Each new version reveals the weaknesses of proprietary software. Vendors need to sell software to keep going, and they need to provide a reason for people to upgrade. Until very recently, the continuous increase in computing power and the availability of new features made this a no-brainer.
Now, well, the "expansion areas" that software companies are looking involve turf wars with other "content companies", so any features they add are basically worthless (woop-dee-do, a home theater system that will sometimes do what I want). Meanwhile, they have to make it "like new", so they change the interface, and hope that establishing "Software as a Service" will solve their problems.
People don't like giving up their experience at something unless there's a significant reward. So, bang, here they are, forced to pay out for the supernew version of whatever, which runs slower, has an unfamiliar interface, and does less for them. Heck, if you want that, why spend money on it when you can get OpenOffice for free?
When people see their old files become useless because of a software upgrade, they start to listen about open formats. When Qualcomm drops Mac Eudora support, and the adserver runs a general but anonymous alarm every two minutes, why not take a break from setting those addresses to 127.0.0.1, and explain how every bit of proprietary software on that glorified fashion accessory could potentially have the same problem? That somewhere down the line, the company may fold, or simply decide to cease support, and that program (and the data it accesses) will become useless or worse, screw up any other task you're trying to perform. Software as a Service might be good on a yearly basis, but your data needs to last a lifetime.
There's no sense evangelizing: people are having very real problems today that could be solved by F/OSS.
Clarification: It was a long time ago, and all I did was some pre-release testing on contract to Maxis. No code was looked at by me, but my impression from dealing with software (=number of bugs we found per hour put in the game) and the developers was that the code was very clean. Also, the way the producers talked about the program showed that they had a very clear idea of how it worked, how solid it was, and how much love they had for it. By the time we saw the Mac version, it was practically perfect. Now the PC version's interface, on the other hand, had issues...
Professionalism + Love = Solid Work. The equation's that easy, but antithetical to an endeavor that seems to spawn either hackers (lots of love, little professionalism) or suits.
Off-board artillery? Dude, that's all wrong. This is COINOPS. You know, urban areas? Off-board artillery notoriously has high-angle trajectories. For COINOPS you need realistic artillery effects (along with smoke, WP, and even those snarky SADARMS, as well as whatever terminally-guided 120mm mortar shells BOFORS is cooking up these days).
Now, the PC version of SimCity was released 5 years before Windows 95 broke. And, as much as I loath the Mac horde around here, SimCity was released on the Mac first (Micropolis may have been developed for the C64, but I only remember Raid on Bungeling Bay as a Will Wright genius game. And yeah, don't knock it until you spend fifteen minutes watching fighters land, refuel and rearm. Before ROBB, all we had were threats coming right at us. In that game, those evil dudes we'd try to shoot down, they stood up and said "we have a life outside of you." Trivialize it if you will, it was revolutionary).
So, yeah, SimCity = Macintosh game. The PC Port was just that (and I remember working on it, but not more than a few hours). That Microsoft would make an accommodation six years later doesn't strike me as an instance of bad coding - heck, if you present most game developers today with the choice of the "right way" or an expedient that works much better, and caution that the expedient will only work for six years, what do you think they'll pick?
(Yes, I am a hacker. It is an article of faith to me that the revolution will only come through information technology provoking a new awaking. And the only way that can come about is by implementing shortcuts designers hadn't thought of, or even had thought undesirable. Yes, we need to change with every version, but the revolution ain't never gonna be legacy, babe!
Nate man, what have you been smoking? We're talking SimCity here. You know, the game where all you need to do is build one rail square next to a building development and its transportation needs are taken care of, even if that railway leads to nowhere. It's predicated on the grid system of urban planning -- a system that was in disrepute when the game was made. COINOPS? Yeah, okay, what you need is a modded SimCity backend wired into an Armed Assault/VBS2 FPS frontend.
There's still a lot of craptastic code in there, but the heart of the software (the simulator) hasn't changed.
I dunno, from the QA side in 88/89, the results were darn clean. The simulation would crash from time to time, but the interface, never. To all those who point to multi-threaded apps and say it's too hard for coders to do, I'd suggest that really good programmers are hard to come by.
