Okay, I know it doesn't really mean the device is hard to use, but there is certainly that perception for a consumer. The last embedded commercial product I worked on was Linux based (on a little ARM system) and it was just great. But we didn't tell people it was Linux unless they specifically asked or bothered to dig through the manual.
'It runs Linux' means:
- Apple people sneer, but they'd buy an iPod anyhow so it's not a huge loss.
- My dad sees 'Linux' and thinks 'Oh my god, Linux was so confusing I guess I'll just get an iPod instead'.
- Normal people see 'Linux' and think they'll need to crack the password in 72-bit font like mad haxxors every time they want to use it.
- Nerds go 'ooooooooh.' This is the one group for which it is a good thing. But also a small group.
- GNU people think 'Why doesn't this just boot into root shell? Corporate evil!' Seriously, we had one guy who pestered tech support for months claiming GPL meant we had to tell him the root password. Why did we stop giving everyone root? Because they screw it up and RMA the thing.
And honestly I have bad UI associations with Linux too, the same way I do with Windows CE. Just the thought of my MP3 player booting into Gnome or something like Gimp is enough to give me the hives, even though rationally I know an embedded device is more likely to be running something like PegUI or Qt Embedded. Or even totally custom, but that usually also means bad, because people who build their own UIs from scratch almost never have any idea what they're doing.
The bottom line is that even though I love embedded Linux I just don't see that there's a commercial advantage (and there is plenty of disadvantage) to letting people know it runs Linux unless being a cheap open device is one of your primary selling points. If they did their job right you will never know what OS the thing is running. The nerds will find out anyhow (see the Kindle). Only the crusaders crave the validation.
Okay, this is an obvious troll, or someone who didn't realize what the quotes around the 'just' signified, but http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741312%28VS.85%29.aspx and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IExplore.svg for the non-trolls who actually care.
Now, I am not using IE8. Have not since I booted this morning (for weeks, even). Yet ShDocVW, BrowseUI, URLMon, MSXML, WinINET, etc are all loaded. The only things not already in memory are the Trident rendering engine(MSHTML) and iexplore.exe. If I'd been using any other non-browser app that wanted to render HTML in a frame MSHTML would be loaded as well. Now I load IE8, and using Process Explorer it's a 15MB process with 10MB shared and a 13MB process (for the blank tab) with 10MB shared.
IE8 uses system components and is well integrated. This is its biggest strength.
Internet Explorer is 'just' a shell around Explorer - all the components it needs are pretty much there and often locked into memory (which means not swapped out, and disk access is the mindkiller I mean batter killer). I imagine this is sufficient to cover the difference.
Still not giving up my Flashblock+Adblock+Noscript though. Especially on the laptop.
Okay, treating this whole story more seriously than Apple's stupid deserves:
The evil they fear is user generated content that bypass the app approval process. Like shaking a baby to death with giant flying dongs while 'Heil Hitler Satan' scrolls in the background. Or worse, writing a clone of some copyrighted game. Or even worse, using emulated SID to play copyrighted music. BASIC would let you do that. This is presumably what they fear.
Now there's nothing to stop you from writing this game on your C64 without BASIC, creating an image, and then just running it in the emulator, as far as I can tell. Other than needing to know 6502 assembly, which is no big deal. But nobody ever accused the App Store monkeys of consistency.
This is not whoredom, this is blessed relief. I gave up on the series when I realized that the book I'd just read took 700 pages to get through... 45 minutes of real time? Or maybe it was a day, it's all lost in haze.
But anyone who's stuck to the series through however godawful books there are/needs/ an ending. They deserve an ending. I can't fault Tor here at all, they've done what they could.
I also don't envy Brandon Sanderson, having to slog through all of Jordan's books and notes and trying to make sense of it all and knowing it's probably a thankless job and the fans are going to hate you anyhow. The irony here is that Sanderson may be able to pull off something that Jordan himself would never have been able to pull off - actually ending the thing. You could see the Wheel of Time books as Zeno's Paradox in action. If with each book you only go half as far because you're cramming in twice as much detail, you will never reach the end. And I'm not sure Jordan ever would have been able to.
Yes, and I respect that reasoning for you, but I'm telling you that's not enough to drive the market. All you can hope for (and all you need) is to maintain a healthy little self-sustaining niche barring a black swan event like someone deciding your little niche is great and making it the basis of one of their products.
