No. Not until it's proven. As long as someone could come up with another theory that predicts the exact same results, in a different way, which is not disproven, it's still a theory.
For example, I could say "My theory includes everything in General Relativity, except for a small sphere four miles wide in the center of Andromeda, where light travels twice as fast."
Yes, this makes truly proving anything in the physical world basically impossible.
You don't even need a debugger for something like this. I spent a year and a half on a project that didn't have a working debugger (a PS2 game, for the curious - a debugger was included in the devkit but we were never able to get it working.)
Luckily it had stream output, so we just used printf for everything. To this day I use printf for all my debugging. If you don't know why an area is failing, just sprinkle a dozen printf statements around and you can trace the execution easily by hand. The advantage is that you can look at a few dozen paths through the function without having to tangle with breakpoints - just scroll up and down in the several-thousand-line-buffer.
A friend of mine once had a large windowing class he needed to write. He was late on a project and basically needed it done Now. Or sooner. So he resigned himself to an all-nighter and got crunching.
Round about 8pm, he realized he was getting overly stressed, and he still had about half the code left to write. So he decided to take an hour break, smoke some pot, and come back to the project after he was a little unwound.
The next thing he remembers is waking up the next day. He had that dawning moment of realization that I'm sure all of us have experienced at one point in our lives - "Oh CRAP I screwed up" - and ran to his computer to finish the code as fast as he could.
The code was finished.
Several thousand lines, all commented, all readable even without comments. The interface was clean. The implementation was clean. It was finished.
To this day, he has never remembered writing even a single line post-toke. He has also never found a single bug, and he's used that code quite often. Now, I don't recommend relying on this technique - but once in a while, it seems to work.
Only half the solution - inevitably, someone will run across a new breed of spyware that the proxy doesn't yet catch. At that point, you need spyware protection on people's computers as well, so that it can be exterminated once the adware database is updated.
Yes, you could also filter outgoing packages, neatly making the spyware/adware useless, but I've seen spyware that killed a computer's internet connection if it couldn't communicate with its home system (on a user's computer in college, which was a problem since they had to authorize their computer - on a webpage - before they could connect to the outside world.)
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
I see your point - but I think if you looked a little more deeply, you might see it differently.:)
There are plenty of games that allow for many things to be destroyed. Hell, you can boot up Simcity and just unleash monster after monster if you want. GTA3 is unique is that it allows for things to be destroyed semi-realistically, in a very cool fashion, by someone who's extremely badass and who you control.
I think if you got rid of the pyrotechnics and sheer coolness of it, people wouldn't play it. Mindless slaughter alone - despite the first impression - just isn't enough anymore.
(Actually, I don't even have to think about this - there's proof. Compare GTA3 sales to Postal 2 sales. End of story.)
Not if it's running Windows - then it'll be full of holes!/rimshot
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
Yes. What does that have to do with this conversation?
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
Oddly, the pistol is the best weapon for sniping at medium range, because it auto-tracks.:) On the other hand, I've found it's not good at *truly* long range, and it's hard to get headshots with it. For that, you need the sniper rifle.
Also, keep in mind that "so far away they were just pixels" isn't all that far away at 640x480.
I'm not particularly going for realism, I suppose - just balance. When any gun can snipe, that just sucks. Oddly, the pistol in Halo is an extremely powerful and accurate single-shot gun - it's sort of a close-to-medium-range sniper rifle (and probably my favorite weapon). I'm not sure why they chose a pistol for that, but they did.:)
I never said Blizzard wasn't good. I never said they didn't have an amazing amount of polish. I just disagree that they bring anything truly new to the genre. Examples:
(1) "We have quests. Lots of quests!" On the other hand, every game has quests. They just have a lot of them. Cool? Yes. Incredibly inventive? No.
(2) Instanced dungeons: AO had instanced missions, although (AFAIK - it might have changed since a few years ago) they didn't have named monsters. FFXI has instanced boss fights. Now that I'm thinking about it, I can't think of any games that have instanced dungeons, but there's a lot of games that come really close.
