Try reading what I wrote. Nobody said cell phones are continuously pumping out 4W.
Wikipedia: "The radio waves emitted by a GSM handset, can have a peak power of 2 watts, and a US analogue phone had a maximum transmit power of 3.6 watts."
Like I said, cell phones regularly pump out about 4W.
Well, I could blame Valve for shoddy coding and insufficient testing.
But instead, I'll point out that I'd be quite happy if Valve released stuff on PC first, waited for the bugs to be shaken out, and then (and only then) released on console, so they could be practically certain they wouldn't have to do a bug fix to the DLC. (Assuming, that is, they're not changing the underlying engine.)
DLC is ruining sales of games on consoles, at least as far as I can see.
On the PS2, it was pretty simple: The game was $40-50 new, or you could wait a year or so and buy it for $20 as a Greatest Hits release. Either way, you got the same game. Buying new, you'd pay $50 up front, play the game, sell it for $15-20, overall cost $35. Buying Greatest Hits, you'd buy for $20, sell for $10-15, overall cost $5-10. With buying the game at release costing you maybe $20 more overall, it often made sense to buy games on release day.
On the PS3, the game is released new for $60. A couple of DLC packs are released for $10 each. Then after a year or two, the entire game plus the DLC packs is released as a Game Of The Year Edition for $30. So if you buy new, you pay $60 + $20, but by the time you sell the game second hand it's worth $20 at best because of the GOTY edition at $30, so your overall cost is $60. Buy later, and you get the entire game plus add-ons for $30, resell for $20, overall cost $10. So now suddenly it costs $50 more to buy on release day than to buy and play later.
So basically, there's now a major financial incentive to wait for the Game Of The Year edition which has the DLC bundled in. For instance, I was considering buying Red Faction. However, I just saw on the PSN store that the first DLC has been released for $10. So now, I'd much rather wait and buy the whole thing in a year or two for $30.
Ultimately, I think the game companies are shooting themselves in the feet by penalizing early purchasers to this extent. I wonder if this might be why PS3 and Xbox 360 game sales have been down.
And if we're talking Valve, the way they've treated Xbox 360 owners is nothing compared to how they've fucked PS3 owners. There's no DLC for TF2 on the PS3 at all; we haven't even seen any of the fixes for the initial maps, which means that games tend to be ruined by glitchers. (Yeah, I know the "It's up to EA" excuse, but it's Valve's decision to let EA decide release policy, so ultimately they're still responsible.)
Regular users don't even know that they can't have multiple apps running at the same time.
They do once they ask why they can't use their phone for proper instant messaging, file sharing, streaming music, or any of a dozen other things you might want to use a 3G-connected smartphone for.
JavaScript is the most awful excuse for a scripting language I have ever tried to work with
Never used Perl, eh?
You should read "JavaScript: The Good Parts". I used to think JavaScript was crap, but that book converted me. Sure, JavaScript is no Ruby, but it's a pretty good language with a few rough edges and only a couple of fundamental misfeatures... a bit like Python really.
Perhaps I am wrong. I mean I would not mind a file format that allowed album artwork, lyrics, and liner notes to be stored in a standardized way along with all the songs of a single album
We already have that, it's called MP3. ID3v2 tags allow you to store album artwork, lyrics and liner notes. All that's needed is a way to package all the MP3s together so that they look like one icon, and call it an album. iTunes already does that, so basically they're solving a non-problem.
If they really want to do so anyway, I'd suggest following the Java.jar approach. Make the album file a simple zip file with a different extension, containing MP3 files of the actual music, and a metadata directory with a standard name containing the album art and liner notes in the form of web pages. You could trivially make a nice client player for that for both Windows and OS X, and no special tools will be needed to build it. Should be easy to support on portable players too. You could optionally provide multiple resolutions of artwork, or PDF versions, but keep the web/JPEG/PNG version as the baseline.
Of course, my guess is they'll do something far more stupid, probably involving DRM.
Well, either you believe in static typing, or you don't. If you do, Java is a good choice. If you don't, Ruby is a good choice. C++, on the other hand, is static enough to be annoying, but not static enough to be safe.
I actually much prefer Objective-C to C++. Once again, the worse solution won.
Because C++ is a statically typed language, which means that type errors are discovered at compile time.
Well, many type errors are discovered at compile time. Unfortunately, static typing tends to have the side effect of requiring more complex code, and often has to be worked around.
Personally, I write mostly in Java and Ruby. Java is pedantically static to a level that would make C++ blush, while Ruby is completely duck typed. I've had situations where Java's pedantic nature has caught bugs before test runs, but I've also had situations where the code was 10x as long and harder to debug because of the inflexibility. I think it's highly debatable which approach is better, and the answer probably depends on the kind of problem you're solving.
