Yes, I like functional programming. But like most other things, it depends on the problem you're trying to solve. If you mosty deal with nails, you'll want to use a hammer. If you mostly deal with screws, you'll want to use a screwdriver. Hammers make lousy screwdrivers and vice-versa.
Functional languages are great for highly parallelized computation because well-behaved functions don't have side effects, and that eliminates entire classes of race condition and locking issues. Functional languages are also good for abstracting higher-order patterns, since you can manipulate data and other functions without having to care about their lower-level details. Specific functional languages like Scheme, where code and data share the same form, are great for creating custom syntactic structures and writing self-modifying code.
If you aren't doing any of those types of things, then functional programming may seem pointless to you, and that's OK. But every developer should be aware of the tools available to them in case the day comes when they might benefit from using them.
If you're a developer, work for companies that build complete hardware/software systems rather than just software. Typically if they design and manufacture in-house, the bulk of the software work requires close collaboration with hardware, FPGA, and systems engineers, and this works best keeping everyone local. Attempts to outsource in these environments usually end in failure, and the companies that try often learn their lesson and don't try again.
Nonconformism is always viewed with suspicion by the masses. Either you have the courage of your convictions or you don't.
Any company that's going to judge me based on the lack of a Facebook account isn't someplace I'd want to work.
The story that I've heard repeated often is that developer salaries tend to flatline in a person's 50s and even retreat a bit as they close out their careers, while managerial salaries continue to increase throughout the later years of a career. Whether this is supported by actual data or not, I don't know. I can certainly see the potential for this to happen with developers who get complacent in a long-term job where they've maxed out their career path and then get laid off, which could force them to take a significantly lower-paying job elsewhere.
I've transitioned from development into management over the past few years, largely because I'd endured a string of awful managers and was confident I could do a better job. Management is definitely not for everyone, though -- it requires a different set of skills from development, and many developers lack the patience and people skills needed to do the job well. But developers with an interest in and aptitude for management clearly make the best managers for development groups, because they have a deep understanding of the issues their teams face, and they have a much easier time building trust and credibility with the group.
In the end, it's really about where your skills and interests lie. Do you have the patience to deal with petty office politics, hand-holding MBAs through repeated explanations of the mythical man month, fielding complaints from your team that you're too focused on schedule and complaints from above that you're not focused enough on schedule? Do you get gratification out of identifying and building on your developers' strengths and helping them earn their way to a promotion? Do you enjoy solving problems related to scoping, sequencing, and balancing of other people's work to define and meet milestones? Do you mind dealing with software licenses, office supply purchases, and other mundane "care & feeding" tasks? Can you be content relegating coding to a hobby activity, rather than your main pursuit?
If you answered "yes" to all of the above, then it may be worth considering a management path. If not, then you should stay sharp, stay current, and keep your skills valuable and marketable, regardless of your age.
Same thing here. Our project has been using git for years, much to the chagrin of the least common denominator middle managers in our department. They've been pushing hard to get rid of useful work tools with "funny names" under the guise of a common tools initiative that was always in the bag for Microsoft. This will really stick in their craw. I love it.
This is exactly what I do. It also has the advantage of letting you do the lossy compression on your own terms, so the resulting files don't automatically sound like shit.
When there's a client involved and significant money, "cool" and "new" are only good if they actually help sell and maintain the software. The client doesn't care about [...] lambda expressions.
Lambda expressions are in fact cool, but anyone who thinks they're new must have been in a coma since the 1930s.
> How about go adopt a kid instead? There's a world full of children that need good parents.
For a lot of people, the major appeal of having children is to mix their DNA with their partner's and see what they get. I would have no interest in raising someone else's child and pretending they were my own.
For the people who do enjoy this, great. I'm sure the children benefit from it.
> Quite frankly, I think it's irresponsible to have children of your own with so many that need the love, protection, and guidance that a good parent could provide.
