Joel on Software published an excellent article about web standards a few months ago, and it brings up a lot of great, great points. The article is a bit on the long side (and gets side-tracked with an odd analogy), but it is well worth reading. A couple excerpts:
So you have to "test" in your own head, purely as a thought experiment, against a bunch of standards documents which you probably never read and couldn't completely understand even if you did.
Those documents are super confusing. The specs are full of statements like "If a sibling block box (that does not float and is not absolutely positioned) follows the run-in box, the run-in box becomes the first inline box of the block box. A run-in cannot run in to a block that already starts with a run-in or that itself is a run-in." Whenever I read things like that, I wonder how anyone correctly conforms to the spec.
The precise problem here is that you're pretending that there's one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it's not a real standard: it's a platonic ideal and a set of misinterpretations, and therefore the standard is not serving the desired goal of reducing the test matrix in a MANY-MANY market.
Obfuscation... You fear to go into those minds. The coders delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Programming... shadow and flame.
From the article, page 3: "The majority of courts that have heart cases against specific EULA's and clauses have ruled against the EULA, though some have ruled in favor of it."
I know that EULAs are pretty bad and all... but do the members of the court have to go through heart attacks and coronary artery bypass surgery (presumably caused by frustation) just to realize that EULAs aren't that great?
The only ad-blocking software I use is the Flashblock extension for Firefox. I had an issue where some ads (like one with a few hundred Playstation Portables floating around randomly) would consume 99% of my CPU... and that's simply unacceptable.
Other than such instances where the ads are detrimental to my general computing experience, I'd feel guilty if I went out of my way to block all ads. I sympathize with (most) web site owners trying to scrape together some sort of money from their site.
The problem with using C# and DirectX is you're requiring the user to have the.NET Framework and (I believe, not 100% sure) DirectX 9 installed.
And if the user has dial-up, then expecting them to download a 20 MB+ pre-requisite will probably turn a significant percentage of your potential audience away.
Blah, while attempting to find some sort of estimate of how many PC's have the.NET Framework installed (no dice), I stumbled upon a possible solution to the.NET Framework problem:.NET Framework Linking, which basically includes all of the required.NET libraries in the executable itself. That example seems expensive ($5000 to $10000??), but there might be a free way of doing it somewhere.
Makes sense for now, but how long before it becomes recognized and accepted as just as valid as today's peer-review academic publishing?
Never, just like encyclopedias have never been a viable source for research content. And while Wikipedia has some advantages over Brittanica and such, it is still an elaborate form of encyclopedia, covering a wide bredth of topics with varying degrees of depth.
One of the most gruesome boss battles I've ever seen was in Mario Sunshine. Seriously.
At a couple points in the game, you have to defeat an octopus. He's about 20 feet tall, has a sickly black ink around his mouth, and sits up on land. The octopus' main defense is his tentacles: four of them writhing around menacingly. He'll try to swat Mario with all of them at once, and if Mario is quick enough, he can grab one.
Mario latches onto the end of the tentacle with his arms and legs, and tugs on it. After a grotesque game of tug-and-war, Mario pulls off the tentacle and rides it around as it flops this way and that, completely detached from the body.
I mean, I'm no stranger to violence. Right now I'm playing through Resident Evil 4, and it has all of the blood and guts in the world. But none of it lives up to pulling off the limbs of an octopus in broad daylight, one by one.
I was seriously surprised to see it in a 'kids' game.
In one of the demonstrations that Nintendo gave to the press a month or so ago, they demoed a 'stylus' attachment for your thumb. Essentially you could move your left thumb (or right thumb, I think the DS has ambidextrous support) over the touch screen and use it like an analog stick. The game software seemed to have a bug in it, so it wasn't demonstrated... but it seemed like a really cool. Hopefully not too uncomfortable.
Here is a link to the movie I mentioned (select the "Gameplay Demonstration" movie listed at the bottom), with the thumb 'stylus' thing is near the very end.
Pshaw, if you think that's bad, try doing a search for Dink Smallwood without quotes (its a relatively obscure computer game), and the common sponsored link is:
Adventure Big Dink Second Smallwood Compare rates and receive up to four mortgage quotes by completing a free online application at Nextag. Affiliate. www.nextag.com
Not only does the sponsored advertisement make absolutely no sense at all, but it seems to relish in this fact by bolding the search words.
I suspect the Sponsored Results were written in Engrish.
Some people view such drastic matters (such as telling what a scanner can scan and what a printer can print and what photoshop can edit) will only be further abused with time, and this is just the first step.
When Microsoft's Pallidium project is put into effect, it will be mostly worthless because someone can just take a photo of their computer screen, bypassing all of the digital interference checking. But what if it a digital camera will refuse to take such a picture, and a scanner will refuse to scan it?
But if technologies related to anti-counterfieting are put to widespread use, then who knows what will happen. Perhaps the government will only allow appropriate pictures of whoever the president is in 2015 to be printed. Maybe they'll have computers that automatically detect when a naked person is on the screen, irregardless of context.
Or maybe this anti-counterfeiting technology will not spread into any further areas of computing. My Crystal Ball is far too cloudy.
