I'm pretty much a "turn the other cheek" kind of guy. I'm also a fan of "do unto others", by which they're just begging for us to be nasty to them.
Oh, the internal turmoil.
I don't get enough spam to anger me to the level that I'd participate in something like this. That said, if spam were a real problem for me I'd probably give it more than a second thought. If a spammer wants to piss off how many thousands of people regularly in order to make a bit of cash, he'd better damn well be ready to deal with it if those thousands of people decide to smack his servers with some extra bits. Likewise with any company who hires a spammer as a publicist.
I'm not sure it's immoral. Is it immoral for people to band together to fight something that's been shitting on them for years? Spam's obviously not as bad as taxation without representation or slavery or something, but it's not as though DDOS attacks are as bad as artillery fire and bombs, either.
As for illegal, what's right and wrong isn't right or wrong because someone up the food chain tells you so. Maybe they're right, or maybe they're full of shit and/or money. If it is illegal though, that's one more thing I've got to weigh if I consider doing this. Am I so upset at spammers that I'd go to jail for fighting them? "That's illegal" is just part of the question, not the answer.
In utilitarian terms, obviously a DDOS doesn't do good to anybody. The idea is, now the spammer can't spam for a while, or the business decides hiring a spammer was a bad idea and drops it. Either way, the distributed and continual negatives of irritation, server clogging, and other harmful side-effects of spam are reduced, more than enough to justify the pain of a spammer's smoking server. Is that right? Hell if I know. But if I were getting a million spams a day instead of a dozen a week, if spam had brought my mailserver to its knees or made my other accounts unusuable, I'd probably have a pretty strong opinion.
Yeah, this beast would be hella expensive at the moment, and whether OLEDs or e-Ink or some other wacky thing would wind up being the way to go is still not clear (to my ignorant self, anyway), but I think it's too good an idea to write off.
I've been pissed off at keyboards ever since it got hard to find one without stupid windows keys on it. On those grounds alone it would be cool to use something like this. But more seriously, some of my favourite and most-used programs are Emacs, the Gimp, and Blender, all of which have tons of wacky keyboard shortcuts, often more than my little brain can remember if it's been too long since the last time I used some given function.
There are plenty of fancy keyboards upwards of $100 out there today, and while most people would just as soon have the manufacturer-bundled freebie or some cheapo board and keep the extra cash, something like this could change that pretty quickly. I doubt many people would pay much higher than that; for all my interest I don't think I would. But once the right technologies get cheap enough to make this sort of thing possible, I would think it could easily become the next big thing in input devices. I'm spoiled with my scroll-wheel-equipped, optical mice and hate using any mouse without those things, and if/when I get spoiled with a keyboard like that, I'll similarly never want to go back to anything less.
In any case it's a better idea than my old dreamed-up keyboard innovation: analog keys. Tap as usual for normal operation, or mash harder for the repeat rate to go up. Mostly handy for the arrow keys and backspace I suppose, but it would be nifty in games too.
Well how about that.:^) Thanks for the info. You don't happen to know of any card faster than the Radeon 9200 that's supported by Free-as-in-speech drivers, do you? That coupled with my cheapness has kept me using those trusty old things all this time...
That's pretty interesting. I don't know that I would especially want any current government to control most or all of the LaGrange points.
I'm a US citizen, but am so embarassed by the current trends and administration that I wouldn't dare support putting the US in an even more powerful position.
At the same time, China has such a lack of respect for its own citizens that I have a hard time believeing they'd do anything for the greater good if their power expanded into space. So far, better the US than China; still with you.
I know as much about India as most citizens of the US: next to nothing. As some other/.ers have pointed out though, neither China nor India has as much capacity space-wise as the US or Russia, and would have an insane amount of catching up to do if they wanted to be in the running in another space race.
Russia, though, is in an interesting position. Very wary of the destructive power of government corruption (not that it's been eradicated, but they're cautious of it where we ignorantly embrace it in the US) and probably just about as good a candidate as any to hold real weight in space (bad pun, sorry). But again it's not like I know a great deal about Russian government, its organization, or how I could expect it to behave were it to gain control of key points in near space.
So I'm not sure I agree or not. Maybe it's a case of better the US than Country XYZ, but maybe not. I'm not alone in thinking it would be great if the squabbling among countries and powers would disappear, but everyone has their own (often destructive) ideas of how that could/should come about.
I would love to see some real activity in the space program (The Mars rovers are great, don't get me wrong, I'm just fascinated by space activity and would love to see we as human beings do more of it) and if history has anything to say about it, it will probably be military strategy like this that motivates us to really get in gear. Isn't that always the way, doing potentially good things for potentially horrible reasons.
I'm with you. When the original Doom hit, you could run it pretty comfortably on mediocre hardware. It would run better on top-of-the-line stuff, sure, but it was no less fun at half resolution or in a slightly bordered window.
Part of that, I think, was that its big fancy new "3D" graphics were done through really clever software tricks, taking advantage of the 386's general-purpose nature. Of course, nowadays we've got specialized 3D processing hardware as a given in any machine that's going to be used for gaming. That started out as a great thing, giving us the ability to see Quake in high resolution, but has now become something that limits the way graphics are done. Clever software tricks for rendering NURBS or funky new camera styles or the like don't map to the functions presented in 3D acceleration hardware, or if they do, they map only to the highest-end boards out there.
Even if it ran on my Radeon 9200 (I guess I don't know that it doesn't, but it's an old card so I never tried) I would probably complain about the darkness. So there are reasons lined up for folks like us why Doom 3 never really had a chance.
It's really too bad. I'd have loved to see a relatively low-tech Doom 3 (think the original Unreal Tournament in terms of polygon count etc) that had the excellent level design and hoards of baddies of Doom 1 and 2. With something like that, I think ID could have gotten away with having no head shots or the occasional not-enough-ammo situation. But what do I know, I'm just a gamer. Gamers don't know what we want, right?;^)
Yeah, I didn't explain that too well.:^) I certainly could have stuck with Red Hat. There was more to it than being pissed off at RPMs though.
I was still a relative newbie to GNU/Linux. I was using RPMs as a crutch, which led to extra irritation when they didn't work correctly. I thought that by presenting myself with a sink-or-swim situation, I'd force myself to get to the point where I knew what the heck was going on and would no longer use or need any crutches. Slackware jumped out at me as a good sink-or-swim type of distro, with a traditional system layout and no fancy packaging tools I could wuss out and fall back on. Even now I prefer building stuff to installing binaries someone else has built. (Dumb psychological thing.) It's probably time for me to move on to Gentoo or some such distro, but I've gotten sort of attached to good ol' no-magic Slackware. Someday I might decide it's not worth the time to build everything from source, and I'll use a Red Hat, SuSE, or Mandrake type rig again. I just use what suits my needs and what I'm comfortable with. That I picked Slackware way back when and stuck with it all this time was just a crap shoot. It could have been Debian or whatever else. Heh, Caldera was even one I looked into. That would have made for a neat ride.
Steering this tangent back a little towards on-topic, if I was a newbie in this day and age, I'd probably still find myself frustrated from time to time by package management systems (on any newbie-friendly distro), but more importantly I'm still the type of geek who isn't satisfied with myself if there's magic going on behind the scenes that I don't understand at all and couldn't fix....At least in software. Ask me to rebuild my car's engine and I'll have no clue.;^)
...I have to praise NLD. I'm a Novell employee.:^)
Way back when, I used Red Hat as my first serious GNU/Linux rig. I'm glad I did, it was well suited for teaching me the ropes, and my buddies knew it, at least moreso than they knew any other distro. Of course, that was a different time, Red Hat was the undisputed king of distros. Eventually I ran out of patience for RPM hell, which I'm sure has gotten much better in recent years. I wound up taking a deep breath and diving into Slackware, where I knew I'd basically be on my own. I love it, I love basically building everything myself. I should try one of these new-fangled Gentoo type distros that promise to do the grunt work for me.
