#1) I have to agree, and "guilds" really started with PvP shooters, so guilds are mostly associated with PvP roots and thus the PvP requirement. An in game friends list would work just as well as guilds for PvE, IMO, as you rarely need a private space to go and chat about tactics (though it is nice... but an in-game "home" with a visit command would work just as well for that).
#2) Level capping is a form of grinding, and I don't think it is essential for a RPG, as skill based systems have no levels and are still fun. I still think they will be a staple in MMOs because they give an immediate power comparison, but honestly I'd rather this trend to your equipment and armor showing your power and restricting them based on attributes that go up over time, but that's me.
#3) yes and no - you need hundreds of hours of content, but if done right you could have the players create that content. I don't think Eve Online has anywhere near as much content as World of Warcraft or Guild Wars (I haven't seen what was added with Incursion, I played it briefly about 4 years ago), but there is plenty to do.
#4) Tank and healer will always get the blame if such roles exist and the team fails if such roles exist no matter who was the real problem. Even if you are good, with a bad partner in a PUG you may be screwed - I remember one PUG (not sure what game as I was playing several at the time) where I was one of two healers and the other healer provided either no healing or almost no healing and we were both kicked for "sucking" when we were beaten. Even though it wasn't my fault, I got blamed. I then joined up with a guildie healer and we were both lauded for our awesomesauce healing by the next party and that wasn't even with vent (which we always use for PvP, but not much for PvE, mainly because we usually have to be quiet when we do PvE due to people sleeping in nearby rooms).
Arena Net's was actually started by members of the Diablo/Diablo 2 team that broke off from Blizzard and I believe they use a similar development methodology. Basically, features are developed in a development environment and when ready, they are dropped into a test environment. If the feature is not fun, it gets pulled. If it needs work, the testers direct it on how it could be better and the developer works on it and it is re-evaluated again later. If it is fun, it stays. It is probably most similar to Agile Programming, but more asynchronous (like if each group has their own independent Sprints and not a fixed amount of time for any one feature).
Meh - personally I found grind to be the annoying part - fun is doing a boss battle with 8 friends. Grind is two things to me - one is finding 15 tulips and killing 20 rats to exchange tulips to the tulip vendor and rat tails to the ratcatcher for the key that unlocks the boss dungeon. The second is having to cross 1 hour of map and then grind through a dungeon for 2 hours to get to that boss with no "entrance" to quickly get there (two hours of dungeon I can deal with, spending an hour to get there and then having to grind through it I can't, as I rarely have 3+ hours of uninterrupted time to play any game). I don't know if that is a problem with WoW because I never made it far in WoW, but it is in most other MMOs I've played.
Not sure about app distribution, but for games if Apple doesn't allow selling through other channels, they will likely lose ground to Steam, which does. On Steam, the publisher sets the price, so they can keep the price artificially high so that it doesn't affect retail sales (and reap mad profits due to much lower overhead, a win-win for the publisher). Apple doesn't set the price on the app store (though they may refuse it or try to leverage the price down), so I don't see that as a problem.
The other option would be to yield to Steam for major games distribution and stick to applications, tools and maybe indie and smaller games. To give up this cash cow would be a foolish thing for Apple to do IMO, but I've seen them do stupid things in the past.
There is an enormous difference between costs of digital distribution and costs of traditional distribution. With traditional distribution, you have printing costs (e.g. manual), media costs, box art costs, print marketing, physical shipping costs, reclaims costs (damaged media), and pay a cut of profits to the developer, publisher, and point-of-sale. Worst of all is dealing with availability issues where a publisher's goal is to have zero items in a warehouse
In the end, the publisher typically gets the lion's share of profits, but they also absorb most of those costs. Contracted to an indie developer working for a major publisher in the 1990s, I think heard in the end they took in maybe 10-15% of total profits (not sales...), and the owner of that company's self-published download only software (what was called crippleware back then - you played a 10% of the game for free and paid $15-30 to unlock the rest) made more than the commercial game they were contracted to make ever did. I haven't talked with the owner of that company in years, but they went mobile after that debacle - first to Nintendo DS games and then to iPhone games, both of which are fairly lucrative, but for different reasons (iPhone uses digital distribution and DS uses a cost recoup marketing model with overpriced software and cheaper hardware).
