The man wrote a lot of great stuff. I learned Python using his guide to that language, and I used his HTML5 guide to keep current on that. I don't think I'll be alone in missing him.
That said, he obviously intends for this to be permanent. He was a stickler for proper HTTP status codes, and wouldn't have his sites throw a 410 if he ever intended on bringing them back. Given the open nature of the things he wrote, it would have been nice of him to transfer maintenance of the guides before doing this. Archives and mirrors are springing up, so the work won't be lost. But if he wanted to go quietly, he could have made things much quieter by saying something.
At the very least, he could have avoided this chaos and the police visit.
I haven't been a Mac zealot in years. I switched to Linux quite some time ago. But the fact remains that large portions of my life, online and off, would be very different if not for this man. Rest in peace.
Remove the platters from the drive (so you can salvage the super-strong magnets for Science! projects), and then take a sledgehammer to the platters. Breaking them into several pieces should keep anyone short of an intelligence agency away from your data, and even if an intelligence agency is actually after you, this will make their lives very miserable while they recover the data.
If you absolutely positively must destroy the data beyond all hope of repair, then melt the platter pieces down, use your sledgehammer to break up the resulting lump of metal again, and bury the pieces separately (in blocks of concrete if you can manage it). This is overkill, but it'll work.
Of course, then you have to deal with the problem of people deciding that your hard drives aren't worth recovering and going after your data other ways. Witness http://xkcd.com/538/ for an example.
On the hatefest, while I still love Firefox and can't find anything better... Why did they switch to Chrome-like numbering? These are NOT major releases, they're bug fixes and minor updates.
You answered your own question: they switched to Chrome-like numbering because it is Chrome-like. I also, frankly, suspect that they thought they might be able to get away from that awful drudgery known as maintenance.
I'm just hoping that Firefox will survive long enough for the developers to grow up and consider this an embarrassing chapter in its history.
JavaScript is not a perfect language by far: it desperately needs a good packaging system, semicolon insertion was a poor solution to a non-problem, overloading is a mess, and any number of other things. But the people trying to replace it are usually more concerned not so much with fixing the problems as enforcing archaic programming paradigms, replacing JavaScript's best features -dynamic typing, prototypal OO, and so on- with things that have been driving people away from programming for decades. Dash is no different.
The Web needs something better than JS as-is, but what people tend to try to replace it with is no improvement. Incremental improvement to JS is far preferable.
On September 17, 2001, I bought one share of Apple. It cost me about $20, and it was more of a symbolic gesture than anything else. The stock split in 2005, so now I have two shares.
I'm not the Apple-zealot that I once was. In fact, I went Linux-only a few years ago. But man, oh man am I kicking myself for not buying more of that stock.
Imagine if all the money spent on sending handfuls of people into space was spent on health care education here on Earth?
Well, we'd probably see far fewer posts like this post's parent, and that does hold a lot of appeal: health care education would certainly go a long way toward eliminating the homeopathy advocates and so on. All the same, if you're going to argue that the money spent on space exploration could be better spent on earth, I can think of far better arguments for that than these ridiculous conspiracy theories.
If I'm reading this right, the court's opinion seems to have been that this was a church-state violation, but that the teacher was immune to lawsuits for such. How does that work?
It's more that the beta for 7 comes out pretty much the instant 6 is released. One of the more interesting aspects of the Mozilla development process is that they essentially have a pipeline of four "releases" going on at once: Current (stable stuff, now 6), Beta (code being stabilized, now 7), Aurora (testing and major bugfixes, now 8) and Nightly (new feature work, now 9). When it comes time to do a new release, Current gets booted out, Beta and Aurora get promoted, and Nightly coughs up a build that becomes the new Aurora. It would actually be a pretty good system, except for the part where they forgot about maintenance releases and long-term support.
No, you do not know how this industry works. The people working on the story have nothing to do with the gameplay. They are almost always separate people/divisions working on these parts unless it is an extremely small game. Even for the game linked below (a 1 person owned company), my brother wrote the game...he had another guy write the music and another do the arts/graphics while I wrote the story. His working on the gameplay mechanics had absolutely no bearing on the story and vice versa. In a large studio, 100% these people are different.
This is part of the problem. Many of the best story-focused games integrate the gameplay with the story: something that becomes much harder to do if you keep the teams too separate. A good director can mitigate the problem, but not completely.
