Far too often, outrageous system requirements are a result of the programmers being [too lazy | under too much pressure from Marketing] to take the time to write good, clean code. Hell, if I didn't care about optimisation, I could write my own version of Pong that would need a PIII to get more than 1 fps. (For that matter, the later versions of ZAngband don't run too well on my P200...)
And if length of development were the only thing contributing to system requirements staying low, then Daikatana should be able to run on ENIAC. Blizzard used that time for (among other things) making sure that the engine didn't get out of hand and force the system requirements up too much. The only change from the projected requirements was from a P166 to a P233, and I've heard more than one stress tester report that it runs decently on a P200 (64 meg RAM), and one on a P166 (32 meg). How many games these days can be played reasonably well on less than the "minimum" system? (How many can be played reasonably well on the "recommended" system, for that matter?)
For YEARS I had been sitting in my chair leaning forward to 'peek' around a corner in games like Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, et. al. (and NO, it didn't work, but it never stopped me from tryint!)
My one unbreakable rule of playing Doom was this: the moment I leaned forward and bumped the monitor with my nose because I was trying to look over the edge of a ledge, it was time to stop playing for the night, because I was too badly immersed. Glad I'm not the only one who did this.
Form a design team. Doesn't have to stay together.
If game is somewhere between 50% and 75% finished at Halloween, cut whatever corners are necessary to get game on shelves before Christmas.
Ship on Marketing's ship date. Why pay beta testers when there are thousands of gamers who will pay to beta-test the game?
Stay out of the bargain bin for at least 3 months.
Hard:
Have an idea. Make sure it isn't a total rehash, or simply an excuse to wrap expensive eye candy around not much game.
Form a design team. Keep them together during the entire project.
Test and tweak sufficiently to warrant a version number of 1.0 (at least) on the gold master.
Don't listen to Marketing, but still try to get the game out in time for Christmas if it looks like release will be in Q4.
Sell 100,000 units.
Expert:
Have an idea. If you're rehashing, make sure it's a rehash of something you've done, and make sure you're doing it better this time. Even this much rehashing is only permissible in a sequel.
You've got a design team because, with few exceptions, your people don't leave.
Make sure the game works. Nobody wants to download patches. Nobody catches all the bugs, true, but the game should be fundamentally sound out of the chute.
Don't set a release date. Don't let Marketing set a release date. Screw Christmas.
Sell 250,000 units.
Don't kill anyone. Depriving QA personnel of normal lives during beta testing is allowed, though.
Too many developers play at Normal, and game companies aren't the only culprits. Not nearly enough play at Hard, and a literal handful even try Expert. And now there's one fewer of those. Damn shame.
It's amazing that corporate America went so out of their way to invest in every Linux IPO out there, yet they dont take the OS itself seriouly.
The corporations invest because Linux draws favourable attention from the press, especially the trade press, and 'most anything that gets favourable media coverage is seen as a worthwhile investment.
The corporations don't take it seriously because it's new tech (in their eyes, anyhow; never mind that Bill was in grade school when Ken appropriated that PDP-6), and new tech is best left for others to expend time and money experimenting with.
The worst thing about this is that since Windows hides file extensions by default, many users don't even know what a.vbs file is. IIRC, when ILOVEYOU went around, the "warhead" file was actually named iloveyou.txt.vbs or something of the sort, so most users (those with filename extensions hidden) would see iloveyou.txt and not think twice about it.
I took care of this by creating an empty text file, changing the extension to.vbs, and sending it around the company so that everyone could see what the icon for the file looks like, regardless of what the filename appears to be.
Well, a typical Exodus facility isn't nuke-proof, but it's pretty damn close. I've toured one (in Herndon, VA) because our company is about to co-loc at it. Here's a brief rundown of the physical security:
The building is a converted warehouse; every interior and exterior wall is filled with reinforced concrete
Extra curbs and islands in parking lot directly in front of the door
Two-foot-high concrete pillars in sidewalk leading to the door
Concrete overhang over door, only 8 feet of clearance
No windows
One door for entry (no loading dock)
Receptionists/security chimps sit in a bulletproof enclosure
Mantrap-style "airlock" with 3"-thick steel doors leads to all computer facilities; office areas have single steel doors sealing them off from lobby
You run into all this before you even see anything resembling a computer, apart from the terminals in the receptionist's enclosure. In the actual computer pens, you have the cages, and for the really paranoid, you can get a steel box with a biometric lock instead of a conventional cage.