At work, of course, it's SuSE and NLD, and I'm honestly very impressed with both. SuSE's my weapon of choice as a developer, but it's not hard for me to understand NLD's high marks in terms of usability and as a general Windows-replacement OS.
I'm obviously biased, and I haven't even touched a Red Hat distro in some time, apart from a short fling with Fedora on some spare hardware. And it's not as though the stuff coming out of Red Hat's been getting bad press either, both Red Hat and Novell's offerings to the business world have been really solid lately from the sounds of it. It's probably little more than a matter of taste right now. Novell obviously hopes to shift that and do some very big things in the desktop space, and I think we will. So my knee-jerk recommendation stands; Novell's not going to let you down if you're looking for a solid GNU/Linux OS but don't have any experience with such things.
Just don't let those of us with flamethrowers influence your decision.:^)
It's from an old idea I had and was looking for an excuse to teach myself SDL, which some buddies and I had chosen for a much more ambitious game we're still working on.
We chose SDL primarily because it is cross-platform. I use and develop under GNU/Linux myself, but I want all my windows-running buddies to be able to play my games. OSX and even DreamCast porting is trivial, as SDL happily runs on those platforms and many more. http://www.libsdl.org/ SDL is very well documented and very slick to use, even to a newcomer (so long as you do have some programming experience). I'm a C and C++ guy, and SDL works with those natively, but if you wish to stick with Java or any other such language there are appropriate bindings. I highly recommend the libraries SDL_image and SDL_mixer as well, for boosting image and sound loading support. (I love being able to have my game just load up.png and.ogg files directly... it just feels all warm and fuzzy:^)
I subscribe to master Miyamoto's game design theories, which basically amount to making your game into its own little playground, running on its own rules and rewarding the player for being clever. Keep the controls simple; a person should be able to pick up and play. Now, my game Tong is pretty rough at first, so I maybe don't follow this thinking very well in practice, but the philosophy is an implementation of the old "Keep It Simple, Stupid" that you've heard so often and I think it's very sensible. Especially for budding game developers.
Even with a well-documented API and a clear idea of what you want your game to be, it's going to take a while. Get a demo of "stuff happening on-screen" with mock-up graphics to get a feel for how you're going to render things, then trash the whole thing and start building up all the pieces you need. If your strengths are with object-oriented design, figure out all your game entities in terms of objects that all inherit things like how to draw themselves. If you're more of a procedural programmer, and even if not, figure out your main game loop, what needs to happen every cycle and what can be called out in special cases.
Take your time, let it be a pet project. The last thing you'd want is to extinguish your interest by making it a serious commitment. Starting small and building up is an obvious and good approach.
Best wishes! Long live the independant game developer!
I think good spelling and grammar are a small section of what some of us find lacking today: good manners. They're not really necessary; there's extra effort involved for little or no real return. But, whether it "counts" or not, it's part of how a person projects.
Now, if everybody is curt with everybody else, and nobody expects or would even appreciate anything different, there's really no problem. Some of us do appreciate eloquence though. Some of us do appreciate someone taking a few extra seconds and polishing their message a bit, whether it's written or not. Maybe the only real problem is that some people value those things while others don't. If we all agreed that good grammar and polite etiquette are a complete waste of time, then nobody would bother, and nobody would feel like there has been any sort of decay in what's valued. At the very least, we would probably tend to be more honest with one another; no more sugar coating.
I'm not sure where I fall. When I think of "good manners" I think of seven forks about which I know nothing of their proper use, stilted "I beg your pardon, good sir, but..." nonsense, bowing or curtsying when greeting someone, all that antiquated stuff I'm genuinely not interested in. It's just progress, we've phased those things out for a variety of reasons. Perhaps proficiency in English is doomed to a similar fate. I certainly find myself caring less about it over time. In terms of doing good or harm to anyone, pristine spelling isn't exactly important even relative to other areas of etiquette. The girl yakking away on her phone on the freeway isn't just rude, she's a threat to other people's lives. But if she wants to L her AO when she gets home, then OMG, there's, like, nothing wrong with that, and stuff.
Whether we're talking about the US or the entire world, it's a melting pot culture, all kinds of lowest common denominators get settled on eventually. It's what we all make it. We're either going through a phase now where language skills dip in common value, or it's just going to be the case where over time those skills are less and less relevant. Neither picture offends my senses.
Don't take it seriously, unless you don't mind having a busted DS.
I wanted to believe it too. But no, the DS hasn't got GBC-compatible hardware. Emulation is probaby on the way though. Hell, if the Linux development gets far along enough that SDL can be ported, GnuBoy would run! (Who knows at what speed, but still...:^)
Thanks, that was it! That was gonna drive me nuts....'Course, remembering the sheer stupidity of it ain't helping either.:^) I'm not sure one scene has single-handedly damaged my opinion of a movie that badly any other time. Medichloreans, maybe.
What, me off-topic?...Umm... All the Star Wars movies should have done this sort of mathematical consulting. Han Solo wouldn't have been bragging about his twelve parsecs then. (I'm not buying the smuggler's run / shortcut stuff.)
The zooming in and "enhance" stuff always gets me. No matter how interesting the story is, I get pulled out of it for several minutes every time that happens.
My (least?) favourite was after a bit of "zoom in on this" and "magnify that" they did a "pan around to this side". I wish I could remember what that was from; it ruined the whole show/movie/whatever for me. First, a "pan" would keep the camera stationary, he meant (and the effect was) a "dolly" or "truck" or some combination of the two. Second... NO! Can't do that! No crook would ever get away with anything, provided someone on the block had a camcorder running at the time, if such magic were possible.
The other one is bleeps and other noises on every keystroke, every selection, every page event, every blink of some huge piece of text. 'Cause good UI design involves enormous, blinking text.
Gotta love the sophisticated visual effects that any virus/trojan/etc creates, too....Sorry, one more. A mac will not shut down or crash to an orange/green "C:\" DOS prompt. Even Office Space is guilty of that nonsense (nevermind the ISA boards and other out-of-place hardware inside the evil printer...) But that movie I can forgive, since it got so much right culture-wise.:^)
I'm actually with you that innovation is probably dead in sports games. I'd LOVE to be wrong, however. And now, nobody's gonna have the chance to prove us wrong besides EA, and they have no incentive whatsoever to do so.
As for a company's best interests being a different matter than the customer's best interests... You're right, there's a lot of profit to be made by screwing people over. The tobacco industry is a wonderful example. And in both the case of that industry and the case of EA, I don't have any good solution in mind. I don't want the government to run amok with all kinds of paternalistic laws basically protecting people from themselves, but even when they do such things, (again, the tobacco industry makes an apt example, laden as it is with regulations) the problem isn't solved. In tobacco's case, the customers just get even screwed more by way of higher prices on the damn things they're addicted to.
So, I've presented my rant about how EA (substitute cigarette companies, Microsoft, or major record and film labels if you like) are acting irresponsibly and basically being bullies, but I readily admit there's no easy answer. Capitalism, in theory, will eventually make such entities collapse under their own weight, but let's not make either the mistake of assuming reality will follow theory, or the mistake of ignoring or underestimating the fact that large corporate interests are doing a pretty good job of changing the rules to unlevel the playing field. Your average consumer or upstart developer doesn't have lobbying dollars, nor do they make enormous campaign contributions. Watchdog groups trying to protect consumers do exist, and I'm glad they do, but it's a bit of a David vs Goliath fight, minus the sling.
