Is it really 3 hours from Reading to London? What's the speed limit on M-4? Your average highway in the US has a limit between 55 and 70 mph.
M4 speed limit is 70mph (same for all motorways). But you'll find that if you commute into London, speed limits are rarely something you need be concerned about, as your chances of exceeding them are vanishingly small. I used to commute out of London up the M25, and the traffic on the other side (going into London) usually resembled a car park.
Is that the guy who, when asked by Robert Scoble what the Zune's screen resolution was (in an interview just before launch), replied "Er...I don't know."?
I'm slightly confused - hard links have been in NTFS for years, and I've use them a few times for various tasks, so why is NT so bad in relation to others? I'm also not sure why shortcuts are different to symlinks. Don't both just store a pathname to link to? If the target changes, the symlink/shortcut still points to that named file, or if the target no longer exists, both shortcuts and symlinks no longer work? Or am I misunderstanding? Your analogy doesn't seem to work - the key difference as far as I can see is that symlinks behave as if they were files in every way - shortcuts are just signposts for Windows Explorer. Assuming you're using Explorer, they seem to work the same.
As for Mac OS X aliases being 'best of class', the only time I needed to use one of those I found it didn't work over SMB sharing - exactly the same sort of complaint as is being levelled at Vista, as far as I can tell. This was a few revs back of OS X, so maybe it's fixed now.
If you want a job in the games industry (as a developer), you need the following
I wouldn't normally quibble, but you said 'need', so...
1: Good C++ engineering skills. Have this as part of your portfolio you send with a resume
It all depends on your definition of 'good':-). In my experience, on average, people in the games industry have poor C++ engineering skills. They are especially bad at managing physical dependencies. However I must point out that I believe this level of skill to be average across the different software industries (I've worked in a few different segments of the software industry), so games programmers aren't on average worse than programemrs in other discliplines. I'm currently lucky to be working with a team of definitely above average programmers, but then the team is small. In terms of general quality, it's one of the best teams I've worked with in my career...it's just the other teams I've had to work with drag the average down hard:-).
2: A good understanding of algorithms in general, both single and multithreaded
Again, define 'good'. I would say a 'reasonable' understanding is required. And as for multi-threaded, don't make me laugh. The vast majority of game coders don't know much about multi-threading, if anything.
3: Datastructures
4: Linear Algebra
5: If you want to be a rendering guy (which I kind of am, though more generally I'm a high performance guy), you need calculus.
Agreed.
6: Basic physics
Disagree. I can use myself as an example here - I didn't even take any kind physics exam qualification in school. I wish that I did know more (I've taught myself some), but most other people in the industry who did take physics exams (but stopped short of degree level qualifications) seem to have forgotten it all anyway, so they're no better off than me:-).
7: Depending on what specifically you want to do, some 'advanced' (ie second year) physics
See above. But if you're saying that you want to do some physics work then you need to know about physics, then I guess I can't argue with that.
8: Operating systems. That is, how does the OS work, how does that impact me as a software developer.
If only. Again, most game developers don't really understand this stuff either. Then again, some developers of console games have to work with OSs of such laughable quality, I can understand why they wouldn't want to learn any more about it.
To clarify, I'm quibbling with the 'need' part of your statement. These skills are all useful and relevant, and I wish you did need them to get a job in the games industry, but looking around at the people I see in the industry, it is self-evident that these skills are not mandatory.
C++ engineering skills are lacklustre, and mainly seem to consist of "I'm a C man" or "I like to use every C++ feature available without thinking". The latter is the one that leads to ludicrous build times ("oh look, I used templates everywhere, now my build times are measured in hours"), but there are plenty of others.
And I haven't even got on to basic things like how to debug (i.e. problem solving), understand how a compiler/linker etc. operates on at least some level of technical detail, so you can deal with problems with your tools/build process. You might hope to never encounter such problems, but the tools for console development are not exactly high quality (MS are the best here, as you might expect). On one project I worked on a while back, I found 5 separate code generation bugs in the compiler in about the first 4-6 weeks of using it. By comparison, I've used tools on Windows/Linux for years, and the last
the PS3's costs are exorbitant. I remember reading something from Gamasutra a while back about how it would cost you 12 mil just to get STARTED on a competitive PS3 game all things considered.
Don't believe all the bullshit you read. PS3 devkits are expensive, but 12 mil (I assume you mean 12 million dollars) is ludicrous.
One of the main problems for PS development is the quality of Sony development tools, but also, let's not forget that when the PS2 was coming, the head of Square announced that he thought there were maybe 5 games development companies in the world that would be capable of making a PS2 game, because it was so complex/expensive. There's a lot of bullshit out there.
But then, I'm still waiting for the PS2's 'Emotion Engine' to give game characters real emotion. I'm sure that in same way, the PS3's Cell processor will deliver awesome physics and AI in PS3 games, and not just be used to shore up the bottlenecks in the rest of the architecture and push more polygons.
