Wii hasn't been out long enough for "the test of time" to even be applicable.
That said,
Super Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart Wii are two titles that come to mind. New Super Mario Brothers Wii is also pretty good, not yet old enough to tell how well it'll age though.
I welcome this trend, a few extra confirmation boxes would help.
Can we also get rid of excessively long sigs, embedded graphics, comic sans and outlook stationary too? Or at least made them more difficult to automate.
Personally I never quite understood why HTML e-mail was/is used. Plain old text is fine for what the majority of people need, and it should be the default IMHO. The number of times that the extra formatting was useful via HTML is very rare and no one generally knows how to really make any use of it (besides marketers).
Of course, for some deranged reason Outlook tends to render it in Courier, which makes it look ugly. I receive ASCII e-mail in Thunderbird and Mail.app, both of which render it in pleasant looking sans serif typefaces.
I also always like the four-line signature 'guideline' from the Usenet days and try to follow it whenever possible.
HTML is amazingly useful in messages. Simple things such as including inline screenshots of an application under discussion, or ease of properly formatting lists.
For longer and more complex emails I may very well divide the email up into multiple segments using headers
Sure I could do all of that with ASCII art, but why the hell should I when HTML exists?
The.NET framework actually has built-in support for running on non-Windows and non-x86/x64 systems: there are various internal enumerations which indicate running on Windows, Mac, or Linux systems and there are also flags for indicating Big and Little Endian CPUs. It was *designed* to be cross platform; it's just MIcrosoft themselves have never bothered to take advantage of this.
Look into.NET Micro Framework, it is a completely open source implementation of.NET (by Microsoft!) running on a wide variety of platforms.
Netduinos are the easiest way to get started with.NETMF.
(To be fair,.NETMF is more of a platform in of itself, a cool little mini-runtime of sorts, very awesome and fun to play around with)
As a happy owner of an original model Kia Soul, it took me all of about 1 tank of gas to realize the reported fuel numbers were off. 23MPH is about the best I can get, which is horrible for a car that weighs 2650lb and has a 144hp engine.
I have actually yet to figure out how in the world the gas mileage is that bad. (The "I am not sure which gear I should be in" automatic transmission may have something to do with it.)
That said, in every other respect the car is great. Practical beyond all belief and fun to drive. (I have one of the limited edition models that is a fair bit closer to the ground than is typical, so I don't end up upside down all the damn time!)
If you HONESTLY think they are gonna gut the ENTIRE UI before release day? here is a cookie to go with the koolaid you have been drinking. as for why show it to them?
Actually the Start tiles experience was redesigned due to customer feedback about the Developer Preview.
The concept is not going away, but the implementation is improving a lot before release.
I know this may surprise you, but Microsoft relies on selling stuff to customers. As such, as a general rule (though not always, everyone messes up from time to time), they try to create products that customers want to buy. If they get feedback that something can be improved, and if it is possible to improve it given budget/time/etc, quite often it ends up being improved. Not always, but features have a cost to implement (both financial and in terms of human resources).
folks PUT UP with their cell phone, most don't sit there caressing the thing and they sure as hell don't want to spend their day in front of it!
Try talking to a younger demographic.
Also, if you are putting up with technology, try getting better technology.
In regards to the new start screen though, it is basically a simple evolution of the original Windows 95 flyout start menu that just now takes up the entire screen. It is a full screen start menu. Live Tiles are Desktop Icons that can display snippets of information, and that are easier to arrange in to meaningful groups.
Do either of those sound that bad to you? Does de-cluttering desktops (while still allowing users to put things on the desktop! Just making those things easier to organize!) really sound horrible? And why the hell not make the start menu full screen? It damn well should be, much better than the stupid small hit boxes that existed on the Win95 through WinXP start menus, and tons better than the seriously unusable start menu that debuted with Vista and continued on to 7.
Seriously dude. Tone down the anger some, and study history some more.
You might want to start off with the essay The Rise of "Worse is Better". It lays out a pretty consistent reasoning for why quick to release, flexible software wins the day. It doesn't have to have all the features that are possible, it doesn't have to be 100% stable. Software that is in users hands NOW and enables them to be productive is worth infinitely more than bug free (or even just "far less buggy") software that may be available some date in the future.