And with equal frankness, I think it's ridiculous to paint people as being irresponsible simply because their priorities don't match yours. If you're happier raising a used child instead of a new one, bully for you. Other people prefer having sole responsibility for whatever baggage a child is going to carry through their life.
Estimate the parts required using historical proxies based around size and content. Use historical development time data based on the part estimates. Consolidate the group of smaller estimates for yourself, or ideally across an entire team, to allow estimation error to cancel itself out as much as possible across the group. Now you have a solid estimate of the total effort required, and you just have to map that to the available development hours in each developer's schedule, rebalance as necessary, and see what your end date looks like.
Team Software Process
> No, whats funny is that the downloadable game was probably a better game then the 4 disc-based games you purchased.
No, it wasn't, although Super Stardust HD is still a great game.
> The "game drought" may be over, but the "quality game drought" lives on.
It depends on your definition of "quality". The PS3 is currently lagging in extremely high-rated games (90+), but it's doing better than the other current-gen consoles when you look at the percentage of games that rate 75+ or 80+ out of 100. Let me refer you to my other post which goes into more detail.
> i think he means nobody is playing games on this particular system (of 8 ps3's) not that nobody plays games on the ps3 in general. how can so many people have misinterpreted that?
The quote is "since nobody is actually playing games on the system, it makes sense to use them for research projects like this". Your interpretation would only make sense if these particular PS3s were already lying around, ready to use for any purpose, and someone chose to use them for research instead of gaming. As the article states, Gaurav Khanna's interest in the PS3 was specifically for research computation, and that's why Sony gave him 8 of them for free.
If there was any misinterpretation here, it wouldn't seem to be on my end.
> 8 games? Yikes, either you play *everything* or you've got some real crud in there. Care to elaborate?
The four games I was referring to were Ninja Gaiden Sigma (88), Skate (85), Stuntman: Ignition (75), and Warhawk (84). The downloadable game was Super Stardust HD (84). None of those games are even remotely close to "crud".
The four games I referred to having an interest in purchasing before the end of the year are Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools Of Destruction, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Rock Band, and the collector's edition of Stranglehold. I might also consider Army Of Two, Assassin's Creed, and Call Of Duty 4, depending on the reviews.
> To give an idea, the top 8 games on PS3 get metacritic scores of 85 or more [...] Only one of those is over 90. To compare, the 360 has *27* games at 85 or more [...] 9 of which rate 90 or more.
The original post had nothing to do with the 360 -- it was about the insinuation that no one uses the PS3 for gaming, which is ridiculous.
You're also making an apples to oranges comparison, because the 360 has been out longer and has a much larger base of titles. But if you want to compare, as of October 13th Metacritic's aggregated ratings for the 360, PS3, and Wii show that the 360 has 264 rated games, the PS3 has 82, and the Wii has 87. Since the PS3 and Wii came out later than the 360 and around the same time as each other, this makes sense.
If you look at the percentage of each console's library that has a metascore of 75 (out of 100) or higher, the PS3 leads with 54%, followed by the 360 at 44%, then the Wii with only 16%. If you go with a metascore of 80+, the PS3 has 34%, the 360 has 27%, and the Wii has only 8% above that level. At 90+ the Wii has 3%, the 360 has 3%, and the PS3 trails with only 1% of its library at that level.
Going by percentages, the PS3 and 360 libraries are of roughly equivalent quality, while the Wii's lags far behind.
> the general sentiment is the PS3 needs a killer app (like a halo, gears of war, or some other really good exclusive title) to make it worth getting.
The general sentiment is also that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and that Britney Spears's personal life is somehow newsworthy. I'll think for myself, thanks.
That said, every console gets a "killer app" eventually. I'm sure the inevitable God Of War III will fill that void if nothing else does beforehand.
> Since nobody is actually playing games on the system
You can always count on Slashdot for a fair and balanced presentation of information.
Funny that I've bought 4 disc-based games and at least one downloadable game since the beginning of July, and have been using my PS3 almost exclusively for gaming since then. I'll be buying at least 4 more games before the end of the year, too.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the PS3 game drought has been over for a while now...
