Yeah, we liked it:-) I learned a lot from these listing and find the lack of programming related topics in todays computer magazines very sad.
But back to discs: you know the saying Never underestimate the bandwidth of truck full of backup tapes, and there still are a lot of people without fast internet connection, and without flatrate. To them, it might be cheaper to get for example OpenOffice.org by magazine disc than getting it online. Plus, since you already have it one mouse click away, you might get tempted to try out stuff that you wouldn't usually waste your bandwidth for. URLs, "download codes" (kind of URL shorteners) or QR codes are cheaper (no physical medium to prepare and ship) for the magazine and you could even keep them up-to-date. But there still is a audience for these discs.
You find the forum discussions on heise to be fun? My brain starts to ache when I read their forum, never ever have I seen such a childish forum (I'm serious; and I'm online for 17 years now). When they started to link to the latest 5 forum topics for each article I was in agony and despair and wrote them about that, boy was I relieved when they abandoned that "feature". But if you're into trolling and "Fremdschämen" then this really is the forum of choice.
Well, I'm from Germany and can only describe the situation here, but "bonus" discs really are pretty standard for a long time now. Especially with computer and gaming magazines, although some have abandoned them for online content.
For example, Linux magazines often provide a disc with the software that is reported about in the magazine, and often they're also bootable (rescue systems, latest Debian, whatever) which comes in very handy in case you're system broke down and thus can't get online (happened to me once a few years ago). Other computer magazines' discs have demos, free software and drivers but I've also seen them provide movies (I have no idea why). Luckily the notorious AOL discs have vanished;-) A noteworthy example of a really useful bonus disc is from the popular computer magazine c't: about once a year it provides Knoppicilin, now called Desinfec't which is a Linux Live-CD with content to fix your Windows system: it comes with a few virus scanners (latest version: the commercial scanners Avira, BitDefender, Kaspersky and the free ClamAV) and always support reading and writing NTFS partitions.
Gaming magazines also put these discs to good use as some of them put video reviews of games on their discs and that really is useful additional content as often two or three screenshots printed in a magazine just can't transport the experience of a game. Of course the PC targeted magazines also have game demos.
You won't see the blinding speed when you're poking around the main UI or some of Google's apps, as they're occasionally nonresponsive, although screen transitions are a bit more fluid than on other Android tablets.
I wonder when this will finally be solved. Previously, the lag was blamed on poor hardware. With this beast, that excuse really does not hold at all anymore.
I do have a ZFS setup of currently 6 disks and I really recommend buying server-grade HDDs, unless you have set up a monitoring system that tells you whenever a HDD is failing so you can buy a new one.
Until half a year ago I used normal USB HDDs that you can buy everywhere. My experience was that they simply aren't meant to be always on and fail pretty soon. I usually had a failed HDD once every quarter year. It drove me mad. Almost one year ago I started using these HDD docks where you can put two 2,5" or 3,5" HDDs into and bought HDDs that where labeled for server use. After half a year they still ran fine, so each time a normal USB HDD failed I replaced it with another dock. Haven't had a single failure since then. Nice bonus: double the amount of HDDs I can connect to the server (speed isn't so much an issue as space in my case). The solution with these docks with better HDDs costs more at first but turns out to be cheaper in the long run.
I also find it totally amazing that Konrad Zuse's Z3 is always and consistently omitted by americans when it comes to determine which one was the first real computer. My guess is most of them simply don't know about the Zuse and the Z3. It's quite sad, because the achievements of this man are astounding.
Yup, the processor was alright... Intel's Linux drivers were not. Just to enable the embedded ethernet driver I had to compile in a whopping 1MB of driver madness from Intel. On a system where the kernel itself was only 600kB. And where we only had 16MB NOR flash for storage. Hurray. I have never seen such a shit before, it looked like they implemented their own kernel besides the kernel.
They're dominating the market, but it's not a monopoly (any more, now that there are more competitors).