All large software projects have huge lists of bugs. Heck you can even take estimated metrics of Bugs/Line of Code. Even with really damn good coders, once you have millions of lines of code Bugs/LOC is going to bite you in the ass.
Managers and companies set schedules - not programmers.
This is true for everybody in a company. Their job and delivery schedule is based upon the needs of the company.
Marketing idiots says we need feature x because he has a hard-on and absolutely no basis to demand feature x.
Typically some large customer who is willing to pay large sums of money is requesting the feature. Those same large sums of money go to pay your salary. In some cases, especially for one off features, it may be the case that a large company will have a work stoppage if the feature isn't implemented. Or perhaps the software package is not nearly of as much use to them without that feature.
Your job is to make USABLE software. Software that isn't usable isn't worth anything to anyone.
Programmers do their best to create feature in y duration. Its buggy. This is known. The company releases it anyways.
If a company continues with that practice, eventually they will get a reputation for writing low quality software and they will find themselves in a poor financial situation.
In regards to how much Microsoft is to blame for this, have you taken a look at any other enterprise software vendors? Be it Java2 EE, SAS, or IBMs latest and greatest product, enterprise software development is an ugly picture no matter who is producing the tool chain.
(Actually J2EE can be done properly if you have the right people in charge, I am pretty sure SAS and LOTUS are always horrid horrid things to get close to however.:) )
but anyone who knows what they are doing and doesn't install random shady-looking garbage never has any trouble.
Yes, because all OEMs make their devices to the same quality bar! Why, ever single android device out there, from low end to the high end are top notch highly performant and bug free!
bullshit.
Just like any other open device ecosystem Android has issues with some device makers not even realizing what a quality bar is.
My computer has a reset switch. Depends on which model you buy. Or just build your own.
The mechanical off switches were horrible. They were a common source of failure for computers. Not too surprising, given how much current (voltage?) was supposed to run though them when they got flipped. They were heavy as heck for a reason.
If microsoft finally sacrifices the holy vestal virgin of legacy compatibility (Its major strongpoint in corporate environments by a long shot-- Look at the immense power of zombie IE6) for its ARM port, it will suffer the same fate as all the previous alternative architecture builds (PPC, SPARC, Itanium, et al.)-- That is to say, it will die on the vine because users will hate it with purple pasion.
Except that if this is a consumer orientated release, back compat is not nearly as important. Old games don't run, but old games don't run on ANY of the tablet platforms.
Having a usable and responsive UI, ease of use, and hitting a good price point are more important than back compat for a consumer device. Being able to run Office is another plus.
If you dance in front of a camera naked, check the "please upload pictures of me to the web" button, don't be surprised when the camera takes naked pictures of you and uploads them to the web.
I used my Tablet PC to take copious notes with OneNote while recording the lecture at the same time. I loved it. OneNote is an awesome app for taking notes in, really well thought out, and my Tablet PC with its long battery life (for the time, ~2004) was awesome.
On any given day about half the class would be playing World of Warcraft in the back though. I can understand how that would be annoying when trying to teach.
Another down side to having a laptop was trying to stay off of the Internet if the lecture got too boring. (Of course trying to stay awake was also an issue...)
And how the fuck is it a racial slur? Seriously WTF?
It is a movie. It had action and good music.
Lower your expectations a bit. Yesh.
They raped Hell Blazer like a Chinese finger trap, calling it "Constintine".
Constantine sucked because it had too much emo whining and not enough action. *yawn*
It was based on another work? Hey guess what? I don't give a shit. I go to the movies to be entertained.
I don't give a fuck about the "artistic merit" of the original work. Hell for that matter I don't care about the artistic merit of the movies I go to see. If I want a good story I read a book. I go to the movie theater to see shit get blown up.
While the original Doom did not exactly have a solid story line, the setting (HELL) is a pretty damn good one. It would require a large budget to fully realize, but a bad ass marine vs hell's legion could have made for an awesome action horror film.
If MS really wanted to support hacking through the USB interface, they should release the interface specs. Tell us the commands and how to fully utilize the hardware.
That would cost MS money, they would have to assign someone to clean up whatever internal docs they have and make them fit for public consumption, get someone from legal to sign off that the docs have been cleaned of MS trade secrets, and then get the docs pushed on to MSDN with appropriate linkage.
