PSYCHONAUTS IS AVAILABLE FROM STEAM For far more than you will pay elsewhere! There corrected.
All right, perhaps you could bother to tell us where then?
I found Psychonauts for $3 in a local bargain bin a year ago, I bought all three remaining copies and gave them away, but most people will not find older games in shops...
If you didn't listen all the way to the end, it is worth repeating - PSYCHONAUTS IS AVAILABLE FROM STEAM REALLY CHEAP! If you don't buy it, you have forfeited your right to ever again complain about lack of originality and fun in games.
While you are at it, so is Vampire: Bloodlines, which with the unofficial patches is a really good game these days, the new Sam and Max episodes, and Bioshock, (but if you haven't already heard about the last one and how good it is you are probably dead).
Has there ever been a more stupid quote than: "If they can access the Internet, they can get to anything," Hutchinson Police Chief Dick Heitschmidt said. "Anyone in the whole world could have access, if that's what really happened."
Yes. I think "No, it's not loaded! Here, I'll prove it to you!" beats it.
JavaFX's grammar was taked from F3, which is a declarative GUI language for Java.
I thought that too, but it turns out JavaFX IS actually F3, just rebranded with an official name. I thought Form Follows Function was a pretty nice name, but then I don't work in marketing, do I...
Indeed, it is a real shame nobody sees this sort of deception for what it is. There is someone running around defending the fact that the JRE system libraries will be memory resident regardless of whether a Java application is actually used.
They had a session about the Consumer JRE at JavaOne, and they are NOT putting it in memory. They are doing a touch of the files at startup (or possibly after login) to put the files in the disk cache. Still a cheat, if everybody did it the situation would be hopeless, but still.
the real solution is to reduce the enormous size of the JRE libraries to something more reasonable.
The one problem for java applications is still startup time. I just don't know what can be done about that except preloading java at boot. Which is a waste if you are not running a java app that day.
Actually, Chet Haase recently blogged about the changes being done in this area. Unfortunately many of these quickstart "cheats" are for Windows only, when questioned about this at JavaOne they said they didn't have enough engineering hours to do this for other operating systems but would welcome community contributions to this with open arms.
Linux and other users WILL still benefit from the Java Kernel work by Ethan Nichola's team though, this will be backported to Java 6 as part of the Consumer JRE project.
Can Swing please be replaced with something that doesn't suck in terms of performance?
I think it is doing quite well these days. Have been working quite hard on the OpenGL and Direct3D pipelines. See this recent blog on OpenGL shaders for instance.
Can it also look halfway decent?
Now that they have open sourced it... let's hope.;)
That is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Right now my bandwidth is all but maxed out (32 player enemy territory server running in the background). Not ONCE has bandwidth saturation EVER made any media that I've been playing choppy, unresponsive, or have any "glitches" as they describe them.
No, neither have I, but as the article states, tests by Microsoft showed that very heavy network traffic MIGHT in some circumstances affect media playback on Vista. You often have to decide if you want to design an operating system for optimized throughput (good for servers) or for optimized responsiveness (good for end users). Here they chose the latter, and then screwed up the implementation in several ways - always throttling, and throttling too much, especially with multiple network cards.
The simple fact of the matter is that in the process of trying to accomodate the demands of the U.S. "media" industry that they made an engineering mistake, one that actually makes your computer run _less_ efficiently than before.
In the previous article about this on Slashdot, many people speculated that it was DRM that caused the slowdown, but it seems it was not the demands of the media industry but rather the internal design goal - that throughput should be sacrificed for the optimal experience of the "typical end user".
So why can my Windows 98/95/2000/ME/XP computers play mp3s without this happening?
Because they don't have the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service that Vista has, which ups the thread priority, which in turn causes a throttling of network traffic because heavy network traffic interrupts might disrupt playback to the end user? (Only a bug caused WAY too much throttling) You didn't read the article, did you?:)
They are openly discussing making the Niagara 2 available as open source as well, but note that there are some roadblocks such as the US government's restrictions on crypto technology.
