A data structures class shouldn't only tell you how to create a linked list, or a binary search tree, or a hashtable. It should also teach why why and when.
Since when does any school teach you about application and implementation on any subject?
Take a typical history class, for example. Plenty of names and dates are thrown around, but little information as to why things happened. My college history classes weren't any better than those I took in high school.
The way trailers are made these days, I liken them to screenshots. Random scenes strung together out of context, and often out of chronological order as well. I rarely find trailers to be informative.
Movie demos are more like actual, unedited, 30-second clips from the movie you see showing up on YouTube and video reviews.
Every PC I've ever owned required a screwdriver and less than 5 minutes to open it up.
My Mini required two putty knives, 45 minutes, a lot of sweat every time I heard plastic creak. Thank goodness the memory is the only thing I can realistically upgrade, because I don't ever want to open the damn thing again.
Re:Apple has made Microsoft look "open".
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The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
Those disadvantages mostly go a way with a closed system.
Or, if you only use the software that came with the machine and nothing else. I might be a tad out of touch with the latest cutting-edge marketing tactics, but mal-ware tends to be caused by 3rd-party software... or PC vendors that just don't give a shit.
The real problem is that a lot of "open" architectures tend to come with very little software, so you have to get 3rd party software. It's entirely possible to use an open platform and not have to worry about all that evil crap.
Seriously... Adobe PDF exploits wouldn't be an issue if the vendors did their damn job and provided their own, proper PDF viewer. Just because most PC vendors want to make money through contracts on pre-installed mal-ware rather than their own damn hardware doesn't mean the "open-ness" of the platform is the problem.
For me, the value of driving games depends on the accuracy of the physics engine. The arcade version of Hard Drivin' was originally made to be a driving simulator for instructional purposes, and even after 20 years, it's still one of my favorite racing games ever (it's a shame the PC/console ports were rubbish). Other accurate games like Viper Racing and any of the Papyrus classics are good, too. Most other racing games play like a bumper car arena. IMO, Gran Turismo doesn't quite make the grade.
Of course, there's also the issues that people who play racing games are probably a bit more aware of how cars function than your typical daily driver, and the fact that gamers tend to have better reaction time, too. Playing games improves your awareness and coordination? What a surprise.
My impression is that a lot of people here (compared to other forums) have used more than one OS, and know how to customize them, too.
I have a Mac right next to my Windows/Linux PC. I hate Macs because I've been using them for, oh, about 10 years, and have become quite familiar with how they work.
Adventure games went extinct because they are, to put it bluntly, a horrible game format. At each and every point of the game you're trying to guess how the adventure maker wants this puzzle to be solved.
So, if 90% of FPS games suck and the other 10% still manage to drive a viable market, why do 90% of adventure games suck and thus the market is dead?
I wouldn't go so far as to say FPSes are "dirt cheap" to make, but the parent certainly has it right. It's easier to polish a FPS to make it look worth purchasing, even if it does still take money and time to do so. I've never played Myst and I don't know how good a game it really is, but I have heard quite a lot about the awesome graphics helping to drive sales.
Lately, though, pixel games and old-school shoot-em-ups are coming back into style, and I couldn't be happier.
Yeah, Apple's brilliant marketing had nothing to do with it. To this day, the iPod commercials are the only ones I remember. Actually, I don't even remember having seen commercials for any other music player.
The first time I picked up an iPod, it took me forever to figure out how to scroll. I kept pushing the icons on the touch wheel as if they were buttons. If they had made the icons follow the shape of the touch ring, it would have been more obvious what I was supposed to do. Yes, you may laugh, but a touch pad is not the same thing as a physical rotating wheel, like on the first iPod. Maybe the reason why the later touch pad iPods are so intuitive is because everybody already knows how to use one. Either that, or people play with them constantly. When I want music, I push "Play". Everyone I know who has an iPod treats music like it's a ritual, and they are fiddling with the thing all day long. I guess that means they enjoy the UI more than the music.
It also took me a long time to understand that I had to select a "Back" option from the menu to go back, which is very annoying. Most players have separate Back and Select buttons, which makes navigation much easier and faster, provided you have more than 10 seconds of experience with the device.
