Most of the problems Flash has had with non Windows platforms are inherent to the platform. e.g. Flash wants to decode video in hardware, convert to RGB, compose with other RGB elements, and present this preferably in a widget / window running inside a 3rd party app. If the OS / browser impedes any of this Flash will fallback on slower methods and performance takes a dump.
Ubuntu needs to recognize that there are different classes of users. One class of users may well want an "app store" and never need anything else. It's not a new concept on Linux (e.g. ClickNRun) but done properly it would make it easy to install apps, receive updates and whatnot. Who knows perhaps Ubuntu could even sell commercial software from here, but it would be suicide to sell free stuff (also see ClickNRun).
Then there is a different class of users who want complete control over their package management, including the ability to install random developer libraries, add new sources and so on. These people like synaptic because it is a searchable full list of available packages. Someone looking to install headers for something, or to figure out another package's dependencies can do it from a nice GUI. I realise the second group of people are probably capable of figuring out how to install Synaptic for themselves.
Therefore I think it is reasonable for Ubuntu to dump Synaptic but recognize it MUST be offered from their app store also through the command line, e.g. apt-get install synaptic. I also think this must come with a concession (or perhaps a reality check) from Ubuntu - fix Unity. Unity's proto-app store integration is fucking horrible and it needs to be configurable and preferably rewritten. At the minute Unity makes it hard enough to find the apps on my box without the added insult of recommending apps from the store that I was never looking for in the first place and eating up screen space for this useless info. Unity needs to let me disable this - I want want to browse apps from an app store I want an explicit, discrete button / icon I can click on for this purpose. Otherwise get out of my face and stop phoning home.
Assuming there were a HTML5 + Javascript option, it would be more akin to programming XUL on Firefox than it would be a website. It would have to provide access to a wider range of APIs than a browser provides to a website, the security model would be different and it's likely there would be extra markup for Windows elements like common controls, media players etc. If MS were really super clever they'd even let people code away in Silverlight or.NET and then run the app through something analogous to GWT where the code is compiled into the equivalent JS & HTML.
I really don't see what the fuss is about. Microsoft aren't going to shitcan.NET or COM any time soon unless they want to break every app in existence. However their imperative is probably to give tablet based devices, especially those running ARM the best chance possible and that means facilitating development which is not tied to the old Win32 API or native instructions. And that means providing an API for developers to use to do it. It would be nice to know how they expect native C++ apps to migrate though - seems like Windows 8 would be screaming for a LLVM like solution where a single binary could target multiple architectures without especially caring what architecture it was running on for the most part.
So Nokia have produced yet another generic smart phone indistinguishable from virtually every other smart phone running android or Windows Phone 7 in the last few years. Big screen, a button, camera on the back, smart phone shaped. Frontpage news.
Yup most MMOs have a pile of grind. I play LOTRO and it's there too. Fortunately for the game it has the lore, some decent unique content (e.g. all the book chapter stuff) and some pretty landscapes to hide most of it. The grind was definitely a lot worse before it went FTP, presumably because they know it doesn't work so good when you want people buying content rather than smacking their heads against a wall because the grind is too bad.
Worst game for grind I've played would be A Tale in the Desert by a mile. The least grind would be Puzzle Pirates where the games are the grind but you play them for fun in the first place. The most hands off grind would be Eve where skills auto train themselves but the higher proficiency skills can take days in realtime to learn but you don't have to be logged in while they happen.
It's quite different. People can set their own pace and their own budget to suit their free time and interests. :
You can go completely FTP and enjoy a large chunk of opening game for nothing and then grind for points to progress. Not my cup of tea but it's possible.
You can pay a la carte, augmented with easy to reach FTP achievements. It's easy to claw back 50-100 points per zone without much effort during the course of normal play. Which is fine for me.
You can go VIP and use a sub. A pile of stuff is included and 1000 points per month for stuff that isn't. I don't play enough to justify this.
You pick. It's simply more flexible. I stuck in €39 in January (after playing since it relaunched) and six months further on and I still have points left over. If I had been paying a sub that whole time in the old model it would have cost me €90. So less than half the cost in effect.
As grinds go, how is this different than any other MMO?
