why not? Chances are your home network is sitting there doing nothing. If you load it up with a game stream... so what!
It does mean you can have a teeny tiny 'games console' in front of your TV that basically acts as a input device with a tv-out port. Just enough power to stream video and sound to the TV, and possibly add enough video processing to stream movies too when they port XBMC to it!
It also means you can game from the comfort of your bed, while your PC 'suppercomputer' whines and whirrs away as loud as it likes in the basement.
I have heard rumours that Nokia was so unhappy with the sales of Windows Phones ( or more likely, their profit margin on the things) that they were considering dumping them for Android - and that the MS takeover is a reaction to that.
I'm not sure if it was the board who were pushing for that, and Elop snitched on the plans to his old buddies, or if Elop figured it all out (on his own!) that he'd end up forcing the takeover.
I liked that Microsoft admitted IE8 and IE9 were being hit, the implication being that IE10 is perfectly ok, completely unaffected and you should upgrade, but they're still going to patch it, you know, just to be on the safe side...
In fact the reason everyone loves.NET development is down to the IDE. I just had to write an admin tool in C#, and after a short time using it, it was clear the productivity gains from the IDE were huge
The language is a bit crappy all in all, but I wouldn't even consider it if it didn't have the autocomplete, intellisense, refactoring and codegen features, anyone without any knowledge of C# can write C# code using Visual Studio... which is not a huge endorsement, but it shows just how easy it is made to be.
Now I'm back to the back-end C++ system, and I am actually missing the helpfulness of the IDE. I can;t see why Microsoft couldn't have spent all that effort on the C# stuff on adding the same features to a proper language. I just hope someone else can manage it better. A C++ IDE on Linux that was as good to use as C# on Windows would make developers jump platform.
The only form I see Linux gaming succeeding in is either on set-top boxes that run a custom distribution
yep, that's exactly what will happen - Steam Linux on his own hardware will play the games as flawlessly as they do on Windows. He might configure them for a specific Ubuntu setup too, as a sop to the community, but if you want to play on anything else then you'll be at the mercy of a forum or google search to get it running perfectly.
And maybe this is the way it should be, there is so much Linux option out there that no-one could realistically support every particular way everyone has their box set up, let alone go into hardware and driver differences.
But that said, he still needs to get it running well on Linux in the first place, and that's where the community comes in - as improving gaming and development support on Linux isn't mutually exclusive even if he'll come up with yet another Linux distro. Those who think that somehow this is bad for Linux are deluded. There's space for the mainstream Linux distro that he'll make and all the others that Linux users currently use. That also means the cynicism that suggest he doesn;t give a shit about Linux and is only doing it for self-serving reasons are also deluded. He probably is doing it to help himself - but then, isn't that what every Linux user is doing too? This "selfish selflessness" is a good thing and is what Linux is built around.
For example, if WINE or something similar reached the point of enabling enough compatibility to allow many Windows games to play seamlessly, that might make a big difference.
it won't in itself, but it will be required to help establish a Linux game platform once such a thing appears. I will refer you to the old DOS games that people still play (including myself). On Windows you can run these in an emulator like DOSbox, but it can require a fair amount of twiddling that the average user just doesn't want or can do. So you can buy these pre-configured on Steam today. I would imagine Steam on Linux would have a large section dedicated to wine-based games that steam itself would manage, configure and install for you.
ah, I thought the little link had been mangled somehow between pasting it in (for example, you can't click a link on the search results page and select 'copy link' anymore as its not the link to the site, but a link to google that then redirects you to the site).
I thought maps had done something else given that he'd described a long long url.
But, but, but... I did cut and paste from the shortened link! It should have been goog.gl/... but I guess either I cocked it up, or google preferred to expand the link trying to be helpful and show us some adverts and link tracking, for our convenience, of course.
Shiver me surprised! well, not that surprised as there's always a market for the cheapest way to solve a problem, even though I would have thought the scrap value of the metal would be worth something.
that ancient VB6 app will probably still work fine - its been used for the last 10 years after all, so why would you think its not fit for purpose?
What usually happens is the adequate-but-not-pretty VB6 app is replaced by a new web app wirth all the latest "cool" technologies and ends up costing a fortune to develop and doesn't really work.
Old stuff tends to work, that's why its still used. Technology used to make it is irrelevant.
You're right that the problem with Windows RT was the black of backwards compatibility, you forget the reason for that problem was Microsoft,not the ARM chips. Anyone could recompile their code to run on ARM, MS did it for most of Office after all. Those programs that could not, or would not be re-compiled could be run on an emulation layer (a bit like DOSbox still lets me run old games).
The problem was that Microsoft in their wisdom decided that Windows RT would be a new tablet where you could only install apps from their 30%-cut app store, and that only apps written with their new WinRT API would be allowed.