The only voice I have that any of these companies would care about is my wallet. I know I'll never buy an EA Sports game, but EA is enormous now, and I'm not so sure I can swear off Lord of the Rings, Sims, and 007 games. So that leaves me with how many of my peers here, bitching about stuff I'm powerless to affect, and feeding the monster anyway.:^)
A company acting in its best interests is different than a company acting against its customers' best interests. But it's not illegal, so it must be ok, right? This is the nasty side of capitalism, when competition is factored out.
And let's say the next few EA football games are great. That won't exactly be any surprise. It's not like they've been terrible all these years and people buy them anyway. Sports games in general aren't my cup of tea, but Madden and the like are polished games, gripping to those who are into the genre. They have, however, been a bit stale lately, if I understand correctly. How much more innovative or realistic or detailed can a football game get? Video game football has looked almost like the real thing since the Dreamcast. We still use joysticks and buttons, we still pick plays... How much improvement is really going to happen?
The short answer is, not a lot. EA knows that not much is going to happen in terms of making next year's football game better than this year's. That's exactly the problem -- not that there won't be progress, but that EA _knows_ there won't be progress. With that as a given, they've decided to tie up the market. If there's no innovation to be done, well dammit, we want to be the only ones here! Where the players lose is where that "fact" is broken. Say Sega or 989 Studios or somebody _did_ come up with a genuinely fresh idea for a football game. Say there actually _is_ room for improvement. Well, now that's just too bad. If you're not EA, you can't make a football game and expect it to sell now. Even if your innovation is the greatest thing ever to happen to sports games, you're fooling yourself if you think it will sell without any actual teams attached to it. And then EA's game next year will just hijack your idea anyway. Nobody wins here except EA. Not other developers, but more importantly, not players either.
At the risk of running off-topic for a bit, I'm still very glad I only need to put up with XP at work. At home, I run various flavors of GNU/Linux, mostly Slackware, and for the sake of the lady's Sims-playing, Win2K dual boots on a couple machines.
I had a scare the other day when a new laptop looked as though it was going to refuse to work properly with 2K, that I'd have to put XP (which it naturally came with) back on it. Thankfully, I did finally hunt down a driver that let its graphics work beyond 16 colors and at the correct resolution in 2K, but I was genuinely scared for a while. That's right, I still haven't gotten over XP and I probably never will.
While I'm a bit of a free software zealot, and no fan of Microsoft, (to the point that I refuse to buy an X-Box, even) I do have to hand it to 'em, they got a lot right in 2000. It's stable and fast, and with only a few exceptions, bullshit-free. My kudos to Microsoft end there; they screwed it all up again for XP, and I'm guessing they'll keep right on using the horrible nagware-style registration, ridiculous crippling DRM, and ability to remotely determine what you can and can't run on your own hardware in future releases. XP is to NT/2000 what ME was to 95/98. It's a whole bunch of terrible ideas that never should have seen the light of day, and its widespread use came about for the simple reason that Microsoft decided that everybody should use it. Nearly all PCs have it pre-installed, laptops especially. It's dirt slow once up, no matter how quickly it draws the log on screen. XP never should have happened. Yes, years later I'm still bitter. And with mandatory upgrades, it's the kind of bitter that keeps on biting... or something.:^)
This whole service pack 2 thing in and of itself doesn't bug me too much; I'm no stranger to patching kernels, apache and sendmail, which occasionally will trigger some sort of regression. What did bug me is when they wedged XP's licensing (we own your desktop, not you) into a service pack for 2K. I still feel like I can trust 2K more than XP, but I look forward to the day that all the games we care about come out on consoles near the same time as PC releases, so I can once again leave all traces of Windows behind. Even the somewhat-blasphemous use of Cedega or the like is starting to look attractive, knowing where MS is headed with their OS.
Great, now I hope she _doesn't_ run for president. Not that this country would snap that far back from its frighteningly far right pendulum swing that quickly anyway. I knew she had some ideas I didn't like, but I hadn't bothered to remember what those were until this came up. Ahh yes, any form of censorship. Quick way to lose my respect.
Side rant: Can we please, PLEASE get some liberals into positions of power in this country? These middle-of-the-road politicians are almost as bad as the extemist religious right wing nuts. Seriously, there's a huge problem if John Kerry's the most liberal person we've got.
All that said, it's not as though I like GTA. It seems to me like little more than a string of adolescent power fantasies with clunky controls and stilted animation. I can "slam" it on those grounds. But Clinton's a mother, for crying out loud; she ought to know that parenting is the way a child learns right and wrong. And she, better than most, could tell you about the unfathomably large gap between mainstream media in any form and reality. I guess I can respect her opinion, it just boggles me that she could come to hold it.
I'm looking forward to a time when it doesn't matter what game console you have, any more than it matters what brand TV or DVD player you use to watch movies. As an art form, video games could really benefit from breaking away from the hardware. Plenty of games are cross-platform already, but that's not really the same thing. I don't go and buy Lord of the Rings films for a Sony DVD player or a Panasonic, I get them in a standard format. Sony had plans to do this and turn Playstation into a "platform" a while back, but to my knowledge, nothing ever came from that.
I think it should not to matter whether there's a Sony or Nintendo machine under my TV. I'd still like to play Nintendo _games_, and fans of Gran Tourismo etc will still want to play Sony _games_, but the machine shouldn't matter. For that to happen, some somewhat arbitrary standards have to be chosen, a bullet none of Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft would be thrilled to bite. There would need to be a standard lowest-common-denominator controller. As much as I like the GameCube controller, I think something like Sony's DualShock2 should be the baseline. If, for example, Nintendo wanted to market a compatible with better ergonomics and a modified button layout, they can have at it, and the market will reflect what shapes/weights people like best. While we're on the subject, the wires have to go; Nintendo got it 100% right with the WaveBird, and four players on one box has to be the minimum supported. No more multitaps; they're ridiculous. A standard memory card is also needed. I'd personally love the ability to use USB thumb drives, but any standard will do. A minimum set of performance specs must also be defined. Three PowerPC's and an ATI something-or-other sounds just fine to me, but it could be anything that reads some standard game executable format and pushes X number of polygons, does Y amount of floating point calculations, etc. The megahertz can't matter anymore, and we're nearly there now.
Imagine being able to buy a game console anywhere from a no-name brand at $200 to a posh big-name one at $500, with newer, smaller, cheaper models coming out all the time, just as with VCRs and DVD players. Some of these consoles will also play DVD movies, some will also do time-shifting PVR stuff, some will have USB ports, some will include legacy PlayStation or GameCube compatibility (or both!) and you would buy one depending on your needs, just as you do with the rest of your equipment. Whichever one you get, Gran Tourismo 6 and Halo 4 and Super Mario Moonshine will all play on it. Period.
If and when video game consoles work like that, I'll no longer be cursing Sega for picking the wrong box to put Panzer Dragoon on, or find myself dropping a couple hundred extra dollars so I can play Metal Gear Solid. I wish I had some idea of how realistic this little fantasy of mine is. I never thought we'd have two rounds of consoles from three strong players, but that's what we're getting. Traditionally in video games, the fewer machines, the better (why waste shelf space on three different releases of the same third-party game?) but loads of compatible machines, that could remove the last of the silliness from console gaming.
My favorite agreements (not quite EULA's, most of them, but similar) are on websites. Most of the time they just use a textarea as a poor man's iframe to hold the agreement's text, and you must click the "I accept" submit button to continue. Nearly every one of these i have encountered (Verisign does this for sure, if you want to try it out) does not lock the textarea. So, I erase all the crap that's in there and replace it with:
Shawn was a high school buddy of mine, and it's surreal every time this hits the news.
We all happened to be gamers, my little posse of guys that didn't fit into the other clicks. Some of us were somewhat popular, some were gossipers, some (like myself) were computer geeks, but one thing we found we had in common was gaming. I'd sneak my N64 into the big projector room by the library so we could play Goldeneye during lunch break. Before the administration became uptight about lab usage, we'd play Quake anytime several of us showed up to school early. We tended not to have the greatest social skills (Shawn maybe being exemplar there) but we got along anyway; we were all decent guys just wanting to get the heck through high school so we could go have our own lives.