Who knows, when memory and bandwidth get cheap enough Apple may decide lossless is the way to go as a differentiator, and suddenly everyone who swore up and down they couldn't hear the difference between FLAC and 320kbps MP3s will be gushing about how rich and full the lossless sounds on their iPod tube amps. But not yet.
This isn't really new, it's just the 95% rule (where admittedly 95% is just a WAG) and I've considered it a rule of thumb for decades
Basically anything that's 95% good enough and has some other overwhelming advantage (cheapness, convenience, lack of confusion) wins over technically more capable competitors, except for a few fanatics who aren't enough to drive the market. MP3s lose some quality from CDs and FLAC/WAV, but who cares? They're more convenient. YouTube is a horrid example of this - everyone thinks blocky, tiny, hitching video is good enough because it's so convenient and there's so much content. So you have to reboot your mobile phone now and then or can't get coverage in some places, when land-lines work damn near 100% of the time - who cares? Apple knows this rule and uses it brilliantly - Mac OS and its apps do 95% of what people need and it don't bother you about or give you decision paralysis for the other 5% that only tech-heads want.
I find that Linux with package management does about 95% of what I need to do out of the box and I have to script the rest... but that's good enough for me to just run Debian on all my servers and not worry about it. It's worth not having to fetch and compile every damn dependency by scratch or wade through all of Windows's hideously incestuous server configuration crap. More to the point, I could run BSD on all those servers, but why bother? Yes, I know you have all sorts of technical reasons why I should, but they don't matter. It's good enough and more convenient.
I've got about 10 more examples but will shut up now, because I think I've made 95% of the point.
I mostly agree with him, but just to be anal (nerdly prerogative)... Stupid, irrational fanboyism isn't really a disease, it's just tribalism. We're apes. We choose some stupid tribe to identify with, be it PS3 or XBox or Windows or Linux or Mac whatever and death to all outsiders. The more underdog the group, the more rabid the members are (Linux, Mac, Amiga). Religion is one of the best, if not the best, strategies for cementing loyalty and killing all competitors, so it shouldn't be a surprise that even something as secular as this takes on strongly religious overtones.
Not so strangely, as Linux continues to spread its influence the fanbase is getting less stupidly polarized (but then the old guard entrenches further, to combat this 'threat'). Generally this eases up as you get older and your penis stops ruling your brain, but not always.
Well technically Vista is usable now, though I can't see why you'd ever use it instead of just XP or Win7.
But I had hoped they would realize now that you can't launch with an OS that is so broken that it can't even reliably copy or delete files, and no driver support because you changed the APIs so late in the game. Apparently this marketing d-bag did not learn that lesson.
There are so many comments in here this will probably get buried, but just in case: I'm a software engineer of 20 years. If you want to be an engineer, and not a programmer, the larger your toolbox the better. There is a difference - programmers churn stuff out in a given language, engineers solve problems given constraints.
You need the widest exposure to languages and concepts you can get in college. That's what college is for. I hope you end up having to write a compiler, even if you would never actually do such a thing normally. I hope you have to write comprehensive documentation for it, and maybe even do a Gantt chart, even though you hate all that sooooo much. There are things you need to do at least once.
You need C and assembly to teach you about the realities of the lower levels - people without this write hideously bad code because they have no idea what's actually going on. You need to understand pointers and freeing memory even if it's incredibly annoying and you never deal with it again - what it really means that Java/Python strings are invariant. People who've never done this have no chance at all of understanding what a cache line miss is either.
You need Oracle (or any SQL DB) because it's useful to have something to store your data in - you might find non-relational stores like key/value work better for your apps, but SQL is the default and as such a good comparison point.
You need bash because it's used a lot and you need to be punished with some of the worst syntax on earth (bad is good too, it's educational). See what happens when something is accreted rather than designed. You don't need csh, though, because that would be counterproductive.
Python (or Ruby) is an excellent thing to have experience in because it gives you the experience of being (relatively) utterly unconstrained by underlying worries - these languages exist to get things DONE. You can concentrate on the high level algorithms instead of worrying about whether methods are virtual. You can make huge changes to your architecture with relatively minimal code changes and see what happens.
Java is a good thing to know because it's the new COBOL and there is no better virtual machine - it's fast and the sandboxing is unparalleled outside of special high-security setups. The language is intended to be a straitjacket to contain incompetent consultants from doing too much damage on huge projects, but that's still something that's worth knowing how to do.
But if you knew just Python/Ruby/Java without knowing C you'd be cut off at the knees, or at least not suitable for real projects. What does it really mean that objects are just shared references (now that you know what pointers are)? What does it mean that strings (or other mappable keys) are invariant?
