I do a lot of Java and XML. I don't know what you're using for a library, but I'd suggest JDOM.
As for the abuses for Maven and Ant... yeah. I'll agree. There are a lot of things that seem to use XML just because they can. I know there is some theory behind why they use them (machine readable, blah blah blah) but for most things it's just a giant pain for the complexity you get. Maybe if you were trying to build Windows with Ant.
Here are some of the "fun" things I have run across in other people's (almost certainly custom) XML interpreters/producers:
Tags must be upper case
Tags can't be upper case
You must put line breaks between elements
There can't be any whitespace between elements
It's import to URL encode the XML before it gets sent from them to me
You don't need CDATA blocks, just put the ampersands and >s right in there, it'll be OK
Your XML should all be inside a CDATA block in container XML
No tags can self-close
Self closed tags need a space between the slash and bracket
Self closed tags can't have a space between the slash and bracket
That's just what I can think of off the top of my head. We've seen quite a bit of crazy stuff. If everyone would just use one of the already written XML producers or parsers (the big ones, the ones that work) life would be much easier around here from time to time.
Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing these companies getting a slap on the wrist for a changing definition of what Blu-Ray is by changing the profile but not making the differences obvious (it's a little tiny box on the back of a case).
That said, sounds like the guy has a case to me. Read this part:
At issue are some significant title-compatibility problems with the player. In his complaint, plaintiff Bob McGovern says that a number of movies he purchased after buying his BD-P1200 wouldn't play on the device. He also accuses Samsung of failing to offer firmware updates to remedy the problem, saying that the consumer electronics giant "does not intend to provide future firmware updates or otherwise repair" the problematic player.
As one of our readers pointed out via e-mail, the P1200 has a checkered reputation when it comes to hardware reliability. A massive thread in the AV Science forum is filled with numerous complaints about the player. "I have had the BDP 1200 for 7 weeks. Not a finished product," reads one post. "Should not have been brought to the market until it was fully beta tested. Would not play Blu-ray Weeds. Was told needed updated software."
It was defective. It sounds like the bought a DVD player (let's pretend) that wouldn't play a good percentage of DVDs. Not "doesn't play every neat feature". Not "doesn't support 12.16 theatrical sound". Just plain "won't play". They could fix it with a software update, but they don't seem to want to.
That part is bait-and-switch. He bought a player that should play any good Blu-Ray movie (possibly san-extras). It won't play many of them. Either all those movies are defective, or the player is. If it is the player, he was ripped off. At the very least, they should have replaced his player with something that would play movies.
We ask the bad offenders to fix things, and they usually do. It can take a while, but they'll usually do it. But it can take a while, and we have financial power over people we deal with (since we can cut or restrict traffic). The W3C doesn't have that power over most people.
The idea of a public shame list is a good one for those people who refuse to fix their own problems, and is far more realistic than the military "to bad you messed up, you can't come back until you fix it" approach (which is almost always completely untenable).
I've got to say, this doesn't surprise me at all. In the time I've spent at my job, I've been repeatedly floored by the amazing conduct of other companies IT departments. We've only encountered two people I can think of who have been hostile. Everyone else has been quite nice. You'd think people would have things setup well, but they don't.
We've seen many custom XML parsers and encoders, all slightly wrong. We've seen people transmitting very sensitive data without using any kind of security until we refused to continue working without SSL being added to the equation. We've seen people who were secure change their certificates to self-signed, and we seem to consistently know when people's certificates expire before they do.
But even without these things, I can't tell you how many people send us bad data and flat out ignore the response. We get all sorts of bad data sent to us all the time. When that happens, we reply with a failure message describing what's wrong. Yet we get bits of stuff all the time that is wrong, in the same way, from the same people. I'm not talking about sending us something that they aren't supposed to (X when we say only Y), I'm saying invalid XML type wrong... such that it can't be parsed.
