today's "businessspeak" (mindless repetition of words and phrases that have long since been driven into the ground by thoughtless, banal, stupid repetition)
Kids! That word, meaning "trite" or "unoriginal", is pronounced "ba-NAHL". If you say it the wrong way like I did in an interview, it sounds naughty and you sound stupid.
I don't know why I'm defending myself, but here we go.
As you might've guessed, I'm going into the computer programming industry. I'm especially looking at games companies. As I said in the grandparent, I spend a good amount of my free time doing programming and creating games that, at least to me, are impressive and show off my abilities. See my URL for a crappy website that has outdated screenshots of 2 of my games. I think these projects are far more important to put on a resume than "washed dishes part time at a restaurant," but that's just me.
Also, my college is all the way across the country, and I'm leaving in about 2 weeks. I don't think many people hire for 2 weeks at a time.
How do people have time for MMO's? It's simple: they don't get obsessed over them.
I play WOW casually. I usually only play about 4 days a week, and only for 4 hours each day, on average. I have plenty of free time to do more productive things. While I don't have a job, and am on summer break from school, I keep busy by making my own games, reading, studying programming, biking, those kinds of things.
I just wonder, how it is possible to participate in an MMO and still do anything with their lives?
Frankly, I don't even understand how you can be asking that question. Part of life is time management. Some people are poor at it (like your friend), and others are not. I'm able to balance my time so that I can play WOW enough to be worth paying for, yet get my own projects done, and continue learning. Do I have several 60's maxxed out in Tier2 armor? No. Do I still have fun playing the game? Yes. You don't need to spend your life in game to participate.
I hate what Microsoft has done to gaming: gone and brought American developers's into the console market
Way to be racist, Jack. "Oooh, better not play American games. Damn stinky Americans always making terrible games. Because, you know, what nationality you are really affects the quality of game you produce."
I've been thinking about these problems for a long time. I want to go into game development, preferably either game design or game programming. I'm working on several projects in my spare time right now (see URL). I'm going to college for software engineering with an emphasis on games this fall.
I've read articles and comments like those on this page, and they all say the same thing to me: Game companies underpay and overwork their employees, and this is creating both terrible games and burned out programmers. After thinking about it, I thought of what I think the problem is and how it can be fixed.
Here's my bottom line: Games are too expensive to develop. Like the parent poster said, innovative ideas don't get any of the funding they need to thrive. We're talking millions of dollars with today's development budgets. The only games that get funding are the already-proven, sure-fire (at least, according to the bean-counters) games. This makes sense - why spend millions of dollars on something that might crash and burn?
So the problem isn't with people unwilling to fund games, but rather with the game development cost itself: if the cost was a few thousand dollars instead of several million, a small group of people could probaby fund an entire project by themselves! I compared today's games to the games of the NES and SNES eras -- why are we hearing so many horror stories of low-paid, overworked employees working on unoriginal games that suck? In the NES/SNES days, practically anyone could get in on the action because it wasn't a huge risk with millions of dollars at stake. Having so many developers working on so many games really opened the door for innovation. Look through your favorite NES collection and see how many different developers there are: Hudson Soft, Virgin Interactive, Camerica, Mindscape, Taito. Now look through your favorite current-generation games; many fewer developers with hits that you love: Nintendo, maybe Bungie or Rockstar, Konami...
After identifying the problem, I tried thinking of solutions. What can we do to lower development costs? One thing stands out beyond all the others: graphics. It takes many weeks to create a model and all of the poses and animations that go along with that. Not to mention all of the level design that goes into adding the third dimension. I think it would do the industry a large favor if it started encouraging 2D games more. Handhelds are a good market, though they are too turning to 3D-only games. Now, I'm not saying that 3D games don't have their place -- amazing games like Ocarina of Time, Halo, or Metal Gear Solid would have been impossible without 3D -- I'm just saying that we should encourage modern 2D games (think Cave Story) more than we do. In short: bring 2D back to the gaming world.