I'd actually like to see some C++ in there - as horrible as it is syntactically, it is the zenith of eking out maximum speed and minimal memory usage at the cost of vomitous syntax, and that's worth studying. Used right, C++ templates plus private inheritance let you do incredible things that fail at compile time rather than run time, which is huge for commercial deployment.
Still, you are rightly concerned about your lack of specialization here, to which all I can say is: pick your favorite language(s) and write lots of stuff that interests you or at least a major project. If you can't do that you shouldn't be in this field anyhow. This curriculum is far better than being stuck with one or two languages for your entire degree just because your teachers are cranky old farts who don't want to learn something new. I envy you!
Why does everyone just say 'Activision'? Uneasy about dragging your beloved WoW into this? It's Activision Blizzard, and that 'Blizzard' along with Call of Duty and Guitar Hero are why Kotick can afford to be the huge raging prick he is.
He's got a long history of being a total @#$hole to squeeze profits, and it's worked. He's the reason you're going to be paying for Starcraft II three times instead of one, no matter what lame excuses they feed you. He's got no compunctions about selling you multi-hundred dollar overpriced plastic controller sets to go with his games while he complains about PS3 prices. His unbridled douchebaggery works quite well, at least in the short run, and it might work in the long run because Blizzard can get away with anything.
Now of course he knows that Activision Blizzard paid Sony $500 million dollars last year in per-game royalties and other crap, and I'm sure he's looking to shave some of that. That's what this is really about. And Sony is vulnerable - just the suggestion that a major publisher could drop the PS3, even if they wouldn't, is hugely damaging when they're in third place in the largest markets. I'm sure fanbois will sneer that they don't need Activision, but someone's sure buying their stuff on PS3.
I'm not giving them any money because of the Brutal Legend fiasco (part of Kotick's deliberate cockmongering), but I realize that's sort of quixotic. In general you people (forgive my broad brush) will continue to bend over and spread wide for Call of Duty and WoW and Starcraft and Diablo III.
It's fairly interesting that as with the US documents there's no smoking guns here but there are a lot of 'yeah that was experimental or military but we couldn't admit it at the time' and the rest is 'we have no idea what that was.' So either they're playing a meta-game here or there really is nothing but 'man that unidentified thing sure was... unidentified.' I think it's unlikely that two such incompetent entities could do such a brilliant job of covering up something as huge as decades (or millenia) long alien visitations, but this won't prove it either way.
I love me some Linux, all my server boxes run it and I do do app and gui work on it, but the last time I tried to port a game to it I just gave up in disgust after hitting the sound stuff. And it wasn't just the sound, it was getting the mouse input, getting gamepad input, and a bunch of other things you don't even think about normally but have to work right to get a game running.
This is why my desktop runs Win7 - I like my games. The Direct X family (including Direct Sound, Direct Input, etc) was possibly the smartest thing Microsoft ever did. Yes, you can get it all working under Linux with enough work, but why bother except as a work of love? I write cross-platform stuff using PyGame now, which works pretty well, but since it's using SDL there are sound issues on Linux (the sound nightmare again).
I'm not sure I have a solution here, just whining. Really, you need a unified API for/everything/ involved in making a game that doesn't care what mouse or sound card or sound drivers or gamepad or video card you're using. And I realize that's a big 'Good Luck With That' with open source. There are cases where a benevolent dictator is better than democracy - as long as they stay benevolent, which is another 'Good Luck'.
I know some of you would say that any ads are annoying, but I would be willing to load and view reasonably sized banner/side ads that were:
- not animated
- didn't popup or popunder in any way
- didn't play sounds
I'd subscribe to an adblock plus list set which didn't block sites which would play by those rules. Every time I decide to play nice and view ads to show support I get hit (within 24 hours) with one that's so annoying I give it up.
Of course I also think this will never happen, so it's a bit of an empty promise - as soon as I got hit with an ad that violated those rules I'd instantly go back to the nuke it from orbit list.
The book 'There Must be a Pony in Here Somewhere' is a great read about this whole debacle.
To spoil the title, it's about how a small pile of steaming horsecrap is just a pile of steaming horsecrap, but if you get a HUGE pile of it, then start digging, because there must be a pony in here somewhere. At least that was Time Warner's theory.
