especially since microsoft provides an extremely low cost way to develop Xbox360 games that use all the bells and whistles.
Or most of the bells and whistles, anyway. Graphically, XNA gives you nearly as much power as a full dev kit since the graphical horsepower is harnessed via shaders. However you currently can't do any networking, nor do you have support for some peripherals like the Vision camera. All of that (and a way to properly distribute your games) should come along eventually, but it's a matter of the XNA guys being able to do it in a way that does not jeopardize the current revenue stream of retail and XBLA games while also making sure it's secure so that XNA won't end up as an enabler for Linux or pirated games.
That said, XNA vs. PS3 Linux is just another manifestation of the different strategies Microsoft and Sony have for their consoles. Microsoft has constantly pushed the 360 as a game machine first while Sony likes to claim the PS3 is a full-fledged computer. Thus Microsoft gives users a way to build their own games for the 360 and Sony provides a way for users to harness the generic power of the PS3 with Linux (and other operating systems in the future).
I have yet to read a review of a BMW with iDrive where the operator liked the resulting change to the user interface.
That's because iDrive didn't simplify anything. In fact, it made common operations more difficult, like having to traverse three or four menu levels just to be able to change the volume on your radio (arguably a very common function).
All of the items on the ribbons have keyboard shortcuts, and the Office menu still uses "alt-F" like the old File menu. Thus to tell a user how to save, you could say, "Press alt-F, then choose Save", or you could say, "Press alt-1" (I wouldn't rely on this one -- the quick access toolbar is customizable, and the shortcuts appear to apply to position in the toolbar rather than the function of the item so alt-1 might do something else if the user's changed their quick access toolbar items), or you could even say, "Press ctrl-s". If you need to do something fancier, like change the view to Web Layout, you can say "Press alt-w, L". When you press or hold Alt, the shortcut keys popup on screen so it's no longer a case of magically knowing which shortcut key to use. Press alt and the first level of shortcut keys pop up (office menu, quick access toolbar to the right of the office menu, and ribbon tabs). Choose one of the ribbon tabs and the next level of shortcut keys pops up (items on the ribbon itself).
I'd say so...I mean, they're very small, and not under the thumb of any major publisher...they pretty much do whatever they want. They just happen to be an incredibly successful indie company...
I'd disagree. Indie games are published either directly by the developer or by other smaller publishing houses. Id games are published by Activision, which is definitely "mainstream". If id went back to the Apogee days, I'd consider them indie. As it is, they're just another third-party developer building games for mainstream publishers (although id has rightly earned a lot of lee-way in their development -- id decides what they want to do and Activision publishes it, rather than having Activision tell id that they have to do a Quake 5).
By that definition, Valve could almost be considered "indie", though they're closer to a mainstream publisher these days (publishing other developers' games on Steam).
It's probably not 5 full years worth of work, but it's good.
That would be because Vista/Longhorn wasn't being worked on for five continuous years. The Longhorn reset essentially restarted the clock on Vista around mid-2004. That means Vista as it ships really represents only the last 2.5 years of work, not the full 5 years since XP RTM. In between was Windows Server 2003, XP SP2 (which really could've been a full OS release rather than a service pack), 2003 SP1, and a fair amount of Longhorn work that went away (WinFS, for example).
I think PRey is probably the most interesting game of the year. The game itself was so-so but the capabilities of the engine are really cool. I love the gravity and portal effects. It seems like the perfect engine to build multiplayer games in.
I liked it better when the game was called Serious Sam back in 2001.
Seriously, the Serious Engine (1.x, 2.x) did multi-directional gravity, portals, and pretty much all of the "cool" Prey stuff long before Prey (you know, way back when Prey was vaporware alongside DNF). Besides, the Serious Sam games are much more fun in their irreverence
Down with phosphors!
on
Plasma or LCD?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Plasma TVs still use phosphors to emit colored light, just like CRTs. This is the reason they're so prone to burn-in. The upcoming SED displays will also use phosphors. I say, no more phosphors!
LCD, LCoS, and DLP use filters to emit colored light rather than phosphors. There's no chance of burn-in with any of these technologies. I for one prefer my DLP rear-projection TV to any LCD or plasma flat-panel on the market today. I don't care to hang my TV on a wall, and the depth of LCD, LCoS, and DLP projection TVs are a mere fraction of older CRT-based RPTVs. While these technologies do have their problems (dead pixels, thicker form factor, rainbow effect on DLPs), to me they show much more promise than any phosphor-based technology currently or yet-to-be available.
