I hitchhiked the length and breadth of Ireland as a teenager. In other for these inanimate hitchers to have a genuine experience, drivers should live up to their obligations and:
- Inaudibly admonish/curse at them through the windshield. - Stop 10 feet away and then wheelspin away at the last moment, veering wildly. - Swing planks of wood out of the passenger window at high speed in an effort to decapitate the hitchers (I made the mistake of hitching outside Limerick City *once*). - Drive them to some mountainous vista, stop the car, and lecture them for 1 hour about the end of the world (I made the mistake of taking a lift from a Jehova Witness *once*). - Make signs indicating that they are going in impossible directions (i.e. taking a left turn off a precipitous 12 mile mountain pass).
It's a dead practice in Ireland now, which saddens me. Anyway those hitchers should NOT make it to wherever they're going. For one thing, they can't duck.
It's been said above but I think it deserves more than one mention.
I cackled with glee as I deleted the atrocious Yahoo Messenger from my Mac. AdiumX is one of the only perfect apps I have used in my 21 years of computing.
My niece stood on my once beloved Dell 8200 the other day and cracked the LCD. I said, "era, what the hell...".
I did a development job with Flex lately and was impressed, to say the least. In less than a day I had prototyped the entire interface of a rich administration UI, including tabbed panels, wizards, drag and drop between lists, etc.
Contrast this again so called AJAX; the day would have spent trying to figure out why my resizable table columns were jumping across the page in internet exploder. A comparable prototype would have taken weeks.
Once finished that work I thought seriouly about moving my own projects across to Flex but was put off by the prohibitive price (OK, I see this has changed in some way apparently...) So I investigated Lazslo, and herein is the point I want to make.
Laszlo lacks an *extremely* important aspect of Flex; declarative bindings from client side flash controls/models to remote java beans. In Flex, you can provide a thin service wrapper for whatever API you want to work against and declaratively tie client apps to it in minutes. Flash looks after the (asynchronous) serialization of deeply nested java obj graphs to actionscript and vice versa; in my experience this worked flawlessly. Lazslo on the other hand required the client to invoke something akin to a servlet that would generate a bunch of XML; this could be parsed by the client runtime and various controls populated.
Seems to me this is quite a major shortfalling compared to Flex which can for instance bidirectionally bind list controls to the return value of your service method public List getXXXXX. IMHO it puts the products in two different leagues. And mind you this was Flex 1.5 so probably the technology is better again. Apologies for sounding like a salesman..but I felt here at last was a web UI technology usable without selling one's soul...
This trend spells bad news for Be Inc, who are staking their lives on their "new" applicance OS, BeIA, to the point that the last line on their main website reads:
"We also offer BeOS, an alternative operating system for personal computers"
Nintendo's N64 rendering hardware was once hailed as equivalent to having an O2 sitting under your TV...and, in fairness, it did make the PSX look rather scratchy by comparison.
However, the PSX quickly became "King of the Consoles" despite this fact, because, unlike Nintendo, both Sony and the game producers recognised the fact that games consoles are no longer the sole domain of ten year old kids - and consequently produced games with more adult, complex, violent, and engaging themes...this diversity resulted in unprecedented sales, in turn leading to more concentrated development efforts and games of a standard which few could have predicted...a profitable feedback loop.
For Nintendo to avoid abject failure, they have to kill off the juvenile Mario, Waveracer, and Pokemon, and start targeting that nameless bunch of beer drinking lads shamelessly gathered around Tekken, Fifa or Metal Gear Solid on a winter's night.
Having glanced at the demos linked to, Nintendo look like making the same mistake all over again...also, why make the same mistake as Sega in using a proprietary CD format???
Regardless of how apparently unpleasant the PS2 is to code on, consumers will pick it up not only to play sequels to some of the finest console games ever, but also as their domestic DVD player.
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I hitchhiked the length and breadth of Ireland as a teenager. In other for these inanimate hitchers to have a genuine experience, drivers should live up to their obligations and:
- Inaudibly admonish/curse at them through the windshield.
- Stop 10 feet away and then wheelspin away at the last moment, veering wildly.
- Swing planks of wood out of the passenger window at high speed in an effort to decapitate the hitchers (I made the mistake of hitching outside Limerick City *once*).
- Drive them to some mountainous vista, stop the car, and lecture them for 1 hour about the end of the world (I made the mistake of taking a lift from a Jehova Witness *once*).
- Make signs indicating that they are going in impossible directions (i.e. taking a left turn off a precipitous 12 mile mountain pass).
It's a dead practice in Ireland now, which saddens me. Anyway those hitchers should NOT make it to wherever they're going. For one thing, they can't duck.
It's been said above but I think it deserves more than one mention.
I cackled with glee as I deleted the atrocious Yahoo Messenger from my Mac. AdiumX is one of the only perfect apps I have used in my 21 years of computing.
My niece stood on my once beloved Dell 8200 the other day and cracked the LCD. I said, "era, what the hell...".
http://adiumx.com/screenshots.php
I did a development job with Flex lately and was impressed, to say the least. In less than a day I had prototyped the entire interface of a rich administration UI, including tabbed panels, wizards, drag and drop between lists, etc.
Contrast this again so called AJAX; the day would have spent trying to figure out why my resizable table columns were jumping across the page in internet exploder. A comparable prototype would have taken weeks.
Once finished that work I thought seriouly about moving my own projects across to Flex but was put off by the prohibitive price (OK, I see this has changed in some way apparently...) So I investigated Lazslo, and herein is the point I want to make.
Laszlo lacks an *extremely* important aspect of Flex; declarative bindings from client side flash controls/models to remote java beans. In Flex, you can provide a thin service wrapper for whatever API you want to work against and declaratively tie client apps to it in minutes. Flash looks after the (asynchronous) serialization of deeply nested java obj graphs to actionscript and vice versa; in my experience this worked flawlessly. Lazslo on the other hand required the client to invoke something akin to a servlet that would generate a bunch of XML; this could be parsed by the client runtime and various controls populated.
Seems to me this is quite a major shortfalling compared to Flex which can for instance bidirectionally bind list controls to the return value of your service method public List getXXXXX. IMHO it puts the products in two different leagues. And mind you this was Flex 1.5 so probably the technology is better again. Apologies for sounding like a salesman..but I felt here at last was a web UI technology usable without selling one's soul...
Whatever happened to Chess Piece Face?
This trend spells bad news for Be Inc, who are staking their lives on their "new" applicance OS, BeIA, to the point that the last line on their main website reads: "We also offer BeOS, an alternative operating system for personal computers"
However, the PSX quickly became "King of the Consoles" despite this fact, because, unlike Nintendo, both Sony and the game producers recognised the fact that games consoles are no longer the sole domain of ten year old kids - and consequently produced games with more adult, complex, violent, and engaging themes...this diversity resulted in unprecedented sales, in turn leading to more concentrated development efforts and games of a standard which few could have predicted...a profitable feedback loop.
For Nintendo to avoid abject failure, they have to kill off the juvenile Mario, Waveracer, and Pokemon, and start targeting that nameless bunch of beer drinking lads shamelessly gathered around Tekken, Fifa or Metal Gear Solid on a winter's night. Having glanced at the demos linked to, Nintendo look like making the same mistake all over again...also, why make the same mistake as Sega in using a proprietary CD format??? Regardless of how apparently unpleasant the PS2 is to code on, consumers will pick it up not only to play sequels to some of the finest console games ever, but also as their domestic DVD player.