With digital distribution the model is much simpler - developer and distributor (optimally directly to Steam - if a publisher is involved because of boxed games also being sold, they will likely take a large cut), and marketing (digital). There are minimal warehouse costs (data warehousing), the software is always available, no printing costs, no shipping costs, and far fewer mouths to feed. As long as there are new titles added, the bandwidth costs for distribution should never be an issue. In fact, it would not surprise me if the developer makes more money on a $5 downloadable game than they would on a $30 traditionally published game.
Probably because Windows tablets will probably include heavy handed DRM out of the box and the French think that will keep people from sharing... um, er stealing.
That was grammatically correct, I believe, just spelt wrong. And yes I used spelt intentionally - it is the equivalent of spelled despite Firefox dictionary not recognizing it OotB (it is a rarely used, yet still correct form). Spelt is also a form of wheat my grandpa used to grow in the US, mainly to sell to the German community in South Dakota, though the majority of his wheat was bread grain like most farmers.
Planed was obviously incorrect spelling, but was corrected by the time I read the headline.
Re:Old system is fine.
on
Joel Test Updated
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Who needs a distributed source control system if everyone on my team works in the same office?
Says the person who's job is about to be exported to India.
It seems like a fairly logical list, but I've noticed that the list is geared more toward waterfall, and not for, say, Agile - for instance "Do you have a spec?" doesn't really apply because the requirements become the spec. Also Agile often has non-dedicated roles - for instance, I work in Product Validation and in waterfall I do nothing but write test plans and run tests, but in Agile I manage the Lab Manager VMs, write schema, and run unit tests, none of which I would do in my traditional role (it doesn't hurt that I am a programmer originally hired into automation, but that got outsourced, and I've filled a variety of roles since then like US government security testing, which the US doesn't allow to be outsourced).
Interpreted languages are very different now than they were 10-15 years ago. First, most are compiled into bytecode, which is pseudo assembly that can be compiled faster than source code. Second, the interpreter does dynamic recompilation and optimization on the fly, something C and C++ don't do (these code blocks were hand tuned in assembly in the past, but that is rare because the compiler is better than most humans at instruction order because of out of order optimization. While it may not be faster than C/C++, it isn't that bad, especially with systems that make calls to hardware (I get decent OpenGL performance on mine - way better than my old 1.3GHz Pentium on a 1GHz chip, and FAR better memory management). I would hope the optimizations made for Dalvik (the android runtime) also exist in the NDK VM, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet (going to try to port a C++ library to it, but I have a feeling the OpenGL to OpenGL ES transition will be painful on that one).
single line = post office a week before Christmas multiple lines = grocery store before Christmas
In the post office, the line snakes out the door and part way down the street and takes nearly 2 hours. At the grocery store I'm at the front of the line in under 15 minutes.
Now if you just have that much information, obviously multiple lines > single line. So what is missing? The number of cashiers. At the post office, there are 4-5 people working. At the grocery store there are potentially 22 registers and 4 self-checkout lanes at the store I go to most and 42 lanes at the one I go to if I'm shopping on my way home from work (a Super Target).
Microcenter and Best Buy, who also use the single line setup at stores near me also only have 8 registers or less. So the perceived slowness is mostly due to less registers being open in most cases. The problem is, and I've said it before in this thread, is that single lines don't scale well because customers can't tell which lines are open. Also the additional walking is difficult for the old and/or handicapped, so having them get to the register may take some time.
Actually, that isn't true - Microcenter has a single queue and they wrap it along a wall where the customers would stand in multiple queue checkouts. They then pack in an entire aisle of impulse buy items where normally they'd have 2 feet at each register for those. Some Best Buy stores have also moved to this model, as well. I did notice at both stores that when they have 5 or 6 registers open like the week before Christmas the cashiers often have to call for the next customer because it's too busy for customers to always see when someone is leaving.
The problem with someplace like Target or Walmart adopting single queue is that they potentially have 40 registers open at once, and herding people becomes non-trivial when over a certain size. Even if they split the aisle and had 20 on each side that is still too large for single queue without some mechanism that tells customers to go and what aisle to go to. If you solve that problem cheaply, and efficiently, I'm sure Walmart would pay for the patent rights.