Not especially different. Do missions, gain exp, level up, train, buy skills, repeat. Travel to new zone fight new enemies, repeat. What made it more stark though was the repetitiveness of it. There were 4 or 5 generic sceneries used for virtually every mission and they got boring really fast. I would hope the intervening time and updates (called Issues) have added new features and taken some of the monotony out of it. As I said, LOTRO got a lot better between the time I dumped it and came back and maybe the same holds true for COH. I know I'll give it a spin assuming my character is revivable from where I left him (around lvl 25).
Turbine have done a pretty good job in LOTRO. You *can* play FTP if you wish but it gets excruciatingly grindy (e.g. kill wolves ad nauseum in some zone to gain advanced wolf killing achievement and 15 turbine points) but most people would pay just to avoid this and enjoy themselves.
Knew it was coming. I still play this game, but only a few of the servers are populated. Many of them are near empty.
I played COH and COV for a while (the free month plus a few extra) before becoming quite bored of the game. Like many games it suffered from that perennial problem of grind and lack of content. Most of the missions I played it involved traversing generic offices / sewers / factories / tunnels zapping generic stationary bad guys before a boss encounter then repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Levelling up usually meant a change of scenery and bad guys but more or less identical gameplay whichever zone you were in.
I did leave about 3 years ago so maybe things have been shaken up a bit since. I know that LOTRO was a *lot* better when I returned after it went FTP so perhaps the same holds true for COH/COV.
Audio and video files can be identified by watermarks and it's likely that there are ways to compute an acoustic / visual fingerprint for arbitrary content which doesn't rely on the codec, bitrate, filesize or any byte level hashing. Given that Apple is in bed with the recording industry, it's safe to assume they can do this if they wished and have the content to produce references from. They probably hash files too (ignoring tags) so if a P2P rip did propagate (or an Apple user started sharing their MP3s) they'd be capable of tracking it.
Short of Apple coming out and saying the key is on the client side and all content and file names are encrypted in transit I wouldn't trust their service for storing anything illicit.
Even if they don't get evidence they could throw him in the clink under RIPA pt III if they suspect he has encrypted files and is unwilling to divulge the keys.
Templates are fine for little classes but they got so abused by STL that it was not uncommon to see trivial syntax errors turn into enormous cryptic compiler errors spanning multiple lines of nested templates and typedefs, half of whom you'd never heard of. After poring over this enormous error for minutes or longer you might eventually discover you missed a * off some declaration.
Java libs do have cruft, as can be expected from their age - things like all the synchronized collections, StringBuffer, AWT etc. and from Java 7 the mess of date / time APIs has been superceded. I guess they would deprecate this stuff if they could but it's used too much to remove entirely..NET and QT had the benefit of coming later and could learn from mistakes, but even.NET is gathering cruft, such as WinForms but at least it appears to be a more dynamic language.
There are piles of documentation & tutorials but to be honest the system APIs are the least of your troubles. Java becomes useful by virtue of the masses of 3rd party libs and learning those is 10x more effort, especially many of those like Spring, Hibernate, JUnit etc carry their own cruft.
The VM is okay and indeed there are hardware implementations, even some ARM processors have Jazelle which allows direct execution of bytecode. I think it would have been better register based but changing it is not a possibility. I'm not aware that Java is especially slower than.NET, they're about the same especially with modern VMs that would do JIT / Hotspot compilation anyway.
I think comparison between C++ the language and Java is only useful so far because C++ tries to be a superset of C whereas Java is a C-like ground up approach to a new language. I think if you wanted C++ like performance with a Java like syntax that something like Google Go would be worth checking out.
Re:Q: Why hasn't Mozilla considered a Firefox OS?
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Where Is Firefox OS?
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· Score: 1
A: Because it's a dumb idea.
Chrome OS is a dumb idea but a version of Linux that cold boots in under 30 seconds to desktop & browser and has instant on capabilities in other regards is not a dumb idea.
I don't think it would be dumb either for Mozilla to pursue the concept of native client like Chrome, but PNaCl, not NaCl.
Hey maybe Oracle should be paying some of us damages for inflicting Java on the world.;)
Java's not a bad language although the pace of development is glacial. No more so than on J2ME where Oracle / Sun did vastly more to damage the platform than any other company. J2ME was built for another age. It might still have application in PLC and lightbulb dimmers, but not in phones or set top boxes any more and I fail to see how Android "damaged" anything of theirs.