Boy if this isn't Office Space and every boneheaded corporate move ever in a nutshell. Hey let's do something nice for out employees, they're adults who will enjoy this and can have a beer without getting completely drunk and making asses of themselves at work (or we'll fire them, that's fair). Then a lawyer takes a look at it, says you know this looks like it might be fun and actionable, and god knows we don't have any money - better cancel it.
So you end up five times worse than never even having planned it in the first place, because you got everyone's hopes up and now you look like stupid jackasses. But your asses are covered, so all is right with the world! And this is why we pay all you stupid CEOs and MBAs the big bucks, to be dithering asswipes who lead by windsock.
It went out of its way to be irreverent to everyone: 'The new twerps really get those codgers steamed when they talk about how all of the computers in the cluster will get around to replicating the data' is a playful slap at both sides. And just like the PS3 Fanboys/XBots, if you identify too much with one of the sides you will nod your head knowingly at one and gasp and fan yourself as you suffer an attack of the vapours of offense at the other.
This seems semi-related: If you work at a sandwich shop maybe you shouldn't post video of yourself stuffing the lettuce up your nose on YouTube. Would anyone argue this is off bounds just because it's on YouTube? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1161234/Subway-worker-filmed-putting-lettuce-leaves-nose-sandwich-shop--putting-display.html
Obviously not quite the same as what Ettienne did, because he didn't post evidence of outright wrongdoing.
I guess it boils down to whether someone thinks you're joking or you're 'joking ha ha wink wink'. As a bio-chem researcher your Gattaca comment obviously trips the nerd humor trigger because it's so ridiculous. But we catch corrupt cops all the time. How about that Republican party member who made 'just a joke' about Obama's Easter watermelon hunts? Or if you'd snickered instead that you were 'falsifying COX2 inhibitor research results'?
Cops are given an amazing amount of power - I've seen that if there's no evidence otherwise the judge will take their word over anyone else's, but they're caught lying and falsifying evidence quite often. Given that, joking on your Facebook page about using Training Day as a model he is are makes me go 'Ha ha ha... ha?' because it does happen. It is an admitted prejudice of mine, but I've never met a single good cop (and there are plenty of those too) who ever joked, even in private, about how corrupt they were.
The persona you show in the locker room or internet is your real self, or at least a closer version of it than what you show on the streets when anyone else but the guy you're screwing with is watching. I've seen fine upstanding cops like this lie their asses off in court enough to believe that if he jokes that 'Training Day' is great training that he more than halfway actually believes it.
The suspect, Waters, is obviously not a great guy, but I'm not convinced I can trust anything a guy like Ettienne says either.
Kirk and Khan never confront each other face-to-face during the film; all of their interactions are over a viewscreen or through communicators, and the their scenes were filmed four months apart.
Montalban enjoyed making the film, and counted the role as a career highlight. His major complaint was that he was never face-to-face with Shatner for a scene. "I had to do my lines with the script girl, who, as you might imagine, sounded nothing like Bill [Shatner]," he explained.
Yes, yes, everyone who disagrees with you is a fanboy and an idiot.
I suppose on learning I've actually written programs using the SPEs on the PS3 under linux (it's 'easy', YDL supplies the tools like spu-gcc and elfspe, but you have to write in assembly language or did at the time) you'll just be horrified that I could have done that but not learned anything about how unconditionally AWESUM the PS3 is.
I meant what I said and I think it's a reasonable statement. The Cell is unparalleled at crunching floating point numbers if you can keep the SPEs supplied with data - unfortunately that's also the problem, and one that is far more easily solved in the supercomputing scenario.
This is really kind of misleading. The PowerPC, which is at the core of the Cell and is what MS uses as the cores of the Xbox 360, has been IBM's baby for years.
The Xbox 360 uses 3 of the cores. The Cell uses one of the cores plus 8 SPEs (6 of which you can actually use in a game). If you will recall, the Wii uses a PowerPC too, a slightly beefed up Gamecube CPU which IBM made for Nintendo even before they made Cell. And of course Apple used to use PowerPCs (and IBM itself did and does, for servers).
Anyhow, without the Cell's SPEs, there's not a lot to really 'steal'. The lack of SPEs is what makes the Xbox 360 so easy to program for, but the SPEs are what really define the Cell and make it such a floating point crunching monster (better suited for supercomputing than writing video games for in my opinion, and that's not intended as a dis here).
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I know it doesn't really mean the device is hard to use, but there is certainly that perception for a consumer. The last embedded commercial product I worked on was Linux based (on a little ARM system) and it was just great. But we didn't tell people it was Linux unless they specifically asked or bothered to dig through the manual.
