But not all good photos come from people who make a living off art. I would imagine 1 or 2 good photos at a time from weekend hacks could make a significant contribution to a site like this. If the professional artist don't want to help... fine!
The trouble is that there are no designers. At best, there are programmers that know a little bit about how to make a UI not suck. This will only get you so far. The UI is typically an afterthought, and the most common suggestions for improving it is "themes" or "skins" or "window decorations" or "make it an option", none of which actually address the problem.
I agree completely. Even if there were designers working on this, their opinion would be taken as optional fluff. By the very nature of open source programming, the programmer has the last word. Programmers wouldn't take the word of a designer until the designer had proven to the programmer that his way is better. This is where commercial software has a significant advantage - in a good company, the UI people have pull, and can mandate changes. This isn't to say all (or even most) commercial companies do this, or that all open source software has a bad interface. But I think at this point, we should be happy with what we have: a stable, free program, with lots of options and a fairly decent interface... considering.
What's wrong with abstract base classes and inheritance? These are fundamental concepts of OO. Spaghetti code can be written in any language, regardless of these features.
Because inheritance breaks encasulation. When given the choice between composition and inheritance, you should always choose composition. With a well encasulated library, you won't need to dig into the source. Chances are, with a lot of inheritance, you'll need the original library source even for the most basic use of that library.
Obligated to ensure compatability, probably not. Obligated to refrain from taking antocompetitive measures in a market in which they are the dominant supplier, that's another question.
No. Not really. This is not Microsoft. Apple has not been declared a monopoly in any market (even if they were, it would only restrict how they enter NEW markets). There are no laws (at least in the US) against selling proprietary software/hardware. Just because they are the market leader doesn't mean they have to 'play nice'.
My last job was at a non-profit software company. They sold software to electric cooperatives in the US. They had to price their software at fraction of their competitors to keep from making money, which priced them out of the market for commercial electric companies (they wanted to spend more to feel better about thier purchase).
Being a non-profit has nothing to do with being commercial. Non-profit companies provide commercial services every day (that's what cooperatives are all about). They just can't make too much money at the end of the year without loosing their non-profit status (even that has *some* leeway).
The Times' is just trying to give charitable organizations a break on price, and their criteria seems to be very subjective. If it were set in stone they wouldn't have misused phrases like 'non-profit'.
Numbers are nice, but I'd also like to know why. Does anyone know what advantages Delphi has over Visual Studio and mono products?
Re:Betamax gets the last laugh
on
The VHS is Dead
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· Score: 1
I rent about 15 movies a month through Netflix. Over the last three years, I've gotten 3 discs that wouldn't play (one of the three had broken in half in the mail). All the rest have been fine. There isn't anything wrong with DVDs. It's either your rental store or your player.
Your right. I wasn't responding to the study, but to the spouse's blog entry. I should have said so in my post. There are two separate issues here:
- These companies are tearing themselves apart with by taking advantage of these programmers (your point) - These programmers are allowing themselves to be taken advantage of (my point)
I can't imagine anyone thinking that exploiting employees is in the long term best interest of the industry. The debate seems to be over what to do. The way I see it, we have two choices:
1) Find a job that treats you well, and let intellectual pursuits take a close second place on your priority list. The companies will eventually figure things out, as the EAs of the world loose talent. 2) Stay at the company, and bitch a lot until things change.
The point of my original post - choose life. Even if you can change a company from the inside, by the time you do, you will be old, bitter and broken.
When I do notice huge technical issues (not the little ones like instant DNA and computerized fingerprint/palmprint searches), it makes me wonder how many people believe this stuff. Even worse, it makes me wonder what I've picked up from shows in other subjects and assumed to be based on fact. I catch things on CSI, but I don't know enough about medicine or law to know what's made up. How much of my perception of law is completely fictional?
Just for fun, here are a couple of my favorite CSI science facts: - NTSC overscans allow you to see footage that takes place 30% outside the normal video - If you zoom in on a photo of a person, you can find a reflection in their eye. Zoom in on the reflection, and you can see facial features on the people standing behind the photographer.
That "does not follow". Just because people go into something driven by ideals does not imply in any way that it's okay to exploit the crap out of them for the good of the corp.
Your still looking at the company. Sure, EA is an evil company. I never said otherwise. They should stop acting so evil. But you have to admit, its a bit hard to feel sorry for someone who could easily solve their own problem. Quitting wouldn't make EA any less evil, but it would make one programmer's life easier.
