Am I surprised that this fourth film, decades after the last, is no good? Of course not - 'twas ever thus.
I still haven't got over my disappointment at the utter pile of poo that was the second Highlander film, when the original was (and still is) one of my favourite films.
Creative people lose the original vision, the original enthusiasm, over time. It's difficult to do anything else. It doesn't make me happy, but it happens.
Oh how I wish I hadn't thrown away my Amstrad CPC 464 three years ago, or I would have been able to actually help. I had an external 3" disc drive that was connectable to a PC in lieu of a 3½ floppy.
There just wasn't any way I was going to be able to get it back to the US from my parents' attic in Britain and I didn't have time to dispose of it properly on eBay, so off to the skip it went.
In you situation, the thing you need to use most is your voice: talk to people who already understand the code.
The last time I had to do this (with no documentation, meaningful code comments, or engineering support - no voice option!) it was in a mixed-language code base too.
My tools of choice were:
* etags - like ctags, but supporting pretty much any block-structured language. So navigating from Delphi code into C# code actually worked.
* vim - reads etags files, and of course it is my editor of choice.
* grep - etags doesn't work so well on finding references, nor on qualified names in Delphi (and why should it? I was delighted it understood Delphi at all)
Other tools that were used in the team included Eclipse, Visual Studio and Delphi for the parts that they could each understand but jumping across languages was hard in those IDEs.
Then we wrote lots of wiki pages and I drew UML diagrams to capture program structure. We got there in the end, but it was a hard road.
But it was a nasty mess and I sympathise with your predicament.
With any luck this treatment will be (a) effective enough, and (b) available enough in the UK for it to have a positive effect on Terry Pratchett's condition.
I'm wondering if I would be able to use this at all since I have a squint.
The summary on Ars mentions that the system tracks the relative positions of the pupils so it might work, but if it is calibrated to non-squinty binocular vision then I suspect it wouldn't work for folks like me.
Actually, yes you do see the Harry Potter franchise behaving stupidly - there were several stories about fan websites being sent cease and desists letters by Warner Brothers lawyers about brand dilution and so on.
They haven't done that recently - the Potter people have learned.
Games Workshop are special, as another poster remarked, because they have been pulling these kinds of customer alienating tricks for years. I gave up on the hopeless bunch in around 1990.
The Edge piece is quite clear that it is looking for games which are still worth playing now.
The Crave posting misunderstands this point and brings in an entirely different criterion.
I don't actually agree with either article (I don't remember Mario mattering that much in Britain, and I didn't like Ocarina of Time much), but the Crave piece just seems like pointless disagreement with the basis of the Edge article.
This seems similar to the ractives in "The Diamond Age", where actors would bid for contracts with publishers to appear as the NPCs in other people's stories.
The bit that's missing is the bit about being paid to be an NPC.
What a very amusing conceit, that only the US could produce tax law baroque enough to require software to navigate!
I know that the forms for UK tax returns are easier than US ones, but using software was still a better bet for me when I had to fill one in, especially since the online tool that the Inland Revenue supplied could not at the time deal with non-residents.
I was going to start ranting about the US tax code, but this is not the time.
I'm in my very late 30s and I am developing better software than ever. What's changed is that I am in a more stimulating environment than I was before, working on stuff I care about.
I've noticed that my abilities have changed over the years. I can't pull all nighters these days, even a 60 hour week is out of the question, but I also find that I don't need to do these things because I'm not making the same mistakes I did when I was in my early 20s.
But if you had asked me this question a few years ago I probably would have agreed, because I was burned out then. That was nothing to do with my abilities as a programmer, just that there were bills to be paid on the all nighters and 60 hour work weeks I had been inflicting on myself.
My roleplaying buddies and I were excited when we heard about the Serenity RPG, but hugely disappointed when it was based on a new set of game mechanics. My friends have settled on D20 as their ruleset of choice, and it was enough of a struggle for me to get them to play Call of Cthulhu using BRP which is a piece of cake to learn.
So my pleasure at hearing about a BG RPG is tempered somewhat by the knowledge that I will never play it.
"How many windows?" seems like the wrong question - the questioner already included the observation that their Firefox instance runs with multiple tabs. The same goes for any application which can open multiple things at once. Call these things information streams.
So, on my work machine right now I have nine virtual desktops. I'm actively using five of those today, but three only contain one window. Outlook only really lets you look at one thing at once, but the other applications (Firefox and Eclipse) keep many streams open at once using tabs.
Usual information stream coefficient for me is therefore:
@work - 8 single stream application windows + 5 tabs in Firefox + 10 files open in Eclipse = 25 (more if I have multiple Eclipses open, less if I am doing design spec work)
@home - 6 Finder windows + 3 Terminal windows + 5 tabs in Firefox + 6 other single stream apps = 20
I didn't realise that MSX never made it to the States. You lucky, lucky people.