(3) It's a bit new. It doesn't generate any really new playstyles. It's just a slightly new way to prevent ganking. It doesn't bring any new strategies to the game (that I can think of, at least.)
(4) Polish. Polish! Polish. Blizzard always has a crazy amount of polish in their games. It's the thing they do better than anybody. But, again, this isn't anything really groundbreaking (unless you count "make polished games" as a groundbreaking idea, and admittedly, it does seem to be something nobody's figured out except Blizzard.)
(5) I'd love something new and imaginative. How is battle.net that thing? Combine Quake 1 and Meridian 59, and, bam, Battle.net.
(6) Everquest: Champions of Norrath. Angband. Ultima Underworld. Hell, do a search for "dungeon crawler the underdogs" on Google, you'll get a whole slew of them. No, I can't think of any old ones that were in third-person isometric off the top of my head, but then again, I haven't really looked.
(7) Yes. This is EXACTLY MY POINT. Blizzard doesn't do new things - it does things that have already been done, and does them really fucking well.
(8) Ask Americans what they think about how 'noteworthy' Britney Spears is. Noteworthy-in-terms-of-popularity has nothing to do with quality (which Blizzard has), and neither of those has anything to do with inventiveness.
My point is that I can't expect them to pioneer a new genre with every game they release. In fact, they haven't pioneered a new genre with *any* games. They're really really good at doing old genres really really well. I'll grant them that. But they're not imaginative.
I'm glad they're around - they're making some fantastic games. But if I had to choose one game company to survive, and all the others would be destroyed, I sure wouldn't choose Blizzard. I'd be dooming myself to a life of really well-done games with no brilliantly new ideas.
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 2, Insightful
*cough* lousy player *cough*
Seriously, since when did "sniping" mean "stopping in the middle of battle and firing off a shot in half a second"? You can snipe someone in five or six seconds, if they're not moving all that fast - three seconds or so if they're not moving at all. Even that is horribly unrealistic compared to reality, but, hey.
If they're dodging, of course, you have basically no chance of sniping them unless you get really lucky. Which is how it should be.
Blizzard is the most polished developing studio of the modern gaming era. However, they never do anything really noteworthy and imaginative - their games are pretty derivative. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - they're still damn fun games - but it's clear that it's up to other companies to come up with truly new ideas.
The WoW beta was fun, but there was literally nothing in it that jumped out at me as being spectacular and genre-changing. In the end, it's Everquest with orcs. Both FFXI (with its crazy economy, crafting system, subjobs, etc) and CoH (with a really new combat system and play style) are more imaginative.
On the other hand, WoW is incredibly polished. So it'll be a good game also.
I also love how Blizzard has this fantastic epic fantasy universe. I don't know if that was intentional or not (just look at Warcraft I, and note the "storyline" *snicker*), but it was brilliant either way.:)
I wish I could agree with you entirely, but Kingdom of Loathing, especially, has really been going downhill lately. I played it for months and bought a Mr. Accessory, but haven't opened it up again for a month or two - there's just nothing to do anymore, y'know? When I started, 99% of the game was "fight monsters, get items, level up", and the "fight monsters" part wasn't fun whatsoever - the only fun parts were finishing quests and getting new items. Now I've got all the Star Garb and I can't kill the final boss because the final boss doesn't exist, and what's Jick doing?
Penguins! Mafia! New familiars! Yet more random things that don't add anything noteworthy to the game, just increase the number of minor variations a millionfold!
It's a cool game and all, but he's done absolutely nothing to make it deeper - just wider. I've lost interest. If he started adding really interesting new things, I'd go back, but . . . well, there's just nothing to do anymore, unless you want to get incredibly rich.
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I've spent a long time trying to figure out why I dislike this argument. It never sat well with me. It took me months - but one day I went to a friend's house to play some RPGs and I realized why.
"Give us better weapons!" "No." "But the game won't be fun unless you do!"
