Actually, that's not entirely correct either, as iPhone and iPod Touch apps will run on iPad without a special version. The plus denotes that the developer has bundled the iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad-specific version together. Example: if Angry Birds didn't have a separate iPad app that was customized to the iPad's device metrics and UX but rather bundled in as a single install, you would see the plus icon meaning that you get both the "normal" and the "HD" version. If you only have Angry Birds for iPhone/iPod Touch, you can still run that on your iPad. You just won't get the "native" iPad experience.
I don't know where this idea that "plus means in-app purchase" got started, but the entire Internet community seems to believe in this misconception.
I find that community/junior colleges are embracing the online courses way more than traditional four-year universities. I would love to complete my BS in Computer Science (left school a long time ago, in 1997) but there are precious few programs for a *true* BSCS. Florida State University is the only Tier 1 school that I've found to offer it.
I live in Dallas, Texas, and we have several good schools to chose from in the state. Baylor, Texas A&M, University of Texas, Texas Tech, University of Texas @ Dallas, Southern Methodist University, Texas Christian University; absolutely none of them offer anything remotely technical as a distance learning program. Texas Tech has a degree in General Studies online, and I've seen some other school offering things like English or Humanities. It's always some sort of basic, generic degree, and that's a frustrating fact.
I should clarify that I'm referring to Bachelor's degrees. Graduate programs seem to be plentiful at many schools. I guess they want the young kids to come spend their money and go to class. Despite discussing the issue with those friends and acquaintances in education, I've never heard a convincing answer. "I don't really know" seems to be the standard response.
It's so funny that this question has been posed. I thought for a second that I had actually posted this!:)
I'm pretty much in your same situation. I dropped out of college back in the late 90s, and the last math class that I successfully passed was Calculus II. I took a Calculus III class, but stopped going around the time I dropped out. This puts me at almost 15 years since I've attended a structure math class at the university level. Before that, I look Precalculus in high school...in 1991. I haven't had an Algebra class since 1990.
I can recall many things, but definitely NOT enough to pass a college exam. I decided that I would go back to school and start with Calculus I. After all, SURELY if I've had this material before I could easily get an A! Ahem. I could remember the basics, I could remember the rules of derivation and integration, but I couldn't remember the Trigonometry. Finding the derivative of something involving sine, cosine or tangent confounded me. At the behest of the professor, I enrolled in Precalculus. After the first week, we had a test covering the basics of Algebra. I flunked that. I couldn't remember every last detail, and it's been nearly 20 years since I've seen this material directly in a classroom environment.
After consulting with a friend, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I'm not willing to spend the time (and money) in a classroom retaking math classes, so I headed to my local Half Price Books. I'm fortunate enough to live in Dallas where we have several large stores with a massive stock of older college texts. I picked up a book on Algebra, Trigonometry and Precalculus. I also acquired the teachers manuals and student's solutions manuals for these texts, giving me a nice base of information to jog my brain. Math hasn't changed a whole lot in the last few years, and the main thing that I find that dates the books is the calculator requirement. Some of these books use a TI-85 or TI-86 in their chapter sample exercises, but these are the calculators I have lying around since my college days.
iTunesU is also an awesome source. Go search on Algebra and other math subjects to get full courses on any subject you lack. You can get older courses and cheap textbooks on Amazon if you want to precisely follow along. Th Algebra videos from Harrisburg Area Community College have helped me immensely.
As mentioned above, MIT's OCW can help you, but if you were so inclined to teach yourself mathematics with MIT's material you probably wouldn't be posting on Slashdot asking for some assistance. I don't mean this as an insult in the slightest; I'm not one to learn this type of material on my own, either!
In summary: hit iTunesU and get some FULL courses to fill you in. Go get some used, older textbooks either online or at a local used bookstore if you have such a resource in your area. Outside of these self-help options, you can always enroll at a local community college to basically start over. I know the Dallas area colleges sometimes have rolling enrollment and/or compressed schedule courses. You may find that you can plow through classes like College Algebra, Trigonometry and Precalculus in a shorter time since you're basically refreshing your knowledge.
It's said comments are like sex - even when they're bad, they're still pretty good.
No, programming is like sex. Make one mistake and you end up supporting it the rest of your life.
Re:Are the underwear gnomes in charge?
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Where are Wii?
