Little or no technical details, controlled environments that make their technology appear better than it is, and exaggeration. If you read the last article linked, it's not even a fair comparison. For instance, there's this quote:
Docked atop an indoor road simulator, the test car's suspension system was switched on and off to highlight the difference between it and typical hydraulic systems.
There's no reason to assume that the Bose suspension does not in any way affect the existing suspension, so simply switching it off is not a fair comparison.
The idea of active suspension is not new, and Bose is not the only one doing it. GM has had "Magnetic Ride Control" for a few years now, and other manufacturers have similar active technologies. While the Bose articles are light on details, it seems that the Bose technology is not far different from other electronically controlled systems (something about electric motors at all four wheels, yet it apparently still uses standard pneumatic suspension components as well).
Bose's flair for hyperbole and marketing is their only real asset. My ass it took 24 years to develop this technology. Perhaps it's been 24 years since there has been any significant innovation in suspension technology (I'm not buying it, though...), but there's no way Bose has been working on this one piece of technology for 24 years.
Bose can sell a $20 clock radio for $300, and a $1000 home theater system for $3500, and you can bet they'll sell this technology for quite a bit more than average as well, where similar systems are currently optioned around $1000-$3000 depending on the make (ie, Porsche's system is more expensive than Chevy's, and I would expect Bose to be even more expensive than Porsche)
Besides, do you really trust a second-rate "hi-fi" (haha!) company to build the suspension for your car? I certainly wouldn't! Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Chevy, et al have been doing it for far longer, and have a much deeper wealth of automotive knowledge. I'll trust the experts on this one, rather than Bose.
As for Longhorn, you'll still buy it like all the other cattle (Ha! Longhorn! Cattle! Now I see the connection!) when it comes out, by the way, I expect the successor to Longhorn to be Bighorn (Guess the species!;-)
The name of Longhorn is pretty easy to track if you look at the previous version of Windows (Whistler) and the blue-sky version of Windows (Blackcomb), and know a bit about the Pacific Northwest (specifically, the Whistler ski resort up in Canada). At the Whistler resort, there are two mountains, Whistler and Blackcomb. Between the lifts for the two mountains, there is a tavern called Longhorn. The initial plan for Windows was supposed to have Longhorn be a small release between XP (Whistler) and Blackcomb, with Blackcomb coming around 2006 or 2007. Thus, Longhorn, because it's a stop on your way from Whistler to Blackcomb. Somewhere along the line, Longhorn became a much more prominant release, so the codename is no longer as appropriate, but that's the root of the name.
XMMS is a wonderful media player XMMS is a multimedia player for unix systems
(emphasis added by me)
And Winamp is a multimedia player for Windows systems (with the exception of a horribly crappy alpha version of the now-dead 3.0 release of Winamp that was made available on Linux, but that hardly counts does it?). If I'm a Winamp user, I'm using Windows, and so XMMS is not an option. Why would I change my entire operating system simply to get a media player that started life as a duplicate of the one I already have on Windows (and XMMS still is little more than a Winamp-wannabe)?
But the world is concentrated on making absolutely unusable WYSIWYG crap instead of a decent human-readable structural markup language for serious documents.
Go get your WYSIWYM on (What You See Is What You Mean), while retaining all of the goodness that is LaTeX. No need to learn confusing TeX markup unless you really want to do so.
Notepad has a serious size limit. It's ok for a couple pages, but falls flat when doing a full document. There is just too much stuff that notepad can't open because it's too large. I quickly move on to other text based editors.
Bullshit. Stop using Win9x. Notepad on NT has always been able to handle large files. Notepad on win3.x had something like a 64K limit. Win95's notepad had the same problem, and so I would assume win98 and winme did as well (don't have any of those hanging around to check, though I wouldn't be surprised if that was changed in later versions of win9x). It's never had that limitation on an NT-based OS.
Notepad does suffer for lack of features, but it does what it's supposed to do -- it's a simple, lightweight text editor. If you need more power in your text editing, install Vim, emacs, EditPad, TextPad, or one of the many other more fully-featured free and not-so-free text editors available for the win32 platform.
If you know a way to make this problem stop, please do tell me (but don't just say "well you must not have told the installer to install onto the disk", because I did).