You know, power isn't everything. Sometimes part of the fun is not being godlike. In PC FPS games, you're pretty much guaranteed to be able to snipe people, instantly, with a machine gun, from two hundred yards away. And you know, I don't care. It's not interesting.
In Halo, it's a lot tougher. "Fire for effect" becomes a reality. Sometimes you're not really trying to hit anything, because you can't, you're too far away - you're just trying to keep their heads down.
To me, a game isn't necessarily fun just because I can kill things more easily. It's fun because of the challenge. It's fun because of the story, or the coolness. I'm told they jacked up the difficulty when they moved Halo to the PC - is it more fun now? I mean, sure, you're more powerful. No argument. So are they. So why is it now "more fun"?
I'd agree that there's a level of frustration when you just can't make the controls do what you want. But I didn't encounter that in Halo. You can snipe easily, if you have a sniper weapon. You can aim if you put a little time and work into it. It's far above the frustration point - so what's the issue?
Compare Starcraft and Total Annihilation. In almost every way, Total Annihilation's interface was far superior. You could select an unlimited number of units. You could queue up any commands, up to and including construction commands (yes, that's right - thirty seconds of clicking and you've got fifteen minutes of construction set up.) Does this mean TA is a better game?
No, of course not.
A game is a good game if people enjoy it. That is necessary and sufficient. Deer Hunter is a good game - for its target audience, it fills the exact need. Halo is a good game.
But there's the thing - I don't have a user.:) I'm just trying to process a large amount of data and get out other useful data, that, presumably, bears some close resemblance to patterns that are probably infeasible to detect exactly (although I'm going to do my best, heh.)
Test suites are *great* when you know what the output of your program is going to be. When you're not even 100% sure what output *format* you'll end up with, to say nothing of the actual output, they end up being a bit less useful.
(Which is not to say I don't have consistency checks scattered all over my code - in fact a few days ago one of the new ones triggered, and I discovered a bug in a very early bit of code that I couldn't have realistically found before. Took me two days to track down, sigh.)
In the first case, it did in fact pass all the tests (and I went back and added more tests once it was fixed) - one of those "wow, that bug was so big I didn't imagine we'd ever have to test for it" dealies.
In the second case, writing formal tests wasn't particularly possible - it was a very complicated optimization problem, and it's mighty hard to write unit tests for code that doesn't have a designated "correct result". (I'm running into the same problem with my current codebase - I'm testing all the deterministic stuff I can, but in the end, the complicated testing is me looking at the output and saying "yup, yup, that looks good".)
Funny, that. I recently started working at a company with mandatory code reviews. Here's a list of my recent experiences with it:
1) Checked in code. Spent fifteen minutes justifying design decisions. No changes made.
2) Checked in code. Code contained horrible horrible bug. Code reviewer didn't see it.
3) Checked in code. Defended my design against several more computationally expensive suggestions that were also more complicated. No changes made.
4) Listened to a friend gripe about having to spend a DAY AND A HALF repeating design reasons and fixing bugs introduced by his code reviewer "cleaning up" his code.
5) Received company-wide email about a build that flat-out didn't compile - apparently someone hadn't bothered compiling a patch, and had sent it to a code reviewer, who likewise hadn't bothered compiling it before authorizing it.
Now I'll admit that there are also a whole lot of "well, it only took five minutes, so it wasn't much of a waste" cases. But so far I haven't heard one person talking about how useful the mandatory code reviews are.
Maybe it's just an artifact of the kind of programmers working at this company, or the kind of code being worked on, but so far code reviews have been a net loss in my experience. I've taken to doing major changes in my own personal branch of the repository (which doesn't enforce the code-review requirement) and in a month or two I'll have 3000 lines of code for someone to look at - but at least I won't have nickel-and-dimed them to death with 120 100-line code reviews, 3/4 of which I will inevitably end up deleting entirely.
Note that I'm not saying "code reviews are bad" - what I am saying is that there's a time and a place for just about every technique, and there's also a time and a place where each technique is worse than useless. Pick your battles and pick your tools.
