Is 'Oblivion' really a sandbox? It has a very specific set of tasks that must be completed to 'win' the game. You can go further by doing side quests, collecting things, talking to everyone, and even after you 'win' you can still keep playing. But, for people that need direction their is a story arc that takes you from 'start' to 'finish'.
When I think of a 'sandbox', I think more of something like Second Life. There really is no 'finish' or 'goals'/'quests'/etc in that game. It just dumps you in and expects you to do something on your own.
I'm not sure where I would put World of Warcraft. There are all sorts of quests, and I guess when you get to be level 60 (or 70 now) you have gotten to the top... but it seems hugely open ended.
That [ebay.com] can [bbc.co.uk] be [riverusers.com] applied [cbsnews.com] to [wkyc.com] sightings [nbc10.com] of [bbc.co.uk] many [optusnet.com.au] other [snafu.de] things [nbcsandiego.com].
The [ebay.com] problem [ebay.com] is [farshores.org], how [metro.co.uk] does [wkyc.com] one [jsonline.com] determine [goldenpalaceevents.com] which [pittsburghlive.com] patterns [local6.com] indicate [nbc5.com] something [nbc5.com] and [nbc5.com] which [nbc5.com] patterns [nbc5.com] are [nbc5.com] just [nbc5.com] convincing [wtol.com] illusions [reuters.com]?
I am staring at that really hard - I know that there must be some pattern in that stream of letters, some piece of information trying desperately to get out... but I just can't see it.
My wife and I got one of these made. My side is red, orange and black, her side is orange, red and black. The walls in our kitchen are red, and the cabinets are black - it looks really cool in my personal opinion. A side bonus is that we were 2 of the first hundred people to get them made!
It was really pricey, so its the only piece of art we've bought for our house, but it looks cool and is unique so I think it was worth it.
Yep, there is no arguing with that. But, that's the kind of crap almost all employees (at any company) do, and if you are a VP, or some other customer-facing type, it is actually your job.
I wish I remembered the company... But there is a commerical on US tv, it ran last year not sure if it is still on (go TiVo!), but it shows 2 yahoos sitting around a meeting desk balancing donuts on their heads trying to come up with an idea, and they say that they wonder what some other medium-sized creative company was doing. Then they flash to a conference room at the medium-sized company, and they are wishing they head the market power that some big established company had. Then they flashed to an executive room, and some stodgy old dude says they should try to be more like the original 2 person startup at the beginning.
Point being, most companies have something they are good at, and even companies that are great at something look to others for inspiration. That 'inspiration' could be in a good way, where they try to emulate or improve upon something, or it could be in a negative way, where they know to absolutely stay away from some disaster they other company made.
It is rare though that one of those companies would say 'oh yea, that other product rocks, that's what we're trying to do'. (though companies frequently say 'that other product is really stupid' of course)
You are correct, I am a sociopath. I have no morals, no sense of ethics, and am social inept. Anyone who wants to improve existing products, society, or themselves must be a sociopath - because that goes against the current social norm of being a lazy pacifist. The fact that I used a military reference in a phrase also proves that I am psychopathic. Especially since I used the 'battles in a war' phrase, certainly only the most seriously disturbed would ever use such a phrase. It also clearly indicates that I view every encounter with another person as a violent struggle, and every time a discussion goes my way I think it is a victory against tyranny. Yep, you got me pegged.
2-and-a-half years later, Windows Vista has turned into a phenomenal product, better than any other OS we've ever built and far, far better than any other software available today, in my opinion. It's going to be available to customers on Jan 30, and I suggest everyone go out and get it as soon as you can. It's that good.
Next thing he says is:
The spirit of being self-critical continues to flourish at Microsoft.
Those two sentences may seem to conflict, but you are not seeing the whole picture.
You are not seeing the people who are already working on making their feature 'have more features'. You are not seeing the work that the team is doing in preparation for a Service Pack, which will not add much in the way of new features but will address any late breaking issues or customer-reported features requests/bugs. And most importantly, you aren't seeing the individuals who are extremely passionate about the products that are shipped by Microsoft, the people who write ranting emails to other teams, the people who use the product and file bugs about how something is lame, or the people who go to meetings and sometimes have to get in to shouting matches with other people who just don't get it.
Vista, like it or not, has turned into a 'phenomenal' product, by definition. Is it better than any other OS MS has released? Well, in some places it is, and in some places it isn't. There is a lot of new code that fixes a lot of old issues, but there are new behaviors that are less than pleasant. Is it far better than any other software available today? I don't really know what that even means. 'Better' in usability, stability, feature-bredth, customer-focus, opportunity for 3rd party develops, source code quantity? Who knows, luckily he put 'in my opinion' after it so we don't have to try to figure it out.
