What you are illustrating is present tense vs. present participle.
Here is an illustration of active vs. passive voice: Active: The boy rides his bike to the shore. Passive: The bike is ridden to the shore by the boy.
You are correct in saying that active voice is the more direct and succinct of the two voices, and that technical writers should prefer it over passive voice. But it helps if your example illustrates the correct principle.:)
Having recently seen Bewitched, I'm half-expecting a Revenge of the Nerds remake wherein the nerds decide to make their own movie: a Revenge of the Nerds remake! I believe this sad, blatantly derivative state of affairs is exemplary of what they call "postmodernism".
Memo to Hollywood: You got your Revenge of the Nerds remake already. It was called Napoleon Dynamite and it was more awesome than all of the trite remakes of the present century by at least an order of magnitude or two.
And at the end of the day, that's what the name "Wii" is all about: another in the long line of utterly meaningless names meant to convey friendliness or slickness in a non-culture-specific manner.
And actually VAIO is pronounceable in Japanese with some approximation; "Wii" with less approximation (in katakana it would be rendered as "uii").
For kids you have the familiar, lovable Disney characters. For the grown-up crowd you have Nomura's familiar smooth-faced, spiky-haired girly men. Never underestimate the power of bishies and hinted-at shounen-ai when targeting that oh-so-important magnesium-panties fangirl demographic.
# The two people who are in political control in the game are called "President", even though they are a Father and Son. "President" suggests a republic, where leaders are suggested through merit, not because of who your father was. # In addition, the government doesn't seem to be elected. It seems to be just a front for a bunch of greedy energy company executives.
[Insert standard snarky Slashdotter remarks about the Bush administration here.]
If you rolled into a glitch in the geometry that took you off the map, the King would appear and take you back to a safe spot on the map, and spend about 2 minutes telling you all about how wonderful the "Royal Warp" is.
Some sort of open BIOS, like LinuxBIOS, would be a good way to go too; but this is Microsoft Research we're talking about here, and Microsoft wants control over your hardware just as bad, if not worse, than any skript kiddie.
The difference between Daikatana and SotC is this:
SotC was made pretty much by a single team, and they pretty much had a cohesive vision of what should go into the game. It may have taken them a long time to find out what that vision was, but the team, being small for game team standards, managed to pull it all together in the end through communication and a common goal of making a great game.
Romero... how many teams did he go through to produce Daicrapola? 3? Didn't he bring in a bunch of game mod kiddies off the street for that game? And then there's the whole issue of some people being on there strictly for decoration's sake (*cough*"Killcreek"*cough*). Not exactly a great way to alchemize a team devoted to outputting a cohesive product of high quality.
In these two extreme cases we see two entirely *different* kinds of long development cycles, so that using the one to attempt to refute the validity of the other becomes an apples-and-oranges comparison.
A big developer complaint with Linux is that there are so many GUI toolkits to choose from, they all look different, and have different APIs. With Windows it's different: one standard API, one look and feel. Business developers like that. Java, with its proliferation of different, different-looking GUI toolkits, is suffering from the Linux problem. That makes it less attractive as a deployment platform for real-world applications. For most applications which will be delivered to Windows desktops, the best choice is to use Windows Forms on.NET.
And don't say web apps. Web apps suck. Their UIs do not scale up to the heavy-duty data entry people do in a corporate environment; they tend to require too much mousing around. Browser Web form usability just isn't up to the standard established by GUI apps, particularly when it comes to keyboard navigation.
Having seen Link repeatedly try and fail to cop a snog off Zelda in this cartoon before acquiring Zelda II, I found the ending to that game (in which Link and Zelda seem to embrace, and ostensibly kiss, behind a curtain) oddly satisfying.
You called me a scripting language fanboy also; given the list of languages in my post that you were responding to, it's quite clear that you have a very slippery at best grasp on what a "scripting language" is.
