Not to mention the fact that the entire MSDN library is available for free at http://msdn.microsoft.com/.
But what am I saying? This is the exact same trolling comment that gets posted wherever and whenever something, anything.NET gets posted. Probably even the same troll.
My guess is either
a) It's someone who hates Microsoft so very much that it wouldn't matter if Bill Gates cured Cancer and AIDS tommorow, he'd still be the antichrist
b) It's someone who has never used anything.NET in his life and doesn't get what it is.
c) It's someone who has been advocating "non-MS solution X" for years now and is frustrated at the fact that no one's listened yet
d) It's the same "*BSD is Dying" guy
e) CowboyNeal
If you want my explanation on what.NET is, check my URL below.
Besides the other reasons cited here, one of the reasons AOL is hated so much is because, traditionally, the speed of their connection sucked for various reasons. The chief blame laid upon the fact that their network merely grafted Internet access into their fold. Consequently, instead of being able to rely on even decent dial-up modem speeds, developers of Internet related software (like computer games) had to do extra work to make up for the "short bus" people on AOL.
In addition, it's my information that their motivations for buying out other companies is dubious at best. They knew that home.netscape.com got lots of hits so they figured owning Netscape would get them lots of advertising impressions. Of course the reason home.netscape.com got lots of hits is because lots of people never bother to change their home page, something that went away once IE took the market. They knew that MP3 was "this big thing" so they bought out the most popular MP3 player - this was at the time that most people thought Napster was "a website". Of course AOL merges with Time Warner (or did they?) which owns record labels that don't care for MP3 at all - and imagine their thrill when Justin Frankel (of Winamp/Nullsoft) turns around and writes Gnutella and gives birth to the (soon to be) post-Napster P2P boom.
As for Mozilla "dying" - well this is as good a time as any to test out those open source notions.
As for AIM dying, well witness how Napster dies, so Morpheus becomes big, then Morpheus dies, so KaZaa becomes big. People move on. Hell, thanks to Trillian all I'd notice is a little circle being dimmed.
Obviously just about everyone who would come here will err on the side of the videogames. And I've gone on and on about it already, so I won't regurgitate that here.
But one of the things I rarely see mentioned is this - not terribly unlike the JFK consipracy theorists of the world, people who make the bold sweeping claim that video game violence caused things like Columbine do like to hang on to the tiny shreds of evidence that support their theory and ignore the mountains of evidence against it.
The lawyer mentioned in the article has attempted to make a living off of suing video game makers. His Kip Kinkle and Columbine cases were thrown out, so either he's making money either way or he's getting really frustrated right now. In addition to the Beltway Sniper case, he's suing the government over the America's Army game. His mentality is that of a spammer - it doesn't matter how sleazy and slimy what he does is, so long as he gets paid.
And the fact is that all you have to do is bring a picture of a dead kid and a waving finger to Congress and you can get any law in the world you want passed.
But think about it - how many violent kid incidents do you ever hear about? Columbine, Kip Kinkle, those kids in Arkansas, that kid in Flint. That's what, four? And what did they all have in common? Well three of them were white kids shooting white kids (the kid in Flint was a black kid shooting a white kid - significant since the kids were six years old). But what about black kids shooting black kids? It happens all the time, but the news never centers on it. Similarly, when Elizabeth Smart went missing it was Chandra Levy Part II, but the same week a black girl from a poor neighboorhood was kidnapped and no one outside of her state cared.
So the parents groups, mostly white people terrified of this happening to them, use this handful of incidents and blow them out of proportion. The game industry is growing while the overall crime rate is dropping. We haven't had a big school shooting since Columbine. And the biggest retailers (Wal-Mart, Target, GameStop) won't sell M-rated games to minors.
Personally I support not selling M-rated games to minors, but not at the point of law. The movie industry hasn't needed laws to enfore R-rated movies. Do kids still see them? Sure. But they can't just walk in. And consider this - kids can't pirate cigarettes, but if you make it to where kids can't buy M-rated games by law they'll just hit up the newsgroups.