But, the point is: The spirit of being self-critical is alive, and though every now and then it suffers a minor setback those events are simply small battles in the larger war.
I bought mine when I was a freshman in high school. It carried me through 4 years of high school, 5 years of college, and even though I haven't needed to use it in a long time it still works after 5 more years in the workforce.
That thing was made like a tank. None of that cheap flimsy crap that the TIs were made out of. And if you don't care about the expansion cards (I never found one that I needed), and you were handy with a soldering iron you could upgrade your G to the same amount of ram the GX came with pretty easy.
Oh, and taking two bare wires out the top and jamming them in to holes on my printer so that I could print out long strings of calculations? Freakin awesome!
Buy a Mac to run Safari and Firefox, then buy Parallels Desktop (or if you bought a used/close-out pre-Intel Mac, Virtual PC. Pick up a copy of Windows XP to run the modern versions of IE, and you're done. You wouldn't need XP Pro, you could get away with Home Edition, so it wouldn't be a huge outflow of cash.
some other absolutely 100% hacker proof crazy things
Sorry, but anyone who makes statements like that is not as good as they think they are. If there is anyway for someone to get access to the system then it is not 100% 'hacker proof'. Designing a 100% secure system would be cost prohibitive. (unless you happen to have access to steel vaults, guys with guns, dna analysis tools, and sharks with freakin` lasers and you don't mind the computer not actually being connected to a network)
It is much better in 360-land. Unless there is a problem with the harddrive itself, you are specifically told not to include it when you return your 360.
and centre, and favour, and rumour, and honour, and pronounce "roof" (not as ruff) and say "chimney" not as "chiminey", and pronounce freedom as "being alive and in the absence of tyranny" and...
The pronunciation of "roof" (ruff like a dog makes, or roof with 'oo' like in 'boot') is not an 'America-wide problem'. It is localized to different geographic regions. The US is pretty darn big, and have multiple main dialects, and even more localized versions.
"Chiminey" would be the same thing - though I've never heard anyone say that, outside of the Disney Mary Poppins movie.
I'm not sure if this feature is in build 5728, but figured the/. community would want to know anyway given the heated discussion on this topic a month or so back. After much feedback, and many arguments, the Vista startup sound is finally getting a toggle! Yes, you read that right, someone finally yelled loud enough that marketing/upper mgmt realized that users in fact do want to be able to control their own computer!
Reserve development time for "fit and finish"!
Fit and Finish has quickly become my least favorite phrase. Sorry, just snarky, I agree with this point. But I would say "Hire a designer" as opposed to "reserve development time", mainly because it will allow collaboration with someone who always has their eyes on the UI and can give the developers continual feedback on how their code is totally rocking for the user... experience, or totally deviating from reality.
You are misinterpreting 'fit and finish' if yu think "hire a designer" is more important then "reserve development time". Those two events are complimentary, though they happen at completely different times in the project.
Hire your designer early on in the dev cycle to design your user interface, and bring them back after a major preview release (maybe you got a lot of feedback from a beta, or maybe some unforeseen issue exists with the original design). If you have a program with anything more then a basic UI, skipping this step could be a disaster. Skipping the other step would not be a disaster, but is one of the things that separate 'professional' apps from the rest.
Now, you also must still reserve dev time at the end of the project for the 'fit and finish' issues. Just because your UI was designed beautifully, doesn't mean that there aren't going to be some goofy little issues that pop up. Maybe you antialiased a graphic against the wrong background color so now you have some weird colored pixels, maybe you messed up an alpha channel so one of your icons isn't quite right. Maybe some string changed to correct a typo and now the period at the end of the sentence is partially clipped. Maybe a dev misaligned one button by a few pixels, or allowed some UI elements to be closer to the edge of the window on one tab then on the other. Maybe there is one string describing a property 5 dialogs deep where few ever go that had its text italicized on accident. A looping 'please wait' animation that that only appears under extreme situations that has an odd stutter due to a misaligned frame. There are tons more but I think you get the point.
Some of those could be caught early on in testing, but it is a well proven fact that when someone looks at something day in day out, eventually they'll get used to what they see and won't realize that there is a trivial cosmetic defect in some minor area of the program.
I've been using d2 for awhile, and I love it. The only real complaint I have so far is the 'instant' moderation. I like to set the popup to a moderation, then if I find something even more brilliant, and I've not enough points, I go back and rethink before hitting 'save'. This new 'instant' version takes away my ability to do that, and when some of these discussion threads are really long it is easy to lose a comment that I wanted to compare.
Window didn't just leave Microsoft to join Mozilla, she actually left awhile back to be one of the co-founders of Matasano Security, http://www.matasano.com/. Founding a company is a good reason to leave a company;) She did a great job at Microsoft, and I'm sure she is going to do a great job at Mozilla.
