I used tab groups all the time at work. Feature used to make me so much more productive, and its been missed since removed from Nightly.
Used to separate different workstreams into tab groups. Used to quickly jump between projects without the need to go hunting for the correct firefox icon. (had about 6 or so active groups at any one time).
Going into the tab group also gave a nice preview render of the pages within each group too - very useful for quickly picking out a tab that's miles away in the current tab group stack of tabs.
I really, really question the direction of firefox, and mozilla in general.
2 * 9 gig Raid 1 SCSI OS drive
5 * 250 Maxtor Maxline II, in raid 5
Running Gentoo Linux, no hardware controller, all handled by the kernel.
The rest of the machine is an AMD 500, 256megs ram. No X, nothing un-needed installed.
CPU usage never gets maxed out, and I can copy too, or read from at the max a 10/100 network will allow.
I'm very happy, as its got an uptime of about 200 days.
Maybe in the larger none specific channels, but the ones I've visited reciently for support for some OSS have been first class.
I had a problem reciently with the subversion server at work running out of random entropy (tho I didn't know this was the problem - just showed itself as people being unable to auth). The guys over at the subversion channel on Freenode helped me locate the problem (dodgy ebuild script for apr in Gentoo), and gave me a posible solution. (saved my neck that day, I had upgraded to svn 1.2.x for locking = none of the 50 developers can commit or get latest).
I agree if you go into say #gentoo and ask for anything other than a 1 line fix your out of luck, but smaller community channels are still excellent.
First off, anyone that tells you working in the games industry is a path to fame and fortune, slap them in the face. For 99.9% of people, thats a complete lie.
Sure, our company directors drive Ferraris, 911 GTs, Z4s etc, but the rest of us working class peasants are in 1.1ltr rustbuckets (and worse, some at our place are stuck with public transport!) And we are a driving / racing games company!
Best advice I can give to any games players that want to join the industry - DONT. If you enjoy gaming and love the idea of working on great games, people above you will see that, and get you working all the hours god sends on the back of your passion. Only join the industry if you don't really give a damn, then you can remain objective, work your employment hours and still have a life.
Bottom line, enjoy your games, don't become bitter and twisted like me, stay away from the industry, keep loving games, don't get involved.
I've been banging on about this with Linux (KDE especially) for years now.
KDE and the QT toolkit just seems to waste space - buttons have massive empty areas, scroll bars are way thinker than needed (and I've never found an easy way to scale them down).
The first thing I do when I boot up an XP machine from a fresh install is move the top window size down to 20 and scrol bars to 12. Yet in KDE you seem stuck with massive obtrusive buttons. Windows has a nice 2 pixel seperator, KDE will have about 12 pixels. Total waste of desktop real estate.
Project wide revision numbers and log messages are the 2 things as a Project Manager I find most useful!
Part of our build process reads the revision number from the.svn dirs in our tree and displays them on the title screen - bug reports coming back with a project wide revision, rather than just some stab in the dark like the date the bug was found, makes my job so much easier.
Got to agree, I think K3b is a perfect example of how CLI + GUI application development should happen.
K3b is a wonderful application, but under the hood is an equally powerful set of command line tools. I've lost count with the number of times I've been thankful that I'm still able to burn a CD/DVD from the commandline.
CDRecord (etc) CLI tools + K3b frontend= perfect example of software engineering. IMHO. More applications should be engineered in such a way.
About 6 months ago I was in the market for some extra home storage. My solution was the following:
2 * 9 gig Scsi drives for OS - Raid1
5 * 250 gig Maxtor Maxline 2 - Raid5, 25% redundancy
I build a machine round Gentoo, using software raid. The drives were picked because of the assurance of being able to use them 24/7 by Maxtor. I also picked the 5400 spin to reduce heat (storage was the issue, not speed).
Put them into a standard half-tower case (4 ide in the bottom, 1 in the top, along with the 2 scsi os drives). Controlled by a standard PCI (promice) IDE controller, and an old amd500 with motherboard.
The only down side, its full, and my backup dvds are all over the place again =)/dev/md1 935G 934G 1.4G 100%/home/ftp
I'm sure I could get some photos of the finished machine if anyone wants.
Wasn't it Tempest X that was released on the PlayStation, and Tempest 2000 on the Sega Saturn, PC and Jag?
I'm sure that how it worked in the UK at any rate.
"Every game out there has somebodys blood, sweat, and tears in it"
And thats why, even as a developer, I'm not too concerned about piracy. I'm currently playing a few SNES and Amiga classics that without piracy would be a bitch (if not almost impossible) to get a hold of.
In 10 years time, I'd be guttered if all the hours, pain and suffering I'd put into the 3 titles I've worked on thus far, had vanished without a trace.
Piracy is a form of preservation, and gives people who couldn't afford, or weren't able to play some games first time round, the chance to experience some wonderful gaming moments.