There are many different reasons people don't finish games. If they removed story from games as you suggest, many of those games wouldn't be finished by people who are motivated by story.
If the linked article is any indication, they're not finishing these games anyway. That indicates that something is is wrong with the games, and it's wrong to such a degree that even many story-motivated folks get turned off. For it to be happening to so many games -pretty much the entire contemporary catalog- indicates an industrywide problem, likely something rooted in the philosophy of game creation itself.
I offer one proposal. I back it up by the abundance of classic games, even long ones, which neither espoused this philosophy nor had this problem.
I love the Slashdot attitude that it is easy to make good games...
That's not the Slashdot attitude at all. It doesn't even make sense: if it were easy to make good games, more companies would be doing it, and we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. What's easy to do is wow a very specific demographic with whiz-bang graphics and bombastic story elements, and because that particular crowd is so easily amused, this sells a lot of copies. That's why game makers do it: it's the easiest possible way to make money in the business.
That last bit -about bombastic story elements- isn't the same thing as telling a good story. Good storytelling is indeed difficult, but one extremely important element of good storytelling is picking the most suitable medium with which to tell it. For example, good movie plots seldom if ever make for good games, and vice versa. I pick that example specifically because game makers are hiring writers who ought to be making movies or TV series, or in some cases even writing novels, rather than people who are good at making game stories. The result, predictably, is movie-games, and these don't make for good games at all. The phenomenon we're seeing now is a glut of such games.
...and if you suddenly paid less attention to graphics or story then gameplay would magically become better.
Only if the attention being wasted on overwrought graphics or ill-suited story went back to the gameplay, where it always belonged.
The reason people aren't finishing contemporary long games is that they suck. Seriously: if a game can't hold most people's interest long enough to finish it, there is something wrong with the game.
Part of the problem here is that game developers are focusing overly much on story at the expense of the gameplay. A good story can grab people at the beginning and end, and at climactic points in the middle, but no story can keep that up throughout the whole game. Between those points of interest, the gameplay has to be able to deliver, or the player will get bored: often so bored that even the promise of more story doesn't hold them. And in many contemporary "story-based" games, the gameplay simply doesn't deliver: either gratuitous complexity kills the fun, or generic mechanics wear out their welcome, or the game gets so linear that it doesn't even feel interactive anymore.
That's why people aren't finishing contemporary, "story-focused" games: because they aren't good games. Story is nice, but it can't make a bad game good. Only improved gameplay can do that. The solution isn't to make shorter games, or even to ditch story; it's to make better games.
I don't know if it'll hemorrhage users to Chrome, per se. While Chrome does manage to be slightly more enterprise-friendly (mostly due to providing MCSE-friendly.msi and DSO packages), it still doesn't provide the basic corporate need of long-term support.
Technically, this presents an opportunity for Opera and Safari to step in and try to grab some enterprise marketshare for themselves, as they now pretty much have the market for IE alternatives with stable code bases pretty much locked up. But let's be realistic: they haven't managed to do this in the past, and so they probably won't manage it now.
No; what Firefox will probably lose its enterprise users to is IE. This is far less problematic than it was back in the days of IE6 or IE7. However, it still encourages businesses to stick with whatever was installed by default on their machines: in other words, by trying to force businesses into a constant-upgrade cycle, Mozilla is creating a perverse incentive to not upgrade at all.
So basically, the Mozilla Corporation's plan to deal with the bona fide corporate need for a stable codebase with long-term support is to stick its head in the sand and pretend that there are no releases anymore?
Way to go at killing the enterprise market for your product. And all this just so no one on your side would have to do that horrible boring 'maintenance' work anymore.
There are apparently legal issues with this sort of thing. In order to be an "investment coin," it must be legal tender in its country of origin at the time it is made.
Um, read my post again: I actually did get that. My point is that while the merchandising aspect is an interesting twist, this really isn't any different from something that lots of countries already do.
Isn't this really just a set of bullion coins, up to and including the fact that they're technically legal tender but you'd have to be out of your mind to actually spend them? Or are they hoping that value to collectors might push the value of these things up even further than the cost of the silver itself?
Gunpei Yokoi coined the phrase. As long as Nintendo adheres to it, they win every time. When they start blindly grabbing for MOAR POWUR, without offering any meaningful improvements to gaming but only pretty pictures, they lose. They can't compete on graphics-are-everything; that's Sony's and Microsoft's model, and they just plain do it better. Nintendo's only hope to compete is on actual quality, and when they bother to do this, they come out on top.
