Good question. The obvious counterexamples are DDR, Guitar Hero, and the like -- games that exist to sell a particular controller.
Usually, though, additional controllers have gotten very poor adoption. If you can sell to 30 million people if you use the standard controller, and 1 million people if you use the new controller, that's a big incentive not to rely on the new controller.
Now, you could make a game that can go either way -- but for a genuinely new interface, that usually means not having a good interface foor the new controller, meaning you aren't helping adoption of the new controls. (Look at the way that the Lair developers got panned for actually using the sixaxis motion sensing instead of just using analog sticks -- they eventually had to release a patch to use analog sticks.)
So I think these new controllers are probably, for now, just a way for people to experiment with the new controls that we'll probably see as standard on the PS4 and next Xbox.
Tons of research has been done, mostly pointing to combinations of environmental factors and genetics. Last I heard, the big interesting "cause" to look at was Vitamin D -- because while autism isn't more common in Somalia than it is anywhere else, it's much more common among Somalians in Oregon and Sweden than... Which hints at Vitamin D issues.
Keep in mind that there's no evidence at all that the incidence of autism is increasing, only the diagnosis -- which is to say, obviously, before the notion of "high-functioning autism" or "Asperger's Syndrome" was widely known in the US, obviously very few people were diagnosed as such... So there's probably nothing here to begin with.
The thing that bugs me is stuff like the recent Macs with "GT 120" cards in them. What's that? Well, looking around, it PROBABLY means a card that's the same chip as a GeForce 9500 GT. Which is to say, a pretty low-end card. But it's sure not easy to tell.
Well, the obvious reason would be that they make money on it.
I signed up for that agreement. Haven't published anything yet, but I have an app I started on (before getting buried in work again). If I get it done, I'll submit it. If it sells even a relatively small number of copies, I get my money back. If it doesn't, hey, I get to use my app on my phone, and since I want the app, I win.
Untrue. Look at the famous case of McDonald's suing people for libel in the UK.
In the UK, it has been possible to win on the basis that, although the claims made were completely true, and are not disputed, the making of those claims caused injury to a person or corporation.
In the US, truth is an absolute defense -- no truthful statement can ever be defamation. (Furthermore, sincere belief is good enough, which I think is probably a good choice...) In the UK, empirically, it is not.
Actually, no. I tried a couple of the pre-iPod ones, and at least some DID NOT play unencrypted MP3 files. I had one, I think it was a "Lyra", that made strange squealings unless you "converted" your MP3s using a special licensed version of RealPlayer for Windows.
None of them have really, for my uses, caught up to iSilo for one of my black-and-white Palm systems. I mean, they're better, except they aren't small, portable, and able to use arbitrary quantities of completely DRM-free material with free conversion from basically any format.
Or if they have, they haven't yet revealed this. I really do prefer to have reading be a function of a device which I can do other things on, but none of the current of general-purpose gizmos are anywhere near the battery life of the Handera 330 (4+ hours with backlight on = ~20% of a charge at most; without backlight, I never even saw the meter dip).
I've been sorta hoping that after another round or so of gratuitous DRM, they'll come up with one that is a bit better thought through and can display plainish documents in some usable way.
What you say does not seem to be factually correct. Things that were previously visible to only a couple of people suddenly became visible to other people even if you did not enable or accept anything.
If you're weak, carelessness isn't a big deal. If you're powerful, carelessness can harm people egregiously. If you know that, and don't care, you're evil. Google does not show any sign of caring how much they hurt people, but they clearly know.
Look for things like misspellings, undefined behavior, indentation screwups, and so on.
The reason is, if there's a lot of these, that's a big clue to you that you have to be MUCH more careful with the code, because it is probably crap. Stupid comments? Probably crap. Explanations of things that are a bit surprising, with citations or justification? Maybe not so bad. Comments that are visibly out of sync with the code? Bad. Consistent naming convention? Good. Inconsistent naming convention? Bad. Tons of copy and paste? Bad.
