Why not take a look at the code for an existing game engine like Quake (1/2/3) ?
That's a bit too much for a beginner if you ask me. Better start out with some simple sprite based game to learn the basics and move on to 3D from there.
You do realize that Windows 7, for all intents and purposes, is really Vista SP3 with some big tweaks, mostly cosmetic, and some loosening up of the security layer. Most of your bitches are about things that Microsoft simply patched up and released as a new OS.
Then MS turned around and sold Windows 7 to the same people they previously sold Vista to after keeping them stuck with Windows XP for eight years. The really funny part is that these are also the same people who make fun of Mac users for paying the Apple OS X "upgrad-tax" and claim Windows cost of ownership is lower. Personally I think this debate is completely idiotic. I have used OS X from 10.2.x onwards, I have upgraded to each major OS X release since then and feel that spending the money was worth it. I have also upgraded several computers from Windows XP and Vista to Windows 7. I'm not an entranced Windows user, but I'd rather use Windows 7 than Windows XP or Vista (yuk!!) any day of the week and pay for the privilege because I feel that the added features of Windows 7 are worth the money (mind you I would still try to get a refund for Vista or expect a free Win 7 upgrade if my PC came with Vista pre-installed). As for Windows 7 being based on Vista, I don't really care. It was mainly the ergonomics of the Windows Vista UI and the security system that sucked, not so much the underlying OS. These are just my two cents, I'm not telling anybody to shell out the money for a new OS. People can stick with Windows XP or OS X 10.2, or whatever they prefer as long as they want for all I care.
Christianity, on the other hand, have been silencing people for 2000 years, and their methodology is murder and torture. They were able to hold back science completely for 600 years just so a few theories wouldn't disprove a few 'facts' on the bible. And Creationism is being taught in schools in more places everyday (Well, at least in undeveloped and illiterate countries like the US).
I'm not a religious person but I still say: "Let's take this down a couple of notches". While it is true that the Catholic church stood in the way of science during the renaissance it is also true that a huge volume of ancient Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, etc... writings on science, literature, history and technology were preserved by the religious organizations of Europe and the Middle East and the Far East throughout the various 'dark ages' of the last couple of thousand years. This knowledge would otherwise have been lost to us if it hadn't been for those priests, monks and nuns whom it is hard to accuse of having some sort of anti-knowledge complex. It may be true that today a bunch of Christian and Islamic fundamentalists are making a name for them selves by advertising their ignorance in a very visible way and I'm not even going to try to defend Scientology but we should not dump all reglious organizations into one drawer and label it 'Bastions of ignorance'. In fact we owe Christian monks, as well as Islamic scholars (much material saved in among other places the libraries of islamic mosques) as well as Buddhist monasteries in the Far East and other religious organizations a huge debt for the vast amount of scientific and other knowledge they prevented from begin lost.
What is annoying is that in many Windows programs (at least Office 97) you can't even copy and paste the error message text. Your only option is to do a screen capture of the window.
What I love the most about Windows, and especially Windows Server, is the error messages that sometimes just tell you something like "Windows encountered an error while executing your task". You get no error code, there is nothing in the logs and you are left sitting there wondering which of dozens if not hundreds of things that could have gone wrong while, say... trying to activate remote administration for an IIS server, did go wrong. The least you can do, as a developer, is print what diagnostic info you can get along your exception when it ends up in your catch-all clause into the system log to give the user at least a clue of what went wrong.
A DRM riddled, unable to multi-task, underpowered tablet with no ability to expand? Lord, I hope not.
The reaction to the iPod was pretty similar way-back-when, to much capacity, too expensive, not enough whiz-bang features.... now everybody has one. I'll wait and see before passing judgement. Personally I'd prefer the iPad to have the full OS X desktop OS rather than the iPhone OS.
Just because you can use their service to illegal distribute content does not make the creator a pirate. This would be the equivalent of calling the city a 'drunk driver' because it builds the streets that can be used to facilitate drunk driving.
Not quite, what the state does is build streets, pass laws against drunk driving and maintain a police force to make sure people don't drive drunk. What the Pirate-Bay did was more like build streets, facilitate the free distribution of booze then make fun of people who complained about drunk drivers.
Here is a list of Microsoft stuff to remove from your XP slipstream:
Automatic Updates (for reasons related to the article) Windows media player (including 6.4) because it downloads codecs at will. Accessibility Options (unless you need them) ClipBook Viewer (useless) Games Internet Games...
Long list, wouldn't it be simpler to just remove Windows XP in it's entirety from your PC and replace it with something else?