Why does my Xbox360 still require bizarre router settings to connect wirelessly to my router? Oh yeah I forgot, Microsoft does not care.
"Bizarre router settings"? Like what, turning on UPnP? Oh noes, GRC says the interweb will hax0r my b0x0r if I use UPnP! Never mind that routers enable it only on the internal interface...
What would you prefer Microsoft to do? Tell all of the NAT users out there that they're SOL for playing games if they don't want to forward ports manually? They had a problem, namely allowing NATed users to directly connect to peers, and they solved it with the correct solution, namely using UPnP to dynamically request port forwarding on an as-needed basis. I'm sorry that the routers you bought (which, BTW, probably weren't from the list of routers supported directly by Microsoft, and if they were then why didn't you try calling 1-800-4-MY-XBOX?) suck so much. Next time, do your research. Hell, it's easy enough to get UPnP working flawlessly on a linux server acting as a router. I've been doing it for over two years now (obviously with my original Xbox, since the 360's only been out for just over a year). While I'm running wired now, when I wrote that entry I was using wireless. In fact, I've never had a problem with my Xbox or Xbox 360 recognizing my wireless AP. The only problem I've ever had was with NAT, and that was completely solved with the UPnP daemon.
Until the whole world moves to IPv6, you're going to run into issues like this more and more often. You can take the Nintendo approach and force users to forward ports by hand (seriously, that's what you have to do with the Wii -- it's a good thing there are no multiplayer online games yet), or you can use technology that was designed to solve this problem (among others, of course) -- UPnP.
A chip tailored for the application and high performance computing (sorry for the buzzword) when off the shelf components are becoming more and more commonplace. Come on, you want a Cell, don't you? Imagine running a differential equation solver in real time for sound synthesis on one of those, say
What?
Also, I think it is a tool to market Blu-ray, which is a rather interesting strategy. Blu-Ray will probably pay off as games get bigger with the screens, and should generate a lot of revenue for Sony, if it defeats HD-DVD in the home movie market.
While games may eventually need the space provided by Blu-Ray discs, I can't see that happening for another 4-5 years at least. In the meantime, proper compression techniques and at worst multi-DVD games will be more than enough. As for beating HD-DVD, I'd say the chips are historically stacked against Sony. They didn't win with Betamax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, or UMD. I'd be surprised if they win with Blu-Ray. Besides, the price of an Xbox 360 + HD-DVD player is about the same as a PS3, and HD-DVD standalone players are generally cheaper than standalone BD players. To top it off, early HD-DVD transfers have been much better than on BD, giving HD-DVD an early quality lead.
It'll probably be at least another year before there's a clear winner in this format war, but if I was a betting man I'd have to go with HD-DVD for now. It has much more going for it than Blu-Ray. Sony might pull it out of their collective asses with BD, but don't count on it.
Last time I watched a race any car that bumped into the wall or another car didn't win the race... in every GT game it has never been about sim racing unless you put it on time trials. It is a joke of a racing game and the only thing it has ever gotten right was it's licensing deal to include real car brands. Let me know when I don't just pick the fastest car and bounce off the AI drivers and fake walls to get around every corner.
For the reasons you mentioned, Gran Turismo has never been a sim racer. It's a collect-em-all game with cars with a bit of piss-poor racing tossed in to facilitate collection (just like Pokemon is a collect-em-all game with a bit of piss-poor RPG tossed in to facilitate collection). If you want a simulation racer, the best you're going to get on a Playstation is the TOCA or Colin McRae series. Forza on Xbox (and soon, Forza 2 on Xbox 360) blows away Gran Turismo in terms of racing realism and fun. GTR2 on the PC (and supposedly soon on Xbox 360) is currently the pinnacle of racing simulation.
Pick up Gran Turismo if you just absolutely have to see a Model T in a video game. Pick up Forza if you want to play a simulation racer on a console. Pick up GTR 2 if you're hardcore.
This is like some big bank with a bad reputation for being greedy and unwilling to work for people buying up mortgages.
"Actual cases and not the 'OMG they might evict us' screeching please."
Does the "screeching" make a little more sense now?
Pay your mortgage on time and you won't have to worry about being evicted. If you can't afford to pay your mortgage on time, it doesn't matter whether or not you have a nice mortgage broker who "understands you" or a big bank who looks at you as just so much $$$, you're in over your head and need to immediately start thinking about selling or declaring bankruptcy. You got yourself into that situation, not your mortgage broker who decided to sell your mortgage to Big Evil Bank Co.
