exactly - if you are stupid enough to blast your music at full volume (which so many people seem to be prone to do judging from riding the bus around town) then you are only doing yourself major hearing damage for later on.
i've gone to so many live shows (blisteringly loud metal) that i can't even listen to music loud anymore - it's my own fault, but now i wear earplugs for shows simply because it actually hurts to listen to loud music.
just want to slap people that are blasting loud music on the bus - it's soo freaking annoying to everyone around you as well.
not to mention the stupid white 'ipod' earphone people - so pretentious you want to just beat them for thinking they're so 'cool'
Exactly - almost all of the large movie houses use Linux for their rendering pipelines (see http://linuxmovies.movieeditor.com/software/index. html for more) and there is a LONG list of software available for pretty much every task you could ever want regarding creating / editing / processing video on Linux.
Many of these tools are easily commercial quality and/or created by commercial companies for use on linux - and many of them are 'linux-only' which blows the 'not for linux' argument out of the water.
it's hilarious - the same networks that spout endless marketing babble about the features that are offered on their new phones, but these are the same networks that charge ridiculous bandwidth prices (often by the kb transfered) for using their networks.
there are endless studies with cel providers complaining that no one surfs the net on their phones, no one plays games on their phones - and this is exactly why.
who's going to bother surfing the net - unless it's an absolute emergency - when you are being billed by the kb?
this is why wap is such a collosal waste of time to develop for - when people are being milked money for every extra character that you have on your webpage, how are you supposed to provide ANY kind of 'rich media experience' for these customers?
we are just finishing off a celphone game for a large publisher that is just entering the mobile market - and it's a ridiculous market to try and enter into, both from a developer and a consumer perspective.
i'm not even going to get into the nightmare of developing games for celphones - you hear all these reports of millions of dollars being invested into mobile game development - and the platform is so fragmented and flat-out broken that it's a complete waste of time to get into.
it's the dot com bubble except a thousand times worse...except that when the bubble 'pops' it will only be good for consumers.
first the celphone providers forced you to ONLY use the ringtones that they provide you and threatened with lawsuits any company that dared to break that monopoly.
second the celphone providers try to force unwanted features onto consumers with new phones - which helps as far as 'market penetration' goes - but the overall impact has still be next to negligible simply because of all of the 'hidden costs' to the consumer - namely airtime.
the cost to download a 3 meg MP3 (or whatever format itunes spits songs out in) over the celphone networks would be easily 5-10 times what itunes itself charges for their songs.
so instead of a 99 cent song, you suddenly have 5+ dollars PER SONG in order to transfer the songs to your phone.
the better solution is providing integrated wifi into the ipod-type phones - then when the phone is near a wifi spot, it can just access the 'normal' internet much like a windowsCE PDA device (for example).
As hotspots continue to popup everywhere, this kind of solution would definitely be a huge boost to the consumer experience.
I hardly consider modern society as a 'normal' state of evolution.
Whether you have more money or not has absolutely nothing to do with whether your 'genes' are hardy enough to survive, propogate and evolve.
The state of modern society has in fact thrown out thousands of years of evolution in favour of 'creationism', and the 'golden law' - ie those with the most toys wins.
This has nothing to do with evolution, it has everything to do with the rich feeding the rich and the rich doing everything in their power to stay rich.
Look at how much 'old money' runs the world (in the US and abroad). You think that these same people, if given the same upbringing, financial situation and social status (ie 'socialist states') are somehow 'better' than those raised in capitalist 'everyone for themselves' environments?
I hardly think so.
The Bush family dynasty is the prime example of how this theory fails miserably.