'It runs Linux' means:
- Apple people sneer, but they'd buy an iPod anyhow so it's not a huge loss.
- My dad sees 'Linux' and thinks 'Oh my god, Linux was so confusing I guess I'll just get an iPod instead'.
- Normal people see 'Linux' and think they'll need to crack the password in 72-bit font like mad haxxors every time they want to use it.
- Nerds go 'ooooooooh.' This is the one group for which it is a good thing. But also a small group.
- GNU people think 'Why doesn't this just boot into root shell? Corporate evil!' Seriously, we had one guy who pestered tech support for months claiming GPL meant we had to tell him the root password. Why did we stop giving everyone root? Because they screw it up and RMA the thing.
And honestly I have bad UI associations with Linux too, the same way I do with Windows CE. Just the thought of my MP3 player booting into Gnome or something like Gimp is enough to give me the hives, even though rationally I know an embedded device is more likely to be running something like PegUI or Qt Embedded. Or even totally custom, but that usually also means bad, because people who build their own UIs from scratch almost never have any idea what they're doing.
The bottom line is that even though I love embedded Linux I just don't see that there's a commercial advantage (and there is plenty of disadvantage) to letting people know it runs Linux unless being a cheap open device is one of your primary selling points. If they did their job right you will never know what OS the thing is running. The nerds will find out anyhow (see the Kindle). Only the crusaders crave the validation.
Okay, this is an obvious troll, or someone who didn't realize what the quotes around the 'just' signified, but http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741312%28VS.85%29.aspx and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IExplore.svg for the non-trolls who actually care.
Now, I am not using IE8. Have not since I booted this morning (for weeks, even). Yet ShDocVW, BrowseUI, URLMon, MSXML, WinINET, etc are all loaded. The only things not already in memory are the Trident rendering engine(MSHTML) and iexplore.exe. If I'd been using any other non-browser app that wanted to render HTML in a frame MSHTML would be loaded as well. Now I load IE8, and using Process Explorer it's a 15MB process with 10MB shared and a 13MB process (for the blank tab) with 10MB shared.
IE8 uses system components and is well integrated. This is its biggest strength.
Internet Explorer is 'just' a shell around Explorer - all the components it needs are pretty much there and often locked into memory (which means not swapped out, and disk access is the mindkiller I mean batter killer). I imagine this is sufficient to cover the difference.
Still not giving up my Flashblock+Adblock+Noscript though. Especially on the laptop.
I guess that was another limitation they were forced to negotiate, then, for the same reasons. Gad that's evil.
Thanks for the info, I stand corrected.
Okay, treating this whole story more seriously than Apple's stupid deserves:
The evil they fear is user generated content that bypass the app approval process. Like shaking a baby to death with giant flying dongs while 'Heil Hitler Satan' scrolls in the background. Or worse, writing a clone of some copyrighted game. Or even worse, using emulated SID to play copyrighted music. BASIC would let you do that. This is presumably what they fear.
Now there's nothing to stop you from writing this game on your C64 without BASIC, creating an image, and then just running it in the emulator, as far as I can tell. Other than needing to know 6502 assembly, which is no big deal. But nobody ever accused the App Store monkeys of consistency.
This is not whoredom, this is blessed relief. I gave up on the series when I realized that the book I'd just read took 700 pages to get through... 45 minutes of real time? Or maybe it was a day, it's all lost in haze.
But anyone who's stuck to the series through however godawful books there are /needs/ an ending. They deserve an ending. I can't fault Tor here at all, they've done what they could.
I also don't envy Brandon Sanderson, having to slog through all of Jordan's books and notes and trying to make sense of it all and knowing it's probably a thankless job and the fans are going to hate you anyhow. The irony here is that Sanderson may be able to pull off something that Jordan himself would never have been able to pull off - actually ending the thing. You could see the Wheel of Time books as Zeno's Paradox in action. If with each book you only go half as far because you're cramming in twice as much detail, you will never reach the end. And I'm not sure Jordan ever would have been able to.
Yes, and I respect that reasoning for you, but I'm telling you that's not enough to drive the market. All you can hope for (and all you need) is to maintain a healthy little self-sustaining niche barring a black swan event like someone deciding your little niche is great and making it the basis of one of their products.
Who knows, when memory and bandwidth get cheap enough Apple may decide lossless is the way to go as a differentiator, and suddenly everyone who swore up and down they couldn't hear the difference between FLAC and 320kbps MP3s will be gushing about how rich and full the lossless sounds on their iPod tube amps. But not yet.
