I worked in the IT department of a school district here in the upper midwest, and to a man (well, person) every single one of us could no longer stand computers after about a year on the job. The two or three people we had that were absolute Macintosh fanatics--me included--were ready to burn anything with an Apple logo. One of my colleagues quit so that he could do "anything but work with computers."
Almost everyone I work with now hates the damn things as well. For me, the only reason I stay is because I'm not qualified for anything else and I can't afford to quit.
Sure, I have my dream job, but it turns out to have been a stupid, crappy dream.
I just bought a copy of both UnixWare 7 and OpenServer 5; the company I work for makes a version of its communications products for several different Unixes, and the vast majority of our customers use OpenServer.
Of all the Unixes it has been my pleasure to use professionally (AIX, Solaris, HP, RHE and other flavors of Linux), the SCO products have been by FAR the worst to set up. It's like traveling back to about 1989.
At least one major fax board manufacturer supports UnixWare 7, also.
The EyeToy seems like a lot of fun. At least, it's neat to demo it in a store. It would be neat to have one, although I bet it would get old after a few hours kicking and slapping at the air just to see what happens on the video screen.
What they need to have is a controller of some sort that accepts your leaning and ducking as an input. I know that some arcade games have that--they just need to bring the technology home. Sort of like the EyeToy (or whatever it's called) for PS2, I guess.
I was reluctant to use Eclipse at first, because I thought I wanted something that had a GUI building tool built into it, like NetBeans. And NetBeans had the XML stuff built in as well.
Then I used Eclipse. About a week after I started, I migrated all of my projects over to Eclipse and got rid of NetBeans. Eclipse is faster and more responsive. It actually helps me stay organized, which is no small task for me.
Now if only they would add a vi-like code editor...
That happened to me once, too. I was doing an act with a friend where we were spoofing Father Guido Sarducci, and I got myself stuck in the fake-Italian accent for about an hour. I literally could not stop.
That's exactly why I bought a GBA instead of a PocketPC. I was extremely honest with myself, and I knew that the only thing I would buy a PocketPC for was playing games--so I spent the $300 on a GBA and a half-dozen games rather than on a PocketPC and nothing else.
Of course, about a month later I had about five good ideas for PDA applications, but that's another story entirely.
Unless "The King's Game" or "Kriegspieler" are alternate names for Chess...where's chess?
That leaves aside the issue of whether a gaming canon is a good idea or not; I don't think it's necessarily important that a game designer have played all of these games, but that he or she have played games, period. Any reasonably intelligent person can derive from the game-playing experience the things they need to know to evaluate whether their own games are fun or not--but you need to have that experience.
Probably not, but I can sell you some oxygen-free teflon-jacketed Single-Crystal copper cables with rhodium connectors for just $750 per foot. Guaranteed to align the electrons properly, for maximum presence and soundstage.
One of the Dreamcast racing games...MSR, I think...looked at the hardware clock to set the lighting conditions, but the races were set in various locations around the world. What that meant in-game was that it would set the lighting to reflect the time of day in the local time zone--Japan, England, whatever else--relative to you. So you don't necessarily always have night races if the race location is sufficiently far ahead/behind your zulu.
I used to like User Friendly. Now I read it because it's on my daily list of things to read and I'm too lazy to take it off. I guess I also keep hoping that it might someday become good again.
For me, it's hard to pin down quite when I stopped liking it, and I'm starting to wonder if I ever actually did like it. If I had to guess, I'd say that it started going downhill when Iliad started taking himself seriously and User Friendly became the too-too-precious "UFie Community" and then "User Friendly, Inc."
I mean, come on...does anyone really find the Cthulhu and Hastur jokes funny? I can't remember the last time I even cracked a smile reading User Friendly.
I give UF props for being the first web comic I ever read, and for introducing me to the wider world of web comics, but it's really starting to seem like a waste of time.
I hope they use the time to fix Steam. Does this also mean that they're going to delay having Steam be a requirement for HL? Or has that deadline already passed? To be honest, I stopped playing HL after Steam was released, so I don't know.