We have, a few times while I've been there, had people make a change in their software (or something) and bombard us with invalid data until we we either block their IP or manage to get into voice contact with their IT department. Sometimes they don't even seem to notice the lockout.
Some places can be amazing. Some software can be poorly designed (or something can cause a strange side effect, see here). I really like one of the suggestions in the comments on the article... start replying really slow, and often with invalid data. They won't do it. I wouldn't. But I like the idea.
They annoy me to no end. It was one thing to keep the disc in the drive back when the data had to be pulled off (I wouldn't want to install Wing Commander 4 and it's 6+ CDs on my hard drive back then). Recently, this has been driving me nuts though. Valve has done such a good job with Steam, that it makes the problem even more obvious.
I bought Sam & Max Season One in the retail box, and it uses copy protection. I use a Mac and the game isn't available for my platform, so I have to play the episodes in Windows. I can't use Parallels because the copy protection thinks I'm using a copied disc. I can't use a disc image for the same reason. I can't play it under OS X. I have to boot into Windows. That takes a long time to shutdown OS X, start Windows, start the game, check the CD, then get into it. It's an amazing pain.
Sam & Max is not an intensive game at all. Even with the lowered performance of 3D stuff in Parallels, it should work fine. I understand Half-Life 2 not running well (it likes a beefy system), but there is no good reason I shouldn't be able to play Sam & Max that way.
But I paid for the physical media, because I prefer that. And because of that, I get copy protection. I'm seriously considering not playing Season Two at this point.
But it's a mitigating factor. The tiger didn't attack some random person, this guy was doing something to provoke the attack. That puts the attack in a different category. Both categories are bad in this case, but they are still different.
A well designed enclosure would have prevented this. The zoo is at fault. There is no question there.
However, the guy wasn't innocent. The tiger may not have attacked if he was behaving differently. There is a risk when you tease a 350lb killing machine. I see the fact he was doing that as important.
Your point is a bit like "sure he was kicking the dog, but that doesn't make it OK that the dog mauled him". Just because the result (mauling) was worse than the crime (kicking the dog) doesn't mean the crime is irrelevant.
Now teasing a tiger is not as bad as kicking a dog... the tiger isn't actually injured. The point is that the guy is not without blame.
If I had kids, I'd rather they heard this story with that fact, and would get the chance to learn the lesson "don't taunt things that can easily kill you, even if you think you're safe" than either never learn that lesson or learn it the hard way.
Seeing as that happened, I wonder if that section will now see tons of bidding (they don't have to worry about making it free, it's already there) as companies try to get (some) control over it, or will bidding be mostly dead since the companies lost their (theoretical) game of chicken and now they have to comply with open access rules... making it less profitable (in theory) to buy?
Thanks to the 100M cable limit, Ethernet can't be used easily for that without going to fiber optic or something else... so much for the easy cost.
I'm trapped with Comcast too. AT&T says they are deploying U-Verse near me (they've been doing the digging) but I expect it will be at least 1 year or two late. I can't wait to move off.
There are a few options. You can use WiFi links over long distances with better antennas and a good line of sight... but this requires the other person to be able to get something like DSL etc. WiMax will fix this in decent sized areas, since it can cover a larger area than WiFi by a large margin. Too bad it's not available yet and will end up really expensive (you didn't expect Sprint to go cheap, did you?). You could use a 3G cellular modem... no... wait.. those are expensive and slow (compared to cable). Then there is white space internet which is only just starting to get tested by the FCC on an experimental basis. Powerlines don't seem to work well (big wires work like antennas? No!). Satellite is too slow (latency) and expensive.
So if you are stuck on Cable, like me, enjoy. You'll be there for quite a while.
That's called channel stuffing, and Microsoft has done it quite a few times with the Zune, XBox, and XBox 360 in order to temporarily inflate the sales numbers. What happens is after you've done that, those stores don't need to order more for a while, so after your "great sales" period, you'll get a "low sales" period as the old units get cleared out.