This isn't really new, it's just the 95% rule (where admittedly 95% is just a WAG) and I've considered it a rule of thumb for decades
Basically anything that's 95% good enough and has some other overwhelming advantage (cheapness, convenience, lack of confusion) wins over technically more capable competitors, except for a few fanatics who aren't enough to drive the market. MP3s lose some quality from CDs and FLAC/WAV, but who cares? They're more convenient. YouTube is a horrid example of this - everyone thinks blocky, tiny, hitching video is good enough because it's so convenient and there's so much content. So you have to reboot your mobile phone now and then or can't get coverage in some places, when land-lines work damn near 100% of the time - who cares? Apple knows this rule and uses it brilliantly - Mac OS and its apps do 95% of what people need and it don't bother you about or give you decision paralysis for the other 5% that only tech-heads want.
I find that Linux with package management does about 95% of what I need to do out of the box and I have to script the rest... but that's good enough for me to just run Debian on all my servers and not worry about it. It's worth not having to fetch and compile every damn dependency by scratch or wade through all of Windows's hideously incestuous server configuration crap. More to the point, I could run BSD on all those servers, but why bother? Yes, I know you have all sorts of technical reasons why I should, but they don't matter. It's good enough and more convenient.
I've got about 10 more examples but will shut up now, because I think I've made 95% of the point.
According to ShackNews, this also increases the between race load times from 12 seconds to 20 seconds.
Now that's 'meeting advertiser demand,' thanks Sony.
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/59821
I mostly agree with him, but just to be anal (nerdly prerogative)... Stupid, irrational fanboyism isn't really a disease, it's just tribalism. We're apes. We choose some stupid tribe to identify with, be it PS3 or XBox or Windows or Linux or Mac whatever and death to all outsiders. The more underdog the group, the more rabid the members are (Linux, Mac, Amiga). Religion is one of the best, if not the best, strategies for cementing loyalty and killing all competitors, so it shouldn't be a surprise that even something as secular as this takes on strongly religious overtones.
Not so strangely, as Linux continues to spread its influence the fanbase is getting less stupidly polarized (but then the old guard entrenches further, to combat this 'threat'). Generally this eases up as you get older and your penis stops ruling your brain, but not always.
Well technically Vista is usable now, though I can't see why you'd ever use it instead of just XP or Win7.
But I had hoped they would realize now that you can't launch with an OS that is so broken that it can't even reliably copy or delete files, and no driver support because you changed the APIs so late in the game. Apparently this marketing d-bag did not learn that lesson.
There are so many comments in here this will probably get buried, but just in case: I'm a software engineer of 20 years. If you want to be an engineer, and not a programmer, the larger your toolbox the better. There is a difference - programmers churn stuff out in a given language, engineers solve problems given constraints.
You need the widest exposure to languages and concepts you can get in college. That's what college is for. I hope you end up having to write a compiler, even if you would never actually do such a thing normally. I hope you have to write comprehensive documentation for it, and maybe even do a Gantt chart, even though you hate all that sooooo much. There are things you need to do at least once.
You need C and assembly to teach you about the realities of the lower levels - people without this write hideously bad code because they have no idea what's actually going on. You need to understand pointers and freeing memory even if it's incredibly annoying and you never deal with it again - what it really means that Java/Python strings are invariant. People who've never done this have no chance at all of understanding what a cache line miss is either.
You need Oracle (or any SQL DB) because it's useful to have something to store your data in - you might find non-relational stores like key/value work better for your apps, but SQL is the default and as such a good comparison point.
You need bash because it's used a lot and you need to be punished with some of the worst syntax on earth (bad is good too, it's educational). See what happens when something is accreted rather than designed. You don't need csh, though, because that would be counterproductive.
Python (or Ruby) is an excellent thing to have experience in because it gives you the experience of being (relatively) utterly unconstrained by underlying worries - these languages exist to get things DONE. You can concentrate on the high level algorithms instead of worrying about whether methods are virtual. You can make huge changes to your architecture with relatively minimal code changes and see what happens.
Java is a good thing to know because it's the new COBOL and there is no better virtual machine - it's fast and the sandboxing is unparalleled outside of special high-security setups. The language is intended to be a straitjacket to contain incompetent consultants from doing too much damage on huge projects, but that's still something that's worth knowing how to do.