The other costly factor is distribution and marketing. While I think this was a "problem" back in the NES/SNES era as well, we now have the tool we need to nearly eliminate this cost. The internet is the perfect distribution platform. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but hear me out. If we could get mainstream console developers (the "big three") to support downloads of smaller gamedev companies' games onto their consoles, this would lower costs and be a huge boon for "indie" companies. Look at the PSP's homebrew development community. Amazing work going on there. Now imagine if independant developers had the power and the market penetration of mainstream consoles like the Revolution or the PS3. Obviously, the big three would have to open their dev kits to smaller developers, too.
I think the thing that could *really* revolutionize and recreate this industry is low-cost, digital downloads of (what I'm going to call) fourth-party games -- games created by companies that don't have the means to hire large development groups and sell their games in Wal*Mart. As an example, Nintendo could charge fourth-party developers a small monthly fee to have their games put up for sale on their online service. Custom
One of my friends said something very scary to me just the other day. We were discussing using cameras in public spaces to capture criminals & people who run red lights. He said he would rather give up is rights to privacy to catch the criminals. I told him he was unAmerican for having that view, and he just couldn't fathom how giving up freedoms could be unAmerican.
What I'm wondering, however, is if this trend will continue forever. Will we eventually reach a point where the majority of people FINALLY realise how many freedoms we've given up for the guise of protection? By the time that happens, will it be too late to change our ways without resorting to a civil war or revolution? Maybe politicians will continue to rule our government poorly and unjustly until we turn into a fascist police state.
Either way, I'm thankful I'm finally old enough to vote. What scares me is that my friend is now also old enough.
Fine. Research all you want. The problem is when that research is used to make laws that impair our right to free speech. We have every right to buy video games, no matter how harmful they may be to our mental health. If they start censoring video games by law, I see no reason why cigarettes and alcohol shouldn't be illegal -- they are far more damaging to our health, both physical, and mental, than video games will ever be. I think we all know how well a cigarette/alcohol ban will go over; I don't see why a video game ban/censorship law shouldn't be resisted with just as much, if not more, force.
Of course, as with alcohol and cigarettes, children belong in a different category. But that's for another discussion.
For reference, I learned PASCAL, followed by Java, then C++, C, and PHP (if you want to call that a programming language).
If beginners shouldn't be dealing with pointers, then don't teach that part until they've grasped all the other aspects of writing procedural code.
Pointers don't point to memory... they point to things. If you're using pointers to randomly traverse your machine's guts then you deserve what you're getting. There are some things (such as linked lists) that are far easier to construct using pointers than by doing it by maintaining array indices (for example).
I agree completely with the parent in this regard. Since I'm studying to go into the Video Gaming field, I use linked lists extensively. While it may not be the best design, my current project (3D Adventure-Platformer for PC) has very many linked lists: a list containing every object within the level, a list containing every display polygon within each object, a list containing every point for every display polygon within each object, a list containing the three points for each hit detection triangle within each object... the list (no pun intended) goes on.
Should pointers be tought to beginners? Maybe not. But they should definitely be tought at some point, and they are useful in certain cases. There's no reason to limit yourself because pointers can be used unsafely. Simply learn effective and safe programming techniques so that you aren't limited by what others feel you aren't prepared for.
I avoid it for heated issues (mostly political) but for other topics, such as science, geography, and (most) history, it's an invaluable resource. Sure it has its bad spots, but you just have to know how to identify and ignore them.
When I started running Linux, I quickly saw the advantages... Installing software didn't require the usual "Next, Next, uncheck every checkbox, delete desktop and quicklaunch icons, uninstall additional software installed along with the software I actually wanted, check for hidden startup items, make sure program doesn't phone home", when I started my PC I wasn't greeted by millions of splash screens, applications that couldn't make a connection popping up and letting me know, I didn't have to readjust settings that kept resetting for some reason (volume levels, icon positions on the quicklaunch)... GNU/Linux is about using your PC and not just working around problems to get what you want...
Try using quality software then. Yes, it exists for Windows. I'm curious to know what you were installing that gave you so much trouble? I use quite a few programs (Firefox, Thunderbird, Trillian, JetAudio, several games) and none of them ever give me crap like that when installing or after. Sounds to me like you weren't using your PC properly -- that's hardly Windows's fault.