I have my doubts that a statue and a museum devoted to the props from a single movie, no matter how popular that movie was at the time it was released, could be that much of a draw.
I would be forced to agree with you with nearly any movie (or series of movies) such as The Matrix, Star Wars, Titanic, and what not... but not The Lord of the Rings.
If you happened to catch the extra features on the Extended Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring (and to a lesser extent The Two Towers), you'd see that they made literally tens of thousands of swords, pieces of armor, costumes, helmets, everything. Heck, every dang mug from the Prancing Pony was custom made.
And then there are the Uber Cool 'Bigatures', like the two towers, the Black Gate, and others, not to mention the various sculptures of Gollum and Treebeard.
Weta Workshop's work is utterly amazing, and if I had any reason to go near New Zealand or Australia, I'd definately stop at that museum.
The game was originally titled Dark Justice, as this well describes the game's theme.
That's rather funny... Max Payne 2 had an episode of 'Dick Justice' on one of the TV's, where a fugitive cop went after the people who killed his wife. But instead of film noir style, it was like 70's.
1) Easy conversions. Wondering what 78 centimeters in inches is? Type "78 cm in inches" into the google toolbar (w/out quotes). Yeah, the same thing can be done with google.com, but the toolbar is just faster.
2) One of the best and least-intrusive pop-up blockers known to man kind.
3) Highlight whatever is typed into the google bar on the current web page. You wouldn't believe how useful this is.
Haven't they figured out yet that the people that download this crap will NEVER EVER actually buy the DVD release.
I beg to differ. I downloaded Fight Club off of some file sharing network a couple years ago. I heard it was good from a friend, but never got around to watching it. I was extremely impressed, so I bought it later that week. The same thing happened with Donnie Darko. There's something just *good* about owning a movie you know is good.
In contrast, Microsoft is selling a world view -- theirs. I can't even imagine searching for gcc, or Java, or "Linus Torvalds" on Microogle and expecting to get useful information. You don't ask a plumber if your pipes need fixing.
Oh come on. Microsoft is selling their world view right now on MSN, and yet a search for gcc java linux torvalds yielded over 5000 results, and hell, the 6th result is a link to the Halloween Documents. Unless you're assuming that 'Microogle' would be more censored than the current MSN search...
Some people seem to think that front lit is evil, and back lit is some sort of necessity. But, back lit LCD displays drain batteries really, really, really fast... way beyond what Nintendo's 10 hour general guideline for Gameboy products.
And it isn't like they are sticking light bulbs in the thing for their front lit display... it looks like the Afterburner's transparent light-emitting polymer.
As for the size... I was concerned for a bit too, even before i saw the pictures. But then I was reminded that the old Gameboy and Gameboy Color models weren't that hard to hold, and this seems to be a return to that kind of form factor. But those L and R buttons do look hard to press...
While I tried to find a new host a month or so ago, I stumbled upon Your Host Sucks and the WebHostingTalk Forums. Both are excellent for finding out if a potential host is worth the bother of going through... I saw quite a few horror stories while browsing around. For example, I think FeaturePrice said a failed router was an 'act of god', and therefore the down-time didn't fall under their uptime guarantee. Yeah. God smited their router... try proving that in court.
Also, the WebHostingTalk forums have a dedicated forum subsection for having companies compete over you... it was somewhat amusing when I did so. I got like 5 responses within an hour, plus 5 or so e-mails. But then I realized that the bandwidth I'd require was much greater than I anticipated (or could afford), so I edited my post saying something like that. And they're still e-mailing me. Like once a week...
Slashdot Mirror
The number of days that an old, crusty Perl developer can laugh at another language are few and far between.
Thank you, PHP.
Obfuscation... You fear to go into those minds. The coders delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Programming... shadow and flame.
I know that EULAs are pretty bad and all... but do the members of the court have to go through heart attacks and coronary artery bypass surgery (presumably caused by frustation) just to realize that EULAs aren't that great?
Other than such instances where the ads are detrimental to my general computing experience, I'd feel guilty if I went out of my way to block all ads. I sympathize with (most) web site owners trying to scrape together some sort of money from their site.
The problem with using C# and DirectX is you're requiring the user to have the .NET Framework and (I believe, not 100% sure) DirectX 9 installed.
And if the user has dial-up, then expecting them to download a 20 MB+ pre-requisite will probably turn a significant percentage of your potential audience away.
Blah, while attempting to find some sort of estimate of how many PC's have the .NET Framework installed (no dice), I stumbled upon a possible solution to the .NET Framework problem: .NET Framework Linking, which basically includes all of the required .NET libraries in the executable itself. That example seems expensive ($5000 to $10000??), but there might be a free way of doing it somewhere.
Did you try the 'Redefine Input' option in the Options menu? Just follow the instructions, and your joypad should work.
Never, just like encyclopedias have never been a viable source for research content. And while Wikipedia has some advantages over Brittanica and such, it is still an elaborate form of encyclopedia, covering a wide bredth of topics with varying degrees of depth.