When you have generation after generation of idiot propogating and continuing their 'dynasty', you inevitably result in the idiots rising to the top - hence gwb II 'the sequel' - and the rest of the old money families that think they know best and flounder around trying to play 'risk' and destroy the world...
i second step 6 - we have a game that was fairly popular in a certain crowd (won an award at the indie games festival this year) - and had volunteers step up to offer to port the engine & game to Linux
not only volunteers, but extremely talented coders that were able to not only port the game, but improve the codebase by fixing compiler-specific issues that were not apparently until trying to compile under gcc.
what it comes down to is - if you have written your game using directx (anything) then the game is most likely NOT going to be able to ported to anything but windows - unless you use wine or something similar (and this isn't really porting, it's just hacking until your game runs).
if you want to have a portable game (or a game that is ported), you need to plan this into the code base UP FRONT - trying to hack it in afterwards is a nightmare even for those that have platform specific knowledge.
in our case, the game was written to be cross-platform & was ported to the mac os (9 & osx) already, so most of the compiler-specific issues had been solved previously, making the porting job considerably easier than it might have been previously.
the final point i have to make is this: not knowing much about linux desktop distros (even having used linux for all of our servers for the past half-decade), even trying to figure out HOW we might port the engine & game to linux took us way too long.
the linux community is so fragmented that it seriously kills any chance of getting applications ported to the platform, let alone something as complicated as a game.
we decided that we'd get the game running under one specific distro and leave it at that for now - and even that ended up with us taking almost as long to get the graphics drivers for our hardware accelerated nvidia card installed and running as it did to actually port the game.
linux as a desktop application platform has serious issues - as much as we wanted to support the platform, until shit 'just works', it isn't work supporting for the fragmented userbase and broken software system.
every distro has it's own 'install' process, it's own update process, etc - this is unsupportable for a large company, let alone a small one that is trying to port a game...
or the fact that Windows Vista isn't going to support a full OpenGL ICD driver and will apparently run OpenGL under a Virtual Machine resulting in 50% performance under Vista?
Submitted almost a week ago, and didn't show up on slashdot whatsoever...no, this isn't important or a conscious decision by microsoft, no...they wouldn't do that now would they...
Nothing like having your computer crash, bring it back up, open email client and have it say 'Welcome to your email...would you like to create an account?'...ugh...
I've also had firefox randomly crash on me (or windows crash while firefox was open) and delete my entire set of bookmarks. This has actually happened several times. Gotta love losing that 3 years of bookmarks of who knows what useful information and/or sites...gone...
With IE, even as crappy as it is, I've never had it just randomly 'lose' all of my bookmarks or anything like that.
As far as the firefox/bookmarks side of things goes, I've setup the FTP plugin to sync my bookmarks to our server, helps prevent losing all of the info for the most part, and allows me to jump onto any machine and update my bookmarks...which in itself is pretty sweet;}
one thing that's always bugged me is that i used the full mozilla suite prior to using firefox and briefly trying out thunderbird.
firefox and thunderbird offer to import IE and/or outlook / outlook express settings & email but don't even offer the option of importing mozilla suite info.
i've since heard that you can just 'point' firefox at mozilla's settings and it will pick up the bookmarks, but how is the average user supposed realize this kind of thing?
particularly with thunderbird / mozilla - if i happened to start using the mozilla suite, and wanted to try thunderbird next, it is by no means intuitive or apparent if i can get my email from one program to another...to this day i'm still using mozilla as my mail and firefox for browsing because i don't want to risk losing my email because i decided to try pointing thunderbird at my mozilla mail and have it screw up or blow away my email...
for the opposite view, i use mozilla for my email and firefox for my browsing - but there is no way to get mozilla mail to open url links in anything but mozilla's browser... open source developer whine about microsoft not playing nice with other programs, but this is the most 'lock in' type behavior i've ever seen...
even in outlook express you can get your links opening in firefox or another browser, but mozilla suite assumes that it is the only browser in the world and doesn't even give you a chance to try and open links in other programs.
that said, i did try thunderbird for a week or so but then it crashed and blew away my email inbox (with all of the emails in it) and i haven't gone back...i don't need my business emails being blown away randomly;}
Sounds like someone just needs to learn how to admin their computer.
doesn't matter what programs you have on your computer, if you aren't using them at that particular moment, they don't need to be running in your systray.
this is a common misperception from alot of newer computer users - or people that buy dell & other 'name brand' computers. they come shipped with so much crap on them that it's ridiculous.