> the Wii has definitely kept up with the others in terms of game count.
Game count, yes. Game quality, no.
Using Metacritic's aggregated ratings for the 360, PS3, and Wii, you can see that the 360 has 264 rated games, the PS3 has 82, and the Wii has 87. Since the PS3 and Wii came out later than the 360 and around the same time as each other, this makes sense.
If you look at the percentage of each console's library that has a metascore of 75 (out of 100) or higher, the PS3 leads with 54%, followed by the 360 at 44%, then the Wii with only 16%. If you go with a metascore of 80+, the PS3 has 34%, the 360 has 27%, and the Wii has only 8% above that level. The only place where the Wii is competitive is in the 90+ tier, where the Wii has 3%, the 360 has 3%, and the PS3 trails with only 1% of its library at that level.
Going by percentages, the PS3 and 360 libraries are of roughly equivalent quality, while the Wii's lags far behind. That may change as developers shift more resources over to Wii development, but for now it's the reality.
> GameStop/EBGames does not carry on their website, Walmart and other retailers will not stock and Blockbuster does not rent AO titles.
That's fine, and perfectly within their rights. But it also doesn't prevent people from self-publishing AO-rated titles on the PC. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft actually prevent the licensing of AO-rated titles for their game consoles, so it's not legally possible to bypass traditional sales channels to release this sort of content for their systems.
> I do not think companies should be "ashamed" of making a conscious business decision.
They should when the average game player is 15 years older than the age of consent, yet they still behave as if their customer base has to ask mommy to buy them games for Christmas.
While I'm glad that Rockstar has found a way to get the game released, I think it's ridiculous that they had to jump through so many hoops just to protect the supposedly fragile minds of 17-year-olds (the only people affected by an M rating vs. an AO rating).
Sony and Nintendo should be ashamed of themselves for their prudish prohibition of AO-rated titles on their consoles, and Rockstar should have the last laugh by releasing Manhunt 2: Uncut for the PC at some point down the road.
> However Sega has done such a bang up job at destroying practically every one of their franchises that I have very little hope for this game.
Virtua Fighter and Virtua Tennis seem to be chugging along just fine, and Shinobi & Nightshade on the PS2 have a strong cult following. True, Sega screwed the pooch with the Sonic franchise a long time ago, but I can't think of any other botched franchises off the top of my head...
"Take-Two and Rockstar Games were interested in continuing their longtime relationship with Sony, in which they premiered their Grand Theft Auto games on PlayStation platforms exclusively for 6-12 months before bringing them to other systems. [...] But neither company's top executives--all extremely important figures in the games industry--could get an answer from Kutaragi. PlayStation's Japanese headquarters was effectively radio silent, and without Kutaragi's signoff, the normally independent American and European branches had no authority to reach agreements on the exclusives they believed could be valuable to the PS3 cause.
While Kutaragi dragged his feet, Microsoft's top brass called these third-parties almost daily, asking each of them, "What would it take for you to publish these games on 360?" Finally, the executives could wait no longer, and both Take-Two/Rockstar and Ubisoft cut deals to make their games available on Xbox 360 as well as PS3." (source)
Their intent had always been to have the PS3 as the lead platform. Resources only shifted to focus on a simultaneous multiplatform release in the second half of 2006. But thanks for the attitude.
Slashdot Mirror
"You know what, Stuart? I like you. You're not like the other people, here, in the trailer park."
Functional languages are great for highly parallelized computation because well-behaved functions don't have side effects, and that eliminates entire classes of race condition and locking issues. Functional languages are also good for abstracting higher-order patterns, since you can manipulate data and other functions without having to care about their lower-level details. Specific functional languages like Scheme, where code and data share the same form, are great for creating custom syntactic structures and writing self-modifying code.