Companies were already deserting in droves before Android took off. If Oracle were smart they'd put all this shit behind them and try some constructive dialog with Google with the hope of getting something like JavaFX 2.0 and some other bits and bobs into the standard API stack.
Yup and you will continue by explaining why the country's course of action regarding CO2 emissions should depend on this hypothetical group of poor people and all policies relating to housing, public transportation, energy etc. should be stationary because of it.
As long as bitcoin provides an attractive way to transfer value, it can go back up.
Of course it can go up. Perhaps there will be a second wave of "investors" eager to scoop up junk value bitcoins in the hope that it does. Doesn't mean it's going to be any more successful the second time around.
A vendor can turn coins over into cash within a short time frame, with far less fees and overall risk (straight bitcoin transactions can't be reversed). As long as the price crash doesn't happen between the sale and the bitcoin flip, which, could be done in minutes, but for most of us...could be done in an hour or two (usually).... then 3 days of waiting for the EFT from dwolla for $.25 (per $1000 effectively)
With the price of bitcoins vs the dollar going up and down like a yoyo, I would say there is MASSIVE risk. Who's to say that if there isn't a run on the exchanges that the $1000 limit doesn't go down to $100 tomorrow, $10 the next day? Even when they're operating normally, the exchanges are calculating a commission on currency exchanges. And unless you're selling something illegal, why bother with doing any of this at all? There are perfectly functional national currencies that can be used for trading services. If the service provider and customer are in the same country they don't even have to worry about any exchange rate and if they physically hand each other cash they probably can dodge any tax implications too.
It's very clear from a quick google of Vincent Courtillot that his opinions are not held in high regard by climate scientists. Indeed one of the leaked emails suggests Phil Jones rejected one of his papers as "awful". Therefore why should a scientist bend over backwards to satisfy his requests?
I do agree that some protocol should be put in place for scientists to release data and in return to be immune from being pestered by FOIA requests but that's a separate topic altogether, and certainly does not imply that absence of arbitrary-data-request-being-satisfied that somehow it implies conspiracy. It doesn't. The UEA emails don't reveal any "smoking gun" at all, just a bunch of scientists engaged in technical, mundane and occasionally bitchy chitchat with their peers.
Poor people do have a choice, bicycles, walking, public transportation, car pooling, electric vehicles, or simply choosing a more economic vehicle the next time around. Of course I'm sure you could concoct some hypothetical poor person for whom none of these choices is practical, and of course the entire country should shape it's policies around that one person right?
And you're so sure because? Of what. A two letter word? Sorry doesn't wash. "Climate scientists" in australia have been doing the same thing as their colleagues have been in the UK, US, and in Canada. Refusing to disclose data including methodology for years.
Actually they have been disclosing their methodologies for years. As one would expect from papers submitted to various peer reviewed journals. That isn't quite the same as feeling inclined to satisfy arbitrary, time consuming FOIA requests from armchair bloggers who want the data merely to nitpick it. It's funny how the so-called "climategate" email leak didn't unveil some vast librul conspiracy. What it did reveal was a bunch of scientists bitching in private about armchair bloggers wasting their time with specious FOIA requests.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not going to open source something which has a substantial amount of reusable IP.
Most of the problems Flash has had with non Windows platforms are inherent to the platform. e.g. Flash wants to decode video in hardware, convert to RGB, compose with other RGB elements, and present this preferably in a widget / window running inside a 3rd party app. If the OS / browser impedes any of this Flash will fallback on slower methods and performance takes a dump.
I'd recommend Brainfuck. It has no library at all to confuse beginners and only 8 commands.
More manufacturers, more handset models, more components = more faults.
Then there is a different class of users who want complete control over their package management, including the ability to install random developer libraries, add new sources and so on. These people like synaptic because it is a searchable full list of available packages. Someone looking to install headers for something, or to figure out another package's dependencies can do it from a nice GUI. I realise the second group of people are probably capable of figuring out how to install Synaptic for themselves.