Technically land lines are deregulated and other phone companies can lease them from the incumbent carrier, but most people not only go with the incumbent, they don't even know about the competition. In contrast, cable companies like Comcast are government regulated monopolies and are charged a fee for this, which they pass on to the consumer. If you read your bill for, say, Comcast, it says "regulatory fees" - this is just the fees the monopoly pays the government.
From a consumer perspective, there is no way I'd ever want net neutrality to end - it would allow providers like Comcast to strangle whatever businesses they want out of the market to fail. If they decided BitTorrent was worthless, they could strangle all of the sites where you find torrents to 1 byte/second so the page takes all day to load. So until regulated monopolies are gone, I see net neutrality as a necessity.
OTOH, if I ran Comcast I would feel net neutrality is the devil - kill it and strangle out any free sites and replace them with pay alternatives!!! MORE MONEY FOR THE MONOPOLY!! More money to buy lobbyists and government. Pretty soon, Comcast will replace the government with corporate drones... oh wait, they're doing that already with tea party Republicans (a group I personally find either idealistic or clueless that they would empower monopolies like this with their ideals - I'm pretty sure most are clueless idealists because the only one I've personally met is Michelle Bachmann [before she got elected the first time] and she definitely fell in that category).
That assumes texting service, and I for one refuse to pay $20/month ($30 for family) for what is essentially a costless IM system for the carrier (and yes, I have a workaround semi-implemented).
How about barcodes on the phone, or better yet, neck barcodes?
Well if you've had other functional programming languages, C is pretty easy to learn and it was only a 1 quarter long class for me in college, as was C++, but I can't imagine they can cram C++ into a quarter (maybe a semester, but that would be pushing it IMO) these days as a ton has been added to it since I had it (heck, we didn't even have templates or try/throw/catch blocks).
I write C++ sometimes in my day job (more java, perl and silverlight these days) and I personally feel it is an awkward and kludgy language, to say the least. It is in no way elegant like true OOPs (smalltalk, objective-C), and my work even writes 99% of our code as true OOP outside of about a 40 line "main" - so no public or protected variables in classes and the classes MUST include message passing.
As for my high school, we had 40 IBM PCs (and by that, I mean the ORIGINAL IBM PCs - I believe they were 10 or 12 years old when they finally got replaced) locked in a lab and one teacher that knew enough of how to use them to teach an intro to computers class, which was in BASIC. In contrast, my elementary school and Jr High had Apple ][s in open labs where we used them before, during, and after school, and we (as in the assembly language programming pre-teens that were also cracking every piece of software we could get our grubby hands on) often taught the teachers how to use them.
Companies like cubicles because they are a vastly cheaper way to convert warehouse type space to office like space, and while they don't completely block out noise, they divert it enough so that while one worker is on the phone with a customer, that customer hears you, not the person sitting next to you talking about her cat.
Having worked in call centers with cubicles and without, I vastly prefer cubicles, though I'd prefer never to work in a call center again (both of those were college temp jobs).
I do some telecommuting, but having moved to an Agile team at work makes that a bit more difficult (we don't follow Agile exactly because employees are strewn across about 6 sites, but we do use a lot of collaboration tech to work around that, like virtual teleconferencing and netmeeting-like desktop sharing).
Well if there were any surprises, I haven't heard of 'em. US and most Arabs don't like Iran and even some like Saudi Arabia want the US to attack them... yawn. That is about as informative as telling me North Korea is run by a dictator with lavish mansions while his people starve (a fact), not unlike Saddam Hussein.
As far as US opinions on people, well we all know opinions are like assholes - everyone's got one and they all stink.
My two bits - the main issue with MacOS X graphics drivers isn't that they're bad, it is that aside from bugfixes they are updated only with OS upgrades and often a generation or two behind what the cards support. They also don't support graphics card upgrades on most machines, which further hinders their adoption. Of course, the driver issue can be worked around in the same way it is done on Windows, which is by including newer headers and calling the hardware directly, but Apple goes out of their way to make this difficult by going against the C standard and always including system headers before local headers, so programmers either need to replace the system header (primarily the glext.h header) or "escape it" with #defines and #undefines. On the other hand, Apple writes and tunes their own drivers, so if the specs are supported it should run faster than having to use function pointers with a lookup and callback cost.