Buggywhip manufacturers, manual telephone switch operators, monks who manually copied documents, etc., all lost their jobs because they no longer added value to society...
It is common to deliberately add a check that breaks the whole stuff when some 'unexpected' condition happens. You know, assertions.
Assertions are for catching internal errors in software, such as API mismatch between modules. Assertions are not for catching and reporting user errors or other unexpected user behavior.
(Or at least, if you do use something as unfriendly as assertions for dealing with user error, good luck selling your product.)
My code is probably wrong(it's a hack job on some badly designed pre-existing code, not a clean rewrite), but nevertheless it works fine on everything else.
So basically, you admit your code is probably wrong, but you can't be bothered to fix it? Fine, but don't complain when your code stops working or fails in someone's browser and you lose business as a result.
The way I see it, this is only incidentally a story about stupidity. Not working in a standards-compliant web browser is a good indicator of poor web application quality. The cited behavior of deliberately failing in Opera would make me unlikely to pick the product, even though I'm a Firefox user.
Well, if they developed the interface using non-standard JavaScript events that are only supported as extras by some browser makers, they deserve what they get.
Sony Ericsson phones run Java apps, and are not locked. BlackBerry phones run Java apps and BlackBerry apps, and are not locked.
Both may be locked to a single carrier, but they're not locked with respect to what software you can run, and where you can download it from. In fact, the iPhone is the only common phone I know of which has such a control-freak approach to applications.
It's worth noting that some people are just not compatible with pair programming.
I literally cannot work with someone else watching my screen. I can't write code, I can't write text, it completely blocks me. If I were forced to do pair programming, the other person would end up writing all the code.
Again, I think the NoScript UI should be part of the core Firefox product.
Yes, there are many sites that require JavaScript. That's the point of NoScript--you can enable JavaScript for just the source domains you trust (e.g. Facebook), in a couple of clicks, and leave it disabled for all the other random sites you browse.
And of course, the NoScript functionality would remain off by default, so naive users wouldn't be confused by it. Just like the functionality to not download images is off by default.
This would be due to the capsule being surrounded until ground impact by a 3-mile-wide cloud of burning solid propellant fragments, which would melt the parachute. NASA management has stated that their computer models predict a safe outcome.
I see a simple solution: get NASA management to climb into an Ares themselves and demonstrate, if they're really that confident.
Slashdot Mirror
Try reading what I wrote. Nobody said cell phones are continuously pumping out 4W.
Wikipedia: "The radio waves emitted by a GSM handset, can have a peak power of 2 watts, and a US analogue phone had a maximum transmit power of 3.6 watts."
Like I said, cell phones regularly pump out about 4W.
Your cell phone pumps out about 4W on a regular basis, and you keep it in your pocket next to your junk.
It's funny, just the other day on Slashdot I saw people claiming that the average person doesn't care about the lack of multi-tasking.
Well, I could blame Valve for shoddy coding and insufficient testing.
But instead, I'll point out that I'd be quite happy if Valve released stuff on PC first, waited for the bugs to be shaken out, and then (and only then) released on console, so they could be practically certain they wouldn't have to do a bug fix to the DLC. (Assuming, that is, they're not changing the underlying engine.)
DLC is ruining sales of games on consoles, at least as far as I can see.
On the PS2, it was pretty simple: The game was $40-50 new, or you could wait a year or so and buy it for $20 as a Greatest Hits release. Either way, you got the same game. Buying new, you'd pay $50 up front, play the game, sell it for $15-20, overall cost $35. Buying Greatest Hits, you'd buy for $20, sell for $10-15, overall cost $5-10. With buying the game at release costing you maybe $20 more overall, it often made sense to buy games on release day.
On the PS3, the game is released new for $60. A couple of DLC packs are released for $10 each. Then after a year or two, the entire game plus the DLC packs is released as a Game Of The Year Edition for $30. So if you buy new, you pay $60 + $20, but by the time you sell the game second hand it's worth $20 at best because of the GOTY edition at $30, so your overall cost is $60. Buy later, and you get the entire game plus add-ons for $30, resell for $20, overall cost $10. So now suddenly it costs $50 more to buy on release day than to buy and play later.
So basically, there's now a major financial incentive to wait for the Game Of The Year edition which has the DLC bundled in. For instance, I was considering buying Red Faction. However, I just saw on the PSN store that the first DLC has been released for $10. So now, I'd much rather wait and buy the whole thing in a year or two for $30.
Ultimately, I think the game companies are shooting themselves in the feet by penalizing early purchasers to this extent. I wonder if this might be why PS3 and Xbox 360 game sales have been down.