To sum up...it would take a truly concerted effort to physically breach one of these facilities.
It is about time that us "geeks" re-claimed our Internet from the dumbed down masses. We should return to the days of ARPA, when only people with a legitimate requirement could get net access. The "democratization" (i.e. moronification) of the web has gone too far and is responsible for the majority of problems us "original internet users" are seeing. The flood of newbies must not only be stopped, it needs to be REVERSED. These non-tech-savvy people need cable TV, and not something as sophisticated and potentially dangerous as the Internet.
While my wife and I often joke about the sentiment of this statement (at least once a day, one of us will point at a website or an email and say, "Yet Another person who really shouldn't be on the Internet"), we also know that actually believing it is horribly shortsighted thinking. Yes, there's a lot of no-content fluff out there on the web. But people have to start somewhere. I wouldn't expect a person's first web page to be more meaningful than "here's my house, my family, and my pets" any more than I'd expect a 6-year-old's first two-wheeler to be a Harley.
Granted, some folks never get past the "training wheels" stage. (Okay, make that "a lot of folks" these days.) But the Internet has long passed the days when it was a tool for a select group of people. If the S/N ratio is dropping precipitously, well, then, improve your noise filters. Make it a habit to include things like "-url:aol.com" in every search if you need to. You're one of the "tech-savvy" crowd (directed at the original AC who posted); use your tech knowledge! If all you can do is bitch about the fluff on the web without using readily-available tools to cut through it, maybe you're not as tech-savvy as you'd like us to believe.
"I shouldn't have to" isn't a valid response, either. In any information search, irrelevant data will turn up, and you're going to have to sort through it anyhow.
There may not be any publicly-available repositories as such, but there are firms out there doing this sort of thing. My wife and I recently went on a search on behalf of a friend of ours, who was trying to get into some of her old Philips Videowriter disks and not having much luck.
We found two good leads. One is a pure data conversion company, which has a huge list of formats up on its website which it can convert between. One would assume that they have a database of the format information, though the gods only know whether they'd release any of it. (If it's magnetic media, it's on that list, I think. Didn't take the time to look for drums or cores, though...) They're at pivar.com.
The other one seems to be a one-man shop at www.macdisk.com. He sells a couple of utilities: one which reads your ancient floppy and generates an image of it on your Windows box or Mac, while the other can actually extract the individual files from that image. Presumably, he also has a list of the specs on these file formats.
If anyone could persuade these folks to give up the goods on the formats themselves (not the conversion tools, since they've chosen to make their living off of them), it would probably do us all some good.
There really hasn't been any significant technological progress in space exploration since the early 1980s. Sure, probes are smaller and cheaper, but that's because the onboard computers are smaller and more powerful. Otherwise, the most advanced "spaceship" on the planet is little changed from when it was developed in the 1970s. That's right, the shuttle.
So what happened to the space program, in the US at least? With the technology that was available, it was getting prohibitively expensive to keep moving forward. The real benefits of the space program were being felt dirtside, especially the development of more powerful computers.
Computers happened. When computers became The Next Big Thing, and no significant progress was arising in space exploration (that little thing called the Challenger explosion didn't help), our priorities shifted. Now most of our engineering is focused on making the computers faster, smaller, and more powerful. Maybe in a couple generations of desktop computer, we'll be able to start taking space exploration seriously again. Maybe not.
I'd offer an analogy to a tech-advancing strategy game like Civ II, but it's late and it's time to hit the road.
What's the real issue here? Sex? Free speech? Or the fact that far too many parents want the government to do the job of parenting for them?