I've never seen that problem, and I've used all of the Office products since Office 2000 (and before). While you don't want me to say so, it does sound like an installation problem on your part. You might try the Word MVP site for more help.
Word has plenty of problems, especially in the realm of lists and numbering (I can never seem to get my lists to number correctly, or consistently, or indent properly, if I'm working on a sufficiently large file). However, the complaint that makes up nearly half of Dvorak's article is his own damned fault. Why? He obviously doesn't understand the Office installer. When you install, you're given several choices for how to install the feature:
Install to the hard drive
Install to the hard drive on first use (requires CD)
Run from the CD (never installs to the hard drive, but will prompt you for the CD)
Disable (don't install the feature, don't prompt for the disk, not available for all features)
It's pretty obvious that Dvorak chose #3 for one or more features that he uses frequently. He can remedy this by re-running the Office setup and choosing to actually install the feature (notice he never says what feature it actually is...)
His other points are trivial, or have already been addressed.
Ever-changing.doc format: Yes, the doc format changes. How else are new features supposed to be saved? However, Office has XML-based formats that work quite well now, too (since Office2K, even!)
Poor HTML output: This is not Word's domain. Yes, Word can save to HTML. Yes, it's gotten much better since it was introduced in Office 97. No, it's still not all that great. However, it's a workable solution if you need a quick 'n dirty solution to turn a Word document into HTML. If your target is HTML, with no requirement at all for a doc version, you should use Frontpage. Frontpage has gotten much better as well, and actually generates fairly clean HTML. No, it'll never be as clean as if you had done it by hand, but it's still damned good.
Plain-text in Word: Who does this? Why? Get a real text editor. Even Notepad is preferable to Word when dealing with plain text. That's fine, because plain-text is not Word's domain either.
If Dvorak wants to be taken seriously, he should pick on some of the real problems instead.
Re:No one can answer that question
on
Portable Storage?
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And here I was thinking it was an easy answer. The root problem is that he wants to keep work stuff and personal stuff separate. The solution is to leave work at work, and leave personal stuff at home. Problem solved.
I assume you mean "earliest EA sports game", since EA has been around for a long time, and was making games long before they made sports games. However, you're wrong on the sports game account, too. I believe Dr J and Larry Bird Go One on One was EA's first real sports game.
Thank you very much. Clueless Medic didn't have a link, and perhaps I'm a little naive to think that "whatever".com would be valid:). The scammers on suprnova.com are pretty slick, copying most of.org's site design. Apparenlty they've scammed quite a few folks, because they show up as the number 4 hit on google (1 and 3 are the right site, 2 is a.tk site that doesn't have anything on it). I should've googled first, and gotten the right site initially.
See, if BBC America would just bring Top Gear State-side, we wouldn't have this problem, would we?:).
Look on Suprnova for torrents of the Top Gear episodes, regulary uploaded.
I did, but Suprnova is for-pay. While there's nothing wrong with that (though it does seem a bit suspect, since they appear to offer more than just videos of TV shows, such as games and other apps. $29.95 for a lifetime subscription to warez?), I'm not going to pay for that. I checked out UKNova from another poster, which is free, and they have a few torrents to recent Top Gear episodes. It'd be nice to have access to the Top Gear archives, but if I'm going to pay for that I'd rather pay BBC directly (because I'm sure Suprnova doesn't pay BBC).
Maybe BBC America will eventually wise up and bring over Top Gear, too. It doesn't matter that they review a number of cars that will never be available in the US (the show Fifth Gear does that as well, yet Speed TV carries the program). The reviews are highly entertaining (so much better than anything we get here from shows like Autoweek and such), and they actually run many of the cars on a race track and compare times against others they've reviewed.
A lot of the best BBC programming (together with other top-notch British television output) can be had in the US on BBC America.
We get whatever BBC America gives us. Unfortunately, that doesn't currently include the only BBC program I'd care to have -- Top Gear. Thankfully, you can find some clips on the web, and BBC has some downloads available as well (only available in Real format, though, so I won't bother). However, that's not quite the same as watching the full episodes on my TV. They used to have a page where you could vote on what shows you wanted them to air on BBC America, but I can't find that now (and IIRC, the list didn't include Top Gear anyway).
