It was the "It will change the way cities are built" that pretty much did it. They didn't come CLOSE to delivering on that. Tons of hype, hugely oversold, and really, it's only good for a few specialized uses. Great for those, but so what?
Like his "apparently" heartfelt opposition to patent abuse, which was followed by the exact sort of patent litigation (not "defensive" in any way at all) that is usually characterized as patent abuse.
In short, the guy's a habitual liar, of course what he says is "apparently heartfelt".
They do have something of a point. I think. I don't entirely trust them. I had a neogaf account at one point, and a while back, I got a form letter ban message. I have no idea why. I wasn't active (hadn't posted in a few months), and queries have gone unanswered. So, I have no clue. Maybe someone broke into the account? Maybe they don't like inactive accounts? Maybe they were searching for threads at least six months old in which people posted something they don't like? I can't say, but I will say, I wouldn't count a neogaf ban as meaning anything. (And if anyone CAN tell me why my account got banned, well, I sure would be curious.)
I submitted a rebate form to MSI. They submitted the address to multiple spam sources.
No, I'm not guessing. I got IP addresses from helpful people at a couple of the companies, and it correlates with the day they found out I was suing them for refusing to honor the rebate. So, that's one way it can happen.
Read the PSN ToS sometime. They're pretty extreme -- and not always consistent. At least one version claims not just to get a worldwide license, but a worldwide exclusive license to any content of yours which even happens to pass through the system.
So no PSN account for me.
So no downloadable games.
So it's useless to me. Until they change that.
(Think about it; more draconian terms than the ones people complained about from Facebook, from a company with a history of abusive litigation.)
It'd be neat if you provided links to these things you say are way better than Rails. I haven't used all that many of them, but Rails has so far consistently annoyed me less than most of the environments I've had to work in. I've done a bit of database code in several languages. ActiveRecord was by FAR the least painful.
Nintendo's focused on bridging the gap between the markets -- producing slightly more involved games which nonetheless appeal to new players. They're doing fine -- and intentionally leaving some niches for third parties, so that the third parties can rake in money while Nintendo avoids confusing their market image of 100% accessible gaming.
It's an interesting question. Many people would categorize me as a cowboy -- I'm careless about procedure, have no formal training, and will happily dive into a ridiculously complicated and difficult task without adequate planning.
In terms of TFA, I think I'm a "cowboy". I don't think this reflects well on TFA, though.
A friend of mine uses Eclipse, not for some huge "grunt work" but just to have all the class reference stuff quickly available from code. I actually sorta like that; I've used NetBeans for the same reason, and I use Xcode sometimes for Objective-C. They all have the ability to provide real improvements in the work I'm actually doing.
Don't be too quick to throw away a tool. There is a reason that Rails has 'script/generate scaffold', and it's not just that programmers don't know any better -- it's that often that framework will be close enough to right to save you a ton of time.
Hi, I'm a self-taught cowboy programmer. Never took a single CS course.
I spent ten years on the ISO C committee. My coworkers like my code reviews because I'm thorough and careful. While my code isn't as good as I'd like it to be, the big hunk of my code that we put into our last product release has one known outstanding bug, and it's considered "cosmetic" -- it never impacts the actual output. (And that's for five thousand lines of code I produced in three weeks...)
I don't buy it. I am a big fan of the "hacker ethic" -- and I see maintainability and code quality as *central* to it. Sloppy work is habit forming. The reason I can type ten-line shell scripts in at the prompt and have them work is that I have worked really hard to be good at what I do.
So, basically, I don't accept the premise. We used to have offshore coworkers from India, and they were useless. They'd reopen bug reports because the same package failed to build for TOTALLY unrelated reasons. ("TeX is not installed" and "linker error due to frame table full" are not the same bug.) Since then, we started hiring people in China, and actually hiring them as full-time staff, and it works a lot better. They're not all hugely experienced, but they're solid, and they learn. (They even argue with us sometimes, which I'm really enthused about. That's how you get good.)
It's not illegal to report truthfully about embarassing facts. It's not illegal to give someone money. It's illegal to blackmail people.
It's not illegal to get drunk. It's not illegal to drive. It's illegal to drive drunk.
Some combinations of legal things are illegal.
I really don't object to them banning this -- I think the harm done to the rest of the community is significant, and would not miss these people at all.
As someone else pointed out, this link was to the wrong review.
And the review made the wrong analysis.
I have two machines with SSDs in them. My Eee has a cheapish SSD in it. Is it as fast as a HD? Probably not. But:
1. It's faster for random-access reads, which are 95% of my workload on the Eee. 2. It is quieter and uses less power.
The Eee ran its fan all the time when I got it. I swapped the hard drive for an SSD. Now the fan runs only very occasionally. Why should it? I just took half the heat out of the system, easily. It also gets longer battery life.
