I did all the calculus classes that they made me do in University. Personally, I think the time should have been spent in several other branches of mathematics.
All CS majors should have to take classes that focus specifically on fairly advanced algebra. I enjoy learning math, but it turns out that I'm not a very good math student. However, my math skills went way up when I started taking algebra courses. Because algebra is the basis of basically all mathematics, it ends up being a serious foundation to programming. As near as I can tell, programming languages are generally no more than fancy algebra.
Secondly, I think that all CS students should have to pick some sort of algorithmic minor. Graph theory, logic theory, automata theory, whatever. By specializing in a branch of algorithmics, I can guarantee that you'll end up a better computing scientist and a better programmer as well.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think calculus is too applied.:P
I'd like to point out that it's not just E3 anymore. Starting in January or February, we start ramping up for demo season. The GDC (Game Developer's Conference) is also a big demo for most companies. That means about 1/3 of the year (finishing with the E3 demo) is spent preparing for demos. For a pretty decent game, the dev cycle is 2 to 3 years. So in 3 years, you've probably got 2/3 of a year dedicated to showing demos at shows (the first year doesn't usually see you having enough of the game done to even announce its development, let alone show it), and one release deadline. Besides working crunch for all those events, you also have all sorts of intermediate milestones that you have to meet for internal demos, or demos for your publisher, like you mentioned.
I got my job straight out of University. The crunch there was much more intense, but for a shorter time. As long as I don't have to work 80 hour weeks for 3 straight months or more, I can cope. (Especially if my crunch is in the winter, when I'm not going outside anyway.:)
That's the way I used to do most of my debugging. I'd fire up DDD only if I needed to see the state of a lot of data in a way that I needed a picture of. Conceptually, it's sometimes better to actually SEE what you're dealing with, rather than just having a bunch of printfs and a huge text log to search through.
However, working on a deveopment team on a game for the XBox has really shown me that a debugger can be incredibly useful. I can't control how other people program, and while I try to code my systems in a modular, intelligent way, bugs are bound to slip in. It gets even worse when I'm told to start inserting features that weren't originally planned. I do my best to maintain orthogonal systems, but it's a hard battle that you can't always win when you're trying to be expedient.
We use a great deal of logging in our game code, but there are things that don't lend themselves well to being dumped to text. We have events happening thirty times a second, and if you try logging that sort of thing, not only do you murder the framerate (making it slower to reproduce the bug that you're looking for) but you end up with an astounding amount of text. Looking for anomalous results in 10MB of text for a run of only a few minutes isn't my idea of a good time.
Lastly, when you don't know the system that the problem is in and you've got over a hundred files to work with, checking out 30 of them so that you can put a printf in each one as you binary search through the code is significantly more time consuming than just putting a break point in where you think the problem may occur. Most of the time our problems that manifest themselves graphically aren't actually problems with the graphics engine; some game-side programmer is just doing something stupid. Break-pointing in a graphics method and climbing back up the stack isolates the problem in significantly less time.
All that said, if you can make print debugging work for you, that's great. If you can back up your claim that you write largely bug-free code, and make errors that are of the small, easy to find sort, even better. You'll have a job forever. However, most people don't program like that. It's just the way it is. Of COURSE the best way to debug code is to not write code with bugs in it, but that's just not a reasonable assumption or demand.
To a certain extent, I agree with you. On the other hand, I think that the problem with using a standard keyboard for most people is that they do it wrong.
When I put my hands on a MS Natural keyboard, I find it pushes my elbows out, rolls my wrists up, and forces my wrists to curve up unnaturally. As an experiment, hold your arms out, and let your wrists drop down. Wiggle your fingers. No problem, right? Now push your wrists up and wiggle your fingers. You'll probably feel some tension in your forearms. This is what I feel when I use one of those keyboards.
To be sure, a 'standard' keyboard also tires me out unreasonably because I have to be so careful about my posture.
With my Kinesis, the heel of my hand can rest on the pad, and because the keys are recessed, they drop down to rest on the keys. Because the keyboard is contoured, it reduces the distance that I have to reach to get to each key. It's really quite excellent.
I'm glad the MS keyboard is working out for you, though. It's considerably less expensive than my Kinesis.:)
(BTW, there's nothing 'verifiably not true' about my statement. Just because the position is possibly LESS unnatural than a normal keyboard, it doesn't mean that it's very natural at all. A normal keyboard is significantly more natural than one that forces you to type with one hand behind your back, too.)