I am used to being able to hot key swap and click at a fairly fast rate and do so often, which is why the zooming is infinitely annoying.
AFAIK keyboard focus is instantely switched, you can ignore the visuals and just keep on typing.
Though quite frankly I almost never minimize an app anyway (I just shove something else on top of it:) ), so I haven't even noticed the zoom effect until you mentioned it and I explictly went to check it out.
Of course WinKey-M minimizes everything w/o a zoom effect.
And the Aero UI *does* use RAM and resources, even if the heavy lifting is on the GPU,
You can read over on the Engineering Windows 7 Blog (Scroll down to "Desktop Graphics - Reduced Memory Footprint ") about how window contents are stored purely in GPU memory.
If I start Chrome, the icon goes away, so I can't easily start a second instance. Instead I have to either click on the desktop icon (which I never used to even have) or open a new tab and separate it from the parent.
Middle click the running instance of Chrome in the taskbar to open a new instance. The icon is still there, it has just been expanded out.
Granted this is 100% non-discoverable... But I think the idea is that anyone who wants to open umpteen browser instances probably also reads sites like/.:)
Another way to open a new instance is to hit shift-winkey-#, where # is whatever numbered position the chrome icon is on your taskbar when the taskbar is empty.
And yes, this is something I do many times per day. There are 100 little things like this that simply take more time for each step than it used to.
Reply with a list of'em and I'll see how many work arounds I know.:)
and has some decent refinements in some areas,
Being able to slam windows to the side and get them sized to 1/2 screen is insanely useful.
have managed to make networking even harder than it was by virtually forcing you to go throw their wizard and explain what kind of network you have.
I actually really appreciate this, as when I bring my laptop over to someone's house, or to any WiFi hotpot that I don't trust, I can just select "Public" and know that my HD contents aren't going to be shared out over the network. On the flip side of things, home networking actually works now! YAH! (About damn time)
and wireless support may be better, but I've had to explain to more people how to get it to work than I did with XP, so not sure what to tell you there
My main issue with XP was that half of the damn wireless cards would co-opt the really good Windows Wireless UI with their own POS UI that couldn't do half the things the Windows UI could do.
Haven't had many issues with Win7's UI. Normally my interaction with it consists of clicking on the tray bar icon and then selecting whatever network I want to connect to.
Slashdot Mirror
Wii hasn't been out long enough for "the test of time" to even be applicable.
That said,
Super Mario Galaxy and Mario Kart Wii are two titles that come to mind. New Super Mario Brothers Wii is also pretty good, not yet old enough to tell how well it'll age though.
I welcome this trend, a few extra confirmation boxes would help.
Can we also get rid of excessively long sigs, embedded graphics, comic sans and outlook stationary too? Or at least made them more difficult to automate.
Personally I never quite understood why HTML e-mail was/is used. Plain old text is fine for what the majority of people need, and it should be the default IMHO. The number of times that the extra formatting was useful via HTML is very rare and no one generally knows how to really make any use of it (besides marketers).
Of course, for some deranged reason Outlook tends to render it in Courier, which makes it look ugly. I receive ASCII e-mail in Thunderbird and Mail.app, both of which render it in pleasant looking sans serif typefaces.
I also always like the four-line signature 'guideline' from the Usenet days and try to follow it whenever possible.
HTML is amazingly useful in messages. Simple things such as including inline screenshots of an application under discussion, or ease of properly formatting lists.
For longer and more complex emails I may very well divide the email up into multiple segments using headers
Sure I could do all of that with ASCII art, but why the hell should I when HTML exists?
The .NET framework actually has built-in support for running on non-Windows and non-x86/x64 systems: there are various internal enumerations which indicate running on Windows, Mac, or Linux systems and there are also flags for indicating Big and Little Endian CPUs. It was *designed* to be cross platform; it's just MIcrosoft themselves have never bothered to take advantage of this.
Look into .NET Micro Framework, it is a completely open source implementation of .NET (by Microsoft!) running on a wide variety of platforms.
Netduinos are the easiest way to get started with .NETMF.
(To be fair, .NETMF is more of a platform in of itself, a cool little mini-runtime of sorts, very awesome and fun to play around with)
My state (Washington) has a nice little label that says "may".
