Microsoft is my favourite example of an unresponsive company. We know there are flaws to be addressed. We know people aren't happy. Some even file bug reports, but never even get an acknowledgement that the report was received, much less messages providing tracking information as the bug is prioritized and dealt with or scheduled into "low priority" oblivion.
Contrast that with SourceForge, who's techs not only post information about bugs in the tracking system, but email the reporter to let them know what's happening and how things are resolved. (Particular Kudos to them because I've had to rely on them a couple of times to fix issues, and they always provide that feedback instead of expecting me to go to some "update" page to read the info myself.)
you get the impression that the product must really suck because everyone calls to complain about it - until you realize that the people that are very happy with the product don't call customer support!
While that's true, the comments section is often also the last option people have for their legitimate concerns to be heard. Where the "axe to grind" mentality comes in is with off-topic trolls who keep on about their favourite issue on each and every article they can post to, but they're pretty obvious.
Governments like to point to the "silent majority" as being approving of their policies. I don't make that assumption; I've dealt with too many large user communities. In my experience, the "silent majority" is rarely satisfied. Far more often they've simply given up hope that anyone will listen to their concerns so they suffer in silence, not realizing that there are many people who feel the same way they do.
For example, I've found common UI problems in the past that ticked off the whole user community. But the IT department I worked for at the time had a reputation of ignoring user feedback, so no one bothered complaining. They were thrilled when I made the trivial fix to correct the oversight, but they never did start sending in bug/errata reports because they were still convinced no one would listen.
A few users did start contacting me directly instead of through channels, because they knew I would listen.
The flicker of CFLs is as bad as the flicker of fluourescent tubes. Both give me migraines.
Maybe these new ESLs won't cause the same problem. I know LEDs don't, but the landlord isn't willing to pony up the extra dollars for them and I'm hardly going to invest that kind of money in bulbs that I have to leave with the apartment (under Saskatchewan law, if you attach something to the walls or elsewhere, you're supposed to leave it behind as an "improvement" to the property. Of course most people don't leave their shelves and stuff behind, but legally you're supposed to.)
To me, open source represents the ultimate escrow of code for companies that insist on having a copy "for safe keeping" in case a provider goes belly up. It also represents the best way to address potential issues of patent infringement, because the entire set of code that could be accused of infringement is available for review, avoiding unnecessary and costly litigation to force a company to comply with an investigation of whether their code infringes patents or not.
But even when RMS did his early '80s speeches at the beginning of the open source era, he emphasized the fact that open source was a philosophy that did not prevent anyone from charging for services such as packaging, distribution, maintenance, integration, etc.
The whole argument is as inane as the debate as to whether BSD or GPL represents a "freer" license. Some believe in letting anyone use the code without penalty; others (like myself) insist freedom can only occur if changes and modifications have to be published as well so everyone gets the improvements. There is no "right" answer to that question, only your own decision as to which way you think and choose to license your code.
Despite the bleating of naysayers and freetards who object to specific clauses of different licenses, it is up to the creator of the code to decide which philosophy of open source they're going to follow. Badgering and hounding people to change to use your preferred license simply makes people look like idiots; you're not going to convince someone who put years of work and thought into the issue to change their mind just because you don't like their decision.
Personally I've never run into anyone who objects to making money from open source anywhere except on Slashdot, home of the freetard. Everyone I've met in real life readily grasps the basic tenet that "I have to eat."
Slashdot is populated by intelligent, educated engineers and programmers for the most part. Yet even here there are specious and flawed arguments, knee-jerk reactions, dogmatic dictators, and all the other ills of society.
Yet I wouldn't want Slashdot to go away (obviously), and I wouldn't want the comments at newspaper sites and such to go away, either. There are some people who stick to discussing the article at hand and it's impacts, and for those few worthwhile comments, we'll just have to put up with the trolls, bigots, racists, and the rest of the trash.