I have two logitech trackballs. One is thumb operated, and the other is operated with the index and middle fingers. The thumb controlled trackball is easily the better gaming device, but generally I can't complain about the other one. It's cordless, and has a lot of buttons, which works out well for me on my Mac (I bind 3 of them to Expose functions).
As for keyboards, I DON'T recommend the Microsoft Natural keyboards. There's nothing natural about the position that they put your hands in. Personally, my arms go numb if I try to type on one of those. They're worth trying out, though, since everyone is different.
I personally a Kinesis keyboard. I've bought two, and convinced work to buy me one. My hands are considerably less tired at the end of the day than they used to be - especially my pinkie fingers. Check them out: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com. The keyboards are expensive, but worth every penny.
Lastly, I type using the dvorak keyboard layout. It hasn't made me much faster (and I attribute the speed increse almost entirely to being forced to be a better typist, not the layout as such), but because the hands are forced to alternate more, they share the burden of typing more equally. This also helped considerably in making my hands less tired at the end of the day.
Maybe, but most of the people on/. aren't, and most of them are responding that they'd take the PS2 as well. As a geek, I've always had a hard time meeting women, even just as friends. I'd jump at the opportunity to meet someone new. She may be a waste of my time, but I'd never know if I took the PS2. And I KNOW the PS2 would be a waste of my time.:)
Y'know, even if nothing came of it, sometimes it's just nice to meet new people. Maybe she wasn't dating material, but maybe she was friend material. Maybe she would be a good travel partner, since she's fluent in Portuguese. Hell, maybe she would have been fun to invite over to play PS2 games with! It's easy to buy a PS2 anytime you want. Meeting other people is usually harder than just dropping by a store and picking out the one that you want. Interacting with something other than your console and computer and the people on IRC and/. is FUN.
Anyone that would have asked for the PS2 probably needs to get out more. More friends is a good thing.
I still think it's true. To be honest, it IS a good comment, and I have no desire to see it modded into the basement since it was just as good today as it was yesterday.
As long as my comment noting that I'm the original author is modded up with it, I'm okay. I'm glad that people think the content of the post is worth reading.:)
I currently use a smart playlist in iTunes to make sure that I don't hear my music too often. The list is 100 songs that haven't been played in the last 4 days that have the lowest play count. The songs also have to have a rating that's 3 stars or better.
However, I'd like an option to have a weighted random shuffle by rating. If I rate songs from 1 to 5, I'd like the song that are rated 5 to be played most often, and the songs that are rated 1 to only be played occasionally. Songs that I don't want to listen to ever are deleted. I'm USUALLY not in the mood for the songs that I rate low, but I like hearing them every once in a long while. It would also give me a better usable range of ratings. Right now, I rate songs that I basically never want to hear either 1 or 2, and populate my smart playlists with songs rated 3 to 5.
I initially thought this was a good idea. Real gets a lot of credibility, and Apple gets someone else to sell songs for their iPod.
Then I started to think about the competing stores. It doesn't really do either of them any good to be selling the same songs, usually at the same price. I suppose it DOES give incentive to each of them to differentiate from the other store, but that's on TOP of the work that they have to do to offer more than the stores that use WMA.
I think Real's best proposition would be to somehow license the iTunes music store. Rather than set up a whole store on their own which is a huge waste of money - and arguably unsustanable - they could make it so it's possible to buy from the iTMS through their player. Steve would have to hand down some strict interface guidelines, but suddenly the Real player would have a lot of ACTUAL value added. Starting up their own store kind of looks like value added, but it's really just a gimmick when it's so hard to make money, do it properly, sell good music, etc.
His issue is that he never heard anything about being yanked off the air for indecency until he started criticizing Dubya. Clear Channel is (apparently) the largest broadcasting donator to Dubya's campaign, and he feels that pressure was probably put on them to yank him off the air.
It's all conjecture, I suppose, and I haven't read a whole lot about it other than what's on the news wires, so I'm hardly an expert.
If you're always playing catch-up, you can't advance as fast as the people that are in the lead. At best, you can keep copying them as fast as they can come out with stuff. At worst, you're always lagging behind the stuff that they release because you can't implement is as quickly as them.
To some extent, you're correct. Linux had a lot of ground to make up, and it copied a lot of interfaces as fast as it could. It's hit a plateau, though. Now is the time for OSS developers of desktop environments to either start coming up with good, easy to use, innovative things, or start admitting that they can't do it, and that we'll be using copied interfaces until the end of time.
