Not so with Microsoft; they know how to milk a cash cow when they find one. Merchandising! Merchandising! Umm, I don't get it. What experience does Microsoft have in merchandising? Office the coloring book? Office the lunch box? Anyway, the merchandising is just advertising. Microsoft isn't going to make hundreds of millions of dollars on merchandising. They are going to make hundreds of millions of dollars on games.
They're almost certainly going to pack luke's early life with exciting star-flung adventures, cameos of star wars characters, and a constant use of the force powers he supposedly didn't know he had.
Hahah. You mean that Luke's entire childhood and adolescence will be filled adventures that he--and the writers--will ignore and forget. He will demonstrate unknown, confusing powers that he will confront with his family but will suppress around friends and outsiders. He will have relationships with characters that he will be intricately involved with later in life, yet everyone involved will ignore their early experiences. And there will be plenty of teen angst, forbidden love, and sexual tension.
In fact, Rich McCallum will not have to develop any new plot lines, and the writers can lift them directly from Smallville. Just replace Clark with Luke, the Kents with the Lars, Lana Lang with Leia, Chloe with C3PO/R2D2, Lex Luthor with Darth Vader, and Lionel Luthor with Emperor Palpatine!
Udi Manber was a professor at the University of Arizona back in the day when Web pages were grey and most of the Web could still be viewed in the text-based browser Lynx. He tortured students (myself included) in classes like Algorithms, his specialty, and Automatas, Grammars, and Languages. Actually, he was pretty level-headed for a university professor. Instead of teaching his students how to recite algorithms and theory from a big cookbook, he taught us how to understand and develop them from scratch--for the most part, that is. One thing I'll never forget is that you never understand proofs of NP-complete reductions, you just get used to them. For more, his book, Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach, is recommended reading.
Since the University of Arizona was a research institution, he applied his expertise in algorithms to the Web. That was his ticket out of academia into the real world, including stopovers at Yahoo!, A9, (and others?) and now Google. The moral of this little story: useful things can actually come out of academia!
I think it's kind of insulting to James Doohan just to encapsulate remberences of him solely as his most well-known character.
Here's a little blurb taken straight from the CNN obit:
When the series ended in 1969, Doohan found himself typecast as Montgomery Scott, the canny engineer with a burr in his voice. In 1973, he complained to his dentist, who advised him: "Jimmy, you're going to be Scotty long after you're dead. If I were you, I'd go with the flow."
"I took his advice," said Doohan, "and since then everything's been just lovely."
To most people, James Doohan was Scotty, is Scotty, and always will be Scotty. It's not insulting at all. Here's a guy who knew what he was, accepted it, and lived an enjoyable, pleasant life for it. We'd all be better off by learning a lesson from him.
Gettng a chargeback from the CC company for this would be at best underhanded and at worst immoral or fraudulent. He was not charged for something he didn't approve. He was charged for something he forgot about.
I would agree except the guy had 60 days to dispute the charges with Microsoft and did not know about them until over a month after he was charged. Yes, he was notified by email, but email is not a reliable delivery system for billing. Messages can too easily get lost amidst spam and changing email addresses.
In that sense, getting the renewal message by email is as bad as canceling gym membership by snail mail, as the previous poster mentioned. It sounds like the guy made a good effort to dispute the charges with Microsoft within 60 days and that Microsoft is being at best underhanded and at worst immoral or fraudulent.
Yes, it is a good idea to simplify GUI programming with scripting languages. I used to work on applications that had screens and screens of text, images, and some forms, carefully designed by graphic artists and customized for multiple clients. We basically did the same thing and designed a scripting language that was interpreted using a UI class library. However, the scripting language and class library were all proprietary and not useful to anyone else.
It used to take someone with a 4-year CS/CE/IT degree or related experience to put buttons on a form, which is ridiculous. The Web made it easier for UI engineers to design Web apps with some HTML. Maybe XAML will do the same thing for the desktop.
I think the title says it all. I mean, BOWLS? Who the hell is on crack at MS?
According to the article (which was even blockquoted in the prior post), the bowls idea did not come from MS but from "students from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands". So the question should be, what are students smoking in the Netherlands?
Windows does have a built-in language. More precisely, it has 2 of them, VBScript and JScript. They've been included with Windows since Win 2000 and can be downloaded for 95 & 98.