The biggest advantage of the Comments sections is that anyone and everyone can have a say, whereas only a very few can have their rebuttal published as a Letter to the Editor.
You may not read the comments, but I do. Taking away that thread of discussion because it didn't work out the way some had hoped would be censorship for no other reason than "I don't like what's being said."
At this time, I can work a "natural" schedule, because I'm not serving any customers.
That means getting up at around 6AM when the birds start shrieking and the sun peeks through the windows. Here in Saskatchewan we don't follow daylight savings time; we just get up earlier if we feel like it. Nobody forces us to get up early in some vindictive attempt to get more work out of us during daylight hours.
Which is odd, when you think about it, because as a farming-dominated culture, you'd think the farmer's "crack of dawn" mentality would have won DST a place in provincial politics. Instead, the farmers are pragmatic and consider the idea of changing the clocks to be silly; they just get up whenever the sun does, regardless of the clock time, the same way farmers have for centuries.
As to Ben Franklin "inventing" DST? I don't think so. There's a huge difference between lamenting the late candle-lit hours and expense thereof and actually tabling some sort of proposal to address the problem. Franklin complained about the issue; he didn't propose a solution of any kind.
But then again, the Americans never have been content to accept that they didn't invent everything useful in the world. They've long claimed they invented the telephone, despite the clear evidence that it was a Canadian invention.
But y'all just keep go on re-writing history to make yourselves feel better about your importance in a world that cares less and less about the US and more about the interaction of a global economy free from the interference of your banking culture and government interference in foreign nation's policies. The rest of the world still has their history books, so we know it's all a lie.
I agree. It's like the robocall scandal in Canada, the ejection of the Greek Prime Minister, and the questionable elections in the Ukraine and Russia. As a professor of politics from U of R rightly pointed out at yesterday's protest against the robocalls, such attempts to usurp democracies are to be expected. If the population appears complacent enough, someone will try to seize power eventually. It's not a question of if; it's a question of when.
Large businesses are similarly statistically vulnerable to having one or more managers and projects push unethical products and corporate standings. Unless the rest of the company is perpetually vigilant for such abuses, the abuses will happen.
The real question is whether such abuses are treated as abuses and corrected, or whether a company leaps off a cliff and starts implementing such abuses as general policy and practice.
Sony does the latter. Apple does the latter in regard to patents. IBM, Oracle, and others take a dimmer view of such abuses, and seem more interested in their corporate integrity and the opinion of the general public about their company.
The difference is simple: Is the corporate motive profit at any price, or is it to be a "good citizen" and do more than just "make money?"
3D data visualization does not require the use of anything more complex than Gourard shading, which does not rely on programmable shaders. You don't need ultra-realistic visuals to garner the gist of a 3D visualization. In fact, I'd argue that using fancy shaders on such data would skew the correlation between shading and depth/Z coordinate information.
Note that the problem being encountered by game developers is not an inconsistent or unreliable implementation of the built-in OpenGL shaders, but the programmable shaders that came as extensions a couple of decades after the basic built-in shaders were specified. The core shaders work just fine; I've never heard any programmer whether game dev or otherwise complain about them.
I'm sorry, but even the one who posted the video says there isn't any interesting content until 18 minutes in.
I was not able to fast forward the video.
I am NOT going to sit through 18 minutes of tripe to get to something that sounds like it's been done a dozen times before, just repackaged, renamed, refactored, and presented as some yahoo's "new" idea because he changed a couple keywords and ignored history.
Not at all. I'm stating the obvious: that the only evidence there is any truth to what the poster is saying is their own post history, and the gut judgement as to whether that history warrants being taken seriously, or blown off as someone prone to bullshitting.
I did a fair bit of reading before deciding, and left a comment tag a few days into the post history to show I did indeed do some reading. Something about Microsoft having a Star Trek Movie OS, with every second release sucking.:)
At least you posted this under an account instead of an Anonymous Coward.