Oh, and I found Linux far more usable before the days of GNOME and KDE. When I stopped using Linux, my GNOME system was pretty bare bones. I didn't click on things to make them go, I still did 90% of my work on the command line. Now I'm using OS X, and it's a big shift. I CAN use the command line, but it's a big difference having a system that's designed around making things visible and accessable. OS X isn't just better because the icons are nicer and it's more clicky, it's better because there's a real feeling of being interested in your interface experience.
I'm going to correct your use of that excellent quote, mostly because I think the correct version carries slightly more weight.:)
"This is Ambassador Delenn of the Minbari. Babylon 5 is under our protection. Withdraw... or be destroyed." 'Negative, we have authority here. Do not force us to engage your ship.' "Why not? Only one Human Captain has ever survived battle with a Minbari fleet. He is behind me, you are in front of me. If you value your lives... be somewhere else."
As for good space battles, B5 easily has the best ones that I've seen. Anything with an Earth Alliance cruiser is IMO opinion particularily fun to watch. I just love those massive cannons that they have mounted on the fronts of the ships.
My sister got involved in this one day while she was sitting around in an office at her university.
She and her friend were both working on their laptops, and they both had iTunes opened. They were sharing their playlists, and came across a playlist with some good music (belonging to someone that I'll name GuybrushT). Clever person that she is, she changed the name of HER playlist to say 'GuybrushT is cool!'. He noticed, and she and her friend and GuybrushT had a conversation, all in their shared playlist names!
Your other alternative is, of course, to buy yourself an iBook and just give in to Apple and OS X. It's a pretty cheap way to buy an addition to your social life.
In all honesty, I think it's hard to automate a considerable amount of testing in our newer games, especially the XBox games. Moreover, automation is just another variable that you don't want to have to deal with. If a bug pops up, you have to question whether it was the automation process or an actual bug. We don't trust our code to automatic generation, and we don't trust our testing to automated processes. I think we come out ahead both times.
QA usually consists of tasks like, "Open and Close this dorr 1000 times, and see if anything breaks", or "Walk over this trigger 500 times and see if the server and client fall out of sync."
It's hard work, but it's not usually SKILLED work, in the sense that you don't need a lot of special training beforehand. I'm SUPER appreciative of our QA staff, but it's not something that you need a degree for. What you DO need is attention to detail, the ability to do monotonous tasks for hours on end, and a willingness to put up with annoying programmers like me that say that the bug can't be reproduced and that you're on crack for suggesting that it's still in the game.:)
I wouldn't say that QA is 'disposable'. It especially wouldn't be considered that if people knew what the job was like. It ruins a lot of people's ability to play and enjoy games. It really changes your outlook on life, from what I hear. You notice the flaws in everything, and see where OTHER QA departments have failed.
I half agree. The complete lack of regard that most programmers have for the amount of system resources that they have is in most cases, entirely tragic. There are a lot of programs that could have a smaller memory footprint or run much faster if any time was taken to make these things fundamental to the design.
That said, I've never really heard anything good about the code that developers have to write for systems like the PS2 that simultaneously have a wealth and a lack of resources. The PS2 has a lot of processors to work with, and that's great! Well, it's great until you realize that the abundance of processors just makes things really hard to synchronise, and you're doing all sorts of hacks to make things work. On the other hand, the PS2 barely has any memory to work with at all, and that's ALSO problematic, since you're always cutting corners, and getting data off the disc in a timely fashion is a pain in the ass. (The PS2 developers that I know have all had to write their own memory managers just to make things even pretend like they're working.) Both those things contribute needlessly to high complexity. Managing complexity well is the TRUE mark of a good programmer, but nobody wants to deal with more than is absolutely necessary.
By comparison, both the XBox and GameCube are purportedly easier to program. Both of them have hard and fast limits on memory and CPU speed, but both of them provide enough of each to make managing the complexity easier. Programmers still have to be careful with their resources, but they don't have to resort to as many dirty tricks to get everything to work.
So, just because a system has limited resources doesn't mean that the code coming out the other end is going to be clean and the programming is going to suck any less. You just end up with a different kind of sucky programming.
You don't have to buy Opera. I haven't. I like the ads, and I click on them now and then. They've managed to get contextual text ads, and google searches into the ad bar, so it's actually kind of handy sometimes. They're even less obtrusive than in windows.