No, it doesn't mean that at all. Prove to me that CD installations outnumber downloaded-but-not-installed. What it means is that there is only the vaguest of relations between downloads and installs, and nobody knows in which direction it's skewed.
I have friends who write software that happens to transmit anonymous usage stats. I'm told that, at best, installations is within an order of magnitude of downloads - in either direction. And sometimes it's not even that accurate.
Download stats are utterly meaningless, and adding extra unknowns doesn't give you any more data.
Oh, definitely. I don't argue at all that the numbers are looking up. There's a really obvious upward trend on all of this, and I'm quite happy about it. I just think it's way way way too early to be making claims about how OpenOffice is winning - we could see it easily plateau.
(1) Downloads are meaningless. Just look at a few of the comments attached to this story - people downloading it many multiple times and often uninstalling it. I know that I personally am responsible for at least 15 Mozilla downloads, and 2 OpenOffice downloads, and while I finally do use Mozilla I haven't used OpenOffice.
(2) "Countless CD installations" does not imply there's necessarily a lot. It simply implies we can't count them.
(3) 14% of the large enterprise office systems as counted how? I note that the same story also says "Microsoft dominates the office suite market, with 95% of the overall share" - so why's "large enterprise office" so different from "office"? Are they making a distinction that naturally favors Linux houses?
I'd love to raise the banner and shout "Go OpenOffice!" but that 95% figure is still pretty damning, especially since there's no guarantee the remaining 5% is OpenOffice.
A few days ago I went to dump a DVD on Windows so I could send a video clip to a friend. Oddly, copying files didn't work. I presume this was because of that above-mentioned DRM thing.
Took me all of five minutes to find a utility to work around it.
When are these people going to realize that DRM is utterly ineffective?
Slashdot Mirror
No. Not until it's proven. As long as someone could come up with another theory that predicts the exact same results, in a different way, which is not disproven, it's still a theory.
For example, I could say "My theory includes everything in General Relativity, except for a small sphere four miles wide in the center of Andromeda, where light travels twice as fast."
Yes, this makes truly proving anything in the physical world basically impossible.
You don't even need a debugger for something like this. I spent a year and a half on a project that didn't have a working debugger (a PS2 game, for the curious - a debugger was included in the devkit but we were never able to get it working.)
Luckily it had stream output, so we just used printf for everything. To this day I use printf for all my debugging. If you don't know why an area is failing, just sprinkle a dozen printf statements around and you can trace the execution easily by hand. The advantage is that you can look at a few dozen paths through the function without having to tangle with breakpoints - just scroll up and down in the several-thousand-line-buffer.
Debugging is vital. Debuggers are not.
A friend of mine once had a large windowing class he needed to write. He was late on a project and basically needed it done Now. Or sooner. So he resigned himself to an all-nighter and got crunching.
Round about 8pm, he realized he was getting overly stressed, and he still had about half the code left to write. So he decided to take an hour break, smoke some pot, and come back to the project after he was a little unwound.
The next thing he remembers is waking up the next day. He had that dawning moment of realization that I'm sure all of us have experienced at one point in our lives - "Oh CRAP I screwed up" - and ran to his computer to finish the code as fast as he could.
The code was finished.
Several thousand lines, all commented, all readable even without comments. The interface was clean. The implementation was clean. It was finished.
To this day, he has never remembered writing even a single line post-toke. He has also never found a single bug, and he's used that code quite often. Now, I don't recommend relying on this technique - but once in a while, it seems to work.
Only half the solution - inevitably, someone will run across a new breed of spyware that the proxy doesn't yet catch. At that point, you need spyware protection on people's computers as well, so that it can be exterminated once the adware database is updated.
Yes, you could also filter outgoing packages, neatly making the spyware/adware useless, but I've seen spyware that killed a computer's internet connection if it couldn't communicate with its home system (on a user's computer in college, which was a problem since they had to authorize their computer - on a webpage - before they could connect to the outside world.)
