The second problem -- MS *FORCED* people to use VB, people who *KNEW* better, by making it the only way to do certain things (office automation comes to mind). So lots of developers have been forced into a language they didn't like when it suited MS, and the irony of being forced out of it again is deliscious.
Microsoft used VBScript in a number of things and VBA for the automation you mentioned. Both of those are simple scripting affairs. Neither of which have anything to do with VB6, which is the point of this article.
VBScript and VBA are fine for scripting tasks, which is what office automation is. There's no need to get the Excel gurus of the world to learn C++ or something like that. Most "real" developers script in VBScript or VBA when neccessary and then go back to their real language of choice.
No one's being forced to do anything. Older code will be maintained in VB6 and newer code will be written in something else. Big deal.
Some Star Wars nut out there can probably find it faster than I can, but I thought I remember reading somewhere that the contract Lucas signed with Fox stipulated that he was to deliver three PG rated movies by 2005. So either what I read was wrong, or Lucas has renegotiated, or the movie will really be PG.
I think the comment is supposed to be read "I see this movie as more of a PG-13 rating" whether or not it really gets that or has to be pared down, instead of "yeah we got it reviewed and it's getting a PG-13"
Just to prove the point, he criticized the effort of rewriting Netscape - the mozilla project! If we didn't do it, we wouldn't have had Firefox today. I rest my case.
He criticized the fact that Netscape the company decided to throw away every line of Netscape 4.x and rewrite it. From scratch. They didn't go back in and rewrite it a section at a time, they decided to wipe the slate clean. The lead developer quit over this. In an effort to remain cross-platform, they decided to rewrite every widget, so instead of people on Linux feeling like they're running Windows, everyone's platform nuances get ignored completely. They produced no new Netscapes (other than bug/security fixes for 4.x) for over three years, all the while Microsoft destroyed them.
And then when Netscape 6 was released, it was a horrible, buggy piece of crap that was completely unusable and the average person looked at it and decided that indeed IE was the superior browser. Mozilla 1.0 was still years away.
So yes, while the Netscape rewrite was a good thing for open source in the long run, it's the real reason that "throw everything away" rewrites are almost always a bad idea. You can disagree if you like but it's the real reason that MS almost always wins and Netscape is now a joke shell for IE/Firefox and a low-cost ISP.
IIRC, this has been in the works for more than a decade. I get what you're saying - one minute it won't make Longhorn, the next it's going to be in XP - but "rushed" isn't the term here.
This, along with Avalon being ported back to XP and IE7, is interesting - MS is responding to consumer demand for new features instead of doing the usual: forcing people to upgrade operating systems for them.
One thing though - I would hope that MS allows us ambitious types to activate a new XP installation so that we can try this out on a different machine. Otherwise most people like me will adopt a real "wait and see" attitude when it comes out.
I am working with an Oakland, CA prosecutor in a murder trial in which the older gang members used GTA 3 to train teens to do carjackings and murders
Wait - how did they find this out?
COP: "OK so you're all under arrest and... hey what's that?"
GANG MEMBER: "Oh, that's GTA 3"
COP: "What did you do, use it for training?"
GANG MEMBER: "Umm.... yeah! That's it! We used it for training!"
COP: "OK, we're going to need to bring that in, too."
Yeah, when you hand them a perfect excuse they'll take it. Obviously the prosecuters can be sidetracked by it.
Or, it could be that after millions of copies sold there's a good chance that the perpetrators of any crime own a copy. Or that people who are in real life gangs also like to play games with gangs in them.
I bet they had all seen Star Wars as well. OH MY GOD GEORGE LUCAS MUST BE STOPPED!!!
Yes, you're right - let's write standards-compliant javascript that won't run on most people's browsers but will instead run on a standards-compliant browser that less than 10% of the populace has. Then let's wonder why competing sites eat our lunch.
Let me download an MPEG2 file which I can burn with any DVD burning program
Not that DRM-protected file you give me, and not something I can only legally use Sonic MyDVD 6.1 on. Something I can feed to Nero without dancing through illegal hoops on.
Let's be honest - no one gives a crap about spending two hours to download a one hour show. We want to burn them to DVD. Period. And we don't want to futz with MythTV, we want to do it with a piece of hardware we can get at Best Buy.
