Make a prototype. Develop it for the PC but make it portable. Pimp your prototype to smaller development houses. All three major console developers are trying to promote indie games through their download services, so if you have a solid prototype and are good at selling your idea, you'd have a shot.
Alternatively, grab the XNA development kit and a XNA Creator's Club membership, and target your game to the 360. Your audience will be limited to other XNA Creator Club members, but you can go on to pimp your idea later.
I like homebrew as much as the next guy, but they're hardly beating the pants off the industry in creativity and innovation. I'd say the vast majority of quality homebrew games tend to copy pre-existing ideas. I mean, what have other posters in this thread put forth as an example of quality homebrew? Lemmings. A copy of a commercial game.
We're very picky in the first place about who we allow to access customer data. We have a separate deployment team and production support team who are authorized to see the customer data. The QA team can get copies of customer data to cover certain test cases. This data can be partially scrubbed. The development team only gets thoroughly scrubbed or generated data. We handle data on a need-to-know basis, basically.
But your question is more geared at legitimate data on laptops. Well, our corporate policy is that all laptops have hard-drive level encryption, no exceptions. If you lose that laptop, you have to report it to our incident team. Your laptop has to be secured at all times in the office, and if you lose track of it at any time in, say, an airport, thats an incident that needs to be reported. You can't let other people use or borrow your laptop if you have sensitive data on it.
Thumb drives are forbidden unless they are an officially sanctioned encrypted thumb drive. Those thumb drives cannot be used with non-corporate machines. If you violate these rules you can be penalized anywhere from sanctions to termination.
Additionally, our internet is proxied, firewalled, and heavily monitored. Doing tricks with tunneling to get around the web censor software or firewall rules can get you pink slipped.
Obviously this is a high level overview. The best thing to do is try to give that data to as few people as possible and make them accountable. If someone has access to that data they can leak it, despite any technological measures you take. The best course of action is to make sure as few people have the data as possible, that they understand how to protect it properly, and that they are properly punished if they don't practice due-diligence in protecting the data.
Yeah we really hate having to call a vendor who needs their product to work in order to survive and ask them for a fix, when some guy here can muck around in the code and fix it ourselves.
You're assuming that you or your problem matters enough to the vendor for them to fix it. We have, more than once, been told "Sucks to be you..." by a vendor. My boss actually quipped that the Microsoft support we payed for was nearly worthless.
Both ways suck. Would be better if the bugs simply weren't there in the first place, now wouldn't it?
Yep, that is the best. You can usually get that with open source, though. I mean, there are plenty of companies around where you can pay for OSS support. Red Hat, for one.
"The domain cruisecontrol.net is for sale. To purchase, call BuyDomains.com at 781-839-7903 or 866-866-2700."
Yeah but sometimes you then get the BS with "approved software." We technically weren't allowed to use Firefox at my job for the longest time because it wasn't company approved software. My team works on a web application which is supposed to support Firefox. Took a year or two to get it on the approved list.
Oh and the fastest way to get a piece of software approved here is to have it released/supported by IBM.
Depends on how you spin it. We use CruiseControl.Net where I work. When I had to justify it as opposed to a "superior" (not really superior technologically, but in a "we're paying for it so it must be better" sense) proprietary technology, I pointed out that since I have access to the source code I can debug issues with our build system without needing vendor support. And I have several times. Of course, people like the cost, but managers also understand "we don't have to depend on a single source if things go to hell." Well, some of them do.
So the assumption is that someone who has worked with proprietary technologies is incapable of working with OSS technologies? Because I'd say thats pretty much completely contrary to my experience.
I work with propriety technology ATM. Didn't stop me from opting for CruiseControl.Net and NAnt over the proprietary build systems that were vying for our business. There are plenty of technologies we're using that I'd switch to OSS alternatives in a heartbeat (goddamn ClearCase...). Yeah, some of my coworkers have drunk vendor kool-aid, but plenty others are open to the OSS side of things too.
I would say that putting that kind of arbitrary restriction on your hiring process may be cutting you off from some valid talent. That is unless you're looking for someone religious about it, then I guess it would be perfectly valid. Just some food for thought though.
As a software development guy in the process of job hunting, I can't say that this has reflected my experience. The only reason I don't have a new job already is because I'm being super-picky.
True "hardcore" gamers don't play on a console anyway, that's what PCs are for.
Which is only true if you think gaming consists entirely of FPSs, RTSs, and MMORPGs. If you ignore huge genres of games then I guess you might have had a point. Most of my hardcore gaming friends don't have a PC which is capable of playing modern games, and do their gaming almost entirely on consoles.