They do NOT have a history of aggressively suing patent infringers. In fact, they've started promising that they WILL NOT do this
They're Microsoft - they don't need to actually sue patent infringers. They just need to ask them to stop - most organisations don't want a legal fight with MS. Especially if they're just some guy writing an open source application (the example I linked to seems to be a really good case of MS behaving like a jerk for no particularly good reason).
Not only using a CVS, but also installing such. If you end up working in a company where there is no CVS in use and no-one knows how to install it, how usefull would your skills be there?
The point of education is to teach you how to fish, not to give you fish. Learning how to install a particular revision control system should definitely not be on the list of priorities. Learning what a revision control system is, what it does, how it can help you, etc. are all way more important. A CS degree should not be system admin.
After all:
Well I actually have been in this situation and it took less than a day for me to learn and install subversion there for us to work with.
What do you think they should have done, got off him and asked him pretty please to put his hands behind his back? Gave him a foot massage while feeding him grapes?
You're right - between the foot massage/grape option and the 'repeatedly punching subdued suspect in the face' option, there is no middle ground.
When two cops are sitting on you and are repeatedly saying "put your arms down" you do NOT fight them. You do as you are told.
I think you're underestimating the survival reflex here. As an asthmatic, I know (like thousands of other asthmatics) the terror of not being able to breath, and the panic it causes. If the suspect genuinely was unable to breath, it may have been all he could manage to do to just wave his arms around and croak "I can't breathe" now and then, rather than trying to punch the officers and struggle like hell. When you can't breathe, I'm guessing a lot of people would fight like hell until they can. If I was in his situation, and actually unable to breathe, I'm not sure I'd be able to put my arms calmly by my side and wait for the officer to stop suffocating me.
And the point that if he can't breathe, then he can't say that he can't breathe is just stupid. Believe me, someone fighting for breath will vocalise their distress if they think it will help.
I'm not trying to patronise you re: being in the position of not being able to breathe easily, but I think you're underestimating (or just not remembering) the panic it can cause.
(btw, I offer no opinion as to whether the suspect involved is a scumbag or not.)
all one team has to do is keep those areas filled with grenades and bullets
In the version of Counter-Strike I used to play, you didn't get unlimited ammunition or grenades, so that tactic wouldn't have lasted long/been very effective. I didn't realise Valve had changed the game so much.
Besides, when you shoot, that lets people know where you are.
making it possible for a bad team to spam a good team to death.
I rather think it depends on your local definitions of 'good team' and 'bad team'.
Yeah, they suck, because all they do mostly is just play your music and stuff.
Sorry - I missed these tags out of my original post: <joke> and </joke>
xmms does have the stupid visualizations, although by default it's just an oscilloscope-like thing, nowhere near so annoying as that nonsense Windows Media Player shows you
I find oscillocope displays the most annoying. So by your logic xmms is teh ultimate suck.
I'm sure there must be a way to turn the visualizations off altogether. Maybe someday I'll find it.
Right click on the visualisation, choose 'No Visualisation'.
I wonder how many people in Pakistan remember the date of the London Underground bombings. I'm not sure where this international memory pissing contest is going, to be honest.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's been updated to 'do not ram in remaining eye' now.
M4 speed limit is 70mph (same for all motorways). But you'll find that if you commute into London, speed limits are rarely something you need be concerned about, as your chances of exceeding them are vanishingly small. I used to commute out of London up the M25, and the traffic on the other side (going into London) usually resembled a car park.
Is that the guy who, when asked by Robert Scoble what the Zune's screen resolution was (in an interview just before launch), replied "Er...I don't know."?
If so, my sympathy is at a low ebb.
I'm slightly confused - hard links have been in NTFS for years, and I've use them a few times for various tasks, so why is NT so bad in relation to others? I'm also not sure why shortcuts are different to symlinks. Don't both just store a pathname to link to? If the target changes, the symlink/shortcut still points to that named file, or if the target no longer exists, both shortcuts and symlinks no longer work? Or am I misunderstanding? Your analogy doesn't seem to work - the key difference as far as I can see is that symlinks behave as if they were files in every way - shortcuts are just signposts for Windows Explorer. Assuming you're using Explorer, they seem to work the same.
As for Mac OS X aliases being 'best of class', the only time I needed to use one of those I found it didn't work over SMB sharing - exactly the same sort of complaint as is being levelled at Vista, as far as I can tell. This was a few revs back of OS X, so maybe it's fixed now.
I wouldn't normally quibble, but you said 'need', so...
It all depends on your definition of 'good' :-). In my experience, on average, people in the games industry have poor C++ engineering skills. They are especially bad at managing physical dependencies. However I must point out that I believe this level of skill to be average across the different software industries (I've worked in a few different segments of the software industry), so games programmers aren't on average worse than programemrs in other discliplines. I'm currently lucky to be working with a team of definitely above average programmers, but then the team is small. In terms of general quality, it's one of the best teams I've worked with in my career...it's just the other teams I've had to work with drag the average down hard :-).
Again, define 'good'. I would say a 'reasonable' understanding is required. And as for multi-threaded, don't make me laugh. The vast majority of game coders don't know much about multi-threading, if anything.
Agreed.