You'd think that the Wii and DS would have taught them this lesson once and for all, after the disaster that was the N64/Gamecube era. Apparently, however, they need another go-round.
Of course this is a publicity stunt. Killing off superheroes is always a publicity stunt, which is part of why deaths never stick.
Odds are, the replacement won't stick either. More likely Parker will come back in a year or two, possibly with minor alterations to his character design but nothing too significant. When this happens, the legacy character will either die, retire, or adopt a new superheroic identity; sometimes they do more than one of these, and due to this being comics they can come in any order.
If this is how they're talking about Spider-Man's replacement, my money's on the new-identity option, and that identity has probably already been fully designed and named with the first issue or two ready to go. The Spider-Man brand is merely a springboard, an attempt to start this guy's intended comic off with a pre-grown reader base.
The thing about the CDC is that it is possible to immunize and/or treat basically anyone. Financial and logistical concerns may make doing so impractical, but where treatments exist, they tend to work to varying degrees in just about anybody.
Malware isn't like this. Older software tends to lapse out of support. That's not an insurmountable problem in the OSS community, where the source code to the OS is available so that someone other than the maintainer could write a patch. But with closed and obsolete operating systems -Win95, for example, or Mac OS 9- who's going to write the patches?
Currently they have enough resources to keep four versions in the air at once: Current, Beta, Aurora, and Nightly. This is actually up from the previous structure, where they had up to three versions in the air at once: current, one back, and (sometimes) Beta.
It's also worth noting that the people taking care of Current already have a lighter load than the other three teams, because their product has already gone through multiple rounds of QA and isn't getting any new features. My thought, therefore, is to augment the transform the Current team into a Maintenance team that handles one version back and the LTS. This will probably require some augmentation, but not nearly as much as two entirely new teams, and likely not even as much as one. There's also a number of large OSS projects out there which can be tapped for advice on how they maintain older products.
Bottom line: while it might require some augmentation, it is nowhere near "way more than it will ever have."
Slashdot Mirror
The man wrote a lot of great stuff. I learned Python using his guide to that language, and I used his HTML5 guide to keep current on that. I don't think I'll be alone in missing him.
That said, he obviously intends for this to be permanent. He was a stickler for proper HTTP status codes, and wouldn't have his sites throw a 410 if he ever intended on bringing them back. Given the open nature of the things he wrote, it would have been nice of him to transfer maintenance of the guides before doing this. Archives and mirrors are springing up, so the work won't be lost. But if he wanted to go quietly, he could have made things much quieter by saying something.
At the very least, he could have avoided this chaos and the police visit.
I haven't been a Mac zealot in years. I switched to Linux quite some time ago. But the fact remains that large portions of my life, online and off, would be very different if not for this man. Rest in peace.
Remove the platters from the drive (so you can salvage the super-strong magnets for Science! projects), and then take a sledgehammer to the platters. Breaking them into several pieces should keep anyone short of an intelligence agency away from your data, and even if an intelligence agency is actually after you, this will make their lives very miserable while they recover the data.
If you absolutely positively must destroy the data beyond all hope of repair, then melt the platter pieces down, use your sledgehammer to break up the resulting lump of metal again, and bury the pieces separately (in blocks of concrete if you can manage it). This is overkill, but it'll work.
Of course, then you have to deal with the problem of people deciding that your hard drives aren't worth recovering and going after your data other ways. Witness http://xkcd.com/538/ for an example.
You answered your own question: they switched to Chrome-like numbering because it is Chrome-like. I also, frankly, suspect that they thought they might be able to get away from that awful drudgery known as maintenance.
I'm just hoping that Firefox will survive long enough for the developers to grow up and consider this an embarrassing chapter in its history.
JavaScript is not a perfect language by far: it desperately needs a good packaging system, semicolon insertion was a poor solution to a non-problem, overloading is a mess, and any number of other things. But the people trying to replace it are usually more concerned not so much with fixing the problems as enforcing archaic programming paradigms, replacing JavaScript's best features -dynamic typing, prototypal OO, and so on- with things that have been driving people away from programming for decades. Dash is no different.
The Web needs something better than JS as-is, but what people tend to try to replace it with is no improvement. Incremental improvement to JS is far preferable.
Static typing should be considered in violation of international conventions on torture.