If you play the game, you have to play by the rules. Nobody forces anybody to use the AppStore. It's the developer's decision (I know because I do play this game). But if you want to distribute your app through it you have to obey to Apple's rules, it's their playground.
You can always use Cydia instead or serve a different platform (Android, Nokia, RIM, WP7) if you don't like Apple or the AppStore.
Psssst, don't spoil the fun of mindless Apple bashing by providing a totally valid reason for the app removal ! Or at least provide another possible victim to direct the nerd rage at.
When the deal regarding the Transrapid was announced in Germany most people didn't take notice that the deal involved China wanting to eventually build the trains themselves which of course means licensing the technology and transferring a lot of know-how. So people who now accuse China of stealing obviously didn't pay attention back then because at least to me and a few of my friends it was immediately obvious that eventually we would get cut out of the picture. So what, we've got the Transrapid for over 20 years now and all we have in Germany is a test course. In Shanghai, at least it's really transporting people even if in the long run it won't be our technology any more. Better than not making use of it at all.
Almost, now it's: "In Corporate America, movie watches you":-) I'm not from the US so I can't tell how bad it is, but one can get the impression that the level of surveillance is even worse than during the cold war... but most surveillance seems not to be done by the government any more but by corporations.
All kidding aside, Objective-C isn't the sort of language people use because they want to. Rather, they use it because it's what Apple says they can use.
Back in the NeXT days, we used it because it was far better than anything else out there. But that was 20 years ago. Times have changed, and we have better programming languages available to us. Even with Objective-C 2.0, it's still somewhat of a relic.
Well, over the past 20 years I've played around with a lot of languages and a lot of environments and I do enjoy writing in Objective-C. It makes a few neat things that I like easy, like Duck Typing and delegates. But more than the language I enjoy Apple's APIs. They are very consistent and nicely done. I know it wasn't always like this, and there are still a few dark corners if you really dig into non-common areas, but all in all it really is fun to use. More fun than most C++ APIs, IMHO, and to me also more fun than.NET or Java. I like C# as a language, but I can't stand the.NET API. Likewise, Java as a language is OK (neither great nor bad) but the API is so-so. It's good, but I never really enjoyed using it. But I can say that I do enjoy Cocoa.
One thing in particular that I like is that due to a few Objective-C language features you can often avoid creating yet another subclass of something, thanks to Duck Typing.
Now they even added support for C blocks allowing easy anonymous callback functions, which enables a few more neat programming patterns. My favorite scripting language is Ruby and Objective-C is the compiled language that comes closest to it allowing me to make use of design patterns that I learned to love via Ruby.
People don't want them here in Europe, either, at least on the countryside. People don't care about them in the cities, I think. At least I never heard somebody even talking about these towers here in Munich, except if the reception is bad.
There was a very funny story a few weeks back here in Germany (I'm citing off the top of my head, maybe I don't get it 100% correct, sorry for that): A company erected a new cell tower and people began to complain about health issues like headaches that they directly blamed to the tower. After a few weeks there was some kind of meeting between the people and company officials where the people demanded that the tower gets switched off immediately because of their health problems. Turned out the company switched the tower off three weeks before said meeting due to some technical problems:-) Fine example of a negative placebo, IMHO.
Maybe I miss something, but where exactly in my posting did I state that we have a constitution ?
BTW, just looked it up, the law in question is StGB 86a "Verwenden von Kennzeichen verfassungswidriger Organisationen", which is where the term "verfassungsfeindliche Symbole" stems from which I translated with "anti-constitutional" symbols (using quotes exactly because we don't have a constitution).
We want to keep right-winged people to from glorifying the Nazi time and we want to keep them from using their symbols, if possible.
In other words you want to restrict their freedom of political expression because you find their ideals abhorrent. You can justify it any way that you wish but it's still censorship. Personally I find the notion of censoring a Nazi to be as offensive as his political goals if not more so -- because we ought to know better.