It's true that the people who made Anachronox were all fired once the game came out but your post makes it sound like they were singled out.
To recap, Ion Storm at this point in time (circa 2001) was two different houses, Ion Storm Dallas and Ion Storm Austin. Ion Storm Dallas gave us Anachronox and Daikatana. Daikatana's story has been chronicled as a textbook case of what can go wrong with game development, but the game itself took some five years and $30 million to make. Obviously it didn't move enough boxes to justify that, and with Eidos losing money on that and the deteriorating Tomb Raider franchise, someone had to get the boot, so Ion Storm Dallas was disbanded.
Ergo, it wasn't so much the Anachronox team that got fired as it was entire developer getting the boot for an unrelated game.
Ion Storm Austin is still around though - they made Deus Ex and are working on the sequel as well as a new Thief game. They attempted to change their name to something else without a stigma, but almost every name they thought of was copyrighted, so they ditched the "Austin" and became Ion Storm.
Ergo, if you buy an Ion Storm game you're buying a game from a company with little to do with the Daikatana legacy.
contributing technologies, such as the internet...software vendor can increasingly gain protection without increasing inconvenience, and so forth
Kinda reminds me of the CD Key system being used in online games nowadays. It's so effective that when you see the.nfo files for these games you see things like "no internet multiplayer - buy the game if you want to play online".
Not that the CD Key system completely eliminates piracy, but it's just generally accepted that you have to buy the game now.
heh - well it used to be that websites (as I followed it) could charge to run banner ads (Google still does this). Then it became a deal where the site only got paid for "click-throughs", and the rate is like less than 1/2 of 1%. Same thing for popups. But Spammers are still in that mode where they get paid no matter who buys what - but if Spam 100% did not work, wouldn't companies give up on paying spammers, too? And without a steady paycheck, wouldn't spammers stop, too?
but wouldn't this in theory go away at some point? I mean, people moved away from banner ads because they didn't work and popups don't work either, but if all spam stopped working wouldn't it eventually go away too?
In a way the spammer is like the people who ran e/n websites to live off the money from banner ads. Only spam is a lot more effective, and the spammer doesn't even have to come out with the e/n.
That's something interesting I hadn't thought of before. Google got all scared that the term "google" would become a verb - or at least they're tepid about the idea that it would become such a verb as to become unbreakably synonymous with "search". But Yahoo! had a series of ads with the "Do You Yahoo!?" tagline (they even got sued for the yoedeling) and they desparately wanted "yahoo" to become a verb. One wants it but can't get it, the other has it and doesn't want it.
Of course "yahoo" was already a slang term ("some yahoo tried to sell me this...") whereas "google" is a made up word, a "beatles"-esque pun on the spelling on "googol".
Two things I would suggest in regards to the reliance upon VS.net:
VS.net obviously gives you the "VB" approach to design and coding, so you have things like Intellisense pop down your available functions and methods, and instead of worrying with coding your GUI design you design it in design mode.
Of course the problems with this approach is that it's way too easy to use the IDE as a crutch - especially Intellisense. One day you'll be in a situation (like a technical quiz for an interview) where you won't have these tools available, so unless you're paying attention you won't know what to do.
Now this is not to say that IDE's are bad - we all use them. But be aware of what you're doing - commit to memory the notion of what event handlers you're really writing code for.
Also, VS.net writes part of your code for you as part of the interface design - this is hidden (collapsed) by VS.net into a region - something like "Forms Designer Generated Code". They're correct in telling you in the comments not to touch it, but do open it up and look at it every once in a while, both because then you'll see the behind the scenes stuff (something VB6 wouldn't let you do) and because that stuff is written with Microsoft Best Coding Practices in mind, so it's clean to look at and study.
The second thing I would say is use the command line compilers now and again. Obviously you don't want to commandeer a huge project with command line compilers if you don't have to, but it's still a good way to make sure you know the code better than you know the IDE. A happy medium can be found with the open source (!) IDE SharpDevelop, but be forewarned that the forms designer leaves a bit to be desired and I've had SD wipe out code of mine before.
