This does give your company's IT the ability to monitor and crack down on unauthorized play. If SC2 becomes as popular as SC1, I could kind of understand if a company wants to block SC2 traffic during work hours.
That said, I agree with the points on avoiding lag. But I think we shouldn't fault Blizzard for wanting to cut down on dev costs by keeping their servers in-house. I'd imagine that their in-house servers, which are designed to scale to many thousands of players, would have an almost completely different code base than the server they'd ship with the product. I'm also sure that they weighed this dev cost against statistics of their existing products and players.
In other words, stop bitching. You know you're gonna play it no matter what.
Maybe the world still runs on Microsoft because the TCO difference just isn't high enough to justify the cost of switching. The cost of migration has to be figured into the TCO of the alternative, despite how unfair it sounds to do so.
I think that opinions generalizing talent along lines of nationality is usually a load of bullshit fueled by the prejudices of the one doing the opining. This sounds like hubris to me. Perhaps they should consider developer productivity to be as much a function of management and empowerment rather than some innate ability of the people of some nation.
Isn't virtual currency just a microcosm of a "real" currency system? Perhaps they should also start cracking down on retail gift cards and "point" systems, too.
Microsoft dominates because businesses don't mind too much, and the basic equation of domination hasn't changed enough, yet. The business defines the tools you must work with. If I went to work for Ubisoft as a 3D designer, should I be pissed that they force me to use 3DS Max, and that I can't use Blender? Even though Blender has 3DS and FBX export? Is Autodesk a monopoly if 90% of game shops use it?
In both cases, I say no: the enemy of change is being good enough. The world just isn't yet convinced MS isn't good enough (though it came close with Vista).
And taking your email elsewhere isn't really a good example because it really isn't that easy. If I want to get my gmail through Yahoo, I'll be left wanting.
I think cybersquatting should become increasingly costly over time, with crowd ratings as the determining factor as to whether someone is in fact squatting. If, say, 85% of people say a domain is being squatted, then the squatter's registration fee should double each successive year.
I wouldn't go so far as to blame management for motivation problems. It isn't really a dev manager's job to motivate a developer who doesn't know why they are demotivated any more than it is to be a developer's therapist. If the developer has a concrete reason (eg. "the lead is abrasive" or "the deadlines are way too unrealistic") then you can blame the manager for inaction.
That said, perhaps the solution to this developer's motivation problems is to become a dev manager for a while. Then he'll find coding far more enjoyable than being blamed for things outside his control.
How does he support the claim that it costs businesses money to mask passwords? If your banking site didn't mask your password, would you use it? I wouldn't. Not in this age of high resolution zoom camcorders being able to take 18 hours of straight video.
I go through exactly the same thing, and I have no real solutions, but here are some things I sometimes try:
- Try doing something creative outside programming. Do you play an instrument? I sometimes take a hiatus and concentrate on learning a new piece. Or compose something. - Try doing something you don't know how to do, but always wanted to. I always wanted to write a short story, but my writing skills are horrible. I try sometimes, and I always fail. But it sure does make me want to return to something I *am* good at. - Try reading some interesting books.
Try anything. Eventually, you'll throw an exception and restart your process.
Having a huge amount of physical books is great, but like everyone else has pointed out, it can't hope to match the raw amount of material on the Internet. But, amazingly, it does provide a lot of arcane stuff that you just won't find.
Try finding the January 1974 issue of Popular Mechanics online. Try finding the archived reports of the State Department for the last 50 years. Libraries are a veritable eBay of finding lost treasures of information.
I think it's the feeling of being surrounded by lost information that makes libraries such an interesting, satisfying place to study. Far more satisfying that in front of my plasma TV with my wifi laptop, getting distracted by So You Think You Can Dance.
There's also something to be said not just for a hall of books that is completely free for your use, but the fact that the hall of books actually provides Internet for many who can't afford it.
I always found that with complex games, the number of scripts starts to grow, and then at some point I wish I had a script verifier to make sure I didn't make any typos. And then, I start hunting for ways to make the script faster. And then I realize that what I really want is a compiler that produces native code. Which then leads me to writing the logic in C++.
So, I don't see any advantage at all in not recompiling.
I think that seriously understates the importance of the actual brains behind making something a reality. You can make this same point without denigrating the very people who actually wrote LUA.
I think in many cases, embedding a scripting engine is overkill. The only scenarios I can think of where it's advantageous are:
- If your bots/NPC behavior is sophisticated enough that they need their own programs that run concurrently as mini-virtual machines. - If your game accepts user generated content, and a simple scripting language becomes an end user feature. - If your team indeed is really big and you have non-programmers designing game logic.