The other is a desktop machine I put together on a lark to see whether I could make a machine which ran WoW really nicely and was very quiet on a reasonable budget. ("Reasonable" is probably the wrong word to use.) I have a fanless video card, a huge heatsink, a bunch of 120mm or larger slow fans, and an SSD. The SSD is one of the nicer ones (OCZ vertex). It is at least TWICE as fast, probably moreso, than the striped array of fastish (but not super fast) platter drives it replaced. It is, of course, silent. Since the VAST bulk of everything the game does is random-access reads, the net result is a huge performance win.
Would I use these for everything? No.
If I got a big chunk of money, would I seriously think about putting a 250GB flash drive in my laptop, or ordering my next laptop with one? Yes.
If you're willing to spend $4,000 on a computer, the chances are extremely good that you're a corporation and that the person with the computer won't be the IT staff, and that half of the IT staff don't know anything about hardware, because they usually get it all preconfigured from Dell.
In practice, having done some of those upgrades, I would agree with their basic evaluation that most users are not going to be competent to do them. Now, I think they should let some people do them anyway, but...
Have you ever worked support? It turns out that it is not rational to expect that the people who tell you how well they understand computers, and how qualified they are, to actually have clue one. The people who say "I could do that, why do I need some pimply kid to do it for me" are the ones who, statistically, are pretty damn likely to end up swapping a CPU module out while the machine is turned on.
Averages aren't good for much. The only game to outscore the top Wii game is GTA4 -- a game which a huge number of people complain was overrated because all the reviewers gave it 100, but the actual gameplay was sorta okay.
Perhaps more importantly, try looking at the best games [b]in each genre[/b].
Sony and MS have a ton of highly ranked shooters, racers, and sports games, plus a couple adventure games.
Nintendo has RPGs, platformers, puzzle games, shooters, racers, sports games, adventure games, and more -- and they have good games of all those types.
I play games a fair bit, and for me, there's not even a hint of a contest. Whatever mood I'm in, there is something on Wii that I would enjoy playing. There may not be anything on the others.
I use http://www.megabitz.net/ -- been with them for a year or two, service has been decent. There have been a couple of outages, but they were pretty brief.
I don't use Usenet as much as I used to, but when I want Usenet, it is useful to me that I have access to a good Usenet service. I've been liking it better than relying on my upstream ISP, which I used to do.
Key points: * Flexible pricing (you can choose whether to pay by total bandwidth or by instantaneous bandwidth) * Supports multiple simultaneous connections * Good support for binary groups (only occasionally significant, but when it is, it's pretty useful) * Competent techies * Responsive support
Full disclosure moment: I did some work for them once. Specifically, I helped with cleaning up some of the text describing their service at one point. Here's the thing: That's not written by marketers. When they say "We listen!", that doesn't mean that some marketer determined that 37.6% of a key target demographic liked companies that claim to listen. It means they really do, and they think you'll care. And yes, they really do. Quick responses to emailed questions have been the norm.
So, basically, I'm a big fan, and I'm not a current employee and don't expect to be one again (too busy, if nothing else), but I really like the service, and happily pay for it. (I could probably get by with a cheaper plan, but the one I'm one is useful on the occasions when I want to try to grab an ISO and for some reason torrents aren't my first choice.)
Come on, give the guy credit. Usually, he posts tripe which was previously posted on slashdot twice, and so was a complete refutation proving that the original source was lying. If he's down to posting stuff which is merely stupid and sensationalistic, but which is not a dup of previous slashdot postings, and slashdot hasn't already posted the debunking, that's PROGRESS for kdawson.
I know, you might have some notion that it'd make more sense for them to replace him with an untrained monkey, which would do a better job about 95% of the time. But kdawson's horrible editing is part of the slashdot mystique. We've been wondering for YEARS why they still let him approve stories when he's so spectacularly bad at it, and his article summaries are frequently worse than kindergartener Tarot readings, but the fact is, part of what makes slashdot what it is, is kdawson's utter reliability in posting stuff that should never have seen the light of day.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting point, and it really does put tihngs in perspective. Good catch.
It was the "It will change the way cities are built" that pretty much did it. They didn't come CLOSE to delivering on that. Tons of hype, hugely oversold, and really, it's only good for a few specialized uses. Great for those, but so what?
Like his "apparently" heartfelt opposition to patent abuse, which was followed by the exact sort of patent litigation (not "defensive" in any way at all) that is usually characterized as patent abuse.
In short, the guy's a habitual liar, of course what he says is "apparently heartfelt".