VBScript and JScript are pretty good, basic languages for beginners. They have the basic features of programming languages (variables, statements, functions, I/O, etc.) without some of the messy details (like pointers). Their syntax is similar to more popular languages (VBScript to VB, JScript to C/C++/Java/C#/etc.). They also support advanced features for more advanced developers (like COM objects). Unfortunately, they are interpreted instead of compiled, so debugging errors could be a pain for beginners (but then when isn't it:-).
When I started four years ago this was the degree to have if you wanted to be guaranteed a job. Now it seems run-of-the-mill and it does not set you apart from the masses whatsoever.
There's one thing that will surely "set you apart from the masses"; it's called talent. Usually that goes hand in hand with actually having a passion for the subject - it doesn't sound like you have this.
This is too true, and the market is finally weeding out the fakers. During the technology boom, the job market attracted way too many people who wanted a big, fat paycheck and sweet perks but who didn't want to grapple with technology. Unfortunately, since jobs were in demand, these people found work anyway, despite lousy attidutes and work ethics. Now that the job market is getting tighter, the jobs are going to the people who really enjoy doing this stuff--contemplating core dumps, analyzing the interaction between multiple processes, staring at memory contents, etc. There will always be jobs for good employees, but when things get tight, the poor employees can go elsewhere.
I've been there and back again. My friends and I grew up on consoles through high school, then we shifted to PCs during college, and now we are back on consoles again.
One big reason is finances. Our parents wouldn't invest in bleeding edge machines and games when we were kids, but my friends and I would when we had enough disposable income to chase after tech toys. Now, we are starting our own families, and it's a lot cheaper to invest in a console instead of the latest video and sound cards.
Another big reason is logistics. When we were kids, we wouldn't drag our computers around to a LAN party, but we would when we were young and single in college. Now with wives and some kids, it's easier to just drop by a friend's house for an evening and play on a console instead of loading up our gear for a LAN party. I have a few PCs on a small LAN for some Starcraft, but, again, there's no way we could afford to upgrade those for the latest and greatest games.
However, when it came down to picking out a console, it came down to taste. Now, we are all about casual, fun gaming, so I went with the Gamecube. Whenever we really want some seriously long and detailed strategy games, we play some Starcraft on the LAN, but those games are usually too long and involved for our taste. We want something easy to pick up, play a few games, and move along and spend some time with our wives and families--or get them to game with us. We don't want anything too violent, cause the kids will pick it up and become little menaces, especially to us! Plus, the Cube takes us back to when we started gaming, playing Super Smash Bros. Melee with Mario, Zelda, etc., so it's back to consoles for us.
It may just be me, but in my opinion the physics model is one of the most important features of a game. Good physics means great control, which makes all the difference between a good game and a great game.
Take, for example, the difference in physics between Super Mario 2 and 3. Each character in Super Mario 2 had their own funky physics, like Luigi's leg-spinning jump, which was sort of the charm of the game. However, Super Mario 3 had solid physics where you could easily predict where your character was going and send the character where you wanted it to go. I think that's a big reason why Super Mario 2 is a good game and Super Mario 3 is one of the best of all time.
Anyway, to relate this back to the article, a good side-scrolling game development kit needs a good or customizable physics model. Do many open game development kits emphasize that?
The more closely the dynamic of company (and in turn, each of it's sub groups) resembles that really fun softball/basketball/water polo/lacrosse team you played on before high school (before sports got really competitive) or that club team you played on in college, the better and more productive it will be.
This is so true. I left my last development job a couple of times to go back to school, but I kept returning because of the team of people who worked there. We did not just develop our team dynamic by working together but also because of "beer Friday." Every other Friday, the boss would bring in beers, stop work around 4:30pm or so, and we would hang out for a few hours with a couple of cold ones.
At the end of last year, higher-ups decided to close our division, lay off half the staff, and relocate the other half from the Southwest US to the East Coast. The only people who stayed with the company wanted to live on the East Coast. Everyone else left since the team was going to be disassembled, and the company lost the development team.
Ownership by every member of the company is essential.
This is also true, and it sounds a lot like Extreme Programming's "common code ownership." I've been on projects where I have been handed small tasks bit-by-bit, and I've been on projects where I have been handed larger tasks with more authority. I have been much more productive on the latter, since I did not have to verify every detail with a manager. However, larger tasks require consistently producing high-quality code, which I have to verify to myself.