The mere fact that these iditos knew full well there would be a public outcry, and that they should focus on shipping lanes and illegal immigrants in order to spin this, should sending warning bells across the UK. It's quite clear that the police view activists and legitimate protesters as "domestic extremists", so there's only one reason they want the capabilities of these drones: They're lying bastards who want to infiltrate what little privacy we have left in our lives even further to make us live in fear, and to stifle dissent.
Outcry? why? FLIR, Cameras and other sensors, recording devices, There is nothing these things can do that police helicopters and prop driven aircraft can't do and are probably already doing. The only significant advantage these things have over manned aircraft is loiter time, it isn't even as if they can lay off their pilots, they still need people to operate these things. The loiter time costs you a degree of flexibility. If anything UAVs are probably less effective for things the police do a lot of than manned choppers are. From what I have been told it is apparently a lot easier, for example, to lose track of a car you are tracking if you are coordinating the surveillance form a UAV than if you are doing it with a manned chopper.
Time spent playing (per dollar) seems like a good measurement. If a game has other advantages beyond being good, such as being a mobile phone game you can play while sitting bored on a train, then that will cause you to play it more. Everything naturally factors in.
Of course, values between different people aren't comparable due to different tastes and amounts of time available to play games, and it's virtually impossible to work out in advance how many hours you will play the game for, but it's a good way to quantify a game's value.
It's one way but not the only one. I paid about the same amount of money for Quake I and Duke Nukem, I also spent about the same amount of time playing them. As far as I was concerned Duke Nukem was the better game by far even though it didn't have nearly as much eye-candy as other games it was just more 'fun' to play. The same applies to Half Life I and II and Unreal as well, now that I think about it, were also superior games IMHO. A good game should take more than one weekend to complete (single player). I wouldn't even mind having the story spread out over a few expansion packs like Half Life (as long as they don't get greedy with the pricing), it should have a plot that makes sense, it should be 'fun' to play and I'd be willing to lose a bit of eye candy for things like playability, good AI and big well designed maps with lots of open spaces etc... I don't know about the rest of you, but take the some of the Doom series games for example, those endless rooms and hallways started boring me to tears after a while. Games other than 1st person shooters have different requirements. Take for example Civilization, going by length of game play it's a winner. I can still waste an entire day playing Civilization IV but they could improve the AI. In a game like that AI is really important.
The thing is, Nokia has all the rights to do that since Apple keeps infringing their patents and doesn't even agree to cross license patents like every phone manufacturer does. This is just Apple being childish and trying to kick back in tears.
You could also point out that Nokia has been a major player on the mobile phone market for a long time. According to wikipedia their share of the device market was 38% in Q3 2009. Alluvasudden some upstart invades *their* mobile phone market, steals a big chunk of *their* share of the smartphone market, with an innovative new media-player/smart-phone this competitor succeeds in selling apps and music hand over fist where Nokia has had only mediocre success and to make matters worse no matter what they do Nokia can't seem to beat the Apple iPhone even when they practically copy it. Now Nokia is trying to play rough to hurt their competitor. Do those tactics remind you of anybody else? I think Nokia's problem is that Apple isn't some smalltime competitor they can just step on and squash under foot. They used to make good products but lately Nokia phones have just, well.... just plain sucked. Perhaps Nokia should pour it's energy into innovating and trying to come up with a phone that causes customers on their way to buy an iPhone to peel off to the Nokia display stand and buy something else. Either way, I don't thing they can hope for any kind of success if they intend to sue their way out of the problem the iPhone has become for them. This stinks of desperation.
Why is the government wasting time with this? Everybody knows what the answer is going to be, the Chinese government is going to deny everything and change nothing.
That's more or less exactly what happened when the USA got caught using the Echelon system for the exact same purposes as the Chinese are now mounting these attacks. Why is it such a shock that everybody else is repaying the US in kind? Industrial espionage has been going on for millennia, hell, it's almost a tradition. US corporate weasels should just do what the EU corporate weasels did (well some of them... there are always enough people that will never learn) after the Echelon scandals: Stop whining and introduce military grade encryption for all vital communications and generally fortify their IT infrastructure better.
Please tell me how many companies care about the niche market of 0.1% of Linux users? How many Linux games do you see? And don't even get me started how much bitching there would be if the "bad" companies wouldn't open source their games when releasing Linux versions.