I like my MS Ergo keyboard, but I really don't understand why the keyboard driver keeps thinking it needs to access the internet every time my computer starts up.
I mean - it's a KEYBOARD for gawds sake...is it sending key monitoring info back to MS headquarters or something? trying to see if i'm typing some 'oh so bad' words into my msn blog or something? (not that i have an msn blog or ever would)
On an offtopic note, People don't trust microsoft because they have proved time and time again that they are untrustworthy - It's too late for most people for microsoft to even try and regain their trust - it's a lost cause.
Another PKD book (specifically) that is more along the lines of the Minority Report future includes 'Divine Invasion', or potentially 'Solar Lottery'...and many others...
One of his books has a futuristic scenario where appliances are all coin-operated, so if you want to open your fridge, you have to pay a fee, if you want to open your door, it costs a fee, etc...leads to some pretty funny scenarios where they are being chased by badguys and try to go through a door, but don't have proper change, so they have to choose another route, etc...
Funny, but also scary because there are advertising / marketing exec's out there that read this stuff and go 'thats a GREAT idea...why dont we do that?'...
Or watching movies like Terminator and seeing the cyberdyne setup and thinking that it would be a great idea...freaking morons the bunch
Ok so they might not have blatantly stolen from Minority Report itself, but anyone that has read William Gibson or, more specifically, Neal Stephenson had more than enough background material to 'forecast' such a future.
There is also another excellent book by Melissa Scott called 'Dreaming Metal' that is all about skinsuits and retina scanning - it came out quite a while back - well worth the read if you are interested in similar types of reading.
All Speilberg did was buy the rights to a story written 30 years ago - by arguably the most visionary writer in this century - Philip K Dick.
Even other amazing writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson are simply extrapolating the futuristic vision as envisioned by PKD way before their time.
Beginning with Blade Runner, Total Recall, etc PKD's books have become the foundation of 'futuristic' sci-fi/cyberpunk movies as Hollywood continues to realize it has no creative vision whatsoever...
However, the more people that become aware of PKD's amazing writing and vision, the better;}
Also check out the upcoming 'Scanner Darkly' by Linklater - it's another PKD story gone movie coming out soon...
at least one of the developers worked on the very cool indie games festival winner 'savage: battle for newerth' (sp?) as well, so they have already proved that they can do some cool stuff, game-design wise
unfortunately the character designs are less than inspired...so many games doing the same kind of blah characters...
but very inspiring to have a team like this blowing the lid off the whole 'throw away your code' attitude that gabe newell spouted a few weeks back, and the 'indie developers wont be able to compete' line that EA tried to pass off a while back as well.
lets hope the online play is as innovative as savage was (even being the natural selection ripoff that it sorta was)...combining an rts, fps and 3rd person game into a very fun online action game...
savage did things in it's online play that haven't been seen in an action game before or since, with the ai controlled npc's mining resources and other very cool things like that.
looking forward to seeing how this project (pardon the pun) progresses...
even if you watch shows exclusively on your TIVO you are watching advertising...
An example is that Fox has a contract with Ford so that EVERY CAR on EVERY FOX show is a Ford. Pay attention next time you watch.
if the characters are using a celphone in the show, you can guarantee that it's a sponsored 'ad' in the show - if they have a drink of something, you can guarantee that it's a sponsored item.
do the stars of your favorite show wear shoes? likely sponsored. clothes? again...
------
Fox does not make money on you watching the show on cable - they make money from advertisers paying them to put the show on tv.
Something that not many people realize, but TV Broadcasters are not in the business of selling 'tv shows', they are in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers.