If you aren't doing any of those types of things, then functional programming may seem pointless to you, and that's OK. But every developer should be aware of the tools available to them in case the day comes when they might benefit from using them.
If you're a developer, work for companies that build complete hardware/software systems rather than just software. Typically if they design and manufacture in-house, the bulk of the software work requires close collaboration with hardware, FPGA, and systems engineers, and this works best keeping everyone local. Attempts to outsource in these environments usually end in failure, and the companies that try often learn their lesson and don't try again.
Nonconformism is always viewed with suspicion by the masses. Either you have the courage of your convictions or you don't. Any company that's going to judge me based on the lack of a Facebook account isn't someplace I'd want to work.
The story that I've heard repeated often is that developer salaries tend to flatline in a person's 50s and even retreat a bit as they close out their careers, while managerial salaries continue to increase throughout the later years of a career. Whether this is supported by actual data or not, I don't know. I can certainly see the potential for this to happen with developers who get complacent in a long-term job where they've maxed out their career path and then get laid off, which could force them to take a significantly lower-paying job elsewhere. I've transitioned from development into management over the past few years, largely because I'd endured a string of awful managers and was confident I could do a better job. Management is definitely not for everyone, though -- it requires a different set of skills from development, and many developers lack the patience and people skills needed to do the job well. But developers with an interest in and aptitude for management clearly make the best managers for development groups, because they have a deep understanding of the issues their teams face, and they have a much easier time building trust and credibility with the group. In the end, it's really about where your skills and interests lie. Do you have the patience to deal with petty office politics, hand-holding MBAs through repeated explanations of the mythical man month, fielding complaints from your team that you're too focused on schedule and complaints from above that you're not focused enough on schedule? Do you get gratification out of identifying and building on your developers' strengths and helping them earn their way to a promotion? Do you enjoy solving problems related to scoping, sequencing, and balancing of other people's work to define and meet milestones? Do you mind dealing with software licenses, office supply purchases, and other mundane "care & feeding" tasks? Can you be content relegating coding to a hobby activity, rather than your main pursuit? If you answered "yes" to all of the above, then it may be worth considering a management path. If not, then you should stay sharp, stay current, and keep your skills valuable and marketable, regardless of your age.
Same thing here. Our project has been using git for years, much to the chagrin of the least common denominator middle managers in our department. They've been pushing hard to get rid of useful work tools with "funny names" under the guise of a common tools initiative that was always in the bag for Microsoft. This will really stick in their craw. I love it.
This is exactly what I do. It also has the advantage of letting you do the lossy compression on your own terms, so the resulting files don't automatically sound like shit.
When there's a client involved and significant money, "cool" and "new" are only good if they actually help sell and maintain the software. The client doesn't care about [...] lambda expressions.
Lambda expressions are in fact cool, but anyone who thinks they're new must have been in a coma since the 1930s.
> How about go adopt a kid instead? There's a world full of children that need good parents.
For a lot of people, the major appeal of having children is to mix their DNA with their partner's and see what they get. I would have no interest in raising someone else's child and pretending they were my own.
For the people who do enjoy this, great. I'm sure the children benefit from it.
> Quite frankly, I think it's irresponsible to have children of your own with so many that need the love, protection, and guidance that a good parent could provide.
And with equal frankness, I think it's ridiculous to paint people as being irresponsible simply because their priorities don't match yours. If you're happier raising a used child instead of a new one, bully for you. Other people prefer having sole responsibility for whatever baggage a child is going to carry through their life.
it's simple, really - spin-offs are, by definition, lame and derivative.
[...] tv shows based on movies [...]
Yeah, that M*A*S*H show sure sucked. And no one on Slashdot liked Buffy or Stargate, obviously...
Estimate the parts required using historical proxies based around size and content. Use historical development time data based on the part estimates. Consolidate the group of smaller estimates for yourself, or ideally across an entire team, to allow estimation error to cancel itself out as much as possible across the group. Now you have a solid estimate of the total effort required, and you just have to map that to the available development hours in each developer's schedule, rebalance as necessary, and see what your end date looks like. Team Software Process
> No, whats funny is that the downloadable game was probably a better game then the 4 disc-based games you purchased.
