Not sure if you were purposefully vague, but there is more than one MSU..
There are 8 states beginning with the letter "M" and I'm pretty sure each of those has a state U. (I figure if Montana has an MSU, then so do the other 7)
That doesn't even count any extra Universities that have State University tacked onto the end that are a State U, but not THE State U for that State. Now I'm just going overboard...
At any rate, to get ever-so-slightly back on topic, we've already got bean counters, we don't need them to become packet counters. I don't think too many people here will disagree.
Extremely uninteresting without a chart of who's in what place. Or maybe I'm just blind today and can't find the link.
I think the main reason for lack of adoption of broadband in the U.S. is the effective monopolies that cable and telecom companies have in much of the country.
In most places in the U.S., cable television (and if you are lucky, internet) is supplied by a single provider. The same is often true of telecom (and thus DSL). With this effective monopoly, the cable and telecom companies set their rates at whatever level they feel like, since they have no competition to drive down prices. Usually this price is around the $50 per month range or more, which for your average user is simply too steep.
In some areas, access to broadband is still virtually impossible to obtain. I know of towns in rural areas where the cable companies have been promising broadband "soon" for 5 years or more - with no end in sight. Infrastructure is often a big part of the problem with rollout. In some places in the U.S., the phone and cable lines are so old that they cannot be used to carry broadband, or at least thats what they're telling people who inquire about such services.
Why this isn't a problem in Canada I have no idea. Less monopolies? Better lines? Providers who have a clue? Maybe there are less cheapskates in Canada? Inquiring minds want to know...
I would imagine, were China to make leaps and bounds into space, that the US would respond by pouring money into our own space program in order to compete.
So I for one say, "Go China!", even living in the USA, becuase that may be the only way we can finally start our steps towards getting off this rock.
As for popular opinion? I'd say China landing on the moon would piss a lot of people here off. Nobody owns the moon, but I think if you asked a random sampling of people in the US, you'd find that most of them consider it in a way "our territory" simply because we're the only ones who've landed actual people there. Especially if you phrased it like "would you consider China putting a manned base on the moon to be an aggressive act towards the United States?"
Thats why I think leaps and bounds by other nations in manned space exploration might lead the US to crank manned space exploration back up, perhaps even putting a base on the moon.
In my opinion, the ISS should be nothing more than a gas station anyway - send fuel up there on unmanned rockets, and fill up ships there and head out somewhere interesting. So maybe I'm biased and people really don't care about whether other countries go into space without us. But I'm still hoping they do.
He was trying to be "edgy". Which is fine, except that when most people try to be "edgy" they really come off as unprofessional. Hint to "edgy journalists": using the common language and grammatical structure of a 14 year old does not constitute "edgy journalism" even if one is 14 years old.
I'd also like to add that the article - rant really - has to be the most boring, overblown, ego tripping, artsied up language piece I've read since I started blocking John Katz articles.
First, banning text messaging. Anti-text-messaging technology will be implemented.
At some point they'll realize people are using cell phones to tell their friends movies suck. Anti-cell-phone technology will be implemented.
And finally, they'll realize people aren't leaving bad movies to go to the bathroom, they're leaving to warn their friends that the movie sucks! Movie patrons will be prevented from getting up during a movie.
Wait. I'd get to see a movie without beeping, ringing, glowing devices going off every few minutes? And people wouldn't be moving all around and getting in the way?
Sounds like paradise, but we all know how it will really be:
People buy tickets, sit down in theater.
45 minutes of previews begin. The theater doors shut and lock. (KAWANG!)
Bad Preview. Worse Preview.
Moviegoers begin to wonder how these things can possibly get worse.
They get worse.
Anti-cellphone grid engages. Every pager, phone, etc in the theater protests with an annoying beeping sound.
Movie begins.
Moviegoer #1 complains the entire movie that her cell phone doesn't work. She presses buttons on it every few minutes to check for a signal.
Moviegoer #2, an 8 year old child going to the most violent movie of the year with his parents, begins complaining he has to pee. Halfway through the movie, he begins pounding on the entrance door to the lobby. Parents ignore him.
