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From Slashdot Games Story | Game Development In a Post-Agile World

When to use “agile” methods. (Score:3, Interesting)

by Animats (122034) on Tuesday February 09, @02:23AM (#31069448)
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“Agile” methodologies are most appropriate when the project consists of a large number of loosely coupled user-oriented features with no major architectural or technical innovations. Like PHP-based web sites. Or, in fact, much programming which involves using an existing “framework”. Someone else has already figured out what the different parts of the system need to say to each other and roughly how they will say it. Development is mostly filling in the blanks.

Trying to use “agile” on a hard, tightly-coupled problem with no predefined structural framework, like an optimizing compiler or a database engine, is likely to result in a disaster.

A game can fall into either category. If the game requires new technology, especially something hard, (advanced AI, a new physics engine, a very large seamless world, etc.) a very front-end design-driven approach may be necessary. On the other hand, if most of the game consists of developing content for different areas of the game world, an
“agile” methodology could work fine. Second Life is probably the most extreme example of this.

It’s interesting to note that movie-making has become very much a waterfall model business. A few decades ago, moviemaking was much more “agile”, and most directors came from a theatrical background. For a theatrical director, there’s a debugging phase involving actors on a bare stage, and the content may change considerably during development. Big-budget moviemaking today involves going from script to storyboard to previsualization (making a low-end animated version as a planning tool) to production. That’s very much a waterfall process.

From Slashdot Entertainment Story | The Definitive Evisceration of The Phantom Menace *NSFW*

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review by Red Letter Media.

Re:Different Audience (Score:5, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21, @02:13PM (#30515444)

Star Wars was for children because it was about a teenage hero who teamed up with a mysterious old wizard and a swarthy space pirate to rescue a princess, battle an evil knight dressed in black armor, and destroy the Death Star.

TPM was for children because it was about galactic teamsters strike negotiations, interspersed with with CSPAN footage of a senate sub-committee debate on interplanetary tariffs. If the Jedi don’t foil Senator Palpatine’s evil plan in time, he will be elected to a Senate sub-committee chair! The video game probably expands on this theme by including lots of exciting amendments and cloture votes, because kids love that stuff.

From Slashdot Entertainment Story | The People vs. George Lucas To Premiere At SXSW

Re:If you don’t like it… (Score:5, Insightful)

by Vintermann (400722) on Sunday February 07, @03:54PM (#31054690)
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Let’s forget George Lucas for a moment, and focus on another filmmaker who was in the news recently, James Cameron. Now tell me: Are you of the school of thought that James Cameron is the greatest filmmaker of all time, or do you think that perhaps the fact that he gets to play with new toys before everyone else has something to do with his success?
How about Madonna. How about J.K. Rowling. Success may involve a lot of perspiration, but so does failures. Dumb luck is a far bigger part of it. Once you are established, you don’t have to make the insane grab for people’s attention again – they’ve invested in you, got to know you and your work, and they will want more – even if you strictly speaking don’t deserve it.

Commercial artistic success is rarely something people deserve. Certainly they don’t deserve the insane compensation – if art worked as any other market, you could look at the huge number of would-be supplyers, and the ease of reproduction, and conclude art would be essentially free. The reason it isn’t, is _not_ that George Lucas or J.K Rowling or Mick Jagger or bloody whoever is that much better than all the wannabees. Think about it: if you gave 10000 people James Cameron’s resources and opportunities, set them to make movies, did a blind test, you think Avatar would stand out as clearly the best?

Most successful artists think that they live by their art. They are wrong. They live by social inertia and network effects – lots of people wouldn’t mind being obsessed about a film, few people would want to be obsessed about a film no one you care about has heard of. There can only be so many stars. What this means is this: Star Wars the movies, may be Lucas’ work of art, but no one really cares about the movies. Star Wars the phenomenon is what people really pay for, and Lucas’ role in creating that is small. It’s almost non-existent. If Star Wars hadn’t been created, we the people would have found something different to obsess about.

This is why fans should “have a say in someone else’s art”. In fact, fans are way too subservient, and our culture is hopelessly locked into a view of “the artist” which appeared in the romantic period, and should have died a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, it became institutionalised (in large part through copyright legislation) and walks on as a ravenous zombie.

That is all.