It's not really about the 1% of desktop users that use Linux. What you are failing to note is that there is an awful lot of software written for mobile systems (read: mobile phones and iPod like devices that double as gaming platforms) and many of those systems run Unix like OS'es such as iPhone/iPod OS and Linux. Writing games for mobile devices is a growing market and portability is a key component if you want to make any kind of money since the world of Mobile operating systems isn't quite the Microsoft dominated monoculture that the world of Desktop OS'es is. If Android gains any kind of a foothold and iPhone OS keeps gaining market share (and there is no reason to believe they won't) I'd say OpenGL has a bright future, if only thanks to people developing for mobile devices. Also keep in mind that the most popular mobile phone OS is Symbian. Mind you I don't think Symbian owes much to Unix but it isn't made by Microsoft either. Symbian has an OpenGL port that is also the official Symbian 3D graphics API (according to Wikipedia). Now I'm sure people can bitch and moan about how mobile games aren't really as sophisticated as as PC games and I suppose that's true. Nevertheless it still cracks me up every time some bozo puts in a book review on a game development book on Amazon and goes on endlessly about how Direct3D is a "game development industry standard" and how "OpenGL is a dying technology". OpenGL is alive and well and likely to stay that way. The (mobile software developing) world is not Microsoft.
...admin access to production servers, absolutely not. I've seen way too many scary, scary things happen when developers are given unrestricted access to production systems.
IMHO:
Development should be done using dedicated development systems that replicate the production environment. I have seen way to many problems and delays arise because the developer's setup on his personal laptops didn't exactly replicate the productions deployment environment.
The development machine-pool should have it's own admin who's **only** role it is to service those development machines along with the version control/collaboration suite/bug tracking/etc... servers and development should never be done on live systems if it can be avoided. You need dedicated admins for the development machines because otherwise dozens of developers with root access will turn them into a godawful mess in no time flat.
Developers should have root access to their own personal workstations/laptops.
Developers should not have root access to development systems.
Developers should never, ever, ever have root access to production systems.
I have worked in various places that had strategies ragning from what I just described and to developing-on/deploying-to live productions systems (with all the irate customers due to regular downtime caused by unexpected bugs which that entails). One place I worked at didn't allow developers admin rights on what development systems they had, they were too cheap to cough up for enough development machines and whenever (rarely) they did overcome their sense of thrift it took a week (if you were lucky) to get the machine up and working. The work had to be requested through proper channels, approved by a management committee and then performed by a bunch of overworked IT gnomes that also had to service several hundred workstations and a huge productions server-pool. We didn't even get to be Admin on our own Windows (by management mandate) laptops. Getting a port opened in the firewall on your own Windows workstation had to be approved by a security committee at management level. You can imagine how long that took. Needless to say most people solved these problems by setting up their own development environments. The result was a whole fleet of rogue machines. Every desk had 3-4 computers under it and workstations were regularly taken off the Windows domain by developers or Windows it self was simply quietly replaced with Linux. It was the only way to get things done and even then the pace of work was glacial.
I tend to agree with him some, but there is simply too much music, art and knowledge out there to take in the old fashioned way. and if you do own the physical media it becomes a clutter and storage nightmare
i don't buy too much ebooks but in the last few weeks i bought a MS SQL T-SQL ebook app on my iphone to read on the train to work and some pdf's from mannning books. and the convenience factor is very nice in not carrying around the extra weight
That's true, PDF's and electronic books in general spare you the storage nightmare. On the other hand I hate reading PDFs off a computer screen and I have yet to find an electronic device that didn't suck as a ebook reader and that statement covers purpose designed ones like the Kindle as well. Perhaps if that rumored Apple tablet turns out to be more than just vaporware I'll have cause to reconsider... although... now that I think about it I rather doubt it simply because with these eBook readers they can apparently remotely delete and silently 'revise' books in your electronic library after you bought them. Nobody can delete or 'revise' a good old-fashioned hardcopy of some book I have bought and that is sitting in my good old-fashioned wooden bookshelf.
I can well understand the why the move to electronic readers like the Kindle would worry authors and book publishers. It has hitherto been considerably more work to pirate a book than to do so with movies, software and music and if that changes, all the 'goodwill' authors and publishers get from people downloading their stuff for free using BitTorrent & co. still won't pay their bills. Those bills have to be paid in real world money, not pirate consumer's goodwill. I buy lots of books on subjects such as the history of automotive, aviation and electronic technology. These books sometimes get printed in runs of no more than a few thousand copies by small time speciality publishers. The move to "full digital" inevitably means an exponential increase in book piracy (YAY! we're getting even more stuff for free now) but it's also going to kill off that kind of small scale publishing which I don't see as a good thing. It would mean the death of all but the biggest publishing houses, the ones that are rich enough to be able to survive the piracy. That in turn would mean a considerable reduction in the variety of what is being published.
Would you truth other companies to manage your physical secrets? Well, lots of people do. They're called banks.