I can't say I have much of a problem with using a controller in my FPSs, though, just so long as the other players are also using controllers. As long as the playing-field is fair, I still enjoy it. I play Call of Duty 4 pretty much exclusively on XBox.
I'm one of the other few people that strongly disliked Okami. I managed to make it about halfway through before quitting out of boredom. For me it was a couple of things. I thought the level and world design was boring and uninspired. The treasures were often too randomly dispersed, and the rewards were too small, so tracking them back down was more of a chore than an adventure.
Your sidekick was just completely annoying. I know comparisons to Navi are fairly apt, but OOT and Twilight Princess are much more intelligent about how you interface with your assistant. Usually they give you an audio cue and you can press the button to bring it up. In Okami, he would often pop up without any interaction and basically pause whatever you are doing. One boss fight, he popped up EVERY TIME I missed one of my attacks, and I had to run through his dialog about how I needed to use the ability I just used and missed with. Very frustrating.
Then again, one of my biggest problems was that painting the special abilities became very monotonous using the PS2 pad. Playing it on the Wii may fix one of my biggest problems with it. If they fixed the sidekick to interrupt you less, then I wouldn't mind giving it another shot.
And for all the ravings about the story, I didn't find it that much more imaginative than any of the Zelda games (and I'm pretty sure I got past the "big plot twist" halfway through).
But I'm also one of those freaks who feels like "A Link to The Past" was the high-point of the Zelda series, and the newer 3d Zeldas have marked a steady decline in quality. I barely got through Twilight Princess.
Developers don't ask for ClearCase, managers do, which is how it worked here. It doesn't help that ClearCase was mandated as the standard SCM for our entire organization. And hey! We're back on topic!
Seconded on saying no to ClearCase. We use that here, and its simply terrible. We lose so many hours of productivity on stupid problems. If you're forced to use it, then insist on the thick client. If you have to use the thin client (VPN, remote network) then God help you.
Off topic, but if you don't mind me asking what company are you working for? I'm looking around at moving over there.
On topic, I think that immersion is a requirement. I'm at the point where I'm sort-of treading water with my Japanese skills. But if I spend some time around Japanese speakers, the improvement is quick and dramatic. Usually falls off when I'm no longer around them though. The best bet short of living there is to find a girl/boyfriend (or just a lot of friends) who speak the language and try to use it as much as possible.
If you're living in Japan, can't you just go to the nearest Book Off and pick up some older manga? Usually local book stores will sell older and used manga for extremely cheap ( $1 per book). I usually grab a stack of manga when I'm on vacation and use it for practice back in the US.
I didn't say that all wealth was earned. Here's what I read out of your post:
1) There's no reason everyone can't have wealth 2) A person who has more wealth than other people detracts from those other peoples' wealth
I was agreeing with point 1 and disagreeing with point 2. Usually the justification for wealth redistribution is that the wealthy "take" their wealth from the common people, which is not the case in a free trade. Of course, not every trade is a free trade, but I'm speaking theoretically here.
As far as Spears goes, she is more wealthy because society at large has deemed that she has contributed more. More every day people are familiar with Spears' music than Hawking's contributions to physics. Of course, from an objective standpoint, the physics are more useful, just on a more long-term, so this is one of those cases where the "invisible hand" doesn't work so hot. Thats why a lot of physics research is at least partially government-funded.
Wealth is not zero-sum. Its theoretically possible for everyone to be equally as wealthy. But that also means that eliminating my wealth does not necessarily create wealth for others, or that my wealth was gained through the loss of someone else's wealth.
That sort-of reminds me of my elementary school days. My parents took me to a specialist to get tested and see if I needed to be put on Ritalin. I also found out that the reason they did so was because my teachers were pushing very hard for it. You see, after getting bored about learning about addition for the third time, I decided that paying attention in class was not worth my while, and started advancing to higher level material.
But see, I still aced all my tests and finished my homework, so they couldn't just give me a bad grade. I wasn't giving them the amount of attention they "deserved," and they couldn't punish me by giving me bad grades, so they decided that the best course of action was drugging me up. Luckily the specialist said that there was nothing wrong with me, other than having a low tolerance for boredom.
And here I thought it was because I didn't approve of the Chinese government's human rights abuses. I had no idea it was simply because I wasn't Chinese. Gee golly, that must make me some kind of racist I guess.~
Oh and my Chinese friends might want to hear about how I obviously hate them for what their government does. They don't seem to have gotten the message. Maybe its because they don't have their heads stuck up their asses?