From Slashdot Science Story | Studies Reveal Why Kids Get Bullied and Rejected

The bully and the outcast – a true story (Score:5, Interesting)

by germansausage (682057) on Tuesday February 02, @11:23PM (#31005654)

Once upon a time there was a bully. He bullied a lot of kids. One day he bullied the outcast. He shoved the outcast from behind as he was walking by. The outcast was slammed into the lockers and split his lip. The bully walked away laughing. That evening the outcast and his one lone friend came back to the school with a hacksaw, a school issue combination lock and two large garbage bags. While the friend stood watch at the end of the hall the outcast sawed the lock off the bully’s locker. It took no more than a minute to empty the bullies locker into the garbage bags. The outcast locked the locker back up with the lock he brought. The garbage bags were tossed into a dumpster behind the gas station.

The next morning the outcast watched from a distance while the bully tried to open his locker. The school locks all looked the same but his wouldn’t open. Eventually the principal and the custodian came with some bolt cutters and the lock was cut. The locker was opened and inside was….nothing. No gym clothes, no textbooks, no almost complete woodwork project, no homework, no notes, no tennis racket, no leather jacket, no anything. The bully may have eventually realized that one of his victims had gotten even, but who it was, he never knew. He bullied a lot of kids.

Re:I could have told you that. (Score:5, Insightful)

by j_w_d (114171) on Tuesday February 02, @09:39PM (#31004622)

Bullies are scum. No ‘if onlies,’ no ‘buts.’ There’s no reason why a kid with difficulty understanding social cues should spend grade school making sure an upper grade bully got fat off his lunch money. No one ‘makes’ a bully steal your stuff, throw tarred rocks at you or generally lurk around for a chance to otherwise make your life miserable. All understanding the social cues offers is the knowledge of whom to avoid. There’s a reason so many bullies go by handles like “Chopper,” “Dumbo” and “Buddy” (all ones that I knew personally) and it isn’t because they’re brightest bulbs in the lamp. However, my dad always said ‘don’t get mad, get even.’ I expect that Buddy never did understand why when he stole my home work he still got D’s, and I still got A’s.

Re:I could have told you that. (Score:4, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 02, @09:50PM (#31004712)

Some bullies are sociopaths [wikipedia.org]. Sociopaths are scum. Other bullies simply need a better social environment (including home environment).

And yes, all blame should fall squarely on the aggressor. It’s a teaching mechanism. It should be nothing more, nor less.

Amusing story, though.

Which TFA did you read? (Score:5, Insightful)

by n dot l (1099033) on Wednesday February 03, @03:52AM (#31007378)

The TFA I read discussed social rejection, and noted that bullies often focus on the socially rejected. This isn’t about using your social skills to charm the bully (lol), it’s about using them to get friends and hoist yourself out of the immediate target population, or at least get yourself on a better footing to fight back (most bullies have their own social issues – if you can sort yours out that’s an automatic advantage).

I’ve been bullied. I watched other kids get bullied too. I got rid of my bullies by not behaving like the other victims, not by beating anybody up (as if I could). I realized that the only targets were people who were isolated from the main social group and unwilling to fight back (in most cases by their own low self-esteem) and made an effort to not be one of them. I learned to control my emotions so I could think clearly in social situations that weren’t going how I wanted. I learned to actually pay attention and read other people’s body language properly. I learned the social rules. I made friends outside my usual circle.

The guys that spent 5 minutes between classes laughing at me in the halls every day (not hardcore bullying but hardly pleasant, I assure you)? Most of them weren’t being sarcastic or mean like I thought. They were confused by how incongruously I acted. I was the one that was too stupid to read their expressions correctly. Once I clued in, I stopped escalating simple misunderstandings (I actually thought I was sticking up for myself) and quickly made friends with many of them. I had no trouble ignoring the few asshole opportunists (most of who were doing it due to their own self esteem issues) in the lot who were jumping in with a nasty quip just because they saw they had a chance to get a laugh at my expense. Over the next few weeks I got rid of a good two thirds of the grief I’d get at school (the low grade harassment) in this way. I’d say fixing this one mistake of mine is probably where I started to really build my self-confidence.