I see your point - but I think if you looked a little more deeply, you might see it differently. :)
There are plenty of games that allow for many things to be destroyed. Hell, you can boot up Simcity and just unleash monster after monster if you want. GTA3 is unique is that it allows for things to be destroyed semi-realistically, in a very cool fashion, by someone who's extremely badass and who you control.
I think if you got rid of the pyrotechnics and sheer coolness of it, people wouldn't play it. Mindless slaughter alone - despite the first impression - just isn't enough anymore.
(Actually, I don't even have to think about this - there's proof. Compare GTA3 sales to Postal 2 sales. End of story.)
Not if it's running Windows - then it'll be full of holes! /rimshot
Yes. What does that have to do with this conversation?
Oddly, the pistol is the best weapon for sniping at medium range, because it auto-tracks. :) On the other hand, I've found it's not good at *truly* long range, and it's hard to get headshots with it. For that, you need the sniper rifle.
:)
Also, keep in mind that "so far away they were just pixels" isn't all that far away at 640x480.
I'm not particularly going for realism, I suppose - just balance. When any gun can snipe, that just sucks. Oddly, the pistol in Halo is an extremely powerful and accurate single-shot gun - it's sort of a close-to-medium-range sniper rifle (and probably my favorite weapon). I'm not sure why they chose a pistol for that, but they did.
You have just proved my exact point.
I never said Blizzard wasn't good. I never said they didn't have an amazing amount of polish. I just disagree that they bring anything truly new to the genre. Examples:
(1) "We have quests. Lots of quests!" On the other hand, every game has quests. They just have a lot of them. Cool? Yes. Incredibly inventive? No.
(2) Instanced dungeons: AO had instanced missions, although (AFAIK - it might have changed since a few years ago) they didn't have named monsters. FFXI has instanced boss fights. Now that I'm thinking about it, I can't think of any games that have instanced dungeons, but there's a lot of games that come really close.
(3) It's a bit new. It doesn't generate any really new playstyles. It's just a slightly new way to prevent ganking. It doesn't bring any new strategies to the game (that I can think of, at least.)
(4) Polish. Polish! Polish. Blizzard always has a crazy amount of polish in their games. It's the thing they do better than anybody. But, again, this isn't anything really groundbreaking (unless you count "make polished games" as a groundbreaking idea, and admittedly, it does seem to be something nobody's figured out except Blizzard.)
(5) I'd love something new and imaginative. How is battle.net that thing? Combine Quake 1 and Meridian 59, and, bam, Battle.net.
(6) Everquest: Champions of Norrath. Angband. Ultima Underworld. Hell, do a search for "dungeon crawler the underdogs" on Google, you'll get a whole slew of them. No, I can't think of any old ones that were in third-person isometric off the top of my head, but then again, I haven't really looked.
(7) Yes. This is EXACTLY MY POINT. Blizzard doesn't do new things - it does things that have already been done, and does them really fucking well.
(8) Ask Americans what they think about how 'noteworthy' Britney Spears is. Noteworthy-in-terms-of-popularity has nothing to do with quality (which Blizzard has), and neither of those has anything to do with inventiveness.
My point is that I can't expect them to pioneer a new genre with every game they release. In fact, they haven't pioneered a new genre with *any* games. They're really really good at doing old genres really really well. I'll grant them that. But they're not imaginative.
I'm glad they're around - they're making some fantastic games. But if I had to choose one game company to survive, and all the others would be destroyed, I sure wouldn't choose Blizzard. I'd be dooming myself to a life of really well-done games with no brilliantly new ideas.
*cough* lousy player *cough*
Seriously, since when did "sniping" mean "stopping in the middle of battle and firing off a shot in half a second"? You can snipe someone in five or six seconds, if they're not moving all that fast - three seconds or so if they're not moving at all. Even that is horribly unrealistic compared to reality, but, hey.
If they're dodging, of course, you have basically no chance of sniping them unless you get really lucky. Which is how it should be.
When you first play the game it's fucking hilarious and fantastic. :)
That's why it's so sad what's happening to it - it has so much potential, but instead it's just meandering off into the bushes in a drunken stupor.
Ah well.