I absolutely agree that trying to outlaw "thoughts" or symbols is absolutely useless and that it is censorship. But it seems you missed my point. The point was that this law is there for historic reasons and can't go away since it's a very sensitive issue here. If you propose to kick that law people would suspect you're far right-winged and that's a serious accusation here. And so most politician wouldn't vote to change it, fearing to lose voters over this issue.
The law was done by the Allied Control Council and was then taken over into our "Grundgesetz" (constitution). So you can blame your politicians for our censorship, in a sense;-) Still, most of us Germans regard the law to be a non-issue. It's meant to keep right-winged people from glorifying the Nazis. Normally, it's only an issue if you're right-winged or a game maker placing your game in WWII.
Well, it's an old thing in games here in Germany. Basically, the law forbids to show "anti-constitutional" symbols (unless it's in a historic, educational and/or satiric context). According to the German Wikipedia entry this law was made by the Allied Control Council during their move to forbid the NSDAP and its symbols. It was then taken over into our "Grundgesetz" (think constitution) and AFAIK you need more than a normal majority to change a "Grundgesetz" law which would make it very hard to change the law. Especially since a lot of people here in Germany still are afraid that right-winged people might ever gain too much ground again. We want to keep right-winged people to from glorifying the Nazi time and we want to keep them from using their symbols, if possible.
The english Wikipedia also has an article regarding that issue.
First, if your game awards some score or something then getting a hint must cost them.
And/or you only give a set amount of hints throughout their session. Maybe allow for an additional hint every x levels.
And/or make them aware that they have not succeeded themselves. I remember a good Solitair back in the MS-DOS days which also gave you a hint if you asked it to. When the game was finished it displayed ''You won (with my help)''. The ''with my help'' was what encouraged me not to press the button.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, we liked it :-) I learned a lot from these listing and find the lack of programming related topics in todays computer magazines very sad.
But back to discs: you know the saying Never underestimate the bandwidth of truck full of backup tapes, and there still are a lot of people without fast internet connection, and without flatrate. To them, it might be cheaper to get for example OpenOffice.org by magazine disc than getting it online. Plus, since you already have it one mouse click away, you might get tempted to try out stuff that you wouldn't usually waste your bandwidth for. URLs, "download codes" (kind of URL shorteners) or QR codes are cheaper (no physical medium to prepare and ship) for the magazine and you could even keep them up-to-date. But there still is a audience for these discs.
You find the forum discussions on heise to be fun? My brain starts to ache when I read their forum, never ever have I seen such a childish forum (I'm serious; and I'm online for 17 years now). When they started to link to the latest 5 forum topics for each article I was in agony and despair and wrote them about that, boy was I relieved when they abandoned that "feature". But if you're into trolling and "Fremdschämen" then this really is the forum of choice.
Well, I'm from Germany and can only describe the situation here, but "bonus" discs really are pretty standard for a long time now. Especially with computer and gaming magazines, although some have abandoned them for online content.
For example, Linux magazines often provide a disc with the software that is reported about in the magazine, and often they're also bootable (rescue systems, latest Debian, whatever) which comes in very handy in case you're system broke down and thus can't get online (happened to me once a few years ago). Other computer magazines' discs have demos, free software and drivers but I've also seen them provide movies (I have no idea why). Luckily the notorious AOL discs have vanished ;-) A noteworthy example of a really useful bonus disc is from the popular computer magazine c't: about once a year it provides Knoppicilin, now called Desinfec't which is a Linux Live-CD with content to fix your Windows system: it comes with a few virus scanners (latest version: the commercial scanners Avira, BitDefender, Kaspersky and the free ClamAV) and always support reading and writing NTFS partitions.
Gaming magazines also put these discs to good use as some of them put video reviews of games on their discs and that really is useful additional content as often two or three screenshots printed in a magazine just can't transport the experience of a game. Of course the PC targeted magazines also have game demos.
You won't see the blinding speed when you're poking around the main UI or some of Google's apps, as they're occasionally nonresponsive, although screen transitions are a bit more fluid than on other Android tablets.