I may be wrong here but I'm still convinced my super secret stuff will be safer in a safety deposit box (where I have the only copy of one the two keys needed to open it), which is located behind a massive steel door, encased in layers upon layers of concrete in the cellar of a bank than those secrets will be if I store them on "the cloud". It takes a court order (which isn't easy to get in most places since the banks tend to fight them tooth and nail) or a gang of seasoned bank robbers with a lot of time on their hands and some very heavy equipment to lift my secrets from that vault. On "the cloud" the only thing standing between my secrets and Russian mafia hackers is a badly paid marginally competent sysadmin in an IT sweatshop in India.
Look, the plot is basically Dances with Wolves in Space, but still -- this movie was an example of amazing, expensive effects paired with an actual story.
It's just a guess, but I'd say that Avatar is more likely to be loosely based on the life story of Gonzalo de Aroza and Zazil Ha than being some sort of brazen of Dances with Wolves ripoff. As far as I know Aroza's story has never been filmed which is a pity since it is a better story than what most fiction authors are capable of coming up with these days. That said I agree with you Avatar is an amazing movie.
King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England.
That sounds a lot like the development history of Windows.
True, as the French surrendered (again) before we became fully engaged there. Prior to their (typical) surrender we helped back them in terms of money and troops. Yet even with the quagmire that sadly enough was Vietnam I don't think it's comparable to the poor choices that Nappy made back in the day...
Yeah, It's not like the USA had to haul ass out of Vietnam with it's tail between it's.... uh... oh wait it did.... If there is one thing we learned from Vietnam (at least the ones of us that haven't been brainwashed with an overdose of extreme right wing ideology) it's that not all problems on this earth can be solved with the lavish over-application of obscene amounts of firepower. Maybe one day you will wake up and realize that the world is not a Rambo movie.... and that line about the French and surrender is getting really old and very tired. You people seem to find it awful easy to forget that it was French money, French guns and French ships that picked your revolution up out of the N-American mud at a time when the British army was wiping the floor with George Washington and his continentals and eventually brought you your independence. At the end thousands of their soldiers and sailors proved instrumental in that process as well. Apparently French troops outnumbered the Americans at at their key victory, the famous siege of Siege of Yorktown.
What? There are a million and one things that could happen to a nice shiny laptop while travelling, if your data is that important it's pretty stupid not to backup, especially before travelling.
I work while traveling so backing up before embarking on a lengthy trip is of limited value. If you are on the road you have three options for backup: You can use an external HD which you have to carry with you and while traveling and which these paranoid guards would have put another three bullets through so although that's a valid option it's no good in a situation like this. Also keep in mind that your backup HD stands a good chance of getting stolen right along with the rest of your luggage. The second option is cloud storage which can't be easy to access when you are on the road in war-torn palestine even if you have a GSM connector. It's a quite expensive option to use if you do manage to get a connection and if your data goes over a few megabytes (let's say you're a photographer) it's a totally impractical. You could also store your stuff on a flash drive or memory cards which is better than an external HD since you'd be likely to carry that in your pocket which makes it less likely to get lost when your luggage is misplaced or stolen. Of course that's assuming those paranoid Israeli border guards don't confiscate your flash storage devices and... oops... accidentally drop them under the tracks of a passing Merkava.
A year from now, a lot of Chromium's appeal could be riding on what users can do with one when they aren't connected to the Internet or want to save content locally. There are occasions, after all, where 'the cloud' is the very last place you want certain information to reside.
Google has come up with a variation on a thin client and plans to deploy it on laptops. If this OS really is a pure thin client then google is going have their work cut out for them selling these devices because eventually people are going to want want to be able to work offline. There must be some sort of offline capability built into Chrome wich makes it more of a hybrid than a pure thin client/Web OS and it will be interesting to see what the final product look like. Then there is the expense, Wifi isn't universally available where I live, even remaining connected over mobile networks is problematic outside urban areas and also extremely expensive.
One final bit of irony. Over ten years ago, Microsoft was sued for bundling a browser with Windows 98. Does it amuse anyone else that Google is bundling an operating system along with their browser?
Just because someone knows how to use a typewriter doesn't mean they can write a book just as well as an English major.
I don't think that being an English major is going to make you a good writer, either you have talent for it or you don't. An English degree may improve your writing style and open your eyes to different schools of literature but it won't increase your ability to write good books that people want to read. Much the same applies to programming. I have met people with CS degrees from very respectable schools who wrote very naive code and others who were brilliant developers. Much the same goes for people from less snobby schools, there are people who can code and ones who don't. When hiring I'd take a second look people who display an enthusiasm for development and see it as a fun thing to do rather than a chore they have to perform to get a good salary. Education matters, but just blindly going by what academic titles people have picked up is no guarantee that you will get somebody who can code worth a damn.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not take a look at the code for an existing game engine like Quake (1/2/3) ?