Please, say to hell with the companies that would be offended by this. If you have millions of customers you would have the money to do a court battle.
IANAL, but I think there are *some* expectations of privacy.
Yeah, because by the "kids have no privacy" argument, a father could require his 16-year-old daughter to allow him into her room when she's getting dressed. I think we'd all agree that was unreasonable. But, say, requiring that your son allow you to go through his room to make sure there are no drugs (which I had happen to me growing up), while frustrating for the kid, is acceptable to most.
Well I was thinking was - when LOTR used CGI it looked good, it looked really appropriate. When the Star Wars prequels use CGI, a lot of it looks overdone or out of place. I think a lot of us are getting jaded to seeing "CGI Everything". The live-action Marvin is a nice touch.
Harry Potter in general is an interesting case study of book-->movie.
One of the issues they had is that the books get longer and longer (still not sure how they're going to do Goblet of Fire) and so since they knew more and more would have to be cut from the books, for the first movie they decided, initially, to go with a 2-hour movie that took some decent liberties with the plot and left X amount out entirely.
Then in test screenings the children in the audience all complained about the movie with the exact same warcry, "not enough like the book! too much left out! you did ___ all wrong!"
Since this was their target audience here, they went back in, re-edited it, filmed more scenes, and made a 3 hour movie. Kids still bitched, of course, but less so. But then since movies can't reasonably be more than three hours long the series is doomed to have movies that are less and less like the book. Especially with Azkaban, since that movie was also only 2.5 hours.
And all of this is the reason why Harry Potter movies tend to be boring, especially if you've read the books. They follow the books to the letter, never deviate except for issues of excising things due to time, and tend to be rather dry.
So me personally, I hope this movie just uses the book as a guide (no pun intended) and has a good time with it. That last scene in the trailer with the things bapping them in the face gives me a lot of hope that this movie will not collapse under the weight of the work and will instead just be a hell of a fun movie.
I personally think it's great when people try to do things "the hard way". I mean, yeah LOTR with it's expensive special effects is great and all, but it's fun to occasionally pull out my bootleg DVD's of the original untouched Star Wars trilogy and see what a sci-fi movie made "the hard way" was like.
Whomever it was (I think it was Alex St. John) that convinced Bill Gates that "multimedia" on Windows shouldn't just mean being able to play/edit video but also games (and therefore the impetus for DirectX) should be given credit for the stranglehold on the market Windows has today.
Why do people stay on Windows? Microsoft Office? Partially, but that doesn't account for why 90% of consumers do. Security? Nope. Stability? XP goes a long way, but nope. The real reason people stay on Windows is because that's where the games are. Period.
Also, something Joel pointed out, if you're developing a Windows game you're developing for 90% of the market. If you write for the Mac you're writing for less than 10% of the market. If you have a Windows game and you port it to the Mac, the cost of porting it has to be less than 10% of the overall cost (of doing both ports) or it's not worth it, because you will only get 10% of the overall sales from the Mac. Conversely, if you're writing the game for the Mac then you can port the game to Windows and get nine times the potential sales. Notice how, as much as Macintosh people loved Marathon and were somewhat ambivalent about Marathon 2, Marathon 2 sold truckloads more since it was the first Bungie game to run on Windows.
Yeah this pretty much hits the nail on the head. I still have, in my briefcase, an original Handspring Visor PDA. Like 2MB of RAM and PalmOS 3.1 on it. It occasionally alarms me - either to buy it more batteries or some meeting which has long been cancelled but I haven't resynched it in forever.
My Wife has an iPaq something and barely uses it. A waste of money. I thought about getting one but why? So I can schedule meetings? I'm at my desk all day - Outlook tells me what I need to know. Perhaps if I had a lot of appointments outside of the office I'd need one, but I don't have kids to take to little league or tons of parties to go to (married and posting to slashdot - what a surprise).
I thought about getting a top-of-the-line Windows PDA but why? To develop things for it? Might be neat, but who would buy it if the PDA market is slumped? To run games? My GBA SP does this much better than a PDA can.
In the battle for the PDA versus the cell phone, the cell phone wins. I thought about getting a phone with PDA integrated but they're way too expensive.