For those who don't know, this is a troll. The CPU is way faster than RAM. Replacing the cache (which is large physically compared to RAM) with normal DRAM would be a disaster for performance. Go look at the original Celeron, then remember that this chip is even faster than that.
This is like saying cars will soon move back to steam, starting with small cars, because steam engines don't need large refineries to refine the oil. Technically correct on one point, but ignores lots of reality that would completely contradict it.
Ooh. I just thought of a solution to this problem. They're not talking about capping uploads, right? I'll just use that bandwidth. We'll use my newly invented HLPoIP, or High-Low-Protocol-over-IP. Here is how it works.
Initiate connection as usual
When it is time to download, you tell me how big the file is
I send you 64 KB of data.
You tell me if my guess (taken as a 64k digit binary number) is high or low
If I'm right, we move on to the next block of data
If I'm wrong, I alter my guess based on randomness and binary search (both efficient and crazy at the same time) based on if my guess was too high or low... and I guess again
Done!
There we go. I used very little download bandwidth (assuming my computer can guess right a tiny fraction of a time, which it can't), I got my file, I swamped your server, and I used up the upstream bandwidth of everyone else on my cable link.
Don't worry, it'll get "better". My big worry with something like this is that specific services I use will cause me to go over. Netflix watching, TiVo downloading shows, Apple TV (if I had one), etc.
Which means that they'll probably start adding exceptions. Soon your plan will be:
10 GB per month, except stuff coming from Netflix, TiVo, or Apple... you get 200 GB there. Our site(s) are unmetered, watch our ads all you want. Also, you can add any site you want to the list of exceptions for only $5 per month, but we don't have to honor that.
In my experience, it's dead. My office has a bit of an informal tone, but I get emails from external businesses we deal with that have spelling mistakes, IM speak ("... if UR able 2..."), and other things.
We've received emails that are clearly accusatory that we've failed at something, or something is our fault. We've had people fly off the handle when we reply that that's not the case with evidence attached (my favorite: when it's a quote from one of their earlier emails).
Things just still surprise me. Yesterday I got an email from one of the highest ranking people in our sales/marketing department. It was all very business and sort of what I'd expect, until the second to last line which was... "kthxbye".
People (both internal and external) are often far less proper and "businessey" (I hate to use that fake word, but I don't know what else to use) than I would expect. The etiquette is gone (not that it was probably ever there).
Not going to happen. There are certain considerations in external drives. Most won't take a ton of power, they'll be 7200 RPM or something like that. In a case, you see people with 10 and 15k drives that use much more power.
The biggest problem is that what we have works very well. It supplies a few different kinds of power (3.3/5/12v?) so they drive probably doesn't need to step that up or down. Using one power connector the external drive will have to step down the power from the max (12v?) to be able to power it's logic circuits. That wastes energy, space, and components. It's more expensive.
Then there is the circuit board part. Powered SATA means that you have to get the power to the connectors. The more power you want to run (like that needed for 10/15k drives, or CD or DVD writers) would be problematic. The more power you deliver, the larger the trace on the motherboard has to be so it won't burn out. So now you either have large traces running all over the place, or you have to put the ports next to the power supply connector. Or you make a new additional power connector going to that area of the motherboard.
Or you could make a connector that goes in the middle of the cable to supply power on route, instead of from the motherboard. But that would only mess up your case more.
The current specification works very well for internal stuff, I would be amazed if they changed it to provide this kind of thing for even modest internal drives.
The Catholic Church has declared public that they know they were wrong with Galileo. They can't listen to this man? Having him walk on their grounds stops them from being autonomous? That simple act forces them to bend to his will? I didn't realize the leader of my faith had that kind of power. I'd think we'd have more followers if that was the case.
You don't have to agree with all his points of view. Let him come. Ask him to clarify his statement (made 17 years ago). Debate him. Don't just exclude him. It's not like he's saying the holocaust didn't exist. The church has already admitted they were wrong.
