well, marketing depends on building up interest. If you're having this problem, go to somebody at tell them not to make up dates, but my experience tells me that when engineers or programmers like me are asked to place a date on something, they refuse. So there you have it. Eventually, somebody higher up will try and make an educated decision. It is a good idea to be friends with the folks at your company who are likely to put themselves in the line of fire to provide this date.
If its you, then no worries. If its your management, find another company. Yes, I realize that changing jobs is not always possible, but thats outside the scope of the unrealistic expectations department.
If your deadlines are being created by marketing, I think you're probably misunderstanding something. Marketing has bosses, and their bosses are whoever runs the company, be it a board or a person. Marketing doesn't give a shit when anything comes out. Their dates are provided to them by higher ups. At some point, the folks that run your department and their department meet. Find that source. The marketing department couldn't give less of a shit when something comes out. They just need to know as soon as possible, because
I don't think an office is unreasonable for anyone.
Sweet, point me to the next building with 200 offices for 200 programmers.
When it comes to 200 lines of code, if you can't think like an engineer or an architect, you should not be a programmer.
Byte alignment is important to debug software .. I'd hate to think of a business software programmer who is unfamiliar with packing, endianess, etc.
Incidentally, high performance software generally has to be maintained a lot less. I'd say a hefty chunk of software refactoring involves having to change a system because some component of the system does not scale. Like going from performing a certain transaction in real time to having to batch operations, cache data, blah blah. I don't know how many times I've come across software where its obvious that the programmer never believed that the code/feature would be used on the scale it is required at the present day.
Thats why I don't have much respect for programmers who completely disregard the performance of their design/software. If their software is part of a particular success story, then its bound to get used much more than it is when they initially design it, so why not design for that success story instead of something that only works right now?
Emotionally underdeveloped. What part of that term implies you're speaking *with* emotion?
I'm saying you're as bad as Zen because you're responses to him seemed to contain about the same amount of maturity. A third party interjecting on a pissing match between emotionally underdeveloped human beings doesn't implicitly descend to their level of immaturity because he chooses to voice his opinion.
So I'll quit when I'm done. I certainly ain't relying on your supposed mastery of circular logic to tell me when that is. I never stated that you were emotional in your post, nor did I say that somebody responding to you is a nitwit, only somebody responding to him. Maybe you can take some consolation from that.
I only said it is of my opinion that you're emotionally undeveloped. You're the one that took the shovel and kept digging.
As far as I can tell, all you demonstrated is that you're emotionally as underdeveloped as Zed is.
Anybody that responds to that nitwit has some issues. According to his own post, I'm happy to see that most employers, from desperate start-ups to Google, are eagerly standing to ignore or low ball his job inquiries.
I'm wondering what kind of person hangs his dirty laundry in a public place, and a good chunk of it revolves around his inability to find work.
.. programming for somebody at a company? What a thankless twit .. the best revenge is to live well, not to program for 21 years before dropping a missive that sounds like it was written by a 21 year old to be dropped on XBoxLive voice chat at 3am.
You know what I think makes a good coder? Somebody who can work with the way things are, not they way they think they should be.
I don't doubt there are some massive tools in the Ruby community, but there are some massive tools in life. What kind of person wastes so much of their energy and life fighting elements that they clearly can't change? It's a waste of a brain, and to wit, maybe not as brilliant a brain as it imagines itself to be.
What kind of thankless nitwit turns down a junior job at Google and bemoans giving cut rate deals to nobodies under the condition that the money is payed ASAP?
Eat some humble pie, kiddo, and get a hobby that doesn't involve trying to be awesome. Maybe, like
Cripes, I can hear folks tremble at the thought of him becoming more active in some of the other communities.
You dumbass, the link you pointed at is making use of the accelerometers, not the IR cam. It must rock to be too stupid to know how pointless your input is.
Just to expand on that a little. As you point out, everyone knows Coke exists and has probably tried one, so touting competitive advantages Coke has against competing products is marketing dollars not so well spent. So they engage in branding. That is the goal of imprinting some sort of emotional association on somebody, usually targeted towards a particular scenario.
For instance, the "3 Hour Meeting" ad is an attempt to create an associating between the work place and ones enjoyment of a Coke. The goal of branding is generally to influence the ways people relate or associate in a positive manner with a product or brand, with the goal of, as you stated, increasing the consumption of a product or utilization of a service.
You know, the Quake mod.
Totally agree.
Bonus points for playing MegaTF
MegaTF was a blight upon the awesomeness that was stock Q1TF.
What you have describe is "game design". You design a game, and it has X gameplay mechnics by the time you have access to them all.
Level design is a separate discipline entirely. It's about taking the game design, and crafting progression within those limitations.
These cliches you're talking about are more along the lines of game design cliches, which forces the land of level design to introduce gameplay elements at a rate which feels challenging, but not overwhelming, impossibly, or narratively nonsensical to the gamer.
