...choose the tool that's best for the job, don't choose the job that's best for the tools you know already.
Game developers, for instance, are among the guys who write the most performance sensitive code out there, and they use a mix of C, C++, C#, Lua/Python for the various parts of the game. Usually the inner, tight loop is written in C/C++, higher level modules are written in C# and designer/modder scripts are written in a very high level language such as Lua. There is no best language in general, and whoever says otherwise is often an idiot.
Computer scientists? I'm a programming languages guy, type systems and declarative/functional programming. I hardly see myself as an engineer and I've never published at an engineering conference...
As a university researcher in applied game development I pretty much work on abstracting and generalizing *finished* software.
I usually do this: I spend between six months and a year building a game according to some technique, framework or new language I am researching. The game is then finished, published and even sold. Then a paper is written describing the technique and its inpact. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This is just anecdotical experience, but in this day and age of shrinking research budgets it is not uncommon to find scientists who also package and sell their research.
So this whole "programmers are cool, they develop finished stuff while the other a-hole scientists quit halfway" is just a stupid generalization based on a superficial stereotype of academia. Also, THIS IS NOT NEWS, and even if it were it wouldn't matter.
And no malware has ever been transmitted through the browser, so another problem brilliantly solved!
Now if only we could remove the OS and only have a browser that does exactly what the OS did but under a different name, the world would be a far better place...
Where the fuck did anybody officially say they dropped support for Silverlight?
So, Microsoft has changed one of its websites from Silverlight to HTML 5. That's a standard, so it's always A Good Thing.
Silverlight remains there, a good way to build animated user experiences; Silverlight 5 will be integrated with XNA. Having the chance to push a reduced version of my game (I am a game developer, and I can assure you this is VERY IMPORTANT TO MY COMPANY) through the browser as a demo/for betas, etc. is great. Easily deploying an application with a complex logic (nope: a dynamically typed language such as Javascript is worse than C# for complex reasoning) to many users through the browser with the possibility of right-clicking it to install it offline is another Good Thing.
So from where I sit Microsoft has done a good job because HTML 5 is better for that kind of website, and Silverlight is very alive even though it will be reduced to the only thing it was successful at: medium/large applications that must be easily deployed.
The fact that many books will be supplanted by digital versions is obvious and is already happening at a very fast pace. The idea that this trend will continue linearly is very dumb. There are applications for paper books, be it because you want the object for your physical collection, be it for taking notes or be it because a prestigious conference wants to print its proceedings.
We will probably end up in a world where most "perishable" low-cost/read-once books exist only in digital because they are not interesting enough that anybody may care about printing them, where high-value publications, proceedings, etc. will remain on paper because the value of the medium is by far surpassed by the value of the contents and a hard copy still makes a lot of sense.
You often see this kind of asinine ideas that trends will never stop when some equilibrium will be reached: smartphones and tablets are growing, therefore the PC is going to die soon, etc. Wake up: new and old find ways to live together, and a successful innovation does not necessarily displace everything that was before it...
Win 7 infections went from 3/1000 to 4/1000, that is infected ratio went from 0.3% to 0.4% (yes, it is a 33% increase, to be precise), while XP went from 18/1000 to 14/1000, that is infected ratio went from 1.8% to 1.4%. The numbers actually mean that Microsoft is doing a good job on security, since over 1000 PC the combined metric is not an increase of 11% (as the article seems to imply) but rather we went from 2.1% infected to 1.8%, which is a nice step.
It's just a very cheap way to make my users try a full, free (ad-supported), on-demand version of my game by using the same assets of the Desktop/Windows and Xbox versions. Also, I can let paying users access the SL out of browser system to let them install the application and use it offline, without even having to build an installer package. Development time is very costly for an indie team, and for us this is already making a large difference, especially given how happy our publisher is about this opportunity...
Honestly I don't get the point of your snarkiness about my humour...