So maybe somebody can point to what's being complained about here. Back in the day, we didn't have the luxury of infinite space for code and variables. But from a quality-of-product point-of-view, very little could match (and can match) SimCity
Well, according to Gizmodo's Richard Blakeley, the banned man in question, his Badge is for sale. If you look closely, you can clearly read the word "Blogger".
The only reason to put encryption in would be to prevent people shutting these things off at product demos and restaurants. Turning them off at restaurants isn't a widespread problem (unfortunately), and at product demos, duct tape is going to be a lot more popular in the future.
I wish they would stop calling these things "gates", and worry about the future of bloggers. Yes, the CES created two classes: "press" and "blogger", and yes, members of that underclass acted in a juvenile manner, bad enough to cause a stink that will appear in the "press". It will appear in the "press" tomorrow. See, yesterday it was all over the blogs, and now it's hit the aggregators. Sooner or later those with press credentials will catch on to the story.
Hey, the Eee looks cool, and it's making waves, especially since Microsoft announced they'll be supplying an OS for them. They're scared.
It's praiseworthy, since effectively people use their computers for a limited range of tasks, and that range hasn't changed much in the last ten years. So a cheap, portable laptop fills many niches.
Of course, I left my desktop in the other hemisphere for a few weeks. I rolled outta bed, checked my email; went downstairs, fixed breakfast, read the newspapers and online news; got a skype call from a friend in that other hemisphere; went upstairs, read slashdot. Set up on the kitchen table, and started to write a reply, and got interrupted several times (tis the holidays).
I did all this on my N800 with a foldin' keyboard. An Eee would have lost its charge a while ago, or have been left upstairs. YMMV. Whatever the case, linux mobile devices are the wave of the future.
yeah, updating that screen with any speed is the achilles heel of the n8x0. These things are super-cool though, and turn out to be more useful than I thought.
They also seem to spread virally. I know of 2 people who bought n800s after seeing mine, and they aren't IT professionals either.
Yeah, you qualify as an explorer, but only if you accept the Bartle division of player types. The problem is that the quadripartite division you cited (as I understand it) assumes a static gamespace. But human agents don't experience a shared gamespace, they define it. That is, they create their systems of meaning, using the game as a common point of reference. So, "exploration" as we're discussing it here, really has two meanings: one sense of exploration is acquiring knowledge of the virtual lay of the land, and the capabilities one has; the other involves understanding the program and its limitations, and figuring out where the creases lie. They are very different types: for example, in TOS: Oblivion, the first kind of "explorer" may go collecting every single Nirnroot, or pick all the flowers possible, while the second kind will figure out how to break the level-based grind system, and find the "creases" in the simulation where things start to break down.
To boil it down: one group of "explorer" likes fantasy novels (don't take me too literally here, I mean books where the author paints a completely and consciously fictitious world), the other likes mysteries (where the author plays with conventions and leaves clues, allowing the reader to guess at the solution). It's a division we find among academics quite often.
It's analysis, not exploring. The goal isn't to figure out the entire map, or find every little Easter Egg, or even to do funky things at the edge of the game. Analyzing a game means looking at the final product and trying to reconstruct A. what it is trying to do, B. how effective it is at doing it, and C. how it got to the state it is at. Then you can spin off the little mechanical issues, and art design choices.
As for making a game suck less, well the problem has always been that developers started out because they really like games. Most of them end up doing stuff they may enjoy, but it's not making the games they really wanted to make. And those who end up making the games they really wanted to make, well, they get developer conceit, where their idea is so sacred, and so cool, that they will fight for it, even when evidence mounts to show that it doesn't work.
The most eye-opening experience can be watching how someone else uses your software. 20 years ago, we would send videotapes of testing back to the development house, and they'd be shocked by the kinds of things we did. Now, playtesting is standard practice in most places, and some houses (Valve, for one) have turned it into an art.