Moviegoer #3 attempts ridiculing the movie. Which would have been entertaining, save for the fact he's an idiot.
Moviegoer #4 periodically yells at #3, telling him to shut up and occasionally threatening him.
All of which is more interesting than the movie itself, which is so horrible the rest of the moviegoers are trying to figure out ways to claw out their eyes.
Exactly. The problem is that the theory is impossible to disprove.
I see that the topic of at least one of the linked papers contains the idea that it might be possible to prove the simulation theory, which is mildy interesting. I think ultimately however, even that is pointless.
Since we do not understand everything about our universe we cannot know for certain whether an anomaly is a "glitch in the program" or simply a lack of true understanding about the nature of the anomaly. If the anomaly occurs in an area it is thought that humanity understands completely, scientists will assume the anomaly indicates that our understanding is not complete. They will then hypothesize and experiment with various explainations for the anomaly until they are satisfied that our understanding is complete - or at least "complete enough".
The "simulation theory" isn't even a recent development. The idea that our entire world/galaxy/universe is simply a dream or toy or the like of some greater being has existed for centuries. The recent development is just that "computer simulation" has been tacked onto the list.
I think the first idea is a lot better than the second. I dislike those little IBM nubs. Mice with those already exist and you don't see too many people using those, do you? The scrollwheel is much better for the position and natural movements of the fingers when holding the mouse, IMHO.
Since the orientation of the thumb is horizontal on the side of the mouse, the natural range of movement would work nicely with a horizontally oriented scroll wheel.
So put a scroll wheel on the side for the thumb instead of the mouse button I never use. Though I don't scroll horizontally often, it'd be nice to have a scroll wheel when I do need it.
The troll to regular poster ratio is absolutely rediculous on this topic. It has to be running at about 5:1 right now. Unbelievable.
I think this article may have gathered the highest troll post percentage I have ever seen. I don't know whether congradulations are in order or if its a sign of the apocolypse.
So I'll finish with this: Congradulations trolls, we'll see you in hell!!
Thats actually a use for return type sensitivity that I hadn't thought of, but that'd be really cool. Being able to overload a function with different return types, however, I've wanted many times.
Being able to do so would be extremely powerful, you could do all sorts of useful things.
For instance, even something as simple as returning an int or float from an overloaded Average function based upon what the user wanted back:
public int Average(int a, int b) {
return a*b/2 }
public double Average(int a, int b) {
return double(a)*double(b)/2.00 }
int intAverage = Average(1,2); double doubleAverage = Average(1,2);
And hey, that's psuedo code so don't get all syntax freaky on me!
It'd be sweet if that worked in the major languages, I think right now it'd certainly be my top request for language enhancements...
I'm still waiting for a PDA with a hard drive. To me, storing contact information isn't enough. And 128MB doesn't store enough to do much of anything else. I could get a few songs on there, an ebook or two, and maybe a really tiny little video, and contact information.
Really, I don't see PDAs as a killer app until they can store large amounts of data without having to carry around a gazillion memory sticks. Then the usefulness becomes clear. Store and display every ebook I want to read. Store and play my music collection. Store and play a significant amount of video. Store whatever other data I want so that I can get at it wherever I happen to be. Oh, and store contact information.
Yeah, I know, much larger (1GB+) memory sticks are on the horizon. But I see a lot of problems with those, such as very high initial cost and tremendous incompatibility issues. Portable hard drives are here now, they work reliably, and they are relatively cheap. Just add one to a PDA. Change to a bigger rechargeable battery if necessary.
That, to me, would be worth shelling out some cash for. These PDAs with the bitty memory sticks? Toys.
The "author" is clearly going for the slashdot story obfuscation award.
Either that or someone has written a slashdot story submission bot that posts the same article over and over using slightly different language each time. A bot which apparently needs some major tweaking.
Why hasn't Diablo 2 gotten a lot of attention/bugfixes/patches by Blizzard over the last year or so? Not many people are buying Diablo 2. So how does Blizzard pay an army of developers to fix the problems in Diablo 2? Well, either from the company coffers or the profits of some other game. If I were Blizzard, would I commit more than a few developers to these issues? No.