I recommend you do a little more investigation before quitting.
Well like I mentioned in a response to another post, I'm in a state run institution and they purchased an interim solution from the same vendor that sold us the mainframe environment twenty years ago, and that's the only thing we're allowed to use. Nothing else is up for discussion. Another reason I'd like to jet.
OK, the phrase "code is wrong" is misleading. In particular I run part of a Student Info Management System, and we'll have, say, 50,000 bills printed and all look fine - except for one or two. So we'll look at what's unique about these students and we'll recreate them in the system. Or try to. We don't have any way to dump the data of the student into the test system (and since we're a state institution it may be illegal to do so) so we have to recreate everything about the student through the interfaces in the test system. Only it's damn near impossible to do so. There's a million flaming hoops to jump through - we have to go through a financial aid approval process in test to get a student admitted to a class! This takes forever of course - plus of course whatever the student's enrolled in isn't in the test system. So what we wind up doing is making our best approximation since the bills have to be printed NOW. So we come up with what we think is wrong, fix the programming around it, and rerun the bill when we get to production. But the bill is still wrong.
So part of the problem is our system. And my particular set of coworkers. And the fact that we're a state institution with lots of people comfortable in cushy jobs hoping the technology curve doesn't get any steeper before they retire.
Of course this isn't the case for all mainframe programmers. It isn't even the case for all the mainframe programmers around me. But to me the difficulty curve of programming is like your aforementioned Moore's Law - and a lot of old timers got in on the low end. I'm sure there are lots of mainframe programmers who are perfectly adept at modern concepts, but if I mentioned "polymorphism" or "multiple inheritance" around my workplace I'd probably fell a few people with heart attacks.
But to be perfectly honest, I just don't *like* mainframe programming. It's not for me. Hell, get me programming for Windows with command-line compilers my whole life - at least that sounds interesting.
Here's what's mind-numbing about programming them:
Imagine coding all day at a screen limited to 20 lines, 80 characters wide, all capital letters, red text on a black background. This is regardless of screen resolution. You can customize colors on your Windows client, but it's pretty much the same. I've downloaded programs into text files to study them for sanity's sake before.
Imagine no debugging. Just hardcoded write statements.
Imagine jumping through 1,000 loopholes to recreate test data, only to discover too late that the production data still doesn't work - your code is wrong.
Imagine top down programming. Structured? Sorta. No object-oriented nature at all. Being punished by people thirty years older than you for trying to use a function or some reusable code. Make a change to a program? Good - now change the 10 others sorta like it.
Now imagine that suddenly your clientele (college students in my case) suddenly want all their data to be accessible via the web. Now do you chuck the old busted system? No, you instead place more systems on top of it to interface it with your web system. Synchronization? Forget about it. Transactional data over the web? Not gonna happen.
I'm 26. My colleagues are dinosaurs. I'm getting out as soon as I can. I'm not sure what's gonna happen to this situation in the long run but I don't care.
My colleague across the room from me is thirty years older than me, is nursing a bad back and refuses to learn anything new. He's the guy with a hammer who sees everything as a nail. He has a bizarre theory that the bad economy is good because it means the COBOL programmers of the world shall rise again (I'm pretty sure JFK and Roswell factor into his theory somewhere). Sad thing is he may be right - only they're rising in India.
I think by "products" they mean things like video cards, printers, etc. There's an approval program for these sort of things, and since people tend to buy the "official looking" things, Office Depot has found a nice way to get rid of the non-selling items.
I think I remember reading an interview with her wherein EA was going to give M.U.L.E. the remake treatment, but they wanted to "modernize" it a bit, which apparently Bunten was OK with, except for weapons. EA wanted to add weapons to the game. Bunten was against the idea, it got deadlocked, and the idea died.