On September 17, 2001, I bought one share of Apple. It cost me about $20, and it was more of a symbolic gesture than anything else. The stock split in 2005, so now I have two shares.
I'm not the Apple-zealot that I once was. In fact, I went Linux-only a few years ago. But man, oh man am I kicking myself for not buying more of that stock.
Oh, what the hell; I'll bite.
Imagine if all the money spent on sending handfuls of people into space was spent on health care education here on Earth?
Well, we'd probably see far fewer posts like this post's parent, and that does hold a lot of appeal: health care education would certainly go a long way toward eliminating the homeopathy advocates and so on. All the same, if you're going to argue that the money spent on space exploration could be better spent on earth, I can think of far better arguments for that than these ridiculous conspiracy theories.
The usual: people whining about the language not conforming to their favorite paradigms.
..as if millions of Slashdot trolls cried out at the expiration of their material, and were suddenly silenced.
Good luck to you. Bummer about Steve Jobs stealing your thunder, though.
If I'm reading this right, the court's opinion seems to have been that this was a church-state violation, but that the teacher was immune to lawsuits for such. How does that work?
It's more that the beta for 7 comes out pretty much the instant 6 is released. One of the more interesting aspects of the Mozilla development process is that they essentially have a pipeline of four "releases" going on at once: Current (stable stuff, now 6), Beta (code being stabilized, now 7), Aurora (testing and major bugfixes, now 8) and Nightly (new feature work, now 9). When it comes time to do a new release, Current gets booted out, Beta and Aurora get promoted, and Nightly coughs up a build that becomes the new Aurora. It would actually be a pretty good system, except for the part where they forgot about maintenance releases and long-term support.
No, you do not know how this industry works. The people working on the story have nothing to do with the gameplay. They are almost always separate people/divisions working on these parts unless it is an extremely small game. Even for the game linked below (a 1 person owned company), my brother wrote the game...he had another guy write the music and another do the arts/graphics while I wrote the story. His working on the gameplay mechanics had absolutely no bearing on the story and vice versa. In a large studio, 100% these people are different.
This is part of the problem. Many of the best story-focused games integrate the gameplay with the story: something that becomes much harder to do if you keep the teams too separate. A good director can mitigate the problem, but not completely.
There are many different reasons people don't finish games. If they removed story from games as you suggest, many of those games wouldn't be finished by people who are motivated by story.
If the linked article is any indication, they're not finishing these games anyway. That indicates that something is is wrong with the games, and it's wrong to such a degree that even many story-motivated folks get turned off. For it to be happening to so many games -pretty much the entire contemporary catalog- indicates an industrywide problem, likely something rooted in the philosophy of game creation itself.
I offer one proposal. I back it up by the abundance of classic games, even long ones, which neither espoused this philosophy nor had this problem.
I love the Slashdot attitude that it is easy to make good games...
That's not the Slashdot attitude at all. It doesn't even make sense: if it were easy to make good games, more companies would be doing it, and we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. What's easy to do is wow a very specific demographic with whiz-bang graphics and bombastic story elements, and because that particular crowd is so easily amused, this sells a lot of copies. That's why game makers do it: it's the easiest possible way to make money in the business.
That last bit -about bombastic story elements- isn't the same thing as telling a good story. Good storytelling is indeed difficult, but one extremely important element of good storytelling is picking the most suitable medium with which to tell it. For example, good movie plots seldom if ever make for good games, and vice versa. I pick that example specifically because game makers are hiring writers who ought to be making movies or TV series, or in some cases even writing novels, rather than people who are good at making game stories. The result, predictably, is movie-games, and these don't make for good games at all. The phenomenon we're seeing now is a glut of such games.
...and if you suddenly paid less attention to graphics or story then gameplay would magically become better.
Only if the attention being wasted on overwrought graphics or ill-suited story went back to the gameplay, where it always belonged.
The reason people aren't finishing contemporary long games is that they suck. Seriously: if a game can't hold most people's interest long enough to finish it, there is something wrong with the game.
Part of the problem here is that game developers are focusing overly much on story at the expense of the gameplay. A good story can grab people at the beginning and end, and at climactic points in the middle, but no story can keep that up throughout the whole game. Between those points of interest, the gameplay has to be able to deliver, or the player will get bored: often so bored that even the promise of more story doesn't hold them. And in many contemporary "story-based" games, the gameplay simply doesn't deliver: either gratuitous complexity kills the fun, or generic mechanics wear out their welcome, or the game gets so linear that it doesn't even feel interactive anymore.