I'm sure there are more, but for more than one project I've worked on, I ended up abandoning scripting altogether because it just wasn't worth the complexity or performance hit.
One factor I'd think would contribute greatly to the success of one over the others is how well a search provider like Google can reasonably analyze and index the content.
Ideally, the reviewer will understand the context of the code and the context of the review. Reviews should only be conducted by 2 engineers who both have a deep sense of what level is appropriate.
I hate ending up with some ass who thinks every piece of code controls life and death, and happens to also think your variable naming is also going to kill people, too.
I think SE and CS are overlapping disciplines populated by people who tend to analyze the things that overlap and make (sometimes unnecessary) generalizations. Thus, it's natural that people in both disciplines make misguided attempts to define the relationship when in fact there is no stable relationship at all. It simply depends heavily on what you are doing.
I could ask endless other similar questions, like: what's the difference between a musician and a composer? One can be the other, and one doesn't necessarily have to be the other, and one can be made better at one by learning about the other.
Isn't the deskop really just the next evolution of the cloud? Once the desktop becomes an active participant in the cloud?
I think the next step will simply be to make all your desktop apps available anywhere. We're just about there already with remote desktop connections. Isn't the path of remote desktops and virtualization just as valid a distributed computing model? In the future, there might be so much bandwidth and parallel computing power available, a single server could serve remote connections to thousands of simultaneous virtual Win7/OSX/Linux machines. And you won't have to actually rewrite OpenOffice 10.0 for web.
Seriously, Japan needs a Title VII badly. The way they treat women and Burakkumin, and the way they discriminate on age, nationality, disability, and other characteristics, show that they haven't put the kind of thought into discrimination that America had been forced to over hundreds of years.
Sounds to me like this is really just about a compiled model versus a declarative scripted model. I'd imagine that at some point in the future, the theoretical capabilities would be very similar, and that developers will make a choice based on code security and startup performance. That's assuming any scripted version can be compiled and made to perform similarly to pre-compiled code.
Nothing wrong with offering laptops in pink. I personally would like a dark red laptop. Some guys want pink, too. Nothing wrong with offering different designs.
The gimicky stuff has to go, though.
Slashdot Mirror
This does give your company's IT the ability to monitor and crack down on unauthorized play. If SC2 becomes as popular as SC1, I could kind of understand if a company wants to block SC2 traffic during work hours.
That said, I agree with the points on avoiding lag. But I think we shouldn't fault Blizzard for wanting to cut down on dev costs by keeping their servers in-house. I'd imagine that their in-house servers, which are designed to scale to many thousands of players, would have an almost completely different code base than the server they'd ship with the product. I'm also sure that they weighed this dev cost against statistics of their existing products and players.
In other words, stop bitching. You know you're gonna play it no matter what.
Maybe the world still runs on Microsoft because the TCO difference just isn't high enough to justify the cost of switching. The cost of migration has to be figured into the TCO of the alternative, despite how unfair it sounds to do so.
I think that opinions generalizing talent along lines of nationality is usually a load of bullshit fueled by the prejudices of the one doing the opining. This sounds like hubris to me. Perhaps they should consider developer productivity to be as much a function of management and empowerment rather than some innate ability of the people of some nation.
Wake me up when HTC makes their own handheld OS.
Isn't virtual currency just a microcosm of a "real" currency system? Perhaps they should also start cracking down on retail gift cards and "point" systems, too.
Microsoft dominates because businesses don't mind too much, and the basic equation of domination hasn't changed enough, yet. The business defines the tools you must work with. If I went to work for Ubisoft as a 3D designer, should I be pissed that they force me to use 3DS Max, and that I can't use Blender? Even though Blender has 3DS and FBX export? Is Autodesk a monopoly if 90% of game shops use it?
In both cases, I say no: the enemy of change is being good enough. The world just isn't yet convinced MS isn't good enough (though it came close with Vista).
And taking your email elsewhere isn't really a good example because it really isn't that easy. If I want to get my gmail through Yahoo, I'll be left wanting.
I think cybersquatting should become increasingly costly over time, with crowd ratings as the determining factor as to whether someone is in fact squatting. If, say, 85% of people say a domain is being squatted, then the squatter's registration fee should double each successive year.
I wouldn't go so far as to blame management for motivation problems. It isn't really a dev manager's job to motivate a developer who doesn't know why they are demotivated any more than it is to be a developer's therapist. If the developer has a concrete reason (eg. "the lead is abrasive" or "the deadlines are way too unrealistic") then you can blame the manager for inaction.
That said, perhaps the solution to this developer's motivation problems is to become a dev manager for a while. Then he'll find coding far more enjoyable than being blamed for things outside his control.