No, it wasn't, although Super Stardust HD is still a great game.
> The "game drought" may be over, but the "quality game drought" lives on.
It depends on your definition of "quality". The PS3 is currently lagging in extremely high-rated games (90+), but it's doing better than the other current-gen consoles when you look at the percentage of games that rate 75+ or 80+ out of 100. Let me refer you to my other post which goes into more detail.
> i think he means nobody is playing games on this particular system (of 8 ps3's) not that nobody plays games on the ps3 in general. how can so many people have misinterpreted that?
The quote is "since nobody is actually playing games on the system, it makes sense to use them for research projects like this". Your interpretation would only make sense if these particular PS3s were already lying around, ready to use for any purpose, and someone chose to use them for research instead of gaming. As the article states, Gaurav Khanna's interest in the PS3 was specifically for research computation, and that's why Sony gave him 8 of them for free.
If there was any misinterpretation here, it wouldn't seem to be on my end.
> saying that people aren't buying PS3s or PS3 games in any real volume is still a matter of fact more than it is an opinion.
That fact hasn't been disputed, but it also has absolutely nothing to do with the contention that no one uses the PS3 for gaming.
> 8 games? Yikes, either you play *everything* or you've got some real crud in there. Care to elaborate?
The four games I was referring to were Ninja Gaiden Sigma (88), Skate (85), Stuntman: Ignition (75), and Warhawk (84). The downloadable game was Super Stardust HD (84). None of those games are even remotely close to "crud".
The four games I referred to having an interest in purchasing before the end of the year are Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools Of Destruction, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Rock Band, and the collector's edition of Stranglehold. I might also consider Army Of Two, Assassin's Creed, and Call Of Duty 4, depending on the reviews.
> To give an idea, the top 8 games on PS3 get metacritic scores of 85 or more [...] Only one of those is over 90. To compare, the 360 has *27* games at 85 or more [...] 9 of which rate 90 or more.
The original post had nothing to do with the 360 -- it was about the insinuation that no one uses the PS3 for gaming, which is ridiculous.
You're also making an apples to oranges comparison, because the 360 has been out longer and has a much larger base of titles. But if you want to compare, as of October 13th Metacritic's aggregated ratings for the 360, PS3, and Wii show that the 360 has 264 rated games, the PS3 has 82, and the Wii has 87. Since the PS3 and Wii came out later than the 360 and around the same time as each other, this makes sense.
If you look at the percentage of each console's library that has a metascore of 75 (out of 100) or higher, the PS3 leads with 54%, followed by the 360 at 44%, then the Wii with only 16%. If you go with a metascore of 80+, the PS3 has 34%, the 360 has 27%, and the Wii has only 8% above that level. At 90+ the Wii has 3%, the 360 has 3%, and the PS3 trails with only 1% of its library at that level.
Going by percentages, the PS3 and 360 libraries are of roughly equivalent quality, while the Wii's lags far behind.
> the general sentiment is the PS3 needs a killer app (like a halo, gears of war, or some other really good exclusive title) to make it worth getting.
The general sentiment is also that Iraq was involved in 9/11 and that Britney Spears's personal life is somehow newsworthy. I'll think for myself, thanks.
That said, every console gets a "killer app" eventually. I'm sure the inevitable God Of War III will fill that void if nothing else does beforehand.
> Question: why do you read Slashdot.
For the linked articles and the comments from the few people who actually have some insight into the issues at hand.
> Since nobody is actually playing games on the system
You can always count on Slashdot for a fair and balanced presentation of information.
Funny that I've bought 4 disc-based games and at least one downloadable game since the beginning of July, and have been using my PS3 almost exclusively for gaming since then. I'll be buying at least 4 more games before the end of the year, too.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the PS3 game drought has been over for a while now...