It's fundamental business. What is really being sold? Simply follow the dollars.
TV == people watching == Advertisers give TV broadcasters money.
This is why in Canada, the TV broadcasters here are pissed about product placement like the ford deal because when they rebroadcast the same shows, they don't get any cut of the in-show advertising revenue from ford - it all goes to Fox US.
So if we TIVO the show from a canadian broadcaster and strip out the canadian ads, then we are doubly screwing the Canadian broadcaster by removing their major source of revenue (interstitials) and the Fox US company still makes the money from Ford for the broadcast of the show...
Advertising in games is going to happen - the trick is making it natural and integrated into the game in a way that is not horrific to the gamer.
A Lord of the Rings game would bomb if it had sprite ads in the middle of it. A GTA game would simply seem like it had more depth to it.
it's a fine line, but one that developers & publishers will simply have to figure out the hard way;}
>>makes it so that VB is very inconvenient, and not >>only because MS is dropping support.
and in a few years when MS drops support for.net for the latest buzzword that they come up with?
I mean they've already dropped.net as a marketing term because they confused everyone so much that no one even knew what.net meant...
planning any long-term applications no a microsoft platform is asking for trouble, period. open source, open standards is the only way to guarantee that your company makes the decisions how the platform and application grows and changes over it's lifecycle.
as a game developer, we did the same thing with directx 6 several years ago...then directx 7 came out...and then 8...then 9...and now with Vista we get 10...
it's a never ending rewrite case that just means we end up redoing and rewriting the same code every time we need to update it.
we have since (a while ago) switched to opengl for our renderer simply because as opengl adds versions and adds features, it is trivial to enhance the renderer to add features simply because the api is designed for the long-term and is not controlled by one specific companies financial goals, but by a central design committee that introduces new features that benefit everyone involved, not just one company.
just an example, but the same thing applies to all of those old vb programmers - the reason you are rewriting that 'old vb app' will be the same reason you will need to rewrite this.net app in a few years - planned obsolesence...
more important than being platform independent, is vendor independent.
Microsoft was forced to retract their whole 'backwards compatible' statement - they aren't even TRYING for backwards compatibility with the existing Xbox games - they mentioned that if you want the 'xbox 1' games to work on the xbox 360 the developers actually have to recompile their game for the xbox 360 and the game players have to re-purchase the same game again.
This is not backwards compatible whatsoever in my mind, it's milking gamers for extra money for no reason other than to fill microsoft's pockets.
Nintendo and Sony know what gamers want - these days the jump from generation to generation is becoming smaller and smaller and it will be harder for companies to sucker players into buying a new console - for this reason, the backwards compatibility issue is a very large one that Microsoft is completely missing the boat on it seems.
same thing as how Dell has 'a choice' to only offer crappy Intel processors instead of the much superior AMD 64 bit-based machines.
We have been pricing a number of machines in house from Dell, made the mistake of buying one laptop from Dell, but every other machine that we purchase will be from acer or another PC manufacturer that can:
1) beat Dell's prices 2) offers AMD machines & much better machine specs all around 3) offers WinXP instead of the crippleware XP Home edition (which we reformat anyways and put dual/triple boot OS configurations on them, but at least we get a 'real' copy of XP).
The only reason we have any windows machines in-house is that we are a software developer and customers use XP, whether we like it or not.