Knowing whether code is good or bad does you a ton of good in understanding it. If you know the code is crap, you have a better chance of guessing how some idiot will have gotten it wrong. If you know the code is good, you can often guess how someone would have tried to make it robust and/or maintainable.
You have to be at least a tiny bit careful about how you use your power. How is it that Spider-Man figured this out in his first comic, and Google's not figured it out after several years?
Read the "fuck you google" blog post. If you said *no* to buzz, it could get set up in a harmful way, which you couldn't configure or change because you had it disabled.
When people post homework questions on comp.lang.c, I often provide them with answers. For instance, someone posted asking for help writing a program that, given a number, would print out something like "the first digit is one, the second digit is two", etcetera.
for (i = (d >= 0 ? 0 : (hit = 1, 20)); digits[i].lo == digits[i].lo; ++i) { if (d > digits[i].lo) { printf("The %s digit of the number is %c.\n", names[di++], digits[i].d); d = log(exp(d) - exp(digits[i].close)); hit = 2; } if (digits[i].lo == 9) { if (hit == 1) printf("The %s digit of the number is %c.\n", names[di++], digits[i].d); if (hit) hit = 1; } }
I sorta like bookends, but that's not a dock. A dock is a single plug that has all the connectors at once, including power, and does not use the regular ports. That can actually matter, in the case of ports that can get worn out or broken by being plugged in and unplugged a lot.
The mini is already a pretty decent system -- and you can't possibly convince me that the mini is $1k more than a comparable PC. (And if you CAN find a PC for $1k less than that, lemme know -- I want about thirty thousand of them.)
I dunno, I build my own machines from parts sometimes, but if I just wanted another desktop, I'd get a mini. Even if I was gonna run Windows on it; I'd still rather just get a mini, since it's small, cheap, quiet, and no-effort.
I administer all three types of systems occasionally (Linux, OS X, various BSD). Of them, if I want to carefully tweak things, I like BSD best, because the BSD systems tend to have a more coherent design. If I want something that'll run on whatever hardware I have lying around, I like Linux best, because it has nearly all the software and will probably just run out of the box. If I want something to handle basic stuff without much attention, I like OS X best, because it takes the least time by far... IF all I want is the basic/sane setups. Which sometimes it is.
The $500 or so I spent on an OS X Server license for my house was one of the best $500 I ever spent. It's saved me time worth much, much, more than $500. (And I'm running it on a mini I had lying around, so hardware cost was trivial.)
Nonsense. Portable gaming can be awesome. I have had a ton of fun playing games without huge visible areas or anything like that. It is fine. Not everything has to be about a huge screen to be fun.
I play a ton of games on my iPhone, and on my Wii. I don't even have an xbox. But, so far as I can tell, I buy more games than two average xbox gamers, and spend more time per week playing games than the average xbox gamer.
One thing to do is help the people who aren't used to it get set up with it, and set up multiple channels, so people know how to set up smaller chat groups. I am usually on about 8 channels on the work IRC server. There's a couple of functional groups ("people who work on feature X"), a couple of corporate structure groups ("people who report to manager Y"), at least one physical group ("people in office Z"), and a few others for things like "no managers" or "only people who don't care whether you're PC".
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, if only we had PostgreSQL doing just fine as an alternative, then I wouldn't mind so much if MySQL went away.
It's a great article. But it's not new.
I referred to it as a reference in something published by developerWorks in 2005.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-spec12/
Shouldn't "news" be, say, less than HALF A DECADE OLD? Oh, wait. It's kdawson, who has a nearly magical power for making bad decisions.
Good question. The obvious counterexamples are DDR, Guitar Hero, and the like -- games that exist to sell a particular controller.
Usually, though, additional controllers have gotten very poor adoption. If you can sell to 30 million people if you use the standard controller, and 1 million people if you use the new controller, that's a big incentive not to rely on the new controller.