GP doesn't really this is what she's looking for. At the current prices, the N800 is a steal. Yes, you can read books on it, and it has a semi-decent interface wired to a 800x480 4.1 inch screen (so the resolution means things look a lot better than on similar pocketable devices). Yes, it does have internet browser and wifi, and runs VoIP, will do video chats of questionable quality, and show movies, remote administer your PC and whatnot. But most of the platform is build on F/OSS, and it's a portable gadget that doesn't exist solely as a vector to buy something else.
Of course, if you'd rather convert ebooks to 240x160 jpegs and view them on a toy, go ahead.
The Blue Door is in the middle; the Red door is on the right side of the screen. When teams are unbalanced, one door is locked. When teams are balanced, the player chooses between the door in the middle of the screen, or the one to the right. The result? A significant number of players pick the middle door more often, leading to a Blue power play.
How to test this hypothesis? Randomize the color of the two doors each time, and see if the advantage evens out.
For example, Carwhisperer lets you capture and transmit audio to any Handsfree or BT headset using 0000 or 1234 as the password.
BT Keyboards often have a pairing mode (okay, some have a default of 0000), where the user has to put the keyboard into discoverable mode, and type in the code.
Still, everything is vulnerable, given enough resources.
They ain't "them." It's not win-win for "them". It's a win for the MCE folks if customers buy it, and a win for the Xbox division if that's the winner.
It's kinda like "We can't allocate forces to that battle, because if we capture Bin Laden, then the CIA wins, and not the DoD." Or, to quote the Ed209 Project Lead, Dick Jones, "You know what the tragedy is here Bob? We could have been friends. But you wouldn't go through proper channels."
Microsoft should be including a HDDVD-Rom capable drive in the mid and high end versions, it would be cheaper than that damned external $200 dollar optional 'player' and it would turn the box into the media center that Microsoft so desperately desires.
Who told you that Microsoft "desperately desires" to turn the box into a media center? I'm sure some people at MS do, but others are probably saying "if it's too good, it will cut into our Vista Media Center Edition market segment."
Our good friends at Wikipedia claim, or at least did when I pasted it:
Alternatively, in software engineering an orange box is any mechanism that record the sequence of events leading to a crash.
So Orange Box here doesn't refer to Valve; who knows? Maybe that's why Valve called it the "Orange Box" (along with the "Black Box"): it reifies their next phase of data mining; every "Orange Box" continuously records gameplay data for analysis back at HQ. In a software engineering sense, every "Orange Box" is an orange box.
I have a Nokia N800, which runs an embedded linux, i can compile all the same programs i use on my desktop linux machines.
I'm gathering you don't use OOo, the Gimp, or VLC, or any number of other desktop linux programs. If you do, and you have, please accept my apologies, and give me (and the thousands of other N800 users) the link to the repo.
But yes, I did look at something running Windows Mobile. Then I asked myself "Why the hell would I want to do that?"
Some folks want to compare games to movies. Well, don't compare them just to features; compare them to movies in the 1940s, back when there were short features, travelogues, newsreels, and cartoons. Not everything is a long-feature, nor does it have to be.
If you are going to compare games to features movies, why is it that "leaving them crying for more" is a good thing for movies (and books, and plays, and concerts, and so on), but not for games? Why does it have to be: "leaving them exhausted, emaciated and with Post-Traumatic Repetitive Stress Disorder (aka "The thousand-yard controller thumb")?
Portal is genius. It's a game where many of the key developers (writers and the ND folks) are new arrivals to some large company that specializes in developing products through an extensive testing cycle, and it's about being a new arrival in a large company that's developing a product, and you're part of the testing cycle.
There are two cliches that HL and just about every video game in the 90s had, that really didn't work (most of the time): ubiquitous, absurd, crates (uh, nobody uses those any more. Why are they here?), and a sidekick you're supposed to love, but who's two wooden and one-dimensional for it to work. They manage to make a sidekick-crate lovable. I haven't seen a triumph like that since Vladimir Nabokov made a sympathetic character out of a pedarast with delusions of being a king in exile.
One hopes for Amazon's sake they spent the last year taking night courses in how to make the device look less like 1985 got really drunk and vomited all over the drafting table.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because they're trying to keep up with the MI Dept. of Education. Heaven forfend if you get sold down the river!
