human nature has good apsects, bad aspects, and ugly aspects. if i were you, i'd familiarize myself with them, and accept them. but blissfully imagining you can ignore them doesn't have any value whatsoever to any discussion on the matter
They cannot be ignored; however, this does not mean they cannot be overcome or that it is not desirable to do so.
"[IBM has] four times the employees that I have, way more revenues than I have."
And people wonder why we have a problem with happiness. This sort of envious greed is the main problem with Microsoft, and it looks like it goes all the way to the top.
There is no abmiguity here, so the joke isn't funny to people who know even a little about the topic at hand.
(PNP is Plug'n'Play; PnP is just something Zonk used for "pencil and paper", though many people also simply say "tabletop". Usually you don't need either one, since the context is clear.)
NiMH batteries suck. I want a real Li-Poly (or at least Li-Ion) battery. This is hardly too much to ask, since the GBA SP, DS, PSP, PDAs, MP3 players, and just about every other portable electronic device these days have them.
This looks great, and I want one; but I'm not going to buy one until they have a rechargable battery pack.
And don't give me BS about "additional costs". The only people buying these things are enthusiasts and hackers. Like me. Who are willing to pay an extra $50+ for a good lithium polymer battery. I'm not spending $$ on and carrying around AA's. I thought we got over that nonsense with the original GBA.
Eh the lawsuit in question is total BS. I was a customer within the window, I received the email, and I decided that the lawsuit was full of crap and I wasn't going to cash in. Seriously, read the claim... anyone who is semi-literate and halfway-intelligent can understand that when Netflix says "unlimited rentals, 3 at a time" it's not the same as "unlimited rentals, send them all at once".
My guess is the settlement was done because it was really cheap for netflix... upgrade everyone's plan for a month (giving customers a taste of the higher plan and possibly having some switch) vs continuing a pointless lawsuit. Netflix: 1, Lawyers: 0.
Yeah a number of people might subscribe to Blockbuster's deal. It might suit them fine. But in this case, Netflix has won the mindshare. Blockbuster is the video store on the corner, and well-established at that; but on the internet, Netflix is the common word. The red envelopes are signature. They've won the highly-important mindshare game, and they appear to be winning the business game, too.
Sure, there are always advantages of one over the other. Blockbuster has instant gratification---I can get the movie I want within minutes. Netflix has wider selection---I can't walk into a BB and find much anime. They also have convenience---I decide on a movie, I can click it and it'll be there tomorrow. And I can procrastinate and watch it when I feel like, returning it when I want. And it's cheaper than the corner store if I watch a lot of movies.
I can't really speak to BB's online service; they might have similar selection and pricing, but they also have the same disadvantages. And after dealing with Netflix ("oh, the movie never came? here, we'll ship you another free of charge") vs Blockbuster ("oh, you returned the movies in the morning, but we didn't notice til after noon... that's $6 please"), I would definitely rather do business with the former.
Once again, science is not about truth. If you think about science from that perspective then it makes no sense to have this discussion.
Science is about the best bet we can make as to what reality is. Under this perspective, you always keep in mind that current theories may be, and probably are flawed. But each single theory always requires at least some kind of proof to back it up. It requires the ability to find further proof that it may be flawed as well.
Oh totally. Science is about one thing: reproducible effect. "Truth" has no part of it. This is why science is continually wrong, yet it doesn't matter. If you can search back through my slashdot comments and find the one on "Science and Magic" you will see that I agree with this entirely.
The point if that no statement can be disproved in the way you explain. Not a single one. But if we were to take every single statement as science, then science would have no place or meaning in this world.
Actually this is not correct. For a theory to be an effective scientific theory, its hypothesis must be "disprovable," in that there must be a clear case where we can either accept the hypothesis or reject the hypothesis. A theory whose hypothesis cannot be rejected regardless of outcome is not a scientific theory, because science can do nothing to determine if it is, in fact, reproducible or not.
Good theories lead to technology and useful development. This is where science shines. The computers we use, the medicine we have, the cars we drive, most of what we use every day is some form of technological development based on reproducible effect, which is scientific in nature. You try something, and it either works consistently, or it doesn't. (You may even accidentally find some interesting effect that happens consistently, but this too is about reproducibility.)