If you want to play M.U.L.E. online and you don't want to get Space HoRSE, it's a little known fact that in 1993 M.U.L.E. was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the ROM image is floating about. All you need is a NES EMU that does online multiplayer.
Actually I do something slightly different. Let's say I'm looking for the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on Amazon.com. I either have to go to Amazon.com, let it redirect me to that whatever-the-hell-it-is URL, go to the search box, type in the name, select "Books" from the pull-down menu, look at the search results, click the name of the book I want, then click through another page of Amazon trying to sell me unrelated crap that they think I want before I get to the book. I can shorten this by going to amazon.com/books and if there's only one edition and one book named what I'm looking for then I can save another click or two, but either way I have to go through some digging to get to one book listing on Amazon, not to mention the "free shipping" popup. Not that this is some horrible hassle or anything (much easier than looking for the book at the local B&N) but it's still some digging.
Or, I can Google for "Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom" Amazon into my Google Toolbar and boom - the page is the first result. And if I use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, I go there instantly. It's quick and it works.
Also, in the Google Toolbar if you search for "http://www.amazon.com/", then it takes you to amazon.com, but do that on the main Google page and it gives you the skinny on that URL instead of just taking you there. This is obviously meant to help along less savvy users, but it could be that those users now use the Google Toolbar instead of the Address bar in IE (I think my Mom does this).
Interesting. I didn't realize that. I suppose if you really wanted to you could use a proxy server of some sort or just disable javascript forwarding but these are all inconveniences and of course Joe User won't think to do them. Plus Joe User will never realize he's having sites hidden from him.
If I'm reading the article correctly, the deal is this - the versions of Google ending in something other than.com are censoring things based off of the region that the extension is in (i.e., the things that are verboten in Germany are excluded from google.de, but not google.com). So why not just have everyone use google.com? I mean, it's not like Google is doing something to figure out where you are via your IP address, so just use vanilla Google, and look for any DMCA stuff at the bottom - you'll get your results in either event.
And I don't think removing one page to appease the citizens of one village in the UK is that big of a deal.
Slashdot Mirror
But what am I saying? This is the exact same trolling comment that gets posted wherever and whenever something, anything .NET gets posted. Probably even the same troll.
My guess is either .NET in his life and doesn't get what it is.
a) It's someone who hates Microsoft so very much that it wouldn't matter if Bill Gates cured Cancer and AIDS tommorow, he'd still be the antichrist
b) It's someone who has never used anything
c) It's someone who has been advocating "non-MS solution X" for years now and is frustrated at the fact that no one's listened yet
d) It's the same "*BSD is Dying" guy
e) CowboyNeal
If you want my explanation on what .NET is, check my URL below.
Don't you know that toilets are death traps after too long in front of the screen?
In addition, it's my information that their motivations for buying out other companies is dubious at best. They knew that home.netscape.com got lots of hits so they figured owning Netscape would get them lots of advertising impressions. Of course the reason home.netscape.com got lots of hits is because lots of people never bother to change their home page, something that went away once IE took the market. They knew that MP3 was "this big thing" so they bought out the most popular MP3 player - this was at the time that most people thought Napster was "a website". Of course AOL merges with Time Warner (or did they?) which owns record labels that don't care for MP3 at all - and imagine their thrill when Justin Frankel (of Winamp/Nullsoft) turns around and writes Gnutella and gives birth to the (soon to be) post-Napster P2P boom.
As for Mozilla "dying" - well this is as good a time as any to test out those open source notions.
As for AIM dying, well witness how Napster dies, so Morpheus becomes big, then Morpheus dies, so KaZaa becomes big. People move on. Hell, thanks to Trillian all I'd notice is a little circle being dimmed.
There ya go.
Teenagers cannot even fucking drive cars, what makes you think they'll ever be able to grasp polymorphism, OOP and inheritance?
But one of the things I rarely see mentioned is this - not terribly unlike the JFK consipracy theorists of the world, people who make the bold sweeping claim that video game violence caused things like Columbine do like to hang on to the tiny shreds of evidence that support their theory and ignore the mountains of evidence against it.
