Yep, I loved re-enactment fighting with mild steel weaponry, though I was best with a spear. (note: below observations are from dark age weaponry, viking/saxon era, not late medieval greatswords or renaissance rapiers).
I guess the virtual version would work better with a lightsabre-based approach - hence no resistance feedback if you slice someone in half.
You also need the feedback of the weight of the weapon, a steel sword is quite cumbersome to wield, the weight of it will drag you around so you cannot twist and reverse direction quite as easily as a virtual sword, even assuming you don't have a lightweight, cheap, plastic sword shaped wand to use with the controller. And then you will often use a shield, and they get heavy quite quickly, too many hits I made were against opponents who's shield arms were getting a bit tired and droopy.
it means the battery lasts longer - if you can twice the work in the same time, that means the same amount of work takes half the time - so you've cut your CPU usage by half.
Of course, this doesn't mean your battery life doubles as most of the battery goes towards running the screen, but you should get a small boost which you''ll see when running CPU-intensive tasks, like games.
I totally agree - and I even think that "serious" languages should be harder to use, within reason, to stop the cult of the 'developer productivity' and 'ease of use' from taking over. There is a place for these languages, but the people using them need to know that they are not the professional experts.
So Java,.NET and its wizards, and some script languages have not done the industry any good. The time spent making them could so much be better spent on creating the class libraries to make the other languages more functional.
LinkenIn... I'm not sure why they were hacked, but it proves my point that we don;t need new 'easy to use' languages, we need the existing ones to come with 'solved problem' templates - liek in real world engineering, if you want to build a bridge, you don't start from scratch, you start from one of several known-working models and tweak them to look like what you want. Occasionally you push the boundaries by introducing new materials to make them, but then you also go with the rigorous testing that proves it won't fall down. Sure, you sometimes get issues, but they are insignificant compared to the number of still-standing bridges in the world.
I thought he was assuming VB was the only language that had this feature and was thus being critical.
Still, VB doesn't have a difficult to parse structure, way back, we used to take VB classes written by our app guys and generate C++ code that would run on the (Aix) server from it. The parser (that I didn't work on admittedly) was done by our junior guy and he didn't have problems with it.
I agree with you on pythons use of whitespace, while I like indentation, I find its annoying I can't put a line of debug in handily indented at the first column so I can remove it once I'm done with it (or indent it properly if I'm keeping it). I wish python had optional curly brackets for this kind of thing.
3, and 4 are fair points. 1 and 2 are just wrong. VB6 apps are no worse than any other, and you can run VB6 on windows 7 64bit with a patch that you can download from MS.
I do think that VB7 would have killed.NET dead, which is exactly why they didn't make one. I understand MS wanted the original.NET to be much more VB compatible, but the.NET guys didn't (or rather couldn't) want to do this, they wanted to make their own version of Java and nothing was going to stop them. Well, until today when MS has realised.NET performance and efficiency is crap and they need to go back to native code. Maybe now they'll make a VB7 that is geared toward quick-n-easy Metro apps, then Windows8 might actually become popular.
absolutely true, but if you look at TheDailyWTF you'll see that so-called 'professional' programmers can come up stuff that's just as bad. Only they think they're coding gods, at least the salesman with his VB app knows its just a quick n dirty piece of crap tooling that he uses to get his work done.
In my place, I know several VB programmers who happily say this, and they know that one day we'll rewrite their apps "properly" so they are less expensive to maintain and work better, when we have the time... which will probably be never.
exactly, though I'm quite "meh" on VB6, it is still simple enough to slap something out in it in next to no time, and it works. Sure I'd like the IDE to improve and a couple of niggles to disappear, but hey - all languages have them, including.NET.
There was a thread on/. recently about teaching salespeople to code - in my experience you don't bother trying, you just give them a copy of VB6 and tell them to knock themselves out. Next thing you know, they've knocked up something that does what they want. Give them a copy of VS2012 and tell them to do the same thing using WPF front end with a C# WCF webservices remote service and they wouldn't be able to do it. And that pretty much sums up why VB6 is still with us and was so popular.
Not gonna happen. All big sites want to be OpenID *provider*, but none of them will accept OpenID Logins.
true, but with more and more reputation-busting exploits like this, you'd think they'd be happy to pass the password-storage problem to someone else. No more "we were hacked and lost all our passwords" news.
Maybe the issue is that they just don't trust the providers to be secure themselves, though if that's the case, it's still better for the site (but not the user).
alas mainframes (or at least - thin clients attached to remote processing power somewhere on a network) are back, only they called them "the cloud" this time round to make it sound a bit cooler.
plenty of hardware vendors will sign on - Microsoft will only let them pre-install Windows if they have it, and so Dell, HP, Asus, etc will all have this crap setup and rocking from day 1.
that's true, except the scammer would have to first appear legit, I wonder if the russian mafia has any fronts that can do that???