But if you knew just Python/Ruby/Java without knowing C you'd be cut off at the knees, or at least not suitable for real projects. What does it really mean that objects are just shared references (now that you know what pointers are)? What does it mean that strings (or other mappable keys) are invariant?
I'd actually like to see some C++ in there - as horrible as it is syntactically, it is the zenith of eking out maximum speed and minimal memory usage at the cost of vomitous syntax, and that's worth studying. Used right, C++ templates plus private inheritance let you do incredible things that fail at compile time rather than run time, which is huge for commercial deployment.
Still, you are rightly concerned about your lack of specialization here, to which all I can say is: pick your favorite language(s) and write lots of stuff that interests you or at least a major project. If you can't do that you shouldn't be in this field anyhow. This curriculum is far better than being stuck with one or two languages for your entire degree just because your teachers are cranky old farts who don't want to learn something new. I envy you!
Why does everyone just say 'Activision'? Uneasy about dragging your beloved WoW into this? It's Activision Blizzard, and that 'Blizzard' along with Call of Duty and Guitar Hero are why Kotick can afford to be the huge raging prick he is.
He's got a long history of being a total @#$hole to squeeze profits, and it's worked. He's the reason you're going to be paying for Starcraft II three times instead of one, no matter what lame excuses they feed you. He's got no compunctions about selling you multi-hundred dollar overpriced plastic controller sets to go with his games while he complains about PS3 prices. His unbridled douchebaggery works quite well, at least in the short run, and it might work in the long run because Blizzard can get away with anything.
Now of course he knows that Activision Blizzard paid Sony $500 million dollars last year in per-game royalties and other crap, and I'm sure he's looking to shave some of that. That's what this is really about. And Sony is vulnerable - just the suggestion that a major publisher could drop the PS3, even if they wouldn't, is hugely damaging when they're in third place in the largest markets. I'm sure fanbois will sneer that they don't need Activision, but someone's sure buying their stuff on PS3.
I'm not giving them any money because of the Brutal Legend fiasco (part of Kotick's deliberate cockmongering), but I realize that's sort of quixotic. In general you people (forgive my broad brush) will continue to bend over and spread wide for Call of Duty and WoW and Starcraft and Diablo III.
The third batch are at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos/ and then there's a link on the right two the first two batches.
It's fairly interesting that as with the US documents there's no smoking guns here but there are a lot of 'yeah that was experimental or military but we couldn't admit it at the time' and the rest is 'we have no idea what that was.' So either they're playing a meta-game here or there really is nothing but 'man that unidentified thing sure was... unidentified.' I think it's unlikely that two such incompetent entities could do such a brilliant job of covering up something as huge as decades (or millenia) long alien visitations, but this won't prove it either way.
I love me some Linux, all my server boxes run it and I do do app and gui work on it, but the last time I tried to port a game to it I just gave up in disgust after hitting the sound stuff. And it wasn't just the sound, it was getting the mouse input, getting gamepad input, and a bunch of other things you don't even think about normally but have to work right to get a game running.
This is why my desktop runs Win7 - I like my games. The Direct X family (including Direct Sound, Direct Input, etc) was possibly the smartest thing Microsoft ever did. Yes, you can get it all working under Linux with enough work, but why bother except as a work of love? I write cross-platform stuff using PyGame now, which works pretty well, but since it's using SDL there are sound issues on Linux (the sound nightmare again).
I'm not sure I have a solution here, just whining. Really, you need a unified API for /everything/ involved in making a game that doesn't care what mouse or sound card or sound drivers or gamepad or video card you're using. And I realize that's a big 'Good Luck With That' with open source. There are cases where a benevolent dictator is better than democracy - as long as they stay benevolent, which is another 'Good Luck'.
I know some of you would say that any ads are annoying, but I would be willing to load and view reasonably sized banner/side ads that were:
- not animated
- didn't popup or popunder in any way
- didn't play sounds
I'd subscribe to an adblock plus list set which didn't block sites which would play by those rules. Every time I decide to play nice and view ads to show support I get hit (within 24 hours) with one that's so annoying I give it up.
Of course I also think this will never happen, so it's a bit of an empty promise - as soon as I got hit with an ad that violated those rules I'd instantly go back to the nuke it from orbit list.
The book 'There Must be a Pony in Here Somewhere' is a great read about this whole debacle.