I work at a shop that has adopted some XP practices. Generally, I'm not a fan of pair programming, and we don't do a lot of it, but there are situations where pair programming has its advantages.
Pairing a programmer new to a project with a programmer experienced with a project helps bring the new programmer up to speed. The experienced programmer can explain what design decisions made the code what it is.
Pair programming to extend a system works well when both programmers have different knowledge about the system. Together, they will be able to remember things and get the new functionality implemented faster than if either one worked alone.
Pair programming to implement a new design forces both programmers to clearly know what they are doing. It takes time and effort to think through the design and communicate it to each other, but it saves time of following tangents that don't work or having a poor design.
O'Reilly makes the kinds of books I want. I don't mean to say that I only want O'Reilly books, because there are a lot of topics they don't cover, like software engineering, general theory, etc. I also don't mean to say that a publisher is the determining factor of a good book, but generally O'Reilly has a reputation for publishing good ones. What I mean to say is that there are some factors that generally make the books with the animals good:
Applicable topics. They are about languages, systems, etc.--the type of things programmers work with.
Conciseness. They tell a programmer just what one needs to know for the subject at hand. Again, there are a lot of topics they don't cover, but those topics are best left to general theory books. I know how to program, so I don't need a lesson in programming. When it comes to languages, I know how to write a compiler, so I don't need a lesson in programming language design. Even if I didn't know the theory, I could get a theory book. I just need to know about the subject.
The absence of extraneous material, sort of the flip-side of conciseness. They don't ramble on about allegories or basic information, the type of things that a programmer only reads once. They get to the facts and details that a programmer can use for reference.
Timeliness. They aren't necessarily the fastest books to the market, but they are relatively fast with good, stable info. Look at all the.NET books based on the beta releases that are obsolete.
Generally, these factors show that O'Reilly knows their audience. A single book won't give a programmer everything one can know about the subject, but it will give a programmer most of what one needs to know and a good foundation to learn more.
Officially, we get tuition reimbursement for any job-related classes we take outside of work, if we earn a grade of B or better. I have heard of some companies, particularly large ones with deep pockets, which have much more aggressive educational programs, including reduced hours with reduced pay but with full tuition reimbursement and full benefits. I have also heard of some companies, particularly small ones with tight pockets, which have no educational programs, although small companies have more room for negotiations.
Unofficially, no one at our office takes advantage of any educational program. The most useful educational program we have is purchasing tech reference manuals, tutorials, etc. When we get a new technical challenge, we are thrown in sink-or-swim, using these books as life-vests to stay afloat. This really is not a problem with a solid background in Computer Science / Software Engineering / Information Technology. The same concepts and theory keep coming around in different systems. That is, provided you have a solid background, which is worth the investment to obtain from a formal education.
Slashdot Mirror
Hahah. You mean that Luke's entire childhood and adolescence will be filled adventures that he--and the writers--will ignore and forget. He will demonstrate unknown, confusing powers that he will confront with his family but will suppress around friends and outsiders. He will have relationships with characters that he will be intricately involved with later in life, yet everyone involved will ignore their early experiences. And there will be plenty of teen angst, forbidden love, and sexual tension.
In fact, Rich McCallum will not have to develop any new plot lines, and the writers can lift them directly from Smallville. Just replace Clark with Luke, the Kents with the Lars, Lana Lang with Leia, Chloe with C3PO/R2D2, Lex Luthor with Darth Vader, and Lionel Luthor with Emperor Palpatine!
Udi Manber was a professor at the University of Arizona back in the day when Web pages were grey and most of the Web could still be viewed in the text-based browser Lynx. He tortured students (myself included) in classes like Algorithms, his specialty, and Automatas, Grammars, and Languages. Actually, he was pretty level-headed for a university professor. Instead of teaching his students how to recite algorithms and theory from a big cookbook, he taught us how to understand and develop them from scratch--for the most part, that is. One thing I'll never forget is that you never understand proofs of NP-complete reductions, you just get used to them. For more, his book, Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach, is recommended reading.
Since the University of Arizona was a research institution, he applied his expertise in algorithms to the Web. That was his ticket out of academia into the real world, including stopovers at Yahoo!, A9, (and others?) and now Google. The moral of this little story: useful things can actually come out of academia!