And it occurs to me - a lot of people (non-techies) who really need a PDA won't ever use one. Too busy - it would just slow them down. The really busy people have assistants and secrataries.
Some people I know think that AOL is using their netscape brand as an attempt to divert their operations onto a brand with not such a long history in customer complaints
Yeah, but Netscape 4.x went through so many "beta" versions that most people thought Netscape to mean "crap". And Netscape 6 was a total disaster. Plus, most people believe that Netscape "lost" to IE (which, let's be honest, they did). So AOL wants to change to a brand notorious for buggy software and losing?
I'm pretty sure that the reason you can still find it is not because it's still in print but rather because it's just not fanatically popular. I mean it is popular or else people wouldn't have bought enough copies to keep it in print as long as it has been, but I'm pretty sure Hasbro has long since shuttered Avalon Hill and the last copies of 1999 Acquire are just that - lingering.
Acquire is a game I never heard of before meeting my Wife. She and her family are PSYCHO about that game. They still had a copy from the 1960's that was on its last leg.
Christmas before last I got them the last copy in the area. Seems it was re-released in 1999 by Hasbro, who owned Avalon Hill (ironically, for the purposes of putting out a new Civilization computer game). I was the hero of the day. I still don't get how to play the stupid game, and the one thing her family doesn't like is the fact that the hotel companies in the game were changed to tech companies (it was 1999 and all) but they can play the game for like five hours without breaking a sweat.
As far as I know the 1999 printing is the latest one and as a result, the game's been out of print ever since. If you're in the mood for a "hardcore" boardgame snatch it up while you still can...
My parents got hit by Blaster. Come to find out they had been ignoring "that little globe in the corner". So I go to their house with my Wife to wax some free dinner and help them clean their system (if you'll recall the trick to blaster was to issue a command at the command line at the right time - my parents couldn't "get" this over the phone). They didn't even have SP1 at the time so I start it downloading via Windows Update. Over Dial-up. It's like 100MB (or at least the portions they needed were) and about 70MB in the dial-up connection dies. At this point it's late at night and so we decide it would actually be easier for me to drive home, burn SP1 and all the other patches Windows Update listed, burn them to CD, then drive back (at a later date of course). They live in Fort Worth, I live over an hour and a half away. Suffice it to say I learned my lesson - always burn this crap to CD first.
And the point is that this plan only worked since I was able to download the installable patches independently of having to be on the affected system. If they take that away - even for "professionals" - we have a problem.
Only id Software's stance on OpenGL for gaming saved the day
There are only two reasons OpenGL is used in gaming at all:
1. id Software's games and any game they licensed the engine for. This does include quite a few games, but far from the majority. Also, Carmack has stated that frustration with OpenGL 2.0 was the closest to going to Direct3D he's ever been.
2. Games which are concerned with cross-platform compatibility. Consoles are a different kettle of fish, but on the "computer" side of the fence, there's not many games which concern themselves with this. If your game is not going to be released on a console, you can still target 95% of the market and stay on Windows only.
You speak of Direct3D as if it was an evil scheme by Microsoft to destroy non-Windows gaming, but why would Microsoft put out an API on platforms they're not trying to sell? Could Microsoft botch OGL 2.0 to the point where even hardened developers despise it?
I would imagine that the outsourcing isn't offshoring (if he's in Canada and the firm is in the US, I think that's called "nearshoring" believe it or not) because who in their right mind would post to Slashdot of all places to say "my outsourcing didn't work out - any advice?"
Plus if we take this at face value this wasn't a "fire someone to offshore their job", this was literally "we don't have time to do this could you make one for us real quick" kind of things.
Then again if we're to take this at face value then he arranged to pay before the program was evaluated, so who knows.
We know he didn't hire someone local (in the US) because if he did, he would have legal recourse. After all, if there's one thing we know is ALWAYS an option in the US, it's to sue.
But perhaps he doesn't know that. It wouldn't be the first time someone's posted on/. asking for what others call "obvious" advice.
All I had to do is show my missus how it can record Charmed and Alias, even when she forgets to. After that, it didn't matter what it looked like. Of course that it was a nondescript black device next to all the other black devices we have didn't hurt.