That said, the effort may not be that much work depending on the game engine used and may be mostly a testing effort and writing a native GUI. Most engines I've worked on compile and run on Windows, Linux, and Mac and the developer of the game would not need to know much or anything about the platforms it targets (again, some native GUI support may be required, but usually that is it). Steam has 30 million active users, and 4.71% of that is 1413000 - if you could sell to 10% of that audience (which any A-list title should do), that is still over 100000 units, which more than justifies hiring one developer to write a gui and a couple of testers, IMO.
My bet is Gamebryo will not be used on this one, as it is and has been dying a slow death for the past few years (the parent is in Chapter 11 as I recall), and while it was the best choice 10 years ago for an RPG, it is not anywhere near that today. While they have kept up with technology at a high level, they badly needed a low level rewrite and cleanup and that is unlikely since they laid off most of the programmers.
idTech is tailored for first person shooters and skips a lot of necessities for RPGs, so not likely to happen.
UnrealTech is a possibility, but the 25% is probably a deal breaker.
So my bet is on something else - maybe Vision Engine (which has and is been used in RPGs and supports multiple platforms) or Source.
The main advantage of satellite phones is they work pretty much anywhere (though I've heard that like Satellite TV, they have issues in bad storms...). The biggest disadvantage is they chew through power because they need to send a signal much further than cell phones. Batteries life on satellite phones will need to get MUCH better than it is now before I'd ever consider buying one. I've never owned a satellite phone, but I know a surveyor that uses one for work and he says it needs to be plugged in almost all the time.
yeah - I saw Delaware and was thinking the same - Patent Trolls file in eastern Texas where the judge just hands the trolls money without any real fight.
I think many factors doomed Smalltalk, because no language that I know of was truly free in the 1970s and few were in the 1980s, though hardware bundling was common (for instance, Applesoft BASIC was licensed from Microsoft for a fee and included on Apple ][s, and UNIX came with C because it was required in POSIX by the late 1980s [and had OSS implementations by then]). Fast forwarding from 1972 when smalltalk first appeared to 1980 when it was moved off of the Xerox PARC demo and sold by ParcPlace (UNIX) and Digitalk (PCs), you have some serious issues to work around. First, it had way too big of memory footprint for 1980s hardware, and memory was expensive. Second, it was a scripting language, which is inherently slow (without dynamic recompilation, which is more of a 1990s+ thing). Third, it lacked a backend for relational databases, which severely limited its use in business. After that are some minor issues like slowness caused by message passing (but this is the main reason no kernel is object oriented and all are monolithic).
Just because IBM has a lot of open source support doesn't mean they don't sell a lot of commercial software (like Dassault, a partner they had invested heavily in for a long time)- they have gone from a mostly hardware company to mostly a services company with hardware offerings (HP is similar now that they bought EDS). Services and support is the real cash cow for them, as it was for Control Data back in its day (before their management put the company in a tailspin of spinning off profitable divisions to keep stock above junk status... and gee, EDS did that too...).
My brother had no issues with either iPhone or android on AT&T or T Mobile. Everyone else I know bitches about both of those (actually, the 3 other people I know that use T Mobile will never use it again - mostly customer service horror stories).
I used to only hear horror stories about Sprint, so it is good to hear they've improved. I imagine Verizon and AT&T still have better signal support, however (since they have higher penetrating bands). I personally am on Verizon, but I don't own a smart phone and if I did I would switch because Verizon is the most expensive carrier (by $20+). I also don't know anything about US Cellular because they don't have service in my state.
yeah - I had major issues with Blender's interface myself, and it has many of the same problems as the commercial software I work on - the interface is far too busy, flow is not intuitive at all, and has too much garbage most people don't care about on it - it can be powerful, but I personally don't think it would be significantly faster than the professional CAD software I use (note that Blender WAS professional CAD software at one time).
Note that I have not used Blender since 2.3, so I have not tried the interface improvements. I should give it another try - note that I do have a lot of bias because I specialized in usability and user interfaced in college.