How intuitive a device is depends on your experience. I've tried a number of natural devices that required me to unlearn a lot of stuff before they became intuitive. Personally, I see all devices as tools, and anything that is so natural that it doesn't have to be learned is probably crippled in a lot of ways. You shouldn't need hours of training to use a music player, but is it really unrealistic to need 2 whopping minutes to figure out how to use it? Those minutes can translate to hours of saved time in the long run.
I want to be a UI designer, BTW. I'm just sick of dumbed-down interfaces getting all the fanfare.
The iPhone UI tries to solve this problem by replacing the buttons.
Yeah, my telephone did that, too. Now I have to push a couple buttons about 40 times each to navigate through menus, when a dedicated button for each function would have been far, far more intuitive. But, hey, all those buttons look scary and cost money, too. There's no such thing as false simplicity, of course.
"How do I install (something not included with my distro)"
Compiling software is not for the faint of heart.
What the open source community needs to understand is that distributing source code, because binaries are EVIL, isn't the ideal way to appeal to the casual market. Distros can't include and support everything.
No sound? The disk drive in the Wii makes a racket when it seeks, and the fan is far from quiet. It also has a hollow, plastic sound as it operates, much like the original PS1, which gets really annoying. IMO, my (fat) PS3 is much quieter, even when the fan spins up.
XBox360... well, that's a whole new level of noise. I can't stand using mine, because it just sounds like it's going to blow up at any second, and I mostly play Arcade games that don't even need a disc.
My guess is that something that lives in water all the time shouldn't by hydrophobic. The water spiders primarily live in the air.
An otherwise dry, watertight boat hull would be fine, but if a boat hull were made of flesh, a hydrophobic coating probably wouldn't work so well. That's why fish are slippery, not hairy.
The real problem is habit. So many web sites were using annoying ads for so long, that it's a habit for people to leave the ad blocker on all the time, rather than use it only when an annoying ad comes up. No matter how much advertising on the web changes, this is going to be a very difficult habit to break. It's just another case of 90% of people abusing a system, so the remaining 10% have to suffer.
I don't use a subscription to an ad blocking list. I block only when something annoys me. To me, an ad blocker is a mute button. That's the way it's supposed to be done.
Now, JavaScript is a different issue. I have it off by default. If web browser developers allowed you to block all 3rd party JavaScript and use only it from the domain you are viewing, then I would treat it like a blacklist (like ads), rather than a whitelist. This is also the reason why I find it difficult to add JavaScript to my own web site. I know a lot of people have it turned off or use a whitelist system like NoScript. I don't want to force people to turn on JavaScript so they can use my web site, even if I'll eventually have to give in whether I like it or not.
Unfortunately, ads are what drive the Internet. The chance of web browsers changing to favor the community and not the advertisers is pretty remote. That's why Firefox relies on a 3rd party ad blocker in the first place. They aren't trying to kill it since it's a killer feature, but they're not going to add something like that by default unless the browser is in a death spiral.
Enough about JavaScript speed! Could we focus on security, please?
All JS scripts run in a single address space. I'm a bit annoyed that any JavaScript coming from a 3rd party site (namely ads) have the same privileges as JS from the main site. There should be a way to sandbox JavaScript and DOM, or at least configure access privileges. For example, unless configured otherwise, anything in an iframe should be sandboxed, and there should always be some kind of end-user override.
It makes no difference whether you're a provider or an end-user. Since when can we trust advertisers not to abuse privileges? They already siphon usage statistics. When will they start keylogging? So much of the web is "2.0" that just turning JavaScript off is no longer an option.
Even the open source browsers don't seem to care. Are we really going to rely forever on 3rd party extensions to make up for security shortcomings in software products?
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Steve is just a really lucky guy. ---or he is just a genius.
...or he is techno-savvy version of Billy Mays.
Wait, does that still fall under the genius category?
A data structures class shouldn't only tell you how to create a linked list, or a binary search tree, or a hashtable. It should also teach why why and when.
Since when does any school teach you about application and implementation on any subject?
Take a typical history class, for example. Plenty of names and dates are thrown around, but little information as to why things happened. My college history classes weren't any better than those I took in high school.