Would I claim I was battling cheaters when I deleted over a hundred thousand cheater accounts from my system? Yes.
Quite simple, really. Is Blizzard committed to stopping cheating in Diablo 2? Yes, as committed as they can afford to be.
I haven't written a game in Java since then, but that doesn't mean I haven't written Java code. I have the latest Sun One development environment on my machine, and I really like it. I've actually been working on parsing XML log files for a Java project recently in my spare time, which I have very little of.
Honestly I haven't seen enough improvements to the AWT to think it would be worth my time to pursue another graphics engine.
If you know of a Java 2D graphics engine out there that runs at a reasonable speed, I'd love to check it out.
The engine my friend and I wrote was completely 2D, using AWT only. Apples + Oranges.
That said, I've actually played with Java 3D also, and it's reasonably fast, though not as fast as OPENGL+C. (Certainly that would be expected though)
Java 3D is closer to what a developer would need to develop a serious game in Java, but I think its still for the most part underwhelming.
I haven't seen any reasonably advanced games written in Java 3D. Hopefully someday that will change, but without a lot better performance I don't see it happening.
What I think the original poster was talking about was not learning "software development" but rather "software development software".
Employers use varying Development Tools for development. Some of these Development Tools are free. Many are not. Some cost more than any college student is likely to be able to afford, even at educational discounts.
Each Development Tool has its own quirks, shortcuts, etc. How does the debugging mode work? How do you set up a build script? What advanced features does it have that will enhance your productivity using it? Is source control integrated and if so how do you use it? All of these questions and many more need to be known by the developer to properly use the Development Tool.
Why is this important? Well, some employers will choose someone with experience in their particular Development Tools of choice over equally qualified applicants who do not have said experience. The reason for this is obvious, if you don't have to teach a person the Development Tools you are using, they'll be productive more quickly. I've had a lot of interviews over the years, and never had an employer ask _how_ I got experience in a particular Development Tool.
You learn software development in college. But you also need to learn sofware development software. Since universities almost never have these tools, the students obtain them. When the tools cost many hundreds of dollars even at educational prices, many students opt to pirate them. Its all pretty simple when you do the math.
A couple of years ago a friend and I wrote a simple RTS engine in Java.
It was a tile based 2D game. Now, we weren't experts at writing super speedy display code, but we did preload all the images into memory, double buffer the frames, and crop areas of the map which would not be shown before displaying them.
It got a whopping 8 frames a second. With 1 moving unit on the screen. Needless to say we quickly abandoned the project.
Machines have gotten faster. The Java display engine is undoubtedly slightly improved. My guess is its still got a long way to go.
A lot of us are still pissed at the lackluster game linup for the N64. I got burned buying that console, and I doubt I will ever buy a Nintendo console again. If it hadn't been for the fact that I owned the Bond game during the time I was in college dorms, the system would have been a complete waste of my money.
Frankly, I've looked at the linup of games for the GC, and I'm underwhelmed. It seems like after a few interesting titles, such as Metroid and well... Metroid, there just isn't much there.
Maybe its a case of my interests not lining up with the games Nintendo has for their system. Let me put it another way: seems to me that if you aren't enamored with Nintendos franchises, Super Mario and Zelda, Smash Bros and Mariokart, then the Nintendo system just doesn't offer very much. Take a look at the third party games and try and tell me with a straight face that they aren't almost universally mediocre. And a very large percentage of those mediocre games are available on all the consoles.
I don't agree with the article in its entirety, but I do agree with the main point: Nintendo is pumping out franchise games for the GC, and if you don't buy into them, then the GC just isn't a worthwhile system.
I think the root issue is really that Nintendo has less releases for its console. And the number of great games for a system is really a percentage thing, with maybe 5% of games being "great games". If a system has 400 games in its lifetime, thats 20 great games. Nintendo always has a small library, and the "Nintendo seal of quality" does not seem to have any effect whatsoever on the "great game percentage".
Then again maybe I'm still jaded from the bitter taste of N64.