Many teams come up with their feature wish-lists seperately. There is no reason for the memory management guys to care about what the IE team is doing. Some teams have to work together of course if there is integration / close ties between the components. But, to have every feature be decided one at a time would take forever. It would be inefficient becuase you'd constantly be trying to get the right experts in the room, and you would be trying to rank
Slashdot Mirror
Is 'Oblivion' really a sandbox? It has a very specific set of tasks that must be completed to 'win' the game. You can go further by doing side quests, collecting things, talking to everyone, and even after you 'win' you can still keep playing. But, for people that need direction their is a story arc that takes you from 'start' to 'finish'.
When I think of a 'sandbox', I think more of something like Second Life. There really is no 'finish' or 'goals'/'quests'/etc in that game. It just dumps you in and expects you to do something on your own.
I'm not sure where I would put World of Warcraft. There are all sorts of quests, and I guess when you get to be level 60 (or 70 now) you have gotten to the top... but it seems hugely open ended.
I am staring at that really hard - I know that there must be some pattern in that stream of letters, some piece of information trying desperately to get out... but I just can't see it.
My wife and I got one of these made. My side is red, orange and black, her side is orange, red and black. The walls in our kitchen are red, and the cabinets are black - it looks really cool in my personal opinion. A side bonus is that we were 2 of the first hundred people to get them made!
It was really pricey, so its the only piece of art we've bought for our house, but it looks cool and is unique so I think it was worth it.
Yep, there is no arguing with that. But, that's the kind of crap almost all employees (at any company) do, and if you are a VP, or some other customer-facing type, it is actually your job.
I wish I remembered the company... But there is a commerical on US tv, it ran last year not sure if it is still on (go TiVo!), but it shows 2 yahoos sitting around a meeting desk balancing donuts on their heads trying to come up with an idea, and they say that they wonder what some other medium-sized creative company was doing. Then they flash to a conference room at the medium-sized company, and they are wishing they head the market power that some big established company had. Then they flashed to an executive room, and some stodgy old dude says they should try to be more like the original 2 person startup at the beginning.
Point being, most companies have something they are good at, and even companies that are great at something look to others for inspiration. That 'inspiration' could be in a good way, where they try to emulate or improve upon something, or it could be in a negative way, where they know to absolutely stay away from some disaster they other company made.
It is rare though that one of those companies would say 'oh yea, that other product rocks, that's what we're trying to do'. (though companies frequently say 'that other product is really stupid' of course)
You are correct, I am a sociopath. I have no morals, no sense of ethics, and am social inept.
Anyone who wants to improve existing products, society, or themselves must be a sociopath - because that goes against the current social norm of being a lazy pacifist.
The fact that I used a military reference in a phrase also proves that I am psychopathic. Especially since I used the 'battles in a war' phrase, certainly only the most seriously disturbed would ever use such a phrase. It also clearly indicates that I view every encounter with another person as a violent struggle, and every time a discussion goes my way I think it is a victory against tyranny.
Yep, you got me pegged.
Not just miniatures of the moon base, but miniature -snow globes- of the moon base. No, wait! miniature 'asteroid fragment globes' of the moon base!
Next thing he says is:
The spirit of being self-critical continues to flourish at Microsoft.
Those two sentences may seem to conflict, but you are not seeing the whole picture.You are not seeing the people who are already working on making their feature 'have more features'. You are not seeing the work that the team is doing in preparation for a Service Pack, which will not add much in the way of new features but will address any late breaking issues or customer-reported features requests/bugs. And most importantly, you aren't seeing the individuals who are extremely passionate about the products that are shipped by Microsoft, the people who write ranting emails to other teams, the people who use the product and file bugs about how something is lame, or the people who go to meetings and sometimes have to get in to shouting matches with other people who just don't get it.
Vista, like it or not, has turned into a 'phenomenal' product, by definition. Is it better than any other OS MS has released? Well, in some places it is, and in some places it isn't. There is a lot of new code that fixes a lot of old issues, but there are new behaviors that are less than pleasant. Is it far better than any other software available today? I don't really know what that even means. 'Better' in usability, stability, feature-bredth, customer-focus, opportunity for 3rd party develops, source code quantity? Who knows, luckily he put 'in my opinion' after it so we don't have to try to figure it out.
But, the point is: The spirit of being self-critical is alive, and though every now and then it suffers a minor setback those events are simply small battles in the larger war.
If I had mod points today I would have given you a Funny. Well done
There went the joke, flying by just inches over your head
More 'w00t' for the 48G!
I bought mine when I was a freshman in high school. It carried me through 4 years of high school, 5 years of college, and even though I haven't needed to use it in a long time it still works after 5 more years in the workforce.
That thing was made like a tank. None of that cheap flimsy crap that the TIs were made out of. And if you don't care about the expansion cards (I never found one that I needed), and you were handy with a soldering iron you could upgrade your G to the same amount of ram the GX came with pretty easy.