I'm not going to pretend I knew Shawn super-well; sometimes he'd hang out with us and sometimes he wouldn't, but I know his problems didn't come from video games. I have nothing but sympathy and sorrow for his family, but Sony didn't destroy Shawn; he did that himself. At least one guy from our little rag-tag group went on to get addicted to alcohol, too, but that's not the fault of the brewing companies, even if they know full well that alcohol can be addictive, even if they put plenty of research into making the stuff taste good and encourage recurring business. Bigger surgeon general's warnings would not have helped.
I need to disclaimer all this by saying that I personally haven't developed any self-destructive addictions. I haven't gone through it, so my perspective is void of first-hand experience. That said, I still put the responsibility not to allow some activity (smoking, playing video games, whatever) take over a person's life, on that person. We should avail them to help, and support them in finding help if we see that they are slipping, sure. But what sense does it make to talk about freedom and liberty if we won't also talk about accountibility and responsibility.
Shawn was a good guy, but I'm not sure he entirely understood that every effect has a cause, that things don't "just happen". His gaming addiction and his suicide were built piece-by-piece, over a long time, including the few years when I knew him. It was obvious he had problems, but it wasn't obvious, or inevitable, that those problems would culminate in the way they did. Every choice he made contributed. Maybe if we'd shot hoops instead of playing Quake, his choices would have been different. Maybe mine would have too, and maybe I would have wound up in some suicidal spiral instead. I find it more plausible that my not having committed suicide is a result of the decisions I made in life, rather than the existance of addictive and/or damaging things in life. Laws don't keep people from getting hooked on crack, and just because nicotine is legal doesn't mean everybody gets addicted to smoking.
Again, I truly feel for Shawn's family, and the families of everybody who has ever committed suicide, for any reason.
Trust me, "Hula" is good, compared to the other names that were considered. (I'm straining my brain to remember, "bongo" was one, I think.) I thought it was a bit silly too, but it's grown on me very quickly. As was pointed out during a presentation where we (here at Novell) were introduced to the concept, it's ridiculously hard to snag a good name that isn't already trademarked. We could do NOCS for Novell Open Collaboration Server/Suite/System, but what if Red Hat snuck up on us and announced ROCS?;^) Oh, to have had a tape recorder on me during those in-the-hallway chats after the internal presentation...
Anyway, silly name or no, I've been pretty excited about Hula, and it's sweet to see some excitement over it here on/. as well.
I'm a (newish, but still) software engineer at Novell, and I'd like to answer your questions quickly from my little point of view.
The rationale behind this is that we'd like to put out something that's simple at first but can seed an ecosystem of its own, and, with some luck, one day become "the Apache of collaboration". Netmail was a good fit because there were very few issues IP-wise in releasing the code, and because it's a young and extensible base that has the potential to evolve into a killer enterprise-level system. If we were to open up GroupWise, for example, (if that were even possible, which it isn't) we'd be saying to the world "hey, come on and help out with our finished, mature product", which isn't nearly as stimulating as "hey, come on and help shape the future of collaboration!" The latter may be a smidge optimistic, but that's honestly what we're shooting for, if I understand Nat correctly.
As for transferring development of Netmail to the open Hula project, here's what I know and (I hope!) am allowed to say: Netmail was a very small team. The Hula team is bigger. So no, we're not just tossing it out and watching to see who in the OSS community should be the project leader. It's still our project, though everybody is free to fork if they decide we're headed in the wrong direction. That does two things: it forces us to stay honest and on the up-and-up with the OSS community, and (as of right now, no turning back) it gives to the world a useful piece of free software that can and will get more and more useful over time.
There was a joke made in the hallways here (and possibly elsewhere in these comments) in reference to South Park. Step 1: Release Hula. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit!
Step 2 is to play the game right, to give OSS folks what they want and what they need to help us build (or build themselves, if they so desire) a really sweet communications system. Something that there would be demand for at the enterprise level. Right now, Hula is mail and calendar. A year from now, I would be very surprised if it did not include IM, some form of VOIP, and some things I can't even imagine right now. Apache, QT, MySQL, and so on have shown that there is money to be made from a free-as-in-speech, free-as-in-beer tool if: 1) It's good, and 2) An ecosystem develops around it. That money, of course, is what Novell is looking for in the end, and I've got to say I'm pretty excited to see the way we're going after it. Microsoft built a proprietary community around Exchange, and it has dominated collaboration for years. I'm rooting for Hula's free, open community that was officially born today.
So there's two cents from a rookie Novell programmer.
I know folks who do abuse Gimp's or Photoshop's filters and effects, that's another good point. But using a rastor program itself is not the problem and in a lot of cases is a perfectly good solution.
Use your graphics programs as tools, not factories. Art doesn't come out of a machine, it comes out of you.
I've got just enough artist in me to get by, but sometimes when working in Gimp or Blender (my 2D and 3D apps of choice) I'll find my programmer side coming through a bit too much.
Sometimes I spend a great deal of time getting things exactly even, or lined up precisely when it doesn't matter, or getting the image dimensions in pixels to be even multiples of 16. (Seriously, my geek side is like the Gollum to my Smeagol.)
My primary piece of advice would be not to obsess over symmetry or nice numbers, to temporarily set aside your inclinations to make everything general-purpose and extensible. You can adjust vertices by 0.1 units every time, or you can just move the damn things somewhere that looks about right. The latter will look better. Save copies often if you're worried that it won't. (But it will!:^)
As a programmer you do have a couple advantages. Turn your tendancies to over-engineer a problem into making the thing higher-resolution than you would possibly need. You know scaling down or compressing to.jpg gets rid of information you'll never get back. You have a tendancy to make things independant of each other, put that into using several layers and selection groups.
And most of all, if your work looks anything at all like something you might see in Windows XP, or reminds you in any way of any MPlayer skin you've seen recently, it should be scrapped immediately unless you want your project to look fugly on purpose.:^)
As a rabid fan of Metroid games ever since the original 8-bit wonder, I find myself surprised to agree.
On the one hand, I want it to feel something like the Metroid experience I've had over several games in the past. I want to explore and gun down ugly creatures and have tough-as-nails boss fights and find enough upgrades to become a complete badass by the end of the game. But if I want it to feel all new at the same time, I'm fooling myself.
Of all the Metroid titles over the years, I've been least excited by Echoes for some reason. Zero Mission was good, but come to think of it I wasn't anticipating that one too wildly either. I think it's largely because it uses a same-engine, new-data model, like the MegaMan games or any annually-released sports title. At the same time, I'm pretty damn sure I'll be picking this up, and I'd be very surprised if I were disappointed.
Some games lend themselves to new directions better than others. Metroid actually seems pretty good at it. It's done non-linear and linear 2D, and it's done 1st person 3D, all quite well, and all keeping surprisingly close to its roots. I'm very anxious to see how it holds up in a more traditional shooter/deathmatch format on the DS. I think reaching out in these different directions is more exciting than going further on any one established path, but I don't want to dismiss evolutionary stepping either. After all, if Metroid II hadn't taken some new ideas and a bunch of old ones, and had III not done the same, we would have missed out on some really killer games.
Point? Oh, I don't know if I even have a point. Lack of "new and different" can be disappointing, and might feel at times like we're buying the same thing over and over again, but in those terms, I'd pick on sports games and traditional first-person shooters WAY before I'd pick on Metroid.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty much a "turn the other cheek" kind of guy. I'm also a fan of "do unto others", by which they're just begging for us to be nasty to them.
Oh, the internal turmoil.