Slashdot Mirror
exactly - if you are stupid enough to blast your music at full volume (which so many people seem to be prone to do judging from riding the bus around town) then you are only doing yourself major hearing damage for later on.
i've gone to so many live shows (blisteringly loud metal) that i can't even listen to music loud anymore - it's my own fault, but now i wear earplugs for shows simply because it actually hurts to listen to loud music.
just want to slap people that are blasting loud music on the bus - it's soo freaking annoying to everyone around you as well.
not to mention the stupid white 'ipod' earphone people - so pretentious you want to just beat them for thinking they're so 'cool'
ugh
There is a very cool open-source linux app called 'jahshaka' that provides a complete compositing / editing / rendering solution for Linux
http://www.jahshaka.org/
http://linuxmovies.movieeditor.com/studio/index.ht ml
;}
a list of major motion picture studios and the movies that have been produced on linux.
but NOO, there are no tools for video on linux
Exactly - almost all of the large movie houses use Linux for their rendering pipelines (see http://linuxmovies.movieeditor.com/software/index. html for more) and there is a LONG list of software available for pretty much every task you could ever want regarding creating / editing / processing video on Linux.
;}
Many of these tools are easily commercial quality and/or created by commercial companies for use on linux - and many of them are 'linux-only' which blows the 'not for linux' argument out of the water.
ignorance is bliss
it's hilarious - the same networks that spout endless marketing babble about the features that are offered on their new phones, but these are the same networks that charge ridiculous bandwidth prices (often by the kb transfered) for using their networks.
there are endless studies with cel providers complaining that no one surfs the net on their phones, no one plays games on their phones - and this is exactly why.
who's going to bother surfing the net - unless it's an absolute emergency - when you are being billed by the kb?
this is why wap is such a collosal waste of time to develop for - when people are being milked money for every extra character that you have on your webpage, how are you supposed to provide ANY kind of 'rich media experience' for these customers?
we are just finishing off a celphone game for a large publisher that is just entering the mobile market - and it's a ridiculous market to try and enter into, both from a developer and a consumer perspective.
i'm not even going to get into the nightmare of developing games for celphones - you hear all these reports of millions of dollars being invested into mobile game development - and the platform is so fragmented and flat-out broken that it's a complete waste of time to get into.
it's the dot com bubble except a thousand times worse...except that when the bubble 'pops' it will only be good for consumers.
first the celphone providers forced you to ONLY use the ringtones that they provide you and threatened with lawsuits any company that dared to break that monopoly.
second the celphone providers try to force unwanted features onto consumers with new phones - which helps as far as 'market penetration' goes - but the overall impact has still be next to negligible simply because of all of the 'hidden costs' to the consumer - namely airtime.
the cost to download a 3 meg MP3 (or whatever format itunes spits songs out in) over the celphone networks would be easily 5-10 times what itunes itself charges for their songs.
so instead of a 99 cent song, you suddenly have 5+ dollars PER SONG in order to transfer the songs to your phone.
the better solution is providing integrated wifi into the ipod-type phones - then when the phone is near a wifi spot, it can just access the 'normal' internet much like a windowsCE PDA device (for example).
As hotspots continue to popup everywhere, this kind of solution would definitely be a huge boost to the consumer experience.
I hardly consider modern society as a 'normal' state of evolution.
Whether you have more money or not has absolutely nothing to do with whether your 'genes' are hardy enough to survive, propogate and evolve.
The state of modern society has in fact thrown out thousands of years of evolution in favour of 'creationism', and the 'golden law' - ie those with the most toys wins.
This has nothing to do with evolution, it has everything to do with the rich feeding the rich and the rich doing everything in their power to stay rich.
Look at how much 'old money' runs the world (in the US and abroad). You think that these same people, if given the same upbringing, financial situation and social status (ie 'socialist states') are somehow 'better' than those raised in capitalist 'everyone for themselves' environments?
I hardly think so.
The Bush family dynasty is the prime example of how this theory fails miserably.