Oh, and taking two bare wires out the top and jamming them in to holes on my printer so that I could print out long strings of calculations? Freakin awesome!
Shortly after this article hits /. front page, tell us how much money you have left in your bank account.
;)
Actually, don't worry - we'll all just check for ourselves
Buy a Mac to run Safari and Firefox, then buy Parallels Desktop (or if you bought a used/close-out pre-Intel Mac, Virtual PC. Pick up a copy of Windows XP to run the modern versions of IE, and you're done. You wouldn't need XP Pro, you could get away with Home Edition, so it wouldn't be a huge outflow of cash.
Sure if by "nasty surprise" you mean "hilarious shenanigans"
Sorry, but anyone who makes statements like that is not as good as they think they are. If there is anyway for someone to get access to the system then it is not 100% 'hacker proof'. Designing a 100% secure system would be cost prohibitive. (unless you happen to have access to steel vaults, guys with guns, dna analysis tools, and sharks with freakin` lasers and you don't mind the computer not actually being connected to a network)
It is much better in 360-land. Unless there is a problem with the harddrive itself, you are specifically told not to include it when you return your 360.
The pronunciation of "roof" (ruff like a dog makes, or roof with 'oo' like in 'boot') is not an 'America-wide problem'. It is localized to different geographic regions. The US is pretty darn big, and have multiple main dialects, and even more localized versions.
"Chiminey" would be the same thing - though I've never heard anyone say that, outside of the Disney Mary Poppins movie.
Judging by how fast the models end up nekkid, I'd say great .
There... fixed that for you.
That's pretty much the reason everyone is so happy that the Vista team finally got its head out of its ass and put the toggle in place ;)
I'm not sure if this feature is in build 5728, but figured the /. community would want to know anyway given the heated discussion on this topic a month or so back.
6 /09/22/458320.aspx
After much feedback, and many arguments, the Vista startup sound is finally getting a toggle! Yes, you read that right, someone finally yelled loud enough that marketing/upper mgmt realized that users in fact do want to be able to control their own computer!
The regular sound control panel has a new checkbox to control the startup chime as described here: http://blogs.technet.com/windowsvista/archive/200
You are misinterpreting 'fit and finish' if yu think "hire a designer" is more important then "reserve development time". Those two events are complimentary, though they happen at completely different times in the project.
Hire your designer early on in the dev cycle to design your user interface, and bring them back after a major preview release (maybe you got a lot of feedback from a beta, or maybe some unforeseen issue exists with the original design). If you have a program with anything more then a basic UI, skipping this step could be a disaster. Skipping the other step would not be a disaster, but is one of the things that separate 'professional' apps from the rest.
Now, you also must still reserve dev time at the end of the project for the 'fit and finish' issues. Just because your UI was designed beautifully, doesn't mean that there aren't going to be some goofy little issues that pop up. Maybe you antialiased a graphic against the wrong background color so now you have some weird colored pixels, maybe you messed up an alpha channel so one of your icons isn't quite right. Maybe some string changed to correct a typo and now the period at the end of the sentence is partially clipped. Maybe a dev misaligned one button by a few pixels, or allowed some UI elements to be closer to the edge of the window on one tab then on the other. Maybe there is one string describing a property 5 dialogs deep where few ever go that had its text italicized on accident. A looping 'please wait' animation that that only appears under extreme situations that has an odd stutter due to a misaligned frame. There are tons more but I think you get the point.
Some of those could be caught early on in testing, but it is a well proven fact that when someone looks at something day in day out, eventually they'll get used to what they see and won't realize that there is a trivial cosmetic defect in some minor area of the program.
I've been using d2 for awhile, and I love it. The only real complaint I have so far is the 'instant' moderation. I like to set the popup to a moderation, then if I find something even more brilliant, and I've not enough points, I go back and rethink before hitting 'save'. This new 'instant' version takes away my ability to do that, and when some of these discussion threads are really long it is easy to lose a comment that I wanted to compare.
16 hours is more then enough time to get multiple uses out of the paper I'd say!
Actually she left quite some time ago. Before the recent 'oddly coincidental' departures.
Window didn't just leave Microsoft to join Mozilla, she actually left awhile back to be one of the co-founders of Matasano Security, http://www.matasano.com/. Founding a company is a good reason to leave a company ;) She did a great job at Microsoft, and I'm sure she is going to do a great job at Mozilla.
Many teams come up with their feature wish-lists seperately. There is no reason for the memory management guys to care about what the IE team is doing. Some teams have to work together of course if there is integration / close ties between the components. But, to have every feature be decided one at a time would take forever. It would be inefficient becuase you'd constantly be trying to get the right experts in the room, and you would be trying to rank