Each new version reveals the weaknesses of proprietary software. Vendors need to sell software to keep going, and they need to provide a reason for people to upgrade. Until very recently, the continuous increase in computing power and the availability of new features made this a no-brainer.
Now, well, the "expansion areas" that software companies are looking involve turf wars with other "content companies", so any features they add are basically worthless (woop-dee-do, a home theater system that will sometimes do what I want). Meanwhile, they have to make it "like new", so they change the interface, and hope that establishing "Software as a Service" will solve their problems.
People don't like giving up their experience at something unless there's a significant reward. So, bang, here they are, forced to pay out for the supernew version of whatever, which runs slower, has an unfamiliar interface, and does less for them. Heck, if you want that, why spend money on it when you can get OpenOffice for free?
When people see their old files become useless because of a software upgrade, they start to listen about open formats. When Qualcomm drops Mac Eudora support, and the adserver runs a general but anonymous alarm every two minutes, why not take a break from setting those addresses to 127.0.0.1, and explain how every bit of proprietary software on that glorified fashion accessory could potentially have the same problem? That somewhere down the line, the company may fold, or simply decide to cease support, and that program (and the data it accesses) will become useless or worse, screw up any other task you're trying to perform. Software as a Service might be good on a yearly basis, but your data needs to last a lifetime.
There's no sense evangelizing: people are having very real problems today that could be solved by F/OSS.
Clarification: It was a long time ago, and all I did was some pre-release testing on contract to Maxis. No code was looked at by me, but my impression from dealing with software (=number of bugs we found per hour put in the game) and the developers was that the code was very clean. Also, the way the producers talked about the program showed that they had a very clear idea of how it worked, how solid it was, and how much love they had for it. By the time we saw the Mac version, it was practically perfect. Now the PC version's interface, on the other hand, had issues...
Professionalism + Love = Solid Work. The equation's that easy, but antithetical to an endeavor that seems to spawn either hackers (lots of love, little professionalism) or suits.
I know that Copperheads are terminally guided and 120mm STRIX mortar shells are active-homing. I think I even simulated them in an FPS once...
Off-board artillery? Dude, that's all wrong. This is COINOPS. You know, urban areas? Off-board artillery notoriously has high-angle trajectories. For COINOPS you need realistic artillery effects (along with smoke, WP, and even those snarky SADARMS, as well as whatever terminally-guided 120mm mortar shells BOFORS is cooking up these days).
Cool page. Thanks for that.
Now, the PC version of SimCity was released 5 years before Windows 95 broke. And, as much as I loath the Mac horde around here, SimCity was released on the Mac first (Micropolis may have been developed for the C64, but I only remember Raid on Bungeling Bay as a Will Wright genius game. And yeah, don't knock it until you spend fifteen minutes watching fighters land, refuel and rearm. Before ROBB, all we had were threats coming right at us. In that game, those evil dudes we'd try to shoot down, they stood up and said "we have a life outside of you." Trivialize it if you will, it was revolutionary).
So, yeah, SimCity = Macintosh game. The PC Port was just that (and I remember working on it, but not more than a few hours). That Microsoft would make an accommodation six years later doesn't strike me as an instance of bad coding - heck, if you present most game developers today with the choice of the "right way" or an expedient that works much better, and caution that the expedient will only work for six years, what do you think they'll pick?
(Yes, I am a hacker. It is an article of faith to me that the revolution will only come through information technology provoking a new awaking. And the only way that can come about is by implementing shortcuts designers hadn't thought of, or even had thought undesirable. Yes, we need to change with every version, but the revolution ain't never gonna be legacy, babe!
Nate man, what have you been smoking? We're talking SimCity here. You know, the game where all you need to do is build one rail square next to a building development and its transportation needs are taken care of, even if that railway leads to nowhere. It's predicated on the grid system of urban planning -- a system that was in disrepute when the game was made. COINOPS? Yeah, okay, what you need is a modded SimCity backend wired into an Armed Assault/VBS2 FPS frontend.
hey wait a minute, that might just work.
someone give me a contract.