And if we're talking Valve, the way they've treated Xbox 360 owners is nothing compared to how they've fucked PS3 owners. There's no DLC for TF2 on the PS3 at all; we haven't even seen any of the fixes for the initial maps, which means that games tend to be ruined by glitchers. (Yeah, I know the "It's up to EA" excuse, but it's Valve's decision to let EA decide release policy, so ultimately they're still responsible.)
They do once they ask why they can't use their phone for proper instant messaging, file sharing, streaming music, or any of a dozen other things you might want to use a 3G-connected smartphone for.
Never used Perl, eh?
You should read "JavaScript: The Good Parts". I used to think JavaScript was crap, but that book converted me. Sure, JavaScript is no Ruby, but it's a pretty good language with a few rough edges and only a couple of fundamental misfeatures... a bit like Python really.
The UK already removed the right to remain silent in 1994. Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.
We already have that, it's called MP3. ID3v2 tags allow you to store album artwork, lyrics and liner notes. All that's needed is a way to package all the MP3s together so that they look like one icon, and call it an album. iTunes already does that, so basically they're solving a non-problem.
If they really want to do so anyway, I'd suggest following the Java .jar approach. Make the album file a simple zip file with a different extension, containing MP3 files of the actual music, and a metadata directory with a standard name containing the album art and liner notes in the form of web pages. You could trivially make a nice client player for that for both Windows and OS X, and no special tools will be needed to build it. Should be easy to support on portable players too. You could optionally provide multiple resolutions of artwork, or PDF versions, but keep the web/JPEG/PNG version as the baseline.
Of course, my guess is they'll do something far more stupid, probably involving DRM.
C++ will do implicit conversions between types that Java doesn't allow.
Well, either you believe in static typing, or you don't. If you do, Java is a good choice. If you don't, Ruby is a good choice. C++, on the other hand, is static enough to be annoying, but not static enough to be safe.
I actually much prefer Objective-C to C++. Once again, the worse solution won.
Well, many type errors are discovered at compile time. Unfortunately, static typing tends to have the side effect of requiring more complex code, and often has to be worked around.
Personally, I write mostly in Java and Ruby. Java is pedantically static to a level that would make C++ blush, while Ruby is completely duck typed. I've had situations where Java's pedantic nature has caught bugs before test runs, but I've also had situations where the code was 10x as long and harder to debug because of the inflexibility. I think it's highly debatable which approach is better, and the answer probably depends on the kind of problem you're solving.
Yes, and we're talking about Rupert Murdoch here.
Oh yeah? Try <img src="picture.svg"> and see how well it works.
Assertions are for catching internal errors in software, such as API mismatch between modules. Assertions are not for catching and reporting user errors or other unexpected user behavior.
(Or at least, if you do use something as unfriendly as assertions for dealing with user error, good luck selling your product.)
So basically, you admit your code is probably wrong, but you can't be bothered to fix it? Fine, but don't complain when your code stops working or fails in someone's browser and you lose business as a result.
The way I see it, this is only incidentally a story about stupidity. Not working in a standards-compliant web browser is a good indicator of poor web application quality. The cited behavior of deliberately failing in Opera would make me unlikely to pick the product, even though I'm a Firefox user.
Well, if they developed the interface using non-standard JavaScript events that are only supported as extras by some browser makers, they deserve what they get.
Generally, if you develop a site to work in Opera, it'll work in Firefox. Opera is much pickier about JavaScript, validation errors, and so on.
The only big thing I can think of that works in Opera that doesn't work in Firefox is image elements referring to SVG.
I'm waiting for Google Uranus.
Sony Ericsson phones run Java apps, and are not locked. BlackBerry phones run Java apps and BlackBerry apps, and are not locked.
Both may be locked to a single carrier, but they're not locked with respect to what software you can run, and where you can download it from. In fact, the iPhone is the only common phone I know of which has such a control-freak approach to applications.
GNU screen.
I'm only half kidding. I learned using a command line UI, couldn't the kids being given the OLPC devices?
It's worth noting that some people are just not compatible with pair programming.
I literally cannot work with someone else watching my screen. I can't write code, I can't write text, it completely blocks me. If I were forced to do pair programming, the other person would end up writing all the code.
I'm not aware of any malware having been launched from facebook.com.
Again, I think the NoScript UI should be part of the core Firefox product.
Yes, there are many sites that require JavaScript. That's the point of NoScript--you can enable JavaScript for just the source domains you trust (e.g. Facebook), in a couple of clicks, and leave it disabled for all the other random sites you browse.
And of course, the NoScript functionality would remain off by default, so naive users wouldn't be confused by it. Just like the functionality to not download images is off by default.
I see a simple solution: get NASA management to climb into an Ares themselves and demonstrate, if they're really that confident.