The bank buying your mortgage can't change your terms, so you won't suddenly find yourself with a higher interest rate (or a different ARM schedule) or a pre-payment penalty where you didn't have one before. So no, the "screeching" doesn't make any more sense now.
100 sick and 6 or 7 people dead? That's hardly any casualties at all. Look at what storms or earthquakes do to major cities in third world countries. We've got it made here, even the dumb-asses by and large don't get themselves killed.
When you consider that the nationwide average of CO posioning cases is only around 1500 cases per year, 100 cases of poisoning and 6 or 7 deaths in the span of a week is alarming.
Note that I am in no way trying to equate our "little" windstorm to a Katrina-style hurricane or earthquake. Power out for a week and only a few people dead (I think 4 people died directly from the storm) is nothing. However the CO deaths could've been totally avoided.
Wish our infastructure was more underground here. ..
Wouldn't have mattered much if evergreen roots ripped up the lines. If anything, it would take even longer to restore power that way. It would be better if people would properly maintain their trees. That includes the government, as my power went out thanks to all of the downed trees in the state park near my house.
I'm looking at investing in a generator installation (looking at a stationary natural gas solution right now) since I now know that PSE doesn't really value me as a customer (it took them three days to even send out a crew, and five days to fully restore power).
Carbon Monoxide poisoning during severe winter weather actually happens from people burning things(like books, coal etc.) to keep warm. It happens.
Sadly, many people just don't realize this. For example, Seattle was hit with a huge windstorm last week that knocked out power to nearly a million people. It was so bad that there are still people over a week later that don't have power restored yet. Over the past week, 6 or 7 different people died from CO poisoning and over a hundred were treated and survived. All of them were doing blatantly stupid things like running a generator in their garage or basement (afraid of it being stolen if it was outside, I guess) or using a charcoal grill inside to keep warm.
Right...people are going to buy a $400 videogame system to play games they have played on the computer for years, can pickup standalone portable versions, or they can play on a cellphone or similar. Your right. 360 for teh win!
Is that what I said? Because I didn't think it was.
The OP linked a video of a mom and a grandfather playing a Wii, with the description of the video insinuating that it's the Wii of a son/daughter. Obviously mom/grandpa didn't buy the Wii for themselves, but Wii Sports Tennis got them up and interested in playing it. Do you really think mom and grandpa are going to play Zelda or Red Steel? No. They're probably not going to go home and buy themselves a Wii either, but they were able to bridge the generation gap and enjoy their child/grandchild's Wii. My point was that Xbox 360, via XBLA, has a similar mechanism to bridge that generation gap. It's not as social as the Wii, but it has the same "casual gamer" appeal. Will they go out and buy their own Xbox 360 after playing Hexic on the son or daughter's console? Probably not. Will they find some enjoyment playing those games and bonding with their (adult) children? Quite possibly yes.
BTW, I have both a Wii and a 360, so I'm not going fanboy one way or the other. I'm just pointing out that the Wii doesn't have the market cornered on drawing casual gamers.
Not quite applicable. Dreamcast was hindered by a cash-strapped Sega coming off of a horrible previous console generation (Saturn), a lack of games, and most importantly the absence of EA on the platform (say what you will about EA, but without them you can kiss your ass goodbye). Add Sony's PS2 over-hype ("It'll render Toy Story in real time!") into the mix and you have a recipe for disaster. Microsoft, on the other hand, is not cash strapped, made a decent showing with the original Xbox, has a good amount of games for the 360 already, and has EA. Sony again tried the over-hype approach for the PS3 this time (yay, Kutaragi!), but consumers have learned to doubt Sony's promises after the PS2 failed to live up to even half of what they promised. And guess what? The PS3 is living up to maybe half of what they promised this time around, too.
Therefore, I suggest that you as a question that's actually relevant, instead of "I'm sooo cool because I remembered an example on the board from a CS class". You're hiring programmers to solve problems, not copy their CS textbooks.
If your daily job could be boiled down to 15-30 minute bite-size chunks of code that can stand all on their own, I'd happily ask you an interview question around that. Chances are that's not going to be the case. Therefore the point of the question is not so much, "Can you remember your basic CS 101 class?" and more, "I need to keep you up at the white board, thinking through a problem, asking questions, and generally getting a feeling of how you think and work." A "simple" question is best for that because you can fully solve and analyze the problem in 15-30 minutes. If you just bust out a solution based on rote memorization, you're going to be thrown for a loop when I ask you to do it in a different way, or to analyze why your solution does what you think it does, or what performance characteristics you'd expect to see from your solution, etc.