The system that's most amenable to shovelware tends to win. First it was the Atari 2600, then it was the NES ("Seal of Quality" notwithstanding). In the min-90s Sony took the shovelware crown from Nintendo. Now it's Microsoft's turn. They have delivered a platform that's far easier to develop for than their competitors, and more developers are going to commit to a Microsoft console. That generally means more shitty developers, but people tend to buy the console with the most industry support, not the one with the most great games (or else Dreamcast would've been end-of-lifed around now instead of 5 years ago).
Don't expect the might of big multinationals and governments to come up with the best solution. They gave us COBOL and Ada, respectively.
Programmer productivity in a business context is secondary to replaceability and low TCO of said programmers, especially where software/IT is not one of the enterprise's core competencies. Hence the emphasis on hiring large teams of mediocre programmers rather than a few really productive programmers. There is also a sort of Pangloss parity in effect wherein the best programmer on a team must not show signs of being conspicuously more productive than the worst because for a project to rely too largely on one person is considered high risk. So in some situations there is kind of a "race to the bottom".
And anyway, as I said, Microsoft is catching a whiff of the appeal of functional programming; otherwise they would not be incorporating ideas from Scheme and ML into.NET 3.0.
It's not that a blind monkey with 3 fingers can learn to program in it; such is true of Scheme and Smalltalk. It's that the best ur-hacker in the world isn't going to be terribly much more productive than the blind monkey in a language like C#. C#, VB, Java, etc. do not scale well with the intelligence of their programmers; Lisp, Scheme, Dylan, Python, and Smalltalk do.
There are a lot of jobs paying good money because companies are adopting or migrating to.NET for their enterprise applications, and C# is a very poor fit for complex code; you need chain-gangs of coders to churn out that code and high salaries are what get people in the door. Microsoft is trying to ameliorate the deficiencies of its standard platform and language set with something called LINQ; this is a rather paltry band-aid which compensates partially for the fact that C# is not Scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are illustrating is present tense vs. present participle.
:)
Here is an illustration of active vs. passive voice:
Active: The boy rides his bike to the shore.
Passive: The bike is ridden to the shore by the boy.
You are correct in saying that active voice is the more direct and succinct of the two voices, and that technical writers should prefer it over passive voice. But it helps if your example illustrates the correct principle.
(Here comes the grammar nazi moddage...)
Having recently seen Bewitched, I'm half-expecting a Revenge of the Nerds remake wherein the nerds decide to make their own movie: a Revenge of the Nerds remake! I believe this sad, blatantly derivative state of affairs is exemplary of what they call "postmodernism".
Memo to Hollywood: You got your Revenge of the Nerds remake already. It was called Napoleon Dynamite and it was more awesome than all of the trite remakes of the present century by at least an order of magnitude or two.
As in, extremely volatile and burns brightly. As in, "So-and-so's panties explode whenever she sees Sephiroth."
And at the end of the day, that's what the name "Wii" is all about: another in the long line of utterly meaningless names meant to convey friendliness or slickness in a non-culture-specific manner.
And actually VAIO is pronounceable in Japanese with some approximation; "Wii" with less approximation (in katakana it would be rendered as "uii").
For kids you have the familiar, lovable Disney characters. For the grown-up crowd you have Nomura's familiar smooth-faced, spiky-haired girly men. Never underestimate the power of bishies and hinted-at shounen-ai when targeting that oh-so-important magnesium-panties fangirl demographic.
[Insert standard snarky Slashdotter remarks about the Bush administration here.]
The next time you miss a memo concerning new cover sheets for TPS reports, you can simply google it!
If you rolled into a glitch in the geometry that took you off the map, the King would appear and take you back to a safe spot on the map, and spend about 2 minutes telling you all about how wonderful the "Royal Warp" is.
Can your kid Drive and merge with Goofy into Valour form, and then wield two cellphones?! Because that would be awesome.
Some sort of open BIOS, like LinuxBIOS, would be a good way to go too; but this is Microsoft Research we're talking about here, and Microsoft wants control over your hardware just as bad, if not worse, than any skript kiddie.
"'Daily Reminder: Thursday: Purchase feeble public access cable show and exploit it.' Boy, I feel sorry for whoever that is!"