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#1)
I have to agree, and "guilds" really started with PvP shooters, so guilds are mostly associated with PvP roots and thus the PvP requirement. An in game friends list would work just as well as guilds for PvE, IMO, as you rarely need a private space to go and chat about tactics (though it is nice... but an in-game "home" with a visit command would work just as well for that).
#2)
Level capping is a form of grinding, and I don't think it is essential for a RPG, as skill based systems have no levels and are still fun. I still think they will be a staple in MMOs because they give an immediate power comparison, but honestly I'd rather this trend to your equipment and armor showing your power and restricting them based on attributes that go up over time, but that's me.
#3) yes and no - you need hundreds of hours of content, but if done right you could have the players create that content. I don't think Eve Online has anywhere near as much content as World of Warcraft or Guild Wars (I haven't seen what was added with Incursion, I played it briefly about 4 years ago), but there is plenty to do.
#4) Tank and healer will always get the blame if such roles exist and the team fails if such roles exist no matter who was the real problem. Even if you are good, with a bad partner in a PUG you may be screwed - I remember one PUG (not sure what game as I was playing several at the time) where I was one of two healers and the other healer provided either no healing or almost no healing and we were both kicked for "sucking" when we were beaten. Even though it wasn't my fault, I got blamed. I then joined up with a guildie healer and we were both lauded for our awesomesauce healing by the next party and that wasn't even with vent (which we always use for PvP, but not much for PvE, mainly because we usually have to be quiet when we do PvE due to people sleeping in nearby rooms).
And in doing so is becoming a unique MMO.
Arena Net's was actually started by members of the Diablo/Diablo 2 team that broke off from Blizzard and I believe they use a similar development methodology. Basically, features are developed in a development environment and when ready, they are dropped into a test environment. If the feature is not fun, it gets pulled. If it needs work, the testers direct it on how it could be better and the developer works on it and it is re-evaluated again later. If it is fun, it stays. It is probably most similar to Agile Programming, but more asynchronous (like if each group has their own independent Sprints and not a fixed amount of time for any one feature).
Meh - personally I found grind to be the annoying part - fun is doing a boss battle with 8 friends. Grind is two things to me - one is finding 15 tulips and killing 20 rats to exchange tulips to the tulip vendor and rat tails to the ratcatcher for the key that unlocks the boss dungeon. The second is having to cross 1 hour of map and then grind through a dungeon for 2 hours to get to that boss with no "entrance" to quickly get there (two hours of dungeon I can deal with, spending an hour to get there and then having to grind through it I can't, as I rarely have 3+ hours of uninterrupted time to play any game). I don't know if that is a problem with WoW because I never made it far in WoW, but it is in most other MMOs I've played.
Not sure about app distribution, but for games if Apple doesn't allow selling through other channels, they will likely lose ground to Steam, which does. On Steam, the publisher sets the price, so they can keep the price artificially high so that it doesn't affect retail sales (and reap mad profits due to much lower overhead, a win-win for the publisher). Apple doesn't set the price on the app store (though they may refuse it or try to leverage the price down), so I don't see that as a problem.
The other option would be to yield to Steam for major games distribution and stick to applications, tools and maybe indie and smaller games. To give up this cash cow would be a foolish thing for Apple to do IMO, but I've seen them do stupid things in the past.
There is an enormous difference between costs of digital distribution and costs of traditional distribution. With traditional distribution, you have printing costs (e.g. manual), media costs, box art costs, print marketing, physical shipping costs, reclaims costs (damaged media), and pay a cut of profits to the developer, publisher, and point-of-sale. Worst of all is dealing with availability issues where a publisher's goal is to have zero items in a warehouse
In the end, the publisher typically gets the lion's share of profits, but they also absorb most of those costs. Contracted to an indie developer working for a major publisher in the 1990s, I think heard in the end they took in maybe 10-15% of total profits (not sales...), and the owner of that company's self-published download only software (what was called crippleware back then - you played a 10% of the game for free and paid $15-30 to unlock the rest) made more than the commercial game they were contracted to make ever did. I haven't talked with the owner of that company in years, but they went mobile after that debacle - first to Nintendo DS games and then to iPhone games, both of which are fairly lucrative, but for different reasons (iPhone uses digital distribution and DS uses a cost recoup marketing model with overpriced software and cheaper hardware).
