For our coders, what do you think is the best format for the life cycle of a software (e.g. pre-alpha -> alpha -> beta -> gold) or in minecraft's case (/indev/ -> infdev -> alpha/beta basically the same lol -> gold [which is just glorified beta imo]). Or do you even follow a formalized development cycle?

Personally, I've always felt that the better reading out there has always been the classics, and those are usually very inexpensive. Then again, textbooks, "learn to program" guides, etc... Have become surprisingly pricey for what they are.. Often many exhaustive or expansive references are also very expensive, certainly charging much higher prices than what the cost to produce would warrant.

So the debate is, do you think books cost too much? Be sure to vote in the poll!

Yes, because some things I do still require them. But I very hardly use them anymore, maybe once every two months. They are becoming very outdated with USB sticks and just downloading software and even games instead of buying a physical copy of them.

You?

I'm not exactly the world's greatest photographer, and being limited to a 2MP phone camera doesn't help, but it's still something I've really enjoyed. Picasa has also been of great help in repairing the colors that my camera messes up.


A small tourist town in Tennessee. It's actually at the top of a skylift on a mountain, so the view is quite nice.


From the same town.


This one is on the shore of a north carolina sound.


Once again Picasa is used to recover some of the color the camera couldn't capture.







This is one of the few pictures I've edited for the intense effect. I think it looks pretty nice, but is quite unrealistic for sure.

This is a game where we talk in questions (?)

poster 1: Is this a question?
poster 2: why are you asking?

...and so on.

Why didn't blake pick up my sarcasm in the site questions thread?

Over the past several years, CD players have gradually been going out of style. Few people today don't own an MP3 player, and MP3s can be packed by the hundreds onto a $25 device that fits easily inside of your pocket. With their increasing popularity, are they beginning to replace CDs?

My personal feeling is that CDs will gradually become the next records. They will be the vintage way of playing music, but the trends will gradually shift towards electronic copies of media. However, at least for me, nothing can beat a classic CD of a great album held right in your hands. Thoughts?

Personally, I have to say that Google Picasa remains one of my favorite programs when it comes to processing photos and making simple edits. While it may not be suitable for creating flashy logos or amazing designs, it does have all of the features you could need to perform simple edits quickly on photos from a camera, and I have found the GIMP to be a little much for simple edits. Any other picasa users here?

Have any site questions related to Makestation? Ask them here!

-Site administration.

This mod is a second attempt at this. That was abandoned because of a huge morale loss because some progress was not saved. So, without further ado, I present

[nostalgia]Anybody remember the pre-EA Sim games? I loved them. For example, I think SimEarth has to be my favorite. Runners-up have to be SC2000 or SC. I've actually recently recieved SimEarth as abandonware, and using DOSBox, it (surprisingly) runs like a charm on this toaster.[/nostalgia]