As a parallel, think of teachers. Most people would agree that American public school teachers are underpaid. I would be more than happy if we doubled all their salaries. But I don't have any sympathy for 30 year old teachers complaining about their own pay. It was no secret that teachers are under paid. Each and every teach (under a certain age) made an individual decision to take a low paying job in order to fulfill some other aspect of their lives. If they aren't happy, they made the wrong decision. I would be happy to pay more taxes to get better teachers in the school. But I wouldn't pay more taxes to pay our current teachers better. The current teachers don't need more money (if they did, they would leave).
This EA guy obviously likes his job enough to put in the hours. If he didn't he would leave. My brother likes teaching enough to put up with the low pay. I don't. And I don't want that EA job either.
People don't get into game programming for the money and the good hours. Neither do priests, teachers, firemen, policemen or soldiers. Complaining about the long hours in the video game industry is like complaining about the color of the sky. Just deal with it or pick a different profession.
With half the skills an EA job requires, you could get a very nice low-stress job working half the hours. My job isn't especially interesting, but it pays the bills easily and it's very low stress. Plus, I can start working on my more interesting hobby-programming when I get home (between 4:30 and 5 in the afternoon).
Or if you can't settle for less than an interesting, high-demand job, then you must really enjoy what your doing -- in that case, shut up and get back to work!
Developers wouldn't bother writing things to use the HD if they knew everyone didn't have one, or that it's just a small part of the market.
Most developers don't write specificly for the HD now. That doesn't make it any less usefull. If nothing else, you just won't have to worry about memory cards.
Most Xbox games are multi-platform. Not many support Hi definition, widescreen or Xbox Live. That doesn't make these things pointless. If you could save a few bucks to buy a 'lite' xbox for your 27 inch stereo tv, you might do that. I would rather have a high definition picture and 5.1 sound, online support, and downloadable levels for handfull of games that support it - even if it isn't supported for all the games.
You're looking at this over the long term. Think about it in 6-month chunks (like the execs at AOL do):
Exec 1 buys a great little company for a reasonable price considering the boom (later known as a bubble). He gets a lot of credit and a promotion.
Exec 2 takes over and refocuses the division on its strengths - service. Exec 2 keeps costs down by discouraging research and development and promoting 'synergy'. Since AOL owns two of every type of software out there, they underfund half the company in the name of savings. Exec 2 gets a promotion.
Exec 3 takes the new position and wonders why Exec 2 was so highly regarded. Why underfund a product when you can cut funding all together and save even more. Exec 3 takes a CEO job with another fortune 500 company.
Exec 4 takes the job in 2005 and finds a small upstart making a great new music player. They buy the company for $200 million. Exec 4 gets a promotion.
I know/. just eats up this kind of cynical jealousy of the upper middle class, but your post takes generalization to a whole new level.
Do you really think people go to starbucks to look cool? Do you think people use the headphones that came with their iPod because it's more prestigious than upgrading? Grow up. Most decisions people make follow the path of least resistance. What you fail to realize, is that people with disposable income have a different path of least resistance than you do.
If you made six figures, didn't have any children, and didn't know or care much about coffee, why would you make your own just to save $1 a day? If you buy an MP3 player to play over compressed hip-hop mp3s and you don't know/care about what audiophiles think, why would you do research to save $20 on headphones? Why would someone spend $3000 on a mac and hook it up to a Sony monitor just to save $100?
Yes, style makes the sale, but convenience, and indifference keeps them coming back. I can only guess the moderators chose Insightful because there was no moderation for Cynical.
Does Chicken of the VNC support full screen? I currently use VNCViewer on my mac. I use RealVNC on my PCs. Since one of my PCs has two monitors (supported nicely in RealVNC), I like being able to run the client full screen and allow it to scroll. VNCViewer on the mac doesn't support this.
You and the grandparent make some good points. It seems there are just two groups of people with distinct needs. The industry favors the movie growing crowd at the moment out of tradition, but I think that will be changing in the near future. More movies (especially bad ones) are being released early on DVD. If the studios wait too long, the audience forgets about the movie and it seems like old news when finally released on DVD.
I fall into the home theater crowd. I update my netflix queue as I hear about movies, and sometimes don't get to see them for over a year (6 months to get to video and another 6 to make it through my queue). It seems like there are more and more who enjoy their home theaters, but I doubt there are as many who would wait a year to see a particular movie. As the studios realize they are not taking good advantage of this new market, they will adjust.
Slashdot Mirror
How this compares to the sales or HL2 or Doom3?
A quick google search shows that Halo 2 sold 2.38 million units in its first 24 hours
As DpReview pointed out, they were not first
But not all good photos come from people who make a living off art. I would imagine 1 or 2 good photos at a time from weekend hacks could make a significant contribution to a site like this. If the professional artist don't want to help... fine!