Don't get hung up on the actual question. That's just a vehicle to analyze more important stuff. On the other hand, if you can't solve the problem, that's a whole different issue. It might be the question was too hard, inappropriate for the position, or required an "a ha!" type of solution that you wouldn't get unless you'd seen the question before. That definitely happens, but you get a pretty good question calibration when you use it across many different candidates. That means that unless you're testing out a brand new interview question, the more likely issue is with the candidate instead. Now it's up to you as an interviewer to see if you can figure out where the problem lies and determine if it's a superficial you can work with (candidate is just very nervous and wouldn't necessarily be that bad in a normal situation) or a deeper problem that means the candidate is not a good fit for your team. If you can't do that, you've failed as an interviewer just as much as the candidate failed as an interviewee.
As for your point about functional languages, that'd make sense if I were hiring you for a position where you'd work with a functional language. If you're interviewing for a 100%.NET or Java shop, busting out Haskell or Lisp in your interview (beyond mentioning them on your resume) is likely to do more harm than good. You'll get "cool points" for knowing a functional language, but if you can't hack C/C++, Java, C#, Javascript or whatever I happen to be looking for, those cool points aren't going to do you much good. Yes, I know, you probably can learn the language. However if you haven't learned at least one of those languages by now, I have to question what you've been doing. Even coming out of university you should know one of Java, C, or C++ enough to answer a basic question. If you're coming from an industry position with only functional programming under your belt, that's a serious red flag.
$string = "this is a sentence.";
print join ' ', reverse split/[ \.]/, $string;
print '.';
Okay, now do it without using a built-in split, join, or reverse function. Oh, yeah, and make sure the result ends up in the same initial string variable (or string buffer object, if you're working in a language with immutable strings) without using any extra storage space beyond a single character.
It's not as easy as just splitting, reversing the resulting array, and joining it back together. This is a test to see how you handle string and array manipulation, not whether or not you happen to know the language or standard library. My base assumption is that you can do most "simple" interview questions in three lines of code or less if I allowed you to use built-in structures or methods.:)
Unfortunately, since I've been kinda learning four or five programming languages at once for the last year and a half, syntax is a real pain. In retrospect, I am not sure if any of the companies involved were companies I would like to work for.
Any good interviewer will be looking more for your ability to understand (ask for clarification if you need it -- oftentimes an interviewer will intentionally make a question vague or leave out an important piece of information to see how you handle adversity) and solve the problem (preferably in an optimal way, but a working solution is better than nothing) rather than your ability to remember semicolons and public/private/protected. As long as your syntax is relatively close, it doesn't matter (a good IDE will fix it all for you anyway). Bonus points for catching edge cases and actually testing your solution on your own (a good interviewer will walk you through that, but if you can beat him to the punch on finding problems in your code then you'll have taken away any negatives you may have had for having bugs in the first place).
If the company is hiring for a full-time position (as opposed to a contractor), they should be much more interested in your ability to learn and problem solve than your ability to remember your semicolons. Syntax and language-specific constructs can be solved with IDEs and documentation (to a certain extent, of course). Problem solving is much harder to learn than programming languages.
I prefer to write a snippet of code on the board myself and ask the interviewee to interpret it. It can be difficult for people to come up with something on the fly during the pressure of an interview, but they should be able to follow the logic of a program written for them if they know the language (at least somewhat) and if they know anything about computational logic. I basically ask them to walk through the logic of whatever routine I put up on the board, and then ask them something specific about it (what will it print at the end, what is the value of variable x after execution, etc.).
That's a useful exercise for ~15 minutes, but what are you doing for the other 45 minutes of the interview?
I tend to break a 60 minute interview down into 10-15 minutes talking about the candidates previous experiences based on his resume, asking him questions about projects he's listed and such, why he designed the solution the way he did, his role in designing and implementing a solution, etc. The next 15-20 minutes are spent on a simpler item like you mentioned, though I'll usually do a "trivial" programming task (something like reversing words in a string -- relatively simple, no "a ha!" solution requirement, and lets me see how they think about memory management and algorithm complexity). I'll use the remainder of the time on a larger question that focuses more on design. Something like designing the behavior of a Minesweeper game when you click on a cell that's not adjacent to any mine (good exercise in recursion, data structure management, and edge case detection). If there's any time left after that I'll field any questions the candidate may have about the position, the team, or the company.