Blizzard is the most polished developing studio of the modern gaming era. However, they never do anything really noteworthy and imaginative - their games are pretty derivative. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - they're still damn fun games - but it's clear that it's up to other companies to come up with truly new ideas.
:)
The WoW beta was fun, but there was literally nothing in it that jumped out at me as being spectacular and genre-changing. In the end, it's Everquest with orcs. Both FFXI (with its crazy economy, crafting system, subjobs, etc) and CoH (with a really new combat system and play style) are more imaginative.
On the other hand, WoW is incredibly polished. So it'll be a good game also.
I also love how Blizzard has this fantastic epic fantasy universe. I don't know if that was intentional or not (just look at Warcraft I, and note the "storyline" *snicker*), but it was brilliant either way.
I wish I could agree with you entirely, but Kingdom of Loathing, especially, has really been going downhill lately. I played it for months and bought a Mr. Accessory, but haven't opened it up again for a month or two - there's just nothing to do anymore, y'know? When I started, 99% of the game was "fight monsters, get items, level up", and the "fight monsters" part wasn't fun whatsoever - the only fun parts were finishing quests and getting new items. Now I've got all the Star Garb and I can't kill the final boss because the final boss doesn't exist, and what's Jick doing?
Penguins! Mafia! New familiars! Yet more random things that don't add anything noteworthy to the game, just increase the number of minor variations a millionfold!
It's a cool game and all, but he's done absolutely nothing to make it deeper - just wider. I've lost interest. If he started adding really interesting new things, I'd go back, but . . . well, there's just nothing to do anymore, unless you want to get incredibly rich.
I've spent a long time trying to figure out why I dislike this argument. It never sat well with me. It took me months - but one day I went to a friend's house to play some RPGs and I realized why.
"Give us better weapons!"
"No."
"But the game won't be fun unless you do!"
You know, power isn't everything. Sometimes part of the fun is not being godlike. In PC FPS games, you're pretty much guaranteed to be able to snipe people, instantly, with a machine gun, from two hundred yards away. And you know, I don't care. It's not interesting.
In Halo, it's a lot tougher. "Fire for effect" becomes a reality. Sometimes you're not really trying to hit anything, because you can't, you're too far away - you're just trying to keep their heads down.
To me, a game isn't necessarily fun just because I can kill things more easily. It's fun because of the challenge. It's fun because of the story, or the coolness. I'm told they jacked up the difficulty when they moved Halo to the PC - is it more fun now? I mean, sure, you're more powerful. No argument. So are they. So why is it now "more fun"?
I'd agree that there's a level of frustration when you just can't make the controls do what you want. But I didn't encounter that in Halo. You can snipe easily, if you have a sniper weapon. You can aim if you put a little time and work into it. It's far above the frustration point - so what's the issue?
Compare Starcraft and Total Annihilation. In almost every way, Total Annihilation's interface was far superior. You could select an unlimited number of units. You could queue up any commands, up to and including construction commands (yes, that's right - thirty seconds of clicking and you've got fifteen minutes of construction set up.) Does this mean TA is a better game?
No, of course not.
A game is a good game if people enjoy it. That is necessary and sufficient. Deer Hunter is a good game - for its target audience, it fills the exact need. Halo is a good game.
But there's the thing - I don't have a user. :) I'm just trying to process a large amount of data and get out other useful data, that, presumably, bears some close resemblance to patterns that are probably infeasible to detect exactly (although I'm going to do my best, heh.)
Test suites are *great* when you know what the output of your program is going to be. When you're not even 100% sure what output *format* you'll end up with, to say nothing of the actual output, they end up being a bit less useful.
(Which is not to say I don't have consistency checks scattered all over my code - in fact a few days ago one of the new ones triggered, and I discovered a bug in a very early bit of code that I couldn't have realistically found before. Took me two days to track down, sigh.)
In the first case, it did in fact pass all the tests (and I went back and added more tests once it was fixed) - one of those "wow, that bug was so big I didn't imagine we'd ever have to test for it" dealies.