Re:I can't believe they overlooked it!
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 1
A plane is a small, sealed, and confined place. That means that very few smokers can fill the entire cabin with smelly, irritating smoke. I don't think its fair to let a small handful of passengers make air flight far more unpleasant than it already is for a couple of hundred non-smoking passengers. Thats not even mentioning how second hand smoke can affect people with allergies and very young children. Buy some nicotine patches and deal with it, ffs.
I would say accusing someone of beating their wife trumps just about anything he said. I'd lose my temper too after being accused of racism and misogyny repeatedly, just for saying that he wanted an equal partnership and found that the culture he has lived in and studied is more constructive towards that.
The fact that he's had people jump on him for simply making generalizations (which he fully admits) based on his observation that annoys the PC "Everybody everywhere is exactly the same, no exceptions" brigade certainly justifies his anger. He was by no means saying that every American woman was unkind and every Asian woman was kind. But thats what people read into it, including you. And then you singled out the fact that he was surprised at different gender roles as some proof that he was misogynistic.
And because he's upset about being treated that way, he must be abusive to his wife? Way to go, asshole.
Guess what, cultures are different, and those different cultures have different effects on women. It has nothing to do with race, whatsoever.
This trend of people not listening to what people are saying and instead push their bigoted stereotypes onto those people is frustrating for guys who like to date women of other cultures.
It's pretty bad with Japanese women, actually. Their culture, for young women, seems to be even more obsessed with looks than American. My girlfriend was fairly self-conscious about her weight, even though she's very slender. I ran her BMI through a calculator which basically said that if she lost any weight that she would be at an unhealthy weight. I know BMI isn't that accurate, but it helped demonstrate the point that she was perfectly normal.
Now I'll be truthful and say I don't find obese women attractive. But the standards of what counts for overweight can, sometimes, be a bit ridiculous. Sometimes it seems like a girl has to be able to show her ribcage to be considered a 10/10, which is sad because anorexic girls aren't really that attractive.
I'll check out the link when I'm off work. Are you unattached romantically? I've kinda wondered how do-able this would be with, say, a wife (even though I'm not married).
That's cool. I just got defensive myself because I felt that you were doing the same thing to married guys as they were doing to you. Not that I'm married, but its something that has appeal to me. I think being unattached has a lot of appeal too.
Slashdot Mirror
Make a prototype. Develop it for the PC but make it portable. Pimp your prototype to smaller development houses. All three major console developers are trying to promote indie games through their download services, so if you have a solid prototype and are good at selling your idea, you'd have a shot.
Alternatively, grab the XNA development kit and a XNA Creator's Club membership, and target your game to the 360. Your audience will be limited to other XNA Creator Club members, but you can go on to pimp your idea later.
I like homebrew as much as the next guy, but they're hardly beating the pants off the industry in creativity and innovation. I'd say the vast majority of quality homebrew games tend to copy pre-existing ideas. I mean, what have other posters in this thread put forth as an example of quality homebrew? Lemmings. A copy of a commercial game.
We're very picky in the first place about who we allow to access customer data. We have a separate deployment team and production support team who are authorized to see the customer data. The QA team can get copies of customer data to cover certain test cases. This data can be partially scrubbed. The development team only gets thoroughly scrubbed or generated data. We handle data on a need-to-know basis, basically.
But your question is more geared at legitimate data on laptops. Well, our corporate policy is that all laptops have hard-drive level encryption, no exceptions. If you lose that laptop, you have to report it to our incident team. Your laptop has to be secured at all times in the office, and if you lose track of it at any time in, say, an airport, thats an incident that needs to be reported. You can't let other people use or borrow your laptop if you have sensitive data on it.
Thumb drives are forbidden unless they are an officially sanctioned encrypted thumb drive. Those thumb drives cannot be used with non-corporate machines. If you violate these rules you can be penalized anywhere from sanctions to termination.
Additionally, our internet is proxied, firewalled, and heavily monitored. Doing tricks with tunneling to get around the web censor software or firewall rules can get you pink slipped.
Obviously this is a high level overview. The best thing to do is try to give that data to as few people as possible and make them accountable. If someone has access to that data they can leak it, despite any technological measures you take. The best course of action is to make sure as few people have the data as possible, that they understand how to protect it properly, and that they are properly punished if they don't practice due-diligence in protecting the data.
You're assuming that you or your problem matters enough to the vendor for them to fix it. We have, more than once, been told "Sucks to be you..." by a vendor. My boss actually quipped that the Microsoft support we payed for was nearly worthless.