I don't get enough spam to anger me to the level that I'd participate in something like this. That said, if spam were a real problem for me I'd probably give it more than a second thought. If a spammer wants to piss off how many thousands of people regularly in order to make a bit of cash, he'd better damn well be ready to deal with it if those thousands of people decide to smack his servers with some extra bits. Likewise with any company who hires a spammer as a publicist.
I'm not sure it's immoral. Is it immoral for people to band together to fight something that's been shitting on them for years? Spam's obviously not as bad as taxation without representation or slavery or something, but it's not as though DDOS attacks are as bad as artillery fire and bombs, either.
As for illegal, what's right and wrong isn't right or wrong because someone up the food chain tells you so. Maybe they're right, or maybe they're full of shit and/or money. If it is illegal though, that's one more thing I've got to weigh if I consider doing this. Am I so upset at spammers that I'd go to jail for fighting them? "That's illegal" is just part of the question, not the answer.
In utilitarian terms, obviously a DDOS doesn't do good to anybody. The idea is, now the spammer can't spam for a while, or the business decides hiring a spammer was a bad idea and drops it. Either way, the distributed and continual negatives of irritation, server clogging, and other harmful side-effects of spam are reduced, more than enough to justify the pain of a spammer's smoking server. Is that right? Hell if I know. But if I were getting a million spams a day instead of a dozen a week, if spam had brought my mailserver to its knees or made my other accounts unusuable, I'd probably have a pretty strong opinion.
Yeah, this beast would be hella expensive at the moment, and whether OLEDs or e-Ink or some other wacky thing would wind up being the way to go is still not clear (to my ignorant self, anyway), but I think it's too good an idea to write off.
I've been pissed off at keyboards ever since it got hard to find one without stupid windows keys on it. On those grounds alone it would be cool to use something like this. But more seriously, some of my favourite and most-used programs are Emacs, the Gimp, and Blender, all of which have tons of wacky keyboard shortcuts, often more than my little brain can remember if it's been too long since the last time I used some given function.
There are plenty of fancy keyboards upwards of $100 out there today, and while most people would just as soon have the manufacturer-bundled freebie or some cheapo board and keep the extra cash, something like this could change that pretty quickly. I doubt many people would pay much higher than that; for all my interest I don't think I would. But once the right technologies get cheap enough to make this sort of thing possible, I would think it could easily become the next big thing in input devices. I'm spoiled with my scroll-wheel-equipped, optical mice and hate using any mouse without those things, and if/when I get spoiled with a keyboard like that, I'll similarly never want to go back to anything less.
In any case it's a better idea than my old dreamed-up keyboard innovation: analog keys. Tap as usual for normal operation, or mash harder for the repeat rate to go up. Mostly handy for the arrow keys and backspace I suppose, but it would be nifty in games too.
Well how about that. :^) Thanks for the info. You don't happen to know of any card faster than the Radeon 9200 that's supported by Free-as-in-speech drivers, do you? That coupled with my cheapness has kept me using those trusty old things all this time...
That's pretty interesting. I don't know that I would especially want any current government to control most or all of the LaGrange points.
/.ers have pointed out though, neither China nor India has as much capacity space-wise as the US or Russia, and would have an insane amount of catching up to do if they wanted to be in the running in another space race.
I'm a US citizen, but am so embarassed by the current trends and administration that I wouldn't dare support putting the US in an even more powerful position.
At the same time, China has such a lack of respect for its own citizens that I have a hard time believeing they'd do anything for the greater good if their power expanded into space. So far, better the US than China; still with you.
I know as much about India as most citizens of the US: next to nothing. As some other
Russia, though, is in an interesting position. Very wary of the destructive power of government corruption (not that it's been eradicated, but they're cautious of it where we ignorantly embrace it in the US) and probably just about as good a candidate as any to hold real weight in space (bad pun, sorry). But again it's not like I know a great deal about Russian government, its organization, or how I could expect it to behave were it to gain control of key points in near space.
So I'm not sure I agree or not. Maybe it's a case of better the US than Country XYZ, but maybe not. I'm not alone in thinking it would be great if the squabbling among countries and powers would disappear, but everyone has their own (often destructive) ideas of how that could/should come about.
I would love to see some real activity in the space program (The Mars rovers are great, don't get me wrong, I'm just fascinated by space activity and would love to see we as human beings do more of it) and if history has anything to say about it, it will probably be military strategy like this that motivates us to really get in gear. Isn't that always the way, doing potentially good things for potentially horrible reasons.
I'm with you. When the original Doom hit, you could run it pretty comfortably on mediocre hardware. It would run better on top-of-the-line stuff, sure, but it was no less fun at half resolution or in a slightly bordered window.
;^)
Part of that, I think, was that its big fancy new "3D" graphics were done through really clever software tricks, taking advantage of the 386's general-purpose nature. Of course, nowadays we've got specialized 3D processing hardware as a given in any machine that's going to be used for gaming. That started out as a great thing, giving us the ability to see Quake in high resolution, but has now become something that limits the way graphics are done. Clever software tricks for rendering NURBS or funky new camera styles or the like don't map to the functions presented in 3D acceleration hardware, or if they do, they map only to the highest-end boards out there.
Even if it ran on my Radeon 9200 (I guess I don't know that it doesn't, but it's an old card so I never tried) I would probably complain about the darkness. So there are reasons lined up for folks like us why Doom 3 never really had a chance.
It's really too bad. I'd have loved to see a relatively low-tech Doom 3 (think the original Unreal Tournament in terms of polygon count etc) that had the excellent level design and hoards of baddies of Doom 1 and 2. With something like that, I think ID could have gotten away with having no head shots or the occasional not-enough-ammo situation. But what do I know, I'm just a gamer. Gamers don't know what we want, right?
Yeah, I didn't explain that too well. :^) I certainly could have stuck with Red Hat. There was more to it than being pissed off at RPMs though.
...At least in software. Ask me to rebuild my car's engine and I'll have no clue. ;^)
I was still a relative newbie to GNU/Linux. I was using RPMs as a crutch, which led to extra irritation when they didn't work correctly. I thought that by presenting myself with a sink-or-swim situation, I'd force myself to get to the point where I knew what the heck was going on and would no longer use or need any crutches. Slackware jumped out at me as a good sink-or-swim type of distro, with a traditional system layout and no fancy packaging tools I could wuss out and fall back on. Even now I prefer building stuff to installing binaries someone else has built. (Dumb psychological thing.) It's probably time for me to move on to Gentoo or some such distro, but I've gotten sort of attached to good ol' no-magic Slackware. Someday I might decide it's not worth the time to build everything from source, and I'll use a Red Hat, SuSE, or Mandrake type rig again. I just use what suits my needs and what I'm comfortable with. That I picked Slackware way back when and stuck with it all this time was just a crap shoot. It could have been Debian or whatever else. Heh, Caldera was even one I looked into. That would have made for a neat ride.
Steering this tangent back a little towards on-topic, if I was a newbie in this day and age, I'd probably still find myself frustrated from time to time by package management systems (on any newbie-friendly distro), but more importantly I'm still the type of geek who isn't satisfied with myself if there's magic going on behind the scenes that I don't understand at all and couldn't fix.
...I have to praise NLD. I'm a Novell employee. :^)
:^)
Way back when, I used Red Hat as my first serious GNU/Linux rig. I'm glad I did, it was well suited for teaching me the ropes, and my buddies knew it, at least moreso than they knew any other distro. Of course, that was a different time, Red Hat was the undisputed king of distros. Eventually I ran out of patience for RPM hell, which I'm sure has gotten much better in recent years. I wound up taking a deep breath and diving into Slackware, where I knew I'd basically be on my own. I love it, I love basically building everything myself. I should try one of these new-fangled Gentoo type distros that promise to do the grunt work for me.