When you have generation after generation of idiot propogating and continuing their 'dynasty', you inevitably result in the idiots rising to the top - hence gwb II 'the sequel' - and the rest of the old money families that think they know best and flounder around trying to play 'risk' and destroy the world...
i second step 6 - we have a game that was fairly popular in a certain crowd (won an award at the indie games festival this year) - and had volunteers step up to offer to port the engine & game to Linux
not only volunteers, but extremely talented coders that were able to not only port the game, but improve the codebase by fixing compiler-specific issues that were not apparently until trying to compile under gcc.
what it comes down to is - if you have written your game using directx (anything) then the game is most likely NOT going to be able to ported to anything but windows - unless you use wine or something similar (and this isn't really porting, it's just hacking until your game runs).
if you want to have a portable game (or a game that is ported), you need to plan this into the code base UP FRONT - trying to hack it in afterwards is a nightmare even for those that have platform specific knowledge.
in our case, the game was written to be cross-platform & was ported to the mac os (9 & osx) already, so most of the compiler-specific issues had been solved previously, making the porting job considerably easier than it might have been previously.
the final point i have to make is this: not knowing much about linux desktop distros (even having used linux for all of our servers for the past half-decade), even trying to figure out HOW we might port the engine & game to linux took us way too long.
the linux community is so fragmented that it seriously kills any chance of getting applications ported to the platform, let alone something as complicated as a game.
we decided that we'd get the game running under one specific distro and leave it at that for now - and even that ended up with us taking almost as long to get the graphics drivers for our hardware accelerated nvidia card installed and running as it did to actually port the game.
linux as a desktop application platform has serious issues - as much as we wanted to support the platform, until shit 'just works', it isn't work supporting for the fragmented userbase and broken software system.
every distro has it's own 'install' process, it's own update process, etc - this is unsupportable for a large company, let alone a small one that is trying to port a game...
Last time i checked out rubberduck is came bundled with adware / spyware...
Does it still come with this?
xe.com has done this for oh about since the internet existed - how is this something new?
http://www.xe.com/ucc/
or the fact that Windows Vista isn't going to support a full OpenGL ICD driver and will apparently run OpenGL under a Virtual Machine resulting in 50% performance under Vista?
http://www.opengl.org/
Submitted almost a week ago, and didn't show up on slashdot whatsoever...no, this isn't important or a conscious decision by microsoft, no...they wouldn't do that now would they...
Exactly.
;}
Nothing like having your computer crash, bring it back up, open email client and have it say 'Welcome to your email...would you like to create an account?'...ugh...
I've also had firefox randomly crash on me (or windows crash while firefox was open) and delete my entire set of bookmarks. This has actually happened several times. Gotta love losing that 3 years of bookmarks of who knows what useful information and/or sites...gone...
With IE, even as crappy as it is, I've never had it just randomly 'lose' all of my bookmarks or anything like that.
As far as the firefox/bookmarks side of things goes, I've setup the FTP plugin to sync my bookmarks to our server, helps prevent losing all of the info for the most part, and allows me to jump onto any machine and update my bookmarks...which in itself is pretty sweet
our mail server at the time didn't have imap support unfortunately.
;}
we have since moved to a 'real' email server
one thing that's always bugged me is that i used the full mozilla suite prior to using firefox and briefly trying out thunderbird.
;}
firefox and thunderbird offer to import IE and/or outlook / outlook express settings & email but don't even offer the option of importing mozilla suite info.
i've since heard that you can just 'point' firefox at mozilla's settings and it will pick up the bookmarks, but how is the average user supposed realize this kind of thing?
particularly with thunderbird / mozilla - if i happened to start using the mozilla suite, and wanted to try thunderbird next, it is by no means intuitive or apparent if i can get my email from one program to another...to this day i'm still using mozilla as my mail and firefox for browsing because i don't want to risk losing my email because i decided to try pointing thunderbird at my mozilla mail and have it screw up or blow away my email...
for the opposite view, i use mozilla for my email and firefox for my browsing - but there is no way to get mozilla mail to open url links in anything but mozilla's browser... open source developer whine about microsoft not playing nice with other programs, but this is the most 'lock in' type behavior i've ever seen...
even in outlook express you can get your links opening in firefox or another browser, but mozilla suite assumes that it is the only browser in the world and doesn't even give you a chance to try and open links in other programs.
that said, i did try thunderbird for a week or so but then it crashed and blew away my email inbox (with all of the emails in it) and i haven't gone back...i don't need my business emails being blown away randomly
Sounds like someone just needs to learn how to admin their computer.
doesn't matter what programs you have on your computer, if you aren't using them at that particular moment, they don't need to be running in your systray.
this is a common misperception from alot of newer computer users - or people that buy dell & other 'name brand' computers. they come shipped with so much crap on them that it's ridiculous.
