Using such a DB can be a two edged sword. Especially when wielded by bored CTOs who have nothing to do but try new tech without "sweating the details."
They key thing I have taken away from the experience of using such a DB is that typically, software architects will start migrating or build new functionality in earnest, only still succumbing to a relation schema in the end.
Except the schema is backed by a non-relational database now. Which causes very, very high amounts of pain.
This is not to say correct use of NoSQL DBs is not possible. I just have yet to see it.
The VCs behind Skype are some really smart guys that happen to have made a good decision in this case. Get rid of some cruft to benefit the senior engineers and people that actually built the product.
It's good to remember that people above you in the corporate structure aren't necessarily evil idiots. They are just evil idiots 95% of the time.
I agree with your sentiment, but I would like to offer a small correction, if I may.
The vast majority of the popular/jock kids in school/college do not actually make it to the top social strata at all. They merely live out the rest of their days as consumers, contributing to the overall GDP of whatever place they inhabit. Very few of those kids actually go on to become that politicians we nerds hate.
But you said it yourself - we nerds do not really have social skills. To be a politician, you need to control the masses, not be frustrated when they do not understand you (because you are, after all, WAY smarter than them). In short, politicians are not that good at making rational decisions, analyzing vast amounts of informationn, but are rather good at public speaking, are charismatic, etc. This is something that is rooted in the history of the development of the human race.
It, like religion and many other social constructs, are quickly becoming obsolete in the face of the technological juggernaut known as the Internet. Mostly all aspects of our past lives that were bound by distance or the ability to analyze large amounts of relevant data instantly are now under attack.
Naturally, they are resisting that attack. You should take comfort in the knowledge that things are in fact, changing (look at wikileaks). And it is change ushered into the worlds by geeks:)
So, take pride in that. Things are not terrible! We are just seeing the inefficiency in the system, and correcting it as we go along.
Actually this is a real company that has been around for a while. They are into data visualization technology which also sucks. The kind of thing where you can tell 4 Pentagon generals "You can find Osama Bin-Laden from your office by buying our bloat." And they all buy it.
All part of the military industrial complex. Good stuff.
Respectfully, I think the military is the ultimate cooperative ANTI social unit. It's just anti the other social group. The war chimps make is not really the type of war we make, at least in the last 100 years (or farther back). The only real killing chimps commit to is if they manage to corner another chimp all by its lonesome, otherwise the type of war they wage is highly ornamental (kinda of like some Indonesian tribes).
The close social bonds that form within military units are a result of closeness due to a harsh environment, an environment in which you destroy other human beings and they destroy you.
The military just dehumanizes the enemy better than any other group, and honestly, if you look at it on a global scale, that is pretty sociopathic.
Not that there is anything wrong with that. IMO, only the strong must survive, lest all others drown our civilization with their resource needs.
I see nothing in that article that is a concrete design choice the GW2 team has made to specifically address the "problems" of current MMOs. They simply provide out-of-context examples of potentially cool scenarios. Wouldn't it be cool if we fired through walls of fire!!!! Yes it would, the first 15 times.
MMO design needs to take a radical step away from "MMO combat mechanics" into other directions (some people suggested more social aspects which I do not like) in order to be innovative. These mechanics were spawned by old school D&D mechanics by way of MUDs, and honestly, these ideas are OLD. Not all are bad, either. Until they do innovate though, no amount of marketing by game studios will convince me to subscribe to their new games. Neither will it convince all the people currently playing WoW to switch to something else.
There is a reason millions are playing that game. It provides cheap entertainment value for them, through a myriad of activities that, although repetitive, are greatly enhanced through the social aspect that is provided by online connectivity to a context of a world. Combat is boring, UNLESS you have to orchestrate with 25 people. Crafting is boring UNLESS you can sell your wares to a market economy. And so on.
As soon as a game is created to provide the same or greater entertainment value to people, they will jump. It just has to be innovative enough to make them jump. And yeah, open world group quests already failed, with WAR. That game could have been a radical attempt to reforge the MMO landscape, but the designers instead opted to play it safe and re-create WoW. Who will be next? From what I have read it doesn't seem like GW2 is ready to take up that cup.
Agreed. This whole article is like an evil being from another dimension, attempting to enter our world, and destroy our reality's fabric by posting RIDCULOUS non news. iFrames??? Yyyyyeaaahhhh. It makes sense if you look at who wrote it though. Not to be evil or anything, but check out the "About The Author" page. There is some seriously scary shit there. I can't believe this made it to the Slashdot front page.