I remember when those machines came out in Britain. The computer magazines were the only happy people, since it meant there was always at least one new machine a week to review and because so much of the machine's behaviour was the same they can't have needed to do so much work! Not like reviewing those computers where everything was different, such as the Jupiter Ace.
And those MSX machines were terrible - I don't think I knew a single person who bought one, and I had a couple of computer club colleagues who bought Orics, for pity's sake.
No, count yourselves lucky - MSX sucked. You were spared some truly awful computers.
I've been using Multidesk (or possibly Mutidesk2001 - I don't have my work machine to hand to check) for years now, long before the PowerToy came out. It gives you:
up to nine desktops (MSVDM only gives you four)
hot keys to switch desktops
a workable, if inelegant, mechanism to move windows between desktops
It's by no means flawless, though - it's freeware, but not Free; and the code is old, having not been updated since Win98 days. But my Windows days at work would be vastly more painful without it.
I will be looking at some of the other recommendations in this thread, though.
In this situation, saying your company should spend money to do something because it is the Right Thing is not going to work.
Instead, show them how a poorly considered UI is going to cost the company money, eg through more support calls, or through lost sales because the tool is unusable.
If you can't think of ways in which spending money on UI design is going to get money back, then you will not be able to justify the work to your employers.
And if push comes to shove, you can always take your ideas to a competitor.
This is good news, but it's a shame that the EFF couldn't have stepped in years ago when the producers of the Teletubbies shut down all of those parody sites. The difference may have been to do with variations in national laws (no explicit free speech rights in the UK, AFAIR) - I hope it's not just time.
I've been developing as a job for almost twenty years, and I still don't know the answer to this question.
The best approach I've found is to decompose the problem into chunks that are small enough to give a reasonable estimate of, but I've hit two snags with this:
1. it may take time I don't have to do the decomposition
This was one of the things that struck me as weird when I moved from the UK to the US (Pacific NW) - all the urban powerlines in Britain are underground. Our house now has the power coming in through the roof, and it is constantly being menaced by trees. Never had that problem with any house in Britain.
I'm sure the cost of conversion is the major barrier, but I would guess that the points about union concerns are valid too. To give another example of this, in the US around road works you have people employed to hold stop signs to control the traffic. In Europe you have automatic traffic lights.
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Am I surprised that this fourth film, decades after the last, is no good? Of course not - 'twas ever thus.
I still haven't got over my disappointment at the utter pile of poo that was the second Highlander film, when the original was (and still is) one of my favourite films.
Creative people lose the original vision, the original enthusiasm, over time. It's difficult to do anything else. It doesn't make me happy, but it happens.
Oh how I wish I hadn't thrown away my Amstrad CPC 464 three years ago, or I would have been able to actually help. I had an external 3" disc drive that was connectable to a PC in lieu of a 3½ floppy.
There just wasn't any way I was going to be able to get it back to the US from my parents' attic in Britain and I didn't have time to dispose of it properly on eBay, so off to the skip it went.
I feel sad.
In you situation, the thing you need to use most is your voice: talk to people who already understand the code.
The last time I had to do this (with no documentation, meaningful code comments, or engineering support - no voice option!) it was in a mixed-language code base too.
My tools of choice were:
* etags - like ctags, but supporting pretty much any block-structured language. So navigating from Delphi code into C# code actually worked.
* vim - reads etags files, and of course it is my editor of choice.
* grep - etags doesn't work so well on finding references, nor on qualified names in Delphi (and why should it? I was delighted it understood Delphi at all)
Other tools that were used in the team included Eclipse, Visual Studio and Delphi for the parts that they could each understand but jumping across languages was hard in those IDEs.
Then we wrote lots of wiki pages and I drew UML diagrams to capture program structure. We got there in the end, but it was a hard road.
But it was a nasty mess and I sympathise with your predicament.
With any luck this treatment will be (a) effective enough, and (b) available enough in the UK for it to have a positive effect on Terry Pratchett's condition.
Sounds like a failing startup to me.
I'm wondering if I would be able to use this at all since I have a squint.
The summary on Ars mentions that the system tracks the relative positions of the pupils so it might work, but if it is calibrated to non-squinty binocular vision then I suspect it wouldn't work for folks like me.
Area required to fuel worldwide air fleet? 34,000 km^2
Area of West Virginia? 62,361 km^2
Half of West Virginia covered in algae? Priceless!
Actually, yes you do see the Harry Potter franchise behaving stupidly - there were several stories about fan websites being sent cease and desists letters by Warner Brothers lawyers about brand dilution and so on.
They haven't done that recently - the Potter people have learned.
Games Workshop are special, as another poster remarked, because they have been pulling these kinds of customer alienating tricks for years. I gave up on the hopeless bunch in around 1990.
What criteria are you using to measure greatness?
The Edge piece is quite clear that it is looking for games which are still worth playing now.
The Crave posting misunderstands this point and brings in an entirely different criterion.