Except that the point of the blackout is not to save money producing the slot, it's to DENY live coverage, because of legal/marketing reasons. The short version is that someone decided(an executive) that they weren't being paid enough to show you football at that particular time.
That's the core of blackout games, but it gets more convoluted. The NFL has decided that if a game does not sell out its stadium, the local fans should be punished by not having the game broadcast. The assumption there is that watching the game on TV is only supposed to be an alternative to watching the game locally when you can no longer buy tickets. If tickets are still available, tough luck. You can't watch in your favorite pub with a group of friends, you can't watch it at home after a hard day of work, and you can't watch it in the office while you get actual work done. It's an asinine policy, and gets things completely backwards. By making the game available locally, people will be more likely to become fans of the local team and go buy tickets for a game. More than that, it penalizes teams that don't have ideal year-round weather. Most people don't want to sit in the freezing cold watching a football game at a stadium in Buffalo or Chicago. Thus, the games are less likely to sell out, and then the blackout rule comes into effect. Sorry, your team is playing the crucial game to determine whether or not they get a playoff spot, but it's -20F outside and snowing and sane people do not go out in that to watch a game, so you can't watch it on TV either. Sucks to be you. Go pay your NFL tax.
College ball doesn't do that, and college ball is also more interesting to watch. I'm not a big football fan (hockey is more my style), but given the choice between watching an NFL game or a college game, I'll almost always choose the college game. Then again, college games are never played at the same times as NFL games (NFL gets Sunday and Monday, college ball gets Saturday). How much do you want to bet that's due to another NFL rule?
Looking forward to seeing a game engine used for something other than a game. Hey, some day soon I bet Hollywood will be using game engines for their special effects, as it'll all be rendered in real time, which will save time.
It hasn't hit Hollywood yet, but there's a very active scene around "Machinima". Slashdot has posted stories about machinima before, as well, such as the Anachronoxmovie.
Seriously, there is something about those two scenarios that have a sense of personality. They have a sense of uniqueness, not the typical "patrol-n-kill" missions you see in most space sims/shooters.
While that's true, and it's certainly why those battles are continuously revisited, they've simply been done way too many times. I agree that the typical "patrol-n-kill" missions are boring, and escort missions suck even worse (at least, when the game doesn't give you an adequate chance of your escort surviving, which few games have ever gotten right -- the Freespace series is the best I've seen so far for escort duty). For me, the best space sim series has to be Freespace. It has a great story-driven approach like the first few Wing Commanders (okay, 1 and 2), excellent flight mechanics a la X-Wing, and a completely new and interesting universe. As well, the graphical effects were (and still are!) simply stunning.
I want a good space sim, not another Rebel Assault clone. Maybe one in the post-OT time period, or heck I can live with an X-wing v Tie Fighter remake:)
If you can pull yourself away from the Star Wars universe, and haven't done so already, you should check out Freespace 1 and 2. Simply the best space flight sims available today, and you should be able to find them in your local bargain bin. The source for FS2 has been released as well, though I haven't had a chance to play with any of the community projects spawned from that. I've got a few days off work coming up this week, so perhaps I may have to fix that. Now I wonder where my FS2 discs got off to...
The Rogue Squadron series is not a space flight sim like the old X-Wing and Tie Fighter games (you fly, but the control is definitely lacking). Take the graphics from the latest Rogue Squadron games, put them into the flight engine of X-Wing, Tie Fighter, or X-Wing: Alliance, add a new story (dammit, I don't need to play through Hoth or the Death Star battle again!), and you'd have a sure-fire winner.
And I'll also cheerfully explain over a few drinks about the fact that when your application's cheif function is to syncronize data between several backends (not to mention SMTP, flat files, and XML), you really can't rely on any one vendor's parlor tricks.
So "data integrity" is now considered vendor-specific parlor tricks? That's news to me!
As one of those sickos: yes I would actually pay money to use MySQL. In high-volume web transactions speed is everything, and you trust your backend to do nothing.
With a moderately complex data set (ie, pretty much anything you'll do other than a "hello world" database), MySQL has little benefit over Postgres speed-wise. The only reason you trust your backend to do nothing is because MySQL's backend cannot be trusted to do anything!
get around most of mySQL's "limitations" in TCL.
