Journal Journal: Everywhere is home
Watery steps across the sky,
drops of naked new surprise,
smiled into the megaphone,
home onto my mind's throne.
Journal Journal: Sunny side up! 1
Excited! That's the word.
It has that funky flavour of good vibes, but it also contains that aftertaste of some lesser vibes. It has Obama making us forget previous steps in the evolutionary chain, it has economic meltdown, it has a planet with a weather fury, it has outrageous coding pleasure as well as millions of unpaid hours of monkey work. It has a whole new world and a new fantastic point of view. And it has Isabelle, a girl I will marry in about 1 month!
Comment Professional (Score 1) 1365
Not wanting to start a war on anything:
I fully agree with the argument that professional development applications such as 3DMax still have not cut it into the UX realm, except from the usual suspects like Gimp and Renderman. Developing games for other platforms could easily be supported on Linux - ps development - if only the tools were up to par. Meaning: saving time rather than costing it.
That sort of givens automatically drive your decision making process as to what platform you'll be using when developing games. There are alternatives. Like there are alternatives in choosing your workforce, or spending lots of training to convert to Maya or Houdini, but that is not the cheaper solution, and it kind of voids the whole argument.
That said, I really think most of the arguments are really quite minor, except for maybe 1: a regression suite that can detect hardware incompatibility problems.
Another one that would be easy to come up with is a test-suite that streamlines the development of application configuration through both command-line and GUI. Helpful, but not crucial.
Reading the other items, I had an idea: What if distro's refer to a sort of xml configuration file with a shared / common format that specifies how exactly each distro has to set up it's files and dependencies, such that such configuration grief and the fact that 'each distro organises things differently' could be overcome in true linux style: maintaining uniqueness of the software (kernel) AND being flexible about the details (data).
All yours for the bashing..
LittleBigPlanet Goes Gold, Trophies Leaked 51
Upcoming world creation game LittleBigPlanet has gone gold, and will be officially released on Oct. 21st in the US. The game will come out exclusively for the PS3, in part due to the fact that it fills up a Blu-ray disc. The list of trophies was leaked alongside the announcement. Groups of students at Parsons will be using a 24-hour period this weekend to create levels for the game. Gamespy has a collection of videos and previews for LittleBigPlanet. To protect users' creations, it will feature an in-game copyright system.
Activision Goes After Individual Game Pirates 216
brunascle writes "Activision has begun suing individual pirates of console games. Edge Online is reporting that they are going after a New York resident for allegedly copying Call of Duty 3 for the Xbox 360 and other games, seeking $30,000 to $150,000 in damages for each infringement. GamePolitics has also uncovered six other lawsuits with settlements between $1,000 and $100,000, in five of which the defendant was unrepresented."
Activision's lawyers specifically told GamePolitics that the lawsuit wasn't targeting file-sharers, so they probably mean that the alleged pirate was reproducing and distributing physical copies of the game. The court complaint is available here (PDF).
EA Patches Spore, Eases DRM 161
EA has released the first patch for Spore, the purpose of which is to fix a number of bugs and tweak some gameplay settings to be more entertaining. Some of the visual effects were upgraded as well. They've also officially responded to the complaints about Spore's DRM, stating their intention to increase the number of allowed installations to five and to set up a system to "de-authorize" systems in order to reclaim the installation credit. They plan to allow multiple screen names per account, which was an issue for many families trying to play the game. This comes not long after EA made similar changes to the DRM of upcoming RTS Red Alert 3, and after Spore's DRM protest spread to in-game creature designs. Reader SoopahMan notes that users in EA's Spore tech support forum are reporting a number of new issues caused by the patch.
Why Lazy Functional Programming Languages Rule 439
Da Massive writes "Techworld has an in-depth chat with Simon Peyton-Jones about the development of Haskell and his philosophy of do one thing, and do it well. Peyton-Jones describes his interest in lazy functional programming languages, and chats about their increasing relevance in a world with rapidly increasing multi-core CPUs and clusters. 'I think Haskell is increasingly well placed for this multi-core stuff, as I think people are increasingly going to look to languages like Haskell and say 'oh, that's where we can get some good ideas at least', whether or not it's the actual language or concrete syntax that they adopt.'"
Submission + - Serialkillers playing GTA in prison
andr0meda writes: "Hans V.T.(Dutch) was just 18 years old when he murdered 3 people — including a 3 months old baby — in cold blood, in bright daylight and in the middle of a busy city, with an outfit and hairdo like NEO in The Matrix, using a gun he had purchased that very same day, without a permit. He wanted to commit suicide but a police officer shot him in the stomach before he could. According to a note found in his room, he did it because he was expelled from school (for smoking) and was afraid from the reaction his parents would have. Police also found "lots of violent video games" in his room, as well as extreme right material. Today, it appears that Hans is playing the same violent video games — not forbidden by law — in his prison cell. While the trial is examining the motives and facts at this very moment, do you think games or any other media should be allowed to people who clearly can't deal with the difference between fiction and reality?"