Security through obscurity doesn't work in the tech world, and it sure as hell doesn't work in parenting. Yet it's the most popular mode of operation for many parents: try to hide the existence of sex from the kids, while at the same time put off figuring out how to explain it to the kids when the time comes. And just like in the tech world, when the obscurity is dispelled, there's as often as not no real "security plan" left. In the case of parents, what often happens is the kid comes home and wants to know something about sex; the parents haven't planned The Talk out, and hem and haw uncomfortably. Kid decides to do some independent research, the parents find out, and they start screaming about the filth polluting America's youth. Government hears the screams and decides to do something about it. But where was the real point of failure here?
Many kids want to listen to their parents. But for the parents to fill that role, they have to open their eyes and realise that simply hiding uncomfortable truths (and the way a lot of people are brought up, things like sex are uncomfortable truths) isn't the way to go. Controlled, supervised exposure is what's needed. But that's just too much involvement, it seems, for many parents these days.
The probe that just royally screwed up (was it the Mars Polar Lander?) because some tech didn't convert from English to metric units should've been listed, if only to underscore the point that it's long past high time for this country to pick a system of units and STICK WITH IT. (Non-'merkins need not feel slighted, the rest of the world does it right!)
At the risk of starting (or contributing to) an OT flamewar...
The use of Xmas in this context is a nice shorthand for "in the spirit of giving and sharing that is common to many faiths at this time of year". My wife got into a painful discussion of this sort a few days ago at work. She and I are of, shall we say, a religious belief that isn't mainstream. Yet we celebrate Christmas, because we have friends and family who do, and we enjoy giving them presents and being part of their celebrations. Our religion celebrates Yule. The presents we happen to give each other are Yule presents, but they're part of our "Christmas shopping". Not holiday shopping, as most of it is for people who celebrate Christmas, and "holiday shopping" smacks way too much of political correctness for our tastes.
The aforementioned painful discussion was with a cow-orker who doesn't think that someone of alternative beliefs should celebrate Christmas. And more's the pity. Such thought hides the true message of this season, which is that it's time for friends and family to get together and give gifts, most importantly those gifts which can't be packaged in a cardboard box with wrapping paper.
So don't get bent out of shape over the use of "Christmas". If the sacred holiday of Christmas isn't part of your belief system, then insert whatever celebration is appropriate for you. (Especially for those of you who don't get a day off on or around 25 Dec., and therefore don't like thinking of it as "the holiday season".)
After a quick side-by-side (well, window-over-window) comparison between Communicator 4.7 and IE5, both running on NT, I don't see what the problem is. (Apart from the browser-specific text slapped onto the top of the Netscape page, of course.)
Slashdot Mirror
Far too often, outrageous system requirements are a result of the programmers being [too lazy | under too much pressure from Marketing] to take the time to write good, clean code. Hell, if I didn't care about optimisation, I could write my own version of Pong that would need a PIII to get more than 1 fps. (For that matter, the later versions of ZAngband don't run too well on my P200...)
And if length of development were the only thing contributing to system requirements staying low, then Daikatana should be able to run on ENIAC. Blizzard used that time for (among other things) making sure that the engine didn't get out of hand and force the system requirements up too much. The only change from the projected requirements was from a P166 to a P233, and I've heard more than one stress tester report that it runs decently on a P200 (64 meg RAM), and one on a P166 (32 meg). How many games these days can be played reasonably well on less than the "minimum" system? (How many can be played reasonably well on the "recommended" system, for that matter?)
Aero
For YEARS I had been sitting in my chair leaning forward to 'peek' around a corner in games like Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, et. al. (and NO, it didn't work, but it never stopped me from tryint!)
My one unbreakable rule of playing Doom was this: the moment I leaned forward and bumped the monitor with my nose because I was trying to look over the edge of a ledge, it was time to stop playing for the night, because I was too badly immersed. Glad I'm not the only one who did this.
Aero
Normal:
Hard:
Expert:
Too many developers play at Normal, and game companies aren't the only culprits. Not nearly enough play at Hard, and a literal handful even try Expert. And now there's one fewer of those. Damn shame.