Of course no two interviews are the same. Some people may end up spending a full 45 minutes trying to figure out how to reverse the words in a string. Others might blow through the design and code for minesweeper in 15 minutes. You at least have to tailor the interview questions to the level of the job (if a candidate for a senior developer position gets stuck on reverse words, it's game over), and to some extent the candidate himself (I give candidates the option to answer in whatever language they feel most comfortable in; to date I've mostly received C/C++/Java/C# answers, but I've had a few Javascript answers. I'm still waiting for a TSQL answer...:).
In case it's not obvious, what interviewing I've done has been for development positions. Interviewing for QA, project management, or people management would be substantially different. Then again, I wouldn't be a part of any of those interviews since I'm a developer.
Backwards Compatibility is nothing new to Nintendo. Just look at the GBA and DS. The GBA can play GB/GBC games, and the DS can play GBA games.
And that's why I qualified my statement by explicitly stating consoles and that I was ignoring handhelds. Yes, the GBA can play GB/GBC games and the DS can play GBA games, but until the Wii no console from Nintendo could play previous-generation games. As I stated, the SNES could not play NES games, the N64 could not play SNES games, and the Gamecube could not play N64 games.
I fully assume that IE7's phishing filter, like Outlook 2003's Junk Mail Filter, will receive monthly updates from Microsoft to keep it up to date with the latest phising "heuristics".
Actually, IE7's anti-phishing technology is server-based. The judgement of a URL as "phish" or "non-phish" is done completely outside of your browser, outside of your own PC even, so there's no need for heuristic, signature, or filter updates to be pushed to users.
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Or most of the bells and whistles, anyway. Graphically, XNA gives you nearly as much power as a full dev kit since the graphical horsepower is harnessed via shaders. However you currently can't do any networking, nor do you have support for some peripherals like the Vision camera. All of that (and a way to properly distribute your games) should come along eventually, but it's a matter of the XNA guys being able to do it in a way that does not jeopardize the current revenue stream of retail and XBLA games while also making sure it's secure so that XNA won't end up as an enabler for Linux or pirated games.
That said, XNA vs. PS3 Linux is just another manifestation of the different strategies Microsoft and Sony have for their consoles. Microsoft has constantly pushed the 360 as a game machine first while Sony likes to claim the PS3 is a full-fledged computer. Thus Microsoft gives users a way to build their own games for the 360 and Sony provides a way for users to harness the generic power of the PS3 with Linux (and other operating systems in the future).
That's because iDrive didn't simplify anything. In fact, it made common operations more difficult, like having to traverse three or four menu levels just to be able to change the volume on your radio (arguably a very common function).
All of the items on the ribbons have keyboard shortcuts, and the Office menu still uses "alt-F" like the old File menu. Thus to tell a user how to save, you could say, "Press alt-F, then choose Save", or you could say, "Press alt-1" (I wouldn't rely on this one -- the quick access toolbar is customizable, and the shortcuts appear to apply to position in the toolbar rather than the function of the item so alt-1 might do something else if the user's changed their quick access toolbar items), or you could even say, "Press ctrl-s". If you need to do something fancier, like change the view to Web Layout, you can say "Press alt-w, L". When you press or hold Alt, the shortcut keys popup on screen so it's no longer a case of magically knowing which shortcut key to use. Press alt and the first level of shortcut keys pop up (office menu, quick access toolbar to the right of the office menu, and ribbon tabs). Choose one of the ribbon tabs and the next level of shortcut keys pops up (items on the ribbon itself).
I'd disagree. Indie games are published either directly by the developer or by other smaller publishing houses. Id games are published by Activision, which is definitely "mainstream". If id went back to the Apogee days, I'd consider them indie. As it is, they're just another third-party developer building games for mainstream publishers (although id has rightly earned a lot of lee-way in their development -- id decides what they want to do and Activision publishes it, rather than having Activision tell id that they have to do a Quake 5).
By that definition, Valve could almost be considered "indie", though they're closer to a mainstream publisher these days (publishing other developers' games on Steam).
That would be because Vista/Longhorn wasn't being worked on for five continuous years. The Longhorn reset essentially restarted the clock on Vista around mid-2004. That means Vista as it ships really represents only the last 2.5 years of work, not the full 5 years since XP RTM. In between was Windows Server 2003, XP SP2 (which really could've been a full OS release rather than a service pack), 2003 SP1, and a fair amount of Longhorn work that went away (WinFS, for example).
Ha hahahahahaha hahahahahaha hahahahaha! <breath> Hahahahahahahahahahaha!
Ridge Racer is an arcade racer, not a driving sim. If you want a "great driving sim", go pick up GTR2.