The way trailers are made these days, I liken them to screenshots. Random scenes strung together out of context, and often out of chronological order as well. I rarely find trailers to be informative.
Movie demos are more like actual, unedited, 30-second clips from the movie you see showing up on YouTube and video reviews.
Bah. Amiga users learned to live with both a CLI and a GUI environment before high-caliber Linux nerds made it cool.
Gee, thanks. Now I can't help but think that touching it worse than looking at it.
I have to buy a Windows PC to develop for the XBox too.
I thought the original dev kits for the Xbox360 were Macs.
The Apple cult is in a rush to give up any sort of liberty for a little bit of [insert noun here].
Where have I heard this before?
Every PC I've ever owned required a screwdriver and less than 5 minutes to open it up.
My Mini required two putty knives, 45 minutes, a lot of sweat every time I heard plastic creak. Thank goodness the memory is the only thing I can realistically upgrade, because I don't ever want to open the damn thing again.
Those disadvantages mostly go a way with a closed system.
Or, if you only use the software that came with the machine and nothing else. I might be a tad out of touch with the latest cutting-edge marketing tactics, but mal-ware tends to be caused by 3rd-party software... or PC vendors that just don't give a shit.
The real problem is that a lot of "open" architectures tend to come with very little software, so you have to get 3rd party software. It's entirely possible to use an open platform and not have to worry about all that evil crap.
Seriously... Adobe PDF exploits wouldn't be an issue if the vendors did their damn job and provided their own, proper PDF viewer. Just because most PC vendors want to make money through contracts on pre-installed mal-ware rather than their own damn hardware doesn't mean the "open-ness" of the platform is the problem.
For me, the value of driving games depends on the accuracy of the physics engine. The arcade version of Hard Drivin' was originally made to be a driving simulator for instructional purposes, and even after 20 years, it's still one of my favorite racing games ever (it's a shame the PC/console ports were rubbish). Other accurate games like Viper Racing and any of the Papyrus classics are good, too. Most other racing games play like a bumper car arena. IMO, Gran Turismo doesn't quite make the grade.
Of course, there's also the issues that people who play racing games are probably a bit more aware of how cars function than your typical daily driver, and the fact that gamers tend to have better reaction time, too. Playing games improves your awareness and coordination? What a surprise.
My impression is that a lot of people here (compared to other forums) have used more than one OS, and know how to customize them, too.
I have a Mac right next to my Windows/Linux PC. I hate Macs because I've been using them for, oh, about 10 years, and have become quite familiar with how they work.
Waitresses in turtlenecks? No thanks.
For now?
Adventure games went extinct because they are, to put it bluntly, a horrible game format. At each and every point of the game you're trying to guess how the adventure maker wants this puzzle to be solved.
So, if 90% of FPS games suck and the other 10% still manage to drive a viable market, why do 90% of adventure games suck and thus the market is dead?
I wouldn't go so far as to say FPSes are "dirt cheap" to make, but the parent certainly has it right. It's easier to polish a FPS to make it look worth purchasing, even if it does still take money and time to do so. I've never played Myst and I don't know how good a game it really is, but I have heard quite a lot about the awesome graphics helping to drive sales.
Lately, though, pixel games and old-school shoot-em-ups are coming back into style, and I couldn't be happier.
Yeah, Apple's brilliant marketing had nothing to do with it. To this day, the iPod commercials are the only ones I remember. Actually, I don't even remember having seen commercials for any other music player.
The first time I picked up an iPod, it took me forever to figure out how to scroll. I kept pushing the icons on the touch wheel as if they were buttons. If they had made the icons follow the shape of the touch ring, it would have been more obvious what I was supposed to do. Yes, you may laugh, but a touch pad is not the same thing as a physical rotating wheel, like on the first iPod. Maybe the reason why the later touch pad iPods are so intuitive is because everybody already knows how to use one. Either that, or people play with them constantly. When I want music, I push "Play". Everyone I know who has an iPod treats music like it's a ritual, and they are fiddling with the thing all day long. I guess that means they enjoy the UI more than the music.
It also took me a long time to understand that I had to select a "Back" option from the menu to go back, which is very annoying. Most players have separate Back and Select buttons, which makes navigation much easier and faster, provided you have more than 10 seconds of experience with the device.