The trouble is that there are no designers. At best, there are programmers that know a little bit about how to make a UI not suck. This will only get you so far. The UI is typically an afterthought, and the most common suggestions for improving it is "themes" or "skins" or "window decorations" or "make it an option", none of which actually address the problem.
I agree completely. Even if there were designers working on this, their opinion would be taken as optional fluff. By the very nature of open source programming, the programmer has the last word. Programmers wouldn't take the word of a designer until the designer had proven to the programmer that his way is better. This is where commercial software has a significant advantage - in a good company, the UI people have pull, and can mandate changes. This isn't to say all (or even most) commercial companies do this, or that all open source software has a bad interface. But I think at this point, we should be happy with what we have: a stable, free program, with lots of options and a fairly decent interface... considering.
Mono runs on Windows too
What's wrong with abstract base classes and inheritance? These are fundamental concepts of OO. Spaghetti code can be written in any language, regardless of these features.
Because inheritance breaks encasulation. When given the choice between composition and inheritance, you should always choose composition. With a well encasulated library, you won't need to dig into the source. Chances are, with a lot of inheritance, you'll need the original library source even for the most basic use of that library.
Obligated to ensure compatability, probably not. Obligated to refrain from taking antocompetitive measures in a market in which they are the dominant supplier, that's another question.
No. Not really. This is not Microsoft. Apple has not been declared a monopoly in any market (even if they were, it would only restrict how they enter NEW markets). There are no laws (at least in the US) against selling proprietary software/hardware. Just because they are the market leader doesn't mean they have to 'play nice'.
My last job was at a non-profit software company. They sold software to electric cooperatives in the US. They had to price their software at fraction of their competitors to keep from making money, which priced them out of the market for commercial electric companies (they wanted to spend more to feel better about thier purchase).
Being a non-profit has nothing to do with being commercial. Non-profit companies provide commercial services every day (that's what cooperatives are all about). They just can't make too much money at the end of the year without loosing their non-profit status (even that has *some* leeway).
The Times' is just trying to give charitable organizations a break on price, and their criteria seems to be very subjective. If it were set in stone they wouldn't have misused phrases like 'non-profit'.
Numbers are nice, but I'd also like to know why. Does anyone know what advantages Delphi has over Visual Studio and mono products?
I rent about 15 movies a month through Netflix. Over the last three years, I've gotten 3 discs that wouldn't play (one of the three had broken in half in the mail). All the rest have been fine. There isn't anything wrong with DVDs. It's either your rental store or your player.
Your right. I wasn't responding to the study, but to the spouse's blog entry. I should have said so in my post. There are two separate issues here:
- These companies are tearing themselves apart with by taking advantage of these programmers (your point)
- These programmers are allowing themselves to be taken advantage of (my point)
I can't imagine anyone thinking that exploiting employees is in the long term best interest of the industry. The debate seems to be over what to do. The way I see it, we have two choices:
1) Find a job that treats you well, and let intellectual pursuits take a close second place on your priority list. The companies will eventually figure things out, as the EAs of the world loose talent.
2) Stay at the company, and bitch a lot until things change.
The point of my original post - choose life. Even if you can change a company from the inside, by the time you do, you will be old, bitter and broken.
When I do notice huge technical issues (not the little ones like instant DNA and computerized fingerprint/palmprint searches), it makes me wonder how many people believe this stuff. Even worse, it makes me wonder what I've picked up from shows in other subjects and assumed to be based on fact. I catch things on CSI, but I don't know enough about medicine or law to know what's made up. How much of my perception of law is completely fictional?
Just for fun, here are a couple of my favorite CSI science facts:
- NTSC overscans allow you to see footage that takes place 30% outside the normal video
- If you zoom in on a photo of a person, you can find a reflection in their eye. Zoom in on the reflection, and you can see facial features on the people standing behind the photographer.
That "does not follow". Just because people go into something driven by ideals does not imply in any way that it's okay to exploit the crap out of them for the good of the corp.
Your still looking at the company. Sure, EA is an evil company. I never said otherwise. They should stop acting so evil. But you have to admit, its a bit hard to feel sorry for someone who could easily solve their own problem. Quitting wouldn't make EA any less evil, but it would make one programmer's life easier.