That's a bit too much for a beginner if you ask me. Better start out with some simple sprite based game to learn the basics and move on to 3D from there.
You do realize that Windows 7, for all intents and purposes, is really Vista SP3 with some big tweaks, mostly cosmetic, and some loosening up of the security layer. Most of your bitches are about things that Microsoft simply patched up and released as a new OS.
Then MS turned around and sold Windows 7 to the same people they previously sold Vista to after keeping them stuck with Windows XP for eight years. The really funny part is that these are also the same people who make fun of Mac users for paying the Apple OS X "upgrad-tax" and claim Windows cost of ownership is lower. Personally I think this debate is completely idiotic. I have used OS X from 10.2.x onwards, I have upgraded to each major OS X release since then and feel that spending the money was worth it. I have also upgraded several computers from Windows XP and Vista to Windows 7. I'm not an entranced Windows user, but I'd rather use Windows 7 than Windows XP or Vista (yuk!!) any day of the week and pay for the privilege because I feel that the added features of Windows 7 are worth the money (mind you I would still try to get a refund for Vista or expect a free Win 7 upgrade if my PC came with Vista pre-installed). As for Windows 7 being based on Vista, I don't really care. It was mainly the ergonomics of the Windows Vista UI and the security system that sucked, not so much the underlying OS. These are just my two cents, I'm not telling anybody to shell out the money for a new OS. People can stick with Windows XP or OS X 10.2, or whatever they prefer as long as they want for all I care.
Christianity, on the other hand, have been silencing people for 2000 years, and their methodology is murder and torture. They were able to hold back science completely for 600 years just so a few theories wouldn't disprove a few 'facts' on the bible. And Creationism is being taught in schools in more places everyday (Well, at least in undeveloped and illiterate countries like the US).
I'm not a religious person but I still say: "Let's take this down a couple of notches". While it is true that the Catholic church stood in the way of science during the renaissance it is also true that a huge volume of ancient Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, etc... writings on science, literature, history and technology were preserved by the religious organizations of Europe and the Middle East and the Far East throughout the various 'dark ages' of the last couple of thousand years. This knowledge would otherwise have been lost to us if it hadn't been for those priests, monks and nuns whom it is hard to accuse of having some sort of anti-knowledge complex. It may be true that today a bunch of Christian and Islamic fundamentalists are making a name for them selves by advertising their ignorance in a very visible way and I'm not even going to try to defend Scientology but we should not dump all reglious organizations into one drawer and label it 'Bastions of ignorance'. In fact we owe Christian monks, as well as Islamic scholars (much material saved in among other places the libraries of islamic mosques) as well as Buddhist monasteries in the Far East and other religious organizations a huge debt for the vast amount of scientific and other knowledge they prevented from begin lost.
What is annoying is that in many Windows programs (at least Office 97) you can't even copy and paste the error message text. Your only option is to do a screen capture of the window.
What I love the most about Windows, and especially Windows Server, is the error messages that sometimes just tell you something like "Windows encountered an error while executing your task". You get no error code, there is nothing in the logs and you are left sitting there wondering which of dozens if not hundreds of things that could have gone wrong while, say... trying to activate remote administration for an IIS server, did go wrong. The least you can do, as a developer, is print what diagnostic info you can get along your exception when it ends up in your catch-all clause into the system log to give the user at least a clue of what went wrong.
What does the sheep on 'Perl Cookbook' have to do with anything?
Maybe mutton for dinner?!
Well, in that case let's hope they don't put a rat on the cover of the Python cookbook...
A DRM riddled, unable to multi-task, underpowered tablet with no ability to expand? Lord, I hope not.
The reaction to the iPod was pretty similar way-back-when, to much capacity, too expensive, not enough whiz-bang features.... now everybody has one. I'll wait and see before passing judgement. Personally I'd prefer the iPad to have the full OS X desktop OS rather than the iPhone OS.
Just because you can use their service to illegal distribute content does not make the creator a pirate. This would be the equivalent of calling the city a 'drunk driver' because it builds the streets that can be used to facilitate drunk driving.
Not quite, what the state does is build streets, pass laws against drunk driving and maintain a police force to make sure people don't drive drunk. What the Pirate-Bay did was more like build streets, facilitate the free distribution of booze then make fun of people who complained about drunk drivers.
Here is a list of Microsoft stuff to remove from your XP slipstream:
Automatic Updates (for reasons related to the article) ...
Windows media player (including 6.4) because it downloads codecs at will.