At work, of course, it's SuSE and NLD, and I'm honestly very impressed with both. SuSE's my weapon of choice as a developer, but it's not hard for me to understand NLD's high marks in terms of usability and as a general Windows-replacement OS.
I'm obviously biased, and I haven't even touched a Red Hat distro in some time, apart from a short fling with Fedora on some spare hardware. And it's not as though the stuff coming out of Red Hat's been getting bad press either, both Red Hat and Novell's offerings to the business world have been really solid lately from the sounds of it. It's probably little more than a matter of taste right now. Novell obviously hopes to shift that and do some very big things in the desktop space, and I think we will. So my knee-jerk recommendation stands; Novell's not going to let you down if you're looking for a solid GNU/Linux OS but don't have any experience with such things.
Just don't let those of us with flamethrowers influence your decision.
I've written a small game that some folks find addictive:
.png and .ogg files directly... it just feels all warm and fuzzy :^)
http://www.nongnu.org/tong
It's from an old idea I had and was looking for an excuse to teach myself SDL, which some buddies and I had chosen for a much more ambitious game we're still working on.
We chose SDL primarily because it is cross-platform. I use and develop under GNU/Linux myself, but I want all my windows-running buddies to be able to play my games. OSX and even DreamCast porting is trivial, as SDL happily runs on those platforms and many more.
http://www.libsdl.org/
SDL is very well documented and very slick to use, even to a newcomer (so long as you do have some programming experience). I'm a C and C++ guy, and SDL works with those natively, but if you wish to stick with Java or any other such language there are appropriate bindings. I highly recommend the libraries SDL_image and SDL_mixer as well, for boosting image and sound loading support. (I love being able to have my game just load up
I subscribe to master Miyamoto's game design theories, which basically amount to making your game into its own little playground, running on its own rules and rewarding the player for being clever. Keep the controls simple; a person should be able to pick up and play. Now, my game Tong is pretty rough at first, so I maybe don't follow this thinking very well in practice, but the philosophy is an implementation of the old "Keep It Simple, Stupid" that you've heard so often and I think it's very sensible. Especially for budding game developers.
Even with a well-documented API and a clear idea of what you want your game to be, it's going to take a while. Get a demo of "stuff happening on-screen" with mock-up graphics to get a feel for how you're going to render things, then trash the whole thing and start building up all the pieces you need. If your strengths are with object-oriented design, figure out all your game entities in terms of objects that all inherit things like how to draw themselves. If you're more of a procedural programmer, and even if not, figure out your main game loop, what needs to happen every cycle and what can be called out in special cases.
Take your time, let it be a pet project. The last thing you'd want is to extinguish your interest by making it a serious commitment. Starting small and building up is an obvious and good approach.
Best wishes! Long live the independant game developer!
Interesting.
I think good spelling and grammar are a small section of what some of us find lacking today: good manners. They're not really necessary; there's extra effort involved for little or no real return. But, whether it "counts" or not, it's part of how a person projects.
Now, if everybody is curt with everybody else, and nobody expects or would even appreciate anything different, there's really no problem. Some of us do appreciate eloquence though. Some of us do appreciate someone taking a few extra seconds and polishing their message a bit, whether it's written or not. Maybe the only real problem is that some people value those things while others don't. If we all agreed that good grammar and polite etiquette are a complete waste of time, then nobody would bother, and nobody would feel like there has been any sort of decay in what's valued. At the very least, we would probably tend to be more honest with one another; no more sugar coating.
I'm not sure where I fall. When I think of "good manners" I think of seven forks about which I know nothing of their proper use, stilted "I beg your pardon, good sir, but..." nonsense, bowing or curtsying when greeting someone, all that antiquated stuff I'm genuinely not interested in. It's just progress, we've phased those things out for a variety of reasons. Perhaps proficiency in English is doomed to a similar fate. I certainly find myself caring less about it over time. In terms of doing good or harm to anyone, pristine spelling isn't exactly important even relative to other areas of etiquette. The girl yakking away on her phone on the freeway isn't just rude, she's a threat to other people's lives. But if she wants to L her AO when she gets home, then OMG, there's, like, nothing wrong with that, and stuff.
Whether we're talking about the US or the entire world, it's a melting pot culture, all kinds of lowest common denominators get settled on eventually. It's what we all make it. We're either going through a phase now where language skills dip in common value, or it's just going to be the case where over time those skills are less and less relevant. Neither picture offends my senses.
Fine... I figured you would also be capable of googling. Here's all the debunking you should need:
8 1844.html
/. stories must be true and making blanket statements.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/nintendo_ds/
If you need more proof, do some actual research before assuming all
Don't take it seriously, unless you don't mind having a busted DS.
:^)
I wanted to believe it too. But no, the DS hasn't got GBC-compatible hardware. Emulation is probaby on the way though. Hell, if the Linux development gets far along enough that SDL can be ported, GnuBoy would run! (Who knows at what speed, but still...
Thanks, that was it! That was gonna drive me nuts. ...'Course, remembering the sheer stupidity of it ain't helping either. :^) I'm not sure one scene has single-handedly damaged my opinion of a movie that badly any other time. Medichloreans, maybe.
...Umm... All the Star Wars movies should have done this sort of mathematical consulting. Han Solo wouldn't have been bragging about his twelve parsecs then. (I'm not buying the smuggler's run / shortcut stuff.)
What, me off-topic?
The zooming in and "enhance" stuff always gets me. No matter how interesting the story is, I get pulled out of it for several minutes every time that happens.
...Sorry, one more. A mac will not shut down or crash to an orange/green "C:\" DOS prompt. Even Office Space is guilty of that nonsense (nevermind the ISA boards and other out-of-place hardware inside the evil printer...) But that movie I can forgive, since it got so much right culture-wise. :^)
My (least?) favourite was after a bit of "zoom in on this" and "magnify that" they did a "pan around to this side". I wish I could remember what that was from; it ruined the whole show/movie/whatever for me. First, a "pan" would keep the camera stationary, he meant (and the effect was) a "dolly" or "truck" or some combination of the two. Second... NO! Can't do that! No crook would ever get away with anything, provided someone on the block had a camcorder running at the time, if such magic were possible.
The other one is bleeps and other noises on every keystroke, every selection, every page event, every blink of some huge piece of text. 'Cause good UI design involves enormous, blinking text.
Gotta love the sophisticated visual effects that any virus/trojan/etc creates, too.
I'm actually with you that innovation is probably dead in sports games. I'd LOVE to be wrong, however. And now, nobody's gonna have the chance to prove us wrong besides EA, and they have no incentive whatsoever to do so.
:^)
As for a company's best interests being a different matter than the customer's best interests... You're right, there's a lot of profit to be made by screwing people over. The tobacco industry is a wonderful example. And in both the case of that industry and the case of EA, I don't have any good solution in mind. I don't want the government to run amok with all kinds of paternalistic laws basically protecting people from themselves, but even when they do such things, (again, the tobacco industry makes an apt example, laden as it is with regulations) the problem isn't solved. In tobacco's case, the customers just get even screwed more by way of higher prices on the damn things they're addicted to.
So, I've presented my rant about how EA (substitute cigarette companies, Microsoft, or major record and film labels if you like) are acting irresponsibly and basically being bullies, but I readily admit there's no easy answer. Capitalism, in theory, will eventually make such entities collapse under their own weight, but let's not make either the mistake of assuming reality will follow theory, or the mistake of ignoring or underestimating the fact that large corporate interests are doing a pretty good job of changing the rules to unlevel the playing field. Your average consumer or upstart developer doesn't have lobbying dollars, nor do they make enormous campaign contributions. Watchdog groups trying to protect consumers do exist, and I'm glad they do, but it's a bit of a David vs Goliath fight, minus the sling.