Next you'll tell us that Need For Speed: Carbon is the most realistic driving game ever ...
I liked it better when the game was called Serious Sam back in 2001.
Seriously, the Serious Engine (1.x, 2.x) did multi-directional gravity, portals, and pretty much all of the "cool" Prey stuff long before Prey (you know, way back when Prey was vaporware alongside DNF). Besides, the Serious Sam games are much more fun in their irreverence
Plasma TVs still use phosphors to emit colored light, just like CRTs. This is the reason they're so prone to burn-in. The upcoming SED displays will also use phosphors. I say, no more phosphors!
LCD, LCoS, and DLP use filters to emit colored light rather than phosphors. There's no chance of burn-in with any of these technologies. I for one prefer my DLP rear-projection TV to any LCD or plasma flat-panel on the market today. I don't care to hang my TV on a wall, and the depth of LCD, LCoS, and DLP projection TVs are a mere fraction of older CRT-based RPTVs. While these technologies do have their problems (dead pixels, thicker form factor, rainbow effect on DLPs), to me they show much more promise than any phosphor-based technology currently or yet-to-be available.
Down with phosphors! No more burn-in!
With UPnP on you wouldn't need to forward any ports. I never had to adjust MTU, but I can see how that could be an issue.
Maybe your router had a bad UPnP implementation?
"Bizarre router settings"? Like what, turning on UPnP? Oh noes, GRC says the interweb will hax0r my b0x0r if I use UPnP! Never mind that routers enable it only on the internal interface ...
What would you prefer Microsoft to do? Tell all of the NAT users out there that they're SOL for playing games if they don't want to forward ports manually? They had a problem, namely allowing NATed users to directly connect to peers, and they solved it with the correct solution, namely using UPnP to dynamically request port forwarding on an as-needed basis. I'm sorry that the routers you bought (which, BTW, probably weren't from the list of routers supported directly by Microsoft, and if they were then why didn't you try calling 1-800-4-MY-XBOX?) suck so much. Next time, do your research. Hell, it's easy enough to get UPnP working flawlessly on a linux server acting as a router. I've been doing it for over two years now (obviously with my original Xbox, since the 360's only been out for just over a year). While I'm running wired now, when I wrote that entry I was using wireless. In fact, I've never had a problem with my Xbox or Xbox 360 recognizing my wireless AP. The only problem I've ever had was with NAT, and that was completely solved with the UPnP daemon.
Until the whole world moves to IPv6, you're going to run into issues like this more and more often. You can take the Nintendo approach and force users to forward ports by hand (seriously, that's what you have to do with the Wii -- it's a good thing there are no multiplayer online games yet), or you can use technology that was designed to solve this problem (among others, of course) -- UPnP.
What?
While games may eventually need the space provided by Blu-Ray discs, I can't see that happening for another 4-5 years at least. In the meantime, proper compression techniques and at worst multi-DVD games will be more than enough. As for beating HD-DVD, I'd say the chips are historically stacked against Sony. They didn't win with Betamax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, or UMD. I'd be surprised if they win with Blu-Ray. Besides, the price of an Xbox 360 + HD-DVD player is about the same as a PS3, and HD-DVD standalone players are generally cheaper than standalone BD players. To top it off, early HD-DVD transfers have been much better than on BD, giving HD-DVD an early quality lead.
It'll probably be at least another year before there's a clear winner in this format war, but if I was a betting man I'd have to go with HD-DVD for now. It has much more going for it than Blu-Ray. Sony might pull it out of their collective asses with BD, but don't count on it.
For the reasons you mentioned, Gran Turismo has never been a sim racer. It's a collect-em-all game with cars with a bit of piss-poor racing tossed in to facilitate collection (just like Pokemon is a collect-em-all game with a bit of piss-poor RPG tossed in to facilitate collection). If you want a simulation racer, the best you're going to get on a Playstation is the TOCA or Colin McRae series. Forza on Xbox (and soon, Forza 2 on Xbox 360) blows away Gran Turismo in terms of racing realism and fun. GTR2 on the PC (and supposedly soon on Xbox 360) is currently the pinnacle of racing simulation.
Pick up Gran Turismo if you just absolutely have to see a Model T in a video game. Pick up Forza if you want to play a simulation racer on a console. Pick up GTR 2 if you're hardcore.
