As much as I hate to say it, I totally agree. Spelling and neatness count, people. And it's not just like it was a few places, either.
If you decide consciously that you are not going to play by the rules that the rest of us play by, don't be surprised when the rest of us look at you as though you're an idiot.
Huh? mega and Mega in this case are the same. The names use camelCasing, starting with a lowerCasedLetter.
showMegaTexture and megaTextureLevel are referring to settings about the same thing.. I don't know what either does, but you can bet your sweet bippy that they are about settings on the same system.
Having a Data Ready flag doesn't solve the problem that a clock solves. How do you know when you can read your 'Data Ready' flag? How do you know that your current reading of 'Data Ready' is really new data, and not the same data you haven't picked up yet?
A clock is a syncronization scheme, and it solves a very low-level issue: How do I syncronize my reads and writes on a physical level?
Many people have tried to create systems that don't have clocks. Without exception, they have all failed or have been unscalable.
Except that Big Bang Theory neither requires nor expects a crunch. In fact, most modern cosmologists think that we live in an open universe, meaning that we will eventually suffer heat death. There's a lot of literature on this, but I highly recommend Guth's The Inflationary Universe for a layman physics treatment. The book is quite interesting, has little math and lots of references if you want to go look up where he's coming from. To say that Guth is an expert on cosmology would be a gross understatment.
You're totally missing the issue. The workweek is 40 hours. By law. Unless you happen to fall into certain professions. Software programmers do not. And frankly, 6:00am to 5:00pm is laughable compared to the workweeks I worked in the game industry. Try 8am to midnight. (Or if you prefer, 9am till 1-2 in the morning). Try not having a day off (including weekends) for 6 straight months. There are 168 hours in a week. I've worked 112 of them.
We're not talking about a little 'wink wink' 'nudge nudge' "overtime" at the end of the project for two months to get it done. We're talking about the kind of hours that cause game industry employees to have a nearly 70% divorce rate. We're talking about 'gee I haven't seen my kids in 4 years' kind of hours. We're talking about crunches for over a year.
Virtually every project is going to have some kind of push at the end to get all the lose ends tied down. But we're not talking about a little push, we're talking about a jackhammer.
Patrick Moore was a founder of Green Peace, and he shows up on Penn & Teller Bullshit from time to time.
Although, it's sort of unfair to label him an environmentalist these days... It's not that he's against the environment or anything, just that he has nothing to do with the enivormental movement anymore (he became disenfranchised when he realized the organization he had helped to found became a vehicle for political bashing). So he doesn't really share the views common of modern "environmentalists."
He explains all of this in one of the P&T episodes. I don't remember which one, though.
The thing is, if you give any competent engineer, who has never seen a DVR, the task of building a box with all these features
The thing is, if you don't already know what all the features are, it's a lot harder to dream them up and figure out how they work. Tivo actually has a lot of innovative features that they patented. They deserve their money, be it in the form of licensing fees from competitors or settlements from jackholes who copied their design verbatim after they released their product.
In hindsight, most things are "obvious." It's not a question of what's "obvious" now, it's a question of what was "obvious" then.
I'm really pleased that Tivo won their lawsuit. This was definitely a case of the patent system actually working properly.
DRM is one thing that can really differentiate linux from MS for desktop users. If linux would *get there* for gaming, and continue to be DRM free (and especially would allow me to use the media I purchased to its full capacities) whereas I couldn't without DRM on Windows, that would be a compelling reason to switch.
I have not bought or played Half-life 2 precisely because of the phone-home technology that it uses to verify that the single-player title *I would've bought and paid for* was legitimately mine. In my opinion, the linux community should use the DRM front as a differentiating point.
Re:Time to short Google...
on
Google's DNA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's certainly true, and like Netscape, Google has one competitor that it should be especially wary of: Microsoft.
When IE on Vista defaults the homepage to an MSN search page that actually works nearly as well as google, you have to wonder if most people (obviously not all people) will bother typing in google.com at all.
Finally, a voice of reason. This is exactly the issue I have. I find nothing wrong with companies like Tivo and Netflix wanted to patent something that was truly innovative when it was released. Hindsight is 20/20, and for those of you saying how obvious this was, I question why you didn't create such a company.