After the idiocy of his "hacker ethic considered harmful" was pointed out, why are we still seeing this guy's junk?
They do have something of a point. I think. I don't entirely trust them. I had a neogaf account at one point, and a while back, I got a form letter ban message. I have no idea why. I wasn't active (hadn't posted in a few months), and queries have gone unanswered. So, I have no clue. Maybe someone broke into the account? Maybe they don't like inactive accounts? Maybe they were searching for threads at least six months old in which people posted something they don't like? I can't say, but I will say, I wouldn't count a neogaf ban as meaning anything. (And if anyone CAN tell me why my account got banned, well, I sure would be curious.)
I submitted a rebate form to MSI. They submitted the address to multiple spam sources.
No, I'm not guessing. I got IP addresses from helpful people at a couple of the companies, and it correlates with the day they found out I was suing them for refusing to honor the rebate. So, that's one way it can happen.
Read the PSN ToS sometime. They're pretty extreme -- and not always consistent. At least one version claims not just to get a worldwide license, but a worldwide exclusive license to any content of yours which even happens to pass through the system.
So no PSN account for me.
So no downloadable games.
So it's useless to me. Until they change that.
(Think about it; more draconian terms than the ones people complained about from Facebook, from a company with a history of abusive litigation.)
It'd be neat if you provided links to these things you say are way better than Rails. I haven't used all that many of them, but Rails has so far consistently annoyed me less than most of the environments I've had to work in. I've done a bit of database code in several languages. ActiveRecord was by FAR the least painful.
Nintendo's focused on bridging the gap between the markets -- producing slightly more involved games which nonetheless appeal to new players. They're doing fine -- and intentionally leaving some niches for third parties, so that the third parties can rake in money while Nintendo avoids confusing their market image of 100% accessible gaming.
>Not any more, now you're an anecdote.
Cool! I always wondered what the plural of "seebs" was -- now I know! It's "data".
It's an interesting question. Many people would categorize me as a cowboy -- I'm careless about procedure, have no formal training, and will happily dive into a ridiculously complicated and difficult task without adequate planning.
In terms of TFA, I think I'm a "cowboy". I don't think this reflects well on TFA, though.
What makes you think creative thinking can't be taught?
A friend of mine uses Eclipse, not for some huge "grunt work" but just to have all the class reference stuff quickly available from code. I actually sorta like that; I've used NetBeans for the same reason, and I use Xcode sometimes for Objective-C. They all have the ability to provide real improvements in the work I'm actually doing.
Don't be too quick to throw away a tool. There is a reason that Rails has 'script/generate scaffold', and it's not just that programmers don't know any better -- it's that often that framework will be close enough to right to save you a ton of time.
Hi, I'm a self-taught cowboy programmer. Never took a single CS course.
I spent ten years on the ISO C committee. My coworkers like my code reviews because I'm thorough and careful. While my code isn't as good as I'd like it to be, the big hunk of my code that we put into our last product release has one known outstanding bug, and it's considered "cosmetic" -- it never impacts the actual output. (And that's for five thousand lines of code I produced in three weeks...)
I don't buy it. I am a big fan of the "hacker ethic" -- and I see maintainability and code quality as *central* to it. Sloppy work is habit forming. The reason I can type ten-line shell scripts in at the prompt and have them work is that I have worked really hard to be good at what I do.
So, basically, I don't accept the premise. We used to have offshore coworkers from India, and they were useless. They'd reopen bug reports because the same package failed to build for TOTALLY unrelated reasons. ("TeX is not installed" and "linker error due to frame table full" are not the same bug.) Since then, we started hiring people in China, and actually hiring them as full-time staff, and it works a lot better. They're not all hugely experienced, but they're solid, and they learn. (They even argue with us sometimes, which I'm really enthused about. That's how you get good.)
It's not illegal to report truthfully about embarassing facts.
It's not illegal to give someone money.
It's illegal to blackmail people.
It's not illegal to get drunk.
It's not illegal to drive.
It's illegal to drive drunk.
Some combinations of legal things are illegal.
I really don't object to them banning this -- I think the harm done to the rest of the community is significant, and would not miss these people at all.
What happens if you link GPL'd code with Nintendo's code?
Does Nintendo want that to happen?
Seriously, this ain't rocket science.
Why would I want to meet people in meatspace? :)
That said, roommates and the like have worked out well for me, so have conventions and such.
As someone else pointed out, this link was to the wrong review.
And the review made the wrong analysis.
I have two machines with SSDs in them. My Eee has a cheapish SSD in it. Is it as fast as a HD? Probably not. But:
1. It's faster for random-access reads, which are 95% of my workload on the Eee.
2. It is quieter and uses less power.
The Eee ran its fan all the time when I got it. I swapped the hard drive for an SSD. Now the fan runs only very occasionally. Why should it? I just took half the heat out of the system, easily. It also gets longer battery life.