2 things:
1) You misunderstand what I mean by 'inline find'. I don't want a popup panel so that I can type what I'm looking for, I want the search to find items AS I type. If I'm looking for the word 'encyclopedia' on a page, in Opera, I use the inline find, and it's found the word by the time I've typed as far as 'enc'. With Safari, and most other search dialogues, I have to type the whole word, or hope that when I type 'enc' in the panel, I find what I'm looking for right away. Actually, I'm probably terming this incorrectly. Opera's find isn't just 'inline' it's also incremental.
2) 'Reload page every n minutes'. For news and weather sites, I love this feature. I just set/. to reload every 15 minutes, and every time I check, there's new news. It's a minor feature, but I appreciate it. It's even better now that it works on a tab-by-tab basis. I have several tabs that automatically load themselves at different times. (In the early implementation, everything had to reload at the same time, or you could only reload one tab...it's actually useful now.)
Like I said, I love and appreciate Safari for what it is, a small fast browser. It's light on the bloat, but does a lot, which I can respect. I've gotten to Opera and all the little conveniences that it provides, so I'm going to stick with it, even though I realize that in comparison it's an overly complex monstrosity.
I use Opera at work on my Windows box, and use Safari at home on my G5. I admit, I'm probably going to change to Opera when I get home. Opera is a lot bigger than Safari. Safari is a brilliant implementation of a simple, functional browser. I think they should stick with that, and NOT follow Opera's example. That said, I've been using Opera since version 5 something, and I'm having a hard time giving it up.
I can drag and arrange the tabs however I want. Opera has an inline find in page facility, mouse gestures, and a handy feature for paging through galleries where the images follow a simple incremental progression or have a 'next' or similar recognizable link in the page. The tab implementation is generally superior, I find. When I say that I don't want things to open in a new window in Opera, I mean it, and it works. I have that option checked in Safari, but it still opens new windows all the time. I NEVER want another window popping up under ANY circumstances. If I need a new window, I'll open it up myself, manually. I'm VERY fond of the tab state being saved on close, because I always use the same tabs when I first start up. (I've faked it out in Safari by making a bookmark folder that I open when I start up the browser, but I always lose the 'temporary' URLs that I haven't quite finished with yet, and I don't like saving temporary bookmarks in a seperate folder.) Opera is quite fast at rendering pages, at least under Windows. Oh, and provided that Opera maintains its key configurability, it'll definitely have a leg up there on Safari. (My outlook on that is mostly due to me wanting Opera-like keybindings in Safari. When I type 'Cmd-N', I want a new TAB, not a new window.
I'll probably use Safari here and there, but I'm pretty much stuck on Opera. I'll give OmniWeb 5 another shot when it gets more stable. Trying out the betas is fun right up to the moment where everything crashes for the fifth time.
Hopefully, Opera will be reasonably stable. If it is, I'll be happy to use it again under OSX.
Interestingly, I want the old NeXT Browser back, and not this finder thing. The problem with the current finder is it's a bad compromise between the two systems. The NeXT browser was something that I grew up with, and the finder is a bad replacement. As someone that used the 'real' finder for so long, it's obvious that you're finding that the compromise is somewhat less functional than what you're used to.
Not much we can do, I guess. I wonder if there are any finder replacements...?
I don't need glasses away from my machine. So, I went to the Optomitrist and told him that I was interested in preserving my vision. I told him that I wanted to spend money buying glasses, even though I didn't really need them.
He gave me a quite weak prescription. My ability to discern small details is already very good, but these glasses enhance my close vision even more. I put on my glasses, and things are just a bit bigger. As well, the lenses come with an anti-glare coating.
I've found that my eyes ARE a bit less tired after the end of the day. I switch between wearing them and not wearing them pretty smoothly, and I never wear them unless I'm looking right at the monitor.
Even if you have glasses, you can probably benefit by having a slightly different prescription for working at the computer. No reason to let your normal prescription get any worse.
I remember talking to a biochemistry student, and he said the REALLY interesting thing about the stuff in tea is that while it's a completely different chemical, and excites entirely different neural pathways, the end point and end result turn out to be exactly the same. For most intents and purposes, the stuff in tea may as well be caffeine.
Like I said, there're no hardware problems that we can find.
As for the last line of your post, that's what I responded to in the first place. Someone was saying that XP is just as stable as Linux, which is false. It's WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more stable than its predecessors, but it's still a long way from Unix.:)
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I did all the calculus classes that they made me do in University. Personally, I think the time should have been spent in several other branches of mathematics.