Aero
It's amazing that corporate America went so out of their way to invest in every Linux IPO out there, yet they dont take the OS itself seriouly.
The corporations invest because Linux draws favourable attention from the press, especially the trade press, and 'most anything that gets favourable media coverage is seen as a worthwhile investment.
The corporations don't take it seriously because it's new tech (in their eyes, anyhow; never mind that Bill was in grade school when Ken appropriated that PDP-6), and new tech is best left for others to expend time and money experimenting with.
Aero
The worst thing about this is that since Windows hides file extensions by default, many users don't even know what a .vbs file is. IIRC, when ILOVEYOU went around, the "warhead" file was actually named iloveyou.txt.vbs or something of the sort, so most users (those with filename extensions hidden) would see iloveyou.txt and not think twice about it.
I took care of this by creating an empty text file, changing the extension to .vbs, and sending it around the company so that everyone could see what the icon for the file looks like, regardless of what the filename appears to be.
Aero
Well, a typical Exodus facility isn't nuke-proof, but it's pretty damn close. I've toured one (in Herndon, VA) because our company is about to co-loc at it. Here's a brief rundown of the physical security:
You run into all this before you even see anything resembling a computer, apart from the terminals in the receptionist's enclosure. In the actual computer pens, you have the cages, and for the really paranoid, you can get a steel box with a biometric lock instead of a conventional cage.
To sum up...it would take a truly concerted effort to physically breach one of these facilities.
Aero
It is about time that us "geeks" re-claimed our Internet from the dumbed down masses. We should return to the days of ARPA, when only people with a legitimate requirement could get net access. The "democratization" (i.e. moronification) of the web has gone too far and is responsible for the majority of problems us "original internet users" are seeing. The flood of newbies must not only be stopped, it needs to be REVERSED. These non-tech-savvy people need cable TV, and not something as sophisticated and potentially dangerous as the Internet.
While my wife and I often joke about the sentiment of this statement (at least once a day, one of us will point at a website or an email and say, "Yet Another person who really shouldn't be on the Internet"), we also know that actually believing it is horribly shortsighted thinking. Yes, there's a lot of no-content fluff out there on the web. But people have to start somewhere. I wouldn't expect a person's first web page to be more meaningful than "here's my house, my family, and my pets" any more than I'd expect a 6-year-old's first two-wheeler to be a Harley.
Granted, some folks never get past the "training wheels" stage. (Okay, make that "a lot of folks" these days.) But the Internet has long passed the days when it was a tool for a select group of people. If the S/N ratio is dropping precipitously, well, then, improve your noise filters. Make it a habit to include things like "-url:aol.com" in every search if you need to. You're one of the "tech-savvy" crowd (directed at the original AC who posted); use your tech knowledge! If all you can do is bitch about the fluff on the web without using readily-available tools to cut through it, maybe you're not as tech-savvy as you'd like us to believe.
"I shouldn't have to" isn't a valid response, either. In any information search, irrelevant data will turn up, and you're going to have to sort through it anyhow.
Aero
There may not be any publicly-available repositories as such, but there are firms out there doing this sort of thing. My wife and I recently went on a search on behalf of a friend of ours, who was trying to get into some of her old Philips Videowriter disks and not having much luck.
We found two good leads. One is a pure data conversion company, which has a huge list of formats up on its website which it can convert between. One would assume that they have a database of the format information, though the gods only know whether they'd release any of it. (If it's magnetic media, it's on that list, I think. Didn't take the time to look for drums or cores, though...) They're at pivar.com.
The other one seems to be a one-man shop at www.macdisk.com. He sells a couple of utilities: one which reads your ancient floppy and generates an image of it on your Windows box or Mac, while the other can actually extract the individual files from that image. Presumably, he also has a list of the specs on these file formats.
If anyone could persuade these folks to give up the goods on the formats themselves (not the conversion tools, since they've chosen to make their living off of them), it would probably do us all some good.
Dear God, the 10,000th article, and no replies yet. I'm almost afraid to see what will come out.
Petrified grits?