Mostly I do the following: I write reusable meta-libraries in F# that generate the same code-behind that others would repeatedly build by hand in Visual Studio with C#. So I clearly hear what you are saying, but rather than conclude negatively that an easy-peasy avenue makes a library "dumb", I appreciate the fact that the underlying model is clean enough to allow both library makers and "regular coders" to be productive. More often than not you find libraries that are good for idiots but are rather poor representations of whatever they wish to represent, other times you find libraries which are pure shit, and rarely you find stuff which is clean and elegant but which arguably has no possible practical use (http://www.haskell.org/arrows/:D)
Well, I know a shitload of languages too: C/C++/C#/Java/OCaML/Haskell/Lisp/Scheme, so my intellectual dick does not look shorter than yours...
Btw, I know the difference between a library and a language and so I know that it's quite irrelevant how many languages you know to judge a software library.
Silverlight is not "pointy clicky development". It is a clean Reactive Programming model that strongly emphasizes the distinction between general layout, data templates (how you represent your app objects) and application logic. The three layers are put together, respectively, by XAML, templates and styles, and the very powerful mechanism for data-bindings.
I do not wish to offend, but you may not know much about Silverlight. Up until a couple of versions ago it did not even have a visual plugin for Visual Studio...
Actually, dev support is possibly *the only* truly great thing in wp7...
A very interesting move is the integration between Silverlight and XNA: this will allow (I am developing such a game right now!) web-based 3D accelerated games that are also playable on wp7, the XBox and as a desktop Windows application. The framework, at least from the pov of an indie game dev, is truly exceptional and very little out there compares favorably. Unity, maybe, but then it's an engine rather than a framework and so it offers less generality...
Disclaimer: I own various Macs and I work a lot with Microsoft products, so I am very far from being a fanboy in any direction.
Now while I am relatively scared by the idea of students not learning on an actual PC where you can code and experiment freely with stuff, I like the idea of ensuring a good technological plateau for all students rather than leaving it to the families.
The first question that pops into my mind is this: before spending so much money did anyone make a study? Did they compare different tools to see which are the best? Do they have a particular problem in mind that the iPad solves better than the other tablets out there?
Why not eBook readers? As a teacher my job of keeping a classroom of university students is constantly made harder by the distractions afforded them by notebooks and similar. I have come to forbid the use of these unless I am sure the student is following the lesson. A student who is playing also distracts those right next to him who are curious to see what he is doing.
After all it seems more like an initiative to attract students attention: "tell mom and dad to come to our school: you get an iPad!!!"...
What I meant, and it was quite clear IMNSHO, is that you always build an abstraction layer for your input system that launches events or uses some similar mechanism to abstract the input away; you do this because you are always interested in leaving the possibility of customizing the input (same in-game event, different button, touch, whatever) even if you are not planning a porting of your game and so supporting different controllers becomes very much trivial because all the new code happens behind the input wrapper and is very little in terms of written lines.
I am an indie game developer working mainly with XNA. I have published a few XBox Live Arcade titles, plus a few WP7 ones. The ease of portability is really high. The only difference (granted, this is not necessarily trivial to implement) is the input devices, which are the first thing I wrap away because for various reasons it is useful to have a game that works well in Windows with kb + mouse. When porting to wp7 no additional code is required. Usually lighting and shaders will be toned down (not much to do, just set different techniques in the stock shaders) and models and textures must be reduced in detail, both for storage and rendering performance.
In the end this is the reason why our games will keep ending also in the wp7 marketplace even though sales are not as high: the development costs for porting are so low that even few sales result in a gain...
When an issue is sensitive, discussing it may be the best way to deal with it so that it does not happen again. Making fun of tsunamis or earthquakes would be very poor right now, but making fun of evil builders who use cheap materials in 3rd world countries would be much more appropriate especially when the topic is hot and vivid in the collective memory.
Granted, this particular move is mainly thought as a sensible precaution towards those 3 who have suffered problems from nuclear poisoning and related accidents at the Fukushima plant, but the Simpsons episodes around nuclear power are mostly centered on the dangers of incompetence and greed and not on making fun of the victims.
Slashdot Mirror
...choose the tool that's best for the job, don't choose the job that's best for the tools you know already.
Game developers, for instance, are among the guys who write the most performance sensitive code out there, and they use a mix of C, C++, C#, Lua/Python for the various parts of the game. Usually the inner, tight loop is written in C/C++, higher level modules are written in C# and designer/modder scripts are written in a very high level language such as Lua. There is no best language in general, and whoever says otherwise is often an idiot.