Of course, maybe it's just easier to hit the '$5 bet' button if you don't have to load 20 quarters into the machine.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly the reason that they're moving to a ticket-based system. It's like the psychology behind chips--it's designed to make you forget that you're actually spending money by providing a layer of abstraction: "Look, it's not a hundred-dollar bill! It's just a black disk with the casino's name on it!" As the poker players say, the guy who invented chips was a genius.
I work as a QA analyst. That is ostensibly my full-time job. I also sysadmin most of our testing hosts--Linux, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, VMS, UnixWare, NetBSD, Reliant UNIX, Windows, I guess about a dozen machines all told. I also write automated tests.
The sysadmin stuff usually falls by the wayside because we just have to have them up and running and I've got enough other things to do, what with testing interfaces and writing automated tests and proofreading documentation.
As far as a breakdown, I actually do spend most of my day working, although obviously I screw around a bit as well--reading Slashdot and some comics.
Believe it or not, they do take that into account when they're doing schedules around here. If we've got, say, 40 hours to test something, they schedule that as 6 2/3 days of six hours each. Ostensibly it's because we've all got far too many meetings to attend, but also so that we can deal with email and do "other things".
Seriously, I had a job once where I was told that in addition to our regular duties we would also be cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the office. "Be sure," they said, "to dust the chairs."
The number is a lot smaller, but you then get into discussing things in such abstract terms that it's silly to compare. I mean, "Woman impregnated by mysterious visitor learns that her unborn child will be the savior of all mankind" covers lots of different things, from the Bible to "The Terminator".
It brings up an issue of interface vs. implementation. I ported a bunch of software for my employer a couple of years ago, and while I needed to duplicate the UI and the output of the ports, I was otherwise free to code it as I wished. (I was porting internally-developed test
I've always believed that I am the sole author of the ports (well, actually, my employer is, but that's a different story), regardless of the fact that I didn't actually design the output or specify the way that the programs got their input. But we're talking thousands of lines that I wrote to get from point A to point B, and a couple hundred hours of working time that it took me to do it.
It sounds like a gray area to me, which, I suppose is the point of allowing the suit to go ahead.
First of all, this also sounds like a rehash of the "look and feel" lawsuits between Microsoft and Apple. "Your program looks like ours, so you obviously stole it!"
Second, if you couldn't "commandeer" plots, I doubt anybody would be writing any books these days.
The biggest strike against Steam is that server ban lists have been rendered obsolete. If you're a server operator, every single person you've ever banned can now come back.
There's no possible reason for this. How difficult would it have been to leave the WONID in a registry key and allow the server to check that against a ban list?
I know this is late, and you probably know this already, but Internet access WILL be required, even for LAN games. There are supposedly plans for offline authentication, but right now, a multiplayer LAN game will need Internet access for Steam authentication. That's assuming that you update HL with the Steam patches, of course. If you stay at 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.whatever, then you can play LAN games all you want.
I know this is OT, but you've just answered a question that I've been researching today. I've got to develop an app that will work on all of those flavors of Unix plus HP and OpenServer and I was trying to figure out the best way to do it. I had just finished installing NetBeans when I read this...thanks for confirming what I hoped was true.
Neat. I should have listened to the "after" first, though. I could hear exactly where the autotune kicked in, but I'm not sure if it's because I could actually hear the difference (there seems to be a little bit of flanging on the corrected parts) or if it's because I knew where it would be after listening to the uncorrected version.
Oh, I missed the 'executive team-building' the first time around. Still, the point stands.
Of course, it depends on what kinds of executives you've got, but if they're like ours, they want nothing to do with gaming and would rather make out-of-shape desk jockeys go rock climbing for "team-building".
Slashdot Mirror
I worked in the IT department of a school district here in the upper midwest, and to a man (well, person) every single one of us could no longer stand computers after about a year on the job. The two or three people we had that were absolute Macintosh fanatics--me included--were ready to burn anything with an Apple logo. One of my colleagues quit so that he could do "anything but work with computers."
