Yes, Yawn.
I'm all for the X-Prize and private endeavors into spaceflight, but really, what's been acomplished? They are decades behind. Last I heard, Space Ship One barely managed to reach a sub-orbital altitude and return safely. This is comporable to what the X-15 did in 1960 and is so far removed from the complexety of a single shuttle mission (not to mention Apollo) that it's totally outragous to think the private sector is somehow doing better because they didn't screw it up.. Actually, they did screw it up, just not enough to kill anyone. Besides Rutan, everyone else is still doing test fire's or has had their unmanned rocket explode on the launch pad. It will be a long while before they can reach orbit relatively safely and repeatadly. Will they make less mistakes on their way there? No but that's ok because space is really hard.
Meanwhile, NASA has contributed an enourmous amount to planatary scinece and space exploration in the past decades despite seemingly wary public support and a dimished budget. It really is amazing what they've accomplished. Their paradigm has been rightly adjusted to focus on science and exploration. They pursue one of the noblest of human endeavors (and if you don't understand why science and understanding the universe is noble, well..) and in my mind are pretty detached from political and corporate bullshit and burracracy. To bad some of you don't want to pay attention.
Thanks, MY blood pressure just went up. "Linux has no support."
She's fussing with scroll bars and screen savers, not bash shell scripts and incremental AMANDA backups. It's not like the scroll bars go backwards in linux.
"it's not your money, so that's not really your concern."
Ehh.. my moral center tells me that maybe mom doesn't need to spend 1500 dollars on a Power Mac to check her email. A recycled PC with a simple instalation of Linux will work fine. If she expands her interestes to garage band or photoshop then consider making the investment.
Sorry, I just in denial of the tragic predictability of the slashdot crowd.
I always thought what killed the Amiga was the failure to see 3d polygonal graphics in entertainment as the future. Well, that and bone headed marketing... Until the last, the Amiga's AGA, chipset, they seemed concerned with blitting sprites as fast as possible, and trying to sell their machines as powerfull business solutions. I have some old Amiga catalogs here, most of the glossies show pictures of pie charts and some such.. Yea, no photorealistic sex apeal.... no larua croft or explosions, pie charts..
Amiga, never *really* focused on fun.. consumer entertainment and fun was and still is the key to selling machines and the catalyst for innovation. Getting "Work Done" was never the bleeding edge. Playing games was.
SGI seems to have missed this point.. Well most of the pointy headed captains of that company missed this point. Lots of the Engineers in SGI did not. Lots of those engineers now work for Nvidia.
I admin a small ISP and I can tell you that the postmaster inbox had about 25 emails this morning with "I can't email xxxx@verizon.net." Additionally, we've had a few irates in the call center today. This was enough to rattle the nerves a bit, and I actually spent a few hours searching through the logs to see if we were naughty, since the whole thing seemed pretty arbitrary and there was no abuse evidence provided from Verizon. After seeing this, I'm slightly relieved it's not our fault. I took some time to fill out the whitelist form this morning anyway..
The issue (from our domain at least), has apparently resolved itself as of about 7AM EST, 2 hours prior to me filling in the boxes.
Well you Star Control people, there are plenty of non-complete projects out there that are very similar to the Star Control concept. First, there's the:
incredible looking Infinity
Then there is the Starflight III game. Starflight I & II being very similar, and many feel inspirational to the Star Control series. Starflight III has been in development for bloody ages. They are making progress though, and my bets say we'll have it before long. I can't wait for it to finish.
There are others, and I've even spent about 18 months developing my own
unoffical sequel to Starflight with original content. Boy is it hard, despite having basically the full requirements and design goals laid out in the best way possible, the original games. The worst part is the team's motivational considerations. It's hard to work on a game in your own time for weeks on end. I'm probably making a project that no one will play, save the few die hard fans of the old games. I had notions that there may be a wider audience, but after running the game idea past a few 13-14 year olds, I'm not sure the current generation of gamers will appreciate, or even understand a space-opera Star-Trek esq single player RPG since they are not fueled by those romantic memories of games of old. It seems if there is not some military or MMORPG element to games these days, no one wants to publish them. (there's a few exceptions)
On the other hand, there is a counter culture in game development that craves smaller independent type games. PC gamers are all getting pretty sick of 1-2 great titles each year, and the rest, which is pretty much me too crap, from the big publishers.