:P
All CS majors should have to take classes that focus specifically on fairly advanced algebra. I enjoy learning math, but it turns out that I'm not a very good math student. However, my math skills went way up when I started taking algebra courses. Because algebra is the basis of basically all mathematics, it ends up being a serious foundation to programming. As near as I can tell, programming languages are generally no more than fancy algebra.
Secondly, I think that all CS students should have to pick some sort of algorithmic minor. Graph theory, logic theory, automata theory, whatever. By specializing in a branch of algorithmics, I can guarantee that you'll end up a better computing scientist and a better programmer as well.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think calculus is too applied.
I'd like to point out that it's not just E3 anymore. Starting in January or February, we start ramping up for demo season. The GDC (Game Developer's Conference) is also a big demo for most companies. That means about 1/3 of the year (finishing with the E3 demo) is spent preparing for demos. For a pretty decent game, the dev cycle is 2 to 3 years. So in 3 years, you've probably got 2/3 of a year dedicated to showing demos at shows (the first year doesn't usually see you having enough of the game done to even announce its development, let alone show it), and one release deadline. Besides working crunch for all those events, you also have all sorts of intermediate milestones that you have to meet for internal demos, or demos for your publisher, like you mentioned.
:)
I got my job straight out of University. The crunch there was much more intense, but for a shorter time. As long as I don't have to work 80 hour weeks for 3 straight months or more, I can cope. (Especially if my crunch is in the winter, when I'm not going outside anyway.
That's the way I used to do most of my debugging. I'd fire up DDD only if I needed to see the state of a lot of data in a way that I needed a picture of. Conceptually, it's sometimes better to actually SEE what you're dealing with, rather than just having a bunch of printfs and a huge text log to search through.
However, working on a deveopment team on a game for the XBox has really shown me that a debugger can be incredibly useful. I can't control how other people program, and while I try to code my systems in a modular, intelligent way, bugs are bound to slip in. It gets even worse when I'm told to start inserting features that weren't originally planned. I do my best to maintain orthogonal systems, but it's a hard battle that you can't always win when you're trying to be expedient.
We use a great deal of logging in our game code, but there are things that don't lend themselves well to being dumped to text. We have events happening thirty times a second, and if you try logging that sort of thing, not only do you murder the framerate (making it slower to reproduce the bug that you're looking for) but you end up with an astounding amount of text. Looking for anomalous results in 10MB of text for a run of only a few minutes isn't my idea of a good time.
Lastly, when you don't know the system that the problem is in and you've got over a hundred files to work with, checking out 30 of them so that you can put a printf in each one as you binary search through the code is significantly more time consuming than just putting a break point in where you think the problem may occur. Most of the time our problems that manifest themselves graphically aren't actually problems with the graphics engine; some game-side programmer is just doing something stupid. Break-pointing in a graphics method and climbing back up the stack isolates the problem in significantly less time.
All that said, if you can make print debugging work for you, that's great. If you can back up your claim that you write largely bug-free code, and make errors that are of the small, easy to find sort, even better. You'll have a job forever. However, most people don't program like that. It's just the way it is. Of COURSE the best way to debug code is to not write code with bugs in it, but that's just not a reasonable assumption or demand.
To a certain extent, I agree with you. On the other hand, I think that the problem with using a standard keyboard for most people is that they do it wrong.
:)
When I put my hands on a MS Natural keyboard, I find it pushes my elbows out, rolls my wrists up, and forces my wrists to curve up unnaturally. As an experiment, hold your arms out, and let your wrists drop down. Wiggle your fingers. No problem, right? Now push your wrists up and wiggle your fingers. You'll probably feel some tension in your forearms. This is what I feel when I use one of those keyboards.
To be sure, a 'standard' keyboard also tires me out unreasonably because I have to be so careful about my posture.
With my Kinesis, the heel of my hand can rest on the pad, and because the keys are recessed, they drop down to rest on the keys. Because the keyboard is contoured, it reduces the distance that I have to reach to get to each key. It's really quite excellent.
I'm glad the MS keyboard is working out for you, though. It's considerably less expensive than my Kinesis.
(BTW, there's nothing 'verifiably not true' about my statement. Just because the position is possibly LESS unnatural than a normal keyboard, it doesn't mean that it's very natural at all. A normal keyboard is significantly more natural than one that forces you to type with one hand behind your back, too.)