That's why people aren't finishing contemporary, "story-focused" games: because they aren't good games. Story is nice, but it can't make a bad game good. Only improved gameplay can do that. The solution isn't to make shorter games, or even to ditch story; it's to make better games.
I don't know if it'll hemorrhage users to Chrome, per se. While Chrome does manage to be slightly more enterprise-friendly (mostly due to providing MCSE-friendly .msi and DSO packages), it still doesn't provide the basic corporate need of long-term support.
Technically, this presents an opportunity for Opera and Safari to step in and try to grab some enterprise marketshare for themselves, as they now pretty much have the market for IE alternatives with stable code bases pretty much locked up. But let's be realistic: they haven't managed to do this in the past, and so they probably won't manage it now.
No; what Firefox will probably lose its enterprise users to is IE. This is far less problematic than it was back in the days of IE6 or IE7. However, it still encourages businesses to stick with whatever was installed by default on their machines: in other words, by trying to force businesses into a constant-upgrade cycle, Mozilla is creating a perverse incentive to not upgrade at all.
So basically, the Mozilla Corporation's plan to deal with the bona fide corporate need for a stable codebase with long-term support is to stick its head in the sand and pretend that there are no releases anymore?
Way to go at killing the enterprise market for your product. And all this just so no one on your side would have to do that horrible boring 'maintenance' work anymore.
There are apparently legal issues with this sort of thing. In order to be an "investment coin," it must be legal tender in its country of origin at the time it is made.
Um, read my post again: I actually did get that. My point is that while the merchandising aspect is an interesting twist, this really isn't any different from something that lots of countries already do.
Isn't this really just a set of bullion coins, up to and including the fact that they're technically legal tender but you'd have to be out of your mind to actually spend them? Or are they hoping that value to collectors might push the value of these things up even further than the cost of the silver itself?
No. IIRC it can compile to LLVM (it's actually got a bunch of backends), but it isn't actually based on LLVM itself.
Fracking oil shale; how does it work?
Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.
Gunpei Yokoi coined the phrase. As long as Nintendo adheres to it, they win every time. When they start blindly grabbing for MOAR POWUR, without offering any meaningful improvements to gaming but only pretty pictures, they lose. They can't compete on graphics-are-everything; that's Sony's and Microsoft's model, and they just plain do it better. Nintendo's only hope to compete is on actual quality, and when they bother to do this, they come out on top.
You'd think that the Wii and DS would have taught them this lesson once and for all, after the disaster that was the N64/Gamecube era. Apparently, however, they need another go-round.
Of course this is a publicity stunt. Killing off superheroes is always a publicity stunt, which is part of why deaths never stick.
Odds are, the replacement won't stick either. More likely Parker will come back in a year or two, possibly with minor alterations to his character design but nothing too significant. When this happens, the legacy character will either die, retire, or adopt a new superheroic identity; sometimes they do more than one of these, and due to this being comics they can come in any order.
If this is how they're talking about Spider-Man's replacement, my money's on the new-identity option, and that identity has probably already been fully designed and named with the first issue or two ready to go. The Spider-Man brand is merely a springboard, an attempt to start this guy's intended comic off with a pre-grown reader base.
The thing about the CDC is that it is possible to immunize and/or treat basically anyone. Financial and logistical concerns may make doing so impractical, but where treatments exist, they tend to work to varying degrees in just about anybody.
Malware isn't like this. Older software tends to lapse out of support. That's not an insurmountable problem in the OSS community, where the source code to the OS is available so that someone other than the maintainer could write a patch. But with closed and obsolete operating systems -Win95, for example, or Mac OS 9- who's going to write the patches?
Currently they have enough resources to keep four versions in the air at once: Current, Beta, Aurora, and Nightly. This is actually up from the previous structure, where they had up to three versions in the air at once: current, one back, and (sometimes) Beta.
It's also worth noting that the people taking care of Current already have a lighter load than the other three teams, because their product has already gone through multiple rounds of QA and isn't getting any new features. My thought, therefore, is to augment the transform the Current team into a Maintenance team that handles one version back and the LTS. This will probably require some augmentation, but not nearly as much as two entirely new teams, and likely not even as much as one. There's also a number of large OSS projects out there which can be tapped for advice on how they maintain older products.
Bottom line: while it might require some augmentation, it is nowhere near "way more than it will ever have."