To spoil the title, it's about how a small pile of steaming horsecrap is just a pile of steaming horsecrap, but if you get a HUGE pile of it, then start digging, because there must be a pony in here somewhere. At least that was Time Warner's theory.
http://www.amazon.com/There-Must-Pony-Here-Somewhere/dp/1400049644/
Boy if this isn't Office Space and every boneheaded corporate move ever in a nutshell. Hey let's do something nice for out employees, they're adults who will enjoy this and can have a beer without getting completely drunk and making asses of themselves at work (or we'll fire them, that's fair). Then a lawyer takes a look at it, says you know this looks like it might be fun and actionable, and god knows we don't have any money - better cancel it.
So you end up five times worse than never even having planned it in the first place, because you got everyone's hopes up and now you look like stupid jackasses. But your asses are covered, so all is right with the world! And this is why we pay all you stupid CEOs and MBAs the big bucks, to be dithering asswipes who lead by windsock.
It went out of its way to be irreverent to everyone: 'The new twerps really get those codgers steamed when they talk about how all of the computers in the cluster will get around to replicating the data' is a playful slap at both sides. And just like the PS3 Fanboys/XBots, if you identify too much with one of the sides you will nod your head knowingly at one and gasp and fan yourself as you suffer an attack of the vapours of offense at the other.
This seems semi-related: If you work at a sandwich shop maybe you shouldn't post video of yourself stuffing the lettuce up your nose on YouTube. Would anyone argue this is off bounds just because it's on YouTube? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1161234/Subway-worker-filmed-putting-lettuce-leaves-nose-sandwich-shop--putting-display.html
Obviously not quite the same as what Ettienne did, because he didn't post evidence of outright wrongdoing.
I guess it boils down to whether someone thinks you're joking or you're 'joking ha ha wink wink'. As a bio-chem researcher your Gattaca comment obviously trips the nerd humor trigger because it's so ridiculous. But we catch corrupt cops all the time. How about that Republican party member who made 'just a joke' about Obama's Easter watermelon hunts? Or if you'd snickered instead that you were 'falsifying COX2 inhibitor research results'?
Cops are given an amazing amount of power - I've seen that if there's no evidence otherwise the judge will take their word over anyone else's, but they're caught lying and falsifying evidence quite often. Given that, joking on your Facebook page about using Training Day as a model he is are makes me go 'Ha ha ha... ha?' because it does happen. It is an admitted prejudice of mine, but I've never met a single good cop (and there are plenty of those too) who ever joked, even in private, about how corrupt they were.
The persona you show in the locker room or internet is your real self, or at least a closer version of it than what you show on the streets when anyone else but the guy you're screwing with is watching. I've seen fine upstanding cops like this lie their asses off in court enough to believe that if he jokes that 'Training Day' is great training that he more than halfway actually believes it.
The suspect, Waters, is obviously not a great guy, but I'm not convinced I can trust anything a guy like Ettienne says either.
(from wiki)
Kirk and Khan never confront each other face-to-face during the film; all of their interactions are over a viewscreen or through communicators, and the their scenes were filmed four months apart.
Montalban enjoyed making the film, and counted the role as a career highlight. His major complaint was that he was never face-to-face with Shatner for a scene. "I had to do my lines with the script girl, who, as you might imagine, sounded nothing like Bill [Shatner]," he explained.
Yes, yes, everyone who disagrees with you is a fanboy and an idiot.
I suppose on learning I've actually written programs using the SPEs on the PS3 under linux (it's 'easy', YDL supplies the tools like spu-gcc and elfspe, but you have to write in assembly language or did at the time) you'll just be horrified that I could have done that but not learned anything about how unconditionally AWESUM the PS3 is.
I meant what I said and I think it's a reasonable statement. The Cell is unparalleled at crunching floating point numbers if you can keep the SPEs supplied with data - unfortunately that's also the problem, and one that is far more easily solved in the supercomputing scenario.
This is really kind of misleading. The PowerPC, which is at the core of the Cell and is what MS uses as the cores of the Xbox 360, has been IBM's baby for years.
The Xbox 360 uses 3 of the cores. The Cell uses one of the cores plus 8 SPEs (6 of which you can actually use in a game). If you will recall, the Wii uses a PowerPC too, a slightly beefed up Gamecube CPU which IBM made for Nintendo even before they made Cell. And of course Apple used to use PowerPCs (and IBM itself did and does, for servers).
Anyhow, without the Cell's SPEs, there's not a lot to really 'steal'. The lack of SPEs is what makes the Xbox 360 so easy to program for, but the SPEs are what really define the Cell and make it such a floating point crunching monster (better suited for supercomputing than writing video games for in my opinion, and that's not intended as a dis here).