What would be useful is if RH got themselves a key, based on the Microsoft one (and therefore effectively un-cancellable) and then allowed downstream distros (including self-rolled ones) to use it too (yes, you know where I'm going with this).
As there's about as much security in the system as windows update, they might as well do this if they can't scrap the idea completely.
surely the pre-existing medical condition is a bonus if they're paying for health care themselves. Got to keep the American medical industry thriving, how else can you afford to hire foreign doctors on exorbitant salaries?
amen. I'm sure there are Russian hackers right now thinking "oh no, we can't copy Flame for our own purposes because it only attacks Arab countries".
I wonder if a Flame variant is already out there, quietly waiting to do its thing after the fuss has died down a little? If Windwos Update tries to download a special certificate hotfix from mikrosoft.ru, I'd be reinstalling the entire OS.
the thing I liked about this was the "changing web destinations on a per click basis to fund..." - in other words, the UN is going to become a world government funded by advertising!
oh, I was talking about real Visual Studio - got knows what MonoDevelop is like, all my linux dev is done using Code::Blocks or Eclipse. And I think more of my Windows dev will be done in those too!
they already have abandoned.NET - the new APIs for Windows 8 is called WinRT and its the only API supported. Its a native API meaning performance we never quite got with.NET.
However, there are wrappers for C# apps to consume WinRT APIs, so you won't notice too much of a difference, but ou will have some porting to do as they're not 100% compatible with the old.NET assemblies.
Java is the new COBOL, and that means it will survive for a long time. C# is the new Java, as MS seems keen on native stuff this decade. We'll have to give it a couple of years for industry to catch up to where MS is going, but catch up they will, so while there are a lot of C# jobs out there today, they will start to diminish and C# apps will become legacy desktop apps as the cool new stuff goes HTML5 GUIs with C++ cloud backends.
its sort-of true, but nearly everyone has the side-panels either docked together, tabbed or slide-out from a hidden position. I never liked the slide-out bits, and choose 3 or 4 tabs in the left hand panel so I get a large area for text - just a side panel at the left and bottom.
But MS IDEs have always had more dialogs and panels than you can shake a stick at.
previously the Mono dudes didn't care - Novell paid their wages and all was shiny. Until they had to make their own revenue and suddenly things look different.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, I loved re-enactment fighting with mild steel weaponry, though I was best with a spear. (note: below observations are from dark age weaponry, viking/saxon era, not late medieval greatswords or renaissance rapiers).
I guess the virtual version would work better with a lightsabre-based approach - hence no resistance feedback if you slice someone in half.
You also need the feedback of the weight of the weapon, a steel sword is quite cumbersome to wield, the weight of it will drag you around so you cannot twist and reverse direction quite as easily as a virtual sword, even assuming you don't have a lightweight, cheap, plastic sword shaped wand to use with the controller. And then you will often use a shield, and they get heavy quite quickly, too many hits I made were against opponents who's shield arms were getting a bit tired and droopy.
is get rid of Java, then you'd see another 100% performance improvement, and it might not suck up all my RAM and pause occasionally.
it means the battery lasts longer - if you can twice the work in the same time, that means the same amount of work takes half the time - so you've cut your CPU usage by half.
Of course, this doesn't mean your battery life doubles as most of the battery goes towards running the screen, but you should get a small boost which you''ll see when running CPU-intensive tasks, like games.
It does, I've had it running, though I don't really use it very much at all.
http://www.fortypoundhead.com/showcontent.asp?artid=20502
I totally agree - and I even think that "serious" languages should be harder to use, within reason, to stop the cult of the 'developer productivity' and 'ease of use' from taking over. There is a place for these languages, but the people using them need to know that they are not the professional experts.
So Java, .NET and its wizards, and some script languages have not done the industry any good. The time spent making them could so much be better spent on creating the class libraries to make the other languages more functional.
LinkenIn... I'm not sure why they were hacked, but it proves my point that we don;t need new 'easy to use' languages, we need the existing ones to come with 'solved problem' templates - liek in real world engineering, if you want to build a bridge, you don't start from scratch, you start from one of several known-working models and tweak them to look like what you want. Occasionally you push the boundaries by introducing new materials to make them, but then you also go with the rigorous testing that proves it won't fall down. Sure, you sometimes get issues, but they are insignificant compared to the number of still-standing bridges in the world.
IT needs to be more like that.
I thought he was assuming VB was the only language that had this feature and was thus being critical.
Still, VB doesn't have a difficult to parse structure, way back, we used to take VB classes written by our app guys and generate C++ code that would run on the (Aix) server from it. The parser (that I didn't work on admittedly) was done by our junior guy and he didn't have problems with it.
I agree with you on pythons use of whitespace, while I like indentation, I find its annoying I can't put a line of debug in handily indented at the first column so I can remove it once I'm done with it (or indent it properly if I'm keeping it). I wish python had optional curly brackets for this kind of thing.
3, and 4 are fair points. 1 and 2 are just wrong. VB6 apps are no worse than any other, and you can run VB6 on windows 7 64bit with a patch that you can download from MS.