Getting a little offtopic here, but when I was in college, I wrote a c+OPENGL program that depicted all the planets and the distances between them to scale. The planets were all aligned so that the user could easily "fly" between them.
You could set the fly speed to whatever you wanted, and then see how long it would take to get from place to place. I was actually shocked to find that while the inner solar system went by in a blur, just how long it took between the outer planets. The program was taking such huge steps that you'd miss Mercury by hundreds of thousands of miles, yet you'd have to hold down the key for minutes at a time to get between the outer planets. (And, somewhat hilariously, zip by them when you got close because you didn't let up on the key quickly enough)
I knew the planets were very far apart, but that program really helped put it in perspective. I think it would be great to let schoolchildren play with a such a program to give them an idea just how vast the solar system is.
I would agree with the majority of the parent post.
Almost all religion memes include a provision against killing other humans. Only a small percentage of mutated religion memes encourage the killing of humans. Thus, the vast majority of religion memes are genetically benefical.
The Islam meme is the obvious example. The vast majority of people who have accepted the Islam meme have a version which prohibits killing other humans. However, a small group are infected with a more sinister (in genetic terms) version which actually encourages the killing of humans who have other ascribe to other memes. I think it is critical for humanity to find out which other memes are causing the Islam meme to mutate into the Islamic Terrorist meme.
I would argue that the problem in North Korea is an infection of a Communist meme mutated by a Totalitarianism meme. Neither of those is a religion meme, though anti-religion memes often accompany those memes. Luckily a powerful version of the Nationalism* and/or Isolationism meme does not seem to have infected the leadership at this time. As Hitler showed, however, it does not take long for powerful versions of such a memes to infect a very large number of people in a short time due to modern communications equipment.
*Note that I am in this case calling the Nationalism meme a mutation of the Patriotism meme, which rather than merely encouraging pride in ones own country also includes a provision against other countries.
I have only recently become aware of the "meme" meme, and would like to thank the author of the thread root post for making such an informative article available. I find it equally fascinating that deeper rooted memes that I am infected with immediately mutated the "meme" meme described in the article so that it would fit alongside the others I ascribe to. Certainly a unique experience to realize for the first time exactly what was happening.
Its the same. Amazons autocomplete is populated by searches from previous users. Probably some (or possibly all) entries are prepopulated by Amazon themselves, but in terms of the database query being run there is no difference.
Meaning that either autocomplete is working in the same manner - a "completion" populates based on the user typing the first few characters of an item in the database.
Amazon may have added some nifty weighting/sorting to make sure certain entries show up before others, but that doesn't make it a new invention.
I'm not saying ads are going to disappear altogether, such a claim would be rediculous. But how much internet ads make is really immaterial to the discussion.
My hope is that the patent ruling is successful and that the royalty percentage discourages the more annoying versions of ads (popups) in favor of less annoying banner ads. I think this is a reasonable expectation regardless of whether ads are currently successful or not. Any peice of the pie is too much when another option will offer you the entire thing.
I'll fall victim to the troll anyway:
The New York Times is the exception rather than the rule. The vast majority of sites out there do not make very much money off of ads. It is this large percentage of the internet that would be affected by a patent ruling such as this one.
Slashdot itself, attracting a very large number of eyeballs as evidenced by the much maligned "slashdot effect" has introduced a subscription system to supplement their ad revenue. It seems likely to me that this is a move made because ads simply don't make enough cash. (Remember slashdot also rolled out a more annoying larger banner format as well?) Most of the moneymaking ventures on the internet have similar systems.
I would, in fact, argue that subscription systems have so far been more effective than ad revenue, and that internet ad revenue is still not a viable business model in most cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if you were purposefully vague, but there is more than one MSU..
There are 8 states beginning with the letter "M" and I'm pretty sure each of those has a state U. (I figure if Montana has an MSU, then so do the other 7)
That doesn't even count any extra Universities that have State University tacked onto the end that are a State U, but not THE State U for that State. Now I'm just going overboard...