>>"Remember that it was the good DVD sales that brought Family Guy back." >Yeah and look how that turned out.
Ouch... yeah, point. I think Futurama season 4 was a slight step down in quality too. The jokes were telegraphed way ahead, and there were no new interesting characters introduced.
On the other hand, the redeeming qualities were that plots moved from just being satirical joke-vehicles to real story arcs with interesting sci-fi twists and developing characters, at least with regards to Fry&Leela and Kif&Amy. Dangerously close to being sentimental and sappy sometimes, but The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings was a fantastic finishing episode.
One thing I have been wondering about is if the series will add or remove some material? I guess some people would complain if they first bought the movies, and then found additional material on the series DVD release. If so, I would probably buy both. Remember that it was the good DVD sales that brought Family Guy back.
Even when things go horribly wrong, they'll absolutely refuse to accept reality. If the news isn't good, change the news. Failing that attack the messenger. Never seen anything like it in my lifetime. I'm a little young to remember McCarthyism.
eBay is a stock brokerage now? When did this happen?
Whenever your brain choose to interpret what I said incorrectly I guess. If you look at my post you will see I was talking about stock brokerages as well as eBay.
So, you're saying that Java is the reason for eBay's suckage? I'll buy that.
eBay may suck or not, and it may be Java's fault, or not. My point was that it seems the Java platform scales well enough to handle critical stock market transactions from tens of thousands of clients per second.
As I just got back from Java One and RailsConf, my observations are the following:
1) US portions are really huge. I usually only managed to eat half of the meal at restaurants, unless I had sushi. However, by the end of the two weeks, I had started to adapt to eat almost all of it. 2) Sugar and fat in everything, even the salads. Bread, even dark bread, was disgustingly sweet. Lots of fried food, meat as a topping on other meat (beef burgers with sliced chicken on top sprinkled with crispy bacon etc) 3) People drove everywhere. 4) There are restaurants absolutely everywhere.
The JavaOne breakfast was especially disgusting. Mounds of glaced dessert breads and sodas. When I had breakfast at the hotel, the buffet included stuff like that, and I saw Americans actually load up plates with chocolate danish, glazed donuts etc and have a big coke with it. For breakfast.... it was unbelievable.
Most people in the world are either fit or fat. Most Americans i saw were either fat, or muscular AND fat (many of those, especially young guys had a strange sort of two centimeter layer of lard all over, like a seal). So hi fructose sugars and trans-fats may be a contributing cause, but if you think removing these things from food will magically make the obesity epidemic go away you are in for a disappointment I think.
As another reply joked, this particular API is very nice but is hardly going to be a killer app. Interesting to see though that the predictions of the death of Java a year ago seems to have been rather mistaken. I see a lot of job ads in Sweden asking for Java people now, and this is what TPCI-TIOBE says. Not as popular as the peak 5 years or so ago, but growing marketshare again, and more quickly than the competition.
I read the PDF, looks very interesting. I don't feel qualified to comment on the scientific suitability, but I have one suggestion with regards to naming:
SystemOfUnits - would it be possible to rename it to UnitSystem? Easier to write, and especially easier to say in a conversation, which one sounds better if you are talking to colleagues during a code review? For instance -
"Here I've used the SI UnitSystem, but perhaps another UnitSystem would be preferable?"
vs "Here I've used the SI SystemOfUnits, but perhaps another SystemOfUnits would be preferable?
On the other hand, to avoid confusion the SystemUnit class would then have to be renamed to something else - USUnit maybe, which looks ugly, or UnitSystemUnit which is both ugly and awkward. Hmm, difficult choice. Maybe SystemOfUnits isn't that bad after all.:)
What!? Java 6 I'll give you was not as big a change as Java 5, but Java 6 was mainly a stability, manageability and performance oriented release, but even that came with some pretty big changes - support for scripting languages with the Rhino JavaScript engine included for instance. Also, the Consumer JRE changes will be backported to it, with the Kernel JVM, the Quickstarter and Direct3D/DirectX pipeline improvements in Windows to catch up with the OpenGL pipeline.