Therefore I think it is reasonable for Ubuntu to dump Synaptic but recognize it MUST be offered from their app store also through the command line, e.g. apt-get install synaptic. I also think this must come with a concession (or perhaps a reality check) from Ubuntu - fix Unity. Unity's proto-app store integration is fucking horrible and it needs to be configurable and preferably rewritten. At the minute Unity makes it hard enough to find the apps on my box without the added insult of recommending apps from the store that I was never looking for in the first place and eating up screen space for this useless info. Unity needs to let me disable this - I want want to browse apps from an app store I want an explicit, discrete button / icon I can click on for this purpose. Otherwise get out of my face and stop phoning home.
I really don't see what the fuss is about. Microsoft aren't going to shitcan .NET or COM any time soon unless they want to break every app in existence. However their imperative is probably to give tablet based devices, especially those running ARM the best chance possible and that means facilitating development which is not tied to the old Win32 API or native instructions. And that means providing an API for developers to use to do it. It would be nice to know how they expect native C++ apps to migrate though - seems like Windows 8 would be screaming for a LLVM like solution where a single binary could target multiple architectures without especially caring what architecture it was running on for the most part.
So Nokia have produced yet another generic smart phone indistinguishable from virtually every other smart phone running android or Windows Phone 7 in the last few years. Big screen, a button, camera on the back, smart phone shaped. Frontpage news.
Worst game for grind I've played would be A Tale in the Desert by a mile. The least grind would be Puzzle Pirates where the games are the grind but you play them for fun in the first place. The most hands off grind would be Eve where skills auto train themselves but the higher proficiency skills can take days in realtime to learn but you don't have to be logged in while they happen.
so no different to when it was pay to play?
It's quite different. People can set their own pace and their own budget to suit their free time and interests. :
You pick. It's simply more flexible. I stuck in €39 in January (after playing since it relaunched) and six months further on and I still have points left over. If I had been paying a sub that whole time in the old model it would have cost me €90. So less than half the cost in effect.
As grinds go, how is this different than any other MMO?
Not especially different. Do missions, gain exp, level up, train, buy skills, repeat. Travel to new zone fight new enemies, repeat. What made it more stark though was the repetitiveness of it. There were 4 or 5 generic sceneries used for virtually every mission and they got boring really fast. I would hope the intervening time and updates (called Issues) have added new features and taken some of the monotony out of it. As I said, LOTRO got a lot better between the time I dumped it and came back and maybe the same holds true for COH. I know I'll give it a spin assuming my character is revivable from where I left him (around lvl 25).
Turbine have done a pretty good job in LOTRO. You *can* play FTP if you wish but it gets excruciatingly grindy (e.g. kill wolves ad nauseum in some zone to gain advanced wolf killing achievement and 15 turbine points) but most people would pay just to avoid this and enjoy themselves.
Knew it was coming. I still play this game, but only a few of the servers are populated. Many of them are near empty.
I played COH and COV for a while (the free month plus a few extra) before becoming quite bored of the game. Like many games it suffered from that perennial problem of grind and lack of content. Most of the missions I played it involved traversing generic offices / sewers / factories / tunnels zapping generic stationary bad guys before a boss encounter then repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Levelling up usually meant a change of scenery and bad guys but more or less identical gameplay whichever zone you were in. I did leave about 3 years ago so maybe things have been shaken up a bit since. I know that LOTRO was a *lot* better when I returned after it went FTP so perhaps the same holds true for COH/COV.
Short of Apple coming out and saying the key is on the client side and all content and file names are encrypted in transit I wouldn't trust their service for storing anything illicit.
A lifetime sentence for what? Was any demonstrable harm done?
Lulzsec have caused demonstrable harm. Whether this guy has is another matter.
Even if they don't get evidence they could throw him in the clink under RIPA pt III if they suspect he has encrypted files and is unwilling to divulge the keys.
He'll probably fall back on the old "I have aspergers" and "mummy!" defences first.
Templates are fine for little classes but they got so abused by STL that it was not uncommon to see trivial syntax errors turn into enormous cryptic compiler errors spanning multiple lines of nested templates and typedefs, half of whom you'd never heard of. After poring over this enormous error for minutes or longer you might eventually discover you missed a * off some declaration.