How intuitive a device is depends on your experience. I've tried a number of natural devices that required me to unlearn a lot of stuff before they became intuitive. Personally, I see all devices as tools, and anything that is so natural that it doesn't have to be learned is probably crippled in a lot of ways. You shouldn't need hours of training to use a music player, but is it really unrealistic to need 2 whopping minutes to figure out how to use it? Those minutes can translate to hours of saved time in the long run.
I want to be a UI designer, BTW. I'm just sick of dumbed-down interfaces getting all the fanfare.
The iPhone UI tries to solve this problem by replacing the buttons.
Yeah, my telephone did that, too. Now I have to push a couple buttons about 40 times each to navigate through menus, when a dedicated button for each function would have been far, far more intuitive. But, hey, all those buttons look scary and cost money, too. There's no such thing as false simplicity, of course.
If Apple sells it, it's Apple's fault.
"How do I install (something not included with my distro)"
Compiling software is not for the faint of heart.
What the open source community needs to understand is that distributing source code, because binaries are EVIL, isn't the ideal way to appeal to the casual market. Distros can't include and support everything.
No sound? The disk drive in the Wii makes a racket when it seeks, and the fan is far from quiet. It also has a hollow, plastic sound as it operates, much like the original PS1, which gets really annoying. IMO, my (fat) PS3 is much quieter, even when the fan spins up.
XBox360... well, that's a whole new level of noise. I can't stand using mine, because it just sounds like it's going to blow up at any second, and I mostly play Arcade games that don't even need a disc.
Try cell phones. Most people already have them attached to their ears all day.
Do sex toys even belong under .xxx? If a vibrator is put into an ordinary rubber ducky, does that make it ban-able?
Not to mention the fact that this is a sequel, and the first game didn't have this kind of DRM. I'm sure the demo doesn't have the DRM, either.
Oh, wait... there is no demo.
My guess is that something that lives in water all the time shouldn't by hydrophobic. The water spiders primarily live in the air.
An otherwise dry, watertight boat hull would be fine, but if a boat hull were made of flesh, a hydrophobic coating probably wouldn't work so well. That's why fish are slippery, not hairy.
The real problem is habit. So many web sites were using annoying ads for so long, that it's a habit for people to leave the ad blocker on all the time, rather than use it only when an annoying ad comes up. No matter how much advertising on the web changes, this is going to be a very difficult habit to break. It's just another case of 90% of people abusing a system, so the remaining 10% have to suffer.
I don't use a subscription to an ad blocking list. I block only when something annoys me. To me, an ad blocker is a mute button. That's the way it's supposed to be done.
Now, JavaScript is a different issue. I have it off by default. If web browser developers allowed you to block all 3rd party JavaScript and use only it from the domain you are viewing, then I would treat it like a blacklist (like ads), rather than a whitelist. This is also the reason why I find it difficult to add JavaScript to my own web site. I know a lot of people have it turned off or use a whitelist system like NoScript. I don't want to force people to turn on JavaScript so they can use my web site, even if I'll eventually have to give in whether I like it or not.
Unfortunately, ads are what drive the Internet. The chance of web browsers changing to favor the community and not the advertisers is pretty remote. That's why Firefox relies on a 3rd party ad blocker in the first place. They aren't trying to kill it since it's a killer feature, but they're not going to add something like that by default unless the browser is in a death spiral.
Enough about JavaScript speed! Could we focus on security, please?
All JS scripts run in a single address space. I'm a bit annoyed that any JavaScript coming from a 3rd party site (namely ads) have the same privileges as JS from the main site. There should be a way to sandbox JavaScript and DOM, or at least configure access privileges. For example, unless configured otherwise, anything in an iframe should be sandboxed, and there should always be some kind of end-user override.
It makes no difference whether you're a provider or an end-user. Since when can we trust advertisers not to abuse privileges? They already siphon usage statistics. When will they start keylogging? So much of the web is "2.0" that just turning JavaScript off is no longer an option.
Even the open source browsers don't seem to care. Are we really going to rely forever on 3rd party extensions to make up for security shortcomings in software products?
4. Firefox supported it. IE eventually caved in.