I can't agree with this. Am I the only one who thinks this makes the scientists who signed on look petty?
It's great when institutions of higher learning show opposing viewpoints and respectful debate. Wait...
No kidding. My MacBook Pro would be up for months on end except for two things. The first is Apple updates that require restarts (come out once every month or two, it seems) and the times on weekends I boot into Windows to play Half-Life 2 or Team Fortress 2. My PowerBook G4 (which couldn't boot into windows) had a record of 3-4 months, with me hauling it between home and school every day. That was due to an Apple update too.
If you don't want to wait through boot times, just put the computer to sleep.
No kidding. "Look, we invented booting from ROM, only slower".
Windows is slow to boot. OS X is pretty good, but it's no speed demon. But I just close the lid on my MacBook Pro and it goes to sleep. It actually seems to take 10-20 seconds to do this, but it's reliable so in reality I don't have to worry about it. Resuming is done as fast as the display can come up, if not faster. It is, for all practical purposes, instant.
Hibernating in Windows is much slower every time I've seen it, ranging from relatively fast to almost as bad as a cold boot for me.
If you want your computer up fast, just put it to sleep.
The only problem is when you must turn it off (say moving a desktop from one room to another, something that doesn't come up much, obviously). We'll never get to instant boots again, because hardware has to be initialized. Back when you were just loading an interpreter out of ROM it was that fast, but any time you touch a disk, it's going to be slow. SSDs speed things up, but when your OS starts taking up 1-5 gigs (as Windows and OS X do) you'll still pay a penalty. Again, that doesn't include warm up time that some card may need before it starts working (like the negotiation on a network card, but longer).
No. Native is always better. Virtualization works for easier software, but graphics intensive work is really slow because that stuff has to be translated to the native APIs. CPU bound tasks run fine. Quicken will run fine. Maya would run at almost native speed (during final rendering, probably not normal work). Half-Life will drop tons and tons and tons and tons of frames. Don't forget you lose quite a bit of memory to the vitualization environment and guest OS.
At this point Virtualization is pointless for anything more complex than Zuma or other little PopCap type games.
BootCamp works. I use it to play Half-Life 2. But I have to quit everything I'm doing and reboot. That takes time. It takes all sorts of extra hard drive space for the Windows install (just like virtualization).
It works. It's a pain. Don't expect anyone to rely on it. That's like saying "Your bike works for your 50 mile commute to work, doesn't it?"
Ditto. I saw this the other day and thought I saw a note that said this was not using Cider. If that was the case I'm ready to buy the game instantly. It looks fun, and I like quite a few of the games that Wright has done.
Cider just about kills it for me. I'm not surprised. This is why they licensed that technology. But I don't expect it to work. For as long as all this has taken they could have easily made a OpenGL renderer. I expect performance to be terrible.
I guess I'll just play it through BootCamp. But that's a hassle, so I won't play it much, and I won't buy it until it's $20 and has been out a while because I don't want to spend $60 to get a game I have to reboot and put up with the hassles to play. Windows annoys me at this point. My Windows environment isn't tuned to my liking because I only use it for games and I haven't taken the time to do that. I don't have enough drive space dedicated to Windows, so I have to store my games that have lots of file (as I'm sure Spore will) on an external drive that I need to keep attached to my laptop to play. That means I can't play it on a plane or trip. And of course, I'm sure it will require the disk in the drive... which is just one more problem.
Way to go EA. I'd buy it on a console (like my 360) but I'm guessing it will be slightly crippled. And even if it isn't, I'm guessing the control scheme won't work terribly well compared to a mouse.
It's not like EA has a reason to think Mac stuff won't sell. They've only sold 30 billion copies of The Sims 2 to Mac users in the last few years, not including all those expansion packs.
I'll take the game 6 months or a year late and half-native, please.