There are piles of documentation & tutorials but to be honest the system APIs are the least of your troubles. Java becomes useful by virtue of the masses of 3rd party libs and learning those is 10x more effort, especially many of those like Spring, Hibernate, JUnit etc carry their own cruft.
The VM is okay and indeed there are hardware implementations, even some ARM processors have Jazelle which allows direct execution of bytecode. I think it would have been better register based but changing it is not a possibility. I'm not aware that Java is especially slower than .NET, they're about the same especially with modern VMs that would do JIT / Hotspot compilation anyway.
I think comparison between C++ the language and Java is only useful so far because C++ tries to be a superset of C whereas Java is a C-like ground up approach to a new language. I think if you wanted C++ like performance with a Java like syntax that something like Google Go would be worth checking out.
A: Because it's a dumb idea.
Chrome OS is a dumb idea but a version of Linux that cold boots in under 30 seconds to desktop & browser and has instant on capabilities in other regards is not a dumb idea.
I don't think it would be dumb either for Mozilla to pursue the concept of native client like Chrome, but PNaCl, not NaCl.
Hey maybe Oracle should be paying some of us damages for inflicting Java on the world. ;)
Java's not a bad language although the pace of development is glacial. No more so than on J2ME where Oracle / Sun did vastly more to damage the platform than any other company. J2ME was built for another age. It might still have application in PLC and lightbulb dimmers, but not in phones or set top boxes any more and I fail to see how Android "damaged" anything of theirs.
Companies were already deserting in droves before Android took off. If Oracle were smart they'd put all this shit behind them and try some constructive dialog with Google with the hope of getting something like JavaFX 2.0 and some other bits and bobs into the standard API stack.
Yup and you will continue by explaining why the country's course of action regarding CO2 emissions should depend on this hypothetical group of poor people and all policies relating to housing, public transportation, energy etc. should be stationary because of it.
As long as bitcoin provides an attractive way to transfer value, it can go back up.
Of course it can go up. Perhaps there will be a second wave of "investors" eager to scoop up junk value bitcoins in the hope that it does. Doesn't mean it's going to be any more successful the second time around.
A vendor can turn coins over into cash within a short time frame, with far less fees and overall risk (straight bitcoin transactions can't be reversed). As long as the price crash doesn't happen between the sale and the bitcoin flip, which, could be done in minutes, but for most of us...could be done in an hour or two (usually).... then 3 days of waiting for the EFT from dwolla for $.25 (per $1000 effectively)
With the price of bitcoins vs the dollar going up and down like a yoyo, I would say there is MASSIVE risk. Who's to say that if there isn't a run on the exchanges that the $1000 limit doesn't go down to $100 tomorrow, $10 the next day? Even when they're operating normally, the exchanges are calculating a commission on currency exchanges. And unless you're selling something illegal, why bother with doing any of this at all? There are perfectly functional national currencies that can be used for trading services. If the service provider and customer are in the same country they don't even have to worry about any exchange rate and if they physically hand each other cash they probably can dodge any tax implications too.
I do agree that some protocol should be put in place for scientists to release data and in return to be immune from being pestered by FOIA requests but that's a separate topic altogether, and certainly does not imply that absence of arbitrary-data-request-being-satisfied that somehow it implies conspiracy. It doesn't. The UEA emails don't reveal any "smoking gun" at all, just a bunch of scientists engaged in technical, mundane and occasionally bitchy chitchat with their peers.
Poor people do have a choice, bicycles, walking, public transportation, car pooling, electric vehicles, or simply choosing a more economic vehicle the next time around. Of course I'm sure you could concoct some hypothetical poor person for whom none of these choices is practical, and of course the entire country should shape it's policies around that one person right?
And you're so sure because? Of what. A two letter word? Sorry doesn't wash. "Climate scientists" in australia have been doing the same thing as their colleagues have been in the UK, US, and in Canada. Refusing to disclose data including methodology for years.
Actually they have been disclosing their methodologies for years. As one would expect from papers submitted to various peer reviewed journals. That isn't quite the same as feeling inclined to satisfy arbitrary, time consuming FOIA requests from armchair bloggers who want the data merely to nitpick it. It's funny how the so-called "climategate" email leak didn't unveil some vast librul conspiracy. What it did reveal was a bunch of scientists bitching in private about armchair bloggers wasting their time with specious FOIA requests.