The only voice I have that any of these companies would care about is my wallet. I know I'll never buy an EA Sports game, but EA is enormous now, and I'm not so sure I can swear off Lord of the Rings, Sims, and 007 games. So that leaves me with how many of my peers here, bitching about stuff I'm powerless to affect, and feeding the monster anyway.
A company acting in its best interests is different than a company acting against its customers' best interests. But it's not illegal, so it must be ok, right? This is the nasty side of capitalism, when competition is factored out.
And let's say the next few EA football games are great. That won't exactly be any surprise. It's not like they've been terrible all these years and people buy them anyway. Sports games in general aren't my cup of tea, but Madden and the like are polished games, gripping to those who are into the genre. They have, however, been a bit stale lately, if I understand correctly. How much more innovative or realistic or detailed can a football game get? Video game football has looked almost like the real thing since the Dreamcast. We still use joysticks and buttons, we still pick plays... How much improvement is really going to happen?
The short answer is, not a lot. EA knows that not much is going to happen in terms of making next year's football game better than this year's. That's exactly the problem -- not that there won't be progress, but that EA _knows_ there won't be progress. With that as a given, they've decided to tie up the market. If there's no innovation to be done, well dammit, we want to be the only ones here! Where the players lose is where that "fact" is broken. Say Sega or 989 Studios or somebody _did_ come up with a genuinely fresh idea for a football game. Say there actually _is_ room for improvement. Well, now that's just too bad. If you're not EA, you can't make a football game and expect it to sell now. Even if your innovation is the greatest thing ever to happen to sports games, you're fooling yourself if you think it will sell without any actual teams attached to it. And then EA's game next year will just hijack your idea anyway. Nobody wins here except EA. Not other developers, but more importantly, not players either.
At the risk of running off-topic for a bit, I'm still very glad I only need to put up with XP at work. At home, I run various flavors of GNU/Linux, mostly Slackware, and for the sake of the lady's Sims-playing, Win2K dual boots on a couple machines.
... or something. :^)
I had a scare the other day when a new laptop looked as though it was going to refuse to work properly with 2K, that I'd have to put XP (which it naturally came with) back on it. Thankfully, I did finally hunt down a driver that let its graphics work beyond 16 colors and at the correct resolution in 2K, but I was genuinely scared for a while. That's right, I still haven't gotten over XP and I probably never will.
While I'm a bit of a free software zealot, and no fan of Microsoft, (to the point that I refuse to buy an X-Box, even) I do have to hand it to 'em, they got a lot right in 2000. It's stable and fast, and with only a few exceptions, bullshit-free. My kudos to Microsoft end there; they screwed it all up again for XP, and I'm guessing they'll keep right on using the horrible nagware-style registration, ridiculous crippling DRM, and ability to remotely determine what you can and can't run on your own hardware in future releases. XP is to NT/2000 what ME was to 95/98. It's a whole bunch of terrible ideas that never should have seen the light of day, and its widespread use came about for the simple reason that Microsoft decided that everybody should use it. Nearly all PCs have it pre-installed, laptops especially. It's dirt slow once up, no matter how quickly it draws the log on screen. XP never should have happened. Yes, years later I'm still bitter. And with mandatory upgrades, it's the kind of bitter that keeps on biting
This whole service pack 2 thing in and of itself doesn't bug me too much; I'm no stranger to patching kernels, apache and sendmail, which occasionally will trigger some sort of regression. What did bug me is when they wedged XP's licensing (we own your desktop, not you) into a service pack for 2K. I still feel like I can trust 2K more than XP, but I look forward to the day that all the games we care about come out on consoles near the same time as PC releases, so I can once again leave all traces of Windows behind. Even the somewhat-blasphemous use of Cedega or the like is starting to look attractive, knowing where MS is headed with their OS.
Great, now I hope she _doesn't_ run for president. Not that this country would snap that far back from its frighteningly far right pendulum swing that quickly anyway. I knew she had some ideas I didn't like, but I hadn't bothered to remember what those were until this came up. Ahh yes, any form of censorship. Quick way to lose my respect.
Side rant: Can we please, PLEASE get some liberals into positions of power in this country? These middle-of-the-road politicians are almost as bad as the extemist religious right wing nuts. Seriously, there's a huge problem if John Kerry's the most liberal person we've got.
All that said, it's not as though I like GTA. It seems to me like little more than a string of adolescent power fantasies with clunky controls and stilted animation. I can "slam" it on those grounds. But Clinton's a mother, for crying out loud; she ought to know that parenting is the way a child learns right and wrong. And she, better than most, could tell you about the unfathomably large gap between mainstream media in any form and reality. I guess I can respect her opinion, it just boggles me that she could come to hold it.
I'm looking forward to a time when it doesn't matter what game console you have, any more than it matters what brand TV or DVD player you use to watch movies. As an art form, video games could really benefit from breaking away from the hardware. Plenty of games are cross-platform already, but that's not really the same thing. I don't go and buy Lord of the Rings films for a Sony DVD player or a Panasonic, I get them in a standard format. Sony had plans to do this and turn Playstation into a "platform" a while back, but to my knowledge, nothing ever came from that.
I think it should not to matter whether there's a Sony or Nintendo machine under my TV. I'd still like to play Nintendo _games_, and fans of Gran Tourismo etc will still want to play Sony _games_, but the machine shouldn't matter. For that to happen, some somewhat arbitrary standards have to be chosen, a bullet none of Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft would be thrilled to bite. There would need to be a standard lowest-common-denominator controller. As much as I like the GameCube controller, I think something like Sony's DualShock2 should be the baseline. If, for example, Nintendo wanted to market a compatible with better ergonomics and a modified button layout, they can have at it, and the market will reflect what shapes/weights people like best. While we're on the subject, the wires have to go; Nintendo got it 100% right with the WaveBird, and four players on one box has to be the minimum supported. No more multitaps; they're ridiculous. A standard memory card is also needed. I'd personally love the ability to use USB thumb drives, but any standard will do. A minimum set of performance specs must also be defined. Three PowerPC's and an ATI something-or-other sounds just fine to me, but it could be anything that reads some standard game executable format and pushes X number of polygons, does Y amount of floating point calculations, etc. The megahertz can't matter anymore, and we're nearly there now.
Imagine being able to buy a game console anywhere from a no-name brand at $200 to a posh big-name one at $500, with newer, smaller, cheaper models coming out all the time, just as with VCRs and DVD players. Some of these consoles will also play DVD movies, some will also do time-shifting PVR stuff, some will have USB ports, some will include legacy PlayStation or GameCube compatibility (or both!) and you would buy one depending on your needs, just as you do with the rest of your equipment. Whichever one you get, Gran Tourismo 6 and Halo 4 and Super Mario Moonshine will all play on it. Period.
If and when video game consoles work like that, I'll no longer be cursing Sega for picking the wrong box to put Panzer Dragoon on, or find myself dropping a couple hundred extra dollars so I can play Metal Gear Solid. I wish I had some idea of how realistic this little fantasy of mine is. I never thought we'd have two rounds of consoles from three strong players, but that's what we're getting. Traditionally in video games, the fewer machines, the better (why waste shelf space on three different releases of the same third-party game?) but loads of compatible machines, that could remove the last of the silliness from console gaming.
My favorite agreements (not quite EULA's, most of them, but similar) are on websites. Most of the time they just use a textarea as a poor man's iframe to hold the agreement's text, and you must click the "I accept" submit button to continue. Nearly every one of these i have encountered (Verisign does this for sure, if you want to try it out) does not lock the textarea. So, I erase all the crap that's in there and replace it with:
Company XYZ hereby agrees to pay me $1,000,000.
Now that's a contract I can agree to!
Shawn was a high school buddy of mine, and it's surreal every time this hits the news.