I'll say that the writing on the Simpsons game was fantastic. From some of the simpler jokes, to the whole plot (and how it ends) they did a fantastic job. It's too bad the rest of the game is so mediocre that it can be trying to play though.
A Grim Fandango movie won't have the draw of the Grand Theft Auto name, that's true. It will have next to none. I listed it because it has a great story. If you want to make a movie out of a game, it's a good game to use because of the story and how well it could be adapted. If you just want to cash in on a license, you're right it's a terrible game to make into a movie.
It occurred to me that not only could you use that, but there are a small number of games that are already setup as movies: adventure games. If you take out some of the useless puzzles and such, they could get close in run time as well. The Monkey Island games, Grim Fandango (which would be great), Day of the Tenticle, The Dig (which I think was going to be a movie before they decided to make it a game), and I'm sure others which I can't think of.
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I do a lot of Java and XML. I don't know what you're using for a library, but I'd suggest JDOM.
As for the abuses for Maven and Ant... yeah. I'll agree. There are a lot of things that seem to use XML just because they can. I know there is some theory behind why they use them (machine readable, blah blah blah) but for most things it's just a giant pain for the complexity you get. Maybe if you were trying to build Windows with Ant.
That's just what I can think of off the top of my head. We've seen quite a bit of crazy stuff. If everyone would just use one of the already written XML producers or parsers (the big ones, the ones that work) life would be much easier around here from time to time.
Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing these companies getting a slap on the wrist for a changing definition of what Blu-Ray is by changing the profile but not making the differences obvious (it's a little tiny box on the back of a case).
That said, sounds like the guy has a case to me. Read this part:
It was defective. It sounds like the bought a DVD player (let's pretend) that wouldn't play a good percentage of DVDs. Not "doesn't play every neat feature". Not "doesn't support 12.16 theatrical sound". Just plain "won't play". They could fix it with a software update, but they don't seem to want to.
That part is bait-and-switch. He bought a player that should play any good Blu-Ray movie (possibly san-extras). It won't play many of them. Either all those movies are defective, or the player is. If it is the player, he was ripped off. At the very least, they should have replaced his player with something that would play movies.
We ask the bad offenders to fix things, and they usually do. It can take a while, but they'll usually do it. But it can take a while, and we have financial power over people we deal with (since we can cut or restrict traffic). The W3C doesn't have that power over most people.
The idea of a public shame list is a good one for those people who refuse to fix their own problems, and is far more realistic than the military "to bad you messed up, you can't come back until you fix it" approach (which is almost always completely untenable).
I've got to say, this doesn't surprise me at all. In the time I've spent at my job, I've been repeatedly floored by the amazing conduct of other companies IT departments. We've only encountered two people I can think of who have been hostile. Everyone else has been quite nice. You'd think people would have things setup well, but they don't.
We've seen many custom XML parsers and encoders, all slightly wrong. We've seen people transmitting very sensitive data without using any kind of security until we refused to continue working without SSL being added to the equation. We've seen people who were secure change their certificates to self-signed, and we seem to consistently know when people's certificates expire before they do.
But even without these things, I can't tell you how many people send us bad data and flat out ignore the response. We get all sorts of bad data sent to us all the time. When that happens, we reply with a failure message describing what's wrong. Yet we get bits of stuff all the time that is wrong, in the same way, from the same people. I'm not talking about sending us something that they aren't supposed to (X when we say only Y), I'm saying invalid XML type wrong... such that it can't be parsed.
We have, a few times while I've been there, had people make a change in their software (or something) and bombard us with invalid data until we we either block their IP or manage to get into voice contact with their IT department. Sometimes they don't even seem to notice the lockout.
Some places can be amazing. Some software can be poorly designed (or something can cause a strange side effect, see here). I really like one of the suggestions in the comments on the article... start replying really slow, and often with invalid data. They won't do it. I wouldn't. But I like the idea.