Others have asked how you do atomic transactions, stored procedures, and sql injection protection. I'll just say... hahahahaha! (/me waits for replies like, "Stored procedures are pointless, and any DBA worth his salt would know that there's never any reason to use them!" or, "I can do transactions in my middle-tier code," so I can laugh again)
With all the "Postgres is so awesome" stuff I keep reading (well okay, mostly on here), if MySQL backs away from open source, it could be the beginning of the end for them with "the geeks" (ie. us).
The only thing I can say to that: About damned time! MySQL is "teh suck" compared to PostgreSQL and all of the other full-featured databases out there. It's only in such widespread use because a) it was GPLed, and b) because of that, many people started using it even though there were and are better databases with better licenses.
This is the sort of application that screams for a script, rather than some sort of drag-n-drool GUI windows-ish thing. There are several audio sampling and processing utilities over at sourceforge.net, which would be suitable for this sort of thing.
Haha, "drag-n-drool," you are teh funnay, sir!
Seriously, though, do you not realize that Windows has just as much scriptability as *nix, if not more? For instance, you could write a script in JScript, VBScript, or PerlScript using the Windows Scripting Host, or you could write a batch script using cmd.exe. If you need more power, you could install Python, Perl, Ruby, or any number of other scripting languages and have your way. If you must have that *nix environment, you could install Cygwin and get several shells like bash or zsh. Just because Windows has a GUI doesn't mean it doesn't have scripting (wait a second... Linux has X and GNOME/KDE/etc, does that mean it's "drag-n-drool" as well? hrm...)
Maybe it's because my background is in the *nix world, but it'd be a half-day project to get this up and running done on a *nix box with something free from sourceforge.
Bingo! It is your background. The same task in Windows would be a half-day project (or less!) for a skilled Windows programmer or admin (don't laugh!). Your skillset obviously doesn't extend to Windows, so it's understandable that you can't see how this could be just as easy, if not easier, in Windows.
Usually one wants to design the solution to fit the problem, not to introduce more complexity by limiting what the solution can be chosen from. Doesn't seem to be the case in this guy's project.
See above, where scripting is no more complex in Windows than in *nix. As well, if the guy knows Windows, and works in a Windows environment, using *nix for this one problem is going to add complexity.
As soon as a court precedent is set concerning virtual currency, and I dont think it will be much longer considering how bad the scamming is getting, all these people can sue the piss out of this guy. 480mil Isk today is worth about $500. Depending on how long ago this scam happened it could have been worth upwards of $5000 then.
Laws do not apply ex post facto. You can't change a speed limit from 60mph to 30mph and then mail tickets to everybody who drove on the road while it was 60mph, and you can't prosecute this guy for virtual currency fraud when there was no law against it (and still isn't). The victims are welcome to sue in civil court, assuming they even know anything more about the guy than his online avatar name and a library phone number, but it'd be a rare judge that would take them seriously.
What he did wasn't right, but at the time it also wasn't wrong (still isn't). Besides, this is fake money. Fake. As in, not real.
As for the story itself... it's another tale of people pushing the rules as far as they'll go to get ahead.
It was more than that. From his story, Nightfreeze was doing a brisk, legal trade business, with a bit of pirate hunting vengeance on the side, until the developers caved into pirate requests to nerf the one real defense a trader had -- the MWD (micro warp drive). In doing so, it made the game nearly impossible for traders, so Nightfreeze decided that if the developers were going to screw around, why shouldn't he? In the end, he realized that he screwed himself in the process, getting all of that money but losing the time invested in his scamming character, so that his new character wouldn't be able to utilize that bankroll for months.
Disclaimer: I've never played EVE Online, and I'm only going by what was available in the story. It was a good story, though.
Jeez, how many times am I going to see this claim repeated over and over? Perl and Python ARE NOT INTERPRETED LANGUAGES! They both compile to a bytecode (intermediate) language which is then interpreted, just like Java/C#, and thus share the same advantages you mentioned. Python I know was a bytecode compiled language from its very beginning, it was never an interpreted language, and Python at least has Psycho, which is a kind of just-in-time compiler for Python bytecode, which can convert a lot of Python code (but not all) into native x86 instructions.