Disagree. I can use myself as an example here - I didn't even take any kind physics exam qualification in school. I wish that I did know more (I've taught myself some), but most other people in the industry who did take physics exams (but stopped short of degree level qualifications) seem to have forgotten it all anyway, so they're no better off than me :-).
See above. But if you're saying that you want to do some physics work then you need to know about physics, then I guess I can't argue with that.
If only. Again, most game developers don't really understand this stuff either. Then again, some developers of console games have to work with OSs of such laughable quality, I can understand why they wouldn't want to learn any more about it.
To clarify, I'm quibbling with the 'need' part of your statement. These skills are all useful and relevant, and I wish you did need them to get a job in the games industry, but looking around at the people I see in the industry, it is self-evident that these skills are not mandatory.
C++ engineering skills are lacklustre, and mainly seem to consist of "I'm a C man" or "I like to use every C++ feature available without thinking". The latter is the one that leads to ludicrous build times ("oh look, I used templates everywhere, now my build times are measured in hours"), but there are plenty of others.
And I haven't even got on to basic things like how to debug (i.e. problem solving), understand how a compiler/linker etc. operates on at least some level of technical detail, so you can deal with problems with your tools/build process. You might hope to never encounter such problems, but the tools for console development are not exactly high quality (MS are the best here, as you might expect). On one project I worked on a while back, I found 5 separate code generation bugs in the compiler in about the first 4-6 weeks of using it. By comparison, I've used tools on Windows/Linux for years, and the last
Don't believe all the bullshit you read. PS3 devkits are expensive, but 12 mil (I assume you mean 12 million dollars) is ludicrous.
One of the main problems for PS development is the quality of Sony development tools, but also, let's not forget that when the PS2 was coming, the head of Square announced that he thought there were maybe 5 games development companies in the world that would be capable of making a PS2 game, because it was so complex/expensive. There's a lot of bullshit out there.
But then, I'm still waiting for the PS2's 'Emotion Engine' to give game characters real emotion. I'm sure that in same way, the PS3's Cell processor will deliver awesome physics and AI in PS3 games, and not just be used to shore up the bottlenecks in the rest of the architecture and push more polygons.
Yeah, but the American public are branching out, so they had to generalise it.
I think it's because of that song.
They're Microsoft - they don't need to actually sue patent infringers. They just need to ask them to stop - most organisations don't want a legal fight with MS. Especially if they're just some guy writing an open source application (the example I linked to seems to be a really good case of MS behaving like a jerk for no particularly good reason).
My ancestors were on the B Ark, you insensitive clod!
The point of education is to teach you how to fish, not to give you fish. Learning how to install a particular revision control system should definitely not be on the list of priorities. Learning what a revision control system is, what it does, how it can help you, etc. are all way more important. A CS degree should not be system admin.
After all:
Looks like you can fish.
You're right - between the foot massage/grape option and the 'repeatedly punching subdued suspect in the face' option, there is no middle ground.
I think you're underestimating the survival reflex here. As an asthmatic, I know (like thousands of other asthmatics) the terror of not being able to breath, and the panic it causes. If the suspect genuinely was unable to breath, it may have been all he could manage to do to just wave his arms around and croak "I can't breathe" now and then, rather than trying to punch the officers and struggle like hell. When you can't breathe, I'm guessing a lot of people would fight like hell until they can. If I was in his situation, and actually unable to breathe, I'm not sure I'd be able to put my arms calmly by my side and wait for the officer to stop suffocating me.
And the point that if he can't breathe, then he can't say that he can't breathe is just stupid. Believe me, someone fighting for breath will vocalise their distress if they think it will help.
I'm not trying to patronise you re: being in the position of not being able to breathe easily, but I think you're underestimating (or just not remembering) the panic it can cause.
(btw, I offer no opinion as to whether the suspect involved is a scumbag or not.)
Gosh, I really am going to have to start putting in tags. Or else make the jokes funnier.
If you start believing fallacies like that, you're on a slippery slope.
It's the classic Dining Pedants problem!
"Hello, Meme Police? I'd like to report a spillage."
In the version of Counter-Strike I used to play, you didn't get unlimited ammunition or grenades, so that tactic wouldn't have lasted long/been very effective. I didn't realise Valve had changed the game so much.
Besides, when you shoot, that lets people know where you are.
I rather think it depends on your local definitions of 'good team' and 'bad team'.
Well, quite. The nerve of that guy, posting comments on his own web site. There ought to be a law.
Sorry - I missed these tags out of my original post: <joke> and </joke>
I find oscillocope displays the most annoying. So by your logic xmms is teh ultimate suck.
Right click on the visualisation, choose 'No Visualisation'.
HTH
Yeah, I heard those Linux media players suck, too.
I wonder how many people in Pakistan remember the date of the London Underground bombings. I'm not sure where this international memory pissing contest is going, to be honest.
It was like 911 times 2356.
Yeah, I realised the reasoning, thanks.
Not as confused as you seem to be about the definition of 'intuitive'.
I don't mean to be rude, but how the cocking hell could those controls be called 'intuitive'?
Incompetents.
(paging Alanis...)