The difference between Daikatana and SotC is this:
SotC was made pretty much by a single team, and they pretty much had a cohesive vision of what should go into the game. It may have taken them a long time to find out what that vision was, but the team, being small for game team standards, managed to pull it all together in the end through communication and a common goal of making a great game.
Romero... how many teams did he go through to produce Daicrapola? 3? Didn't he bring in a bunch of game mod kiddies off the street for that game? And then there's the whole issue of some people being on there strictly for decoration's sake (*cough*"Killcreek"*cough*). Not exactly a great way to alchemize a team devoted to outputting a cohesive product of high quality.
In these two extreme cases we see two entirely *different* kinds of long development cycles, so that using the one to attempt to refute the validity of the other becomes an apples-and-oranges comparison.
In other news, South Korea unveiled its new supercomputer: KEKEKE ^____^
A big developer complaint with Linux is that there are so many GUI toolkits to choose from, they all look different, and have different APIs. With Windows it's different: one standard API, one look and feel. Business developers like that. Java, with its proliferation of different, different-looking GUI toolkits, is suffering from the Linux problem. That makes it less attractive as a deployment platform for real-world applications. For most applications which will be delivered to Windows desktops, the best choice is to use Windows Forms on .NET.
And don't say web apps. Web apps suck. Their UIs do not scale up to the heavy-duty data entry people do in a corporate environment; they tend to require too much mousing around. Browser Web form usability just isn't up to the standard established by GUI apps, particularly when it comes to keyboard navigation.
Miguel de Icaza? Is that you?
There are lies, damned lies, statistics, and computer models.
Born in Texas actually. I just like the euphony of the phrase "cop a snog".
Having seen Link repeatedly try and fail to cop a snog off Zelda in this cartoon before acquiring Zelda II, I found the ending to that game (in which Link and Zelda seem to embrace, and ostensibly kiss, behind a curtain) oddly satisfying.
You called me a scripting language fanboy also; given the list of languages in my post that you were responding to, it's quite clear that you have a very slippery at best grasp on what a "scripting language" is.
Dude, Nippon Ichi is the new Squaresoft. Makai Kingdom: pure facerock.
The system that's most amenable to shovelware tends to win. First it was the Atari 2600, then it was the NES ("Seal of Quality" notwithstanding). In the min-90s Sony took the shovelware crown from Nintendo. Now it's Microsoft's turn. They have delivered a platform that's far easier to develop for than their competitors, and more developers are going to commit to a Microsoft console. That generally means more shitty developers, but people tend to buy the console with the most industry support, not the one with the most great games (or else Dreamcast would've been end-of-lifed around now instead of 5 years ago).
Don't expect the might of big multinationals and governments to come up with the best solution. They gave us COBOL and Ada, respectively.
.NET 3.0.
Programmer productivity in a business context is secondary to replaceability and low TCO of said programmers, especially where software/IT is not one of the enterprise's core competencies. Hence the emphasis on hiring large teams of mediocre programmers rather than a few really productive programmers. There is also a sort of Pangloss parity in effect wherein the best programmer on a team must not show signs of being conspicuously more productive than the worst because for a project to rely too largely on one person is considered high risk. So in some situations there is kind of a "race to the bottom".
And anyway, as I said, Microsoft is catching a whiff of the appeal of functional programming; otherwise they would not be incorporating ideas from Scheme and ML into
It's not that a blind monkey with 3 fingers can learn to program in it; such is true of Scheme and Smalltalk. It's that the best ur-hacker in the world isn't going to be terribly much more productive than the blind monkey in a language like C#. C#, VB, Java, etc. do not scale well with the intelligence of their programmers; Lisp, Scheme, Dylan, Python, and Smalltalk do.
.NET for their enterprise applications, and C# is a very poor fit for complex code; you need chain-gangs of coders to churn out that code and high salaries are what get people in the door. Microsoft is trying to ameliorate the deficiencies of its standard platform and language set with something called LINQ; this is a rather paltry band-aid which compensates partially for the fact that C# is not Scheme.
There are a lot of jobs paying good money because companies are adopting or migrating to
It's been done. It was called "Killcreek". Now that was offensive.
...and Haskell pwns them both.