Now, you could make a game that can go either way -- but for a genuinely new interface, that usually means not having a good interface foor the new controller, meaning you aren't helping adoption of the new controls. (Look at the way that the Lair developers got panned for actually using the sixaxis motion sensing instead of just using analog sticks -- they eventually had to release a patch to use analog sticks.)
So I think these new controllers are probably, for now, just a way for people to experiment with the new controls that we'll probably see as standard on the PS4 and next Xbox.
If I don't like the deal, I can always, you know, not take it.
I already have the phone, I enjoy writing software, and it's cheap entertainment.
Tons of research has been done, mostly pointing to combinations of environmental factors and genetics. Last I heard, the big interesting "cause" to look at was Vitamin D -- because while autism isn't more common in Somalia than it is anywhere else, it's much more common among Somalians in Oregon and Sweden than ... Which hints at Vitamin D issues.
Keep in mind that there's no evidence at all that the incidence of autism is increasing, only the diagnosis -- which is to say, obviously, before the notion of "high-functioning autism" or "Asperger's Syndrome" was widely known in the US, obviously very few people were diagnosed as such... So there's probably nothing here to begin with.
The thing that bugs me is stuff like the recent Macs with "GT 120" cards in them. What's that? Well, looking around, it PROBABLY means a card that's the same chip as a GeForce 9500 GT. Which is to say, a pretty low-end card. But it's sure not easy to tell.
Well, the obvious reason would be that they make money on it.
I signed up for that agreement. Haven't published anything yet, but I have an app I started on (before getting buried in work again). If I get it done, I'll submit it. If it sells even a relatively small number of copies, I get my money back. If it doesn't, hey, I get to use my app on my phone, and since I want the app, I win.
Untrue. Look at the famous case of McDonald's suing people for libel in the UK.
In the UK, it has been possible to win on the basis that, although the claims made were completely true, and are not disputed, the making of those claims caused injury to a person or corporation.
In the US, truth is an absolute defense -- no truthful statement can ever be defamation. (Furthermore, sincere belief is good enough, which I think is probably a good choice...) In the UK, empirically, it is not.
Actually, no. I tried a couple of the pre-iPod ones, and at least some DID NOT play unencrypted MP3 files. I had one, I think it was a "Lyra", that made strange squealings unless you "converted" your MP3s using a special licensed version of RealPlayer for Windows.
None of them have really, for my uses, caught up to iSilo for one of my black-and-white Palm systems. I mean, they're better, except they aren't small, portable, and able to use arbitrary quantities of completely DRM-free material with free conversion from basically any format.
Or if they have, they haven't yet revealed this. I really do prefer to have reading be a function of a device which I can do other things on, but none of the current of general-purpose gizmos are anywhere near the battery life of the Handera 330 (4+ hours with backlight on = ~20% of a charge at most; without backlight, I never even saw the meter dip).
I've been sorta hoping that after another round or so of gratuitous DRM, they'll come up with one that is a bit better thought through and can display plainish documents in some usable way.
What you say does not seem to be factually correct. Things that were previously visible to only a couple of people suddenly became visible to other people even if you did not enable or accept anything.
If you're weak, carelessness isn't a big deal. If you're powerful, carelessness can harm people egregiously. If you know that, and don't care, you're evil. Google does not show any sign of caring how much they hurt people, but they clearly know.
Look for things like misspellings, undefined behavior, indentation screwups, and so on.
The reason is, if there's a lot of these, that's a big clue to you that you have to be MUCH more careful with the code, because it is probably crap. Stupid comments? Probably crap. Explanations of things that are a bit surprising, with citations or justification? Maybe not so bad. Comments that are visibly out of sync with the code? Bad. Consistent naming convention? Good. Inconsistent naming convention? Bad. Tons of copy and paste? Bad.