Both Paper Marios,
Zelda:OOT,
Age of Empires 3 (and before that, AOE2),
WoW, Doukutsu Monogatari,
and my all-time favorite game. It's an old, obscure platformer for NES made by a small development team from Virgin Games. I've beaten it probably well over 100 times all the way through, and it still continues to be fun. That game is
I've spent a good deal of time thinking about this. I don't want my kids to have easy access to that kind of pornography. There's enough anecdotal evidence, in my mind, from kids that are growing up with this and it being a major problem, that it concerns me a great deal. Kids whose understanding of romantic relationships have become completely skewed because their role models are guys cumming on women's faces and saying, "take that bitch!"
I respectfully disagree with you here. I've been watching porn fairly heavily since 5th grade (around 12-13 years old). The first porn I saw was on our old Win95 box -- in fact, it was my father's stash. While there weren't many videos (this was mid-1990's, the internet wasn't quite to that point), there was plenty of close-up, uncensored, hardcore nudity.
Yet I've never raped a girl. I've never cummed on her face and said, "Take that, bitch!" I've never had the urge to completely dominate a woman. I know that's not what relationships are about. And I know that I'm not the exception.
I think many of the "ills" that face our society today are simply caused by bad parenting and overreactionary politicians. Porn doesn't harm mentally balanced youth. Period. Video games don't cause mentally balanced children to shoot up the school. Period. Movies, music, and TV shows don't cause mentally balanced children to commit suicide after breaking their friends' necks. Period.
Parents that buy Doom3 for their 10-year-old kid are the problem (no 10-year-old is mentally balanced). Parents that drink, smoke, and beat members of the family are the problem. Parents that don't give their children any attention are the problem. Parents that encourage violence (yes! it happens!) are the problem. These kind of parents bring about mentally unbalanced children who don't know or don't care that it's wrong to shoot up the school or dominate their girlfriends.
How do we fix these problems? That's up for debate. But one thing that's clear is how not to fix these problems: by taking away constitutional rights and freedoms in the name of "protecting the children." It simply won't work.
I'm a Windows XP user myself, and I completely agree with the Great-Grandparent. The activation nonsense is completely unnecessary and is only "painless" to those who don't like to tinker with or upgrade their systems. A few months ago, I upgraded my CPU and graphics card. After booting, Windows asked me to activate. While it's a simple, one-step process on a fresh install, it ended up being a half-hour's waste of time. Long story short: Windows refused to activate over the internet and I had to call up Microsoft's support center using the number provided. After some time of waiting, I finally was connected with a person. Needless to say, they didn't speak a word of english beyond repeating and interpreting numbers.
This has happened a few times since then when I do various system modifications, upgrades, reformat/reinstalls, etc. The calls are usually pretty quick (15 minutes) now that I've gotten used to dealing with them. But it's far from what I'd call "painless."
Most of you are looking at this from an individual perspective and you are grossly mistaken. How foolish you all are to think this law is to protect you! You the people! Hah! This administration doesn't do things for the people, they do them for big businesses with lots of funding to contribute to campaigns and with lobbyists who have big entertainment budgets.
The $20M he gave to a University library buys him naming rights. $20M to Bill Gates is pocket change.
But that sure as hell isn't "pocket change" to the university. Get off your fucking high horse, he's donating more to charity than you ever will. Regardless of how much it "hurts" either of you, Bill Gates' $20M matters one hell of a lot more than your $10.
At the end of the day, which matters more to the AIDS research clinic: the life's savings of a poor woman ($1.50), or 2% of a rich man's profits (several BILLION dollars)?
Completely agree with you. While I love most of Adult Swim's shows (Harvey Birdman is genius), Futurama just had the advantage of full funding from a real network. They hired some great people to write and act for the show, and I hope they manage to bring them back.
Slashdot Mirror
today's "businessspeak" (mindless repetition of words and phrases that have long since been driven into the ground by thoughtless, banal, stupid repetition)
Kids! That word, meaning "trite" or "unoriginal", is pronounced "ba-NAHL". If you say it the wrong way like I did in an interview, it sounds naughty and you sound stupid.