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· Score: 1
I think it's a legitimate business strategy to let demand for a popular product continue into a fiscal period that normally experiences slow sales. The fourth quarter of the year (calendar year, that is) always experiences a boost due to the extra gift purchasing, with the quarter after seeing a downturn due to spenders paying off their holiday debts. If you have a product that is in such high demand that people will continue to pay for it well after your normally profitable period, why not let that natural demand continue a while longer and let your company experience a more-profitable-than-usual quarter after that holiday season?
In short, I don't think that EA, Harmonix, Nintendo, et al deliberately create this false demand for their products, but I definitely can see them sitting back with current supply levels thinking that customers that miss December will likely make the purchase in January or February (or even later). Since these are publicly traded companies, anything they can do to boost sales in an otherwise slow quarter is a good thing.
Besides, ramping up production at this point is probably not possible, nor may it be cost effective. Production increases generally takes months to be seen in the wild, and by then the demand may have waned as purchasers find what they're looking for. At that point, you have to bear the cost of scaling back your production again, and the cycle starts all over.
Care to explain then how my local EB took several times more orders for the collectors edition of Burning Crusade then it was actually getting?
I'll take a stab at this one.
1. The publisher miscommunicated the number of copies when the pre-order program started. They said 200,000 but the number was more like 50,000. Gamestop can't really do much about that other than communicate that pre-orders should be stopped when that information becomes known.
2. Your particular store kept taking pre-orders long past the cut-off. Call it miscommunication, bad management, etc. I would say that this is not the norm, but I'm not longer at Gamestop.
3. Miscommunication from the DM/corporate on how many copies your store was to receive. Again, this happens, though it's not the norm.
I would be willing to bet that it's human error at some point, and nothing sinister. From working on the other side, I was always surprised to see the number of people that insisted a store deliberately went out of its way to harm a customer. I'm sure there are dipshit managers around (name a retail establishment that DOESN'T have that problem), but most try to take care of their customers.
have to say, the thing I've always wondered about is the business side of things. I've heard, although I have no hard evidence, that Gamestop/EB stores don't make any significant profit off new games, which is why they're always pushing used games. Their profit sources are "used games" and "product placement" - publishers pay big bucks to have things like Halo 3 in the front-and-center of stores.
You are correct. The margin on new games (systems as well) is razor thin. Everyone wants to maximize their profit from the developer and publisher all the way out to the retailer. I only have experience with Gamestop; other retailers, I would have to assume, operate under the same margin constraints.
This is one of the major reasons behind used games and accessories. The margins are much higher (in some instances; not if you take a trade on out-of-date systems and titles) on used items, and you also gain the possibility of repeatedly making money off of the same physical game if your customers trade-in on a regular basis.
As far as product placement, sure, Gamestop works with publishers to advertise their products. They are no different that any other retailer. The next time you visit Target or Wal-Mart look at the end caps. Do you REALLY think they just happened to have a whole load of extra Coca-Cola products sitting around that they wanted to discount? Companies help subsidize their profit margins with marketing dollars all the time; Gamestop is no different.
What I'm curious about is what they would do if you went to them and said "I have a game, I would like you to sell it, we've been doing advertising and it should sell quite a bit, we can't afford to pay you for placement but we'll sell the actual copies to you for $15 less so you can actually make a profit on it". Would they give some of that front-and-center space over to it in the hopes of selling more, or would they just relegate it to the back shelves because it's not paying the bucks?
I think this would be a complex business transaction. Gamestop is a corporation that exists to make money -- it's not going to shell out hundreds of thousands (or millions) in marketing dollars for someone that walks in off the street saying, "Hey, I've got this great game, but no money". They mostly deal with publishers, so for a developer to get a game like that out they would first need to convince a publisher that it's worth their time. At that point the publisher could then use their muscle to potentially get better product placement. Keep in mind, too, that games generally do well because they're good, not because of marketing. Sure you can find exceptions, but I've can't think of a title that went from zero to AAA with millions of sales just because Gamestop stuck in it in their window and hung signs from the ceiling.
I'm no longer an insider, and this is my personal opinion, but hopefully it helps.
In the United States, physical mail is provided by a federal institution, the US Postal Service. This is why tampering with standard mail is a crime. AFAIK, tampering with packages from other carriers (FedEx, DHL, UPS, etc) does not carry a federal penalty, though other laws may apply.
