Forcing me to use a specific programming language is insane. Imagine Microsoft demanding all windows apps to be written only in C# and compiled only with Visual Studio. It would be an outrage. But hey, it's Steve Jobs, the Big Brother himself, and he knows what's best for us, right?
Is this asinine? You are aware Microsoft is demanding all Windows Phone 7 apps be written in C#/Silverlight, right? I may not agree with their move, but to say it puts them alone on a pillar of evil seems to show your own bias more than any factual opinion.
Actually this driver update miraculously fixed all the issues I was experiencing with PBOs and massively increased texture upload speed under some conditions compared to version 8.12. So I would say it has a good chance of fixing something else. I was about to throw my card in a really dirty bin after hacking away at 5 different methods of speeding up uploads and getting blank textures and 3 FPS for my trouble. 9.1 gave me back a picture, and then another 249 or so in the next second.
I don't know who you are, but I also went to North Sydney, and I also knew Mr. Starling and while he may've been more flamboyant than educational, he was fairly flamboyant.
On a serious note (he never actually taught me), you can't write off a school just because of a single teacher. There are bad teachers everywhere. Apart from a curious lack of girls, there was little else to complain about really.
As for the idea that parents should be able to peruse students comments on teachers... I see certain problems. Not all students are mature. Its a fact. Some of the comments will not be the most mature or helpful in terms of rating teaching ability. Back when I was a kid, if I had known that I could get back at a teacher by posting a scathing review on their educational abilities regardless of their basis on fact, I'll grudgingly admit I may take the opportunity. After a few drinks. May be I am weak, or perhaps its indicative of a problem. Who knows. I may not have read the article.
I tend to agree - they can still quote increased security, with UAC on of course, who would turn it off, you want less security? while the great majority of users turn off the misimplemented annoyance factory.
The article author's views on WoW are fairly spot on, in my mind. It fails because of its total staticity in all areas. Dieing does nothing. Killing someone respawns them 200m away. Clearing a town just gives you a clear town for 20 seconds. Battlegrounds and Raids only have the effect of giving you minute advantages in... battlegrounds and raids.
His solution, however, is a tad too drastic. Removing leveling all together, and its associated goals is not necessary. The next step MMORPG wise is adding some dynamism. The internet isn't ready for a fully player driven world, not with current anonimity and maturity. Perhaps when the stigma to adults of playing these games is cleared there will be interesting opportunities for this.
The compromise, something that would provide a lot of self-sustaining play, would be to add structured social aspects. I know these have been done to a certain degree in MUD's and planned in some MMO's currently in development, but this needs to be done completely and well to succeed at all. Add a certain number of factions, not all known as playable to the player. Kingdom A, Kingdom B, OtherFormOfGovt C, MysteriousFactionFromFarAway D, WizardsGroup E, ReligiousOrg F, RebelliousGroup G, etc etc. Allow the player to start in the world, introduce them to it, then allow them to join one, get a 'job', a role in the world, and give it meaning. Governing a town, a city-guard, mercenary, thief, shopkeeper, the possibilities are endless and obvious. These roles would have to have world impact and a possibility for progression. Guards would defend their town from opposing factions, real players come to raid/invade, and possibly get promoted to captain etc.
Players would get known for more than being level 60, but for their choices socially, and their effect on the events. This would have to mean that existing towns, and all manner of similar places would have to be able to be taken over. Not easily, nothing should be easy in that way, but it needs to be possible. Of course these are really fine grained examples that hopefully illustrate the necessary dynamism.
The fact is, the conditions are nearly the same across the entire American culture. Everyone is always in crunch mode. I can't think of any development position I have ever held that wasn't mostly in crunch mode and I have never worked in game development.
I know this now echoes a few posters views, but I don't think thats accurate. Totally depends on your industry and corporate culture, and I don't think this kind of required overtime is anywhere near the norm. I've been full time programming for 6 months now, and I love my job, but I get in a bit before 9 and leave pretty much on 5, every day, as do all my coworkers.