They annoy me to no end. It was one thing to keep the disc in the drive back when the data had to be pulled off (I wouldn't want to install Wing Commander 4 and it's 6+ CDs on my hard drive back then). Recently, this has been driving me nuts though. Valve has done such a good job with Steam, that it makes the problem even more obvious.
I bought Sam & Max Season One in the retail box, and it uses copy protection. I use a Mac and the game isn't available for my platform, so I have to play the episodes in Windows. I can't use Parallels because the copy protection thinks I'm using a copied disc. I can't use a disc image for the same reason. I can't play it under OS X. I have to boot into Windows. That takes a long time to shutdown OS X, start Windows, start the game, check the CD, then get into it. It's an amazing pain.
Sam & Max is not an intensive game at all. Even with the lowered performance of 3D stuff in Parallels, it should work fine. I understand Half-Life 2 not running well (it likes a beefy system), but there is no good reason I shouldn't be able to play Sam & Max that way.
But I paid for the physical media, because I prefer that. And because of that, I get copy protection. I'm seriously considering not playing Season Two at this point.
But it's a mitigating factor. The tiger didn't attack some random person, this guy was doing something to provoke the attack. That puts the attack in a different category. Both categories are bad in this case, but they are still different.
A well designed enclosure would have prevented this. The zoo is at fault. There is no question there.
However, the guy wasn't innocent. The tiger may not have attacked if he was behaving differently. There is a risk when you tease a 350lb killing machine. I see the fact he was doing that as important.
Your point is a bit like "sure he was kicking the dog, but that doesn't make it OK that the dog mauled him". Just because the result (mauling) was worse than the crime (kicking the dog) doesn't mean the crime is irrelevant.
Now teasing a tiger is not as bad as kicking a dog... the tiger isn't actually injured. The point is that the guy is not without blame.
If I had kids, I'd rather they heard this story with that fact, and would get the chance to learn the lesson "don't taunt things that can easily kill you, even if you think you're safe" than either never learn that lesson or learn it the hard way.
Seeing as that happened, I wonder if that section will now see tons of bidding (they don't have to worry about making it free, it's already there) as companies try to get (some) control over it, or will bidding be mostly dead since the companies lost their (theoretical) game of chicken and now they have to comply with open access rules... making it less profitable (in theory) to buy?
Thanks to the 100M cable limit, Ethernet can't be used easily for that without going to fiber optic or something else... so much for the easy cost.
I'm trapped with Comcast too. AT&T says they are deploying U-Verse near me (they've been doing the digging) but I expect it will be at least 1 year or two late. I can't wait to move off.
There are a few options. You can use WiFi links over long distances with better antennas and a good line of sight... but this requires the other person to be able to get something like DSL etc. WiMax will fix this in decent sized areas, since it can cover a larger area than WiFi by a large margin. Too bad it's not available yet and will end up really expensive (you didn't expect Sprint to go cheap, did you?). You could use a 3G cellular modem... no... wait.. those are expensive and slow (compared to cable). Then there is white space internet which is only just starting to get tested by the FCC on an experimental basis. Powerlines don't seem to work well (big wires work like antennas? No!). Satellite is too slow (latency) and expensive.
So if you are stuck on Cable, like me, enjoy. You'll be there for quite a while.
That's called channel stuffing, and Microsoft has done it quite a few times with the Zune, XBox, and XBox 360 in order to temporarily inflate the sales numbers. What happens is after you've done that, those stores don't need to order more for a while, so after your "great sales" period, you'll get a "low sales" period as the old units get cleared out.
For those who don't know, this is a troll. The CPU is way faster than RAM. Replacing the cache (which is large physically compared to RAM) with normal DRAM would be a disaster for performance. Go look at the original Celeron, then remember that this chip is even faster than that.
This is like saying cars will soon move back to steam, starting with small cars, because steam engines don't need large refineries to refine the oil. Technically correct on one point, but ignores lots of reality that would completely contradict it.