Digital mail is the same -- it's not a service provided by a federal office (and neither are the networks through which digital mail flows) so there is no federal crime. Again, unless there is some sort of particular law that applies. I imagine that tampering with e-mail from a federal government establishment would be a problem
I don't think Stroustrup is in denial at all. Read his book The Design and Evolution of C++ for insight into his decision making process. You may not always agree with it, but at least he's thought things through. When developers start launching complaints about missing features from C++, they generally miss the point of why C++ exists in the first place. It's not a be-all-things-to-all-programmers language. It's a tool to help you get many different types of jobs done.
No thread management : this is an OS-specific issue. Yes, almost all modern operating systems use threads, but C++ isn't designed to do OS tasks. It's a tool so that you can design your own management of threads in a way that suits your projects and style. Use Boost if you want a widely-supported, cross-platform set of thread management classes.
No memory management : again, OS-specific. What if I don't want garbage collection? I like the fact that C++ has deterministic destruction of objects, and I can use that to my advantage. If you want memory management, use boost::shared_ptr and it's siblings. Yes, auto_ptr is broken for various activities, but if you aren't aware of the freely available and widely supported alternatives that work just fine, then you need to update your C++ skill set. Stating that templates are a bolt-on solution for memory management is way off base and shows that you don't really understand that templates are a generic programming construct. And to state that we have buffer overruns in C++ because of bad language features is, again, attempting to assign the problem to the wrong source. If developers would use smart pointers and other safe development tactics, a lot of the problems would go away. Hell, I work with a guy now that refuses to use 'const' in parameters because it involves typing 6 extra characters. It's attitudes like this that cause runtime issues, not the choice of language.
C++ is still a great language. If programmers would take time to familiarize themselves with quick and easy ways to start tightening up their code, we wouldn't have so much problematic software. Instead, everyone sits around and looks at Java, C# and their ilk and demand that the same do-everything-for-me features be brought over. That's not the spirit of C++, and frankly I don't want to see C++ messed with that way. When I want those features, I use those tools and understand why both exist.
Laws that allow a crowd to intervene, maybe? I dunno about you, but I wouldn't want to go to jail for assaulting an officer. And whether or not you think it would be justified doesn't matter. AFAIK citizens aren't allowed to directly intervene in the affairs of a police officer. That's what the courts are for.
Try downloading from MSDN during the day. I get rates that are more in line with a baseline DSL connection than the OC3 my company provides. I never have this problem from sites like Apple (connect.apple.com, not sure from where the downloads for developers actually originate), Akamai, etc. Maybe other parts of Microsoft's network offer fast download rates, but not MSDN. At least not in my recent experience.
$99 is an incredibly small barrier to entry compared to past offerings from Sony. How about the Net Yaroze at $750? Sure you got some hardware with it, but does that really matter when $99 still lets you create games that could be played on Xbox 360s worldwide?
I hear you about being a college student. $99 can be a lot when your income stream is virtually non-existent. You could always do what my roomie and I did in college : sell blood and plasma. We got around $50 every few weeks for doing that, only we spent it on booze and not developing video games.
Companies tend to have these low-cost barriers to entry simply to keep every random person with a game idea from throwing stuff onto their development site. In addition, if it's free, one is more likely to sign up, piddle around and then never create anything. At least with a small entry fee there is a slight financial incentive for you to actually go through with creating and deploying something. To me, $99 is nothing, but it seems like this is targeted at younger kids in their late teens/early twenties. Depending on your family's financial background, $99 is a lot of money to a student with little to no income stream and will ensure that you at least have a vested interest in their program.
Weight Watchers (the only example I can think of right now) has the same principle. They charge you $10-12 a week for their program whether you attend or not. They don't really do anything but weigh you and give you some rah-rah speeches to keep you motivated. The financial cost is there because, psychologically, people who have a vested financial interest in something tend to follow through with it more often and more completely.
I'm sure that's the explanation. I heard that, in order not to seem like a snobby CEO, he's also assigned every Microsoft employee their own personal staff to read and summarize their email for them.
Almost any company that I've worked in, whether the size of MS or the size of one TEAM at MS, has assigned helpers for e-mail, scheduling, etc. to the high level executives. Small companies might have one person for the whole senior leadership team whereas companies as large as MS might have a few people per exec. This isn't uncommon and does nothing to indicate that he's a snobby CEO. I would be willing to wager that senior managers/directors on up @ MS all have staff to assist with e-mail and such.