I dunno, from the QA side in 88/89, the results were darn clean. The simulation would crash from time to time, but the interface, never. To all those who point to multi-threaded apps and say it's too hard for coders to do, I'd suggest that really good programmers are hard to come by.
So maybe somebody can point to what's being complained about here. Back in the day, we didn't have the luxury of infinite space for code and variables. But from a quality-of-product point-of-view, very little could match (and can match) SimCity
Well, according to Gizmodo's Richard Blakeley, the banned man in question, his Badge is for sale. If you look closely, you can clearly read the word "Blogger".
The only reason to put encryption in would be to prevent people shutting these things off at product demos and restaurants. Turning them off at restaurants isn't a widespread problem (unfortunately), and at product demos, duct tape is going to be a lot more popular in the future.
I wish they would stop calling these things "gates", and worry about the future of bloggers. Yes, the CES created two classes: "press" and "blogger", and yes, members of that underclass acted in a juvenile manner, bad enough to cause a stink that will appear in the "press". It will appear in the "press" tomorrow. See, yesterday it was all over the blogs, and now it's hit the aggregators. Sooner or later those with press credentials will catch on to the story.
Hey, the Eee looks cool, and it's making waves, especially since Microsoft announced they'll be supplying an OS for them. They're scared.
It's praiseworthy, since effectively people use their computers for a limited range of tasks, and that range hasn't changed much in the last ten years. So a cheap, portable laptop fills many niches.
Of course, I left my desktop in the other hemisphere for a few weeks. I rolled outta bed, checked my email; went downstairs, fixed breakfast, read the newspapers and online news; got a skype call from a friend in that other hemisphere; went upstairs, read slashdot. Set up on the kitchen table, and started to write a reply, and got interrupted several times (tis the holidays).
I did all this on my N800 with a foldin' keyboard. An Eee would have lost its charge a while ago, or have been left upstairs. YMMV. Whatever the case, linux mobile devices are the wave of the future.
yeah, updating that screen with any speed is the achilles heel of the n8x0. These things are super-cool though, and turn out to be more useful than I thought.
They also seem to spread virally. I know of 2 people who bought n800s after seeing mine, and they aren't IT professionals either.
Yeah, you qualify as an explorer, but only if you accept the Bartle division of player types. The problem is that the quadripartite division you cited (as I understand it) assumes a static gamespace. But human agents don't experience a shared gamespace, they define it. That is, they create their systems of meaning, using the game as a common point of reference. So, "exploration" as we're discussing it here, really has two meanings: one sense of exploration is acquiring knowledge of the virtual lay of the land, and the capabilities one has; the other involves understanding the program and its limitations, and figuring out where the creases lie. They are very different types: for example, in TOS: Oblivion, the first kind of "explorer" may go collecting every single Nirnroot, or pick all the flowers possible, while the second kind will figure out how to break the level-based grind system, and find the "creases" in the simulation where things start to break down.
To boil it down: one group of "explorer" likes fantasy novels (don't take me too literally here, I mean books where the author paints a completely and consciously fictitious world), the other likes mysteries (where the author plays with conventions and leaves clues, allowing the reader to guess at the solution). It's a division we find among academics quite often.
It's analysis, not exploring. The goal isn't to figure out the entire map, or find every little Easter Egg, or even to do funky things at the edge of the game. Analyzing a game means looking at the final product and trying to reconstruct A. what it is trying to do, B. how effective it is at doing it, and C. how it got to the state it is at. Then you can spin off the little mechanical issues, and art design choices.
As for making a game suck less, well the problem has always been that developers started out because they really like games. Most of them end up doing stuff they may enjoy, but it's not making the games they really wanted to make. And those who end up making the games they really wanted to make, well, they get developer conceit, where their idea is so sacred, and so cool, that they will fight for it, even when evidence mounts to show that it doesn't work.
The most eye-opening experience can be watching how someone else uses your software. 20 years ago, we would send videotapes of testing back to the development house, and they'd be shocked by the kinds of things we did. Now, playtesting is standard practice in most places, and some houses (Valve, for one) have turned it into an art.