Unfortunately natural evolution is not one such theory. (And by "natural evolution" I mean "the theory that things improve over time based on natural selection of a large population"; that species N came from species M after several generational iterations of mutation and selection.) It is not practical to experiment with: it either requires geological timescales which we can't observe, empirical evidence which cannot be used to reject the hypothesis, or experimentation which is inherently flawed, because it's not "natural" (i.e., there's someone doing the experiment, so it's immediately invalidated). Furthermore, there's no practical outcome from the proof or disproof of such a theory. There is no reproducible effect. It's almost entirely philosophical, even religious in function.
Sure, you can write SQL in Ruby, but why would you want to?
For a number of reasons:
Building SQL from a (slightly) abstracted language construct makes it much, much easier to piece together a statement. Consider:
q = (tbl.price > n) q &= (tbl.date < t) if t
In this (somewhat) trivial example, you have added a criterion to the query based on a condition in the code without having to worry about SQL syntax, escaping, or converting formats. The logic of your code is obvious and concise, not littered with irrelevant details.
Now imagine how easy it would be to build an interactive report builder with the ability to throw the pieces together in this manner. Yes, it's easy.:-)
Portability is transparent. With the new DBI module updates, Criteria will pick the "flavor" of the database you're using transparently. MySQL likes the REGEXP, PgSQL likes RLIKE. Older Oracle doesn't support JOIN, new Oracle does. MySQL and PgSQL JOIN syntax is subtely different. With Criteria... it doesn't matter. You don't have to worry about it.
It looks more natural in your code. You don't have to worry about where to put long SELECT statements, or have a special editor or mode for that portion of your code.
It can be applied to non-SQL entities. This may be especially helpful if you're debugging code or writing unit tests and don't want to have to configure a database connection.
You can build reusable query templates for later with.x? syntax.
Escaping, database quoting, and bind variables are handled appropriately. You don't have to worry about injection vulnerabilities, even if you're using parameterized SQL in places where bind variables are not supported (such as column lists).
Criminy, that's a hard post to read. Use blockquote instead of bold!;-) Anyway:
Which features are you talking about?
Give an example. This should be pretty easy, but I've found I'll often try and automate something and down the road it turns out to be more maintenance than if I were to have just hacked it out.
Rails requires you do a lot of stuff like do manual updates on objects, write literal SQL strings in your code, and other similar little things that could, with some creative ruby, be done automatically. On the count of SQL, and at the risk of self-promotion, check out Criteria, which lets you write literal Ruby statements that are transformed into SQL, all in a ruby-esque manner.
For the latter count, it is easy (or at least, not very difficult) to implement a system that does implicit object persistence. I have such a system called mephle, which you can see the latest version of in the SVN repository, but it's not documented well enough for general use, and I wouldn't advertise it as such. However, it shows that such a thing is not only possible, but pretty straightforward.
Give an example. This should be pretty easy, but I've found I'll often try and automate something and down the road it turns out to be more maintenance than if I were to have just hacked it out.
This is just poorly-designed automation, then. There is a clear line for where automation should end and where manual usage should begin. Follow these rules:
If it's something the system can figure out automatically based on specified information, it should be automated.
If it's something that's always unique, it should be manual.
If the information has been specified once, it should not have to be specified again.
If there can be special cases, it should be possible to hook in code to handle them.
If you have a system that follows the above rules, you will find yourself writing much, much less code and focusing almost entirely on the problem at hand. And it's possible to write such a system, especially in ruby---see above.
I'm not sure I know what you are talking about, because my interface is for the most part completely separate from my processing. Interface goes in my views and the processing happens in my controller. Explain this please.
The fact you have HTML in a separate file from the code is not sufficient for full separation. You should be able to entirely drop the web interface and instead write, say, a GTK or commandline app, without changing any of the backend code.
Pretty much tied to MySQL? It comes with connection adapters for both MySQL and PgSQL, and it works fine with both of them. This aught to be a pretty good reason not to trust anything you have said. You have no idea what you're talking about. It doesn't make use of any MySQL-specific features like enums, everything is abstracted down to basic SQL.