The best level designers can take a game with a very very small set of mechanics, such as portal, and turn it into a set of puzzles that are fun to play while you learn to exploit the gameplay mechanics.
In platformers (which is really the genre you're talking about), there are usually a ton of mechanics, and so its also quite tricky to present them in a way where you don't blow you're entire budget on creating levels that simply bring the player up to speed.
I think Galaxies did a marvelous job of that. The "this is how you do that" moments of the game are absolutely minute compared to the, "oh sweet, I can apply that knowledge in this non-obvious obstacle puzzle" moments. Sure there are fire levels, ice levels, yadda yadda, but game design is building the car. Level design is presenting you with fun places to drive it.
No, because even games with awesome stories and plots with really overt political overtones make super shitty sources of brain food. If you really care about games, who cares about the plot?
This is an industry which requires a certain buy in to the concept of, "Our enemies must be killed, but only if you're having fun doing it."
Call me when a game puts you in the shoes of a poor arabic boy who kills the shit out of those Americans. A game possibly critical of western civilization? It won't sell, and not because you can't make a kick ass game with an equally derivative plotline.
But you can't produce something meant specifically for entertainment and then balk when people don't "get it".
Sure you can. Being brainlessly entertained is just accepting the subtext of the setting of the game as a cultural truth. Take any brainless game when you were an American soldier ripping the shit out of nazis, and just flip the narrative to be sympathetic to nazis. The game would be equally fun, from a gameplay perspective, but suddenly, you'd experience massive congitive dissonance based on a plot you would perceive as being political.
Suddenly, the game would be trying to hammer you over the head with the fact that the Nazis were so awesome, and yet, so many games are set in a situation where you already implicitly agree with the political context that you just don't react to it.
Lets be honest here; games are a visualization of some kind of button pushing reflex game. Its dressed up to suit the axioms of its consumers to sell more games. It's no wonder that if you want to sell a videogame in Germany you can't have dialog that says "Nazi". Suddenly, a brainless game would have politically overt overtones to them.
If you wan't to stop thinking, stop thinking. If a videogame pisses you off because you feel its being too 'preachy' then keep playing, and ignore the preaching. Like you imply, its a game. I'd hate to think what you do when you do try and so things that make you think if a videogame plot or dialog pisses you off.
I've been to New Zealand, and it is a beautiful country filled with awesome people.
.. you should try and avoid being an expert in anything! More taxes are evil, less taxes are awesome. Thats all you have to believe in if you choose to be a complete tool.
That having been said, the website you quote in your sig is so full of poor spelling that by the time I got to "You don't need to be a climate scientist to understand what is happening," I started to feel sorry for whoever was maintaining the site. Its a site that refutes the overwhelming conclusions of the entire branch of climatology and it says, "Hey, you don't have to be an expert on this stuff to realize its a total sham."
I suppose you don't have to be an expert on the conspiracy of global warming to understand what is happening with respect to that as well, right? Forget the blog, forget the inability to spell by its maintainer(s)
Jesus Christ, what kind of person would choose to link to a site about a topic unrelated to taxes that references taxes in its masthead?
What are you talking about? Nukes dont exist to kill people, they exist to destroy infrastructure. The nuclear threat, as it was used was to destroy tactical military targets, not cause maximal human casualty lists.
Unmanned drones don't do that unless they can deliver a nuke payload. If you want them to selectively take out individual targets, which seems way more feasible in the short term, you're not doing anything to destroy an enemy's capacity to keep fighting. You're just building resentment against folks who are being killed by proxy aggression.
I think you mean a lot of lives on one side of a conflict.
Replace Norton AV with any OS/firewall/etc on the planet. Software packages have bugs. The original poster was saying its stupid to trust a website supplying executable code, implying that the executable code could contain a Trojan in a way that software you run on internet connected machines could not. You think you're smart for pointing out that virtually any software package on the planet is exploitable? Thats not smart, thats obvious. Hell, thats the point of my post. The obvious thing that seems to elude your grasp is that the parent poster wasn't willing to concede is that by the same token, everything you run is exploitable as soon as you plug the cable in, and that certain software is more trustworthy by way of the source. You use the software you think is best intentioned, and best written, but suggesting that downloading executables from the internet is inherently more dangerous than using your browser or email client online is tantamount to saying, "Hello, I don't understand how computers work."
In a way, you proved my point. Norton AV is a pile of shit as an anti-virus package, but the virus didn't come *from* the executable; it was a vector in the same way Firefox and IE has been, never mind operating systems and their packaged daemons. My point was, counter to what the gp suggested, you are FORCED to trust suppliers of code and data if you connect to the internet, in so far as you're forced to trust a hell of a lot more things in life than who writes the software for your PC.
If you can't trust anybody, you have to curl up in a corner and hope the people you don't trust don't bust through your door while you're busy trying to die.