I think the rub of why this is so prevalent in the game industry is that game developers will put up with it. Someone writing bank software will probably perform unpaid overtime if asked by their employer, but will probably resent it. A game developer that truly loves their work, their game, and their coworkers will perform will only a whine. The fact that you have some people in this position willing to do overtime unfortunately ripples on to the other companies in the industry that have no respect for their employees, causing them to think themselves justified in expectations of overtime.
As far as I understand it, the public version of XGL was very out of date for a long long time, much to the dismay of people trying to use it. Essentially, they were dealing with bugs they had seen fixed in public demonstrations. I'm fairly sure this marks the successful merge of some recent XGL into a fork of X.org, for the most part done by the X.org/DRI maintainers.
At least this marks a step toward the future of X rendering for 2 of the 3 available visions (to my knowledge). They all seem to be going for very similar visual/functional features, with only implementational differences (whether you run gl as a special, all encompassing yet sub X context, run X on GL, or change X such that it direct renders GL contexts). Facts may be in error.
Whatever wins out, I'm glad we will one day soon leave behind the flicker. It will not be missed.
Let's pretend that there never was a mouse, and all we had were consoles. How would we bring this about?
Just dumb it the hell down and remove all the dynamism of control gained by having fast precise mouse/keyboard input, never stopped you before. I mean, look what it did to the parent.
On an unrelated note: I don't think I would like GW. It seems like it would be much the same play experience as Diablo 2, only in 3D and with an in-game lobby.
I tend to agree, immersion is my primary goal in MMORPGs (and RPGs), and WOW for all its completely static world and formularised goals, had a lot of effort in the quality of the experience and polish. I would love to see an MMORPG with that much polish and a truly dynamic world. In fact, I'll wait.
As a user of Opera for some 5 or 6 years I have been extolling its virtues to friends for a while now. The answer is always the same for the same reason, the interface is too complex and clumsy. While I have a wierd sort of love for its percularities and loathe the Firefox approach of a supplying the browser feature barren to mimic IE, have you had to resist the impulse to provide a similar interface to attract users of the currently most popular browser?
Also, there are so many things in Opera I find make it a much much more efficient browser than anything out there, especially out of the box. Most prominantly, single key shortcuts (z, x, 1 & 2, w, s, e, d, etc.), far superior mouse gestures to anything out there, fully cached browser history, good default search shortcuts and bookmark shortcuts and the ability to fairly abitarily edit toolbars. I find, however that these features are great but could be amazing with just small changes, and many of the more advanced users of Opera I know agree. Have you thought of providing a more comprehensive and intuitive scripting system for buttons/gestures/shortcuts, more complete control over toolbars, and a gui for editing search shortcuts etc. ? It seems alot of the preferences and functionality is hidden in text strings found only in.ini files and on the forum, where it should be more openly available for a product of this kind.
I think its safe to assume that Nintendo's system will be fairly under the price of the 360 and the PS3, considering they have stated no ridiculously lofty performance goals, and taking into account historical trends. I expect <$300 to be honest.
If you want to complain about consoles taking the roles of computers, look toward the dvd playing, hard drive wielding PS3 and 360.
I would've thought the swings of a teams morale were the kind of things preferably left without simulation. For one, I am entirely uninterested in the happiness of my players and would rather like my wins to be based more upon my skills and/or my morale at the time. Such things are best left to the Sims or Nintendogs.
p.s. Moral-gorithm? Initial reaction included `... * -3.5[kittens_flipped_off] *...'
Am I the only one that thinks distributing full HD content over the internet is a ridiculous concept? Not only are the storage requirments unrealistic as you mentioned, but sending a cool gig or two down a pipe regularly for this purpose is obscene.
The reality of this is that h264 is a scalable codec and whats going to be in primary focus is short films, video clips and television shows formatted for mobile viewing, ie. possibly less than 480.
Personally I think the video store will be as relevant as the hardware its supporting, the current format of the iPod screen is really not sufficient to drive it.
To me, this seems like an interesting catalyst to learn a GUI API. Not only is cross platform is a welcome positive; the Qt structure is intriguing. Particularly see the Qt Object Model for a great read. I had little idea that Qt used a signals model and was tending towards strict use of the MVC paradigm.