Yep, that is the best. You can usually get that with open source, though. I mean, there are plenty of companies around where you can pay for OSS support. Red Hat, for one.
Try this link instead. Whats your point?
Yeah but sometimes you then get the BS with "approved software." We technically weren't allowed to use Firefox at my job for the longest time because it wasn't company approved software. My team works on a web application which is supposed to support Firefox. Took a year or two to get it on the approved list.
Oh and the fastest way to get a piece of software approved here is to have it released/supported by IBM.
Depends on how you spin it. We use CruiseControl.Net where I work. When I had to justify it as opposed to a "superior" (not really superior technologically, but in a "we're paying for it so it must be better" sense) proprietary technology, I pointed out that since I have access to the source code I can debug issues with our build system without needing vendor support. And I have several times. Of course, people like the cost, but managers also understand "we don't have to depend on a single source if things go to hell." Well, some of them do.
So the assumption is that someone who has worked with proprietary technologies is incapable of working with OSS technologies? Because I'd say thats pretty much completely contrary to my experience.
I work with propriety technology ATM. Didn't stop me from opting for CruiseControl.Net and NAnt over the proprietary build systems that were vying for our business. There are plenty of technologies we're using that I'd switch to OSS alternatives in a heartbeat (goddamn ClearCase...). Yeah, some of my coworkers have drunk vendor kool-aid, but plenty others are open to the OSS side of things too.
I would say that putting that kind of arbitrary restriction on your hiring process may be cutting you off from some valid talent. That is unless you're looking for someone religious about it, then I guess it would be perfectly valid. Just some food for thought though.
As a software development guy in the process of job hunting, I can't say that this has reflected my experience. The only reason I don't have a new job already is because I'm being super-picky.
Oh sure, cities in the oceans are all fun and games at first, but then you find some Adam, and the next thing you know *bam* splicers! Damn splicers!
No what you said was:
Which is only true if you think gaming consists entirely of FPSs, RTSs, and MMORPGs. If you ignore huge genres of games then I guess you might have had a point. Most of my hardcore gaming friends don't have a PC which is capable of playing modern games, and do their gaming almost entirely on consoles.
I can't say I have much of a problem with using a controller in my FPSs, though, just so long as the other players are also using controllers. As long as the playing-field is fair, I still enjoy it. I play Call of Duty 4 pretty much exclusively on XBox.
I'm one of the other few people that strongly disliked Okami. I managed to make it about halfway through before quitting out of boredom. For me it was a couple of things. I thought the level and world design was boring and uninspired. The treasures were often too randomly dispersed, and the rewards were too small, so tracking them back down was more of a chore than an adventure.
Your sidekick was just completely annoying. I know comparisons to Navi are fairly apt, but OOT and Twilight Princess are much more intelligent about how you interface with your assistant. Usually they give you an audio cue and you can press the button to bring it up. In Okami, he would often pop up without any interaction and basically pause whatever you are doing. One boss fight, he popped up EVERY TIME I missed one of my attacks, and I had to run through his dialog about how I needed to use the ability I just used and missed with. Very frustrating.
Then again, one of my biggest problems was that painting the special abilities became very monotonous using the PS2 pad. Playing it on the Wii may fix one of my biggest problems with it. If they fixed the sidekick to interrupt you less, then I wouldn't mind giving it another shot.
And for all the ravings about the story, I didn't find it that much more imaginative than any of the Zelda games (and I'm pretty sure I got past the "big plot twist" halfway through).
But I'm also one of those freaks who feels like "A Link to The Past" was the high-point of the Zelda series, and the newer 3d Zeldas have marked a steady decline in quality. I barely got through Twilight Princess.
The fact that some party thrown by a rich 15 year old girl is national news is kind-of depressing. Am I missing something?
Developers don't ask for ClearCase, managers do, which is how it worked here. It doesn't help that ClearCase was mandated as the standard SCM for our entire organization. And hey! We're back on topic!
Seconded on saying no to ClearCase. We use that here, and its simply terrible. We lose so many hours of productivity on stupid problems. If you're forced to use it, then insist on the thick client. If you have to use the thin client (VPN, remote network) then God help you.
Off topic, but if you don't mind me asking what company are you working for? I'm looking around at moving over there.
On topic, I think that immersion is a requirement. I'm at the point where I'm sort-of treading water with my Japanese skills. But if I spend some time around Japanese speakers, the improvement is quick and dramatic. Usually falls off when I'm no longer around them though. The best bet short of living there is to find a girl/boyfriend (or just a lot of friends) who speak the language and try to use it as much as possible.