Here's a little blurb taken straight from the CNN obit:
To most people, James Doohan was Scotty, is Scotty, and always will be Scotty. It's not insulting at all. Here's a guy who knew what he was, accepted it, and lived an enjoyable, pleasant life for it. We'd all be better off by learning a lesson from him.
You know what they say. Long arms... long sleeves...
I would agree except the guy had 60 days to dispute the charges with Microsoft and did not know about them until over a month after he was charged. Yes, he was notified by email, but email is not a reliable delivery system for billing. Messages can too easily get lost amidst spam and changing email addresses.
In that sense, getting the renewal message by email is as bad as canceling gym membership by snail mail, as the previous poster mentioned. It sounds like the guy made a good effort to dispute the charges with Microsoft within 60 days and that Microsoft is being at best underhanded and at worst immoral or fraudulent.
Yes, it is a good idea to simplify GUI programming with scripting languages. I used to work on applications that had screens and screens of text, images, and some forms, carefully designed by graphic artists and customized for multiple clients. We basically did the same thing and designed a scripting language that was interpreted using a UI class library. However, the scripting language and class library were all proprietary and not useful to anyone else.
It used to take someone with a 4-year CS/CE/IT degree or related experience to put buttons on a form, which is ridiculous. The Web made it easier for UI engineers to design Web apps with some HTML. Maybe XAML will do the same thing for the desktop.
Computer Engineers make the systems for Computer Scientists who write the software that IT professionals use.
According to the article (which was even blockquoted in the prior post), the bowls idea did not come from MS but from "students from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands". So the question should be, what are students smoking in the Netherlands?
Highly skilled folks in the rest of the world have been dealing with this for years -- they all learned English to compete. Now it's our turn.
Yes. It is time for all /.'ers to learn English to compete.
US Console Price Drops Widely Rumored : Gamecube $99, PS2 $149, XBox $149
Nintendo Bundles GBA Adaptor With Gamecube : Gamecube $149
Sony's Pre-E3 Press Briefing Summarized : PS2 $179
Microsoft Announces Price Cut For Xbox : XBox $179
Analyst Predicts Further Console Price Cuts : ???
Capcom, Sega Drop Gamecube Software Prices : games $40
Console Game Prices Going Up? : games $60
Is anyone else getting confused? Perhaps the analysts don't know what they are talking about.
VBScript and JScript are pretty good, basic languages for beginners. They have the basic features of programming languages (variables, statements, functions, I/O, etc.) without some of the messy details (like pointers). Their syntax is similar to more popular languages (VBScript to VB, JScript to C/C++/Java/C#/etc.). They also support advanced features for more advanced developers (like COM objects). Unfortunately, they are interpreted instead of compiled, so debugging errors could be a pain for beginners (but then when isn't it :-).
If the text of the article was not repeated in the discussion, I would not have read it.
This is too true, and the market is finally weeding out the fakers. During the technology boom, the job market attracted way too many people who wanted a big, fat paycheck and sweet perks but who didn't want to grapple with technology. Unfortunately, since jobs were in demand, these people found work anyway, despite lousy attidutes and work ethics. Now that the job market is getting tighter, the jobs are going to the people who really enjoy doing this stuff--contemplating core dumps, analyzing the interaction between multiple processes, staring at memory contents, etc. There will always be jobs for good employees, but when things get tight, the poor employees can go elsewhere.
I've been there and back again. My friends and I grew up on consoles through high school, then we shifted to PCs during college, and now we are back on consoles again.
One big reason is finances. Our parents wouldn't invest in bleeding edge machines and games when we were kids, but my friends and I would when we had enough disposable income to chase after tech toys. Now, we are starting our own families, and it's a lot cheaper to invest in a console instead of the latest video and sound cards.
Another big reason is logistics. When we were kids, we wouldn't drag our computers around to a LAN party, but we would when we were young and single in college. Now with wives and some kids, it's easier to just drop by a friend's house for an evening and play on a console instead of loading up our gear for a LAN party. I have a few PCs on a small LAN for some Starcraft, but, again, there's no way we could afford to upgrade those for the latest and greatest games.