Accessibility Options (unless you need them)
ClipBook Viewer (useless)
Games
Internet Games
Long list, wouldn't it be simpler to just remove Windows XP in it's entirety from your PC and replace it with something else?
The mere fact that these iditos knew full well there would be a public outcry, and that they should focus on shipping lanes and illegal immigrants in order to spin this, should sending warning bells across the UK. It's quite clear that the police view activists and legitimate protesters as "domestic extremists", so there's only one reason they want the capabilities of these drones: They're lying bastards who want to infiltrate what little privacy we have left in our lives even further to make us live in fear, and to stifle dissent.
Outcry? why? FLIR, Cameras and other sensors, recording devices, There is nothing these things can do that police helicopters and prop driven aircraft can't do and are probably already doing. The only significant advantage these things have over manned aircraft is loiter time, it isn't even as if they can lay off their pilots, they still need people to operate these things. The loiter time costs you a degree of flexibility. If anything UAVs are probably less effective for things the police do a lot of than manned choppers are. From what I have been told it is apparently a lot easier, for example, to lose track of a car you are tracking if you are coordinating the surveillance form a UAV than if you are doing it with a manned chopper.
Time spent playing (per dollar) seems like a good measurement. If a game has other advantages beyond being good, such as being a mobile phone game you can play while sitting bored on a train, then that will cause you to play it more. Everything naturally factors in.
Of course, values between different people aren't comparable due to different tastes and amounts of time available to play games, and it's virtually impossible to work out in advance how many hours you will play the game for, but it's a good way to quantify a game's value.
It's one way but not the only one. I paid about the same amount of money for Quake I and Duke Nukem, I also spent about the same amount of time playing them. As far as I was concerned Duke Nukem was the better game by far even though it didn't have nearly as much eye-candy as other games it was just more 'fun' to play. The same applies to Half Life I and II and Unreal as well, now that I think about it, were also superior games IMHO. A good game should take more than one weekend to complete (single player). I wouldn't even mind having the story spread out over a few expansion packs like Half Life (as long as they don't get greedy with the pricing), it should have a plot that makes sense, it should be 'fun' to play and I'd be willing to lose a bit of eye candy for things like playability, good AI and big well designed maps with lots of open spaces etc... I don't know about the rest of you, but take the some of the Doom series games for example, those endless rooms and hallways started boring me to tears after a while. Games other than 1st person shooters have different requirements. Take for example Civilization, going by length of game play it's a winner. I can still waste an entire day playing Civilization IV but they could improve the AI. In a game like that AI is really important.
The thing is, Nokia has all the rights to do that since Apple keeps infringing their patents and doesn't even agree to cross license patents like every phone manufacturer does. This is just Apple being childish and trying to kick back in tears.
You could also point out that Nokia has been a major player on the mobile phone market for a long time. According to wikipedia their share of the device market was 38% in Q3 2009. Alluvasudden some upstart invades *their* mobile phone market, steals a big chunk of *their* share of the smartphone market, with an innovative new media-player/smart-phone this competitor succeeds in selling apps and music hand over fist where Nokia has had only mediocre success and to make matters worse no matter what they do Nokia can't seem to beat the Apple iPhone even when they practically copy it. Now Nokia is trying to play rough to hurt their competitor. Do those tactics remind you of anybody else? I think Nokia's problem is that Apple isn't some smalltime competitor they can just step on and squash under foot. They used to make good products but lately Nokia phones have just, well.... just plain sucked. Perhaps Nokia should pour it's energy into innovating and trying to come up with a phone that causes customers on their way to buy an iPhone to peel off to the Nokia display stand and buy something else. Either way, I don't thing they can hope for any kind of success if they intend to sue their way out of the problem the iPhone has become for them. This stinks of desperation.
Why is the government wasting time with this? Everybody knows what the answer is going to be, the Chinese government is going to deny everything and change nothing.
That's more or less exactly what happened when the USA got caught using the Echelon system for the exact same purposes as the Chinese are now mounting these attacks. Why is it such a shock that everybody else is repaying the US in kind? Industrial espionage has been going on for millennia, hell, it's almost a tradition. US corporate weasels should just do what the EU corporate weasels did (well some of them... there are always enough people that will never learn) after the Echelon scandals: Stop whining and introduce military grade encryption for all vital communications and generally fortify their IT infrastructure better.
Please tell me how many companies care about the niche market of 0.1% of Linux users? How many Linux games do you see? And don't even get me started how much bitching there would be if the "bad" companies wouldn't open source their games when releasing Linux versions.