I wonder when this will finally be solved. Previously, the lag was blamed on poor hardware. With this beast, that excuse really does not hold at all anymore.
I do have a ZFS setup of currently 6 disks and I really recommend buying server-grade HDDs, unless you have set up a monitoring system that tells you whenever a HDD is failing so you can buy a new one.
Until half a year ago I used normal USB HDDs that you can buy everywhere. My experience was that they simply aren't meant to be always on and fail pretty soon. I usually had a failed HDD once every quarter year. It drove me mad. Almost one year ago I started using these HDD docks where you can put two 2,5" or 3,5" HDDs into and bought HDDs that where labeled for server use. After half a year they still ran fine, so each time a normal USB HDD failed I replaced it with another dock. Haven't had a single failure since then. Nice bonus: double the amount of HDDs I can connect to the server (speed isn't so much an issue as space in my case). The solution with these docks with better HDDs costs more at first but turns out to be cheaper in the long run.
Maybe he has a girlfriend and doesn't want to lose his homemade porn. I like mine and want them to be safe, too ;-)
You didn't get the memo ? That's out a loooong time ago already.
Somehow, I don't expect this to create the same outrage as back when Apple did something similar...
I also find it totally amazing that Konrad Zuse's Z3 is always and consistently omitted by americans when it comes to determine which one was the first real computer. My guess is most of them simply don't know about the Zuse and the Z3. It's quite sad, because the achievements of this man are astounding.
Yup, the processor was alright... Intel's Linux drivers were not. Just to enable the embedded ethernet driver I had to compile in a whopping 1MB of driver madness from Intel. On a system where the kernel itself was only 600kB. And where we only had 16MB NOR flash for storage. Hurray. I have never seen such a shit before, it looked like they implemented their own kernel besides the kernel.
They're dominating the market, but it's not a monopoly (any more, now that there are more competitors).
If you play the game, you have to play by the rules. Nobody forces anybody to use the AppStore. It's the developer's decision (I know because I do play this game). But if you want to distribute your app through it you have to obey to Apple's rules, it's their playground.
You can always use Cydia instead or serve a different platform (Android, Nokia, RIM, WP7) if you don't like Apple or the AppStore.
Psssst, don't spoil the fun of mindless Apple bashing by providing a totally valid reason for the app removal ! Or at least provide another possible victim to direct the nerd rage at.
Thanks for that link, that's an interesting site.
Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant "idiot".
— Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
When the deal regarding the Transrapid was announced in Germany most people didn't take notice that the deal involved China wanting to eventually build the trains themselves which of course means licensing the technology and transferring a lot of know-how. So people who now accuse China of stealing obviously didn't pay attention back then because at least to me and a few of my friends it was immediately obvious that eventually we would get cut out of the picture. So what, we've got the Transrapid for over 20 years now and all we have in Germany is a test course. In Shanghai, at least it's really transporting people even if in the long run it won't be our technology any more. Better than not making use of it at all.
Almost, now it's: "In Corporate America, movie watches you" :-) I'm not from the US so I can't tell how bad it is, but one can get the impression that the level of surveillance is even worse than during the cold war... but most surveillance seems not to be done by the government any more but by corporations.
All kidding aside, Objective-C isn't the sort of language people use because they want to. Rather, they use it because it's what Apple says they can use.
Back in the NeXT days, we used it because it was far better than anything else out there. But that was 20 years ago. Times have changed, and we have better programming languages available to us. Even with Objective-C 2.0, it's still somewhat of a relic.
Well, over the past 20 years I've played around with a lot of languages and a lot of environments and I do enjoy writing in Objective-C. It makes a few neat things that I like easy, like Duck Typing and delegates. But more than the language I enjoy Apple's APIs. They are very consistent and nicely done. I know it wasn't always like this, and there are still a few dark corners if you really dig into non-common areas, but all in all it really is fun to use. More fun than most C++ APIs, IMHO, and to me also more fun than .NET or Java. I like C# as a language, but I can't stand the .NET API. Likewise, Java as a language is OK (neither great nor bad) but the API is so-so. It's good, but I never really enjoyed using it. But I can say that I do enjoy Cocoa.