Almost everyone I work with now hates the damn things as well. For me, the only reason I stay is because I'm not qualified for anything else and I can't afford to quit.
Sure, I have my dream job, but it turns out to have been a stupid, crappy dream.
I just bought a copy of both UnixWare 7 and OpenServer 5; the company I work for makes a version of its communications products for several different Unixes, and the vast majority of our customers use OpenServer.
Of all the Unixes it has been my pleasure to use professionally (AIX, Solaris, HP, RHE and other flavors of Linux), the SCO products have been by FAR the worst to set up. It's like traveling back to about 1989.
At least one major fax board manufacturer supports UnixWare 7, also.
The EyeToy seems like a lot of fun. At least, it's neat to demo it in a store. It would be neat to have one, although I bet it would get old after a few hours kicking and slapping at the air just to see what happens on the video screen.
"Me too" to both of those.
What they need to have is a controller of some sort that accepts your leaning and ducking as an input. I know that some arcade games have that--they just need to bring the technology home. Sort of like the EyeToy (or whatever it's called) for PS2, I guess.
I was reluctant to use Eclipse at first, because I thought I wanted something that had a GUI building tool built into it, like NetBeans. And NetBeans had the XML stuff built in as well.
Then I used Eclipse. About a week after I started, I migrated all of my projects over to Eclipse and got rid of NetBeans. Eclipse is faster and more responsive. It actually helps me stay organized, which is no small task for me.
Now if only they would add a vi-like code editor...
That happened to me once, too. I was doing an act with a friend where we were spoofing Father Guido Sarducci, and I got myself stuck in the fake-Italian accent for about an hour. I literally could not stop.
If you need a great server browser for HL and Q3-based games, look no further than ServerInfo.
Get it now! It's free-as-in-beer.
Disclaimer: The author is a friend of mine.
That's exactly why I bought a GBA instead of a PocketPC. I was extremely honest with myself, and I knew that the only thing I would buy a PocketPC for was playing games--so I spent the $300 on a GBA and a half-dozen games rather than on a PocketPC and nothing else.
Of course, about a month later I had about five good ideas for PDA applications, but that's another story entirely.
Unless "The King's Game" or "Kriegspieler" are alternate names for Chess...where's chess?
That leaves aside the issue of whether a gaming canon is a good idea or not; I don't think it's necessarily important that a game designer have played all of these games, but that he or she have played games, period. Any reasonably intelligent person can derive from the game-playing experience the things they need to know to evaluate whether their own games are fun or not--but you need to have that experience.
God...I thought I kept reasonably current with all of the laughable bs that they try to pull off. They're not serious, are they?
Probably not, but I can sell you some oxygen-free teflon-jacketed Single-Crystal copper cables with rhodium connectors for just $750 per foot. Guaranteed to align the electrons properly, for maximum presence and soundstage.
One of the Dreamcast racing games...MSR, I think...looked at the hardware clock to set the lighting conditions, but the races were set in various locations around the world. What that meant in-game was that it would set the lighting to reflect the time of day in the local time zone--Japan, England, whatever else--relative to you. So you don't necessarily always have night races if the race location is sufficiently far ahead/behind your zulu.
I used to like User Friendly. Now I read it because it's on my daily list of things to read and I'm too lazy to take it off. I guess I also keep hoping that it might someday become good again.
For me, it's hard to pin down quite when I stopped liking it, and I'm starting to wonder if I ever actually did like it. If I had to guess, I'd say that it started going downhill when Iliad started taking himself seriously and User Friendly became the too-too-precious "UFie Community" and then "User Friendly, Inc."
I mean, come on...does anyone really find the Cthulhu and Hastur jokes funny? I can't remember the last time I even cracked a smile reading User Friendly.
I give UF props for being the first web comic I ever read, and for introducing me to the wider world of web comics, but it's really starting to seem like a waste of time.