Not the clearest labeling I have ever seen. Something more like "does" or "does not" would be appreciated.
As a happy owner of an original model Kia Soul, it took me all of about 1 tank of gas to realize the reported fuel numbers were off. 23MPH is about the best I can get, which is horrible for a car that weighs 2650lb and has a 144hp engine.
I have actually yet to figure out how in the world the gas mileage is that bad. (The "I am not sure which gear I should be in" automatic transmission may have something to do with it.)
That said, in every other respect the car is great. Practical beyond all belief and fun to drive. (I have one of the limited edition models that is a fair bit closer to the ground than is typical, so I don't end up upside down all the damn time!)
Actually the Start tiles experience was redesigned due to customer feedback about the Developer Preview.
The concept is not going away, but the implementation is improving a lot before release.
Compare the design after feedback was taken into account to the earlier design
It was improved.
I know this may surprise you, but Microsoft relies on selling stuff to customers. As such, as a general rule (though not always, everyone messes up from time to time), they try to create products that customers want to buy. If they get feedback that something can be improved, and if it is possible to improve it given budget/time/etc, quite often it ends up being improved. Not always, but features have a cost to implement (both financial and in terms of human resources).
Try talking to a younger demographic.
Also, if you are putting up with technology, try getting better technology.
In regards to the new start screen though, it is basically a simple evolution of the original Windows 95 flyout start menu that just now takes up the entire screen. It is a full screen start menu. Live Tiles are Desktop Icons that can display snippets of information, and that are easier to arrange in to meaningful groups.
Do either of those sound that bad to you? Does de-cluttering desktops (while still allowing users to put things on the desktop! Just making those things easier to organize!) really sound horrible? And why the hell not make the start menu full screen? It damn well should be, much better than the stupid small hit boxes that existed on the Win95 through WinXP start menus, and tons better than the seriously unusable start menu that debuted with Vista and continued on to 7.
Not nearly so much as Java, but C# is a class based OO language, where as C++ is multi-paradigm. Of course C# is going to be more heavily class based.
In other news, LISP requires lots of functions and parens.
Yes yes and yes.
50 thousand times over yes.
Without an Index outlook has to manually scan through the entire text of every single email every time you do a search. Insanely inefficient.
I believe you want to visit reddit.
Seriously dude. Tone down the anger some, and study history some more.
You might want to start off with the essay The Rise of "Worse is Better". It lays out a pretty consistent reasoning for why quick to release, flexible software wins the day. It doesn't have to have all the features that are possible, it doesn't have to be 100% stable. Software that is in users hands NOW and enables them to be productive is worth infinitely more than bug free (or even just "far less buggy") software that may be available some date in the future.
All large software projects have huge lists of bugs. Heck you can even take estimated metrics of Bugs/Line of Code. Even with really damn good coders, once you have millions of lines of code Bugs/LOC is going to bite you in the ass.
This is true for everybody in a company. Their job and delivery schedule is based upon the needs of the company.
Typically some large customer who is willing to pay large sums of money is requesting the feature. Those same large sums of money go to pay your salary. In some cases, especially for one off features, it may be the case that a large company will have a work stoppage if the feature isn't implemented. Or perhaps the software package is not nearly of as much use to them without that feature.
Your job is to make USABLE software. Software that isn't usable isn't worth anything to anyone.
If a company continues with that practice, eventually they will get a reputation for writing low quality software and they will find themselves in a poor financial situation.
In regards to how much Microsoft is to blame for this, have you taken a look at any other enterprise software vendors? Be it Java2 EE, SAS, or IBMs latest and greatest product, enterprise software development is an ugly picture no matter who is producing the tool chain.
(Actually J2EE can be done properly if you have the right people in charge, I am pretty sure SAS and LOTUS are always horrid horrid things to get close to however. :) )
Please tell me you are trolling?
Yes, because all OEMs make their devices to the same quality bar! Why, ever single android device out there, from low end to the high end are top notch highly performant and bug free!
bullshit.
Just like any other open device ecosystem Android has issues with some device makers not even realizing what a quality bar is.
My computer has a reset switch. Depends on which model you buy. Or just build your own.
The mechanical off switches were horrible. They were a common source of failure for computers. Not too surprising, given how much current (voltage?) was supposed to run though them when they got flipped. They were heavy as heck for a reason.