One thing in particular that I like is that due to a few Objective-C language features you can often avoid creating yet another subclass of something, thanks to Duck Typing.
Now they even added support for C blocks allowing easy anonymous callback functions, which enables a few more neat programming patterns. My favorite scripting language is Ruby and Objective-C is the compiled language that comes closest to it allowing me to make use of design patterns that I learned to love via Ruby.
People don't want them here in Europe, either, at least on the countryside. People don't care about them in the cities, I think. At least I never heard somebody even talking about these towers here in Munich, except if the reception is bad.
There was a very funny story a few weeks back here in Germany (I'm citing off the top of my head, maybe I don't get it 100% correct, sorry for that): A company erected a new cell tower and people began to complain about health issues like headaches that they directly blamed to the tower. After a few weeks there was some kind of meeting between the people and company officials where the people demanded that the tower gets switched off immediately because of their health problems. Turned out the company switched the tower off three weeks before said meeting due to some technical problems :-) Fine example of a negative placebo, IMHO.
Maybe I miss something, but where exactly in my posting did I state that we have a constitution ?
BTW, just looked it up, the law in question is StGB 86a "Verwenden von Kennzeichen verfassungswidriger Organisationen", which is where the term "verfassungsfeindliche Symbole" stems from which I translated with "anti-constitutional" symbols (using quotes exactly because we don't have a constitution).
We want to keep right-winged people to from glorifying the Nazi time and we want to keep them from using their symbols, if possible.
In other words you want to restrict their freedom of political expression because you find their ideals abhorrent. You can justify it any way that you wish but it's still censorship. Personally I find the notion of censoring a Nazi to be as offensive as his political goals if not more so -- because we ought to know better.
I absolutely agree that trying to outlaw "thoughts" or symbols is absolutely useless and that it is censorship. But it seems you missed my point. The point was that this law is there for historic reasons and can't go away since it's a very sensitive issue here. If you propose to kick that law people would suspect you're far right-winged and that's a serious accusation here. And so most politician wouldn't vote to change it, fearing to lose voters over this issue.
Recently ? That was years ago and the courts ruled it to be legal, on several occasions now.
... most of them are dead.
You've never been to Bavaria, have you?
I guess in Saxony they have bigger problems with those people.
The law was done by the Allied Control Council and was then taken over into our "Grundgesetz" (constitution). So you can blame your politicians for our censorship, in a sense ;-) Still, most of us Germans regard the law to be a non-issue. It's meant to keep right-winged people from glorifying the Nazis. Normally, it's only an issue if you're right-winged or a game maker placing your game in WWII.
Well, it's an old thing in games here in Germany. Basically, the law forbids to show "anti-constitutional" symbols (unless it's in a historic, educational and/or satiric context). According to the German Wikipedia entry this law was made by the Allied Control Council during their move to forbid the NSDAP and its symbols. It was then taken over into our "Grundgesetz" (think constitution) and AFAIK you need more than a normal majority to change a "Grundgesetz" law which would make it very hard to change the law. Especially since a lot of people here in Germany still are afraid that right-winged people might ever gain too much ground again. We want to keep right-winged people to from glorifying the Nazi time and we want to keep them from using their symbols, if possible. The english Wikipedia also has an article regarding that issue.
Three things come to my mind:
First, if your game awards some score or something then getting a hint must cost them.
And/or you only give a set amount of hints throughout their session. Maybe allow for an additional hint every x levels.
And/or make them aware that they have not succeeded themselves. I remember a good Solitair back in the MS-DOS days which also gave you a hint if you asked it to. When the game was finished it displayed ''You won (with my help)''. The ''with my help'' was what encouraged me not to press the button.