Then you have not seriously used it with other databases. I recommend you hop on #ruby-lang on irc.freenode.net (I'm there as oGMo as well), and ask around for people's experience with Rails and other databases.
There hasn't been nearly as much testing and development going on with those projects. I don't know how you could say they are for "more serious apps". You would probably spend at least twice as much time developing an application with one of those.
Uh, you have metrics for this where? All of the above modules are much older and more developed than Rails. Rails is the new kid on the block, and it's still got a lot of growing up to do.
Rails is OK. It's a great way to get into the language and attract users, and for that I appreciate its existance.
That said, as a fairly long-time user of Ruby myself, I wouldn't use it. Many of the features it provides are more academic proof-of-concept implementations than well-tested, well-polished ones. It requires you to do a lot of things manually that could easily be done automatically, and you still write bits of SQL in your code. Also, more importantly, it doesn't provide an application layer that entirely abstracts the functionality from the interface. This is bad for any number of reasons. Finally, it's pretty much tied to MySQL, so if you use PgSQL or Oracle (and you should), then you're in for a big headache.
That said, if you're interested in Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails looks cool to you, check it out and play around with it. It's also not the only thing that ruby provides to develop applications, even web applications. If you're developing a more serious app, you may look at stuff like PageTemplate for the frontend, ObjectGraph for your ORM, and soap4r for services.
So regardless of your stance on Rails, check out Ruby... there's a lot of cool stuff.
Says who? It would just take new evidence that the genetic coincidence between humans and apes is meaningless, or that we didn't all come from the sea, and evolution would go out of the window. If each species was found not to evolve in any way, then evolution would be proven wrong.
Nope. If it were found that apes and humans were unrelated, we could then say that humans evolved from something else---it's just a matter of finding what. It doesn't matter what they are or are not related to.
The problem is you cannot define a "wrong state". That is what makes something disprovable. You must be able to say that "if this happens, then evolution cannot be true". Except, this cannot be done: if one path proves false, we can pick another tenable path that fits the facts.
For instance: Say, for the sake of argument, we do prove that humans (H) did not descend from apes. (This in itself assumes a lot, namely, that such a thing can be shown.) We can then say, as above, "well, they descended from something else." We have two outcomes: we can find another sufficiently direct ancestor species (S0) to continue the existing theory unmodified (S0 -> H), or we find a less direct species (S1) such that S1->S0->H. In the latter case, we can modify our theory and say that ancestor S0 didn't survive long enough, or conditions weren't sufficient to leave a fossil record.
The problem is we can extend this indefinitely. Even if we can't find an S1, we can continue back and find an Sn, and just assume we can't find S(n-1) to S(0). At what point do we draw the line? The theory is a conceivably sound one---the stated events could possibly have happened---but you can't disprove it.
The same problem arises when we try and factor out traits. Species X inherited trait Y for such-and-such a plausible reason. But if they hadn't, we could find an equally plausible reason. There is no way to disprove either one. Even for traits that appear unlikely---take one's appendix, or something similar---we can simply say "well, it's a leftover" or "well, it's just a mutation that survived but didn't have a detrimental impact on reproducibility" or similar. There is always an excuse. Thus it is nondisprovable.
Hmm, I would say that perhaps the main life of PC gaming isn't solely focused on the latest FPS which uses that big expensive upgrade. I'm talking all the little games that casual gamers play. Web games, solitaire, etc. Stuff that very likely the majority of the non-gamer population plays, simply because the PC is widespread. Stuff that "the little guy" can still make without a big budget---thus will not cease to die anytime soon.
Nothing as long as you don't try to disguise it as science. Scientific theories can be tested. Intelligent design can't.
I might as well tell you that elephants can fly. The fact you can't prove me wrong doesn't make my "theory" science.
It should be pointed out that natural evolution is also a nondisprovable theory.
OK this is just sad. This is, perhaps, the main reason Microsoft fails in this market. They do something and declare it's the best ever: and they believe their own propaganda. That's just sad. It would be one thing if it was, "well, we had fairly strong launch, and we have a lot of games lined up in the future". But no, this sheer stubborn arrogance.