I hope they use the time to fix Steam. Does this also mean that they're going to delay having Steam be a requirement for HL? Or has that deadline already passed? To be honest, I stopped playing HL after Steam was released, so I don't know.
Of course, maybe it's just easier to hit the '$5 bet' button if you don't have to load 20 quarters into the machine.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is exactly the reason that they're moving to a ticket-based system. It's like the psychology behind chips--it's designed to make you forget that you're actually spending money by providing a layer of abstraction: "Look, it's not a hundred-dollar bill! It's just a black disk with the casino's name on it!" As the poker players say, the guy who invented chips was a genius.
I work as a QA analyst. That is ostensibly my full-time job. I also sysadmin most of our testing hosts--Linux, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, VMS, UnixWare, NetBSD, Reliant UNIX, Windows, I guess about a dozen machines all told. I also write automated tests.
The sysadmin stuff usually falls by the wayside because we just have to have them up and running and I've got enough other things to do, what with testing interfaces and writing automated tests and proofreading documentation.
As far as a breakdown, I actually do spend most of my day working, although obviously I screw around a bit as well--reading Slashdot and some comics.
Believe it or not, they do take that into account when they're doing schedules around here. If we've got, say, 40 hours to test something, they schedule that as 6 2/3 days of six hours each. Ostensibly it's because we've all got far too many meetings to attend, but also so that we can deal with email and do "other things".
Do you have to clean bathrooms, too?
Seriously, I had a job once where I was told that in addition to our regular duties we would also be cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the office. "Be sure," they said, "to dust the chairs."
The number is a lot smaller, but you then get into discussing things in such abstract terms that it's silly to compare. I mean, "Woman impregnated by mysterious visitor learns that her unborn child will be the savior of all mankind" covers lots of different things, from the Bible to "The Terminator".
The difference lies in execution.
Ah, I hadn't thought of that. Interesting point.
It brings up an issue of interface vs. implementation. I ported a bunch of software for my employer a couple of years ago, and while I needed to duplicate the UI and the output of the ports, I was otherwise free to code it as I wished. (I was porting internally-developed test
I've always believed that I am the sole author of the ports (well, actually, my employer is, but that's a different story), regardless of the fact that I didn't actually design the output or specify the way that the programs got their input. But we're talking thousands of lines that I wrote to get from point A to point B, and a couple hundred hours of working time that it took me to do it.
It sounds like a gray area to me, which, I suppose is the point of allowing the suit to go ahead.
First of all, this also sounds like a rehash of the "look and feel" lawsuits between Microsoft and Apple. "Your program looks like ours, so you obviously stole it!"
Second, if you couldn't "commandeer" plots, I doubt anybody would be writing any books these days.
The biggest strike against Steam is that server ban lists have been rendered obsolete. If you're a server operator, every single person you've ever banned can now come back.
There's no possible reason for this. How difficult would it have been to leave the WONID in a registry key and allow the server to check that against a ban list?
There was nothing wrong with WON.
I know this is late, and you probably know this already, but Internet access WILL be required, even for LAN games. There are supposedly plans for offline authentication, but right now, a multiplayer LAN game will need Internet access for Steam authentication. That's assuming that you update HL with the Steam patches, of course. If you stay at 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.whatever, then you can play LAN games all you want.
I know this is OT, but you've just answered a question that I've been researching today. I've got to develop an app that will work on all of those flavors of Unix plus HP and OpenServer and I was trying to figure out the best way to do it. I had just finished installing NetBeans when I read this...thanks for confirming what I hoped was true.
Neat. I should have listened to the "after" first, though. I could hear exactly where the autotune kicked in, but I'm not sure if it's because I could actually hear the difference (there seems to be a little bit of flanging on the corrected parts) or if it's because I knew where it would be after listening to the uncorrected version.
Oh, I missed the 'executive team-building' the first time around. Still, the point stands.
Of course, it depends on what kinds of executives you've got, but if they're like ours, they want nothing to do with gaming and would rather make out-of-shape desk jockeys go rock climbing for "team-building".