If you're living in Japan, can't you just go to the nearest Book Off and pick up some older manga? Usually local book stores will sell older and used manga for extremely cheap ( $1 per book). I usually grab a stack of manga when I'm on vacation and use it for practice back in the US.
I didn't say that all wealth was earned. Here's what I read out of your post:
1) There's no reason everyone can't have wealth
2) A person who has more wealth than other people detracts from those other peoples' wealth
I was agreeing with point 1 and disagreeing with point 2. Usually the justification for wealth redistribution is that the wealthy "take" their wealth from the common people, which is not the case in a free trade. Of course, not every trade is a free trade, but I'm speaking theoretically here.
As far as Spears goes, she is more wealthy because society at large has deemed that she has contributed more. More every day people are familiar with Spears' music than Hawking's contributions to physics. Of course, from an objective standpoint, the physics are more useful, just on a more long-term, so this is one of those cases where the "invisible hand" doesn't work so hot. Thats why a lot of physics research is at least partially government-funded.
Wealth is not zero-sum. Its theoretically possible for everyone to be equally as wealthy. But that also means that eliminating my wealth does not necessarily create wealth for others, or that my wealth was gained through the loss of someone else's wealth.
That sort-of reminds me of my elementary school days. My parents took me to a specialist to get tested and see if I needed to be put on Ritalin. I also found out that the reason they did so was because my teachers were pushing very hard for it. You see, after getting bored about learning about addition for the third time, I decided that paying attention in class was not worth my while, and started advancing to higher level material.
But see, I still aced all my tests and finished my homework, so they couldn't just give me a bad grade. I wasn't giving them the amount of attention they "deserved," and they couldn't punish me by giving me bad grades, so they decided that the best course of action was drugging me up. Luckily the specialist said that there was nothing wrong with me, other than having a low tolerance for boredom.
And here I thought it was because I didn't approve of the Chinese government's human rights abuses. I had no idea it was simply because I wasn't Chinese. Gee golly, that must make me some kind of racist I guess.~
Oh and my Chinese friends might want to hear about how I obviously hate them for what their government does. They don't seem to have gotten the message. Maybe its because they don't have their heads stuck up their asses?
A plane is a small, sealed, and confined place. That means that very few smokers can fill the entire cabin with smelly, irritating smoke. I don't think its fair to let a small handful of passengers make air flight far more unpleasant than it already is for a couple of hundred non-smoking passengers. Thats not even mentioning how second hand smoke can affect people with allergies and very young children. Buy some nicotine patches and deal with it, ffs.
I would say accusing someone of beating their wife trumps just about anything he said. I'd lose my temper too after being accused of racism and misogyny repeatedly, just for saying that he wanted an equal partnership and found that the culture he has lived in and studied is more constructive towards that.
The fact that he's had people jump on him for simply making generalizations (which he fully admits) based on his observation that annoys the PC "Everybody everywhere is exactly the same, no exceptions" brigade certainly justifies his anger. He was by no means saying that every American woman was unkind and every Asian woman was kind. But thats what people read into it, including you. And then you singled out the fact that he was surprised at different gender roles as some proof that he was misogynistic.
And because he's upset about being treated that way, he must be abusive to his wife? Way to go, asshole.
Guess what, cultures are different, and those different cultures have different effects on women. It has nothing to do with race, whatsoever.
This trend of people not listening to what people are saying and instead push their bigoted stereotypes onto those people is frustrating for guys who like to date women of other cultures.
It's pretty bad with Japanese women, actually. Their culture, for young women, seems to be even more obsessed with looks than American. My girlfriend was fairly self-conscious about her weight, even though she's very slender. I ran her BMI through a calculator which basically said that if she lost any weight that she would be at an unhealthy weight. I know BMI isn't that accurate, but it helped demonstrate the point that she was perfectly normal.
Now I'll be truthful and say I don't find obese women attractive. But the standards of what counts for overweight can, sometimes, be a bit ridiculous. Sometimes it seems like a girl has to be able to show her ribcage to be considered a 10/10, which is sad because anorexic girls aren't really that attractive.
I'll check out the link when I'm off work. Are you unattached romantically? I've kinda wondered how do-able this would be with, say, a wife (even though I'm not married).
That's cool. I just got defensive myself because I felt that you were doing the same thing to married guys as they were doing to you. Not that I'm married, but its something that has appeal to me. I think being unattached has a lot of appeal too.