As a parallel, think of teachers. Most people would agree that American public school teachers are underpaid. I would be more than happy if we doubled all their salaries. But I don't have any sympathy for 30 year old teachers complaining about their own pay. It was no secret that teachers are under paid. Each and every teach (under a certain age) made an individual decision to take a low paying job in order to fulfill some other aspect of their lives. If they aren't happy, they made the wrong decision. I would be happy to pay more taxes to get better teachers in the school. But I wouldn't pay more taxes to pay our current teachers better. The current teachers don't need more money (if they did, they would leave).
This EA guy obviously likes his job enough to put in the hours. If he didn't he would leave. My brother likes teaching enough to put up with the low pay. I don't. And I don't want that EA job either.
People don't get into game programming for the money and the good hours. Neither do priests, teachers, firemen, policemen or soldiers. Complaining about the long hours in the video game industry is like complaining about the color of the sky. Just deal with it or pick a different profession.
With half the skills an EA job requires, you could get a very nice low-stress job working half the hours. My job isn't especially interesting, but it pays the bills easily and it's very low stress. Plus, I can start working on my more interesting hobby-programming when I get home (between 4:30 and 5 in the afternoon).
Or if you can't settle for less than an interesting, high-demand job, then you must really enjoy what your doing -- in that case, shut up and get back to work!
So is this still funny?
Funny? I was going for Insightful. Does that speak to my horrible communication skills, or our rose colored glasses?
Developers wouldn't bother writing things to use the HD if they knew everyone didn't have one, or that it's just a small part of the market.
Most developers don't write specificly for the HD now. That doesn't make it any less usefull. If nothing else, you just won't have to worry about memory cards.
Most Xbox games are multi-platform. Not many support Hi definition, widescreen or Xbox Live. That doesn't make these things pointless. If you could save a few bucks to buy a 'lite' xbox for your 27 inch stereo tv, you might do that. I would rather have a high definition picture and 5.1 sound, online support, and downloadable levels for handfull of games that support it - even if it isn't supported for all the games.
You're looking at this over the long term. Think about it in 6-month chunks (like the execs at AOL do):
Exec 1 buys a great little company for a reasonable price considering the boom (later known as a bubble). He gets a lot of credit and a promotion.
Exec 2 takes over and refocuses the division on its strengths - service. Exec 2 keeps costs down by discouraging research and development and promoting 'synergy'. Since AOL owns two of every type of software out there, they underfund half the company in the name of savings. Exec 2 gets a promotion.
Exec 3 takes the new position and wonders why Exec 2 was so highly regarded. Why underfund a product when you can cut funding all together and save even more. Exec 3 takes a CEO job with another fortune 500 company.
Exec 4 takes the job in 2005 and finds a small upstart making a great new music player. They buy the company for $200 million. Exec 4 gets a promotion.
Wow! If only Sears had filed a patent for that...
It would have ran out 100 years ago
I know /. just eats up this kind of cynical jealousy of the upper middle class, but your post takes generalization to a whole new level.
Do you really think people go to starbucks to look cool? Do you think people use the headphones that came with their iPod because it's more prestigious than upgrading? Grow up. Most decisions people make follow the path of least resistance. What you fail to realize, is that people with disposable income have a different path of least resistance than you do.
If you made six figures, didn't have any children, and didn't know or care much about coffee, why would you make your own just to save $1 a day? If you buy an MP3 player to play over compressed hip-hop mp3s and you don't know/care about what audiophiles think, why would you do research to save $20 on headphones? Why would someone spend $3000 on a mac and hook it up to a Sony monitor just to save $100?
Yes, style makes the sale, but convenience, and indifference keeps them coming back. I can only guess the moderators chose Insightful because there was no moderation for Cynical.
I downloaded it and tried it out. To answer my own question - yes CotVNC does support full screen.
Does Chicken of the VNC support full screen? I currently use VNCViewer on my mac. I use RealVNC on my PCs. Since one of my PCs has two monitors (supported nicely in RealVNC), I like being able to run the client full screen and allow it to scroll. VNCViewer on the mac doesn't support this.
...but it's still worth remembering that Netscape changed the world not once (by making the first really good browser)...
What was wrong with Mosaic?
You and the grandparent make some good points. It seems there are just two groups of people with distinct needs. The industry favors the movie growing crowd at the moment out of tradition, but I think that will be changing in the near future. More movies (especially bad ones) are being released early on DVD. If the studios wait too long, the audience forgets about the movie and it seems like old news when finally released on DVD.
I fall into the home theater crowd. I update my netflix queue as I hear about movies, and sometimes don't get to see them for over a year (6 months to get to video and another 6 to make it through my queue). It seems like there are more and more who enjoy their home theaters, but I doubt there are as many who would wait a year to see a particular movie. As the studios realize they are not taking good advantage of this new market, they will adjust.