I have two logitech trackballs. One is thumb operated, and the other is operated with the index and middle fingers. The thumb controlled trackball is easily the better gaming device, but generally I can't complain about the other one. It's cordless, and has a lot of buttons, which works out well for me on my Mac (I bind 3 of them to Expose functions).
As for keyboards, I DON'T recommend the Microsoft Natural keyboards. There's nothing natural about the position that they put your hands in. Personally, my arms go numb if I try to type on one of those. They're worth trying out, though, since everyone is different.
I personally a Kinesis keyboard. I've bought two, and convinced work to buy me one. My hands are considerably less tired at the end of the day than they used to be - especially my pinkie fingers. Check them out: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com. The keyboards are expensive, but worth every penny.
Lastly, I type using the dvorak keyboard layout. It hasn't made me much faster (and I attribute the speed increse almost entirely to being forced to be a better typist, not the layout as such), but because the hands are forced to alternate more, they share the burden of typing more equally. This also helped considerably in making my hands less tired at the end of the day.
Maybe, but most of the people on /. aren't, and most of them are responding that they'd take the PS2 as well. As a geek, I've always had a hard time meeting women, even just as friends. I'd jump at the opportunity to meet someone new. She may be a waste of my time, but I'd never know if I took the PS2. And I KNOW the PS2 would be a waste of my time. :)
Y'know, even if nothing came of it, sometimes it's just nice to meet new people. Maybe she wasn't dating material, but maybe she was friend material. Maybe she would be a good travel partner, since she's fluent in Portuguese. Hell, maybe she would have been fun to invite over to play PS2 games with! It's easy to buy a PS2 anytime you want. Meeting other people is usually harder than just dropping by a store and picking out the one that you want. Interacting with something other than your console and computer and the people on IRC and /. is FUN.
Anyone that would have asked for the PS2 probably needs to get out more. More friends is a good thing.
I still think it's true. To be honest, it IS a good comment, and I have no desire to see it modded into the basement since it was just as good today as it was yesterday.
:)
As long as my comment noting that I'm the original author is modded up with it, I'm okay. I'm glad that people think the content of the post is worth reading.
This is an excellent comment! It was just as good when *I* posted it YESTERDAY on the original thread here.
Couldn't you have at least tried putting a different sig on it?
I currently use a smart playlist in iTunes to make sure that I don't hear my music too often. The list is 100 songs that haven't been played in the last 4 days that have the lowest play count. The songs also have to have a rating that's 3 stars or better.
However, I'd like an option to have a weighted random shuffle by rating. If I rate songs from 1 to 5, I'd like the song that are rated 5 to be played most often, and the songs that are rated 1 to only be played occasionally. Songs that I don't want to listen to ever are deleted. I'm USUALLY not in the mood for the songs that I rate low, but I like hearing them every once in a long while. It would also give me a better usable range of ratings. Right now, I rate songs that I basically never want to hear either 1 or 2, and populate my smart playlists with songs rated 3 to 5.
I initially thought this was a good idea. Real gets a lot of credibility, and Apple gets someone else to sell songs for their iPod.
Then I started to think about the competing stores. It doesn't really do either of them any good to be selling the same songs, usually at the same price. I suppose it DOES give incentive to each of them to differentiate from the other store, but that's on TOP of the work that they have to do to offer more than the stores that use WMA.
I think Real's best proposition would be to somehow license the iTunes music store. Rather than set up a whole store on their own which is a huge waste of money - and arguably unsustanable - they could make it so it's possible to buy from the iTMS through their player. Steve would have to hand down some strict interface guidelines, but suddenly the Real player would have a lot of ACTUAL value added. Starting up their own store kind of looks like value added, but it's really just a gimmick when it's so hard to make money, do it properly, sell good music, etc.
His issue is that he never heard anything about being yanked off the air for indecency until he started criticizing Dubya. Clear Channel is (apparently) the largest broadcasting donator to Dubya's campaign, and he feels that pressure was probably put on them to yank him off the air.
It's all conjecture, I suppose, and I haven't read a whole lot about it other than what's on the news wires, so I'm hardly an expert.
If you're always playing catch-up, you can't advance as fast as the people that are in the lead. At best, you can keep copying them as fast as they can come out with stuff. At worst, you're always lagging behind the stuff that they release because you can't implement is as quickly as them.
To some extent, you're correct. Linux had a lot of ground to make up, and it copied a lot of interfaces as fast as it could. It's hit a plateau, though. Now is the time for OSS developers of desktop environments to either start coming up with good, easy to use, innovative things, or start admitting that they can't do it, and that we'll be using copied interfaces until the end of time.