At a couple points in the game, you have to defeat an octopus. He's about 20 feet tall, has a sickly black ink around his mouth, and sits up on land. The octopus' main defense is his tentacles: four of them writhing around menacingly. He'll try to swat Mario with all of them at once, and if Mario is quick enough, he can grab one.
Mario latches onto the end of the tentacle with his arms and legs, and tugs on it. After a grotesque game of tug-and-war, Mario pulls off the tentacle and rides it around as it flops this way and that, completely detached from the body.
I mean, I'm no stranger to violence. Right now I'm playing through Resident Evil 4, and it has all of the blood and guts in the world. But none of it lives up to pulling off the limbs of an octopus in broad daylight, one by one.
I was seriously surprised to see it in a 'kids' game.
In one of the demonstrations that Nintendo gave to the press a month or so ago, they demoed a 'stylus' attachment for your thumb. Essentially you could move your left thumb (or right thumb, I think the DS has ambidextrous support) over the touch screen and use it like an analog stick. The game software seemed to have a bug in it, so it wasn't demonstrated... but it seemed like a really cool. Hopefully not too uncomfortable.
Here is a link to the movie I mentioned (select the "Gameplay Demonstration" movie listed at the bottom), with the thumb 'stylus' thing is near the very end.
Yep. Almost everything is explained at the end of the 4th book, and the end of the 5th book clears up any dangling questions.
Adventure Big Dink Second Smallwood Compare rates and receive up to four mortgage quotes by completing a free online application at Nextag. Affiliate.
www.nextag.com
Not only does the sponsored advertisement make absolutely no sense at all, but it seems to relish in this fact by bolding the search words.
I suspect the Sponsored Results were written in Engrish.
When Microsoft's Pallidium project is put into effect, it will be mostly worthless because someone can just take a photo of their computer screen, bypassing all of the digital interference checking. But what if it a digital camera will refuse to take such a picture, and a scanner will refuse to scan it?
But if technologies related to anti-counterfieting are put to widespread use, then who knows what will happen. Perhaps the government will only allow appropriate pictures of whoever the president is in 2015 to be printed. Maybe they'll have computers that automatically detect when a naked person is on the screen, irregardless of context.
Or maybe this anti-counterfeiting technology will not spread into any further areas of computing. My Crystal Ball is far too cloudy.
I would be forced to agree with you with nearly any movie (or series of movies) such as The Matrix, Star Wars, Titanic, and what not... but not The Lord of the Rings.
If you happened to catch the extra features on the Extended Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring (and to a lesser extent The Two Towers), you'd see that they made literally tens of thousands of swords, pieces of armor, costumes, helmets, everything. Heck, every dang mug from the Prancing Pony was custom made.
And then there are the Uber Cool 'Bigatures', like the two towers, the Black Gate, and others, not to mention the various sculptures of Gollum and Treebeard.
Weta Workshop's work is utterly amazing, and if I had any reason to go near New Zealand or Australia, I'd definately stop at that museum.
I guess Shadow Warrior 2 is out of the question?
The game was originally titled Dark Justice, as this well describes the game's theme.
That's rather funny... Max Payne 2 had an episode of 'Dick Justice' on one of the TV's, where a fugitive cop went after the people who killed his wife. But instead of film noir style, it was like 70's.
1) Easy conversions. Wondering what 78 centimeters in inches is? Type "78 cm in inches" into the google toolbar (w/out quotes). Yeah, the same thing can be done with google.com, but the toolbar is just faster.
2) One of the best and least-intrusive pop-up blockers known to man kind.
3) Highlight whatever is typed into the google bar on the current web page. You wouldn't believe how useful this is.
There are also a few threads on steam, PlanetHalfLife, and arstechnica.
No, but I hear they might port Atari 2600 Doom to it!
I beg to differ. I downloaded Fight Club off of some file sharing network a couple years ago. I heard it was good from a friend, but never got around to watching it. I was extremely impressed, so I bought it later that week. The same thing happened with Donnie Darko. There's something just *good* about owning a movie you know is good.
Oh come on. Microsoft is selling their world view right now on MSN, and yet a search for gcc java linux torvalds yielded over 5000 results, and hell, the 6th result is a link to the Halloween Documents. Unless you're assuming that 'Microogle' would be more censored than the current MSN search...
nytimes annoying free registration not required here.
And it isn't like they are sticking light bulbs in the thing for their front lit display... it looks like the Afterburner's transparent light-emitting polymer.
As for the size... I was concerned for a bit too, even before i saw the pictures. But then I was reminded that the old Gameboy and Gameboy Color models weren't that hard to hold, and this seems to be a return to that kind of form factor. But those L and R buttons do look hard to press...
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Linking to a PHP forum right on the Slashdot main page isn't generally a good idea... :)
Also, the WebHostingTalk forums have a dedicated forum subsection for having companies compete over you... it was somewhat amusing when I did so. I got like 5 responses within an hour, plus 5 or so e-mails. But then I realized that the bandwidth I'd require was much greater than I anticipated (or could afford), so I edited my post saying something like that. And they're still e-mailing me. Like once a week...