The real problem with the patent system is the length of time granted to a patent, not the patent system itself.
You don't get nearly the recognition you deserve. Since your research in the 40s, 50s and 60s, you have saved over a billion people. There's pretty much no other person on earth who can claim to have saved a billion people with their discoveries. In fact, arguably Norman Borlaug has saved more people from death than any person in history, past, present or possibly even towards the future.
There was a great episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! that covered Dr. Borlaug's work. I highly recommend it for a watch, if you have the chance.
From Wikiquote, a quote by Penn Jillette about Norman Borlaug:
"At a time when doom-sayers were hopping around saying everyone was going to starve, Norman was working. He moved to Mexico and lived among the people there until he figured out how to improve the output of the farmers. So that saved a million lives. Then he packed up his family and moved to India, where in spite of a war with Pakistan, he managed to introduce new wheat strains that quadrupled their food output. So that saved another million. You get it? But he wasn't done. He did the same thing with a new rice in China. He's doing the same thing in Afica -- as much of Africa as he's allowed to visit. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1970, they said he had saved a billion people. That's BILLION! Carl Sagan BILLION with a B! And most of them were a different race from him. Norman is the greatest human being, and you probably never heard of him."
No offense, but if you think posting as an AC somehow would help you avoid NDA issues, you're quite foolish. The NDA you agreed to says you won't reveal anything (Non-disclosure), not that you wouldn't reveal who you were when you did reveal something.
Not that your post was revealing any information to begin with.
Certainly it would be impossible to refund you the time you spent on dealing with issues of crappy games.
However, if you buy your games from smaller video game stores, such as Super Software and Electronics Boutique, they generally have much more liberal return policies than Best Buy, CompUSA, etc. Generally, smaller stores will charge you more for a game, ($5 more), but you can return the title for up to a week for any reason whatsoever, including "this game sucked."
That's where I make the majority of my game purchases.
It's been said a few times, but E3 wasn't about the media "in the beginning." It was about publishers selling their titles to retaillers, and developers selling their titles to publishers.
E3 is thus not returning to anything, but evolving yet again.
You're right, I left that aspect out. According to The Entertainment Software Alliance, 105M units were sold in 1996 (the furthest back I could find data), compared to 248 million units sold in 2004. If we generously assume that the market was half that size in 1987, then ~55M units were sold in 1987.
A quarter of the games were sold, to cover development budgets of approximately 1/80th of modern development.
The price of games has hardly changed at all since 1987. For the past ~20 years, games have been sold for $50 apiece.
Meanwhile, the cost to make said games has gone up dramatically (the largest game I worked on had a development and marketting budget of $40M dollars, compared to development and marketting budgets of <500K in 1987). That's not even mentioning the fact that the $50 people paid for in 1987 is worth (conservatively) $74 in today's dollar.
It's foolish to think that the problem with the game industry is that the prices of games are too high.
Game prices have hardly changed since 1987, when the Nintendo was the first console back on the scene after the video game bust. In 1987, you paid $50 for a game. Today, you pay $50 (or less, sometimes) for a game. When you pay more, it's because you buy during the high season (you're unwilling to wait for titles to go on sale, you don't buy during the first few days, etc).
The cost of developing games has gone up and up, but the profit made on each unit has remained constant (~$28 after box costs for console games, and ~$38 after box costs for PC games).
I hope the moderators see your post and mod you up to +100000, Insightful.
This is one of the most infuriating arguments that I hear about OSS, that because a vulnerability is announced and a patch comes out shortly after, OSS is somehow more secure...
When, in fact, the vulnerability could've existed since the first day the code was released.
The irony of your post, and its being rated to +5, Insightful is not lost on me.
As another poster mentioned, the purpose of the Associated Press is to exist as frontline reporters for the various news organizations that link from it. But don't take my word for it, read directly from the AP.
Papers have bought a service from the AP, that is, to provide content for them that would be prohibitive for them to get themselves. They expect, as part of that purchase, that the AP has error and fact checked the material.
People have to learn to evaluate what they read critically and decide how believable it is.
Yes, yes they do.
I'm not very optimistic about this happening on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I hate to say it, I totally agree. Spelling and neatness count, people. And it's not just like it was a few places, either.