The scary looking thug (huge muscles, tattoos, scars, rumors that he’s done nasty things – seriously scary fucker) that went around threatening people into giving him free shit? The confidence I’d gained making some friends was enough to keep me calm around him. Calm enough to see his insecurity screaming through every little gesture (fucked up home life, he had a lot to be insecure about). Flat-out told him “no” when he punched me and told me to give him my CD collection. He was stunned, I don’t think he’d ever seen someone calmly stand up to him before (I admit, it freaked me out afterwards – he had opened up with a punch). He wandered off as though nothing had happened and didn’t bother me again.

The asshole who’d steal my shit, trip me, shove my head into my locker, heckle me in class (WTF teachers, how did that shit ever fly?), throw things at me, etc every single chance he got? I was his favorite victim until a few months after I started turning myself around. He turned out to be desperately afraid he’d lose his friends’ respect if he didn’t act all tough. Getting the courage to go and talk to them (his friends) and find out that they didn’t really like him was the key to getting rid of him. Desperate fuckers turn out to be easy to bait, and I only had to get myself seen with his buddies regularly for a few weeks before he freaked out about them ditching him and did something stupid enough to get them to actually ditch him. He never bothered me again. I’d actually been hoping to get something out of them that I could blackmail him with, but I’m not one to complain if a problem takes care of itself.

So I disagree that TFA’s conclusion is some bullshit way to avoid having to actually punish bullies. We’re social creatures, and learning how to navigate the social web (rather than hovering helplessly around the edges) is definitely empowering. I certainly wouldn’t argue with anyone that would just beat the shit out of a bully, but it’s hardly the only way to deal with things (and I’ve seen a couple of guys that did that get shunned even more for being “dangerous” hotheads).

From Slashdot Technology Story | Woz Cites “Scary” Prius Acceleration Software Problem

Re:Typical Customer Service Department attitude (Score:5, Interesting)

by iamhassi (659463) on Tuesday February 02, @11:21AM (#30996726)
Journal

“Last time I called Dell about a laptop that was completely dead, no power lights, no fans, they asked me what the error message on screen was and it took a few minutes to explain to them something as simple as the fact that I couldn’t get an error message on screen because the laptop was dead.”

Next time you call support take a video, it might be the next “verizon math fail” with 30,000+ hits. [youtube.com] All that bad press over $71. [blogspot.com]

I had a problem with a Whirlpool wash machine. It was a few years old and the warranty expired, but I took a video of the problem and posted it on Youtube.

Within a week and less than 50 views I had an email from someone claiming to be whirlpool [youtube.com] offering to help resolve the situation with a 800 number and extension attached.

I use to work tech support for a huge hosting provider (they’re in the top 5). We’d get threats of lawsuits every day, but one time someone blogged about us and management had an all hands meeting, telling us to ignore lawsuits because those are easy to fight but if a customer threatens to blog about us to escalate to a manager immediately (usually we could only offer manager call backs… yes i know stupid).

People forget how powerful the internet is yet we see the effects of millions of /. readers every day.

From Slashdot Ask Slashdot Story | How To Spread Word About My FOSS Project?

Its called marketing. (Score:5, Informative)

by jellomizer (103300) on Wednesday January 27, @10:03PM (#30929100)

The fact the product is Open Source or free will not get any thing out…

Lets figure out some things…

The 5C’s

Customer or for your case you end users what is you app targeted for Corporate users or end users.

Company or your OSS group that has developed the software what are your values why do you want the product to grow what makes your group better then most

Context what itch are you trying to scratch. Does it solve a problem
Collaborators who do you need to work with to make your program run. Is it linux only or does it work on windows… Do you need 3rd party tools to run it. Do you have any people who are willing to push your product.

Competitors Sure you may have some cool new features but are they better then what the other Open Source tools have… Are there closed source application that do the same thing you do. If so how do you defend against any advantages.

Next is the STP

Segmentation What is the product the best fit for.

Targeting Really push to the people the product is the best fit for. If they prefer a closed source solution or a big name you will be wasting your time. However there are other people who want you app in the open source form.

Positioning make sure you make your product to really show off what it needs to do for your targeted group of people

The 4P

Product what is your product what does it do

Price Sure it is open source and it is free are you going to offer consulting or support services if so how much are you going to charge.

Place What will be your range you want the product to first go out

Promotions Well if you are going to do consulting for your product you might as well add some Linux support too.

These is Marketing 101 in a nutshell. Basic marketing isn’t trying to trick people into getting your product but finding where people would like your product.