A co-worker of mine and I were discussing this very issue yesterday. I surmised that Boot Camp will actually increase Windows XP piracy. There's a resonable assumption that many Mac users will have access to some sort of Windows XP disc, and finding a Volume License key to avoid registration is not hard at all. Hell, if you work for a large company, run Belarc Advisor on your corporate box and you probably have the VL key there staring you in the face. If you're a developer, chances are you have MSDN-granted VL keys with your subscription. Ask your neighbor's teenager to find one for you if those don't work.
The bottom line : I can't see people spending $200-300 for a license of Windows XP just to dual-boot on their Mac. Sure, you'll have the Boy Scouts out there that will fork over the cash, but I bet you'll find most people end up installing a not-100%-legal copy of Windows XP on their Intel-based Macs.
First, Bill Gates wants a digital whiteboard but won't get one until later this year. You'd think that he'd be able to have one installed today, within the hour, as the richest man in the world.
This is just a guess, but maybe Microsoft has a process whereby you request a new item (such as a digital whiteboard) and are placed in a queue to get one. To not seem like the snobby CEO that always is granted an exception, he put himself in the queue; it will get installed when IT gets around to his turn.
My workplace is like this -- LCD upgrades are being handed out, and it's the project managers and developers that are receiving them before the management. The managers want to make sure that they're employees are taken care of first. Perhaps Microsoft (and Bill Gates) have this sort of culture/philosophy as well.
If you use Xcode, you want one of these
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MacBook Pro Reviewed
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· Score: 4, Informative
I just got back from the Apple Compatibility Labs in Cupertino, and I was able to put my code on a MacBook Pro to do some build comparisons. On my current PowerBook G4, with a 7200 RPM drive, 1 GB RAM and a 1.67 G4, it takes about 20-25 minutes to do a full Release rebuild of my code (Universal Binary). It took around 5 on the MacBook Pro. Thank God my boss was with me to help test because that's the easiest convincing that I need a new laptop I ever done.
Bottom line : if you're a developer and you have long compile times on your code (AND you have the need/desire to be mobile), you NEED one of these machines.
If you ever decide to come stateside, move to Dallas. We have AFL, rugby, cricket, and a rather large Aussie ex-pat contingent. I'm a yank and I went to two Aussie Day parties last weekend. What's even more fun is you'll start to mingle more with yarpies and kiwis than ever before! Just don't tell the folks back home.:^)
I've done both. I was actually quoted much faster turnaround from the phone support line. In store they said I would have to leave my laptop there for up to 2 weeks while they ordered the parts. When I asked if I could bring my laptop in when the part arrived, they said no. Why on earth would I need/want to leave my laptop sitting at their store waiting for a keyboard when I could just bring it up one day, drop it off for a couple of hours and have them install it. Bad, bad service and support, if you ask me.
I've been an on and off customer of Apple's since my first IIc back in the 80s, and I've never seen a product with so many problems accompanied by such trouble in getting it fixed.
I picked up my custom 15" PowerBook on November 25th from FedEx. By the next weekend, my battery wouldn't hold a charge AT ALL, and you could watch the percentage meter in the menu bar tick down like a bomb about to go off. Called Apple, they sent me into a store here in Dallas. No batteries there, so they overnighted one to the store. Problem solved...
...until the left Shift key decided to not work. Have fun writing C++ code with no shift key. Took it to the Apple Store in Plano, had them adjust the key a bit, seemed to be alright. After a day of use, it totally stopped working. Called Apple, bitched up a storm. They refuse to do anything because the laptop wasn't DOA. By this time, I'm getting failure of keys on the left side of the keyboard and the right Shift key no longer works. Requests to ship a keyboard to a store so they can replace it were denied. My only recourse is to send in the laptop.
So, here I am, a week before Macworld, trying to get a product ready and the lone machine that I have is a pain to work with. I ended up purchasing an iCurve (wonderful stand), an Apple Keyboard and a Mighty Mouse (cool once you get used to it) just to get my work done. We ordered an iMac for testing, but by the time it arrived I wasn't willing to compromise my deadline by setting up all my dev tools on it. Not to mention that I ordered a PowerBook because I have the need to be mobile.