At any rate, to get ever-so-slightly back on topic, we've already got bean counters, we don't need them to become packet counters. I don't think too many people here will disagree.
When I really need them.
We need a +4 Funny on this pronto.
Chop-chop, lets get modding on this now.
Your assistance is appreciated. Thank you.
Searching for a market.
Honestly this is the dumbest idea for a product I've heard in a while.
Extremely uninteresting without a chart of who's in what place. Or maybe I'm just blind today and can't find the link.
I think the main reason for lack of adoption of broadband in the U.S. is the effective monopolies that cable and telecom companies have in much of the country.
In most places in the U.S., cable television (and if you are lucky, internet) is supplied by a single provider. The same is often true of telecom (and thus DSL). With this effective monopoly, the cable and telecom companies set their rates at whatever level they feel like, since they have no competition to drive down prices. Usually this price is around the $50 per month range or more, which for your average user is simply too steep.
In some areas, access to broadband is still virtually impossible to obtain. I know of towns in rural areas where the cable companies have been promising broadband "soon" for 5 years or more - with no end in sight. Infrastructure is often a big part of the problem with rollout. In some places in the U.S., the phone and cable lines are so old that they cannot be used to carry broadband, or at least thats what they're telling people who inquire about such services.
Why this isn't a problem in Canada I have no idea. Less monopolies? Better lines? Providers who have a clue? Maybe there are less cheapskates in Canada? Inquiring minds want to know...
I would imagine, were China to make leaps and bounds into space, that the US would respond by pouring money into our own space program in order to compete.
So I for one say, "Go China!", even living in the USA, becuase that may be the only way we can finally start our steps towards getting off this rock.
As for popular opinion? I'd say China landing on the moon would piss a lot of people here off. Nobody owns the moon, but I think if you asked a random sampling of people in the US, you'd find that most of them consider it in a way "our territory" simply because we're the only ones who've landed actual people there. Especially if you phrased it like "would you consider China putting a manned base on the moon to be an aggressive act towards the United States?"
Thats why I think leaps and bounds by other nations in manned space exploration might lead the US to crank manned space exploration back up, perhaps even putting a base on the moon.
In my opinion, the ISS should be nothing more than a gas station anyway - send fuel up there on unmanned rockets, and fill up ships there and head out somewhere interesting. So maybe I'm biased and people really don't care about whether other countries go into space without us. But I'm still hoping they do.
Sssssshhhhhhh.....
He was trying to be "edgy". Which is fine, except that when most people try to be "edgy" they really come off as unprofessional. Hint to "edgy journalists": using the common language and grammatical structure of a 14 year old does not constitute "edgy journalism" even if one is 14 years old.
I'd also like to add that the article - rant really - has to be the most boring, overblown, ego tripping, artsied up language piece I've read since I started blocking John Katz articles.
First, banning text messaging. Anti-text-messaging technology will be implemented.
At some point they'll realize people are using cell phones to tell their friends movies suck. Anti-cell-phone technology will be implemented.
And finally, they'll realize people aren't leaving bad movies to go to the bathroom, they're leaving to warn their friends that the movie sucks! Movie patrons will be prevented from getting up during a movie.
Wait. I'd get to see a movie without beeping, ringing, glowing devices going off every few minutes? And people wouldn't be moving all around and getting in the way?
Sounds like paradise, but we all know how it will really be:
People buy tickets, sit down in theater.
45 minutes of previews begin. The theater doors shut and lock. (KAWANG!)
Bad Preview.
Worse Preview.
Moviegoers begin to wonder how these things can possibly get worse.
They get worse.
Anti-cellphone grid engages. Every pager, phone, etc in the theater protests with an annoying beeping sound.
Movie begins.
Moviegoer #1 complains the entire movie that her cell phone doesn't work. She presses buttons on it every few minutes to check for a signal.
Moviegoer #2, an 8 year old child going to the most violent movie of the year with his parents, begins complaining he has to pee. Halfway through the movie, he begins pounding on the entrance door to the lobby. Parents ignore him.
Moviegoer #3 attempts ridiculing the movie. Which would have been entertaining, save for the fact he's an idiot.