It's not really about the 1% of desktop users that use Linux. What you are failing to note is that there is an awful lot of software written for mobile systems (read: mobile phones and iPod like devices that double as gaming platforms) and many of those systems run Unix like OS'es such as iPhone/iPod OS and Linux. Writing games for mobile devices is a growing market and portability is a key component if you want to make any kind of money since the world of Mobile operating systems isn't quite the Microsoft dominated monoculture that the world of Desktop OS'es is. If Android gains any kind of a foothold and iPhone OS keeps gaining market share (and there is no reason to believe they won't) I'd say OpenGL has a bright future, if only thanks to people developing for mobile devices. Also keep in mind that the most popular mobile phone OS is Symbian. Mind you I don't think Symbian owes much to Unix but it isn't made by Microsoft either. Symbian has an OpenGL port that is also the official Symbian 3D graphics API (according to Wikipedia). Now I'm sure people can bitch and moan about how mobile games aren't really as sophisticated as as PC games and I suppose that's true. Nevertheless it still cracks me up every time some bozo puts in a book review on a game development book on Amazon and goes on endlessly about how Direct3D is a "game development industry standard" and how "OpenGL is a dying technology". OpenGL is alive and well and likely to stay that way. The (mobile software developing) world is not Microsoft.
...admin access to production servers, absolutely not. I've seen way too many scary, scary things happen when developers are given unrestricted access to production systems.
IMHO:
I have worked in various places that had strategies ragning from what I just described and to developing-on/deploying-to live productions systems (with all the irate customers due to regular downtime caused by unexpected bugs which that entails). One place I worked at didn't allow developers admin rights on what development systems they had, they were too cheap to cough up for enough development machines and whenever (rarely) they did overcome their sense of thrift it took a week (if you were lucky) to get the machine up and working. The work had to be requested through proper channels, approved by a management committee and then performed by a bunch of overworked IT gnomes that also had to service several hundred workstations and a huge productions server-pool. We didn't even get to be Admin on our own Windows (by management mandate) laptops. Getting a port opened in the firewall on your own Windows workstation had to be approved by a security committee at management level. You can imagine how long that took. Needless to say most people solved these problems by setting up their own development environments. The result was a whole fleet of rogue machines. Every desk had 3-4 computers under it and workstations were regularly taken off the Windows domain by developers or Windows it self was simply quietly replaced with Linux. It was the only way to get things done and even then the pace of work was glacial.
I tend to agree with him some, but there is simply too much music, art and knowledge out there to take in the old fashioned way. and if you do own the physical media it becomes a clutter and storage nightmare
i don't buy too much ebooks but in the last few weeks i bought a MS SQL T-SQL ebook app on my iphone to read on the train to work and some pdf's from mannning books. and the convenience factor is very nice in not carrying around the extra weight
That's true, PDF's and electronic books in general spare you the storage nightmare. On the other hand I hate reading PDFs off a computer screen and I have yet to find an electronic device that didn't suck as a ebook reader and that statement covers purpose designed ones like the Kindle as well. Perhaps if that rumored Apple tablet turns out to be more than just vaporware I'll have cause to reconsider... although... now that I think about it I rather doubt it simply because with these eBook readers they can apparently remotely delete and silently 'revise' books in your electronic library after you bought them. Nobody can delete or 'revise' a good old-fashioned hardcopy of some book I have bought and that is sitting in my good old-fashioned wooden bookshelf.
I can well understand the why the move to electronic readers like the Kindle would worry authors and book publishers. It has hitherto been considerably more work to pirate a book than to do so with movies, software and music and if that changes, all the 'goodwill' authors and publishers get from people downloading their stuff for free using BitTorrent & co. still won't pay their bills. Those bills have to be paid in real world money, not pirate consumer's goodwill. I buy lots of books on subjects such as the history of automotive, aviation and electronic technology. These books sometimes get printed in runs of no more than a few thousand copies by small time speciality publishers. The move to "full digital" inevitably means an exponential increase in book piracy (YAY! we're getting even more stuff for free now) but it's also going to kill off that kind of small scale publishing which I don't see as a good thing. It would mean the death of all but the biggest publishing houses, the ones that are rich enough to be able to survive the piracy. That in turn would mean a considerable reduction in the variety of what is being published.
Would you truth other companies to manage your physical secrets? Well, lots of people do. They're called banks.
I may be wrong here but I'm still convinced my super secret stuff will be safer in a safety deposit box (where I have the only copy of one the two keys needed to open it), which is located behind a massive steel door, encased in layers upon layers of concrete in the cellar of a bank than those secrets will be if I store them on "the cloud". It takes a court order (which isn't easy to get in most places since the banks tend to fight them tooth and nail) or a gang of seasoned bank robbers with a lot of time on their hands and some very heavy equipment to lift my secrets from that vault. On "the cloud" the only thing standing between my secrets and Russian mafia hackers is a badly paid marginally competent sysadmin in an IT sweatshop in India.