Sure your product may not have a big following that is ok there are a lot of small software companies to make software to a lot of big players. I myself when I worked as a consultant myself made software for many large companies that was custom for them even if there was Open Source alternatives I created code and documentation for them so the code is theirs and with No strings attached.

For Open Source tools the trick is to make sure that you are willing to back it up and if fail it is possible for others to pick it up.

Open Source Projects do die sometimes so do closed source product. However there are people making closed source products and selling them. The fact that it is open source and has a small comunity isn’t an excuse. You just need to market the product.

From Slashdot Developers Story | Oracle To Invest In Sun Hardware, Cut Sun Staff

Re:Trying to cut salaries? (Score:5, Insightful)

by fhage (596871) on Wednesday January 27, @08:01PM (#30928230)

So that would make you about 35, right? Well, take a look around you. How many technical coworkers do you see that are ten years older than you? How about twenty? And thirty years?

There’s age discrimination in every field, but being a 60-year-old programmer is only marginally more likely than being a 60-year-old stripper.

While you may be correct, I don’t think the current status quo is necessarily evidence of it. I’m 36, and am of one of the first generations where it was reasonable to have a microcomputer around the house as a small child. People 10, 20, 30 years older than me probably got their first computer at a much older age than me and probably don’t have that much more experience than me. When I’m 60, I’ll likely have decades more software experience than they do now.

Of course, the younger kids might crush me in networking experience, since the WWW didn’t exist until just about when I went to University.

It’s a myth that younger people are “better with computers and technology” because they had access to computers in their house as they grew up. I turned 50 this year and have been doing scientific programming for over 35 years. I started at 14 yrs old in ‘73, working on time share systems and wire wrapping PDP-11 backplanes. I’ve been on the Internet since ‘86 and kids almost always assume they have more “network” experience than I. Some of the recent CS college grads I’ve worked with can’t program their way out of a paper bag without GUI UML tools an IDE and weeks of effort refactoring their work. Young kids take days to do things I’d have it done in several hours because I’d be using use the right tool for the job. ‘Awk’, ’sed’ , bash, csh are still very useful for “fixing” data sets. ‘perl’, ‘php’ and ‘python’ are used for more complex tasks. Compiled languages and libraries are used when performance matters or complexity is high. We had 10+ yr experience software engineers who would spend weeks writing a Java app, when a one line ‘dd’ would do. They’ve never heard of ‘dd’, so they write their own buggy, hard coded program. This old guy was the first one to make use of AJAX and web apps in our 50+ engineering division. Companies should think about this, as they lay off us older guys so they can hire a new cheap, young kid within a month.

I’m now doing low-level Linux driver and DSP work for a scientific instrument maker, trying to rescue them from the mess the Java programmer they hired to port their old C, C++ DOS code to XP. “interrupt latency jitter? what’s that!?”. How come I can’t do 5k interrupts/sec on this PC?

Right now, in many scientific fields, the new software being written have less features and run slower than they did 20 years ago. NCAR has spent over 5 years and many, many FTE’s trying to replace a C application I wrote in 1991 with a Java version. This 19 year old C/C++ application is still being used quite extensively, even though it’s been “replaced” several times with new the development efforts.

From Slashdot Mobile Story | The Cell Phone Has Changed — New Etiquette Needed

Sometimes, you just gotta get down in the gutter (Score:5, Interesting)

by hyades1 (1149581) <hyades1@hotmail.com> on Monday January 25, @06:47PM (#30897934)

While taking the bus to work, I endured about 10 minutes of non-stop, high-volume chatter about matters far too intimate for public exhibition. I finally reached my limit…couldn’t concentrate to read, had forgotten my headphones, couldn’t ignore the conversation (which was carried on at a near-shout). The offender was clearly a Jerry Springer fugitive, and if she wasn’t a star of that People of WalMart site, her attire was such that it’s only a matter of time. The faces of the other transit riders made it obvious I wasn’t the only one offended by a conversation that included the woman’s current sex life, how she enjoyed suckering her sister into babysitting so she could go clubbing, and some lovely racial stereotyping about her child’s absentee father.

I pulled out my cell phone and began to carry on a fake conversation about the woman. I’ll admit that I was pretty far over the top, but I was also seriously pissed. The other riders caught on pretty fast and started laughing. For at least a couple of minutes the woman was oblivious. Gradually, though, it sunk in…I think it was when I mentioned how lucky she was that the bus came along before that Inuit with a harpoon caught up with her.