Moviegoer #4 periodically yells at #3, telling him to shut up and occasionally threatening him.
All of which is more interesting than the movie itself, which is so horrible the rest of the moviegoers are trying to figure out ways to claw out their eyes.
The movie, Gigli 2, mercifully ends.
Exactly. The problem is that the theory is impossible to disprove.
I see that the topic of at least one of the linked papers contains the idea that it might be possible to prove the simulation theory, which is mildy interesting. I think ultimately however, even that is pointless.
Since we do not understand everything about our universe we cannot know for certain whether an anomaly is a "glitch in the program" or simply a lack of true understanding about the nature of the anomaly. If the anomaly occurs in an area it is thought that humanity understands completely, scientists will assume the anomaly indicates that our understanding is not complete. They will then hypothesize and experiment with various explainations for the anomaly until they are satisfied that our understanding is complete - or at least "complete enough".
The "simulation theory" isn't even a recent development. The idea that our entire world/galaxy/universe is simply a dream or toy or the like of some greater being has existed for centuries. The recent development is just that "computer simulation" has been tacked onto the list.
I think the first idea is a lot better than the second. I dislike those little IBM nubs. Mice with those already exist and you don't see too many people using those, do you? The scrollwheel is much better for the position and natural movements of the fingers when holding the mouse, IMHO.
Since the orientation of the thumb is horizontal on the side of the mouse, the natural range of movement would work nicely with a horizontally oriented scroll wheel.
So put a scroll wheel on the side for the thumb instead of the mouse button I never use. Though I don't scroll horizontally often, it'd be nice to have a scroll wheel when I do need it.
The troll to regular poster ratio is absolutely rediculous on this topic. It has to be running at about 5:1 right now. Unbelievable.
I think this article may have gathered the highest troll post percentage I have ever seen. I don't know whether congradulations are in order or if its a sign of the apocolypse.
So I'll finish with this:
Congradulations trolls, we'll see you in hell!!
Thats actually a use for return type sensitivity that I hadn't thought of, but that'd be really cool. Being able to overload a function with different return types, however, I've wanted many times.
Being able to do so would be extremely powerful, you could do all sorts of useful things.
For instance, even something as simple as returning an int or float from an overloaded Average function based upon what the user wanted back:
public int Average(int a, int b)
{
return a*b/2
}
public double Average(int a, int b)
{
return double(a)*double(b)/2.00
}
int intAverage = Average(1,2);
double doubleAverage = Average(1,2);
And hey, that's psuedo code so don't get all syntax freaky on me!
It'd be sweet if that worked in the major languages, I think right now it'd certainly be my top request for language enhancements...
I'm still waiting for a PDA with a hard drive. To me, storing contact information isn't enough. And 128MB doesn't store enough to do much of anything else. I could get a few songs on there, an ebook or two, and maybe a really tiny little video, and contact information.
Really, I don't see PDAs as a killer app until they can store large amounts of data without having to carry around a gazillion memory sticks. Then the usefulness becomes clear. Store and display every ebook I want to read. Store and play my music collection. Store and play a significant amount of video. Store whatever other data I want so that I can get at it wherever I happen to be. Oh, and store contact information.
Yeah, I know, much larger (1GB+) memory sticks are on the horizon. But I see a lot of problems with those, such as very high initial cost and tremendous incompatibility issues. Portable hard drives are here now, they work reliably, and they are relatively cheap. Just add one to a PDA. Change to a bigger rechargeable battery if necessary.
That, to me, would be worth shelling out some cash for. These PDAs with the bitty memory sticks? Toys.
The "author" is clearly going for the slashdot story obfuscation award.
Either that or someone has written a slashdot story submission bot that posts the same article over and over using slightly different language each time. A bot which apparently needs some major tweaking.
Battle.net is still a free service.
Why hasn't Diablo 2 gotten a lot of attention/bugfixes/patches by Blizzard over the last year or so? Not many people are buying Diablo 2. So how does Blizzard pay an army of developers to fix the problems in Diablo 2? Well, either from the company coffers or the profits of some other game. If I were Blizzard, would I commit more than a few developers to these issues? No.