How does he support the claim that it costs businesses money to mask passwords? If your banking site didn't mask your password, would you use it? I wouldn't. Not in this age of high resolution zoom camcorders being able to take 18 hours of straight video.
I go through exactly the same thing, and I have no real solutions, but here are some things I sometimes try:
- Try doing something creative outside programming. Do you play an instrument? I sometimes take a hiatus and concentrate on learning a new piece. Or compose something.
- Try doing something you don't know how to do, but always wanted to. I always wanted to write a short story, but my writing skills are horrible. I try sometimes, and I always fail. But it sure does make me want to return to something I *am* good at.
- Try reading some interesting books.
Try anything. Eventually, you'll throw an exception and restart your process.
Having a huge amount of physical books is great, but like everyone else has pointed out, it can't hope to match the raw amount of material on the Internet. But, amazingly, it does provide a lot of arcane stuff that you just won't find.
Try finding the January 1974 issue of Popular Mechanics online. Try finding the archived reports of the State Department for the last 50 years. Libraries are a veritable eBay of finding lost treasures of information.
I think it's the feeling of being surrounded by lost information that makes libraries such an interesting, satisfying place to study. Far more satisfying that in front of my plasma TV with my wifi laptop, getting distracted by So You Think You Can Dance.
There's also something to be said not just for a hall of books that is completely free for your use, but the fact that the hall of books actually provides Internet for many who can't afford it.
I always found that with complex games, the number of scripts starts to grow, and then at some point I wish I had a script verifier to make sure I didn't make any typos. And then, I start hunting for ways to make the script faster. And then I realize that what I really want is a compiler that produces native code. Which then leads me to writing the logic in C++.
So, I don't see any advantage at all in not recompiling.
I very much agree. Seems to me that one reason game developers integrate LUA is because game designers are at least as big hacks as the developers.
I think that seriously understates the importance of the actual brains behind making something a reality. You can make this same point without denigrating the very people who actually wrote LUA.
I think in many cases, embedding a scripting engine is overkill. The only scenarios I can think of where it's advantageous are:
- If your bots/NPC behavior is sophisticated enough that they need their own programs that run concurrently as mini-virtual machines.
- If your game accepts user generated content, and a simple scripting language becomes an end user feature.
- If your team indeed is really big and you have non-programmers designing game logic.
I'm sure there are more, but for more than one project I've worked on, I ended up abandoning scripting altogether because it just wasn't worth the complexity or performance hit.
lol, thank i stand properly educated. arigatou sensei mctk!
One factor I'd think would contribute greatly to the success of one over the others is how well a search provider like Google can reasonably analyze and index the content.
Ideally, the reviewer will understand the context of the code and the context of the review. Reviews should only be conducted by 2 engineers who both have a deep sense of what level is appropriate. I hate ending up with some ass who thinks every piece of code controls life and death, and happens to also think your variable naming is also going to kill people, too.
Ooh, this gives me a great idea on how to attack the Vatican! Much simpler than stealing antimatter from the LHC.
Now THAT's news!
I think SE and CS are overlapping disciplines populated by people who tend to analyze the things that overlap and make (sometimes unnecessary) generalizations. Thus, it's natural that people in both disciplines make misguided attempts to define the relationship when in fact there is no stable relationship at all. It simply depends heavily on what you are doing. I could ask endless other similar questions, like: what's the difference between a musician and a composer? One can be the other, and one doesn't necessarily have to be the other, and one can be made better at one by learning about the other.
Isn't the deskop really just the next evolution of the cloud? Once the desktop becomes an active participant in the cloud? I think the next step will simply be to make all your desktop apps available anywhere. We're just about there already with remote desktop connections. Isn't the path of remote desktops and virtualization just as valid a distributed computing model? In the future, there might be so much bandwidth and parallel computing power available, a single server could serve remote connections to thousands of simultaneous virtual Win7/OSX/Linux machines. And you won't have to actually rewrite OpenOffice 10.0 for web.
Seriously, Japan needs a Title VII badly. The way they treat women and Burakkumin, and the way they discriminate on age, nationality, disability, and other characteristics, show that they haven't put the kind of thought into discrimination that America had been forced to over hundreds of years.
Sounds to me like this is really just about a compiled model versus a declarative scripted model. I'd imagine that at some point in the future, the theoretical capabilities would be very similar, and that developers will make a choice based on code security and startup performance. That's assuming any scripted version can be compiled and made to perform similarly to pre-compiled code.
Nothing wrong with offering laptops in pink. I personally would like a dark red laptop. Some guys want pink, too. Nothing wrong with offering different designs. The gimicky stuff has to go, though.