She wound up cursing at me, but that was fine. A lot of people were laughing at her, which was exactly what I had in mind. She got off the bus pretty quickly after that. I don’t know if it was her stop; I hope not.

I wouldn’t recommend this course of action except under ideal circumstances, but I don’t regret it.

From Slashdot News Story | Why the IRS Should Automatically Fill In Returns With What It Knows

Re:works fine in Sweden (Score:5, Insightful)

by nanoakron (234907) on Sunday January 24, @01:05PM (#30880020)

Whilst I don’t live in Sweden (I’m in the UK), I have to ask quite what your point is?

The Swedes may pay more in taxes, but in return get free healthcare, good roads, low crime, free schooling and university, (i believe) free (or heavily subsidised) childcare, efficient public transport, and much more.

They’re also very highly rated in terms of their low wealth disparity (road fines for example are based on a percentage of your annual income so that a rockstar in a ferrari feels the same sting in their speeding ticket as does a poor person in a skoda), and human development index.

I could go on. The key point is that nations all make decisions about their priorities – the US believes in waging war and keeping the poor unhealthy and uneducated, other nations do not.

tl;dr – high taxes are worth paying if you get good services in return. Think of Sweden as the ‘Apple’ of nations, versus the ‘Windows Me’ of the USA.

Re:works fine in Sweden (Score:4, Insightful)

by demonlapin (527802) on Sunday January 24, @10:04PM (#30885346)
Homepage Journal

It works in Sweden. The US is not Sweden – the relative cultural homogeneity of the Scandinavian nations is a really crucial part of their ability to conduct welfare states that are not overwhelmed by freeloaders, because that’s the reason that …

[m]ost people who are receiving more money than they’re contributing tend to feel pretty bad about this.

That is not a given in the US. It has been my experience that most Americans I know who are big-government, welfare-state liberals grew up in places where government works. By contrast, most of the small-government, go-it-alone conservatives grew up in places where it doesn’t. Don’t forget that not all governments work…

From Slashdot Entertainment Story | Adding Up the Explanations For ACTA’s “Shameful Secret”

Re:Industry lobbyists hint at the truth of ACTA? (Score:5, Insightful)

by PopeRatzo (965947) * on Friday January 15, @06:06PM (#30785354)
Homepage Journal

This only goes to prove that ACTA is utterly driven by lobbyists for the entertainment inductry (MPAA, RIAA and such).

It also demonstrates that transnational corporations have been more powerful than any government(s) on earth for some time now.

Really, it’s too late to expect government to help us when it comes to standing up to corporate power, because money trumps votes every single time. Any time someone who might pose a threat to corporatist hegemony even comes close to running for national office, they are immediately painted as being nutty, fringe, dangerous (pick your negative smear of choice).

It happened to Dennis Kucinich most recently, and Howard Dean a few years back. If you bring up his name, lots of people will immediately start to say that stuff about him, but if you ask them for an example of a fringe or weird policy he has advocated, at most you’ll get “his wife is a hippie” or something equally inane. Howard Dean had his candidacy destroyed because he hollered. Remember how that one noise he made was used by every mainstream media outlet to indicate he was crazy?

There are others: Ralph Nader, even Ross Perot, who, while a businessman himself, had a distinctly populist approach to the balance of government and big business. The press had a field day tearing him up.

In Europe, the situation is just as bad. If you can’t demonstrate that you’re going to be very friendly to the transnationals, you’ll never get near a national election.

Any international trade agreement is going to be a disaster, just as NAFTA, CAFTA, and all the others have been. Poor countries will stay poor and the citizens of rich countries will get poorer.

It almost makes me a little optimistic about the teabagger movement in the US. If you can get these people to come out and express their anger at “big government”, all you have to do now is fill them in on who the real enemy is and then you’ve got something. Once they figure out that nobody in government so much as scratches their ass without the corporate elites giving them the OK, and no amount of partisan politics is going to change their situation until there is a big thick wall put up between corporate power and government. There is something very transgressive about going out into the street with a sign and hollering, and it’s a waypoint on a continuum that ends up with lighting a torch and a molotov cocktail. The trick now is to dissuade them from their hatred of educated people and their racism, and you’ve got a group that could be a great ally in what will ultimately be a fight by the working class against transnational corporations who are the real “New World Order”.