Oh, and I found Linux far more usable before the days of GNOME and KDE. When I stopped using Linux, my GNOME system was pretty bare bones. I didn't click on things to make them go, I still did 90% of my work on the command line. Now I'm using OS X, and it's a big shift. I CAN use the command line, but it's a big difference having a system that's designed around making things visible and accessable. OS X isn't just better because the icons are nicer and it's more clicky, it's better because there's a real feeling of being interested in your interface experience.
They've got the first four seasons out, which is all that's really important. :)
I'm going to correct your use of that excellent quote, mostly because I think the correct version carries slightly more weight. :)
"This is Ambassador Delenn of the Minbari. Babylon 5 is under our protection. Withdraw... or be destroyed."
'Negative, we have authority here. Do not force us to engage your ship.'
"Why not? Only one Human Captain has ever survived battle with a Minbari fleet. He is behind me, you are in front of me. If you value your lives... be somewhere else."
As for good space battles, B5 easily has the best ones that I've seen. Anything with an Earth Alliance cruiser is IMO opinion particularily fun to watch. I just love those massive cannons that they have mounted on the fronts of the ships.
My sister got involved in this one day while she was sitting around in an office at her university.
She and her friend were both working on their laptops, and they both had iTunes opened. They were sharing their playlists, and came across a playlist with some good music (belonging to someone that I'll name GuybrushT). Clever person that she is, she changed the name of HER playlist to say 'GuybrushT is cool!'. He noticed, and she and her friend and GuybrushT had a conversation, all in their shared playlist names!
Your other alternative is, of course, to buy yourself an iBook and just give in to Apple and OS X. It's a pretty cheap way to buy an addition to your social life.
In all honesty, I think it's hard to automate a considerable amount of testing in our newer games, especially the XBox games. Moreover, automation is just another variable that you don't want to have to deal with. If a bug pops up, you have to question whether it was the automation process or an actual bug. We don't trust our code to automatic generation, and we don't trust our testing to automated processes. I think we come out ahead both times.
QA usually consists of tasks like, "Open and Close this dorr 1000 times, and see if anything breaks", or "Walk over this trigger 500 times and see if the server and client fall out of sync."
:)
It's hard work, but it's not usually SKILLED work, in the sense that you don't need a lot of special training beforehand. I'm SUPER appreciative of our QA staff, but it's not something that you need a degree for. What you DO need is attention to detail, the ability to do monotonous tasks for hours on end, and a willingness to put up with annoying programmers like me that say that the bug can't be reproduced and that you're on crack for suggesting that it's still in the game.
I wouldn't say that QA is 'disposable'. It especially wouldn't be considered that if people knew what the job was like. It ruins a lot of people's ability to play and enjoy games. It really changes your outlook on life, from what I hear. You notice the flaws in everything, and see where OTHER QA departments have failed.
I half agree. The complete lack of regard that most programmers have for the amount of system resources that they have is in most cases, entirely tragic. There are a lot of programs that could have a smaller memory footprint or run much faster if any time was taken to make these things fundamental to the design.
That said, I've never really heard anything good about the code that developers have to write for systems like the PS2 that simultaneously have a wealth and a lack of resources. The PS2 has a lot of processors to work with, and that's great! Well, it's great until you realize that the abundance of processors just makes things really hard to synchronise, and you're doing all sorts of hacks to make things work. On the other hand, the PS2 barely has any memory to work with at all, and that's ALSO problematic, since you're always cutting corners, and getting data off the disc in a timely fashion is a pain in the ass. (The PS2 developers that I know have all had to write their own memory managers just to make things even pretend like they're working.) Both those things contribute needlessly to high complexity. Managing complexity well is the TRUE mark of a good programmer, but nobody wants to deal with more than is absolutely necessary.
By comparison, both the XBox and GameCube are purportedly easier to program. Both of them have hard and fast limits on memory and CPU speed, but both of them provide enough of each to make managing the complexity easier. Programmers still have to be careful with their resources, but they don't have to resort to as many dirty tricks to get everything to work.
So, just because a system has limited resources doesn't mean that the code coming out the other end is going to be clean and the programming is going to suck any less. You just end up with a different kind of sucky programming.
You don't have to buy Opera. I haven't. I like the ads, and I click on them now and then. They've managed to get contextual text ads, and google searches into the ad bar, so it's actually kind of handy sometimes. They're even less obtrusive than in windows.