Now to peruse your post history and see whether I tend to agree or disagree with you before I decide whether to take your statement at face value or not.
Not that I'll bother posting what I decide. Just saying I appreciate you making that possible -- it lends credence to your statement.
Smalltalk and Erlang both have this neat feature where you can not only load and unload new code on the fly, you can change implementations in mid-execution just like you can with the Eclipse Java debugger at a breakpoint, or with the C# debugger under Microsoft's IDE platform.
So what exactly is he talking about that's "new"?
We haven't had to rely on static build-test-debug-fix-repeat cycles for day-to-day programming in at least 5-6 years!
I didn't know the PowerVR chips were still around. I had one of the early video cards based on the technology for my PC years ago. It worked ok, but that was long before things like shaders were an issue.
Still, we are talking about a portable device, so I'd think battery life would be more important than having the latest whizz-bang shaders. And just look at all the grief people hare having with the Android lineup due to shader differences between vendors.
Thank God I focus on business programming, not video games. I've yet to hear of ANY tablet or smartphone having problems displaying graphs and charts.
So in essence the whole article is bitching about the difficulty of developing games for these devices, and have encountered the same problems PC game developers have struggled with for decades: inconsistent driver level support for OpenGL features and buggy implementations.
To imply that this is a problem with the Android platform is disingenuous. The problem is the graphics programming stack, not the operating system, it's languages, or it's libraries.
And quite frankly, the "problem" is irrelevant to anyone doing "real world" applications instead of graphical eye candy for video games. Had this been someone doing a "news reader" or some such other common style of application, it would have made me sit up, take notice, and question the sanity of Android as a platform.
But as it is, it only makes me question the sanity of a game developer being surprised that there are differences between the hardware and driver stacks for different machines/cards.
I can appreciate that. But I question the actual relevance of the results, given that the "memory technology" used doesn't resemble anything I've ever heard of being used in a production computer in 30+ years.
The fact that energy would be needed to force a state change should have been intuitively obvious to anyone with even a Grade 12 physics education.
Even though the decisions were made by politicians and businessmen to save money, in the end, it's the engineers who get blamed for "not doing their job" or "being incompetent."
Just like IT, where all our pleas and warnings go unanswered, and we're expected to put in buku overtime to fix the resulting disaster when it eventually does happen like we predicted for months or years before.
I used to just set up an FTP account and email the receiver the account name and address of the server so they could download it themselves.
Passwords? What passwords? We were INVULNERABLE! Who in their right mind would bother downloading a student's project, and if they did, WTF would they do with it?
Or you could just buy a tablet or laptop from virtually any other vendor which comes with VGA or HDMI ports built in and plug that in to your TV without buying an extra component.
But don't tell Apple afficianados that. Apple can do no wrong while they're fleecing you for "accessories" that other companies call "standard features."
I agree 100%. I only spent 5 minutes with Unity, but it was enough for me to feel thoroughly insulted.
While it works, it is so simplified compared to a "traditional" desktop that I found it to be utterly useless. I'm sure I could figure out ways to do what I want to do, but doesn't that fly in the face of good design? Shouldn't necessary features be intuitive and obvious rather than being something I have to "figure out"?
The grandparent is right: there's a reason tablet/smartphone and desktop UIs are different. And trying to merge them for the sake of saving some money on the code base is a rather rude and insulting thing to do to the user communities of either ecosystem.
Because those who know and need the desktop power will continue to program for that model, making the applications hell to use on the tablets. In the meantime, those who program for tablets will focus on Metro, and make their applications insultingly, mind-numbingly dumbed down, pissing off the desktop users.
Other than in photoshop, you don't see limousines with the back end of a pick-up truck. You use the right tool for the job; you don't try to make one tool do everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is my favourite example of an unresponsive company. We know there are flaws to be addressed. We know people aren't happy. Some even file bug reports, but never even get an acknowledgement that the report was received, much less messages providing tracking information as the bug is prioritized and dealt with or scheduled into "low priority" oblivion.