Would I claim I was battling cheaters when I deleted over a hundred thousand cheater accounts from my system? Yes.
Quite simple, really. Is Blizzard committed to stopping cheating in Diablo 2? Yes, as committed as they can afford to be.
P3 450, 128MB RAM, TNT2 Ultra graphics card. Java 1.2, I believe.
I haven't written a game in Java since then, but that doesn't mean I haven't written Java code. I have the latest Sun One development environment on my machine, and I really like it. I've actually been working on parsing XML log files for a Java project recently in my spare time, which I have very little of.
Honestly I haven't seen enough improvements to the AWT to think it would be worth my time to pursue another graphics engine.
If you know of a Java 2D graphics engine out there that runs at a reasonable speed, I'd love to check it out.
The engine my friend and I wrote was completely 2D, using AWT only. Apples + Oranges.
That said, I've actually played with Java 3D also, and it's reasonably fast, though not as fast as OPENGL+C. (Certainly that would be expected though)
Java 3D is closer to what a developer would need to develop a serious game in Java, but I think its still for the most part underwhelming.
I haven't seen any reasonably advanced games written in Java 3D. Hopefully someday that will change, but without a lot better performance I don't see it happening.
What I think the original poster was talking about was not learning "software development" but rather "software development software".
Employers use varying Development Tools for development. Some of these Development Tools are free. Many are not. Some cost more than any college student is likely to be able to afford, even at educational discounts.
Each Development Tool has its own quirks, shortcuts, etc. How does the debugging mode work? How do you set up a build script? What advanced features does it have that will enhance your productivity using it? Is source control integrated and if so how do you use it? All of these questions and many more need to be known by the developer to properly use the Development Tool.
Why is this important? Well, some employers will choose someone with experience in their particular Development Tools of choice over equally qualified applicants who do not have said experience. The reason for this is obvious, if you don't have to teach a person the Development Tools you are using, they'll be productive more quickly. I've had a lot of interviews over the years, and never had an employer ask _how_ I got experience in a particular Development Tool.
You learn software development in college. But you also need to learn sofware development software. Since universities almost never have these tools, the students obtain them. When the tools cost many hundreds of dollars even at educational prices, many students opt to pirate them. Its all pretty simple when you do the math.
A couple of years ago a friend and I wrote a simple RTS engine in Java.
It was a tile based 2D game. Now, we weren't experts at writing super speedy display code, but we did preload all the images into memory, double buffer the frames, and crop areas of the map which would not be shown before displaying them.
It got a whopping 8 frames a second. With 1 moving unit on the screen. Needless to say we quickly abandoned the project.
Machines have gotten faster. The Java display engine is undoubtedly slightly improved. My guess is its still got a long way to go.
A lot of us are still pissed at the lackluster game linup for the N64. I got burned buying that console, and I doubt I will ever buy a Nintendo console again. If it hadn't been for the fact that I owned the Bond game during the time I was in college dorms, the system would have been a complete waste of my money.
Frankly, I've looked at the linup of games for the GC, and I'm underwhelmed. It seems like after a few interesting titles, such as Metroid and well... Metroid, there just isn't much there.
Maybe its a case of my interests not lining up with the games Nintendo has for their system. Let me put it another way: seems to me that if you aren't enamored with Nintendos franchises, Super Mario and Zelda, Smash Bros and Mariokart, then the Nintendo system just doesn't offer very much. Take a look at the third party games and try and tell me with a straight face that they aren't almost universally mediocre. And a very large percentage of those mediocre games are available on all the consoles.
I don't agree with the article in its entirety, but I do agree with the main point: Nintendo is pumping out franchise games for the GC, and if you don't buy into them, then the GC just isn't a worthwhile system.
I think the root issue is really that Nintendo has less releases for its console. And the number of great games for a system is really a percentage thing, with maybe 5% of games being "great games". If a system has 400 games in its lifetime, thats 20 great games. Nintendo always has a small library, and the "Nintendo seal of quality" does not seem to have any effect whatsoever on the "great game percentage".