Wow, maybe your post is irony but there are plenty of horror stories about working at EA. Game development has become stylish and lots of people think it's the greenest grass in the pasture. I beg to differ. It's highly competitive; lessers tend to get weeded out pretty quickly, especially since you product is in the public domain. It can be enormously stressful.. There are so many elements that need to converge to create the final deliverable product. Most internal business applications don't have sound, music, packaging, animations, art and story lines, and you really don't have as much creative license as you might think. Teams are so big, you are compartmentalized into a small portion of the bigger picture. You might spend months coding AI routines.
Of course, I only write games as a hobby (which is pretty fun), and all of the above is second hand here say, but computer game development should be taken seriously as pull your hair out, bleeding edge computer science.
Well, I certainly agree. Real science can be very provocative however. Many recent missions have made headline news because the prospect of life on another world is surely sexy. So are giant glossy pictures from the surface of another world. I don't know many people that don't find that amazing.
The Internet has created a new fan base for NASA and the availability of media, images and press-releases keeps them under scrutiny, which is good. (kudos to JPL by the way, I frequent their site almost daily)
It could be worse.. or it couldn't. In the 60's we may have been enticed, for better or worse, into the Apollo missions under the guise of science, when really is was about testing our limits and beating the Russians.
BTW -- Stephen Baxter's book, Voyage, is an excellent read and deals with such topics in a compelling science fiction story. It conveys what NASA looks like, smells like and runs like in a very believable way.
Re:Essbase and PSoft Nvision support?
on
Office Delayed, Too
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In my previous job as an IT accounts payable rep for a large tobacco company, I learned to love Excel. It's great at so many things. I was swarmed with all kinds of spreadsheets, asset management, quarterly forecasts, paper bill inventory, you name it. A small percentage of them had interlopy with the big bad accounting SAP database. Maybe such modules exist for OpenOffice, but I'm doubting it's plug and play.
I see OpenOffice working just as well for about 95% of what I did. However, fighting with that remaining 5% would have wasted many of my hours.
No fault of OpenOffice, it's just a shame that they have to play into M$'s hands because accounting land is *saturated* with Excel, Excel and more Excel.
I hit F5 a couple of times and your right. It's more like 2-5 seconds. I embelished a little.
Regardless, my point was that managed code is a viable solution for game development. They have have a whole section devoted to.NET development at gamedev.net, the best game development community around.
Uhh.. I call shenanigans. I write games also in, get this... VB.NET. (Which turns into the same CLR code as any other managed language) Fairly complex stuff, not commercial quality, but impressive none the less. Commercial quality of 4-5 years ago maybe. My current project has about 180 pages of source and that compiles in about 15 seconds on my 2.5Ghz machine. I'm using DirectX 9.0 SDK summer update 2005. You're aware that Quake II was ported to.NET and runs just fine? http://www.vertigosoftware.com/Quake2.htm Compiling that took about 90 seconds on my machine. I noticed approximately 80-90% the performance level of the original C / Assembly version. Maybe there is something wrong with your code, or design.
My development experience in VB.NET has been a pleasure. I write bash/perl shell scrips at work all day so this is polar opposites. The brain dead IDE and syntax makes things nice and easy, and I can focus on problem solving and complex algorithms. Also the speed penalty is more than acceptable, unless you are writing some very serious games.
Perhaps this is slightly off topic, but Stephen Baxter's novel, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061057088/Voyage , deals with such debate in a very compelling story.
It's an interesting, very well researched read that makes you ask questions about NASA's priorities in recent decades.
After I finished, I kind of realized, that real science, smart un-manned missions and baby steps towards long term goals are better than flags and footprints.
For most amatures, the development environment is more important than speed and efficiency of the compiled code.
What can I use to implement my really brain twisting algorithms with the most ease and elegance. What can I use to get closest to the API and the math, because that is more important to understand in game development land then the language. So, if you already know Perl, go for it. But for me, Perl does not immediately come to mind.
I've been writing games in VB.NET and DirectX for a few years, and the brain dead IDE and robust object oriented features of managed.NET code make it a pleasure. And, to put away all those stubborn myths about VB, you can write a 3d game pretty close to commercial quality with a lot less effort.