Java 7 might be one of the biggest changes to the Java language and platform ever, take a look at this list for instance. Note that not all of these might be included in Java 7, or indeed ever. Danny Coward who I believe is in charge of the Java 7 release together with Mark Reinhold talks a bit about the difficult balance between giving people the new features they want and keeping it simple.
If some companies would start producing really slick, well polished, 2D Adventure, RPG, and Strategy games, they would probably meet with a lot of success without much outlay.
Sorry....no. I used to believe that too, but after seeing the pathetic sales numbers of some really great games I have come the following conclusions:
First of all, you underestimate the viciousness of the average bitter hardcore fan of those genres. Nothing will be good enough for them, and if you try, they will first raise you to the skies and pin all their hopes of a revival of their favourite genre on you, and then when you don't do things EXACTLY the way they want (and each fan wants things differently) they will be on an online vendetta to destroy your game and possibly you personally. First you pour your heart out making your games, then you lose money, and then you get to see people dancing on your grave (take Troika for instance).
Secondly - doing these kinds of games is a LOT more work than creating a shooter, and it takes a lot of time and money to create the characters, the intricate branching storylines, the AI, the gameplay balance, the artwork, the depth and breadth of contents people expect these days. And then lots of reviewers will just quickly play through it, miss 90% of the content, and write a snide review slamming you for having outdated graphics and lots of bugs.
Slashdot Mirror
PSYCHONAUTS IS AVAILABLE FROM STEAM For far more than you will pay elsewhere! There corrected.
All right, perhaps you could bother to tell us where then?
I found Psychonauts for $3 in a local bargain bin a year ago, I bought all three remaining copies and gave them away, but most people will not find older games in shops...
If you didn't listen all the way to the end, it is worth repeating -
PSYCHONAUTS IS AVAILABLE FROM STEAM REALLY CHEAP! If you don't buy it, you have forfeited your right to ever again complain about lack of originality and fun in games.
While you are at it, so is Vampire: Bloodlines, which with the unofficial patches is a really good game these days, the new Sam and Max episodes, and Bioshock, (but if you haven't already heard about the last one and how good it is you are probably dead).
Has there ever been a more stupid quote than:
"If they can access the Internet, they can get to anything," Hutchinson Police Chief Dick Heitschmidt said. "Anyone in the whole world could have access, if that's what really happened."
Yes. I think "No, it's not loaded! Here, I'll prove it to you!" beats it.
JavaFX's grammar was taked from F3, which is a declarative GUI language for Java.
:)
I thought that too, but it turns out JavaFX IS actually F3, just rebranded with an official name. I thought Form Follows Function was a pretty nice name, but then I don't work in marketing, do I...
Minor nitpick.
Indeed, it is a real shame nobody sees this sort of deception for what it is. There is someone running around defending the fact that the JRE system libraries will be memory resident regardless of whether a Java application is actually used.
They had a session about the Consumer JRE at JavaOne, and they are NOT putting it in memory. They are doing a touch of the files at startup (or possibly after login) to put the files in the disk cache. Still a cheat, if everybody did it the situation would be hopeless, but still.
the real solution is to reduce the enormous size of the JRE libraries to something more reasonable.
Which indeed is what they are doing.
The one problem for java applications is still startup time. I just don't know what can be done about that except preloading java at boot. Which is a waste if you are not running a java app that day.
Actually, Chet Haase recently blogged about the changes being done in this area. Unfortunately many of these quickstart "cheats" are for Windows only, when questioned about this at JavaOne they said they didn't have enough engineering hours to do this for other operating systems but would welcome community contributions to this with open arms.
Linux and other users WILL still benefit from the Java Kernel work by Ethan Nichola's team though, this will be backported to Java 6 as part of the Consumer JRE project.
Can Swing please be replaced with something that doesn't suck in terms of performance?
;)
I think it is doing quite well these days. Have been working quite hard on the OpenGL and Direct3D pipelines. See this recent blog on OpenGL shaders for instance.
Can it also look halfway decent?
Now that they have open sourced it... let's hope.