The lawyer mentioned in the article has attempted to make a living off of suing video game makers. His Kip Kinkle and Columbine cases were thrown out, so either he's making money either way or he's getting really frustrated right now. In addition to the Beltway Sniper case, he's suing the government over the America's Army game. His mentality is that of a spammer - it doesn't matter how sleazy and slimy what he does is, so long as he gets paid.
And the fact is that all you have to do is bring a picture of a dead kid and a waving finger to Congress and you can get any law in the world you want passed.
But think about it - how many violent kid incidents do you ever hear about? Columbine, Kip Kinkle, those kids in Arkansas, that kid in Flint. That's what, four? And what did they all have in common? Well three of them were white kids shooting white kids (the kid in Flint was a black kid shooting a white kid - significant since the kids were six years old). But what about black kids shooting black kids? It happens all the time, but the news never centers on it. Similarly, when Elizabeth Smart went missing it was Chandra Levy Part II, but the same week a black girl from a poor neighboorhood was kidnapped and no one outside of her state cared.
So the parents groups, mostly white people terrified of this happening to them, use this handful of incidents and blow them out of proportion. The game industry is growing while the overall crime rate is dropping. We haven't had a big school shooting since Columbine. And the biggest retailers (Wal-Mart, Target, GameStop) won't sell M-rated games to minors.
Personally I support not selling M-rated games to minors, but not at the point of law. The movie industry hasn't needed laws to enfore R-rated movies. Do kids still see them? Sure. But they can't just walk in. And consider this - kids can't pirate cigarettes, but if you make it to where kids can't buy M-rated games by law they'll just hit up the newsgroups.
To recap, Ion Storm at this point in time (circa 2001) was two different houses, Ion Storm Dallas and Ion Storm Austin. Ion Storm Dallas gave us Anachronox and Daikatana. Daikatana's story has been chronicled as a textbook case of what can go wrong with game development, but the game itself took some five years and $30 million to make. Obviously it didn't move enough boxes to justify that, and with Eidos losing money on that and the deteriorating Tomb Raider franchise, someone had to get the boot, so Ion Storm Dallas was disbanded.
Ergo, it wasn't so much the Anachronox team that got fired as it was entire developer getting the boot for an unrelated game.
Ion Storm Austin is still around though - they made Deus Ex and are working on the sequel as well as a new Thief game. They attempted to change their name to something else without a stigma, but almost every name they thought of was copyrighted, so they ditched the "Austin" and became Ion Storm.
Ergo, if you buy an Ion Storm game you're buying a game from a company with little to do with the Daikatana legacy.
...at least they're down to one a week now.
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (along with the rest of the series).
Need anything else?
Not that the CD Key system completely eliminates piracy, but it's just generally accepted that you have to buy the game now.
Not that I read .nfo files mind you...
Be sure you have this fix to minimize damage.
heh - well it used to be that websites (as I followed it) could charge to run banner ads (Google still does this). Then it became a deal where the site only got paid for "click-throughs", and the rate is like less than 1/2 of 1%. Same thing for popups. But Spammers are still in that mode where they get paid no matter who buys what - but if Spam 100% did not work, wouldn't companies give up on paying spammers, too? And without a steady paycheck, wouldn't spammers stop, too?
"googol" is the math term. "google" is an intentional mis-spelling of the math term.
And I never got the idea of "beat"les, I just figured Lennon was trying to be silly.
In a way the spammer is like the people who ran e/n websites to live off the money from banner ads. Only spam is a lot more effective, and the spammer doesn't even have to come out with the e/n.
Of course "yahoo" was already a slang term ("some yahoo tried to sell me this...") whereas "google" is a made up word, a "beatles"-esque pun on the spelling on "googol".
Of course the problems with this approach is that it's way too easy to use the IDE as a crutch - especially Intellisense. One day you'll be in a situation (like a technical quiz for an interview) where you won't have these tools available, so unless you're paying attention you won't know what to do.