Care to provide some links? From what I can find, Python is interpreted, Perl is interpreted, and Ruby is interpreted. Now perhaps they mean something different when they things like, "Ruby is the interpreted scripting language," or, "Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language," but to me that says "interpreted". That the interpreter may JIT compile the script into a faster bytecode during runtime does not necessarily make the languages non-interpreted. Java and C# need to be explicitly compiled. Python, Perl, and Ruby do not.
I understand that this is a rather novel concept under Windows, and if I were a Windows application developer I might just go along with it. It's certainly less painful than MFC/COM+. But that doesn't explain the massive exodus away from traditional languages and frameworks by Unix developers.
All I can offer is that C# and.NET are the current "cool" things, and thus Unix (read: Linux) developers don't want to be left out in the cold. That may change in the future. It may not. Mono may mature to the point where cross-platform.NET applications Just Work (tm) without ugly GTK# stuff (GTK# is fine for Linux, but GTK on Windows sucks, and I can't imagine GTK# would be any better -- besides, the look & feel is all off, and themes can only do so much to correct that).
Okay, imagine I also write end user applications for Linux/Unix users. What does Mono give me that C++/Qt/KDE does not? What does it give me that non-Ximian C/GTK/GNOME does not? What does it give me that RubyQT and wxPython do not?
Basically, ask yourself why you would use Java rather than C/C++/Qt/KDE/GTK/GNOME or a scripting language like Ruby or Python, and then realize that C# fixes many annoyances from Java (int is both Object-derived and a value type in C#, unlike int vs. Integer in Java; You can create user-defined value types in C#; C#'s generics implementation is much more robust than Java's syntactical sugar hack that translates everything to Object during compilation; etc) and adds new language features (attributes, properties, events, etc). Java and C# are garbage-collected, which makes them more secure by default than C/C++ (with respect to memory management issues, anyway -- you can certainly still write insecure code in Java or C#). They're also compiled to an intermediate language, so they're faster than scripting languages (yes, Python and Ruby have various different compilers to build C code, java bytecode,.NET IL code, etc, but in their vanilla forms they're interpreted scripting languages).
Or to put it another way, why should I jump on the.NET bandwagon when Java is here today and Parrot is just around the corner?
.NET fixes a number of shortcomings of Java. Also, the C# language and common runtime are truly open (ECMA standardization), unlike Java. Parrot has been "just around the corner" for years, and nothing I've seen has indicated that it will actually "come around the corner" any time soon. If you want to wait, or build your software on top of ever-changing beta code, go ahead and use Parrot.
Slashdot Mirror
Little or no technical details, controlled environments that make their technology appear better than it is, and exaggeration. If you read the last article linked, it's not even a fair comparison. For instance, there's this quote:
There's no reason to assume that the Bose suspension does not in any way affect the existing suspension, so simply switching it off is not a fair comparison.
The idea of active suspension is not new, and Bose is not the only one doing it. GM has had "Magnetic Ride Control" for a few years now, and other manufacturers have similar active technologies. While the Bose articles are light on details, it seems that the Bose technology is not far different from other electronically controlled systems (something about electric motors at all four wheels, yet it apparently still uses standard pneumatic suspension components as well).
Bose's flair for hyperbole and marketing is their only real asset. My ass it took 24 years to develop this technology. Perhaps it's been 24 years since there has been any significant innovation in suspension technology (I'm not buying it, though ...), but there's no way Bose has been working on this one piece of technology for 24 years.
Bose can sell a $20 clock radio for $300, and a $1000 home theater system for $3500, and you can bet they'll sell this technology for quite a bit more than average as well, where similar systems are currently optioned around $1000-$3000 depending on the make (ie, Porsche's system is more expensive than Chevy's, and I would expect Bose to be even more expensive than Porsche)
Besides, do you really trust a second-rate "hi-fi" (haha!) company to build the suspension for your car? I certainly wouldn't! Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Chevy, et al have been doing it for far longer, and have a much deeper wealth of automotive knowledge. I'll trust the experts on this one, rather than Bose.
The name of Longhorn is pretty easy to track if you look at the previous version of Windows (Whistler) and the blue-sky version of Windows (Blackcomb), and know a bit about the Pacific Northwest (specifically, the Whistler ski resort up in Canada). At the Whistler resort, there are two mountains, Whistler and Blackcomb. Between the lifts for the two mountains, there is a tavern called Longhorn. The initial plan for Windows was supposed to have Longhorn be a small release between XP (Whistler) and Blackcomb, with Blackcomb coming around 2006 or 2007. Thus, Longhorn, because it's a stop on your way from Whistler to Blackcomb. Somewhere along the line, Longhorn became a much more prominant release, so the codename is no longer as appropriate, but that's the root of the name.
Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows has an entry in the XP FAQ (near the top, scroll down about 1/5th of the page) and in the Longhorn FAQ (near the bottom) that mention this in lesser detail, though he gets the location of Longhorn wrong. The Garibaldi Lift Co. is the tavern at the base of Whistler. Quite a nice little tavern, too, if you've got friends who are into skiing or mountain biking and you're not.
And Winamp is a multimedia player for Windows systems (with the exception of a horribly crappy alpha version of the now-dead 3.0 release of Winamp that was made available on Linux, but that hardly counts does it?). If I'm a Winamp user, I'm using Windows, and so XMMS is not an option. Why would I change my entire operating system simply to get a media player that started life as a duplicate of the one I already have on Windows (and XMMS still is little more than a Winamp-wannabe)?
Go get your WYSIWYM on (What You See Is What You Mean), while retaining all of the goodness that is LaTeX. No need to learn confusing TeX markup unless you really want to do so.
Here you go. The short reason why there is no "Reveal Codes" option is because Word doesn't work that way.
Bullshit. Stop using Win9x. Notepad on NT has always been able to handle large files. Notepad on win3.x had something like a 64K limit. Win95's notepad had the same problem, and so I would assume win98 and winme did as well (don't have any of those hanging around to check, though I wouldn't be surprised if that was changed in later versions of win9x). It's never had that limitation on an NT-based OS.
Notepad does suffer for lack of features, but it does what it's supposed to do -- it's a simple, lightweight text editor. If you need more power in your text editing, install Vim, emacs, EditPad, TextPad, or one of the many other more fully-featured free and not-so-free text editors available for the win32 platform.
I've never seen that problem, and I've used all of the Office products since Office 2000 (and before). While you don't want me to say so, it does sound like an installation problem on your part. You might try the Word MVP site for more help.
Word has plenty of problems, especially in the realm of lists and numbering (I can never seem to get my lists to number correctly, or consistently, or indent properly, if I'm working on a sufficiently large file). However, the complaint that makes up nearly half of Dvorak's article is his own damned fault. Why? He obviously doesn't understand the Office installer. When you install, you're given several choices for how to install the feature:
It's pretty obvious that Dvorak chose #3 for one or more features that he uses frequently. He can remedy this by re-running the Office setup and choosing to actually install the feature (notice he never says what feature it actually is
His other points are trivial, or have already been addressed.
If Dvorak wants to be taken seriously, he should pick on some of the real problems instead.
And here I was thinking it was an easy answer. The root problem is that he wants to keep work stuff and personal stuff separate. The solution is to leave work at work, and leave personal stuff at home. Problem solved.
I assume you mean "earliest EA sports game", since EA has been around for a long time, and was making games long before they made sports games. However, you're wrong on the sports game account, too. I believe Dr J and Larry Bird Go One on One was EA's first real sports game.
Thank you very much. Clueless Medic didn't have a link, and perhaps I'm a little naive to think that "whatever".com would be valid :). The scammers on suprnova.com are pretty slick, copying most of .org's site design. Apparenlty they've scammed quite a few folks, because they show up as the number 4 hit on google (1 and 3 are the right site, 2 is a .tk site that doesn't have anything on it). I should've googled first, and gotten the right site initially.
See, if BBC America would just bring Top Gear State-side, we wouldn't have this problem, would we? :).
I did, but Suprnova is for-pay. While there's nothing wrong with that (though it does seem a bit suspect, since they appear to offer more than just videos of TV shows, such as games and other apps. $29.95 for a lifetime subscription to warez?), I'm not going to pay for that. I checked out UKNova from another poster, which is free, and they have a few torrents to recent Top Gear episodes. It'd be nice to have access to the Top Gear archives, but if I'm going to pay for that I'd rather pay BBC directly (because I'm sure Suprnova doesn't pay BBC).