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I used tab groups all the time at work. Feature used to make me so much more productive, and its been missed since removed from Nightly.
Used to separate different workstreams into tab groups. Used to quickly jump between projects without the need to go hunting for the correct firefox icon. (had about 6 or so active groups at any one time).
Going into the tab group also gave a nice preview render of the pages within each group too - very useful for quickly picking out a tab that's miles away in the current tab group stack of tabs.
I really, really question the direction of firefox, and mozilla in general.
Had this about 2 years now, without fail...
2 * 9 gig Raid 1 SCSI OS drive
5 * 250 Maxtor Maxline II, in raid 5
Running Gentoo Linux, no hardware controller, all handled by the kernel. The rest of the machine is an AMD 500, 256megs ram. No X, nothing un-needed installed.
CPU usage never gets maxed out, and I can copy too, or read from at the max a 10/100 network will allow.
I'm very happy, as its got an uptime of about 200 days.
DISAGREE!
Maybe in the larger none specific channels, but the ones I've visited reciently for support for some OSS have been first class.
I had a problem reciently with the subversion server at work running out of random entropy (tho I didn't know this was the problem - just showed itself as people being unable to auth). The guys over at the subversion channel on Freenode helped me locate the problem (dodgy ebuild script for apr in Gentoo), and gave me a posible solution. (saved my neck that day, I had upgraded to svn 1.2.x for locking = none of the 50 developers can commit or get latest).
I agree if you go into say #gentoo and ask for anything other than a 1 line fix your out of luck, but smaller community channels are still excellent.
First off, anyone that tells you working in the games industry is a path to fame and fortune, slap them in the face. For 99.9% of people, thats a complete lie.
Sure, our company directors drive Ferraris, 911 GTs, Z4s etc, but the rest of us working class peasants are in 1.1ltr rustbuckets (and worse, some at our place are stuck with public transport!) And we are a driving / racing games company!
Best advice I can give to any games players that want to join the industry - DONT. If you enjoy gaming and love the idea of working on great games, people above you will see that, and get you working all the hours god sends on the back of your passion. Only join the industry if you don't really give a damn, then you can remain objective, work your employment hours and still have a life.
Bottom line, enjoy your games, don't become bitter and twisted like me, stay away from the industry, keep loving games, don't get involved.
I've been banging on about this with Linux (KDE especially) for years now.
KDE and the QT toolkit just seems to waste space - buttons have massive empty areas, scroll bars are way thinker than needed (and I've never found an easy way to scale them down).
The first thing I do when I boot up an XP machine from a fresh install is move the top window size down to 20 and scrol bars to 12. Yet in KDE you seem stuck with massive obtrusive buttons. Windows has a nice 2 pixel seperator, KDE will have about 12 pixels. Total waste of desktop real estate.
Project wide revision numbers and log messages are the 2 things as a Project Manager I find most useful!
Part of our build process reads the revision number from the .svn dirs in our tree and displays them on the title screen - bug reports coming back with a project wide revision, rather than just some stab in the dark like the date the bug was found, makes my job so much easier.
Got to agree, I think K3b is a perfect example of how CLI + GUI application development should happen.
K3b is a wonderful application, but under the hood is an equally powerful set of command line tools. I've lost count with the number of times I've been thankful that I'm still able to burn a CD/DVD from the commandline.
CDRecord (etc) CLI tools + K3b frontend= perfect example of software engineering. IMHO. More applications should be engineered in such a way.
About 6 months ago I was in the market for some extra home storage. My solution was the following: 2 * 9 gig Scsi drives for OS - Raid1 5 * 250 gig Maxtor Maxline 2 - Raid5, 25% redundancy I build a machine round Gentoo, using software raid. The drives were picked because of the assurance of being able to use them 24/7 by Maxtor. I also picked the 5400 spin to reduce heat (storage was the issue, not speed). Put them into a standard half-tower case (4 ide in the bottom, 1 in the top, along with the 2 scsi os drives). Controlled by a standard PCI (promice) IDE controller, and an old amd500 with motherboard. The only down side, its full, and my backup dvds are all over the place again =) /dev/md1 935G 934G 1.4G 100% /home/ftp
I'm sure I could get some photos of the finished machine if anyone wants.
Wasn't it Tempest X that was released on the PlayStation, and Tempest 2000 on the Sega Saturn, PC and Jag? I'm sure that how it worked in the UK at any rate.
"Every game out there has somebodys blood, sweat, and tears in it" And thats why, even as a developer, I'm not too concerned about piracy. I'm currently playing a few SNES and Amiga classics that without piracy would be a bitch (if not almost impossible) to get a hold of. In 10 years time, I'd be guttered if all the hours, pain and suffering I'd put into the 3 titles I've worked on thus far, had vanished without a trace. Piracy is a form of preservation, and gives people who couldn't afford, or weren't able to play some games first time round, the chance to experience some wonderful gaming moments.