What these guys are doing: http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth. Sure they are living in their parent's basement, but they seem genuinely talented, both artistically and technologically. Other game developers that are trying to cater to billions have already given up and have nothing to complain about.
There are some good reasons mentioned here, but I wanted to throw in my 2 cents as well. I have used Wicket professionally and loved it. I evaluated the GWT on my own time and was moderately impressed. HOWEVER:
Most people that are in charge of project are not going to pick a "new and cool" component-based web framework like the GWT or Wicket simply because they are afraid of what they do not know. I am not talking about some guy providing professional services (those are the people mostly using Wicket and GWT actually) but about primary architects at medium to large corporations with multi-million dollar budgets.
Why do they not make what I think is the right choice? The fear is part of it of course, but these guys are good, smart professionals, so there must be another reason. I believe that reason is the glut of web frameworks currently available on the Java platform. Even evaluating one takes time a lot of these people do not have. If they cannot evaluate everything, they cannot agree on anything, so there is no industry wide consensus. Most of these people are very careful risk-averse individuals (a good trait to have for an engineer), and there we are.
That's one I had forgotten, thanks for reminding me. The reason I forgot it is I have not actually played it. The YouTube gameplay videos disgusted me so I opted out. Maybe I was wrong....
I totally and completely agree with you. The irony indeed... Furthermore some here suggest AoC is different. It is NOT. It is yet another WoW clone with minor, trivial differences. I think that to see innovation in the MMO scene, you would have to look away from the big players in the gaming industry. The amount of money required will always let business people be the main drivers in such projects, thereby destroying any potential in utero.
We just have to be patient enough for the indie game scene to catch up technologically, and organizationally. Independent MMO projects suffer from lack of direction and too much geekiness ("Everyone can be a God!"), not to mention insurmountable technological hurdles.
There's really two branches of Warhammer, the Fantasy Battles (which WAR is targeting), and the 40,000 which takes 40,000 year in the future. "40k" as it is known, currently has a much better PC representation. Fantasy battles saw the release of some truly horrible ("Shadow of the Horned Rat") games on various platforms, and currently has no "go to" title in computer games. Both mythologies are similar, and equally rich and fleshed out.
For 40k, you can grab "Dawn of War" and its expansions. They are extremely faithful to the source material and their campaigns are kind of fun. If you are a competitive RTS player, you can really get into it online, as DoW tends to be somewhat balanced.
Or you could go to a gaming story and buy some pewter figurines:)
And I have been paid twenty five quid to scorch my children with the unholy fire of Microsoft's Vista marketing.
*starts sweating*
Marketing executives, marketing executives, marketing executives!
*wild look in the eyes*
...there is no surprise that the helmet has been compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger's killer robot in The Terminator. Predator? Terminator? Somebody's confused again! Gosh, its just so hard to keep all the popular culture straight!
I review games for the Adrenaline Vault site, and I must say even I do not know how the whole thing works. I get sent my assignments, I play the game for a while, then write the review and send it to my editor. He hacks out the critical parts, and posts some bland version of my usually critical work. Although I am often given choices as to what games to review I have no idea why the choices that are presented in front of me are there in the first place. I certainly have no contact with any developer or advertiser.
Some of the games I have been playing lately are so bad, they numb the mind, and I cannot imagine ANYONE caring about them at all. Then there are the reviews I am asked to write about games that came out in April... Tin Hat Wearing types could take that and run with it.
I would like, as a history nerd, to point out that Pearl Harbor was not a defeat in the strategic sense. All of the U.S. carrier battle groups were out of the harbor on training, and thus were not sunk. They were subsequently instrumental in winning key battles such as the battles of Midway and Guadalcanal. People considered it a defeat because few military strategists at the time were aware of the full power of the aircraft carrier, and naval air operations.
I agree with your sentiment about Pearl Harbor the movie being a horrible piece of Hollywood trash. The only thing I liked was the fact it portrayed the Japanese as men of honor and not "them slanty eyed Jap bastards."
Slashdot Mirror
Using such a DB can be a two edged sword. Especially when wielded by bored CTOs who have nothing to do but try new tech without "sweating the details."
They key thing I have taken away from the experience of using such a DB is that typically, software architects will start migrating or build new functionality in earnest, only still succumbing to a relation schema in the end.