That is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Right now my bandwidth is all but maxed out (32 player enemy territory server running in the background). Not ONCE has bandwidth saturation EVER made any media that I've been playing choppy, unresponsive, or have any "glitches" as they describe them.
No, neither have I, but as the article states, tests by Microsoft showed that very heavy network traffic MIGHT in some circumstances affect media playback on Vista. You often have to decide if you want to design an operating system for optimized throughput (good for servers) or for optimized responsiveness (good for end users). Here they chose the latter, and then screwed up the implementation in several ways - always throttling, and throttling too much, especially with multiple network cards.
The simple fact of the matter is that in the process of trying to accomodate the demands of the U.S. "media" industry that they made an engineering mistake, one that actually makes your computer run _less_ efficiently than before.
In the previous article about this on Slashdot, many people speculated that it was DRM that caused the slowdown, but it seems it was not the demands of the media industry but rather the internal design goal - that throughput should be sacrificed for the optimal experience of the "typical end user".
So why can my Windows 98/95/2000/ME/XP computers play mp3s without this happening?
:)
Because they don't have the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service that Vista has, which ups the thread priority, which in turn causes a throttling of network traffic because heavy network traffic interrupts might disrupt playback to the end user? (Only a bug caused WAY too much throttling) You didn't read the article, did you?
...If they put THESE under the GPL, along with the T1, they'd be getting more press than they could imagine.
http://www.opensparc.net/
They are openly discussing making the Niagara 2 available as open source as well, but note that there are some roadblocks such as the US government's restrictions on crypto technology.
And which one rocked your world?
Man, wish I hadn't already posted in this thread, funniest Slashdot comment I've read in weeks, and I have modpoints.
>>"Remember that it was the good DVD sales that brought Family Guy back."
>Yeah and look how that turned out.
Ouch... yeah, point. I think Futurama season 4 was a slight step down in quality too. The jokes were telegraphed way ahead, and there were no new interesting characters introduced.
On the other hand, the redeeming qualities were that plots moved from just being satirical joke-vehicles to real story arcs with interesting sci-fi twists and developing characters, at least with regards to Fry&Leela and Kif&Amy. Dangerously close to being sentimental and sappy sometimes, but The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings was a fantastic finishing episode.
One thing I have been wondering about is if the series will add or remove some material? I guess some people would complain if they first bought the movies, and then found additional material on the series DVD release. If so, I would probably buy both. Remember that it was the good DVD sales that brought Family Guy back.
Even when things go horribly wrong, they'll absolutely refuse to accept reality. If the news isn't good, change the news. Failing that attack the messenger. Never seen anything like it in my lifetime. I'm a little young to remember McCarthyism.
Actually that sounds more like Stalinism to me.
Umm so whats special about Duchovny's hands?
You would have to have seen Zoolander to get that joke.
I'm intrigued, what does scaling have to do with handling something critical?
Having real time constraints puts extra demands on your scaling.
Java is resource hungry as hell and doesn't scale as well as it should with multiple threads, period.
True, it is resource hungry, but it is getting better all the time. Have you seen the improvments in Java 6 and Java 7?
That's what you get when you write a language for idiots to use, and you get away with it blah blah blah
Proving once again that jealousy is the most sincere form of flattery.
eBay is a stock brokerage now? When did this happen?
Whenever your brain choose to interpret what I said incorrectly I guess. If you look at my post you will see I was talking about stock brokerages as well as eBay.
So, you're saying that Java is the reason for eBay's suckage? I'll buy that.
eBay may suck or not, and it may be Java's fault, or not. My point was that it seems the Java platform scales well enough to handle critical stock market transactions from tens of thousands of clients per second.
As I just got back from Java One and RailsConf, my observations are the following:
1) US portions are really huge. I usually only managed to eat half of the meal at restaurants, unless I had sushi. However, by the end of the two weeks, I had started to adapt to eat almost all of it.
2) Sugar and fat in everything, even the salads. Bread, even dark bread, was disgustingly sweet. Lots of fried food, meat as a topping on other meat (beef burgers with sliced chicken on top sprinkled with crispy bacon etc)
3) People drove everywhere.