Contrast that with SourceForge, who's techs not only post information about bugs in the tracking system, but email the reporter to let them know what's happening and how things are resolved. (Particular Kudos to them because I've had to rely on them a couple of times to fix issues, and they always provide that feedback instead of expecting me to go to some "update" page to read the info myself.)
While that's true, the comments section is often also the last option people have for their legitimate concerns to be heard. Where the "axe to grind" mentality comes in is with off-topic trolls who keep on about their favourite issue on each and every article they can post to, but they're pretty obvious.
Governments like to point to the "silent majority" as being approving of their policies. I don't make that assumption; I've dealt with too many large user communities. In my experience, the "silent majority" is rarely satisfied. Far more often they've simply given up hope that anyone will listen to their concerns so they suffer in silence, not realizing that there are many people who feel the same way they do.
For example, I've found common UI problems in the past that ticked off the whole user community. But the IT department I worked for at the time had a reputation of ignoring user feedback, so no one bothered complaining. They were thrilled when I made the trivial fix to correct the oversight, but they never did start sending in bug/errata reports because they were still convinced no one would listen.
A few users did start contacting me directly instead of through channels, because they knew I would listen.
That's a laugh! "Hold still while I load this thing..."
The flicker of CFLs is as bad as the flicker of fluourescent tubes. Both give me migraines.
Maybe these new ESLs won't cause the same problem. I know LEDs don't, but the landlord isn't willing to pony up the extra dollars for them and I'm hardly going to invest that kind of money in bulbs that I have to leave with the apartment (under Saskatchewan law, if you attach something to the walls or elsewhere, you're supposed to leave it behind as an "improvement" to the property. Of course most people don't leave their shelves and stuff behind, but legally you're supposed to.)
To me, open source represents the ultimate escrow of code for companies that insist on having a copy "for safe keeping" in case a provider goes belly up. It also represents the best way to address potential issues of patent infringement, because the entire set of code that could be accused of infringement is available for review, avoiding unnecessary and costly litigation to force a company to comply with an investigation of whether their code infringes patents or not.
But even when RMS did his early '80s speeches at the beginning of the open source era, he emphasized the fact that open source was a philosophy that did not prevent anyone from charging for services such as packaging, distribution, maintenance, integration, etc.
The whole argument is as inane as the debate as to whether BSD or GPL represents a "freer" license. Some believe in letting anyone use the code without penalty; others (like myself) insist freedom can only occur if changes and modifications have to be published as well so everyone gets the improvements. There is no "right" answer to that question, only your own decision as to which way you think and choose to license your code.
Despite the bleating of naysayers and freetards who object to specific clauses of different licenses, it is up to the creator of the code to decide which philosophy of open source they're going to follow. Badgering and hounding people to change to use your preferred license simply makes people look like idiots; you're not going to convince someone who put years of work and thought into the issue to change their mind just because you don't like their decision.
Personally I've never run into anyone who objects to making money from open source anywhere except on Slashdot, home of the freetard. Everyone I've met in real life readily grasps the basic tenet that "I have to eat."
Slashdot is populated by intelligent, educated engineers and programmers for the most part. Yet even here there are specious and flawed arguments, knee-jerk reactions, dogmatic dictators, and all the other ills of society.
Yet I wouldn't want Slashdot to go away (obviously), and I wouldn't want the comments at newspaper sites and such to go away, either. There are some people who stick to discussing the article at hand and it's impacts, and for those few worthwhile comments, we'll just have to put up with the trolls, bigots, racists, and the rest of the trash.
The biggest advantage of the Comments sections is that anyone and everyone can have a say, whereas only a very few can have their rebuttal published as a Letter to the Editor.
You may not read the comments, but I do. Taking away that thread of discussion because it didn't work out the way some had hoped would be censorship for no other reason than "I don't like what's being said."