Except the schema is backed by a non-relational database now. Which causes very, very high amounts of pain.
This is not to say correct use of NoSQL DBs is not possible. I just have yet to see it.
Are these the ones where Greedo shoots first?
The VCs behind Skype are some really smart guys that happen to have made a good decision in this case. Get rid of some cruft to benefit the senior engineers and people that actually built the product.
It's good to remember that people above you in the corporate structure aren't necessarily evil idiots. They are just evil idiots 95% of the time.
That was heartfelt.
:)
I agree with your sentiment, but I would like to offer a small correction, if I may.
The vast majority of the popular/jock kids in school/college do not actually make it to the top social strata at all. They merely live out the rest of their days as consumers, contributing to the overall GDP of whatever place they inhabit. Very few of those kids actually go on to become that politicians we nerds hate.
But you said it yourself - we nerds do not really have social skills. To be a politician, you need to control the masses, not be frustrated when they do not understand you (because you are, after all, WAY smarter than them). In short, politicians are not that good at making rational decisions, analyzing vast amounts of informationn, but are rather good at public speaking, are charismatic, etc. This is something that is rooted in the history of the development of the human race.
It, like religion and many other social constructs, are quickly becoming obsolete in the face of the technological juggernaut known as the Internet. Mostly all aspects of our past lives that were bound by distance or the ability to analyze large amounts of relevant data instantly are now under attack.
Naturally, they are resisting that attack. You should take comfort in the knowledge that things are in fact, changing (look at wikileaks). And it is change ushered into the worlds by geeks
So, take pride in that. Things are not terrible! We are just seeing the inefficiency in the system, and correcting it as we go along.
Actually this is a real company that has been around for a while. They are into data visualization technology which also sucks. The kind of thing where you can tell 4 Pentagon generals "You can find Osama Bin-Laden from your office by buying our bloat." And they all buy it. All part of the military industrial complex. Good stuff.
Respectfully, I think the military is the ultimate cooperative ANTI social unit. It's just anti the other social group. The war chimps make is not really the type of war we make, at least in the last 100 years (or farther back). The only real killing chimps commit to is if they manage to corner another chimp all by its lonesome, otherwise the type of war they wage is highly ornamental (kinda of like some Indonesian tribes).
The close social bonds that form within military units are a result of closeness due to a harsh environment, an environment in which you destroy other human beings and they destroy you.
The military just dehumanizes the enemy better than any other group, and honestly, if you look at it on a global scale, that is pretty sociopathic.
Not that there is anything wrong with that. IMO, only the strong must survive, lest all others drown our civilization with their resource needs.
I see nothing in that article that is a concrete design choice the GW2 team has made to specifically address the "problems" of current MMOs. They simply provide out-of-context examples of potentially cool scenarios. Wouldn't it be cool if we fired through walls of fire!!!! Yes it would, the first 15 times.
MMO design needs to take a radical step away from "MMO combat mechanics" into other directions (some people suggested more social aspects which I do not like) in order to be innovative. These mechanics were spawned by old school D&D mechanics by way of MUDs, and honestly, these ideas are OLD. Not all are bad, either. Until they do innovate though, no amount of marketing by game studios will convince me to subscribe to their new games. Neither will it convince all the people currently playing WoW to switch to something else.
There is a reason millions are playing that game. It provides cheap entertainment value for them, through a myriad of activities that, although repetitive, are greatly enhanced through the social aspect that is provided by online connectivity to a context of a world. Combat is boring, UNLESS you have to orchestrate with 25 people. Crafting is boring UNLESS you can sell your wares to a market economy. And so on.
As soon as a game is created to provide the same or greater entertainment value to people, they will jump. It just has to be innovative enough to make them jump. And yeah, open world group quests already failed, with WAR. That game could have been a radical attempt to reforge the MMO landscape, but the designers instead opted to play it safe and re-create WoW. Who will be next? From what I have read it doesn't seem like GW2 is ready to take up that cup.
Agreed. This whole article is like an evil being from another dimension, attempting to enter our world, and destroy our reality's fabric by posting RIDCULOUS non news. iFrames??? Yyyyyeaaahhhh. It makes sense if you look at who wrote it though. Not to be evil or anything, but check out the "About The Author" page. There is some seriously scary shit there. I can't believe this made it to the Slashdot front page.
What these guys are doing: http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth.