Maybe BBC America will eventually wise up and bring over Top Gear, too. It doesn't matter that they review a number of cars that will never be available in the US (the show Fifth Gear does that as well, yet Speed TV carries the program). The reviews are highly entertaining (so much better than anything we get here from shows like Autoweek and such), and they actually run many of the cars on a race track and compare times against others they've reviewed.
We get whatever BBC America gives us. Unfortunately, that doesn't currently include the only BBC program I'd care to have -- Top Gear. Thankfully, you can find some clips on the web, and BBC has some downloads available as well (only available in Real format, though, so I won't bother). However, that's not quite the same as watching the full episodes on my TV. They used to have a page where you could vote on what shows you wanted them to air on BBC America, but I can't find that now (and IIRC, the list didn't include Top Gear anyway).
That's the core of blackout games, but it gets more convoluted. The NFL has decided that if a game does not sell out its stadium, the local fans should be punished by not having the game broadcast. The assumption there is that watching the game on TV is only supposed to be an alternative to watching the game locally when you can no longer buy tickets. If tickets are still available, tough luck. You can't watch in your favorite pub with a group of friends, you can't watch it at home after a hard day of work, and you can't watch it in the office while you get actual work done. It's an asinine policy, and gets things completely backwards. By making the game available locally, people will be more likely to become fans of the local team and go buy tickets for a game. More than that, it penalizes teams that don't have ideal year-round weather. Most people don't want to sit in the freezing cold watching a football game at a stadium in Buffalo or Chicago. Thus, the games are less likely to sell out, and then the blackout rule comes into effect. Sorry, your team is playing the crucial game to determine whether or not they get a playoff spot, but it's -20F outside and snowing and sane people do not go out in that to watch a game, so you can't watch it on TV either. Sucks to be you. Go pay your NFL tax.
College ball doesn't do that, and college ball is also more interesting to watch. I'm not a big football fan (hockey is more my style), but given the choice between watching an NFL game or a college game, I'll almost always choose the college game. Then again, college games are never played at the same times as NFL games (NFL gets Sunday and Monday, college ball gets Saturday). How much do you want to bet that's due to another NFL rule?
It hasn't hit Hollywood yet, but there's a very active scene around "Machinima". Slashdot has posted stories about machinima before, as well, such as the Anachronox movie.
While that's true, and it's certainly why those battles are continuously revisited, they've simply been done way too many times. I agree that the typical "patrol-n-kill" missions are boring, and escort missions suck even worse (at least, when the game doesn't give you an adequate chance of your escort surviving, which few games have ever gotten right -- the Freespace series is the best I've seen so far for escort duty). For me, the best space sim series has to be Freespace. It has a great story-driven approach like the first few Wing Commanders (okay, 1 and 2), excellent flight mechanics a la X-Wing, and a completely new and interesting universe. As well, the graphical effects were (and still are!) simply stunning.
If you can pull yourself away from the Star Wars universe, and haven't done so already, you should check out Freespace 1 and 2. Simply the best space flight sims available today, and you should be able to find them in your local bargain bin. The source for FS2 has been released as well, though I haven't had a chance to play with any of the community projects spawned from that. I've got a few days off work coming up this week, so perhaps I may have to fix that. Now I wonder where my FS2 discs got off to ...
The Rogue Squadron series is not a space flight sim like the old X-Wing and Tie Fighter games (you fly, but the control is definitely lacking). Take the graphics from the latest Rogue Squadron games, put them into the flight engine of X-Wing, Tie Fighter, or X-Wing: Alliance, add a new story (dammit, I don't need to play through Hoth or the Death Star battle again!), and you'd have a sure-fire winner.
So "data integrity" is now considered vendor-specific parlor tricks? That's news to me!
With a moderately complex data set (ie, pretty much anything you'll do other than a "hello world" database), MySQL has little benefit over Postgres speed-wise. The only reason you trust your backend to do nothing is because MySQL's backend cannot be trusted to do anything!
Others have asked how you do atomic transactions, stored procedures, and sql injection protection. I'll just say ... hahahahaha! (/me waits for replies like, "Stored procedures are pointless, and any DBA worth his salt would know that there's never any reason to use them!" or, "I can do transactions in my middle-tier code," so I can laugh again)
The only thing I can say to that: About damned time! MySQL is "teh suck" compared to PostgreSQL and all of the other full-featured databases out there. It's only in such widespread use because a) it was GPLed, and b) because of that, many people started using it even though there were and are better databases with better licenses.