/. to reload every 15 minutes, and every time I check, there's new news. It's a minor feature, but I appreciate it. It's even better now that it works on a tab-by-tab basis. I have several tabs that automatically load themselves at different times. (In the early implementation, everything had to reload at the same time, or you could only reload one tab...it's actually useful now.)
2 things:
1) You misunderstand what I mean by 'inline find'. I don't want a popup panel so that I can type what I'm looking for, I want the search to find items AS I type. If I'm looking for the word 'encyclopedia' on a page, in Opera, I use the inline find, and it's found the word by the time I've typed as far as 'enc'. With Safari, and most other search dialogues, I have to type the whole word, or hope that when I type 'enc' in the panel, I find what I'm looking for right away. Actually, I'm probably terming this incorrectly. Opera's find isn't just 'inline' it's also incremental.
2) 'Reload page every n minutes'. For news and weather sites, I love this feature. I just set
Like I said, I love and appreciate Safari for what it is, a small fast browser. It's light on the bloat, but does a lot, which I can respect. I've gotten to Opera and all the little conveniences that it provides, so I'm going to stick with it, even though I realize that in comparison it's an overly complex monstrosity.
I use Opera at work on my Windows box, and use Safari at home on my G5. I admit, I'm probably going to change to Opera when I get home. Opera is a lot bigger than Safari. Safari is a brilliant implementation of a simple, functional browser. I think they should stick with that, and NOT follow Opera's example. That said, I've been using Opera since version 5 something, and I'm having a hard time giving it up.
I can drag and arrange the tabs however I want. Opera has an inline find in page facility, mouse gestures, and a handy feature for paging through galleries where the images follow a simple incremental progression or have a 'next' or similar recognizable link in the page. The tab implementation is generally superior, I find. When I say that I don't want things to open in a new window in Opera, I mean it, and it works. I have that option checked in Safari, but it still opens new windows all the time. I NEVER want another window popping up under ANY circumstances. If I need a new window, I'll open it up myself, manually. I'm VERY fond of the tab state being saved on close, because I always use the same tabs when I first start up. (I've faked it out in Safari by making a bookmark folder that I open when I start up the browser, but I always lose the 'temporary' URLs that I haven't quite finished with yet, and I don't like saving temporary bookmarks in a seperate folder.) Opera is quite fast at rendering pages, at least under Windows. Oh, and provided that Opera maintains its key configurability, it'll definitely have a leg up there on Safari. (My outlook on that is mostly due to me wanting Opera-like keybindings in Safari. When I type 'Cmd-N', I want a new TAB, not a new window.
I'll probably use Safari here and there, but I'm pretty much stuck on Opera. I'll give OmniWeb 5 another shot when it gets more stable. Trying out the betas is fun right up to the moment where everything crashes for the fifth time.
Hopefully, Opera will be reasonably stable. If it is, I'll be happy to use it again under OSX.
Interestingly, I want the old NeXT Browser back, and not this finder thing. The problem with the current finder is it's a bad compromise between the two systems. The NeXT browser was something that I grew up with, and the finder is a bad replacement. As someone that used the 'real' finder for so long, it's obvious that you're finding that the compromise is somewhat less functional than what you're used to.
Not much we can do, I guess. I wonder if there are any finder replacements...?
I don't need glasses away from my machine. So, I went to the Optomitrist and told him that I was interested in preserving my vision. I told him that I wanted to spend money buying glasses, even though I didn't really need them.
He gave me a quite weak prescription. My ability to discern small details is already very good, but these glasses enhance my close vision even more. I put on my glasses, and things are just a bit bigger. As well, the lenses come with an anti-glare coating.
I've found that my eyes ARE a bit less tired after the end of the day. I switch between wearing them and not wearing them pretty smoothly, and I never wear them unless I'm looking right at the monitor.
Even if you have glasses, you can probably benefit by having a slightly different prescription for working at the computer. No reason to let your normal prescription get any worse.
I remember talking to a biochemistry student, and he said the REALLY interesting thing about the stuff in tea is that while it's a completely different chemical, and excites entirely different neural pathways, the end point and end result turn out to be exactly the same. For most intents and purposes, the stuff in tea may as well be caffeine.
Like I said, there're no hardware problems that we can find.
:)
As for the last line of your post, that's what I responded to in the first place. Someone was saying that XP is just as stable as Linux, which is false. It's WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more stable than its predecessors, but it's still a long way from Unix.