Let's look at a few things: The PSP sold 500k units in 2 days and many people consider it to have had a weak launch. (Possibly because it didn't entirely sell out.) It also had a more diverse launch title list Exclude Ren Goku and Smart Bomb as they weren't available for a couple weeks (and sucked anyway). The remaining games were solid titles available the day of launch.
And again, many people consider this a weak launch.
The PS2 had a more sizeable list at launch than the X360---also more diverse. (Yeah, so the graphics weren't good; gee, it was 2000. Compare it to the PSX or N64.)
The N64 launched with Mario64, which is widely considered to be one of the best games ever. The SNES was launched with Super Mario World; the NES with Super Mario Bros. All of these are AAA titles, and a single AAA title outweighs any number of B titles.
So in conclusion: Microsoft's claim is laughable at best---but mostly, sad and pathetic.
oh right, giants. Actually if you buffed and debuffed it was very effective as well. The only thing that really hurt at that point was the Frost Wolves Blizzard attack. This was especially true when you could cast and cast and cast spells in DoS.;-)
Isn't this just the same sort of non-abstracted design UNIX uses? I seem to recall having to write code to disassociate daemons from the terminal. Just because terminals can use a text-only mode of the video card, it doesn't mean it doesn't have the same flaw.
No. Terminals are just file descriptors like any other. The only reason you have to manually close them is that the parent process---the shell---doesn't close them when your process starts, because most stuff that runs from the shell will utilize them.
Note that STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR are not necessarily TTYs, but can be redirected by the shell. This is "standard IO", not built-in terminal IO.
Additionally, since they're file handles, the kernel isn't keeping around internal UI structures: it's abstracted and generalized. And quite elegantly.
Totally. When I played the DoS variant (which is very, very easy), I first defeated the Earth Fiend, but now I don't believe even that was necessary. Then I just went to all the other dungeons, harvested the items, and didn't defeat any of the other Fiends. Tiamat was the second to go down, and then when everyone was outfitted with top gear, everything else was trivial to clear out.
I was suprised to see how nonlinear this turned out to be; i really wish they'd make a Final Fantasy that was reminiscent of this. It may be that FFXII turns out to be similar; I'm an admitted fan (addict?) of FFXI, and enjoy the new style. After hearing it has a more mission-oriented format, I'm hopeful that we may see a much less on-rails game than FFX.
Right, but these are all of the low-level variety. The higher-level ones are only available at the Pravoka peninsula, as well as the northeastern continent which can only be reached by airship. If the high-level ones were available in Elfland, it wouldn't be much of a trick, since you get the seaship as the first Pravoka event, and Elfland is your first new destination.
If you ever find yourself pining for those long-past grind sessions, gaining levels outside of Elfland by slaying ogres, this is a game you simply must play.
As others have noted, this more FF1 than DQ1. Additionally, you didn't fight ogres outside elfland; you go to the top of the peninsula just northeast of Pravoka. Due to the map design and the way the monster distribution is laid out in a grid across the map, in these two squares you find monsters from across the next continent. With decent buff skills, and the fact the Pravoka area is very early in the game, you can gain levels very quickly here.
(The Dawn of Souls port for the GBA makes this even more trivial with the addition of MP instead of static spell counts. I was able to complete the game in barely 13 hours with 999999 gold, level 60+ characters, and all the items, using this method followed by harvesting the dungeons out of order for items and exp.)
In Dragon Warrior, you could gain levels very quickly by fighting Metal Slimes, which gave tons of exp and had very little HP... but were very hard to hit.
I didn't say window handle parameter, i said window parameters:
lpStartupInfo
[in] Pointer to a STARTUPINFO structure that specifies the window station, desktop, standard handles, and appearance of the main window for the new process.
Even if this is "just kept" by the kernel, it's still a non-abstracted design. The kernel "knows about" the GUI. It shouldn't. If someone wants window information about a process, it should ask the GUI, not the kernel.
I wasn't aware that pre-1970 kernels assumed the existence of a GUI? How does making the assumption that a Windows application have a Window make it on the level of a pre-1970 applications?