Perhaps comprehension of Qt would increase my chances of bothering to learn the almost entirely alien Cocoa/Obj-C rhetoric.
Slashdot Mirror
Nokia sold their soul to M$ and Erlop will see the Faustian compact consummated,
RIP Nokia, Sad but true.
MFG, omb
Apt post title.
Forcing me to use a specific programming language is insane. Imagine Microsoft demanding all windows apps to be written only in C# and compiled only with Visual Studio. It would be an outrage. But hey, it's Steve Jobs, the Big Brother himself, and he knows what's best for us, right?
Is this asinine? You are aware Microsoft is demanding all Windows Phone 7 apps be written in C#/Silverlight, right? I may not agree with their move, but to say it puts them alone on a pillar of evil seems to show your own bias more than any factual opinion.
Actually this driver update miraculously fixed all the issues I was experiencing with PBOs and massively increased texture upload speed under some conditions compared to version 8.12. So I would say it has a good chance of fixing something else. I was about to throw my card in a really dirty bin after hacking away at 5 different methods of speeding up uploads and getting blank textures and 3 FPS for my trouble. 9.1 gave me back a picture, and then another 249 or so in the next second.
I don't know who you are, but I also went to North Sydney, and I also knew Mr. Starling and while he may've been more flamboyant than educational, he was fairly flamboyant.
On a serious note (he never actually taught me), you can't write off a school just because of a single teacher. There are bad teachers everywhere. Apart from a curious lack of girls, there was little else to complain about really.
As for the idea that parents should be able to peruse students comments on teachers... I see certain problems. Not all students are mature. Its a fact. Some of the comments will not be the most mature or helpful in terms of rating teaching ability. Back when I was a kid, if I had known that I could get back at a teacher by posting a scathing review on their educational abilities regardless of their basis on fact, I'll grudgingly admit I may take the opportunity. After a few drinks. May be I am weak, or perhaps its indicative of a problem. Who knows. I may not have read the article.
I tend to agree - they can still quote increased security, with UAC on of course, who would turn it off, you want less security? while the great majority of users turn off the misimplemented annoyance factory.
The article author's views on WoW are fairly spot on, in my mind. It fails because of its total staticity in all areas. Dieing does nothing. Killing someone respawns them 200m away. Clearing a town just gives you a clear town for 20 seconds. Battlegrounds and Raids only have the effect of giving you minute advantages in ... battlegrounds and raids.
His solution, however, is a tad too drastic. Removing leveling all together, and its associated goals is not necessary. The next step MMORPG wise is adding some dynamism. The internet isn't ready for a fully player driven world, not with current anonimity and maturity. Perhaps when the stigma to adults of playing these games is cleared there will be interesting opportunities for this.
The compromise, something that would provide a lot of self-sustaining play, would be to add structured social aspects. I know these have been done to a certain degree in MUD's and planned in some MMO's currently in development, but this needs to be done completely and well to succeed at all. Add a certain number of factions, not all known as playable to the player. Kingdom A, Kingdom B, OtherFormOfGovt C, MysteriousFactionFromFarAway D, WizardsGroup E, ReligiousOrg F, RebelliousGroup G, etc etc. Allow the player to start in the world, introduce them to it, then allow them to join one, get a 'job', a role in the world, and give it meaning. Governing a town, a city-guard, mercenary, thief, shopkeeper, the possibilities are endless and obvious. These roles would have to have world impact and a possibility for progression. Guards would defend their town from opposing factions, real players come to raid/invade, and possibly get promoted to captain etc.
Players would get known for more than being level 60, but for their choices socially, and their effect on the events. This would have to mean that existing towns, and all manner of similar places would have to be able to be taken over. Not easily, nothing should be easy in that way, but it needs to be possible. Of course these are really fine grained examples that hopefully illustrate the necessary dynamism.
The fact is, the conditions are nearly the same across the entire American culture. Everyone is always in crunch mode. I can't think of any development position I have ever held that wasn't mostly in crunch mode and I have never worked in game development.