I don't actually agree with either article (I don't remember Mario mattering that much in Britain, and I didn't like Ocarina of Time much), but the Crave piece just seems like pointless disagreement with the basis of the Edge article.
One of the stated aims is to generate excitement around alternative fuels, and yet it runs on LPG.
Very curious.
For pity's sake, can the typo in the headline be fixed? It's been up for hours.
For the record, there are two 't's in "interesting".
Good. Thanks.
Presumably then they have solved the problem of blue OLEDs burning out after a year.
This seems similar to the ractives in "The Diamond Age", where actors would bid for contracts with publishers to appear as the NPCs in other people's stories.
The bit that's missing is the bit about being paid to be an NPC.
What a very amusing conceit, that only the US could produce tax law baroque enough to require software to navigate!
I know that the forms for UK tax returns are easier than US ones, but using software was still a better bet for me when I had to fill one in, especially since the online tool that the Inland Revenue supplied could not at the time deal with non-residents.
I was going to start ranting about the US tax code, but this is not the time.
Like so many things, it depends.
I'm in my very late 30s and I am developing better software than ever. What's changed is that I am in a more stimulating environment than I was before, working on stuff I care about.
I've noticed that my abilities have changed over the years. I can't pull all nighters these days, even a 60 hour week is out of the question, but I also find that I don't need to do these things because I'm not making the same mistakes I did when I was in my early 20s.
But if you had asked me this question a few years ago I probably would have agreed, because I was burned out then. That was nothing to do with my abilities as a programmer, just that there were bills to be paid on the all nighters and 60 hour work weeks I had been inflicting on myself.
Just to be clear - I do not like D20. My roleplaying buddies are D&D players of long standing, though, and I came to the group only recently.
My roleplaying buddies and I were excited when we heard about the Serenity RPG, but hugely disappointed when it was based on a new set of game mechanics. My friends have settled on D20 as their ruleset of choice, and it was enough of a struggle for me to get them to play Call of Cthulhu using BRP which is a piece of cake to learn.
So my pleasure at hearing about a BG RPG is tempered somewhat by the knowledge that I will never play it.
"How many windows?" seems like the wrong question - the questioner already included the observation that their Firefox instance runs with multiple tabs. The same goes for any application which can open multiple things at once. Call these things information streams.
So, on my work machine right now I have nine virtual desktops. I'm actively using five of those today, but three only contain one window. Outlook only really lets you look at one thing at once, but the other applications (Firefox and Eclipse) keep many streams open at once using tabs.
Usual information stream coefficient for me is therefore:
@work - 8 single stream application windows + 5 tabs in Firefox + 10 files open in Eclipse = 25 (more if I have multiple Eclipses open, less if I am doing design spec work)
@home - 6 Finder windows + 3 Terminal windows + 5 tabs in Firefox + 6 other single stream apps = 20
I'm quite surprised those are so close.
I didn't realise that MSX never made it to the States. You lucky, lucky people.
I remember when those machines came out in Britain. The computer magazines were the only happy people, since it meant there was always at least one new machine a week to review and because so much of the machine's behaviour was the same they can't have needed to do so much work! Not like reviewing those computers where everything was different, such as the Jupiter Ace.
And those MSX machines were terrible - I don't think I knew a single person who bought one, and I had a couple of computer club colleagues who bought Orics, for pity's sake.
No, count yourselves lucky - MSX sucked. You were spared some truly awful computers.
It's by no means flawless, though - it's freeware, but not Free; and the code is old, having not been updated since Win98 days. But my Windows days at work would be vastly more painful without it.
I will be looking at some of the other recommendations in this thread, though.
In this situation, saying your company should spend money to do something because it is the Right Thing is not going to work.
Instead, show them how a poorly considered UI is going to cost the company money, eg through more support calls, or through lost sales because the tool is unusable.
If you can't think of ways in which spending money on UI design is going to get money back, then you will not be able to justify the work to your employers.
And if push comes to shove, you can always take your ideas to a competitor.
This is good news, but it's a shame that the EFF couldn't have stepped in years ago when the producers of the Teletubbies shut down all of those parody sites. The difference may have been to do with variations in national laws (no explicit free speech rights in the UK, AFAIR) - I hope it's not just time.
I've been developing as a job for almost twenty years, and I still don't know the answer to this question.
The best approach I've found is to decompose the problem into chunks that are small enough to give a reasonable estimate of, but I've hit two snags with this:
1. it may take time I don't have to do the decomposition
2. managers don't like big numbers
Good luck!
This was one of the things that struck me as weird when I moved from the UK to the US (Pacific NW) - all the urban powerlines in Britain are underground. Our house now has the power coming in through the roof, and it is constantly being menaced by trees. Never had that problem with any house in Britain.
I'm sure the cost of conversion is the major barrier, but I would guess that the points about union concerns are valid too. To give another example of this, in the US around road works you have people employed to hold stop signs to control the traffic. In Europe you have automatic traffic lights.