OK, so they caught up with 1960 then?;-) I don't think there were too many OS's before then.
Slashdot Mirror
They cannot be ignored; however, this does not mean they cannot be overcome or that it is not desirable to do so.
And people wonder why we have a problem with happiness. This sort of envious greed is the main problem with Microsoft, and it looks like it goes all the way to the top.
D&D = Dungeons and Dragons
There is no abmiguity here, so the joke isn't funny to people who know even a little about the topic at hand.
(PNP is Plug'n'Play; PnP is just something Zonk used for "pencil and paper", though many people also simply say "tabletop". Usually you don't need either one, since the context is clear.)
NiMH batteries suck. I want a real Li-Poly (or at least Li-Ion) battery. This is hardly too much to ask, since the GBA SP, DS, PSP, PDAs, MP3 players, and just about every other portable electronic device these days have them.
And don't give me BS about "additional costs". The only people buying these things are enthusiasts and hackers. Like me. Who are willing to pay an extra $50+ for a good lithium polymer battery. I'm not spending $$ on and carrying around AA's. I thought we got over that nonsense with the original GBA.
Maybe not the online service, but is this the same "no more late fees" that they got sued for, or have they actually changed their ways?
Eh the lawsuit in question is total BS. I was a customer within the window, I received the email, and I decided that the lawsuit was full of crap and I wasn't going to cash in. Seriously, read the claim... anyone who is semi-literate and halfway-intelligent can understand that when Netflix says "unlimited rentals, 3 at a time" it's not the same as "unlimited rentals, send them all at once".
My guess is the settlement was done because it was really cheap for netflix... upgrade everyone's plan for a month (giving customers a taste of the higher plan and possibly having some switch) vs continuing a pointless lawsuit. Netflix: 1, Lawyers: 0.
Yeah a number of people might subscribe to Blockbuster's deal. It might suit them fine. But in this case, Netflix has won the mindshare. Blockbuster is the video store on the corner, and well-established at that; but on the internet, Netflix is the common word. The red envelopes are signature. They've won the highly-important mindshare game, and they appear to be winning the business game, too.
Sure, there are always advantages of one over the other. Blockbuster has instant gratification---I can get the movie I want within minutes. Netflix has wider selection---I can't walk into a BB and find much anime. They also have convenience---I decide on a movie, I can click it and it'll be there tomorrow. And I can procrastinate and watch it when I feel like, returning it when I want. And it's cheaper than the corner store if I watch a lot of movies.
I can't really speak to BB's online service; they might have similar selection and pricing, but they also have the same disadvantages. And after dealing with Netflix ("oh, the movie never came? here, we'll ship you another free of charge") vs Blockbuster ("oh, you returned the movies in the morning, but we didn't notice til after noon... that's $6 please"), I would definitely rather do business with the former.
Neither does making a product division that loses $4 billion.
Oh totally. Science is about one thing: reproducible effect. "Truth" has no part of it. This is why science is continually wrong, yet it doesn't matter. If you can search back through my slashdot comments and find the one on "Science and Magic" you will see that I agree with this entirely.
Actually this is not correct. For a theory to be an effective scientific theory, its hypothesis must be "disprovable," in that there must be a clear case where we can either accept the hypothesis or reject the hypothesis. A theory whose hypothesis cannot be rejected regardless of outcome is not a scientific theory, because science can do nothing to determine if it is, in fact, reproducible or not.
Good theories lead to technology and useful development. This is where science shines. The computers we use, the medicine we have, the cars we drive, most of what we use every day is some form of technological development based on reproducible effect, which is scientific in nature. You try something, and it either works consistently, or it doesn't. (You may even accidentally find some interesting effect that happens consistently, but this too is about reproducibility.)
Unfortunately natural evolution is not one such theory. (And by "natural evolution" I mean "the theory that things improve over time based on natural selection of a large population"; that species N came from species M after several generational iterations of mutation and selection.) It is not practical to experiment with: it either requires geological timescales which we can't observe, empirical evidence which cannot be used to reject the hypothesis, or experimentation which is inherently flawed, because it's not "natural" (i.e., there's someone doing the experiment, so it's immediately invalidated). Furthermore, there's no practical outcome from the proof or disproof of such a theory. There is no reproducible effect. It's almost entirely philosophical, even religious in function.