However, when it came down to picking out a console, it came down to taste. Now, we are all about casual, fun gaming, so I went with the Gamecube. Whenever we really want some seriously long and detailed strategy games, we play some Starcraft on the LAN, but those games are usually too long and involved for our taste. We want something easy to pick up, play a few games, and move along and spend some time with our wives and families--or get them to game with us. We don't want anything too violent, cause the kids will pick it up and become little menaces, especially to us! Plus, the Cube takes us back to when we started gaming, playing Super Smash Bros. Melee with Mario, Zelda, etc., so it's back to consoles for us.
It may just be me, but in my opinion the physics model is one of the most important features of a game. Good physics means great control, which makes all the difference between a good game and a great game.
Take, for example, the difference in physics between Super Mario 2 and 3. Each character in Super Mario 2 had their own funky physics, like Luigi's leg-spinning jump, which was sort of the charm of the game. However, Super Mario 3 had solid physics where you could easily predict where your character was going and send the character where you wanted it to go. I think that's a big reason why Super Mario 2 is a good game and Super Mario 3 is one of the best of all time.
Anyway, to relate this back to the article, a good side-scrolling game development kit needs a good or customizable physics model. Do many open game development kits emphasize that?
[peo.on.ca]
Did anyone else read this as pee-on.ca?
The more closely the dynamic of company (and in turn, each of it's sub groups) resembles that really fun softball/basketball/water polo/lacrosse team you played on before high school (before sports got really competitive) or that club team you played on in college, the better and more productive it will be.
This is so true. I left my last development job a couple of times to go back to school, but I kept returning because of the team of people who worked there. We did not just develop our team dynamic by working together but also because of "beer Friday." Every other Friday, the boss would bring in beers, stop work around 4:30pm or so, and we would hang out for a few hours with a couple of cold ones.
At the end of last year, higher-ups decided to close our division, lay off half the staff, and relocate the other half from the Southwest US to the East Coast. The only people who stayed with the company wanted to live on the East Coast. Everyone else left since the team was going to be disassembled, and the company lost the development team.
Ownership by every member of the company is essential.
This is also true, and it sounds a lot like Extreme Programming's "common code ownership." I've been on projects where I have been handed small tasks bit-by-bit, and I've been on projects where I have been handed larger tasks with more authority. I have been much more productive on the latter, since I did not have to verify every detail with a manager. However, larger tasks require consistently producing high-quality code, which I have to verify to myself.
I work at a shop that has adopted some XP practices. Generally, I'm not a fan of pair programming, and we don't do a lot of it, but there are situations where pair programming has its advantages.
Pairing a programmer new to a project with a programmer experienced with a project helps bring the new programmer up to speed. The experienced programmer can explain what design decisions made the code what it is.
Pair programming to extend a system works well when both programmers have different knowledge about the system. Together, they will be able to remember things and get the new functionality implemented faster than if either one worked alone.
Pair programming to implement a new design forces both programmers to clearly know what they are doing. It takes time and effort to think through the design and communicate it to each other, but it saves time of following tangents that don't work or having a poor design.
Minimum system requirements: Playstation 3
Recommended system requirements: 12-Playstation 3 LAN
And you know you want it!
O'Reilly makes the kinds of books I want. I don't mean to say that I only want O'Reilly books, because there are a lot of topics they don't cover, like software engineering, general theory, etc. I also don't mean to say that a publisher is the determining factor of a good book, but generally O'Reilly has a reputation for publishing good ones. What I mean to say is that there are some factors that generally make the books with the animals good:
Generally, these factors show that O'Reilly knows their audience. A single book won't give a programmer everything one can know about the subject, but it will give a programmer most of what one needs to know and a good foundation to learn more.
Officially, we get tuition reimbursement for any job-related classes we take outside of work, if we earn a grade of B or better. I have heard of some companies, particularly large ones with deep pockets, which have much more aggressive educational programs, including reduced hours with reduced pay but with full tuition reimbursement and full benefits. I have also heard of some companies, particularly small ones with tight pockets, which have no educational programs, although small companies have more room for negotiations.
Unofficially, no one at our office takes advantage of any educational program. The most useful educational program we have is purchasing tech reference manuals, tutorials, etc. When we get a new technical challenge, we are thrown in sink-or-swim, using these books as life-vests to stay afloat. This really is not a problem with a solid background in Computer Science / Software Engineering / Information Technology. The same concepts and theory keep coming around in different systems. That is, provided you have a solid background, which is worth the investment to obtain from a formal education.