At this time, I can work a "natural" schedule, because I'm not serving any customers.
That means getting up at around 6AM when the birds start shrieking and the sun peeks through the windows. Here in Saskatchewan we don't follow daylight savings time; we just get up earlier if we feel like it. Nobody forces us to get up early in some vindictive attempt to get more work out of us during daylight hours.
Which is odd, when you think about it, because as a farming-dominated culture, you'd think the farmer's "crack of dawn" mentality would have won DST a place in provincial politics. Instead, the farmers are pragmatic and consider the idea of changing the clocks to be silly; they just get up whenever the sun does, regardless of the clock time, the same way farmers have for centuries.
As to Ben Franklin "inventing" DST? I don't think so. There's a huge difference between lamenting the late candle-lit hours and expense thereof and actually tabling some sort of proposal to address the problem. Franklin complained about the issue; he didn't propose a solution of any kind.
But then again, the Americans never have been content to accept that they didn't invent everything useful in the world. They've long claimed they invented the telephone, despite the clear evidence that it was a Canadian invention.
But y'all just keep go on re-writing history to make yourselves feel better about your importance in a world that cares less and less about the US and more about the interaction of a global economy free from the interference of your banking culture and government interference in foreign nation's policies. The rest of the world still has their history books, so we know it's all a lie.
I agree. It's like the robocall scandal in Canada, the ejection of the Greek Prime Minister, and the questionable elections in the Ukraine and Russia. As a professor of politics from U of R rightly pointed out at yesterday's protest against the robocalls, such attempts to usurp democracies are to be expected. If the population appears complacent enough, someone will try to seize power eventually. It's not a question of if; it's a question of when.
Large businesses are similarly statistically vulnerable to having one or more managers and projects push unethical products and corporate standings. Unless the rest of the company is perpetually vigilant for such abuses, the abuses will happen.
The real question is whether such abuses are treated as abuses and corrected, or whether a company leaps off a cliff and starts implementing such abuses as general policy and practice.
Sony does the latter. Apple does the latter in regard to patents. IBM, Oracle, and others take a dimmer view of such abuses, and seem more interested in their corporate integrity and the opinion of the general public about their company.
The difference is simple: Is the corporate motive profit at any price, or is it to be a "good citizen" and do more than just "make money?"
Money.
Not "leaked documents" or "liberated intelligence."
Plain old fashioned credit card fraud.
3D data visualization does not require the use of anything more complex than Gourard shading, which does not rely on programmable shaders. You don't need ultra-realistic visuals to garner the gist of a 3D visualization. In fact, I'd argue that using fancy shaders on such data would skew the correlation between shading and depth/Z coordinate information.
Note that the problem being encountered by game developers is not an inconsistent or unreliable implementation of the built-in OpenGL shaders, but the programmable shaders that came as extensions a couple of decades after the basic built-in shaders were specified. The core shaders work just fine; I've never heard any programmer whether game dev or otherwise complain about them.
I'm sorry, but even the one who posted the video says there isn't any interesting content until 18 minutes in.
I was not able to fast forward the video.
I am NOT going to sit through 18 minutes of tripe to get to something that sounds like it's been done a dozen times before, just repackaged, renamed, refactored, and presented as some yahoo's "new" idea because he changed a couple keywords and ignored history.
Sarcastic?
Not at all. I'm stating the obvious: that the only evidence there is any truth to what the poster is saying is their own post history, and the gut judgement as to whether that history warrants being taken seriously, or blown off as someone prone to bullshitting.
I did a fair bit of reading before deciding, and left a comment tag a few days into the post history to show I did indeed do some reading. Something about Microsoft having a Star Trek Movie OS, with every second release sucking. :)
You noticed that, eh?
I think of it as the "public paid beta" and the "ok, now here's the real thing" releases myself.
At least you posted this under an account instead of an Anonymous Coward.
Now to peruse your post history and see whether I tend to agree or disagree with you before I decide whether to take your statement at face value or not.