Woosh
Ooh. I just thought of a solution to this problem. They're not talking about capping uploads, right? I'll just use that bandwidth. We'll use my newly invented HLPoIP, or High-Low-Protocol-over-IP. Here is how it works.
There we go. I used very little download bandwidth (assuming my computer can guess right a tiny fraction of a time, which it can't), I got my file, I swamped your server, and I used up the upstream bandwidth of everyone else on my cable link.
Imagine how much fun BitTorrent will be!
Don't worry, it'll get "better". My big worry with something like this is that specific services I use will cause me to go over. Netflix watching, TiVo downloading shows, Apple TV (if I had one), etc.
Which means that they'll probably start adding exceptions. Soon your plan will be:
In my experience, it's dead. My office has a bit of an informal tone, but I get emails from external businesses we deal with that have spelling mistakes, IM speak ("... if UR able 2..."), and other things.
We've received emails that are clearly accusatory that we've failed at something, or something is our fault. We've had people fly off the handle when we reply that that's not the case with evidence attached (my favorite: when it's a quote from one of their earlier emails).
Things just still surprise me. Yesterday I got an email from one of the highest ranking people in our sales/marketing department. It was all very business and sort of what I'd expect, until the second to last line which was... "kthxbye".
People (both internal and external) are often far less proper and "businessey" (I hate to use that fake word, but I don't know what else to use) than I would expect. The etiquette is gone (not that it was probably ever there).
Not going to happen. There are certain considerations in external drives. Most won't take a ton of power, they'll be 7200 RPM or something like that. In a case, you see people with 10 and 15k drives that use much more power.
The biggest problem is that what we have works very well. It supplies a few different kinds of power (3.3/5/12v?) so they drive probably doesn't need to step that up or down. Using one power connector the external drive will have to step down the power from the max (12v?) to be able to power it's logic circuits. That wastes energy, space, and components. It's more expensive.
Then there is the circuit board part. Powered SATA means that you have to get the power to the connectors. The more power you want to run (like that needed for 10/15k drives, or CD or DVD writers) would be problematic. The more power you deliver, the larger the trace on the motherboard has to be so it won't burn out. So now you either have large traces running all over the place, or you have to put the ports next to the power supply connector. Or you make a new additional power connector going to that area of the motherboard.
Or you could make a connector that goes in the middle of the cable to supply power on route, instead of from the motherboard. But that would only mess up your case more.
The current specification works very well for internal stuff, I would be amazed if they changed it to provide this kind of thing for even modest internal drives.
The Catholic Church has declared public that they know they were wrong with Galileo. They can't listen to this man? Having him walk on their grounds stops them from being autonomous? That simple act forces them to bend to his will? I didn't realize the leader of my faith had that kind of power. I'd think we'd have more followers if that was the case.
You don't have to agree with all his points of view. Let him come. Ask him to clarify his statement (made 17 years ago). Debate him. Don't just exclude him. It's not like he's saying the holocaust didn't exist. The church has already admitted they were wrong.
I can't agree with this. Am I the only one who thinks this makes the scientists who signed on look petty?
It's great when institutions of higher learning show opposing viewpoints and respectful debate. Wait...
No kidding. My MacBook Pro would be up for months on end except for two things. The first is Apple updates that require restarts (come out once every month or two, it seems) and the times on weekends I boot into Windows to play Half-Life 2 or Team Fortress 2. My PowerBook G4 (which couldn't boot into windows) had a record of 3-4 months, with me hauling it between home and school every day. That was due to an Apple update too.
If you don't want to wait through boot times, just put the computer to sleep.
No kidding. "Look, we invented booting from ROM, only slower".
Windows is slow to boot. OS X is pretty good, but it's no speed demon. But I just close the lid on my MacBook Pro and it goes to sleep. It actually seems to take 10-20 seconds to do this, but it's reliable so in reality I don't have to worry about it. Resuming is done as fast as the display can come up, if not faster. It is, for all practical purposes, instant.