I don't know why I'm defending myself, but here we go.
As you might've guessed, I'm going into the computer programming industry. I'm especially looking at games companies. As I said in the grandparent, I spend a good amount of my free time doing programming and creating games that, at least to me, are impressive and show off my abilities. See my URL for a crappy website that has outdated screenshots of 2 of my games. I think these projects are far more important to put on a resume than "washed dishes part time at a restaurant," but that's just me.
Also, my college is all the way across the country, and I'm leaving in about 2 weeks. I don't think many people hire for 2 weeks at a time.
How do people have time for MMO's? It's simple: they don't get obsessed over them.
I play WOW casually. I usually only play about 4 days a week, and only for 4 hours each day, on average. I have plenty of free time to do more productive things. While I don't have a job, and am on summer break from school, I keep busy by making my own games, reading, studying programming, biking, those kinds of things.
I just wonder, how it is possible to participate in an MMO and still do anything with their lives?
Frankly, I don't even understand how you can be asking that question. Part of life is time management. Some people are poor at it (like your friend), and others are not. I'm able to balance my time so that I can play WOW enough to be worth paying for, yet get my own projects done, and continue learning. Do I have several 60's maxxed out in Tier2 armor? No. Do I still have fun playing the game? Yes. You don't need to spend your life in game to participate.
Exaggerate much? Calm down, punky brewster, it's an Operating System, not the second coming of Christ.
I knew it was heavier than the original XBox, but that's just ridiculous.
It's funny, laugh.
I hate what Microsoft has done to gaming: gone and brought American developers's into the console market
Way to be racist, Jack. "Oooh, better not play American games. Damn stinky Americans always making terrible games. Because, you know, what nationality you are really affects the quality of game you produce."
Who modded this garbage up?
I've been thinking about these problems for a long time. I want to go into game development, preferably either game design or game programming. I'm working on several projects in my spare time right now (see URL). I'm going to college for software engineering with an emphasis on games this fall.
I've read articles and comments like those on this page, and they all say the same thing to me: Game companies underpay and overwork their employees, and this is creating both terrible games and burned out programmers. After thinking about it, I thought of what I think the problem is and how it can be fixed.
Here's my bottom line: Games are too expensive to develop. Like the parent poster said, innovative ideas don't get any of the funding they need to thrive. We're talking millions of dollars with today's development budgets. The only games that get funding are the already-proven, sure-fire (at least, according to the bean-counters) games. This makes sense - why spend millions of dollars on something that might crash and burn?
So the problem isn't with people unwilling to fund games, but rather with the game development cost itself: if the cost was a few thousand dollars instead of several million, a small group of people could probaby fund an entire project by themselves! I compared today's games to the games of the NES and SNES eras -- why are we hearing so many horror stories of low-paid, overworked employees working on unoriginal games that suck? In the NES/SNES days, practically anyone could get in on the action because it wasn't a huge risk with millions of dollars at stake. Having so many developers working on so many games really opened the door for innovation. Look through your favorite NES collection and see how many different developers there are: Hudson Soft, Virgin Interactive, Camerica, Mindscape, Taito. Now look through your favorite current-generation games; many fewer developers with hits that you love: Nintendo, maybe Bungie or Rockstar, Konami...
After identifying the problem, I tried thinking of solutions. What can we do to lower development costs? One thing stands out beyond all the others: graphics. It takes many weeks to create a model and all of the poses and animations that go along with that. Not to mention all of the level design that goes into adding the third dimension. I think it would do the industry a large favor if it started encouraging 2D games more. Handhelds are a good market, though they are too turning to 3D-only games. Now, I'm not saying that 3D games don't have their place -- amazing games like Ocarina of Time, Halo, or Metal Gear Solid would have been impossible without 3D -- I'm just saying that we should encourage modern 2D games (think Cave Story) more than we do. In short: bring 2D back to the gaming world.