With digital distribution the model is much simpler - developer and distributor (optimally directly to Steam - if a publisher is involved because of boxed games also being sold, they will likely take a large cut), and marketing (digital). There are minimal warehouse costs (data warehousing), the software is always available, no printing costs, no shipping costs, and far fewer mouths to feed. As long as there are new titles added, the bandwidth costs for distribution should never be an issue. In fact, it would not surprise me if the developer makes more money on a $5 downloadable game than they would on a $30 traditionally published game.
Probably because Windows tablets will probably include heavy handed DRM out of the box and the French think that will keep people from sharing... um, er stealing.
That was grammatically correct, I believe, just spelt wrong. And yes I used spelt intentionally - it is the equivalent of spelled despite Firefox dictionary not recognizing it OotB (it is a rarely used, yet still correct form). Spelt is also a form of wheat my grandpa used to grow in the US, mainly to sell to the German community in South Dakota, though the majority of his wheat was bread grain like most farmers.
Planed was obviously incorrect spelling, but was corrected by the time I read the headline.
Says the person who's job is about to be exported to India.
It seems like a fairly logical list, but I've noticed that the list is geared more toward waterfall, and not for, say, Agile - for instance "Do you have a spec?" doesn't really apply because the requirements become the spec. Also Agile often has non-dedicated roles - for instance, I work in Product Validation and in waterfall I do nothing but write test plans and run tests, but in Agile I manage the Lab Manager VMs, write schema, and run unit tests, none of which I would do in my traditional role (it doesn't hurt that I am a programmer originally hired into automation, but that got outsourced, and I've filled a variety of roles since then like US government security testing, which the US doesn't allow to be outsourced).
Interpreted languages are very different now than they were 10-15 years ago. First, most are compiled into bytecode, which is pseudo assembly that can be compiled faster than source code. Second, the interpreter does dynamic recompilation and optimization on the fly, something C and C++ don't do (these code blocks were hand tuned in assembly in the past, but that is rare because the compiler is better than most humans at instruction order because of out of order optimization. While it may not be faster than C/C++, it isn't that bad, especially with systems that make calls to hardware (I get decent OpenGL performance on mine - way better than my old 1.3GHz Pentium on a 1GHz chip, and FAR better memory management). I would hope the optimizations made for Dalvik (the android runtime) also exist in the NDK VM, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet (going to try to port a C++ library to it, but I have a feeling the OpenGL to OpenGL ES transition will be painful on that one).
I think the perspective problem comes from this:
single line = post office a week before Christmas
multiple lines = grocery store before Christmas
In the post office, the line snakes out the door and part way down the street and takes nearly 2 hours. At the grocery store I'm at the front of the line in under 15 minutes.
Now if you just have that much information, obviously multiple lines > single line. So what is missing? The number of cashiers. At the post office, there are 4-5 people working. At the grocery store there are potentially 22 registers and 4 self-checkout lanes at the store I go to most and 42 lanes at the one I go to if I'm shopping on my way home from work (a Super Target).
Microcenter and Best Buy, who also use the single line setup at stores near me also only have 8 registers or less. So the perceived slowness is mostly due to less registers being open in most cases. The problem is, and I've said it before in this thread, is that single lines don't scale well because customers can't tell which lines are open. Also the additional walking is difficult for the old and/or handicapped, so having them get to the register may take some time.
Actually, that isn't true - Microcenter has a single queue and they wrap it along a wall where the customers would stand in multiple queue checkouts. They then pack in an entire aisle of impulse buy items where normally they'd have 2 feet at each register for those. Some Best Buy stores have also moved to this model, as well. I did notice at both stores that when they have 5 or 6 registers open like the week before Christmas the cashiers often have to call for the next customer because it's too busy for customers to always see when someone is leaving.
The problem with someplace like Target or Walmart adopting single queue is that they potentially have 40 registers open at once, and herding people becomes non-trivial when over a certain size. Even if they split the aisle and had 20 on each side that is still too large for single queue without some mechanism that tells customers to go and what aisle to go to. If you solve that problem cheaply, and efficiently, I'm sure Walmart would pay for the patent rights.