I realize your analogy regarding Tivo was more towards interface and features than looks. I don't think anyone cares what their PVR looks like - it's a piece of home stereo equipment.
That said - yeah, the Zen Micro is downright fugly. iPod is "cute". And I feel sorry for all those people who bought one of those iRiver devices to find few firmware updates and a lame interface, but hey - at least more hard drive space right?
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VBScript and VBA are fine for scripting tasks, which is what office automation is. There's no need to get the Excel gurus of the world to learn C++ or something like that. Most "real" developers script in VBScript or VBA when neccessary and then go back to their real language of choice.
No one's being forced to do anything. Older code will be maintained in VB6 and newer code will be written in something else. Big deal.
I think the comment is supposed to be read "I see this movie as more of a PG-13 rating" whether or not it really gets that or has to be pared down, instead of "yeah we got it reviewed and it's getting a PG-13"
And then when Netscape 6 was released, it was a horrible, buggy piece of crap that was completely unusable and the average person looked at it and decided that indeed IE was the superior browser. Mozilla 1.0 was still years away.
So yes, while the Netscape rewrite was a good thing for open source in the long run, it's the real reason that "throw everything away" rewrites are almost always a bad idea. You can disagree if you like but it's the real reason that MS almost always wins and Netscape is now a joke shell for IE/Firefox and a low-cost ISP.
This, along with Avalon being ported back to XP and IE7, is interesting - MS is responding to consumer demand for new features instead of doing the usual: forcing people to upgrade operating systems for them.
One thing though - I would hope that MS allows us ambitious types to activate a new XP installation so that we can try this out on a different machine. Otherwise most people like me will adopt a real "wait and see" attitude when it comes out.
COP: "OK so you're all under arrest and... hey what's that?"
GANG MEMBER: "Oh, that's GTA 3"
COP: "What did you do, use it for training?"
GANG MEMBER: "Umm.... yeah! That's it! We used it for training!"
COP: "OK, we're going to need to bring that in, too."
Yeah, when you hand them a perfect excuse they'll take it. Obviously the prosecuters can be sidetracked by it.
Or, it could be that after millions of copies sold there's a good chance that the perpetrators of any crime own a copy. Or that people who are in real life gangs also like to play games with gangs in them.
I bet they had all seen Star Wars as well. OH MY GOD GEORGE LUCAS MUST BE STOPPED!!!
Yes, you're right - let's write standards-compliant javascript that won't run on most people's browsers but will instead run on a standards-compliant browser that less than 10% of the populace has. Then let's wonder why competing sites eat our lunch.
Let me download an MPEG2 file which I can burn with any DVD burning program
Not that DRM-protected file you give me, and not something I can only legally use Sonic MyDVD 6.1 on. Something I can feed to Nero without dancing through illegal hoops on.
Let's be honest - no one gives a crap about spending two hours to download a one hour show. We want to burn them to DVD. Period. And we don't want to futz with MythTV, we want to do it with a piece of hardware we can get at Best Buy.
Please, say to hell with the companies that would be offended by this. If you have millions of customers you would have the money to do a court battle.
Well I was thinking was - when LOTR used CGI it looked good, it looked really appropriate. When the Star Wars prequels use CGI, a lot of it looks overdone or out of place. I think a lot of us are getting jaded to seeing "CGI Everything". The live-action Marvin is a nice touch.
One of the issues they had is that the books get longer and longer (still not sure how they're going to do Goblet of Fire) and so since they knew more and more would have to be cut from the books, for the first movie they decided, initially, to go with a 2-hour movie that took some decent liberties with the plot and left X amount out entirely.
Then in test screenings the children in the audience all complained about the movie with the exact same warcry, "not enough like the book! too much left out! you did ___ all wrong!"
Since this was their target audience here, they went back in, re-edited it, filmed more scenes, and made a 3 hour movie. Kids still bitched, of course, but less so. But then since movies can't reasonably be more than three hours long the series is doomed to have movies that are less and less like the book. Especially with Azkaban, since that movie was also only 2.5 hours.
And all of this is the reason why Harry Potter movies tend to be boring, especially if you've read the books. They follow the books to the letter, never deviate except for issues of excising things due to time, and tend to be rather dry.