For a number of reasons:
Now imagine how easy it would be to build an interactive report builder with the ability to throw the pieces together in this manner. Yes, it's easy. :-)
I could go on, but this should be sufficient.
Criminy, that's a hard post to read. Use blockquote instead of bold! ;-) Anyway:
Rails requires you do a lot of stuff like do manual updates on objects, write literal SQL strings in your code, and other similar little things that could, with some creative ruby, be done automatically. On the count of SQL, and at the risk of self-promotion, check out Criteria, which lets you write literal Ruby statements that are transformed into SQL, all in a ruby-esque manner.
For the latter count, it is easy (or at least, not very difficult) to implement a system that does implicit object persistence. I have such a system called mephle, which you can see the latest version of in the SVN repository, but it's not documented well enough for general use, and I wouldn't advertise it as such. However, it shows that such a thing is not only possible, but pretty straightforward.
This is just poorly-designed automation, then. There is a clear line for where automation should end and where manual usage should begin. Follow these rules:
If you have a system that follows the above rules, you will find yourself writing much, much less code and focusing almost entirely on the problem at hand. And it's possible to write such a system, especially in ruby---see above.
The fact you have HTML in a separate file from the code is not sufficient for full separation. You should be able to entirely drop the web interface and instead write, say, a GTK or commandline app, without changing any of the backend code.
Then you have not seriously used it with other databases. I recommend you hop on #ruby-lang on irc.freenode.net (I'm there as oGMo as well), and ask around for people's experience with Rails and other databases.
Uh, you have metrics for this where? All of the above modules are much older and more developed than Rails. Rails is the new kid on the block, and it's still got a lot of growing up to do.
Rails is OK. It's a great way to get into the language and attract users, and for that I appreciate its existance.
That said, as a fairly long-time user of Ruby myself, I wouldn't use it. Many of the features it provides are more academic proof-of-concept implementations than well-tested, well-polished ones. It requires you to do a lot of things manually that could easily be done automatically, and you still write bits of SQL in your code. Also, more importantly, it doesn't provide an application layer that entirely abstracts the functionality from the interface. This is bad for any number of reasons. Finally, it's pretty much tied to MySQL, so if you use PgSQL or Oracle (and you should), then you're in for a big headache.
That said, if you're interested in Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails looks cool to you, check it out and play around with it. It's also not the only thing that ruby provides to develop applications, even web applications. If you're developing a more serious app, you may look at stuff like PageTemplate for the frontend, ObjectGraph for your ORM, and soap4r for services.
So regardless of your stance on Rails, check out Ruby... there's a lot of cool stuff.
Nope. If it were found that apes and humans were unrelated, we could then say that humans evolved from something else---it's just a matter of finding what. It doesn't matter what they are or are not related to.
The problem is you cannot define a "wrong state". That is what makes something disprovable. You must be able to say that "if this happens, then evolution cannot be true". Except, this cannot be done: if one path proves false, we can pick another tenable path that fits the facts.
For instance: Say, for the sake of argument, we do prove that humans (H) did not descend from apes. (This in itself assumes a lot, namely, that such a thing can be shown.) We can then say, as above, "well, they descended from something else." We have two outcomes: we can find another sufficiently direct ancestor species (S0) to continue the existing theory unmodified (S0 -> H), or we find a less direct species (S1) such that S1->S0->H. In the latter case, we can modify our theory and say that ancestor S0 didn't survive long enough, or conditions weren't sufficient to leave a fossil record.
The problem is we can extend this indefinitely. Even if we can't find an S1, we can continue back and find an Sn, and just assume we can't find S(n-1) to S(0). At what point do we draw the line? The theory is a conceivably sound one---the stated events could possibly have happened---but you can't disprove it.
The same problem arises when we try and factor out traits. Species X inherited trait Y for such-and-such a plausible reason. But if they hadn't, we could find an equally plausible reason. There is no way to disprove either one. Even for traits that appear unlikely---take one's appendix, or something similar---we can simply say "well, it's a leftover" or "well, it's just a mutation that survived but didn't have a detrimental impact on reproducibility" or similar. There is always an excuse. Thus it is nondisprovable.