Then again maybe I'm still jaded from the bitter taste of N64.
40 GB and 80 GB drives are crapping out all over.
I bought a 60 GB drive!
Muhuahahahahahahaha!
At least until the press release next week:
"Oh yeah, 60 GB drives failing also, being recalled."
Getting a little offtopic here, but when I was in college, I wrote a c+OPENGL program that depicted all the planets and the distances between them to scale. The planets were all aligned so that the user could easily "fly" between them.
You could set the fly speed to whatever you wanted, and then see how long it would take to get from place to place. I was actually shocked to find that while the inner solar system went by in a blur, just how long it took between the outer planets. The program was taking such huge steps that you'd miss Mercury by hundreds of thousands of miles, yet you'd have to hold down the key for minutes at a time to get between the outer planets. (And, somewhat hilariously, zip by them when you got close because you didn't let up on the key quickly enough)
I knew the planets were very far apart, but that program really helped put it in perspective. I think it would be great to let schoolchildren play with a such a program to give them an idea just how vast the solar system is.
Does this mean the Fizzer worm is going to Fizzer out?
wakka wakka wakka!
I would agree with the majority of the parent post.
Almost all religion memes include a provision against killing other humans. Only a small percentage of mutated religion memes encourage the killing of humans. Thus, the vast majority of religion memes are genetically benefical.
The Islam meme is the obvious example. The vast majority of people who have accepted the Islam meme have a version which prohibits killing other humans. However, a small group are infected with a more sinister (in genetic terms) version which actually encourages the killing of humans who have other ascribe to other memes. I think it is critical for humanity to find out which other memes are causing the Islam meme to mutate into the Islamic Terrorist meme.
I would argue that the problem in North Korea is an infection of a Communist meme mutated by a Totalitarianism meme. Neither of those is a religion meme, though anti-religion memes often accompany those memes. Luckily a powerful version of the Nationalism* and/or Isolationism meme does not seem to have infected the leadership at this time. As Hitler showed, however, it does not take long for powerful versions of such a memes to infect a very large number of people in a short time due to modern communications equipment.
*Note that I am in this case calling the Nationalism meme a mutation of the Patriotism meme, which rather than merely encouraging pride in ones own country also includes a provision against other countries.
I have only recently become aware of the "meme" meme, and would like to thank the author of the thread root post for making such an informative article available. I find it equally fascinating that deeper rooted memes that I am infected with immediately mutated the "meme" meme described in the article so that it would fit alongside the others I ascribe to. Certainly a unique experience to realize for the first time exactly what was happening.
Its the same. Amazons autocomplete is populated by searches from previous users. Probably some (or possibly all) entries are prepopulated by Amazon themselves, but in terms of the database query being run there is no difference.
Meaning that either autocomplete is working in the same manner - a "completion" populates based on the user typing the first few characters of an item in the database.
Amazon may have added some nifty weighting/sorting to make sure certain entries show up before others, but that doesn't make it a new invention.
Can't believe that got a +5 insightful..
I'm not saying ads are going to disappear altogether, such a claim would be rediculous. But how much internet ads make is really immaterial to the discussion.
My hope is that the patent ruling is successful and that the royalty percentage discourages the more annoying versions of ads (popups) in favor of less annoying banner ads. I think this is a reasonable expectation regardless of whether ads are currently successful or not. Any peice of the pie is too much when another option will offer you the entire thing.
I'll fall victim to the troll anyway:
The New York Times is the exception rather than the rule. The vast majority of sites out there do not make very much money off of ads. It is this large percentage of the internet that would be affected by a patent ruling such as this one.
Slashdot itself, attracting a very large number of eyeballs as evidenced by the much maligned "slashdot effect" has introduced a subscription system to supplement their ad revenue. It seems likely to me that this is a move made because ads simply don't make enough cash. (Remember slashdot also rolled out a more annoying larger banner format as well?) Most of the moneymaking ventures on the internet have similar systems.
I would, in fact, argue that subscription systems have so far been more effective than ad revenue, and that internet ad revenue is still not a viable business model in most cases.