ehnus

Nintendo also has an incredible track record of not being able to foster healthy relations with third party developers, and being outright hostile to indie developers (see: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/03/21/fils-aime-nintendo-not-...). The Wii, outside from the first party titles, was pretty much a wasteland at least compared to the offerings of Microsoft and Sony. This I think has led to the Wii having a fairly low attach rate and, at least anecdotally, the number of consoles that were bought for Wii Sports and have been gathering dust ever since.

I would love to do this, however it is against my employment agreement to develop and sell games on the side. As cool as this would be, I really would like to keep my day job. :(

There's also LoseThos (http://www.losethos.com/), although it's a bit on the eccentric side.

It's not just that you can't fly into busy airspace, it's that you can't fly into airspace where you need to talk to an air traffic controller for VFR flight (class B-D).

If you live in or near a big city chances are that the airports out of which you will want to fly will be close to airspace into which you cannot fly. It a hassle if you have to drive out to the boonies in order to start your flying trip or if you have to take the long way around a large block of busy airspace.

I put together a Linux computer this week based on an Atom D510 (dual core, hyperthreaded). It came to $250 with a 500gb HD, 2gb RAM, case and DVD drive, though I could have saved $30 by omitting the opitical drive and installing from a memory stick. It has the added benefit of being passively cooled -- it is almost silent, the only noise being what is emitted by the harddrive. It's even quieter than my Macbook Pro.

I think whenever the topic of premature optimization comes up most people forget the whole Knuth/Hoare quote:

> We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Everyone seems to latch on the second part, but the first part, and the context, are very important. At the time the quote was first coined they were considering "premature optimization" to be the use of "inc eax" instead of "add eax, 1". The key, I think, is the bit about small efficiencies -- we shouldn't worry that "inc eax" uses two bytes less than "add eax, 1" from the outset, but cache thrashing should definitely be a concern.

Optimization is something that should always be in a programmers mind, especially when programming embedded machines. If you're not at a point where you are optimizing the code you are working with then you should be writing it in a way that it can be optimized down the road.

I would think that anyone who uses "premature optimization is the root of all evil" as a retort is fair game for being challenged on how they would actually optimize their code when they have the chance :)

(disclaimer: I write code for video games, my world view may not be the same as yours, though I still believe this applies globally.)

I always see streams brought up as a critique of C++, at least compared to how it is handled by C, and I agree that they are terrible. However, everyone else also agrees that they are terrible, and as an added bonus the C IO functions are still available.

C++ brings a lot of heavy-weight machinery to the table but the best part is that you don't have to use it. If you just want to write C but desire templates to reduce the amount of writing you need to do then so be it, write C-with-templates!

My big beef with the language is mostly due to the legacy crud it is saddled with in the C preprocessor. Many of the build time issues I find myself suffering with are because of people, for example, including Windows.h a) in the first place and b) not defining WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN. Junior (and senior, for that matter!) developers seldom know how to properly structure their code so that their iteration times don't plummet.

How good of an agent can she be if she was caught?

I just noticed that they don't even feature the Xserve on their main store page anymore.

What kind of job would you be looking to get back into in that week? Would you go back to what you were doing or would you go to anyone with a help wanted sign in the window? I ask because I have been looking to move out of my job and into something similar (video game library/embedded C++ development) for months now and there are few, if any, opportunities available.

If I could get my old job back (or similar) within that time frame I would quit tomorrow.

Good stuff. I had my iPhone stolen a few months ago and I had to buy a replacement through my service provider (Rogers) as Apple wasn't selling them unlocked at the time. I think, if anything, this will help dispel the feeling I had at the time that I was getting screwed by my provider for the replacement phone cost even if it's actually not the case.

> As it happens, I do think it is evil that MS limits who can develop what for XBox.

Although they restrict who can develop games destined for brick and mortar stores, Microsoft has provided XNA as a way of developing for their platform that is not altogether unreasonable in terms or expense.

The article says that it has 8mb of cache per core, shared by four hardware threads.

I don't mind fixing other peoples problems. I will even stay late to do so if asked but if you do so and then fuck off out of the office at 5:00pm you can better believe I'll be doing the same. If your problem isn't an emergency for you then it isn't one for me either.

Calling my work shit without providing any constructive feedback, problem details, or patches will tend to make your future requests for help go straight to the bottom of my priority list.

Blaming me or my work for a problem you are experiencing without performing any investigation into what actually the problem is also will make any future requests for help go straight to the bottom of my priority list. Not quite as far down as the category above though.

I don't want to sound like a prima-donna but I don't like creating unnecessary work for others because most people have better things to do, I just wish this was reciprocated more often.

And what do you suggest for MSVC, which doesn't support attribute unused or have any comparable declspecs?

If assertions disappear in certain optimized builds then what do you do, or recommend, to deal with warnings related to unused parameters or values if you don't believe that casting to void has value?

Also remarkable is that Qantas has had, I believe, no fatal accidents since 1951.

My favorite section is emergency procedures which contains gems like this:

"If both the A and B hydraulic systems fail as indicated by illumination of the A HYD and B HYD warning lights and confirmed by loss of A and B hydraulic pressure and deteriorating control effectiveness:

1. Eject"

That doesn't address my second point of recouping high development costs. Anyways, they would have to coordinate this with the platform providers which tend to keep things bolted down quite tightly when it comes to the provision of online services. Are there even any console games available for the Xbox 360 or PS3 that charge monthly fees?

The two problems I see with your analogy to books is that books don't have an ongoing cost for infrastructure maintenance which online services do. I wouldn't put it past EA to figure out the cost of services provided with a game diminishes over time with one owner, but if someone new were to pick up the game and start playing then they would be incurring a heavier system load than originally forecast.

Book publishers also generally aren't trying to recoup $50-100,000,000 development budgets.

I don't get why people commenting on this article feel that EA is in the wrong here. EA makes nothing off the sales of used games yet currently incurs the cost of providing online services.

What would be a better solution?

The list of requirements is made available to the developer well in advance, it isn't arbitrarily made more restrictive by first parties (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft), and every developer goes through the same submission screening process. If a game is rejected for not meeting the established criteria it happens before it has shipped -- titles aren't just pulled for no apparent reason.

Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are very clear about their restrictions up front and enforce them consistently among licensees. It is very difficult when developing for console platforms to get yourself into a position where you have spent hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on development only to be told that your game has been rejected.

The problem with Apple in this case and in many others is that they do not enforce every app's compliance consistently and see no problem with the fact that they don't.

Is this link mirrored anywhere? It seems to have gone down.

I think the geohot hack is just a red herring given that the PS3 Slim was released months before this hack happened and that it had no provision for Other OS installs. It is still terrible that this happening though.