Hmm, I would say that perhaps the main life of PC gaming isn't solely focused on the latest FPS which uses that big expensive upgrade. I'm talking all the little games that casual gamers play. Web games, solitaire, etc. Stuff that very likely the majority of the non-gamer population plays, simply because the PC is widespread. Stuff that "the little guy" can still make without a big budget---thus will not cease to die anytime soon.
It should be pointed out that natural evolution is also a nondisprovable theory.
OK this is just sad. This is, perhaps, the main reason Microsoft fails in this market. They do something and declare it's the best ever: and they believe their own propaganda. That's just sad. It would be one thing if it was, "well, we had fairly strong launch, and we have a lot of games lined up in the future". But no, this sheer stubborn arrogance.
Let's look at a few things: The PSP sold 500k units in 2 days and many people consider it to have had a weak launch. (Possibly because it didn't entirely sell out.) It also had a more diverse launch title list Exclude Ren Goku and Smart Bomb as they weren't available for a couple weeks (and sucked anyway). The remaining games were solid titles available the day of launch.
And again, many people consider this a weak launch.
The PS2 had a more sizeable list at launch than the X360---also more diverse. (Yeah, so the graphics weren't good; gee, it was 2000. Compare it to the PSX or N64.)
The N64 launched with Mario64, which is widely considered to be one of the best games ever. The SNES was launched with Super Mario World; the NES with Super Mario Bros. All of these are AAA titles, and a single AAA title outweighs any number of B titles.
So in conclusion: Microsoft's claim is laughable at best---but mostly, sad and pathetic.
oh right, giants. Actually if you buffed and debuffed it was very effective as well. The only thing that really hurt at that point was the Frost Wolves Blizzard attack. This was especially true when you could cast and cast and cast spells in DoS. ;-)
...I wouldn't really call it a failure.
No. Terminals are just file descriptors like any other. The only reason you have to manually close them is that the parent process---the shell---doesn't close them when your process starts, because most stuff that runs from the shell will utilize them.
Note that STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR are not necessarily TTYs, but can be redirected by the shell. This is "standard IO", not built-in terminal IO.
Additionally, since they're file handles, the kernel isn't keeping around internal UI structures: it's abstracted and generalized. And quite elegantly.
I was suprised to see how nonlinear this turned out to be; i really wish they'd make a Final Fantasy that was reminiscent of this. It may be that FFXII turns out to be similar; I'm an admitted fan (addict?) of FFXI, and enjoy the new style. After hearing it has a more mission-oriented format, I'm hopeful that we may see a much less on-rails game than FFX.
Right, but these are all of the low-level variety. The higher-level ones are only available at the Pravoka peninsula, as well as the northeastern continent which can only be reached by airship. If the high-level ones were available in Elfland, it wouldn't be much of a trick, since you get the seaship as the first Pravoka event, and Elfland is your first new destination.
As others have noted, this more FF1 than DQ1. Additionally, you didn't fight ogres outside elfland; you go to the top of the peninsula just northeast of Pravoka. Due to the map design and the way the monster distribution is laid out in a grid across the map, in these two squares you find monsters from across the next continent. With decent buff skills, and the fact the Pravoka area is very early in the game, you can gain levels very quickly here.
(The Dawn of Souls port for the GBA makes this even more trivial with the addition of MP instead of static spell counts. I was able to complete the game in barely 13 hours with 999999 gold, level 60+ characters, and all the items, using this method followed by harvesting the dungeons out of order for items and exp.)
In Dragon Warrior, you could gain levels very quickly by fighting Metal Slimes, which gave tons of exp and had very little HP... but were very hard to hit.
I didn't say window handle parameter, i said window parameters:
Even if this is "just kept" by the kernel, it's still a non-abstracted design. The kernel "knows about" the GUI. It shouldn't. If someone wants window information about a process, it should ask the GUI, not the kernel.
OK, so they caught up with 1960 then? ;-) I don't think there were too many OS's before then.