GP doesn't really this is what she's looking for. At the current prices, the N800 is a steal. Yes, you can read books on it, and it has a semi-decent interface wired to a 800x480 4.1 inch screen (so the resolution means things look a lot better than on similar pocketable devices). Yes, it does have internet browser and wifi, and runs VoIP, will do video chats of questionable quality, and show movies, remote administer your PC and whatnot. But most of the platform is build on F/OSS, and it's a portable gadget that doesn't exist solely as a vector to buy something else.
Of course, if you'd rather convert ebooks to 240x160 jpegs and view them on a toy, go ahead.
The Blue Door is in the middle; the Red door is on the right side of the screen. When teams are unbalanced, one door is locked. When teams are balanced, the player chooses between the door in the middle of the screen, or the one to the right. The result? A significant number of players pick the middle door more often, leading to a Blue power play.
How to test this hypothesis? Randomize the color of the two doors each time, and see if the advantage evens out.
Aye, that's the thing about the n8x0: it still needs a little work to do what you want it to. But it continually surprises me.
If I may ask, what sort of application do you use a "slew" of 8-balls for? I've only got two on my home network.
For example, Carwhisperer lets you capture and transmit audio to any Handsfree or BT headset using 0000 or 1234 as the password.
BT Keyboards often have a pairing mode (okay, some have a default of 0000), where the user has to put the keyboard into discoverable mode, and type in the code.
Still, everything is vulnerable, given enough resources.
They ain't "them." It's not win-win for "them". It's a win for the MCE folks if customers buy it, and a win for the Xbox division if that's the winner.
It's kinda like "We can't allocate forces to that battle, because if we capture Bin Laden, then the CIA wins, and not the DoD." Or, to quote the Ed209 Project Lead, Dick Jones, "You know what the tragedy is here Bob? We could have been friends. But you wouldn't go through proper channels."
On that list of media players, the Zune is the only one that is out of stock; it won't be in stock until December 17. Even so, it got #9.
Oh yeah, and the Yahoo article is dated November 19.
Bash all you like, I ain't buying a Zune or an iPod.
So Orange Box here doesn't refer to Valve; who knows? Maybe that's why Valve called it the "Orange Box" (along with the "Black Box"): it reifies their next phase of data mining; every "Orange Box" continuously records gameplay data for analysis back at HQ. In a software engineering sense, every "Orange Box" is an orange box.
I'm gathering you don't use OOo, the Gimp, or VLC, or any number of other desktop linux programs. If you do, and you have, please accept my apologies, and give me (and the thousands of other N800 users) the link to the repo.
But yes, I did look at something running Windows Mobile. Then I asked myself "Why the hell would I want to do that?"
Some folks want to compare games to movies. Well, don't compare them just to features; compare them to movies in the 1940s, back when there were short features, travelogues, newsreels, and cartoons. Not everything is a long-feature, nor does it have to be.
If you are going to compare games to features movies, why is it that "leaving them crying for more" is a good thing for movies (and books, and plays, and concerts, and so on), but not for games? Why does it have to be: "leaving them exhausted, emaciated and with Post-Traumatic Repetitive Stress Disorder (aka "The thousand-yard controller thumb")?
Portal is genius. It's a game where many of the key developers (writers and the ND folks) are new arrivals to some large company that specializes in developing products through an extensive testing cycle, and it's about being a new arrival in a large company that's developing a product, and you're part of the testing cycle.
There are two cliches that HL and just about every video game in the 90s had, that really didn't work (most of the time): ubiquitous, absurd, crates (uh, nobody uses those any more. Why are they here?), and a sidekick you're supposed to love, but who's two wooden and one-dimensional for it to work. They manage to make a sidekick-crate lovable. I haven't seen a triumph like that since Vladimir Nabokov made a sympathetic character out of a pedarast with delusions of being a king in exile.
Anyway, look at me still talking...
One hopes for Amazon's sake they spent the last year taking night courses in how to make the device look less like 1985 got really drunk and vomited all over the drafting table.