So me personally, I hope this movie just uses the book as a guide (no pun intended) and has a good time with it. That last scene in the trailer with the things bapping them in the face gives me a lot of hope that this movie will not collapse under the weight of the work and will instead just be a hell of a fun movie.
I personally think it's great when people try to do things "the hard way". I mean, yeah LOTR with it's expensive special effects is great and all, but it's fun to occasionally pull out my bootleg DVD's of the original untouched Star Wars trilogy and see what a sci-fi movie made "the hard way" was like.
Why do people stay on Windows? Microsoft Office? Partially, but that doesn't account for why 90% of consumers do. Security? Nope. Stability? XP goes a long way, but nope. The real reason people stay on Windows is because that's where the games are. Period.
Also, something Joel pointed out, if you're developing a Windows game you're developing for 90% of the market. If you write for the Mac you're writing for less than 10% of the market. If you have a Windows game and you port it to the Mac, the cost of porting it has to be less than 10% of the overall cost (of doing both ports) or it's not worth it, because you will only get 10% of the overall sales from the Mac. Conversely, if you're writing the game for the Mac then you can port the game to Windows and get nine times the potential sales. Notice how, as much as Macintosh people loved Marathon and were somewhat ambivalent about Marathon 2, Marathon 2 sold truckloads more since it was the first Bungie game to run on Windows.
My Wife has an iPaq something and barely uses it. A waste of money. I thought about getting one but why? So I can schedule meetings? I'm at my desk all day - Outlook tells me what I need to know. Perhaps if I had a lot of appointments outside of the office I'd need one, but I don't have kids to take to little league or tons of parties to go to (married and posting to slashdot - what a surprise).
I thought about getting a top-of-the-line Windows PDA but why? To develop things for it? Might be neat, but who would buy it if the PDA market is slumped? To run games? My GBA SP does this much better than a PDA can.
In the battle for the PDA versus the cell phone, the cell phone wins. I thought about getting a phone with PDA integrated but they're way too expensive.
And it occurs to me - a lot of people (non-techies) who really need a PDA won't ever use one. Too busy - it would just slow them down. The really busy people have assistants and secrataries.
More info here.
Christmas before last I got them the last copy in the area. Seems it was re-released in 1999 by Hasbro, who owned Avalon Hill (ironically, for the purposes of putting out a new Civilization computer game). I was the hero of the day. I still don't get how to play the stupid game, and the one thing her family doesn't like is the fact that the hotel companies in the game were changed to tech companies (it was 1999 and all) but they can play the game for like five hours without breaking a sweat.
As far as I know the 1999 printing is the latest one and as a result, the game's been out of print ever since. If you're in the mood for a "hardcore" boardgame snatch it up while you still can...
(I keed, I keed)
And the point is that this plan only worked since I was able to download the installable patches independently of having to be on the affected system. If they take that away - even for "professionals" - we have a problem.
1. id Software's games and any game they licensed the engine for. This does include quite a few games, but far from the majority. Also, Carmack has stated that frustration with OpenGL 2.0 was the closest to going to Direct3D he's ever been.
2. Games which are concerned with cross-platform compatibility. Consoles are a different kettle of fish, but on the "computer" side of the fence, there's not many games which concern themselves with this. If your game is not going to be released on a console, you can still target 95% of the market and stay on Windows only.
You speak of Direct3D as if it was an evil scheme by Microsoft to destroy non-Windows gaming, but why would Microsoft put out an API on platforms they're not trying to sell? Could Microsoft botch OGL 2.0 to the point where even hardened developers despise it?
Plus if we take this at face value this wasn't a "fire someone to offshore their job", this was literally "we don't have time to do this could you make one for us real quick" kind of things.
Then again if we're to take this at face value then he arranged to pay before the program was evaluated, so who knows.
All I had to do is show my missus how it can record Charmed and Alias, even when she forgets to. After that, it didn't matter what it looked like. Of course that it was a nondescript black device next to all the other black devices we have didn't hurt.
That said - yeah, the Zen Micro is downright fugly. iPod is "cute". And I feel sorry for all those people who bought one of those iRiver devices to find few firmware updates and a lame interface, but hey - at least more hard drive space right?