Pay your mortgage on time and you won't have to worry about being evicted. If you can't afford to pay your mortgage on time, it doesn't matter whether or not you have a nice mortgage broker who "understands you" or a big bank who looks at you as just so much $$$, you're in over your head and need to immediately start thinking about selling or declaring bankruptcy. You got yourself into that situation, not your mortgage broker who decided to sell your mortgage to Big Evil Bank Co.
The bank buying your mortgage can't change your terms, so you won't suddenly find yourself with a higher interest rate (or a different ARM schedule) or a pre-payment penalty where you didn't have one before. So no, the "screeching" doesn't make any more sense now.
When you consider that the nationwide average of CO posioning cases is only around 1500 cases per year, 100 cases of poisoning and 6 or 7 deaths in the span of a week is alarming.
Note that I am in no way trying to equate our "little" windstorm to a Katrina-style hurricane or earthquake. Power out for a week and only a few people dead (I think 4 people died directly from the storm) is nothing. However the CO deaths could've been totally avoided.
Wouldn't have mattered much if evergreen roots ripped up the lines. If anything, it would take even longer to restore power that way. It would be better if people would properly maintain their trees. That includes the government, as my power went out thanks to all of the downed trees in the state park near my house.
I'm looking at investing in a generator installation (looking at a stationary natural gas solution right now) since I now know that PSE doesn't really value me as a customer (it took them three days to even send out a crew, and five days to fully restore power).
Sadly, many people just don't realize this. For example, Seattle was hit with a huge windstorm last week that knocked out power to nearly a million people. It was so bad that there are still people over a week later that don't have power restored yet. Over the past week, 6 or 7 different people died from CO poisoning and over a hundred were treated and survived. All of them were doing blatantly stupid things like running a generator in their garage or basement (afraid of it being stolen if it was outside, I guess) or using a charcoal grill inside to keep warm.
Is that what I said? Because I didn't think it was.
The OP linked a video of a mom and a grandfather playing a Wii, with the description of the video insinuating that it's the Wii of a son/daughter. Obviously mom/grandpa didn't buy the Wii for themselves, but Wii Sports Tennis got them up and interested in playing it. Do you really think mom and grandpa are going to play Zelda or Red Steel? No. They're probably not going to go home and buy themselves a Wii either, but they were able to bridge the generation gap and enjoy their child/grandchild's Wii. My point was that Xbox 360, via XBLA, has a similar mechanism to bridge that generation gap. It's not as social as the Wii, but it has the same "casual gamer" appeal. Will they go out and buy their own Xbox 360 after playing Hexic on the son or daughter's console? Probably not. Will they find some enjoyment playing those games and bonding with their (adult) children? Quite possibly yes.
BTW, I have both a Wii and a 360, so I'm not going fanboy one way or the other. I'm just pointing out that the Wii doesn't have the market cornered on drawing casual gamers.
True enough, but there are other ways to suck them in.
Not quite applicable. Dreamcast was hindered by a cash-strapped Sega coming off of a horrible previous console generation (Saturn), a lack of games, and most importantly the absence of EA on the platform (say what you will about EA, but without them you can kiss your ass goodbye). Add Sony's PS2 over-hype ("It'll render Toy Story in real time!") into the mix and you have a recipe for disaster. Microsoft, on the other hand, is not cash strapped, made a decent showing with the original Xbox, has a good amount of games for the 360 already, and has EA. Sony again tried the over-hype approach for the PS3 this time (yay, Kutaragi!), but consumers have learned to doubt Sony's promises after the PS2 failed to live up to even half of what they promised. And guess what? The PS3 is living up to maybe half of what they promised this time around, too.
If your daily job could be boiled down to 15-30 minute bite-size chunks of code that can stand all on their own, I'd happily ask you an interview question around that. Chances are that's not going to be the case. Therefore the point of the question is not so much, "Can you remember your basic CS 101 class?" and more, "I need to keep you up at the white board, thinking through a problem, asking questions, and generally getting a feeling of how you think and work." A "simple" question is best for that because you can fully solve and analyze the problem in 15-30 minutes. If you just bust out a solution based on rote memorization, you're going to be thrown for a loop when I ask you to do it in a different way, or to analyze why your solution does what you think it does, or what performance characteristics you'd expect to see from your solution, etc.
Don't get hung up on the actual question. That's just a vehicle to analyze more important stuff. On the other hand, if you can't solve the problem, that's a whole different issue. It might be the question was too hard, inappropriate for the position, or required an "a ha!" type of solution that you wouldn't get unless you'd seen the question before. That definitely happens, but you get a pretty good question calibration when you use it across many different candidates. That means that unless you're testing out a brand new interview question, the more likely issue is with the candidate instead. Now it's up to you as an interviewer to see if you can figure out where the problem lies and determine if it's a superficial you can work with (candidate is just very nervous and wouldn't necessarily be that bad in a normal situation) or a deeper problem that means the candidate is not a good fit for your team. If you can't do that, you've failed as an interviewer just as much as the candidate failed as an interviewee.