I do think that VB7 would have killed .NET dead, which is exactly why they didn't make one. I understand MS wanted the original .NET to be much more VB compatible, but the .NET guys didn't (or rather couldn't) want to do this, they wanted to make their own version of Java and nothing was going to stop them. Well, until today when MS has realised .NET performance and efficiency is crap and they need to go back to native code. Maybe now they'll make a VB7 that is geared toward quick-n-easy Metro apps, then Windows8 might actually become popular.
Any language that uses a newline as a statement terminator is demented.
like python?
absolutely true, but if you look at TheDailyWTF you'll see that so-called 'professional' programmers can come up stuff that's just as bad. Only they think they're coding gods, at least the salesman with his VB app knows its just a quick n dirty piece of crap tooling that he uses to get his work done.
In my place, I know several VB programmers who happily say this, and they know that one day we'll rewrite their apps "properly" so they are less expensive to maintain and work better, when we have the time... which will probably be never.
exactly, though I'm quite "meh" on VB6, it is still simple enough to slap something out in it in next to no time, and it works. Sure I'd like the IDE to improve and a couple of niggles to disappear, but hey - all languages have them, including .NET.
There was a thread on /. recently about teaching salespeople to code - in my experience you don't bother trying, you just give them a copy of VB6 and tell them to knock themselves out. Next thing you know, they've knocked up something that does what they want. Give them a copy of VS2012 and tell them to do the same thing using WPF front end with a C# WCF webservices remote service and they wouldn't be able to do it. And that pretty much sums up why VB6 is still with us and was so popular.
Not gonna happen. All big sites want to be OpenID *provider*, but none of them will accept OpenID Logins.
true, but with more and more reputation-busting exploits like this, you'd think they'd be happy to pass the password-storage problem to someone else. No more "we were hacked and lost all our passwords" news.
Maybe the issue is that they just don't trust the providers to be secure themselves, though if that's the case, it's still better for the site (but not the user).
alas mainframes (or at least - thin clients attached to remote processing power somewhere on a network) are back, only they called them "the cloud" this time round to make it sound a bit cooler.
depends how rigorous the vetting process is, it could be really strict, or it could be about as good as, say, verisign's validation methods.
not quite - the current vulnerability is via the hacked certificates. The recent update blacklisted 3 certs used in windows update.
plenty of hardware vendors will sign on - Microsoft will only let them pre-install Windows if they have it, and so Dell, HP, Asus, etc will all have this crap setup and rocking from day 1.
that's true, except the scammer would have to first appear legit, I wonder if the russian mafia has any fronts that can do that???
What would be useful is if RH got themselves a key, based on the Microsoft one (and therefore effectively un-cancellable) and then allowed downstream distros (including self-rolled ones) to use it too (yes, you know where I'm going with this).
As there's about as much security in the system as windows update, they might as well do this if they can't scrap the idea completely.
surely the pre-existing medical condition is a bonus if they're paying for health care themselves. Got to keep the American medical industry thriving, how else can you afford to hire foreign doctors on exorbitant salaries?
amen. I'm sure there are Russian hackers right now thinking "oh no, we can't copy Flame for our own purposes because it only attacks Arab countries".
I wonder if a Flame variant is already out there, quietly waiting to do its thing after the fuss has died down a little? If Windwos Update tries to download a special certificate hotfix from mikrosoft.ru, I'd be reinstalling the entire OS.
and you thought Conficker was bad!
the thing I liked about this was the "changing web destinations on a per click basis to fund..." - in other words, the UN is going to become a world government funded by advertising!
who knows, maybe its designed to let you write metro apps in flash.
oh, I was talking about real Visual Studio - got knows what MonoDevelop is like, all my linux dev is done using Code::Blocks or Eclipse. And I think more of my Windows dev will be done in those too!
they already have abandoned .NET - the new APIs for Windows 8 is called WinRT and its the only API supported. Its a native API meaning performance we never quite got with .NET.
However, there are wrappers for C# apps to consume WinRT APIs, so you won't notice too much of a difference, but ou will have some porting to do as they're not 100% compatible with the old .NET assemblies.
Java is the new COBOL, and that means it will survive for a long time. C# is the new Java, as MS seems keen on native stuff this decade. We'll have to give it a couple of years for industry to catch up to where MS is going, but catch up they will, so while there are a lot of C# jobs out there today, they will start to diminish and C# apps will become legacy desktop apps as the cool new stuff goes HTML5 GUIs with C++ cloud backends.
its sort-of true, but nearly everyone has the side-panels either docked together, tabbed or slide-out from a hidden position. I never liked the slide-out bits, and choose 3 or 4 tabs in the left hand panel so I get a large area for text - just a side panel at the left and bottom.
But MS IDEs have always had more dialogs and panels than you can shake a stick at.
previously the Mono dudes didn't care - Novell paid their wages and all was shiny. Until they had to make their own revenue and suddenly things look different.