Not that I'll bother posting what I decide. Just saying I appreciate you making that possible -- it lends credence to your statement.
Smalltalk and Erlang both have this neat feature where you can not only load and unload new code on the fly, you can change implementations in mid-execution just like you can with the Eclipse Java debugger at a breakpoint, or with the C# debugger under Microsoft's IDE platform.
So what exactly is he talking about that's "new"?
We haven't had to rely on static build-test-debug-fix-repeat cycles for day-to-day programming in at least 5-6 years!
You mean Smalltalk all over again?
I didn't know the PowerVR chips were still around. I had one of the early video cards based on the technology for my PC years ago. It worked ok, but that was long before things like shaders were an issue.
Still, we are talking about a portable device, so I'd think battery life would be more important than having the latest whizz-bang shaders. And just look at all the grief people hare having with the Android lineup due to shader differences between vendors.
Thank God I focus on business programming, not video games. I've yet to hear of ANY tablet or smartphone having problems displaying graphs and charts.
So in essence the whole article is bitching about the difficulty of developing games for these devices, and have encountered the same problems PC game developers have struggled with for decades: inconsistent driver level support for OpenGL features and buggy implementations.
To imply that this is a problem with the Android platform is disingenuous. The problem is the graphics programming stack, not the operating system, it's languages, or it's libraries.
And quite frankly, the "problem" is irrelevant to anyone doing "real world" applications instead of graphical eye candy for video games. Had this been someone doing a "news reader" or some such other common style of application, it would have made me sit up, take notice, and question the sanity of Android as a platform.
But as it is, it only makes me question the sanity of a game developer being surprised that there are differences between the hardware and driver stacks for different machines/cards.
I can appreciate that. But I question the actual relevance of the results, given that the "memory technology" used doesn't resemble anything I've ever heard of being used in a production computer in 30+ years.
The fact that energy would be needed to force a state change should have been intuitively obvious to anyone with even a Grade 12 physics education.
Even though the decisions were made by politicians and businessmen to save money, in the end, it's the engineers who get blamed for "not doing their job" or "being incompetent."
Just like IT, where all our pleas and warnings go unanswered, and we're expected to put in buku overtime to fix the resulting disaster when it eventually does happen like we predicted for months or years before.
Or post it to any of the many BBS servers that were still all the rage at the time.
Silly me.
I used to just set up an FTP account and email the receiver the account name and address of the server so they could download it themselves.
Passwords? What passwords? We were INVULNERABLE! Who in their right mind would bother downloading a student's project, and if they did, WTF would they do with it?
Or you could just buy a tablet or laptop from virtually any other vendor which comes with VGA or HDMI ports built in and plug that in to your TV without buying an extra component.
But don't tell Apple afficianados that. Apple can do no wrong while they're fleecing you for "accessories" that other companies call "standard features."
I agree 100%. I only spent 5 minutes with Unity, but it was enough for me to feel thoroughly insulted.
While it works, it is so simplified compared to a "traditional" desktop that I found it to be utterly useless. I'm sure I could figure out ways to do what I want to do, but doesn't that fly in the face of good design? Shouldn't necessary features be intuitive and obvious rather than being something I have to "figure out"?
The grandparent is right: there's a reason tablet/smartphone and desktop UIs are different. And trying to merge them for the sake of saving some money on the code base is a rather rude and insulting thing to do to the user communities of either ecosystem.
Because those who know and need the desktop power will continue to program for that model, making the applications hell to use on the tablets. In the meantime, those who program for tablets will focus on Metro, and make their applications insultingly, mind-numbingly dumbed down, pissing off the desktop users.
Other than in photoshop, you don't see limousines with the back end of a pick-up truck. You use the right tool for the job; you don't try to make one tool do everything.
A psychiatrist actually talk to patients in North America in this day and age?
Oops.
Sorry.
Time's up.
Next patient, please!