I like my MS Ergo keyboard, but I really don't understand why the keyboard driver keeps thinking it needs to access the internet every time my computer starts up.
I mean - it's a KEYBOARD for gawds sake...is it sending key monitoring info back to MS headquarters or something? trying to see if i'm typing some 'oh so bad' words into my msn blog or something? (not that i have an msn blog or ever would)
On an offtopic note, People don't trust microsoft because they have proved time and time again that they are untrustworthy - It's too late for most people for microsoft to even try and regain their trust - it's a lost cause.
Another PKD book (specifically) that is more along the lines of the Minority Report future includes 'Divine Invasion', or potentially 'Solar Lottery'...and many others...
One of his books has a futuristic scenario where appliances are all coin-operated, so if you want to open your fridge, you have to pay a fee, if you want to open your door, it costs a fee, etc...leads to some pretty funny scenarios where they are being chased by badguys and try to go through a door, but don't have proper change, so they have to choose another route, etc...
Funny, but also scary because there are advertising / marketing exec's out there that read this stuff and go 'thats a GREAT idea...why dont we do that?'...
Or watching movies like Terminator and seeing the cyberdyne setup and thinking that it would be a great idea...freaking morons the bunch
Ok so they might not have blatantly stolen from Minority Report itself, but anyone that has read William Gibson or, more specifically, Neal Stephenson had more than enough background material to 'forecast' such a future.
There is also another excellent book by Melissa Scott called 'Dreaming Metal' that is all about skinsuits and retina scanning - it came out quite a while back - well worth the read if you are interested in similar types of reading.
All Speilberg did was buy the rights to a story written 30 years ago - by arguably the most visionary writer in this century - Philip K Dick.
;}
Even other amazing writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson are simply extrapolating the futuristic vision as envisioned by PKD way before their time.
Beginning with Blade Runner, Total Recall, etc PKD's books have become the foundation of 'futuristic' sci-fi/cyberpunk movies as Hollywood continues to realize it has no creative vision whatsoever...
However, the more people that become aware of PKD's amazing writing and vision, the better
Also check out the upcoming 'Scanner Darkly' by Linklater - it's another PKD story gone movie coming out soon...
at least one of the developers worked on the very cool indie games festival winner 'savage: battle for newerth' (sp?) as well, so they have already proved that they can do some cool stuff, game-design wise
unfortunately the character designs are less than inspired...so many games doing the same kind of blah characters...
but very inspiring to have a team like this blowing the lid off the whole 'throw away your code' attitude that gabe newell spouted a few weeks back, and the 'indie developers wont be able to compete' line that EA tried to pass off a while back as well.
lets hope the online play is as innovative as savage was (even being the natural selection ripoff that it sorta was)...combining an rts, fps and 3rd person game into a very fun online action game...
savage did things in it's online play that haven't been seen in an action game before or since, with the ai controlled npc's mining resources and other very cool things like that.
looking forward to seeing how this project (pardon the pun) progresses...
even if you watch shows exclusively on your TIVO you are watching advertising...
;}
An example is that Fox has a contract with Ford so that EVERY CAR on EVERY FOX show is a Ford. Pay attention next time you watch.
if the characters are using a celphone in the show, you can guarantee that it's a sponsored 'ad' in the show - if they have a drink of something, you can guarantee that it's a sponsored item.
do the stars of your favorite show wear shoes? likely sponsored. clothes? again...