Besides, unless your writing DOOM, CPU cycles are cheap, really cheap. My time spent obfuscating code is not so cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Yawn. I'm all for the X-Prize and private endeavors into spaceflight, but really, what's been acomplished? They are decades behind. Last I heard, Space Ship One barely managed to reach a sub-orbital altitude and return safely. This is comporable to what the X-15 did in 1960 and is so far removed from the complexety of a single shuttle mission (not to mention Apollo) that it's totally outragous to think the private sector is somehow doing better because they didn't screw it up.. Actually, they did screw it up, just not enough to kill anyone. Besides Rutan, everyone else is still doing test fire's or has had their unmanned rocket explode on the launch pad. It will be a long while before they can reach orbit relatively safely and repeatadly. Will they make less mistakes on their way there? No but that's ok because space is really hard. Meanwhile, NASA has contributed an enourmous amount to planatary scinece and space exploration in the past decades despite seemingly wary public support and a dimished budget. It really is amazing what they've accomplished. Their paradigm has been rightly adjusted to focus on science and exploration. They pursue one of the noblest of human endeavors (and if you don't understand why science and understanding the universe is noble, well..) and in my mind are pretty detached from political and corporate bullshit and burracracy. To bad some of you don't want to pay attention.
Thanks, MY blood pressure just went up.
"Linux has no support."
She's fussing with scroll bars and screen savers, not bash shell scripts and incremental AMANDA backups.
It's not like the scroll bars go backwards in linux.
"it's not your money, so that's not really your concern."
Ehh.. my moral center tells me that maybe mom doesn't need to spend 1500 dollars on a Power Mac to check her email. A recycled PC with a simple instalation of Linux will work fine. If she expands her interestes to garage band or photoshop then consider making the investment.
Sorry, I just in denial of the tragic predictability of the slashdot crowd.
I always thought what killed the Amiga was the failure to see 3d polygonal graphics in entertainment as the future. Well, that and bone headed marketing...
Until the last, the Amiga's AGA, chipset, they seemed concerned with blitting sprites as fast as possible, and trying to sell their machines as powerfull business solutions.
I have some old Amiga catalogs here, most of the glossies show pictures of pie charts and some such..
Yea, no photorealistic sex apeal.... no larua croft or explosions, pie charts..
Amiga, never *really* focused on fun.. consumer entertainment and fun was and still is the key to selling machines and the catalyst for innovation. Getting "Work Done" was never the bleeding edge. Playing games was.
SGI seems to have missed this point.. Well most of the pointy headed captains of that company missed this point. Lots of the Engineers in SGI did not. Lots of those engineers now work for Nvidia.
Actually, that was Irix running SGI's FSN 3D file manager. /usr/local/ and /var/
If you look closely, she's clicking on things like
The webcam kinda shot of the port, was an SGI Indy cam type window.
Also, Dennis Nedry seemed to be using Mac OS 7 or 8 and some Unix like maybe A/UX for Mac.
I admin a small ISP and I can tell you that the postmaster inbox had about 25 emails this morning with "I can't email xxxx@verizon.net." Additionally, we've had a few irates in the call center today. This was enough to rattle the nerves a bit, and I actually spent a few hours searching through the logs to see if we were naughty, since the whole thing seemed pretty arbitrary and there was no abuse evidence provided from Verizon. After seeing this, I'm slightly relieved it's not our fault. I took some time to fill out the whitelist form this morning anyway..
The issue (from our domain at least), has apparently resolved itself as of about 7AM EST, 2 hours prior to me filling in the boxes.
Well you Star Control people, there are plenty of non-complete projects out there that are very similar to the Star Control concept. First, there's the: incredible looking Infinity
Then there is the Starflight III game. Starflight I & II being very similar, and many feel inspirational to the Star Control series. Starflight III has been in development for bloody ages. They are making progress though, and my bets say we'll have it before long. I can't wait for it to finish.
There are others, and I've even spent about 18 months developing my own unoffical sequel to Starflight with original content. Boy is it hard, despite having basically the full requirements and design goals laid out in the best way possible, the original games. The worst part is the team's motivational considerations. It's hard to work on a game in your own time for weeks on end. I'm probably making a project that no one will play, save the few die hard fans of the old games. I had notions that there may be a wider audience, but after running the game idea past a few 13-14 year olds, I'm not sure the current generation of gamers will appreciate, or even understand a space-opera Star-Trek esq single player RPG since they are not fueled by those romantic memories of games of old. It seems if there is not some military or MMORPG element to games these days, no one wants to publish them. (there's a few exceptions)
On the other hand, there is a counter culture in game development that craves smaller independent type games. PC gamers are all getting pretty sick of 1-2 great titles each year, and the rest, which is pretty much me too crap, from the big publishers.