I know this now echoes a few posters views, but I don't think thats accurate. Totally depends on your industry and corporate culture, and I don't think this kind of required overtime is anywhere near the norm. I've been full time programming for 6 months now, and I love my job, but I get in a bit before 9 and leave pretty much on 5, every day, as do all my coworkers.
I think the rub of why this is so prevalent in the game industry is that game developers will put up with it. Someone writing bank software will probably perform unpaid overtime if asked by their employer, but will probably resent it. A game developer that truly loves their work, their game, and their coworkers will perform will only a whine. The fact that you have some people in this position willing to do overtime unfortunately ripples on to the other companies in the industry that have no respect for their employees, causing them to think themselves justified in expectations of overtime.
As far as I understand it, the public version of XGL was very out of date for a long long time, much to the dismay of people trying to use it. Essentially, they were dealing with bugs they had seen fixed in public demonstrations. I'm fairly sure this marks the successful merge of some recent XGL into a fork of X.org, for the most part done by the X.org/DRI maintainers.
At least this marks a step toward the future of X rendering for 2 of the 3 available visions (to my knowledge). They all seem to be going for very similar visual/functional features, with only implementational differences (whether you run gl as a special, all encompassing yet sub X context, run X on GL, or change X such that it direct renders GL contexts). Facts may be in error.
Whatever wins out, I'm glad we will one day soon leave behind the flicker. It will not be missed.
As a user of Opera for some 5 or 6 years I have been extolling its virtues to friends for a while now. The answer is always the same for the same reason, the interface is too complex and clumsy. While I have a wierd sort of love for its percularities and loathe the Firefox approach of a supplying the browser feature barren to mimic IE, have you had to resist the impulse to provide a similar interface to attract users of the currently most popular browser?
.ini files and on the forum, where it should be more openly available for a product of this kind.
Also, there are so many things in Opera I find make it a much much more efficient browser than anything out there, especially out of the box. Most prominantly, single key shortcuts (z, x, 1 & 2, w, s, e, d, etc.), far superior mouse gestures to anything out there, fully cached browser history, good default search shortcuts and bookmark shortcuts and the ability to fairly abitarily edit toolbars. I find, however that these features are great but could be amazing with just small changes, and many of the more advanced users of Opera I know agree. Have you thought of providing a more comprehensive and intuitive scripting system for buttons/gestures/shortcuts, more complete control over toolbars, and a gui for editing search shortcuts etc. ? It seems alot of the preferences and functionality is hidden in text strings found only in
This is really only news when a couple of big labels actually sign on.
I think its safe to assume that Nintendo's system will be fairly under the price of the 360 and the PS3, considering they have stated no ridiculously lofty performance goals, and taking into account historical trends. I expect <$300 to be honest.
If you want to complain about consoles taking the roles of computers, look toward the dvd playing, hard drive wielding PS3 and 360.
I would've thought the swings of a teams morale were the kind of things preferably left without simulation. For one, I am entirely uninterested in the happiness of my players and would rather like my wins to be based more upon my skills and/or my morale at the time. Such things are best left to the Sims or Nintendogs.
...'
p.s. Moral-gorithm? Initial reaction included `... * -3.5[kittens_flipped_off] *
Am I the only one that thinks distributing full HD content over the internet is a ridiculous concept? Not only are the storage requirments unrealistic as you mentioned, but sending a cool gig or two down a pipe regularly for this purpose is obscene.
The reality of this is that h264 is a scalable codec and whats going to be in primary focus is short films, video clips and television shows formatted for mobile viewing, ie. possibly less than 480.
Personally I think the video store will be as relevant as the hardware its supporting, the current format of the iPod screen is really not sufficient to drive it.
To me, this seems like an interesting catalyst to learn a GUI API. Not only is cross platform is a welcome positive; the Qt structure is intriguing. Particularly see the Qt Object Model for a great read. I had little idea that Qt used a signals model and was tending towards strict use of the MVC paradigm. Perhaps comprehension of Qt would increase my chances of bothering to learn the almost entirely alien Cocoa/Obj-C rhetoric.