4) There are restaurants absolutely everywhere.
The JavaOne breakfast was especially disgusting. Mounds of glaced dessert breads and sodas. When I had breakfast at the hotel, the buffet included stuff like that, and I saw Americans actually load up plates with chocolate danish, glazed donuts etc and have a big coke with it. For breakfast.... it was unbelievable.
Most people in the world are either fit or fat. Most Americans i saw were either fat, or muscular AND fat (many of those, especially young guys had a strange sort of two centimeter layer of lard all over, like a seal). So hi fructose sugars and trans-fats may be a contributing cause, but if you think removing these things from food will magically make the obesity epidemic go away you are in for a disappointment I think.
Their little Java thingie doesn't scale that well after all:)
Really? You do know that eBay, and many of the world's busiest stock exchanges run all their transactions on Java platforms, right?
Looks like the death-blow for c#?
As another reply joked, this particular API is very nice but is hardly going to be a killer app. Interesting to see though that the predictions of the death of Java a year ago seems to have been rather mistaken. I see a lot of job ads in Sweden asking for Java people now, and this is what TPCI-TIOBE says. Not as popular as the peak 5 years or so ago, but growing marketshare again, and more quickly than the competition.
I read the PDF, looks very interesting. I don't feel qualified to comment on the scientific suitability, but I have one suggestion with regards to naming:
:)
SystemOfUnits - would it be possible to rename it to UnitSystem? Easier to write, and especially easier to say in a conversation, which one sounds better if you are talking to colleagues during a code review? For instance -
"Here I've used the SI UnitSystem, but perhaps another UnitSystem would be preferable?"
vs
"Here I've used the SI SystemOfUnits, but perhaps another SystemOfUnits would be preferable?
On the other hand, to avoid confusion the SystemUnit class would then have to be renamed to something else - USUnit maybe, which looks ugly, or UnitSystemUnit which is both ugly and awkward. Hmm, difficult choice. Maybe SystemOfUnits isn't that bad after all.
Cheers,
Lars
Java 6 and Java 7 are relatively minor changes.
What!? Java 6 I'll give you was not as big a change as Java 5, but Java 6 was mainly a stability, manageability and performance oriented release, but even that came with some pretty big changes - support for scripting languages with the Rhino JavaScript engine included for instance. Also, the Consumer JRE changes will be backported to it, with the Kernel JVM, the Quickstarter and Direct3D/DirectX pipeline improvements in Windows to catch up with the OpenGL pipeline.
Java 7 might be one of the biggest changes to the Java language and platform ever, take a look at this list for instance. Note that not all of these might be included in Java 7, or indeed ever. Danny Coward who I believe is in charge of the Java 7 release together with Mark Reinhold talks a bit about the difficult balance between giving people the new features they want and keeping it simple.
Oh, I guess since it was over 100 years ago, no one cares anymore.
Heh, with the attention span of people today, no one cares what happened a month ago...
If some companies would start producing really slick, well polished, 2D Adventure, RPG, and Strategy games, they would probably meet with a lot of success without much outlay.
Sorry....no. I used to believe that too, but after seeing the pathetic sales numbers of some really great games I have come the following conclusions:
First of all, you underestimate the viciousness of the average bitter hardcore fan of those genres. Nothing will be good enough for them, and if you try, they will first raise you to the skies and pin all their hopes of a revival of their favourite genre on you, and then when you don't do things EXACTLY the way they want (and each fan wants things differently) they will be on an online vendetta to destroy your game and possibly you personally. First you pour your heart out making your games, then you lose money, and then you get to see people dancing on your grave (take Troika for instance).
Secondly - doing these kinds of games is a LOT more work than creating a shooter, and it takes a lot of time and money to create the characters, the intricate branching storylines, the AI, the gameplay balance, the artwork, the depth and breadth of contents people expect these days. And then lots of reviewers will just quickly play through it, miss 90% of the content, and write a snide review slamming you for having outdated graphics and lots of bugs.