Except that if this is a consumer orientated release, back compat is not nearly as important. Old games don't run, but old games don't run on ANY of the tablet platforms.
Having a usable and responsive UI, ease of use, and hitting a good price point are more important than back compat for a consumer device. Being able to run Office is another plus.
Probably because it came factory default with a text editor, xterm, and a python runtime.
If you dance in front of a camera naked, check the "please upload pictures of me to the web" button, don't be surprised when the camera takes naked pictures of you and uploads them to the web.
Durp.
I used my Tablet PC to take copious notes with OneNote while recording the lecture at the same time. I loved it. OneNote is an awesome app for taking notes in, really well thought out, and my Tablet PC with its long battery life (for the time, ~2004) was awesome.
On any given day about half the class would be playing World of Warcraft in the back though. I can understand how that would be annoying when trying to teach.
Another down side to having a laptop was trying to stay off of the Internet if the lecture got too boring. (Of course trying to stay awake was also an issue...)
Awhile back the Australian courts made an inane ruling that porn stars with "small" breasts encouraged pedophilia.
news article.
Oh re-fucking-lax. The books are entertainment, the movies are a related form of entertainment.
No shit, it is called capitalism. Money pays the bills, no one works for free.
Well 99.9% of the nerds who went and saw it did.
And what is wrong with the movies being just that?
Shit gets chopped up. People die. Awesome action scenes. I'm good.
And how the fuck is it a racial slur? Seriously WTF?
It is a movie. It had action and good music.
Lower your expectations a bit. Yesh.
Constantine sucked because it had too much emo whining and not enough action. *yawn*
It was based on another work? Hey guess what? I don't give a shit. I go to the movies to be entertained.
I don't give a fuck about the "artistic merit" of the original work. Hell for that matter I don't care about the artistic merit of the movies I go to see. If I want a good story I read a book. I go to the movie theater to see shit get blown up.
I am actually surprised they DID change it.
While the original Doom did not exactly have a solid story line, the setting (HELL) is a pretty damn good one. It would require a large budget to fully realize, but a bad ass marine vs hell's legion could have made for an awesome action horror film.
Now that would be an awesome promotion!
Every syllabus I ever saw had a line at the bottom "schedule is subject to change."
That would cost MS money, they would have to assign someone to clean up whatever internal docs they have and make them fit for public consumption, get someone from legal to sign off that the docs have been cleaned of MS trade secrets, and then get the docs pushed on to MSDN with appropriate linkage.
All for zero return.
Not going to happen.
Because Adobe keeps threatening to sue Microsoft if that feature is added.
AFAIK keyboard focus is instantely switched, you can ignore the visuals and just keep on typing.
Though quite frankly I almost never minimize an app anyway (I just shove something else on top of it :) ), so I haven't even noticed the zoom effect until you mentioned it and I explictly went to check it out.
Of course WinKey-M minimizes everything w/o a zoom effect.
You can read over on the Engineering Windows 7 Blog (Scroll down to "Desktop Graphics - Reduced Memory Footprint
") about how window contents are stored purely in GPU memory.
Middle click the running instance of Chrome in the taskbar to open a new instance. The icon is still there, it has just been expanded out.
Granted this is 100% non-discoverable... But I think the idea is that anyone who wants to open umpteen browser instances probably also reads sites like /. :)
Another way to open a new instance is to hit shift-winkey-#, where # is whatever numbered position the chrome icon is on your taskbar when the taskbar is empty.
Reply with a list of'em and I'll see how many work arounds I know. :)
Being able to slam windows to the side and get them sized to 1/2 screen is insanely useful.
I actually really appreciate this, as when I bring my laptop over to someone's house, or to any WiFi hotpot that I don't trust, I can just select "Public" and know that my HD contents aren't going to be shared out over the network. On the flip side of things, home networking actually works now! YAH! (About damn time)
My main issue with XP was that half of the damn wireless cards would co-opt the really good Windows Wireless UI with their own POS UI that couldn't do half the things the Windows UI could do.
Haven't had many issues with Win7's UI. Normally my interaction with it consists of clicking on the tray bar icon and then selecting whatever network I want to connect to.
Doesn't set path system wide, only changes it for that instance of CMD.exe