Computer scientists? I'm a programming languages guy, type systems and declarative/functional programming. I hardly see myself as an engineer and I've never published at an engineering conference...
As a university researcher in applied game development I pretty much work on abstracting and generalizing *finished* software.
I usually do this: I spend between six months and a year building a game according to some technique, framework or new language I am researching. The game is then finished, published and even sold. Then a paper is written describing the technique and its inpact. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This is just anecdotical experience, but in this day and age of shrinking research budgets it is not uncommon to find scientists who also package and sell their research.
So this whole "programmers are cool, they develop finished stuff while the other a-hole scientists quit halfway" is just a stupid generalization based on a superficial stereotype of academia. Also, THIS IS NOT NEWS, and even if it were it wouldn't matter.
Ok, I get it now.
Thanks for the explanation.
...it's only advantage is being Open?
I can see how many people may not see a great cost/benefits ratio there...
And no malware has ever been transmitted through the browser, so another problem brilliantly solved!
Now if only we could remove the OS and only have a browser that does exactly what the OS did but under a different name, the world would be a far better place...
I can render a PDF perfectly on all OSes I own (Windows, OS X, iOS, Windows Phone 7) already!
Where the fuck did anybody officially say they dropped support for Silverlight?
So, Microsoft has changed one of its websites from Silverlight to HTML 5. That's a standard, so it's always A Good Thing.
Silverlight remains there, a good way to build animated user experiences; Silverlight 5 will be integrated with XNA. Having the chance to push a reduced version of my game (I am a game developer, and I can assure you this is VERY IMPORTANT TO MY COMPANY) through the browser as a demo/for betas, etc. is great. Easily deploying an application with a complex logic (nope: a dynamically typed language such as Javascript is worse than C# for complex reasoning) to many users through the browser with the possibility of right-clicking it to install it offline is another Good Thing.
So from where I sit Microsoft has done a good job because HTML 5 is better for that kind of website, and Silverlight is very alive even though it will be reduced to the only thing it was successful at: medium/large applications that must be easily deployed.
The fact that many books will be supplanted by digital versions is obvious and is already happening at a very fast pace. The idea that this trend will continue linearly is very dumb. There are applications for paper books, be it because you want the object for your physical collection, be it for taking notes or be it because a prestigious conference wants to print its proceedings.
We will probably end up in a world where most "perishable" low-cost/read-once books exist only in digital because they are not interesting enough that anybody may care about printing them, where high-value publications, proceedings, etc. will remain on paper because the value of the medium is by far surpassed by the value of the contents and a hard copy still makes a lot of sense.
You often see this kind of asinine ideas that trends will never stop when some equilibrium will be reached: smartphones and tablets are growing, therefore the PC is going to die soon, etc. Wake up: new and old find ways to live together, and a successful innovation does not necessarily displace everything that was before it...
In my book you need some studying to do if you think .Net (one of the major managed runtimes of today) is a language.
Plato was Greek, so I doubt he wrote originals in Latin :)
Win 7 infections went from 3/1000 to 4/1000, that is infected ratio went from 0.3% to 0.4% (yes, it is a 33% increase, to be precise), while XP went from 18/1000 to 14/1000, that is infected ratio went from 1.8% to 1.4%. The numbers actually mean that Microsoft is doing a good job on security, since over 1000 PC the combined metric is not an increase of 11% (as the article seems to imply) but rather we went from 2.1% infected to 1.8%, which is a nice step.
It's just a very cheap way to make my users try a full, free (ad-supported), on-demand version of my game by using the same assets of the Desktop/Windows and Xbox versions. Also, I can let paying users access the SL out of browser system to let them install the application and use it offline, without even having to build an installer package. Development time is very costly for an indie team, and for us this is already making a large difference, especially given how happy our publisher is about this opportunity...
Honestly I don't get the point of your snarkiness about my humour...