Hibernating in Windows is much slower every time I've seen it, ranging from relatively fast to almost as bad as a cold boot for me.
If you want your computer up fast, just put it to sleep.
The only problem is when you must turn it off (say moving a desktop from one room to another, something that doesn't come up much, obviously). We'll never get to instant boots again, because hardware has to be initialized. Back when you were just loading an interpreter out of ROM it was that fast, but any time you touch a disk, it's going to be slow. SSDs speed things up, but when your OS starts taking up 1-5 gigs (as Windows and OS X do) you'll still pay a penalty. Again, that doesn't include warm up time that some card may need before it starts working (like the negotiation on a network card, but longer).
Anything that starts with "replace the firmware of your device with this hacked firmware" can obviously cause you problems.
No. Native is always better. Virtualization works for easier software, but graphics intensive work is really slow because that stuff has to be translated to the native APIs. CPU bound tasks run fine. Quicken will run fine. Maya would run at almost native speed (during final rendering, probably not normal work). Half-Life will drop tons and tons and tons and tons of frames. Don't forget you lose quite a bit of memory to the vitualization environment and guest OS.
At this point Virtualization is pointless for anything more complex than Zuma or other little PopCap type games.
BootCamp works. I use it to play Half-Life 2. But I have to quit everything I'm doing and reboot. That takes time. It takes all sorts of extra hard drive space for the Windows install (just like virtualization).
It works. It's a pain. Don't expect anyone to rely on it. That's like saying "Your bike works for your 50 mile commute to work, doesn't it?"
Ditto. I saw this the other day and thought I saw a note that said this was not using Cider. If that was the case I'm ready to buy the game instantly. It looks fun, and I like quite a few of the games that Wright has done.
Cider just about kills it for me. I'm not surprised. This is why they licensed that technology. But I don't expect it to work. For as long as all this has taken they could have easily made a OpenGL renderer. I expect performance to be terrible.
I guess I'll just play it through BootCamp. But that's a hassle, so I won't play it much, and I won't buy it until it's $20 and has been out a while because I don't want to spend $60 to get a game I have to reboot and put up with the hassles to play. Windows annoys me at this point. My Windows environment isn't tuned to my liking because I only use it for games and I haven't taken the time to do that. I don't have enough drive space dedicated to Windows, so I have to store my games that have lots of file (as I'm sure Spore will) on an external drive that I need to keep attached to my laptop to play. That means I can't play it on a plane or trip. And of course, I'm sure it will require the disk in the drive... which is just one more problem.
Way to go EA. I'd buy it on a console (like my 360) but I'm guessing it will be slightly crippled. And even if it isn't, I'm guessing the control scheme won't work terribly well compared to a mouse.
It's not like EA has a reason to think Mac stuff won't sell. They've only sold 30 billion copies of The Sims 2 to Mac users in the last few years, not including all those expansion packs.
I'll take the game 6 months or a year late and half-native, please.
I'll say that the writing on the Simpsons game was fantastic. From some of the simpler jokes, to the whole plot (and how it ends) they did a fantastic job. It's too bad the rest of the game is so mediocre that it can be trying to play though.
A Grim Fandango movie won't have the draw of the Grand Theft Auto name, that's true. It will have next to none. I listed it because it has a great story. If you want to make a movie out of a game, it's a good game to use because of the story and how well it could be adapted. If you just want to cash in on a license, you're right it's a terrible game to make into a movie.
It occurred to me that not only could you use that, but there are a small number of games that are already setup as movies: adventure games. If you take out some of the useless puzzles and such, they could get close in run time as well. The Monkey Island games, Grim Fandango (which would be great), Day of the Tenticle, The Dig (which I think was going to be a movie before they decided to make it a game), and I'm sure others which I can't think of.