Sure they are living in their parent's basement, but they seem genuinely talented, both artistically and technologically. Other game developers that are trying to cater to billions have already given up and have nothing to complain about.
Of the search results from google.cn. That's a big deal, folks. Let's see how this plays out....
Is that like a jiggawatt?
There are some good reasons mentioned here, but I wanted to throw in my 2 cents as well. I have used Wicket professionally and loved it. I evaluated the GWT on my own time and was moderately impressed. HOWEVER:
Most people that are in charge of project are not going to pick a "new and cool" component-based web framework like the GWT or Wicket simply because they are afraid of what they do not know. I am not talking about some guy providing professional services (those are the people mostly using Wicket and GWT actually) but about primary architects at medium to large corporations with multi-million dollar budgets.
Why do they not make what I think is the right choice? The fear is part of it of course, but these guys are good, smart professionals, so there must be another reason. I believe that reason is the glut of web frameworks currently available on the Java platform. Even evaluating one takes time a lot of these people do not have. If they cannot evaluate everything, they cannot agree on anything, so there is no industry wide consensus. Most of these people are very careful risk-averse individuals (a good trait to have for an engineer), and there we are.
That's one I had forgotten, thanks for reminding me. The reason I forgot it is I have not actually played it. The YouTube gameplay videos disgusted me so I opted out. Maybe I was wrong....
I totally and completely agree with you. The irony indeed... Furthermore some here suggest AoC is different. It is NOT. It is yet another WoW clone with minor, trivial differences. I think that to see innovation in the MMO scene, you would have to look away from the big players in the gaming industry. The amount of money required will always let business people be the main drivers in such projects, thereby destroying any potential in utero.
We just have to be patient enough for the indie game scene to catch up technologically, and organizationally. Independent MMO projects suffer from lack of direction and too much geekiness ("Everyone can be a God!"), not to mention insurmountable technological hurdles.
There's really two branches of Warhammer, the Fantasy Battles (which WAR is targeting), and the 40,000 which takes 40,000 year in the future. "40k" as it is known, currently has a much better PC representation. Fantasy battles saw the release of some truly horrible ("Shadow of the Horned Rat") games on various platforms, and currently has no "go to" title in computer games. Both mythologies are similar, and equally rich and fleshed out.
:)
For 40k, you can grab "Dawn of War" and its expansions. They are extremely faithful to the source material and their campaigns are kind of fun. If you are a competitive RTS player, you can really get into it online, as DoW tends to be somewhat balanced.
Or you could go to a gaming story and buy some pewter figurines
Print's dead.
And I have been paid twenty five quid to scorch my children with the unholy fire of Microsoft's Vista marketing.
*starts sweating*
Marketing executives, marketing executives, marketing executives!
*wild look in the eyes*
Let's get you home to Frinky. M-hei.
Editors: You may want to fix the title of the article.
...there is no surprise that the helmet has been compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger's killer robot in The Terminator. Predator? Terminator? Somebody's confused again! Gosh, its just so hard to keep all the popular culture straight!I review games for the Adrenaline Vault site, and I must say even I do not know how the whole thing works. I get sent my assignments, I play the game for a while, then write the review and send it to my editor. He hacks out the critical parts, and posts some bland version of my usually critical work. Although I am often given choices as to what games to review I have no idea why the choices that are presented in front of me are there in the first place. I certainly have no contact with any developer or advertiser.
Some of the games I have been playing lately are so bad, they numb the mind, and I cannot imagine ANYONE caring about them at all. Then there are the reviews I am asked to write about games that came out in April... Tin Hat Wearing types could take that and run with it.
I am under the impression that if successfull, the RIAA will force most radio stations to be hosted offshore, following the Pirate Bay model.
This is pretty cool, what can U.S. customers hope for, I wonder?
I would like, as a history nerd, to point out that Pearl Harbor was not a defeat in the strategic sense. All of the U.S. carrier battle groups were out of the harbor on training, and thus were not sunk. They were subsequently instrumental in winning key battles such as the battles of Midway and Guadalcanal. People considered it a defeat because few military strategists at the time were aware of the full power of the aircraft carrier, and naval air operations.
I agree with your sentiment about Pearl Harbor the movie being a horrible piece of Hollywood trash. The only thing I liked was the fact it portrayed the Japanese as men of honor and not "them slanty eyed Jap bastards."
Check this out: http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=70
Not just an overhaul. Just let it rest in the past.