------
Fox does not make money on you watching the show on cable - they make money from advertisers paying them to put the show on tv.
Something that not many people realize, but TV Broadcasters are not in the business of selling 'tv shows', they are in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers.
It's fundamental business. What is really being sold? Simply follow the dollars.
TV == people watching == Advertisers give TV broadcasters money.
This is why in Canada, the TV broadcasters here are pissed about product placement like the ford deal because when they rebroadcast the same shows, they don't get any cut of the in-show advertising revenue from ford - it all goes to Fox US.
So if we TIVO the show from a canadian broadcaster and strip out the canadian ads, then we are doubly screwing the Canadian broadcaster by removing their major source of revenue (interstitials) and the Fox US company still makes the money from Ford for the broadcast of the show...
Advertising in games is going to happen - the trick is making it natural and integrated into the game in a way that is not horrific to the gamer.
A Lord of the Rings game would bomb if it had sprite ads in the middle of it. A GTA game would simply seem like it had more depth to it.
it's a fine line, but one that developers & publishers will simply have to figure out the hard way
not sure about the UK specifically but i believe that in most (some?) of europe you have to pay a tv levy per tv in your household as well...
>>makes it so that VB is very inconvenient, and not
.net for the latest buzzword that they come up with?
.net as a marketing term because they confused everyone so much that no one even knew what .net meant...
.net app in a few years - planned obsolesence...
>>only because MS is dropping support.
and in a few years when MS drops support for
I mean they've already dropped
planning any long-term applications no a microsoft platform is asking for trouble, period. open source, open standards is the only way to guarantee that your company makes the decisions how the platform and application grows and changes over it's lifecycle.
as a game developer, we did the same thing with directx 6 several years ago...then directx 7 came out...and then 8...then 9...and now with Vista we get 10...
it's a never ending rewrite case that just means we end up redoing and rewriting the same code every time we need to update it.
we have since (a while ago) switched to opengl for our renderer simply because as opengl adds versions and adds features, it is trivial to enhance the renderer to add features simply because the api is designed for the long-term and is not controlled by one specific companies financial goals, but by a central design committee that introduces new features that benefit everyone involved, not just one company.
just an example, but the same thing applies to all of those old vb programmers - the reason you are rewriting that 'old vb app' will be the same reason you will need to rewrite this
more important than being platform independent, is vendor independent.
i'm not even going to start about c#
Microsoft was forced to retract their whole 'backwards compatible' statement - they aren't even TRYING for backwards compatibility with the existing Xbox games - they mentioned that if you want the 'xbox 1' games to work on the xbox 360 the developers actually have to recompile their game for the xbox 360 and the game players have to re-purchase the same game again.
This is not backwards compatible whatsoever in my mind, it's milking gamers for extra money for no reason other than to fill microsoft's pockets.
Nintendo and Sony know what gamers want - these days the jump from generation to generation is becoming smaller and smaller and it will be harder for companies to sucker players into buying a new console - for this reason, the backwards compatibility issue is a very large one that Microsoft is completely missing the boat on it seems.
Then how come I can buy an acer laptop that is 2-3 times the machine of what I can buy a dell one?
Their decision to NOT use AMD parts (in particular) is going to be the downfall of Dell if they continue to go the direction that they are.
Dell absolutely does have 'a choice'
same thing as how Dell has 'a choice' to only offer crappy Intel processors instead of the much superior AMD 64 bit-based machines.
We have been pricing a number of machines in house from Dell, made the mistake of buying one laptop from Dell, but every other machine that we purchase will be from acer or another PC manufacturer that can:
1) beat Dell's prices
2) offers AMD machines & much better machine specs all around
3) offers WinXP instead of the crippleware XP Home edition (which we reformat anyways and put dual/triple boot OS configurations on them, but at least we get a 'real' copy of XP).
The only reason we have any windows machines in-house is that we are a software developer and customers use XP, whether we like it or not.