Things like that ancient VB app is still not viable on a tablet form factor anyway, not unless they let you hook up a keyboard and mouse to it, and probably a monitor too.
indeed. I should think that most people don't even know who makes Breaking Bad at all - maybe they think its HBO or Fox. I'd never heard of AMC before now.
That said, I'm sure some people really do think that Apple made it, some people are dim.
why is Apple being sued even if all they did was set down a box and say "hey consumers, good stuff will be in here" and "hey producers, stick your stuff in here". You'd think with that kind of setup they're doing nothing but acting as a middle man bringing consumers and producers together so they could engage in a transaction of goods for money.
However, they didn't do this - to each side they said "we'll handle this", and charged a tidy sum for the privilege, Consumers don't see who produces the goods, and producers don;'t see who purchases them - Apple sticks a great big wall in between so that they, and only they, are the ones taking the big fat cut. As a result, the consumer has no-one else to sue - his business was with Apple.
now, Apple might well decide to sue the producer in turn for not supplying the described product, but I fear that Apple, in their greed simply set up the box like I first described and left them to it - in order to make as much money as possible with the least amount of effort. And this is the result, no-one to blame but themselves.
Then Ubuntu comes along and goes "NOOOO", and decides to do it differently.
yep, this is the way of Linux. You throw many different things at a wall and see which one sticks best. Then you standardise on that thing.
Too many people are just about bitching that one thing is better than another thing without any comprehension that this is the way FOSS systems evolve. I imagine (or would hope) that Wayland and XMir will stand on their own and one will become a dominant player over the other. Politics aside this is the way it should be. Unfortunately, once the politics and the 'my thing is better than yours' attitude gets involved, it makes dropping the poor version for the better one difficult - people try to maintain the poorer one regardless.
You see this in Openoffice v LibreOffice. Surely by now one of these would have their best bits of code migrated to the other so development and evangelism could focus efforts on just one product, but instead we still have the bitching about which one is better. (though maybe its just too soon for this example)
Hell, even with CASH transactions the government likes to take first and then asks questions
well, that's because cash is the easiest and most obvious form of money laundering, and we all know that criminal proceeds are laundered by terrorists to fund their evil activities, so when you next see someone using cash, just point to them and shout "a terrorist, a terrorist". If they complain, get a group together to chuck them in some water, if they drown they were innocent and will get 27 virgins in the afterlife.
(and before anyone says, that's witches... witches are so 10th century, terrorists are today's excuse for government control).
Oh, any Paypal is not regulated nearly as much as other credit providers. That's the problem - Visa, for example, is not allowed to freeze anyone's account unless they are suspected of being a wit... terrorist, or just disliked by the US government.
Hotmail wanted a phone, and we were forced to give them THAT
no, wrong. Hotmail wanted a phone number, and I give them that... 08770 123456. Just like my email address for some places to get past the stupid: a@b.com works every time.
indeed, they say the quality of slashdot editorial is going down....
I liked myopenid as it didn't require me to have an account with the same people I used service providers (ie I keep my identity and my stuff-I-read separate). Now I guess I'll have to go with my Google account for even more stuff and have Google track me even more easily.
I would have preferred the MyOpenID to be handed over to the community 'under new management' or similar instead of being closed. I'm having difficulty in finding a decent, independent, alternative.
you need to go compare, just because WPF is the flagship GUI tech from Microsoft doesn't mean its the dogs danglies.
There are many problems with its performance, for starters. Then there's the issue that the XAML code itself is practically inpenetrable - it might as well have been a binary protocol to describe the widgets in many cases (I especially think of where its used in TFS to describe the build workflow - truly awful).
But the biggest thing for me is that where Qt allowed you to write user controls in their QML language, with javascript as the code-behind language, you can drop these usercontrols onto a basic form, with the API to these controls the same as that used for everything. There's a lot of similarity between the two.
Imagine if MS had allowed you to write a usercontrol in WPF and then place it onto a winforms form and access it like any other control. One thing about winforms is that its really easy to work with (and doesn't require those horrible bindings or nasty event delegates or that INotifyPropertyChanged nonsense). Now add the power of a WPF usercontrol and you'd have something great.
Qt's QML is a lot like WPF, but done right. You should check it out sometime, it might open your eyes to how good stuff outside the closed microsoft world is.
the patents are not being bought - they're being licenced for 10 years with an option to continue licencing them after that.
They're also not buying the Nokia brand (except for current devices), so it'll be a Microsoft Lumia for future models.... I can see that helping them loads .
Slashdot Mirror
why not? Chances are your home network is sitting there doing nothing. If you load it up with a game stream... so what!
It does mean you can have a teeny tiny 'games console' in front of your TV that basically acts as a input device with a tv-out port. Just enough power to stream video and sound to the TV, and possibly add enough video processing to stream movies too when they port XBMC to it!