Technically land lines are deregulated and other phone companies can lease them from the incumbent carrier, but most people not only go with the incumbent, they don't even know about the competition. In contrast, cable companies like Comcast are government regulated monopolies and are charged a fee for this, which they pass on to the consumer. If you read your bill for, say, Comcast, it says "regulatory fees" - this is just the fees the monopoly pays the government.
From a consumer perspective, there is no way I'd ever want net neutrality to end - it would allow providers like Comcast to strangle whatever businesses they want out of the market to fail. If they decided BitTorrent was worthless, they could strangle all of the sites where you find torrents to 1 byte/second so the page takes all day to load. So until regulated monopolies are gone, I see net neutrality as a necessity.
OTOH, if I ran Comcast I would feel net neutrality is the devil - kill it and strangle out any free sites and replace them with pay alternatives!!! MORE MONEY FOR THE MONOPOLY!! More money to buy lobbyists and government. Pretty soon, Comcast will replace the government with corporate drones... oh wait, they're doing that already with tea party Republicans (a group I personally find either idealistic or clueless that they would empower monopolies like this with their ideals - I'm pretty sure most are clueless idealists because the only one I've personally met is Michelle Bachmann [before she got elected the first time] and she definitely fell in that category).
That assumes texting service, and I for one refuse to pay $20/month ($30 for family) for what is essentially a costless IM system for the carrier (and yes, I have a workaround semi-implemented).
How about barcodes on the phone, or better yet, neck barcodes?
Well if you've had other functional programming languages, C is pretty easy to learn and it was only a 1 quarter long class for me in college, as was C++, but I can't imagine they can cram C++ into a quarter (maybe a semester, but that would be pushing it IMO) these days as a ton has been added to it since I had it (heck, we didn't even have templates or try/throw/catch blocks).
I write C++ sometimes in my day job (more java, perl and silverlight these days) and I personally feel it is an awkward and kludgy language, to say the least. It is in no way elegant like true OOPs (smalltalk, objective-C), and my work even writes 99% of our code as true OOP outside of about a 40 line "main" - so no public or protected variables in classes and the classes MUST include message passing.
As for my high school, we had 40 IBM PCs (and by that, I mean the ORIGINAL IBM PCs - I believe they were 10 or 12 years old when they finally got replaced) locked in a lab and one teacher that knew enough of how to use them to teach an intro to computers class, which was in BASIC. In contrast, my elementary school and Jr High had Apple ][s in open labs where we used them before, during, and after school, and we (as in the assembly language programming pre-teens that were also cracking every piece of software we could get our grubby hands on) often taught the teachers how to use them.
Companies like cubicles because they are a vastly cheaper way to convert warehouse type space to office like space, and while they don't completely block out noise, they divert it enough so that while one worker is on the phone with a customer, that customer hears you, not the person sitting next to you talking about her cat.
Having worked in call centers with cubicles and without, I vastly prefer cubicles, though I'd prefer never to work in a call center again (both of those were college temp jobs).
I do some telecommuting, but having moved to an Agile team at work makes that a bit more difficult (we don't follow Agile exactly because employees are strewn across about 6 sites, but we do use a lot of collaboration tech to work around that, like virtual teleconferencing and netmeeting-like desktop sharing).
Well if there were any surprises, I haven't heard of 'em. US and most Arabs don't like Iran and even some like Saudi Arabia want the US to attack them... yawn. That is about as informative as telling me North Korea is run by a dictator with lavish mansions while his people starve (a fact), not unlike Saddam Hussein.
As far as US opinions on people, well we all know opinions are like assholes - everyone's got one and they all stink.
My two bits - the main issue with MacOS X graphics drivers isn't that they're bad, it is that aside from bugfixes they are updated only with OS upgrades and often a generation or two behind what the cards support. They also don't support graphics card upgrades on most machines, which further hinders their adoption. Of course, the driver issue can be worked around in the same way it is done on Windows, which is by including newer headers and calling the hardware directly, but Apple goes out of their way to make this difficult by going against the C standard and always including system headers before local headers, so programmers either need to replace the system header (primarily the glext.h header) or "escape it" with #defines and #undefines. On the other hand, Apple writes and tunes their own drivers, so if the specs are supported it should run faster than having to use function pointers with a lookup and callback cost.