:D)
Mostly I do the following: I write reusable meta-libraries in F# that generate the same code-behind that others would repeatedly build by hand in Visual Studio with C#. So I clearly hear what you are saying, but rather than conclude negatively that an easy-peasy avenue makes a library "dumb", I appreciate the fact that the underlying model is clean enough to allow both library makers and "regular coders" to be productive. More often than not you find libraries that are good for idiots but are rather poor representations of whatever they wish to represent, other times you find libraries which are pure shit, and rarely you find stuff which is clean and elegant but which arguably has no possible practical use (http://www.haskell.org/arrows/
Uh? It runs *already well* in wp7?
Sounds like a problem with the project developer...
Well, I know a shitload of languages too: C/C++/C#/Java/OCaML/Haskell/Lisp/Scheme, so my intellectual dick does not look shorter than yours...
Btw, I know the difference between a library and a language and so I know that it's quite irrelevant how many languages you know to judge a software library.
Silverlight is not "pointy clicky development". It is a clean Reactive Programming model that strongly emphasizes the distinction between general layout, data templates (how you represent your app objects) and application logic. The three layers are put together, respectively, by XAML, templates and styles, and the very powerful mechanism for data-bindings.
I do not wish to offend, but you may not know much about Silverlight. Up until a couple of versions ago it did not even have a visual plugin for Visual Studio...
Actually, dev support is possibly *the only* truly great thing in wp7...
A very interesting move is the integration between Silverlight and XNA: this will allow (I am developing such a game right now!) web-based 3D accelerated games that are also playable on wp7, the XBox and as a desktop Windows application. The framework, at least from the pov of an indie game dev, is truly exceptional and very little out there compares favorably. Unity, maybe, but then it's an engine rather than a framework and so it offers less generality...
wtf? What on Earth does that mean?
A software has compatibility issues on some specific hardware. Amazing and never seen before. So what?
Disclaimer: I own various Macs and I work a lot with Microsoft products, so I am very far from being a fanboy in any direction.
Now while I am relatively scared by the idea of students not learning on an actual PC where you can code and experiment freely with stuff, I like the idea of ensuring a good technological plateau for all students rather than leaving it to the families.
The first question that pops into my mind is this: before spending so much money did anyone make a study? Did they compare different tools to see which are the best? Do they have a particular problem in mind that the iPad solves better than the other tablets out there?
Why not eBook readers? As a teacher my job of keeping a classroom of university students is constantly made harder by the distractions afforded them by notebooks and similar. I have come to forbid the use of these unless I am sure the student is following the lesson. A student who is playing also distracts those right next to him who are curious to see what he is doing.
After all it seems more like an initiative to attract students attention: "tell mom and dad to come to our school: you get an iPad!!!"...
What I meant, and it was quite clear IMNSHO, is that you always build an abstraction layer for your input system that launches events or uses some similar mechanism to abstract the input away; you do this because you are always interested in leaving the possibility of customizing the input (same in-game event, different button, touch, whatever) even if you are not planning a porting of your game and so supporting different controllers becomes very much trivial because all the new code happens behind the input wrapper and is very little in terms of written lines.
...so I'll burn a bit here :)
I am an indie game developer working mainly with XNA. I have published a few XBox Live Arcade titles, plus a few WP7 ones. The ease of portability is really high. The only difference (granted, this is not necessarily trivial to implement) is the input devices, which are the first thing I wrap away because for various reasons it is useful to have a game that works well in Windows with kb + mouse. When porting to wp7 no additional code is required. Usually lighting and shaders will be toned down (not much to do, just set different techniques in the stock shaders) and models and textures must be reduced in detail, both for storage and rendering performance.
In the end this is the reason why our games will keep ending also in the wp7 marketplace even though sales are not as high: the development costs for porting are so low that even few sales result in a gain...
When an issue is sensitive, discussing it may be the best way to deal with it so that it does not happen again. Making fun of tsunamis or earthquakes would be very poor right now, but making fun of evil builders who use cheap materials in 3rd world countries would be much more appropriate especially when the topic is hot and vivid in the collective memory.
Granted, this particular move is mainly thought as a sensible precaution towards those 3 who have suffered problems from nuclear poisoning and related accidents at the Fukushima plant, but the Simpsons episodes around nuclear power are mostly centered on the dangers of incompetence and greed and not on making fun of the victims.
If anything the Simpsons are a way of becoming more aware of the problem, not making fun of those who suffer for it.