Wow, maybe your post is irony but there are plenty of horror stories about working at EA.
Game development has become stylish and lots of people think it's the greenest grass in the pasture. I beg to differ. It's highly competitive; lessers tend to get weeded out pretty quickly, especially since you product is in the public domain. It can be enormously stressful.. There are so many elements that need to converge to create the final deliverable product. Most internal business applications don't have sound, music, packaging, animations, art and story lines, and you really don't have as much creative license as you might think. Teams are so big, you are compartmentalized into a small portion of the bigger picture. You might spend months coding AI routines.
Of course, I only write games as a hobby (which is pretty fun), and all of the above is second hand here say, but computer game development should be taken seriously as pull your hair out, bleeding edge computer science.
Well, I certainly agree. Real science can be very provocative however. Many recent missions have made headline news because the prospect of life on another world is surely sexy. So are giant glossy pictures from the surface of another world. I don't know many people that don't find that amazing. The Internet has created a new fan base for NASA and the availability of media, images and press-releases keeps them under scrutiny, which is good. (kudos to JPL by the way, I frequent their site almost daily) It could be worse.. or it couldn't. In the 60's we may have been enticed, for better or worse, into the Apollo missions under the guise of science, when really is was about testing our limits and beating the Russians. BTW -- Stephen Baxter's book, Voyage, is an excellent read and deals with such topics in a compelling science fiction story. It conveys what NASA looks like, smells like and runs like in a very believable way.
In my previous job as an IT accounts payable rep for a large tobacco company, I learned to love Excel. It's great at so many things. I was swarmed with all kinds of spreadsheets, asset management, quarterly forecasts, paper bill inventory, you name it. A small percentage of them had interlopy with the big bad accounting SAP database. Maybe such modules exist for OpenOffice, but I'm doubting it's plug and play.
I see OpenOffice working just as well for about 95% of what I did. However, fighting with that remaining 5% would have wasted many of my hours.
No fault of OpenOffice, it's just a shame that they have to play into M$'s hands because accounting land is *saturated* with Excel, Excel and more Excel.
I hit F5 a couple of times and your right. It's more like 2-5 seconds. I embelished a little. Regardless, my point was that managed code is a viable solution for game development. They have have a whole section devoted to .NET development at gamedev.net, the best game development community around.
Uhh.. I call shenanigans. .NET and runs just fine? http://www.vertigosoftware.com/Quake2.htm Compiling that took about 90 seconds on my machine. I noticed approximately 80-90% the performance level of the original C / Assembly version. Maybe there is something wrong with your code, or design.
I write games also in, get this... VB.NET. (Which turns into the same CLR code as any other managed language)
Fairly complex stuff, not commercial quality, but impressive none the less. Commercial quality of 4-5 years ago maybe. My current project has about 180 pages of source and that compiles in about 15 seconds on my 2.5Ghz machine. I'm using DirectX 9.0 SDK summer update 2005. You're aware that Quake II was ported to
My development experience in VB.NET has been a pleasure. I write bash/perl shell scrips at work all day so this is polar opposites. The brain dead IDE and syntax makes things nice and easy, and I can focus on problem solving and complex algorithms. Also the speed penalty is more than acceptable, unless you are writing some very serious games.
Avast. AVG is fine, but Avast is awsome!
http://www.avast.com/
Perhaps this is slightly off topic, but Stephen Baxter's novel, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061057088/Voyage , deals with such debate in a very compelling story.
It's an interesting, very well researched read that makes you ask questions about NASA's priorities in recent decades.
After I finished, I kind of realized, that real science, smart un-manned missions and baby steps towards long term goals are better than flags and footprints.
For most amatures, the development environment is more important than speed and efficiency of the compiled code. What can I use to implement my really brain twisting algorithms with the most ease and elegance. What can I use to get closest to the API and the math, because that is more important to understand in game development land then the language. So, if you already know Perl, go for it. But for me, Perl does not immediately come to mind. I've been writing games in VB.NET and DirectX for a few years, and the brain dead IDE and robust object oriented features of managed .NET code make it a pleasure. And, to put away all those stubborn myths about VB, you can write a 3d game pretty close to commercial quality with a lot less effort.
Besides, unless your writing DOOM, CPU cycles are cheap, really cheap. My time spent obfuscating code is not so cheap.