Now this is not to say that IDE's are bad - we all use them. But be aware of what you're doing - commit to memory the notion of what event handlers you're really writing code for.
Also, VS.net writes part of your code for you as part of the interface design - this is hidden (collapsed) by VS.net into a region - something like "Forms Designer Generated Code". They're correct in telling you in the comments not to touch it, but do open it up and look at it every once in a while, both because then you'll see the behind the scenes stuff (something VB6 wouldn't let you do) and because that stuff is written with Microsoft Best Coding Practices in mind, so it's clean to look at and study.
So part of the problem is our system. And my particular set of coworkers. And the fact that we're a state institution with lots of people comfortable in cushy jobs hoping the technology curve doesn't get any steeper before they retire.
Of course this isn't the case for all mainframe programmers. It isn't even the case for all the mainframe programmers around me. But to me the difficulty curve of programming is like your aforementioned Moore's Law - and a lot of old timers got in on the low end. I'm sure there are lots of mainframe programmers who are perfectly adept at modern concepts, but if I mentioned "polymorphism" or "multiple inheritance" around my workplace I'd probably fell a few people with heart attacks.
But to be perfectly honest, I just don't *like* mainframe programming. It's not for me. Hell, get me programming for Windows with command-line compilers my whole life - at least that sounds interesting.
Imagine coding all day at a screen limited to 20 lines, 80 characters wide, all capital letters, red text on a black background. This is regardless of screen resolution. You can customize colors on your Windows client, but it's pretty much the same. I've downloaded programs into text files to study them for sanity's sake before.
Imagine no debugging. Just hardcoded write statements.
Imagine jumping through 1,000 loopholes to recreate test data, only to discover too late that the production data still doesn't work - your code is wrong.
Imagine top down programming. Structured? Sorta. No object-oriented nature at all. Being punished by people thirty years older than you for trying to use a function or some reusable code. Make a change to a program? Good - now change the 10 others sorta like it.
Now imagine that suddenly your clientele (college students in my case) suddenly want all their data to be accessible via the web. Now do you chuck the old busted system? No, you instead place more systems on top of it to interface it with your web system. Synchronization? Forget about it. Transactional data over the web? Not gonna happen.
I'm 26. My colleagues are dinosaurs. I'm getting out as soon as I can. I'm not sure what's gonna happen to this situation in the long run but I don't care.
My colleague across the room from me is thirty years older than me, is nursing a bad back and refuses to learn anything new. He's the guy with a hammer who sees everything as a nail. He has a bizarre theory that the bad economy is good because it means the COBOL programmers of the world shall rise again (I'm pretty sure JFK and Roswell factor into his theory somewhere). Sad thing is he may be right - only they're rising in India.
Well if they don't sell then they're never out-of-stock, and therefore can't be restocked or not-restocked. This lets them just get rid of them.
I think by "products" they mean things like video cards, printers, etc. There's an approval program for these sort of things, and since people tend to buy the "official looking" things, Office Depot has found a nice way to get rid of the non-selling items.
If you want to play M.U.L.E. online and you don't want to get Space HoRSE, it's a little known fact that in 1993 M.U.L.E. was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the ROM image is floating about. All you need is a NES EMU that does online multiplayer.
Or, I can Google for "Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom" Amazon into my Google Toolbar and boom - the page is the first result. And if I use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, I go there instantly. It's quick and it works.
Also, in the Google Toolbar if you search for "http://www.amazon.com/", then it takes you to amazon.com, but do that on the main Google page and it gives you the skinny on that URL instead of just taking you there. This is obviously meant to help along less savvy users, but it could be that those users now use the Google Toolbar instead of the Address bar in IE (I think my Mom does this).
Interesting. I didn't realize that. I suppose if you really wanted to you could use a proxy server of some sort or just disable javascript forwarding but these are all inconveniences and of course Joe User won't think to do them. Plus Joe User will never realize he's having sites hidden from him.
And I don't think removing one page to appease the citizens of one village in the UK is that big of a deal.