If you decide consciously that you are not going to play by the rules that the rest of us play by, don't be surprised when the rest of us look at you as though you're an idiot.
That's foolish. There are bugs in every project of every size. Including bridges. And skyscrapers. Remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge?
Normally, those bugs have low Severity or Frequency (or both). Sometimes they have catastrophic severity.
Did you know that the twin towers were built to withstand a direct impact from a 707?
Bugs are a fact of life. They follow from the mantra 'nothing is perfect.'
Huh? mega and Mega in this case are the same. The names use camelCasing, starting with a lowerCasedLetter.
showMegaTexture and megaTextureLevel are referring to settings about the same thing.. I don't know what either does, but you can bet your sweet bippy that they are about settings on the same system.
Having a Data Ready flag doesn't solve the problem that a clock solves. How do you know when you can read your 'Data Ready' flag? How do you know that your current reading of 'Data Ready' is really new data, and not the same data you haven't picked up yet?
A clock is a syncronization scheme, and it solves a very low-level issue: How do I syncronize my reads and writes on a physical level?
Many people have tried to create systems that don't have clocks. Without exception, they have all failed or have been unscalable.
Except that Big Bang Theory neither requires nor expects a crunch. In fact, most modern cosmologists think that we live in an open universe, meaning that we will eventually suffer heat death. There's a lot of literature on this, but I highly recommend Guth's The Inflationary Universe for a layman physics treatment. The book is quite interesting, has little math and lots of references if you want to go look up where he's coming from. To say that Guth is an expert on cosmology would be a gross understatment.
Here's some lazy links:
Big Bang
Heat Death
You're totally missing the issue. The workweek is 40 hours. By law. Unless you happen to fall into certain professions. Software programmers do not. And frankly, 6:00am to 5:00pm is laughable compared to the workweeks I worked in the game industry. Try 8am to midnight. (Or if you prefer, 9am till 1-2 in the morning). Try not having a day off (including weekends) for 6 straight months. There are 168 hours in a week. I've worked 112 of them.
We're not talking about a little 'wink wink' 'nudge nudge' "overtime" at the end of the project for two months to get it done. We're talking about the kind of hours that cause game industry employees to have a nearly 70% divorce rate. We're talking about 'gee I haven't seen my kids in 4 years' kind of hours. We're talking about crunches for over a year.
Virtually every project is going to have some kind of push at the end to get all the lose ends tied down. But we're not talking about a little push, we're talking about a jackhammer.
I hope you get modded +5 insightful.
)
The summary wasn't much better than the headline.
(From the products-I'll-never-use-for-fear-of-aneurism-dept
...but he is what they should be.
Patrick Moore was a founder of Green Peace, and he shows up on Penn & Teller Bullshit from time to time.
Although, it's sort of unfair to label him an environmentalist these days... It's not that he's against the environment or anything, just that he has nothing to do with the enivormental movement anymore (he became disenfranchised when he realized the organization he had helped to found became a vehicle for political bashing). So he doesn't really share the views common of modern "environmentalists."
He explains all of this in one of the P&T episodes. I don't remember which one, though.
The thing is, if you give any competent engineer, who has never seen a DVR, the task of building a box with all these features
The thing is, if you don't already know what all the features are, it's a lot harder to dream them up and figure out how they work. Tivo actually has a lot of innovative features that they patented. They deserve their money, be it in the form of licensing fees from competitors or settlements from jackholes who copied their design verbatim after they released their product.
In hindsight, most things are "obvious." It's not a question of what's "obvious" now, it's a question of what was "obvious" then.
I'm really pleased that Tivo won their lawsuit. This was definitely a case of the patent system actually working properly.
DRM is one thing that can really differentiate linux from MS for desktop users. If linux would *get there* for gaming, and continue to be DRM free (and especially would allow me to use the media I purchased to its full capacities) whereas I couldn't without DRM on Windows, that would be a compelling reason to switch.
I have not bought or played Half-life 2 precisely because of the phone-home technology that it uses to verify that the single-player title *I would've bought and paid for* was legitimately mine. In my opinion, the linux community should use the DRM front as a differentiating point.
That's certainly true, and like Netscape, Google has one competitor that it should be especially wary of: Microsoft.