> the Wii has definitely kept up with the others in terms of game count.
Game count, yes. Game quality, no.
Using Metacritic's aggregated ratings for the 360, PS3, and Wii, you can see that the 360 has 264 rated games, the PS3 has 82, and the Wii has 87. Since the PS3 and Wii came out later than the 360 and around the same time as each other, this makes sense.
If you look at the percentage of each console's library that has a metascore of 75 (out of 100) or higher, the PS3 leads with 54%, followed by the 360 at 44%, then the Wii with only 16%. If you go with a metascore of 80+, the PS3 has 34%, the 360 has 27%, and the Wii has only 8% above that level. The only place where the Wii is competitive is in the 90+ tier, where the Wii has 3%, the 360 has 3%, and the PS3 trails with only 1% of its library at that level.
Going by percentages, the PS3 and 360 libraries are of roughly equivalent quality, while the Wii's lags far behind. That may change as developers shift more resources over to Wii development, but for now it's the reality.
No one seems to be complaining that they've cast a Korean to play the Japanese Mr. Sulu...?
> There's what, more than 7 different version of the thing to this date?
There have been four, not counting color variations.
20GB - 4 USB, no card slots, full hardware BC, $499
40GB - 2 USB, no card slots, no BC, $399
60GB - 4 USB, card slots, full hardware BC, $599 (later $499)
80GB - 4 USB, card slots, hybrid hardware/software BC, $599 (later $499)
The 20GB and 60GB versions are now discontinued, so there have never been more than 2 versions actively being marketed at one time.
> GameStop/EBGames does not carry on their website, Walmart and other retailers will not stock and Blockbuster does not rent AO titles.
That's fine, and perfectly within their rights. But it also doesn't prevent people from self-publishing AO-rated titles on the PC. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft actually prevent the licensing of AO-rated titles for their game consoles, so it's not legally possible to bypass traditional sales channels to release this sort of content for their systems.
> I do not think companies should be "ashamed" of making a conscious business decision.
They should when the average game player is 15 years older than the age of consent, yet they still behave as if their customer base has to ask mommy to buy them games for Christmas.
While I'm glad that Rockstar has found a way to get the game released, I think it's ridiculous that they had to jump through so many hoops just to protect the supposedly fragile minds of 17-year-olds (the only people affected by an M rating vs. an AO rating).
Sony and Nintendo should be ashamed of themselves for their prudish prohibition of AO-rated titles on their consoles, and Rockstar should have the last laugh by releasing Manhunt 2: Uncut for the PC at some point down the road.
> However Sega has done such a bang up job at destroying practically every one of their franchises that I have very little hope for this game.
Virtua Fighter and Virtua Tennis seem to be chugging along just fine, and Shinobi & Nightshade on the PS2 have a strong cult following. True, Sega screwed the pooch with the Sonic franchise a long time ago, but I can't think of any other botched franchises off the top of my head...
"Take-Two and Rockstar Games were interested in continuing their longtime relationship with Sony, in which they premiered their Grand Theft Auto games on PlayStation platforms exclusively for 6-12 months before bringing them to other systems. [...] But neither company's top executives--all extremely important figures in the games industry--could get an answer from Kutaragi. PlayStation's Japanese headquarters was effectively radio silent, and without Kutaragi's signoff, the normally independent American and European branches had no authority to reach agreements on the exclusives they believed could be valuable to the PS3 cause.
While Kutaragi dragged his feet, Microsoft's top brass called these third-parties almost daily, asking each of them, "What would it take for you to publish these games on 360?" Finally, the executives could wait no longer, and both Take-Two/Rockstar and Ubisoft cut deals to make their games available on Xbox 360 as well as PS3." (source)
Their intent had always been to have the PS3 as the lead platform. Resources only shifted to focus on a simultaneous multiplatform release in the second half of 2006. But thanks for the attitude.
I can't find the original interview from early in the year where I read someone from Rockstar saying that, but here are some supporting links.