We all happened to be gamers, my little posse of guys that didn't fit into the other clicks. Some of us were somewhat popular, some were gossipers, some (like myself) were computer geeks, but one thing we found we had in common was gaming. I'd sneak my N64 into the big projector room by the library so we could play Goldeneye during lunch break. Before the administration became uptight about lab usage, we'd play Quake anytime several of us showed up to school early. We tended not to have the greatest social skills (Shawn maybe being exemplar there) but we got along anyway; we were all decent guys just wanting to get the heck through high school so we could go have our own lives.
I'm not going to pretend I knew Shawn super-well; sometimes he'd hang out with us and sometimes he wouldn't, but I know his problems didn't come from video games. I have nothing but sympathy and sorrow for his family, but Sony didn't destroy Shawn; he did that himself. At least one guy from our little rag-tag group went on to get addicted to alcohol, too, but that's not the fault of the brewing companies, even if they know full well that alcohol can be addictive, even if they put plenty of research into making the stuff taste good and encourage recurring business. Bigger surgeon general's warnings would not have helped.
I need to disclaimer all this by saying that I personally haven't developed any self-destructive addictions. I haven't gone through it, so my perspective is void of first-hand experience. That said, I still put the responsibility not to allow some activity (smoking, playing video games, whatever) take over a person's life, on that person. We should avail them to help, and support them in finding help if we see that they are slipping, sure. But what sense does it make to talk about freedom and liberty if we won't also talk about accountibility and responsibility.
Shawn was a good guy, but I'm not sure he entirely understood that every effect has a cause, that things don't "just happen". His gaming addiction and his suicide were built piece-by-piece, over a long time, including the few years when I knew him. It was obvious he had problems, but it wasn't obvious, or inevitable, that those problems would culminate in the way they did. Every choice he made contributed. Maybe if we'd shot hoops instead of playing Quake, his choices would have been different. Maybe mine would have too, and maybe I would have wound up in some suicidal spiral instead. I find it more plausible that my not having committed suicide is a result of the decisions I made in life, rather than the existance of addictive and/or damaging things in life. Laws don't keep people from getting hooked on crack, and just because nicotine is legal doesn't mean everybody gets addicted to smoking.
Again, I truly feel for Shawn's family, and the families of everybody who has ever committed suicide, for any reason.
Trust me, "Hula" is good, compared to the other names that were considered. (I'm straining my brain to remember, "bongo" was one, I think.) I thought it was a bit silly too, but it's grown on me very quickly. As was pointed out during a presentation where we (here at Novell) were introduced to the concept, it's ridiculously hard to snag a good name that isn't already trademarked. We could do NOCS for Novell Open Collaboration Server/Suite/System, but what if Red Hat snuck up on us and announced ROCS? ;^) Oh, to have had a tape recorder on me during those in-the-hallway chats after the internal presentation...
/. as well.
Anyway, silly name or no, I've been pretty excited about Hula, and it's sweet to see some excitement over it here on
I'm a (newish, but still) software engineer at Novell, and I'd like to answer your questions quickly from my little point of view.
The rationale behind this is that we'd like to put out something that's simple at first but can seed an ecosystem of its own, and, with some luck, one day become "the Apache of collaboration". Netmail was a good fit because there were very few issues IP-wise in releasing the code, and because it's a young and extensible base that has the potential to evolve into a killer enterprise-level system. If we were to open up GroupWise, for example, (if that were even possible, which it isn't) we'd be saying to the world "hey, come on and help out with our finished, mature product", which isn't nearly as stimulating as "hey, come on and help shape the future of collaboration!" The latter may be a smidge optimistic, but that's honestly what we're shooting for, if I understand Nat correctly.
As for transferring development of Netmail to the open Hula project, here's what I know and (I hope!) am allowed to say: Netmail was a very small team. The Hula team is bigger. So no, we're not just tossing it out and watching to see who in the OSS community should be the project leader. It's still our project, though everybody is free to fork if they decide we're headed in the wrong direction. That does two things: it forces us to stay honest and on the up-and-up with the OSS community, and (as of right now, no turning back) it gives to the world a useful piece of free software that can and will get more and more useful over time.
There was a joke made in the hallways here (and possibly elsewhere in these comments) in reference to South Park. Step 1: Release Hula. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit!
Step 2 is to play the game right, to give OSS folks what they want and what they need to help us build (or build themselves, if they so desire) a really sweet communications system. Something that there would be demand for at the enterprise level. Right now, Hula is mail and calendar. A year from now, I would be very surprised if it did not include IM, some form of VOIP, and some things I can't even imagine right now. Apache, QT, MySQL, and so on have shown that there is money to be made from a free-as-in-speech, free-as-in-beer tool if: 1) It's good, and 2) An ecosystem develops around it. That money, of course, is what Novell is looking for in the end, and I've got to say I'm pretty excited to see the way we're going after it. Microsoft built a proprietary community around Exchange, and it has dominated collaboration for years. I'm rooting for Hula's free, open community that was officially born today.
So there's two cents from a rookie Novell programmer.
I know folks who do abuse Gimp's or Photoshop's filters and effects, that's another good point. But using a rastor program itself is not the problem and in a lot of cases is a perfectly good solution.
Use your graphics programs as tools, not factories. Art doesn't come out of a machine, it comes out of you.
I've got just enough artist in me to get by, but sometimes when working in Gimp or Blender (my 2D and 3D apps of choice) I'll find my programmer side coming through a bit too much.
:^)
.jpg gets rid of information you'll never get back. You have a tendancy to make things independant of each other, put that into using several layers and selection groups.
:^)
Sometimes I spend a great deal of time getting things exactly even, or lined up precisely when it doesn't matter, or getting the image dimensions in pixels to be even multiples of 16. (Seriously, my geek side is like the Gollum to my Smeagol.)
My primary piece of advice would be not to obsess over symmetry or nice numbers, to temporarily set aside your inclinations to make everything general-purpose and extensible. You can adjust vertices by 0.1 units every time, or you can just move the damn things somewhere that looks about right. The latter will look better. Save copies often if you're worried that it won't. (But it will!
As a programmer you do have a couple advantages. Turn your tendancies to over-engineer a problem into making the thing higher-resolution than you would possibly need. You know scaling down or compressing to
And most of all, if your work looks anything at all like something you might see in Windows XP, or reminds you in any way of any MPlayer skin you've seen recently, it should be scrapped immediately unless you want your project to look fugly on purpose.
As a rabid fan of Metroid games ever since the original 8-bit wonder, I find myself surprised to agree.
On the one hand, I want it to feel something like the Metroid experience I've had over several games in the past. I want to explore and gun down ugly creatures and have tough-as-nails boss fights and find enough upgrades to become a complete badass by the end of the game. But if I want it to feel all new at the same time, I'm fooling myself.
Of all the Metroid titles over the years, I've been least excited by Echoes for some reason. Zero Mission was good, but come to think of it I wasn't anticipating that one too wildly either. I think it's largely because it uses a same-engine, new-data model, like the MegaMan games or any annually-released sports title. At the same time, I'm pretty damn sure I'll be picking this up, and I'd be very surprised if I were disappointed.
Some games lend themselves to new directions better than others. Metroid actually seems pretty good at it. It's done non-linear and linear 2D, and it's done 1st person 3D, all quite well, and all keeping surprisingly close to its roots. I'm very anxious to see how it holds up in a more traditional shooter/deathmatch format on the DS. I think reaching out in these different directions is more exciting than going further on any one established path, but I don't want to dismiss evolutionary stepping either. After all, if Metroid II hadn't taken some new ideas and a bunch of old ones, and had III not done the same, we would have missed out on some really killer games.
Point? Oh, I don't know if I even have a point. Lack of "new and different" can be disappointing, and might feel at times like we're buying the same thing over and over again, but in those terms, I'd pick on sports games and traditional first-person shooters WAY before I'd pick on Metroid.