Naked JonKatz?
"Score:5 (Flamebait)"?
Hot Hemos poured down one's pants?
Frightening thoughts, all. I'll be hiding in an abandoned Y2K bunker. Wake me when Linux 2.4 is released.
There really hasn't been any significant technological progress in space exploration since the early 1980s. Sure, probes are smaller and cheaper, but that's because the onboard computers are smaller and more powerful. Otherwise, the most advanced "spaceship" on the planet is little changed from when it was developed in the 1970s. That's right, the shuttle.
So what happened to the space program, in the US at least? With the technology that was available, it was getting prohibitively expensive to keep moving forward. The real benefits of the space program were being felt dirtside, especially the development of more powerful computers.
Computers happened. When computers became The Next Big Thing, and no significant progress was arising in space exploration (that little thing called the Challenger explosion didn't help), our priorities shifted. Now most of our engineering is focused on making the computers faster, smaller, and more powerful. Maybe in a couple generations of desktop computer, we'll be able to start taking space exploration seriously again. Maybe not.
I'd offer an analogy to a tech-advancing strategy game like Civ II, but it's late and it's time to hit the road.
Where's the Lego potato cannon? That would be impressive.
(And where was this thing when I was 10 years old, and throwing the bricks by hand in my Lego battles?)
What's the real issue here? Sex? Free speech? Or the fact that far too many parents want the government to do the job of parenting for them?
Security through obscurity doesn't work in the tech world, and it sure as hell doesn't work in parenting. Yet it's the most popular mode of operation for many parents: try to hide the existence of sex from the kids, while at the same time put off figuring out how to explain it to the kids when the time comes. And just like in the tech world, when the obscurity is dispelled, there's as often as not no real "security plan" left. In the case of parents, what often happens is the kid comes home and wants to know something about sex; the parents haven't planned The Talk out, and hem and haw uncomfortably. Kid decides to do some independent research, the parents find out, and they start screaming about the filth polluting America's youth. Government hears the screams and decides to do something about it. But where was the real point of failure here?
Many kids want to listen to their parents. But for the parents to fill that role, they have to open their eyes and realise that simply hiding uncomfortable truths (and the way a lot of people are brought up, things like sex are uncomfortable truths) isn't the way to go. Controlled, supervised exposure is what's needed. But that's just too much involvement, it seems, for many parents these days.
The probe that just royally screwed up (was it the Mars Polar Lander?) because some tech didn't convert from English to metric units should've been listed, if only to underscore the point that it's long past high time for this country to pick a system of units and STICK WITH IT. (Non-'merkins need not feel slighted, the rest of the world does it right!)
At the risk of starting (or contributing to) an OT flamewar...
The use of Xmas in this context is a nice shorthand for "in the spirit of giving and sharing that is common to many faiths at this time of year". My wife got into a painful discussion of this sort a few days ago at work. She and I are of, shall we say, a religious belief that isn't mainstream. Yet we celebrate Christmas, because we have friends and family who do, and we enjoy giving them presents and being part of their celebrations. Our religion celebrates Yule. The presents we happen to give each other are Yule presents, but they're part of our "Christmas shopping". Not holiday shopping, as most of it is for people who celebrate Christmas, and "holiday shopping" smacks way too much of political correctness for our tastes.
The aforementioned painful discussion was with a cow-orker who doesn't think that someone of alternative beliefs should celebrate Christmas. And more's the pity. Such thought hides the true message of this season, which is that it's time for friends and family to get together and give gifts, most importantly those gifts which can't be packaged in a cardboard box with wrapping paper.
So don't get bent out of shape over the use of "Christmas". If the sacred holiday of Christmas isn't part of your belief system, then insert whatever celebration is appropriate for you. (Especially for those of you who don't get a day off on or around 25 Dec., and therefore don't like thinking of it as "the holiday season".)
After a quick side-by-side (well, window-over-window) comparison between Communicator 4.7 and IE5, both running on NT, I don't see what the problem is. (Apart from the browser-specific text slapped onto the top of the Netscape page, of course.)