It also means you can game from the comfort of your bed, while your PC 'suppercomputer' whines and whirrs away as loud as it likes in the basement.
the difference this time is that they can't slap a hugely expensive, proprietary port on it.
No, no,no. A bribe is when you give the money up front.
I have heard rumours that Nokia was so unhappy with the sales of Windows Phones ( or more likely, their profit margin on the things) that they were considering dumping them for Android - and that the MS takeover is a reaction to that.
I'm not sure if it was the board who were pushing for that, and Elop snitched on the plans to his old buddies, or if Elop figured it all out (on his own!) that he'd end up forcing the takeover.
well, if iOS7 didn't have this sometime, then 100% of connections would not have it.
You have to start somewhere, giving it to loads of apple boys will encourage some takeup and maybe one day everyone will have it.
You believed the bulls^H^H hype?
I liked that Microsoft admitted IE8 and IE9 were being hit, the implication being that IE10 is perfectly ok, completely unaffected and you should upgrade, but they're still going to patch it, you know, just to be on the safe side...
In fact the reason everyone loves .NET development is down to the IDE. I just had to write an admin tool in C#, and after a short time using it, it was clear the productivity gains from the IDE were huge
The language is a bit crappy all in all, but I wouldn't even consider it if it didn't have the autocomplete, intellisense, refactoring and codegen features, anyone without any knowledge of C# can write C# code using Visual Studio... which is not a huge endorsement, but it shows just how easy it is made to be.
Now I'm back to the back-end C++ system, and I am actually missing the helpfulness of the IDE. I can;t see why Microsoft couldn't have spent all that effort on the C# stuff on adding the same features to a proper language. I just hope someone else can manage it better. A C++ IDE on Linux that was as good to use as C# on Windows would make developers jump platform.
The only form I see Linux gaming succeeding in is either on set-top boxes that run a custom distribution
yep, that's exactly what will happen - Steam Linux on his own hardware will play the games as flawlessly as they do on Windows. He might configure them for a specific Ubuntu setup too, as a sop to the community, but if you want to play on anything else then you'll be at the mercy of a forum or google search to get it running perfectly.
And maybe this is the way it should be, there is so much Linux option out there that no-one could realistically support every particular way everyone has their box set up, let alone go into hardware and driver differences.
But that said, he still needs to get it running well on Linux in the first place, and that's where the community comes in - as improving gaming and development support on Linux isn't mutually exclusive even if he'll come up with yet another Linux distro. Those who think that somehow this is bad for Linux are deluded. There's space for the mainstream Linux distro that he'll make and all the others that Linux users currently use. That also means the cynicism that suggest he doesn;t give a shit about Linux and is only doing it for self-serving reasons are also deluded. He probably is doing it to help himself - but then, isn't that what every Linux user is doing too? This "selfish selflessness" is a good thing and is what Linux is built around.
For example, if WINE or something similar reached the point of enabling enough compatibility to allow many Windows games to play seamlessly, that might make a big difference.
it won't in itself, but it will be required to help establish a Linux game platform once such a thing appears. I will refer you to the old DOS games that people still play (including myself). On Windows you can run these in an emulator like DOSbox, but it can require a fair amount of twiddling that the average user just doesn't want or can do. So you can buy these pre-configured on Steam today. I would imagine Steam on Linux would have a large section dedicated to wine-based games that steam itself would manage, configure and install for you.
ah, I thought the little link had been mangled somehow between pasting it in (for example, you can't click a link on the search results page and select 'copy link' anymore as its not the link to the site, but a link to google that then redirects you to the site).
I thought maps had done something else given that he'd described a long long url.
But, but, but... I did cut and paste from the shortened link! It should have been goog.gl/... but I guess either I cocked it up, or google preferred to expand the link trying to be helpful and show us some adverts and link tracking, for our convenience, of course.
Shiver me surprised! well, not that surprised as there's always a market for the cheapest way to solve a problem, even though I would have thought the scrap value of the metal would be worth something.
You weren't wrong when you said dozens
Alice Cooper is a rockstar, and his Python skills are legendary.
Not sure what his Perl's like though.
that ancient VB6 app will probably still work fine - its been used for the last 10 years after all, so why would you think its not fit for purpose?
What usually happens is the adequate-but-not-pretty VB6 app is replaced by a new web app wirth all the latest "cool" technologies and ends up costing a fortune to develop and doesn't really work.
Old stuff tends to work, that's why its still used. Technology used to make it is irrelevant.
You're right that the problem with Windows RT was the black of backwards compatibility, you forget the reason for that problem was Microsoft,not the ARM chips. Anyone could recompile their code to run on ARM, MS did it for most of Office after all. Those programs that could not, or would not be re-compiled could be run on an emulation layer (a bit like DOSbox still lets me run old games).