That said, the effort may not be that much work depending on the game engine used and may be mostly a testing effort and writing a native GUI. Most engines I've worked on compile and run on Windows, Linux, and Mac and the developer of the game would not need to know much or anything about the platforms it targets (again, some native GUI support may be required, but usually that is it). Steam has 30 million active users, and 4.71% of that is 1413000 - if you could sell to 10% of that audience (which any A-list title should do), that is still over 100000 units, which more than justifies hiring one developer to write a gui and a couple of testers, IMO.
My bet is Gamebryo will not be used on this one, as it is and has been dying a slow death for the past few years (the parent is in Chapter 11 as I recall), and while it was the best choice 10 years ago for an RPG, it is not anywhere near that today. While they have kept up with technology at a high level, they badly needed a low level rewrite and cleanup and that is unlikely since they laid off most of the programmers.
idTech is tailored for first person shooters and skips a lot of necessities for RPGs, so not likely to happen.
UnrealTech is a possibility, but the 25% is probably a deal breaker.
So my bet is on something else - maybe Vision Engine (which has and is been used in RPGs and supports multiple platforms) or Source.
The main advantage of satellite phones is they work pretty much anywhere (though I've heard that like Satellite TV, they have issues in bad storms...). The biggest disadvantage is they chew through power because they need to send a signal much further than cell phones. Batteries life on satellite phones will need to get MUCH better than it is now before I'd ever consider buying one. I've never owned a satellite phone, but I know a surveyor that uses one for work and he says it needs to be plugged in almost all the time.
yeah - I saw Delaware and was thinking the same - Patent Trolls file in eastern Texas where the judge just hands the trolls money without any real fight.
I'm guessing next will be the Commercially Underfunded Transportation to Space program, or as businessmen call it, CUTS.
I think many factors doomed Smalltalk, because no language that I know of was truly free in the 1970s and few were in the 1980s, though hardware bundling was common (for instance, Applesoft BASIC was licensed from Microsoft for a fee and included on Apple ][s, and UNIX came with C because it was required in POSIX by the late 1980s [and had OSS implementations by then]). Fast forwarding from 1972 when smalltalk first appeared to 1980 when it was moved off of the Xerox PARC demo and sold by ParcPlace (UNIX) and Digitalk (PCs), you have some serious issues to work around. First, it had way too big of memory footprint for 1980s hardware, and memory was expensive. Second, it was a scripting language, which is inherently slow (without dynamic recompilation, which is more of a 1990s+ thing). Third, it lacked a backend for relational databases, which severely limited its use in business. After that are some minor issues like slowness caused by message passing (but this is the main reason no kernel is object oriented and all are monolithic).
Just because IBM has a lot of open source support doesn't mean they don't sell a lot of commercial software (like Dassault, a partner they had invested heavily in for a long time)- they have gone from a mostly hardware company to mostly a services company with hardware offerings (HP is similar now that they bought EDS). Services and support is the real cash cow for them, as it was for Control Data back in its day (before their management put the company in a tailspin of spinning off profitable divisions to keep stock above junk status... and gee, EDS did that too...).
I noticed earlier on my news rounds that Lucas has already denied this
My brother had no issues with either iPhone or android on AT&T or T Mobile. Everyone else I know bitches about both of those (actually, the 3 other people I know that use T Mobile will never use it again - mostly customer service horror stories).
I used to only hear horror stories about Sprint, so it is good to hear they've improved. I imagine Verizon and AT&T still have better signal support, however (since they have higher penetrating bands). I personally am on Verizon, but I don't own a smart phone and if I did I would switch because Verizon is the most expensive carrier (by $20+). I also don't know anything about US Cellular because they don't have service in my state.
yeah - I had major issues with Blender's interface myself, and it has many of the same problems as the commercial software I work on - the interface is far too busy, flow is not intuitive at all, and has too much garbage most people don't care about on it - it can be powerful, but I personally don't think it would be significantly faster than the professional CAD software I use (note that Blender WAS professional CAD software at one time).
Note that I have not used Blender since 2.3, so I have not tried the interface improvements. I should give it another try - note that I do have a lot of bias because I specialized in usability and user interfaced in college.