Haha, "drag-n-drool," you are teh funnay, sir!
Seriously, though, do you not realize that Windows has just as much scriptability as *nix, if not more? For instance, you could write a script in JScript, VBScript, or PerlScript using the Windows Scripting Host, or you could write a batch script using cmd.exe. If you need more power, you could install Python, Perl, Ruby, or any number of other scripting languages and have your way. If you must have that *nix environment, you could install Cygwin and get several shells like bash or zsh. Just because Windows has a GUI doesn't mean it doesn't have scripting (wait a second ... Linux has X and GNOME/KDE/etc, does that mean it's "drag-n-drool" as well? hrm ...)
Bingo! It is your background. The same task in Windows would be a half-day project (or less!) for a skilled Windows programmer or admin (don't laugh!). Your skillset obviously doesn't extend to Windows, so it's understandable that you can't see how this could be just as easy, if not easier, in Windows.
See above, where scripting is no more complex in Windows than in *nix. As well, if the guy knows Windows, and works in a Windows environment, using *nix for this one problem is going to add complexity.
Laws do not apply ex post facto. You can't change a speed limit from 60mph to 30mph and then mail tickets to everybody who drove on the road while it was 60mph, and you can't prosecute this guy for virtual currency fraud when there was no law against it (and still isn't). The victims are welcome to sue in civil court, assuming they even know anything more about the guy than his online avatar name and a library phone number, but it'd be a rare judge that would take them seriously.
What he did wasn't right, but at the time it also wasn't wrong (still isn't). Besides, this is fake money. Fake. As in, not real.
It was more than that. From his story, Nightfreeze was doing a brisk, legal trade business, with a bit of pirate hunting vengeance on the side, until the developers caved into pirate requests to nerf the one real defense a trader had -- the MWD (micro warp drive). In doing so, it made the game nearly impossible for traders, so Nightfreeze decided that if the developers were going to screw around, why shouldn't he? In the end, he realized that he screwed himself in the process, getting all of that money but losing the time invested in his scamming character, so that his new character wouldn't be able to utilize that bankroll for months.
Disclaimer: I've never played EVE Online, and I'm only going by what was available in the story. It was a good story, though.
Care to provide some links? From what I can find, Python is interpreted, Perl is interpreted, and Ruby is interpreted. Now perhaps they mean something different when they things like, "Ruby is the interpreted scripting language," or, "Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language," but to me that says "interpreted". That the interpreter may JIT compile the script into a faster bytecode during runtime does not necessarily make the languages non-interpreted. Java and C# need to be explicitly compiled. Python, Perl, and Ruby do not.
So, care to back up your statements?
All I can offer is that C# and .NET are the current "cool" things, and thus Unix (read: Linux) developers don't want to be left out in the cold. That may change in the future. It may not. Mono may mature to the point where cross-platform .NET applications Just Work (tm) without ugly GTK# stuff (GTK# is fine for Linux, but GTK on Windows sucks, and I can't imagine GTK# would be any better -- besides, the look & feel is all off, and themes can only do so much to correct that).
Basically, ask yourself why you would use Java rather than C/C++/Qt/KDE/GTK/GNOME or a scripting language like Ruby or Python, and then realize that C# fixes many annoyances from Java (int is both Object-derived and a value type in C#, unlike int vs. Integer in Java; You can create user-defined value types in C#; C#'s generics implementation is much more robust than Java's syntactical sugar hack that translates everything to Object during compilation; etc) and adds new language features (attributes, properties, events, etc). Java and C# are garbage-collected, which makes them more secure by default than C/C++ (with respect to memory management issues, anyway -- you can certainly still write insecure code in Java or C#). They're also compiled to an intermediate language, so they're faster than scripting languages (yes, Python and Ruby have various different compilers to build C code, java bytecode, .NET IL code, etc, but in their vanilla forms they're interpreted scripting languages).
.NET fixes a number of shortcomings of Java. Also, the C# language and common runtime are truly open (ECMA standardization), unlike Java. Parrot has been "just around the corner" for years, and nothing I've seen has indicated that it will actually "come around the corner" any time soon. If you want to wait, or build your software on top of ever-changing beta code, go ahead and use Parrot.