In the second case, writing formal tests wasn't particularly possible - it was a very complicated optimization problem, and it's mighty hard to write unit tests for code that doesn't have a designated "correct result". (I'm running into the same problem with my current codebase - I'm testing all the deterministic stuff I can, but in the end, the complicated testing is me looking at the output and saying "yup, yup, that looks good".)
Funny, that. I recently started working at a company with mandatory code reviews. Here's a list of my recent experiences with it:
1) Checked in code. Spent fifteen minutes justifying design decisions. No changes made.
2) Checked in code. Code contained horrible horrible bug. Code reviewer didn't see it.
3) Checked in code. Defended my design against several more computationally expensive suggestions that were also more complicated. No changes made.
4) Listened to a friend gripe about having to spend a DAY AND A HALF repeating design reasons and fixing bugs introduced by his code reviewer "cleaning up" his code.
5) Received company-wide email about a build that flat-out didn't compile - apparently someone hadn't bothered compiling a patch, and had sent it to a code reviewer, who likewise hadn't bothered compiling it before authorizing it.
Now I'll admit that there are also a whole lot of "well, it only took five minutes, so it wasn't much of a waste" cases. But so far I haven't heard one person talking about how useful the mandatory code reviews are.
Maybe it's just an artifact of the kind of programmers working at this company, or the kind of code being worked on, but so far code reviews have been a net loss in my experience. I've taken to doing major changes in my own personal branch of the repository (which doesn't enforce the code-review requirement) and in a month or two I'll have 3000 lines of code for someone to look at - but at least I won't have nickel-and-dimed them to death with 120 100-line code reviews, 3/4 of which I will inevitably end up deleting entirely.
Note that I'm not saying "code reviews are bad" - what I am saying is that there's a time and a place for just about every technique, and there's also a time and a place where each technique is worse than useless. Pick your battles and pick your tools.
I just glanced at the topic and thought it said "Caffienated Bear".
Either that or I need some coffee.
Ah. True. :)
(I hate the anti-spam filter sometimes. It doesn't *take* me 20 seconds to write "ah true"!)
No, it doesn't mean that at all. Prove to me that CD installations outnumber downloaded-but-not-installed. What it means is that there is only the vaguest of relations between downloads and installs, and nobody knows in which direction it's skewed.
I have friends who write software that happens to transmit anonymous usage stats. I'm told that, at best, installations is within an order of magnitude of downloads - in either direction. And sometimes it's not even that accurate.
Download stats are utterly meaningless, and adding extra unknowns doesn't give you any more data.
Hell, I suggest converting this into entire barrels.
Oh, definitely. I don't argue at all that the numbers are looking up. There's a really obvious upward trend on all of this, and I'm quite happy about it. I just think it's way way way too early to be making claims about how OpenOffice is winning - we could see it easily plateau.
Wait a second.
"We can't determine A+B because we don't know A."
"That's okay, we don't know B either!"
Why does that not fill me with confidence on this particular statistic?
Yes you can.
(1) Downloads are meaningless. Just look at a few of the comments attached to this story - people downloading it many multiple times and often uninstalling it. I know that I personally am responsible for at least 15 Mozilla downloads, and 2 OpenOffice downloads, and while I finally do use Mozilla I haven't used OpenOffice.
(2) "Countless CD installations" does not imply there's necessarily a lot. It simply implies we can't count them.
(3) 14% of the large enterprise office systems as counted how? I note that the same story also says "Microsoft dominates the office suite market, with 95% of the overall share" - so why's "large enterprise office" so different from "office"? Are they making a distinction that naturally favors Linux houses?
I'd love to raise the banner and shout "Go OpenOffice!" but that 95% figure is still pretty damning, especially since there's no guarantee the remaining 5% is OpenOffice.
A few days ago I went to dump a DVD on Windows so I could send a video clip to a friend. Oddly, copying files didn't work. I presume this was because of that above-mentioned DRM thing.
Took me all of five minutes to find a utility to work around it.
When are these people going to realize that DRM is utterly ineffective?