The other costly factor is distribution and marketing. While I think this was a "problem" back in the NES/SNES era as well, we now have the tool we need to nearly eliminate this cost. The internet is the perfect distribution platform. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but hear me out. If we could get mainstream console developers (the "big three") to support downloads of smaller gamedev companies' games onto their consoles, this would lower costs and be a huge boon for "indie" companies. Look at the PSP's homebrew development community. Amazing work going on there. Now imagine if independant developers had the power and the market penetration of mainstream consoles like the Revolution or the PS3. Obviously, the big three would have to open their dev kits to smaller developers, too.
I think the thing that could *really* revolutionize and recreate this industry is low-cost, digital downloads of (what I'm going to call) fourth-party games -- games created by companies that don't have the means to hire large development groups and sell their games in Wal*Mart. As an example, Nintendo could charge fourth-party developers a small monthly fee to have their games put up for sale on their online service. Custom
One of my friends said something very scary to me just the other day. We were discussing using cameras in public spaces to capture criminals & people who run red lights. He said he would rather give up is rights to privacy to catch the criminals. I told him he was unAmerican for having that view, and he just couldn't fathom how giving up freedoms could be unAmerican.
What I'm wondering, however, is if this trend will continue forever. Will we eventually reach a point where the majority of people FINALLY realise how many freedoms we've given up for the guise of protection? By the time that happens, will it be too late to change our ways without resorting to a civil war or revolution? Maybe politicians will continue to rule our government poorly and unjustly until we turn into a fascist police state.
Either way, I'm thankful I'm finally old enough to vote. What scares me is that my friend is now also old enough.
Here you are =)
Fine. Research all you want. The problem is when that research is used to make laws that impair our right to free speech. We have every right to buy video games, no matter how harmful they may be to our mental health. If they start censoring video games by law, I see no reason why cigarettes and alcohol shouldn't be illegal -- they are far more damaging to our health, both physical, and mental, than video games will ever be. I think we all know how well a cigarette/alcohol ban will go over; I don't see why a video game ban/censorship law shouldn't be resisted with just as much, if not more, force.
Of course, as with alcohol and cigarettes, children belong in a different category. But that's for another discussion.
If beginners shouldn't be dealing with pointers, then don't teach that part until they've grasped all the other aspects of writing procedural code.
Pointers don't point to memory... they point to things. If you're using pointers to randomly traverse your machine's guts then you deserve what you're getting. There are some things (such as linked lists) that are far easier to construct using pointers than by doing it by maintaining array indices (for example).
I agree completely with the parent in this regard. Since I'm studying to go into the Video Gaming field, I use linked lists extensively. While it may not be the best design, my current project (3D Adventure-Platformer for PC) has very many linked lists: a list containing every object within the level, a list containing every display polygon within each object, a list containing every point for every display polygon within each object, a list containing the three points for each hit detection triangle within each object... the list (no pun intended) goes on.
Should pointers be tought to beginners? Maybe not. But they should definitely be tought at some point, and they are useful in certain cases. There's no reason to limit yourself because pointers can be used unsafely. Simply learn effective and safe programming techniques so that you aren't limited by what others feel you aren't prepared for.
Above post contains profanity.
Jackass.
I avoid it for heated issues (mostly political) but for other topics, such as science, geography, and (most) history, it's an invaluable resource. Sure it has its bad spots, but you just have to know how to identify and ignore them.
When I started running Linux, I quickly saw the advantages... Installing software didn't require the usual "Next, Next, uncheck every checkbox, delete desktop and quicklaunch icons, uninstall additional software installed along with the software I actually wanted, check for hidden startup items, make sure program doesn't phone home", when I started my PC I wasn't greeted by millions of splash screens, applications that couldn't make a connection popping up and letting me know, I didn't have to readjust settings that kept resetting for some reason (volume levels, icon positions on the quicklaunch)... GNU/Linux is about using your PC and not just working around problems to get what you want...
Try using quality software then. Yes, it exists for Windows. I'm curious to know what you were installing that gave you so much trouble? I use quite a few programs (Firefox, Thunderbird, Trillian, JetAudio, several games) and none of them ever give me crap like that when installing or after. Sounds to me like you weren't using your PC properly -- that's hardly Windows's fault.