The problem was that Microsoft in their wisdom decided that Windows RT would be a new tablet where you could only install apps from their 30%-cut app store, and that only apps written with their new WinRT API would be allowed.
Things like that ancient VB app is still not viable on a tablet form factor anyway, not unless they let you hook up a keyboard and mouse to it, and probably a monitor too.
indeed. I should think that most people don't even know who makes Breaking Bad at all - maybe they think its HBO or Fox. I'd never heard of AMC before now.
That said, I'm sure some people really do think that Apple made it, some people are dim.
why is Apple being sued even if all they did was set down a box and say "hey consumers, good stuff will be in here" and "hey producers, stick your stuff in here". You'd think with that kind of setup they're doing nothing but acting as a middle man bringing consumers and producers together so they could engage in a transaction of goods for money.
However, they didn't do this - to each side they said "we'll handle this", and charged a tidy sum for the privilege, Consumers don't see who produces the goods, and producers don;'t see who purchases them - Apple sticks a great big wall in between so that they, and only they, are the ones taking the big fat cut. As a result, the consumer has no-one else to sue - his business was with Apple.
now, Apple might well decide to sue the producer in turn for not supplying the described product, but I fear that Apple, in their greed simply set up the box like I first described and left them to it - in order to make as much money as possible with the least amount of effort. And this is the result, no-one to blame but themselves.
ok, the way of FOSS - because we do have BSD if Linux isn't to your taste.
Then Ubuntu comes along and goes "NOOOO", and decides to do it differently.
yep, this is the way of Linux. You throw many different things at a wall and see which one sticks best. Then you standardise on that thing.
Too many people are just about bitching that one thing is better than another thing without any comprehension that this is the way FOSS systems evolve. I imagine (or would hope) that Wayland and XMir will stand on their own and one will become a dominant player over the other. Politics aside this is the way it should be. Unfortunately, once the politics and the 'my thing is better than yours' attitude gets involved, it makes dropping the poor version for the better one difficult - people try to maintain the poorer one regardless.
You see this in Openoffice v LibreOffice. Surely by now one of these would have their best bits of code migrated to the other so development and evangelism could focus efforts on just one product, but instead we still have the bitching about which one is better. (though maybe its just too soon for this example)
Hell, even with CASH transactions the government likes to take first and then asks questions
well, that's because cash is the easiest and most obvious form of money laundering, and we all know that criminal proceeds are laundered by terrorists to fund their evil activities, so when you next see someone using cash, just point to them and shout "a terrorist, a terrorist". If they complain, get a group together to chuck them in some water, if they drown they were innocent and will get 27 virgins in the afterlife.
(and before anyone says, that's witches... witches are so 10th century, terrorists are today's excuse for government control).
Oh, any Paypal is not regulated nearly as much as other credit providers. That's the problem - Visa, for example, is not allowed to freeze anyone's account unless they are suspected of being a wit... terrorist, or just disliked by the US government.
Hotmail wanted a phone, and we were forced to give them THAT
no, wrong. Hotmail wanted a phone number, and I give them that... 08770 123456.
Just like my email address for some places to get past the stupid: a@b.com works every time.
indeed, they say the quality of slashdot editorial is going down....
I liked myopenid as it didn't require me to have an account with the same people I used service providers (ie I keep my identity and my stuff-I-read separate). Now I guess I'll have to go with my Google account for even more stuff and have Google track me even more easily.
I would have preferred the MyOpenID to be handed over to the community 'under new management' or similar instead of being closed. I'm having difficulty in finding a decent, independent, alternative.
and if they brought back the Kin name, that would be double-awesome, surely.
The PhoneKinZune by Microsoft.
you need to go compare, just because WPF is the flagship GUI tech from Microsoft doesn't mean its the dogs danglies.
There are many problems with its performance, for starters. Then there's the issue that the XAML code itself is practically inpenetrable - it might as well have been a binary protocol to describe the widgets in many cases (I especially think of where its used in TFS to describe the build workflow - truly awful).
But the biggest thing for me is that where Qt allowed you to write user controls in their QML language, with javascript as the code-behind language, you can drop these usercontrols onto a basic form, with the API to these controls the same as that used for everything. There's a lot of similarity between the two.
Imagine if MS had allowed you to write a usercontrol in WPF and then place it onto a winforms form and access it like any other control. One thing about winforms is that its really easy to work with (and doesn't require those horrible bindings or nasty event delegates or that INotifyPropertyChanged nonsense). Now add the power of a WPF usercontrol and you'd have something great.
Qt's QML is a lot like WPF, but done right. You should check it out sometime, it might open your eyes to how good stuff outside the closed microsoft world is.
the patents are not being bought - they're being licenced for 10 years with an option to continue licencing them after that.
They're also not buying the Nokia brand (except for current devices), so it'll be a Microsoft Lumia for future models.... I can see that helping them loads .