"There are numerous other Duke games in various stages of development, several due out this year. We are definitely looking to bring Duke into casual gaming spaces, plus there are other major Duke games in production."

So that's multiple major Duke games plus several smaller ones with more than one due out in 2010?!

Hillarious! It's like when you ask your friend starting a business on their own how that are doing and they'll say something like "Oh yeah doing great! Got a few things on the burner, with a couple of them looking really good, and few other interesting things going on." which really means "I have no work, but don't want to admit it" :)

Anyway, good luck to them!

Am I the only one that thinks 29 (or even 25) hours per week spent on an online game is grossly excessive?

OK Earth, you've threated my coffee supply. Now I'm listening!

Funny... I sent the link to a friend who does GRB-related research, and she said "thanks, I already know about it though, I'm one of the authors" :). Apparently there are 210 authors on that paper though. Imagine coordinating that.

Anyway, I don't know a thing about astrophysics so that's about all I can contribute to this discussion.

So you're suggesting that instead of creating languages like Ruby, we should create libraries to more complex environments like Java to make them faster to develop with? Variety is the spice of programming :). Personally, I'm glad languages like Python and Ruby exist and they are not only great and productive languages, they have both made me rethink the way I write software. I'm not sure just adding on top of Java would have achieved the same thing.

Phones in Japan all make the clicking sound (which you can usually choose from several - a camera shutter sound, "cheese!" etc.). I believe it's for similar reasons - so people can't take photographs of people incognito in trains etc.

Yes but, I guess the spelling "Viet Nam" doesn't need fixing (unless the reply was fixing something else?).

If I remember correctly, Viet Nam is how the Vietnamese write it.

Bullshit. An idea is useless until it is implemented in the same was that any other potential is useless until it is realised. Once implemented, its success is a combination of how good the idea was and how well it was executed. Giving either party too much credit for the outcome means not giving the other enough respect.

I'm a big believer in paying for both talent and effort. If your idea took you 10 minutes to come up with, but took a programmer six months fulltime to flesh out and implement, you don't deserve 90% of the credit no matter how good your idea is. But you don't deserve 10% either, if your idea was informed by years of experience *and* you were an active participant in the development process.

Finding business people who understand this, as a programmer myself, is harder than it should be.

What about wxWidgets? As far as I know it's as good at QT, and doesn't have the same license problem

A place where you have LittleBigAdventures, and throw a rubber ball around a lot.