As for your point about functional languages, that'd make sense if I were hiring you for a position where you'd work with a functional language. If you're interviewing for a 100% .NET or Java shop, busting out Haskell or Lisp in your interview (beyond mentioning them on your resume) is likely to do more harm than good. You'll get "cool points" for knowing a functional language, but if you can't hack C/C++, Java, C#, Javascript or whatever I happen to be looking for, those cool points aren't going to do you much good. Yes, I know, you probably can learn the language. However if you haven't learned at least one of those languages by now, I have to question what you've been doing. Even coming out of university you should know one of Java, C, or C++ enough to answer a basic question. If you're coming from an industry position with only functional programming under your belt, that's a serious red flag.
Okay, now do it without using a built-in split, join, or reverse function. Oh, yeah, and make sure the result ends up in the same initial string variable (or string buffer object, if you're working in a language with immutable strings) without using any extra storage space beyond a single character.
It's not as easy as just splitting, reversing the resulting array, and joining it back together. This is a test to see how you handle string and array manipulation, not whether or not you happen to know the language or standard library. My base assumption is that you can do most "simple" interview questions in three lines of code or less if I allowed you to use built-in structures or methods. :)
Any good interviewer will be looking more for your ability to understand (ask for clarification if you need it -- oftentimes an interviewer will intentionally make a question vague or leave out an important piece of information to see how you handle adversity) and solve the problem (preferably in an optimal way, but a working solution is better than nothing) rather than your ability to remember semicolons and public/private/protected. As long as your syntax is relatively close, it doesn't matter (a good IDE will fix it all for you anyway). Bonus points for catching edge cases and actually testing your solution on your own (a good interviewer will walk you through that, but if you can beat him to the punch on finding problems in your code then you'll have taken away any negatives you may have had for having bugs in the first place).
If the company is hiring for a full-time position (as opposed to a contractor), they should be much more interested in your ability to learn and problem solve than your ability to remember your semicolons. Syntax and language-specific constructs can be solved with IDEs and documentation (to a certain extent, of course). Problem solving is much harder to learn than programming languages.
That's a useful exercise for ~15 minutes, but what are you doing for the other 45 minutes of the interview?
I tend to break a 60 minute interview down into 10-15 minutes talking about the candidates previous experiences based on his resume, asking him questions about projects he's listed and such, why he designed the solution the way he did, his role in designing and implementing a solution, etc. The next 15-20 minutes are spent on a simpler item like you mentioned, though I'll usually do a "trivial" programming task (something like reversing words in a string -- relatively simple, no "a ha!" solution requirement, and lets me see how they think about memory management and algorithm complexity). I'll use the remainder of the time on a larger question that focuses more on design. Something like designing the behavior of a Minesweeper game when you click on a cell that's not adjacent to any mine (good exercise in recursion, data structure management, and edge case detection). If there's any time left after that I'll field any questions the candidate may have about the position, the team, or the company.
Of course no two interviews are the same. Some people may end up spending a full 45 minutes trying to figure out how to reverse the words in a string. Others might blow through the design and code for minesweeper in 15 minutes. You at least have to tailor the interview questions to the level of the job (if a candidate for a senior developer position gets stuck on reverse words, it's game over), and to some extent the candidate himself (I give candidates the option to answer in whatever language they feel most comfortable in; to date I've mostly received C/C++/Java/C# answers, but I've had a few Javascript answers. I'm still waiting for a TSQL answer ... :).
In case it's not obvious, what interviewing I've done has been for development positions. Interviewing for QA, project management, or people management would be substantially different. Then again, I wouldn't be a part of any of those interviews since I'm a developer.
And that's why I qualified my statement by explicitly stating consoles and that I was ignoring handhelds. Yes, the GBA can play GB/GBC games and the DS can play GBA games, but until the Wii no console from Nintendo could play previous-generation games. As I stated, the SNES could not play NES games, the N64 could not play SNES games, and the Gamecube could not play N64 games.
Actually, IE7's anti-phishing technology is server-based. The judgement of a URL as "phish" or "non-phish" is done completely outside of your browser, outside of your own PC even, so there's no need for heuristic, signature, or filter updates to be pushed to users.