When IE on Vista defaults the homepage to an MSN search page that actually works nearly as well as google, you have to wonder if most people (obviously not all people) will bother typing in google.com at all.
Finally, a voice of reason. This is exactly the issue I have. I find nothing wrong with companies like Tivo and Netflix wanted to patent something that was truly innovative when it was released. Hindsight is 20/20, and for those of you saying how obvious this was, I question why you didn't create such a company.
The real problem with the patent system is the length of time granted to a patent, not the patent system itself.
I suggest Agile Web Development with Rails.
It fascinates me that people still deal with PHP at all.
PS: If you're stuck with PHP, I seriously feel for you.
Norman E. Borlaug is my hero, and he should be yours, too.
There was a great episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! that covered Dr. Borlaug's work. I highly recommend it for a watch, if you have the chance.
From Wikiquote, a quote by Penn Jillette about Norman Borlaug:
No offense, but if you think posting as an AC somehow would help you avoid NDA issues, you're quite foolish. The NDA you agreed to says you won't reveal anything (Non-disclosure), not that you wouldn't reveal who you were when you did reveal something.
Not that your post was revealing any information to begin with.
Just FYI.
Anytime you have to make a statement like "I am about as GLBT friendly as a person gets," you're not.
It's far from a no brainer.
What form of travel can you use between states that doesn't require you carry some form of identification?
Certainly it would be impossible to refund you the time you spent on dealing with issues of crappy games.
However, if you buy your games from smaller video game stores, such as Super Software and Electronics Boutique, they generally have much more liberal return policies than Best Buy, CompUSA, etc. Generally, smaller stores will charge you more for a game, ($5 more), but you can return the title for up to a week for any reason whatsoever, including "this game sucked."
That's where I make the majority of my game purchases.
It's been said a few times, but E3 wasn't about the media "in the beginning." It was about publishers selling their titles to retaillers, and developers selling their titles to publishers.
E3 is thus not returning to anything, but evolving yet again.
You're right, I left that aspect out. According to The Entertainment Software Alliance, 105M units were sold in 1996 (the furthest back I could find data), compared to 248 million units sold in 2004. If we generously assume that the market was half that size in 1987, then ~55M units were sold in 1987.
A quarter of the games were sold, to cover development budgets of approximately 1/80th of modern development.
The price of games has hardly changed at all since 1987. For the past ~20 years, games have been sold for $50 apiece.
Meanwhile, the cost to make said games has gone up dramatically (the largest game I worked on had a development and marketting budget of $40M dollars, compared to development and marketting budgets of <500K in 1987). That's not even mentioning the fact that the $50 people paid for in 1987 is worth (conservatively) $74 in today's dollar.
It's foolish to think that the problem with the game industry is that the prices of games are too high.
Game prices have hardly changed since 1987, when the Nintendo was the first console back on the scene after the video game bust. In 1987, you paid $50 for a game. Today, you pay $50 (or less, sometimes) for a game. When you pay more, it's because you buy during the high season (you're unwilling to wait for titles to go on sale, you don't buy during the first few days, etc).
Meanwhile, the value of the dollar has plummetted in the same time frame. The conservative estimate is that $50 in 1987 should be worth $74 today.
The cost of developing games has gone up and up, but the profit made on each unit has remained constant (~$28 after box costs for console games, and ~$38 after box costs for PC games).
I hope the moderators see your post and mod you up to +100000, Insightful.
This is one of the most infuriating arguments that I hear about OSS, that because a vulnerability is announced and a patch comes out shortly after, OSS is somehow more secure...
When, in fact, the vulnerability could've existed since the first day the code was released.
Hahahahhaha..
Great, if not moderately obscure, reference. Foundation is a great series. I'm up to Foundation's Edge now. Good stuff.
The irony of your post, and its being rated to +5, Insightful is not lost on me.
As another poster mentioned, the purpose of the Associated Press is to exist as frontline reporters for the various news organizations that link from it. But don't take my word for it, read directly from the AP.
Papers have bought a service from the AP, that is, to provide content for them that would be prohibitive for them to get themselves. They expect, as part of that purchase, that the AP has error and fact checked the material.
People have to learn to evaluate what they read critically and decide how believable it is.
Yes, yes they do.
I'm not very optimistic about this happening on Slashdot.
Fixed for you.