Hey, I just felt something woosh over my head! Was it Santa!? Maybe he does exist!
No, that was a chair.
Look, the plot is basically Dances with Wolves in Space, but still -- this movie was an example of amazing, expensive effects paired with an actual story.
It's just a guess, but I'd say that Avatar is more likely to be loosely based on the life story of Gonzalo de Aroza and Zazil Ha than being some sort of brazen of Dances with Wolves ripoff. As far as I know Aroza's story has never been filmed which is a pity since it is a better story than what most fiction authors are capable of coming up with these days. That said I agree with you Avatar is an amazing movie.
King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone
said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same,
just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that
one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over,
and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what
you're going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England.
That sounds a lot like the development history of Windows.
True, as the French surrendered (again) before we became fully engaged there. Prior to their (typical) surrender we helped back them in terms of money and troops. Yet even with the quagmire that sadly enough was Vietnam I don't think it's comparable to the poor choices that Nappy made back in the day...
Yeah, It's not like the USA had to haul ass out of Vietnam with it's tail between it's .... uh... oh wait it did.... If there is one thing we learned from Vietnam (at least the ones of us that haven't been brainwashed with an overdose of extreme right wing ideology) it's that not all problems on this earth can be solved with the lavish over-application of obscene amounts of firepower. Maybe one day you will wake up and realize that the world is not a Rambo movie.... and that line about the French and surrender is getting really old and very tired. You people seem to find it awful easy to forget that it was French money, French guns and French ships that picked your revolution up out of the N-American mud at a time when the British army was wiping the floor with George Washington and his continentals and eventually brought you your independence. At the end thousands of their soldiers and sailors proved instrumental in that process as well. Apparently French troops outnumbered the Americans at at their key victory, the famous siege of Siege of Yorktown.
What? There are a million and one things that could happen to a nice shiny laptop while travelling, if your data is that important it's pretty stupid not to backup, especially before travelling.
I work while traveling so backing up before embarking on a lengthy trip is of limited value. If you are on the road you have three options for backup: You can use an external HD which you have to carry with you and while traveling and which these paranoid guards would have put another three bullets through so although that's a valid option it's no good in a situation like this. Also keep in mind that your backup HD stands a good chance of getting stolen right along with the rest of your luggage. The second option is cloud storage which can't be easy to access when you are on the road in war-torn palestine even if you have a GSM connector. It's a quite expensive option to use if you do manage to get a connection and if your data goes over a few megabytes (let's say you're a photographer) it's a totally impractical. You could also store your stuff on a flash drive or memory cards which is better than an external HD since you'd be likely to carry that in your pocket which makes it less likely to get lost when your luggage is misplaced or stolen. Of course that's assuming those paranoid Israeli border guards don't confiscate your flash storage devices and... oops... accidentally drop them under the tracks of a passing Merkava.
Not much forest under the ocean bits.
Kelp forest
There is always a bigger fish.
-- Qui-Gon Jinn
A year from now, a lot of Chromium's appeal could be riding on what users can do with one when they aren't connected to the Internet or want to save content locally. There are occasions, after all, where 'the cloud' is the very last place you want certain information to reside.
Google has come up with a variation on a thin client and plans to deploy it on laptops. If this OS really is a pure thin client then google is going have their work cut out for them selling these devices because eventually people are going to want want to be able to work offline. There must be some sort of offline capability built into Chrome wich makes it more of a hybrid than a pure thin client/Web OS and it will be interesting to see what the final product look like. Then there is the expense, Wifi isn't universally available where I live, even remaining connected over mobile networks is problematic outside urban areas and also extremely expensive.
One final bit of irony. Over ten years ago, Microsoft was sued for bundling a browser with Windows 98. Does it amuse anyone else that Google is bundling an operating system along with their browser?
Oh Yes.
Just because someone knows how to use a typewriter doesn't mean they can write a book just as well as an English major.
I don't think that being an English major is going to make you a good writer, either you have talent for it or you don't. An English degree may improve your writing style and open your eyes to different schools of literature but it won't increase your ability to write good books that people want to read. Much the same applies to programming. I have met people with CS degrees from very respectable schools who wrote very naive code and others who were brilliant developers. Much the same goes for people from less snobby schools, there are people who can code and ones who don't. When hiring I'd take a second look people who display an enthusiasm for development and see it as a fun thing to do rather than a chore they have to perform to get a good salary. Education matters, but just blindly going by what academic titles people have picked up is no guarantee that you will get somebody who can code worth a damn.