The other is a desktop machine I put together on a lark to see whether I could make a machine which ran WoW really nicely and was very quiet on a reasonable budget. ("Reasonable" is probably the wrong word to use.) I have a fanless video card, a huge heatsink, a bunch of 120mm or larger slow fans, and an SSD. The SSD is one of the nicer ones (OCZ vertex). It is at least TWICE as fast, probably moreso, than the striped array of fastish (but not super fast) platter drives it replaced. It is, of course, silent. Since the VAST bulk of everything the game does is random-access reads, the net result is a huge performance win.
Would I use these for everything? No.
If I got a big chunk of money, would I seriously think about putting a 250GB flash drive in my laptop, or ordering my next laptop with one? Yes.
Yeah. I have bought a little music at Best Buy in the last maybe five years. Maybe five CDs total. I've bought dozens online.
Actually, you have it exactly backwards.
If you're willing to spend $4,000 on a computer, the chances are extremely good that you're a corporation and that the person with the computer won't be the IT staff, and that half of the IT staff don't know anything about hardware, because they usually get it all preconfigured from Dell.
In practice, having done some of those upgrades, I would agree with their basic evaluation that most users are not going to be competent to do them. Now, I think they should let some people do them anyway, but...
Have you ever worked support? It turns out that it is not rational to expect that the people who tell you how well they understand computers, and how qualified they are, to actually have clue one. The people who say "I could do that, why do I need some pimply kid to do it for me" are the ones who, statistically, are pretty damn likely to end up swapping a CPU module out while the machine is turned on.
Unfortunately, this means no money for the people who got the illegal calls, even though they owe us all probably $1,500 a pop.
Lair's motion controls were awesome. It wasn't an abuse; it worked perfectly. There is just one limitation: You had to not be a fucking moron.
But given that, controls were awesome.
Averages aren't good for much. The only game to outscore the top Wii game is GTA4 -- a game which a huge number of people complain was overrated because all the reviewers gave it 100, but the actual gameplay was sorta okay.
Perhaps more importantly, try looking at the best games [b]in each genre[/b].
Sony and MS have a ton of highly ranked shooters, racers, and sports games, plus a couple adventure games.
Nintendo has RPGs, platformers, puzzle games, shooters, racers, sports games, adventure games, and more -- and they have good games of all those types.
I play games a fair bit, and for me, there's not even a hint of a contest. Whatever mood I'm in, there is something on Wii that I would enjoy playing. There may not be anything on the others.
I use http://www.megabitz.net/ -- been with them for a year or two, service has been decent. There have been a couple of outages, but they were pretty brief.
I don't use Usenet as much as I used to, but when I want Usenet, it is useful to me that I have access to a good Usenet service. I've been liking it better than relying on my upstream ISP, which I used to do.
Key points:
* Flexible pricing (you can choose whether to pay by total bandwidth or by instantaneous bandwidth)
* Supports multiple simultaneous connections
* Good support for binary groups (only occasionally significant, but when it is, it's pretty useful)
* Competent techies
* Responsive support
Full disclosure moment: I did some work for them once. Specifically, I helped with cleaning up some of the text describing their service at one point. Here's the thing: That's not written by marketers. When they say "We listen!", that doesn't mean that some marketer determined that 37.6% of a key target demographic liked companies that claim to listen. It means they really do, and they think you'll care. And yes, they really do. Quick responses to emailed questions have been the norm.
So, basically, I'm a big fan, and I'm not a current employee and don't expect to be one again (too busy, if nothing else), but I really like the service, and happily pay for it. (I could probably get by with a cheaper plan, but the one I'm one is useful on the occasions when I want to try to grab an ISO and for some reason torrents aren't my first choice.)
Er, what?
kdawson? Ashamed of himself for posting tripe?
Come on, give the guy credit. Usually, he posts tripe which was previously posted on slashdot twice, and so was a complete refutation proving that the original source was lying. If he's down to posting stuff which is merely stupid and sensationalistic, but which is not a dup of previous slashdot postings, and slashdot hasn't already posted the debunking, that's PROGRESS for kdawson.
I know, you might have some notion that it'd make more sense for them to replace him with an untrained monkey, which would do a better job about 95% of the time. But kdawson's horrible editing is part of the slashdot mystique. We've been wondering for YEARS why they still let him approve stories when he's so spectacularly bad at it, and his article summaries are frequently worse than kindergartener Tarot readings, but the fact is, part of what makes slashdot what it is, is kdawson's utter reliability in posting stuff that should never have seen the light of day.