Knowing whether code is good or bad does you a ton of good in understanding it. If you know the code is crap, you have a better chance of guessing how some idiot will have gotten it wrong. If you know the code is good, you can often guess how someone would have tried to make it robust and/or maintainable.
You have to be at least a tiny bit careful about how you use your power. How is it that Spider-Man figured this out in his first comic, and Google's not figured it out after several years?
"Don't be evil" is more complicated than just not being actively malicious.
Read the "fuck you google" blog post. If you said *no* to buzz, it could get set up in a harmful way, which you couldn't configure or change because you had it disabled.
When people post homework questions on comp.lang.c, I often provide them with answers. For instance, someone posted asking for help writing a program that, given a number, would print out something like "the first digit is one, the second digit is two", etcetera.
My solution started out:
struct {
double lo, close;
int d;
} digits[] = {
{ 6.80183905339058814121, 6.80239476332431092231, '\x39' },
{ 6.68398653227400885157, 6.68461172766792710576, '\x38' },
{ 6.55036579410553621017, 6.55108033504340436792, '\x37' },
[...]
Here's the main loop:
for (i = (d >= 0 ? 0 : (hit = 1, 20)); digits[i].lo == digits[i].lo; ++i) {
if (d > digits[i].lo) {
printf("The %s digit of the number is %c.\n",
names[di++], digits[i].d);
d = log(exp(d) - exp(digits[i].close));
hit = 2;
}
if (digits[i].lo == 9) {
if (hit == 1)
printf("The %s digit of the number is %c.\n",
names[di++], digits[i].d);
if (hit)
hit = 1;
}
}
I sincerely hope he handed this one in.
I sorta like bookends, but that's not a dock. A dock is a single plug that has all the connectors at once, including power, and does not use the regular ports. That can actually matter, in the case of ports that can get worn out or broken by being plugged in and unplugged a lot.
The mini is already a pretty decent system -- and you can't possibly convince me that the mini is $1k more than a comparable PC. (And if you CAN find a PC for $1k less than that, lemme know -- I want about thirty thousand of them.)
I dunno, I build my own machines from parts sometimes, but if I just wanted another desktop, I'd get a mini. Even if I was gonna run Windows on it; I'd still rather just get a mini, since it's small, cheap, quiet, and no-effort.
I administer all three types of systems occasionally (Linux, OS X, various BSD). Of them, if I want to carefully tweak things, I like BSD best, because the BSD systems tend to have a more coherent design. If I want something that'll run on whatever hardware I have lying around, I like Linux best, because it has nearly all the software and will probably just run out of the box. If I want something to handle basic stuff without much attention, I like OS X best, because it takes the least time by far... IF all I want is the basic/sane setups. Which sometimes it is.
The $500 or so I spent on an OS X Server license for my house was one of the best $500 I ever spent. It's saved me time worth much, much, more than $500. (And I'm running it on a mini I had lying around, so hardware cost was trivial.)
Nonsense. Portable gaming can be awesome. I have had a ton of fun playing games without huge visible areas or anything like that. It is fine. Not everything has to be about a huge screen to be fun.
I play a ton of games on my iPhone, and on my Wii. I don't even have an xbox. But, so far as I can tell, I buy more games than two average xbox gamers, and spend more time per week playing games than the average xbox gamer.
So who exactly is a serious gamer? Sheesh.
Robert Sutton, "The No Asshole Rule".
I just picked it up today -- possibly someone in this discussion mentioned it, but anyway, it's awesome. Read it and make you managers read it.
One thing to do is help the people who aren't used to it get set up with it, and set up multiple channels, so people know how to set up smaller chat groups. I am usually on about 8 channels on the work IRC server. There's a couple of functional groups ("people who work on feature X"), a couple of corporate structure groups ("people who report to manager Y"), at least one physical group ("people in office Z"), and a few others for things like "no managers" or "only people who don't care whether you're PC".
Moller who?
It's harder to make things smaller, in general.