A few favorites for me are:
Both Paper Marios,
Zelda:OOT,
Age of Empires 3 (and before that, AOE2),
WoW,
Doukutsu Monogatari,
and my all-time favorite game. It's an old, obscure platformer for NES made by a small development team from Virgin Games. I've beaten it probably well over 100 times all the way through, and it still continues to be fun. That game is
M.C. Kids
Look it up.
If everyone follows his plan, I guess we'll have to find a "cure" to overpopulation damn quick.
I've spent a good deal of time thinking about this. I don't want my kids to have easy access to that kind of pornography. There's enough anecdotal evidence, in my mind, from kids that are growing up with this and it being a major problem, that it concerns me a great deal. Kids whose understanding of romantic relationships have become completely skewed because their role models are guys cumming on women's faces and saying, "take that bitch!"
I respectfully disagree with you here. I've been watching porn fairly heavily since 5th grade (around 12-13 years old). The first porn I saw was on our old Win95 box -- in fact, it was my father's stash. While there weren't many videos (this was mid-1990's, the internet wasn't quite to that point), there was plenty of close-up, uncensored, hardcore nudity.
Yet I've never raped a girl. I've never cummed on her face and said, "Take that, bitch!" I've never had the urge to completely dominate a woman. I know that's not what relationships are about. And I know that I'm not the exception.
I think many of the "ills" that face our society today are simply caused by bad parenting and overreactionary politicians. Porn doesn't harm mentally balanced youth. Period. Video games don't cause mentally balanced children to shoot up the school. Period. Movies, music, and TV shows don't cause mentally balanced children to commit suicide after breaking their friends' necks. Period.
Parents that buy Doom3 for their 10-year-old kid are the problem (no 10-year-old is mentally balanced). Parents that drink, smoke, and beat members of the family are the problem. Parents that don't give their children any attention are the problem. Parents that encourage violence (yes! it happens!) are the problem. These kind of parents bring about mentally unbalanced children who don't know or don't care that it's wrong to shoot up the school or dominate their girlfriends.
How do we fix these problems? That's up for debate. But one thing that's clear is how not to fix these problems: by taking away constitutional rights and freedoms in the name of "protecting the children." It simply won't work.
I'm a Windows XP user myself, and I completely agree with the Great-Grandparent. The activation nonsense is completely unnecessary and is only "painless" to those who don't like to tinker with or upgrade their systems. A few months ago, I upgraded my CPU and graphics card. After booting, Windows asked me to activate. While it's a simple, one-step process on a fresh install, it ended up being a half-hour's waste of time. Long story short: Windows refused to activate over the internet and I had to call up Microsoft's support center using the number provided. After some time of waiting, I finally was connected with a person. Needless to say, they didn't speak a word of english beyond repeating and interpreting numbers.
This has happened a few times since then when I do various system modifications, upgrades, reformat/reinstalls, etc. The calls are usually pretty quick (15 minutes) now that I've gotten used to dealing with them. But it's far from what I'd call "painless."
Most of you are looking at this from an individual perspective and you are grossly mistaken. How foolish you all are to think this law is to protect you! You the people! Hah! This administration doesn't do things for the people, they do them for big businesses with lots of funding to contribute to campaigns and with lobbyists who have big entertainment budgets.
Have you read any of the comments on this site?
The $20M he gave to a University library buys him naming rights. $20M to Bill Gates is pocket change.
But that sure as hell isn't "pocket change" to the university. Get off your fucking high horse, he's donating more to charity than you ever will. Regardless of how much it "hurts" either of you, Bill Gates' $20M matters one hell of a lot more than your $10.
At the end of the day, which matters more to the AIDS research clinic: the life's savings of a poor woman ($1.50), or 2% of a rich man's profits (several BILLION dollars)?
Completely agree with you. While I love most of Adult Swim's shows (Harvey Birdman is genius), Futurama just had the advantage of full funding from a real network. They hired some great people to write and act for the show, and I hope they manage to bring them back.
I'm pretty sure it was a joke :-)
Wait. . . if the free version of Opera has no banners, why would you have to pay for ad banners?
Because you're retarded? That was the Grand-Parent's point =)