I'm sure that my story is unique. The last PB I owned was a G3 Pismo B, and that think kicked some ass. But it's really disheartening when you tell a company that you're trying to prepare for their largest convention of the year, and they just fall back on their "standard policy" song and dance and refuse to try and help you. Oh yeah, I was offered repeatedly to purchase Apple Pro Care for $99, something I didn't feel like I should have to pay for when I had a virtually non-functional laptop less than 3 weeks after it arrived.
I was at the Richardson office for a short time, and the FreeHand team, IMO, had the best engineers and managers, especially on the Mac side. It's more of a shame that Macromedia/Adobe lost the talent there (unless they all moved to Cali or Bangalore) than anything else.
I drive by there everyday on my way to work with fond memories of a great place. RIP Macromedia DAG!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's not entirely correct either, as iPhone and iPod Touch apps will run on iPad without a special version. The plus denotes that the developer has bundled the iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad-specific version together. Example: if Angry Birds didn't have a separate iPad app that was customized to the iPad's device metrics and UX but rather bundled in as a single install, you would see the plus icon meaning that you get both the "normal" and the "HD" version. If you only have Angry Birds for iPhone/iPod Touch, you can still run that on your iPad. You just won't get the "native" iPad experience.
I don't know where this idea that "plus means in-app purchase" got started, but the entire Internet community seems to believe in this misconception.
I find that community/junior colleges are embracing the online courses way more than traditional four-year universities. I would love to complete my BS in Computer Science (left school a long time ago, in 1997) but there are precious few programs for a *true* BSCS. Florida State University is the only Tier 1 school that I've found to offer it.
I live in Dallas, Texas, and we have several good schools to chose from in the state. Baylor, Texas A&M, University of Texas, Texas Tech, University of Texas @ Dallas, Southern Methodist University, Texas Christian University; absolutely none of them offer anything remotely technical as a distance learning program. Texas Tech has a degree in General Studies online, and I've seen some other school offering things like English or Humanities. It's always some sort of basic, generic degree, and that's a frustrating fact.
I should clarify that I'm referring to Bachelor's degrees. Graduate programs seem to be plentiful at many schools. I guess they want the young kids to come spend their money and go to class. Despite discussing the issue with those friends and acquaintances in education, I've never heard a convincing answer. "I don't really know" seems to be the standard response.
It's so funny that this question has been posed. I thought for a second that I had actually posted this! :)
I'm pretty much in your same situation. I dropped out of college back in the late 90s, and the last math class that I successfully passed was Calculus II. I took a Calculus III class, but stopped going around the time I dropped out. This puts me at almost 15 years since I've attended a structure math class at the university level. Before that, I look Precalculus in high school...in 1991. I haven't had an Algebra class since 1990.
I can recall many things, but definitely NOT enough to pass a college exam. I decided that I would go back to school and start with Calculus I. After all, SURELY if I've had this material before I could easily get an A! Ahem. I could remember the basics, I could remember the rules of derivation and integration, but I couldn't remember the Trigonometry. Finding the derivative of something involving sine, cosine or tangent confounded me. At the behest of the professor, I enrolled in Precalculus. After the first week, we had a test covering the basics of Algebra. I flunked that. I couldn't remember every last detail, and it's been nearly 20 years since I've seen this material directly in a classroom environment.
After consulting with a friend, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I'm not willing to spend the time (and money) in a classroom retaking math classes, so I headed to my local Half Price Books. I'm fortunate enough to live in Dallas where we have several large stores with a massive stock of older college texts. I picked up a book on Algebra, Trigonometry and Precalculus. I also acquired the teachers manuals and student's solutions manuals for these texts, giving me a nice base of information to jog my brain. Math hasn't changed a whole lot in the last few years, and the main thing that I find that dates the books is the calculator requirement. Some of these books use a TI-85 or TI-86 in their chapter sample exercises, but these are the calculators I have lying around since my college days.
iTunesU is also an awesome source. Go search on Algebra and other math subjects to get full courses on any subject you lack. You can get older courses and cheap textbooks on Amazon if you want to precisely follow along. Th Algebra videos from Harrisburg Area Community College have helped me immensely.
As mentioned above, MIT's OCW can help you, but if you were so inclined to teach yourself mathematics with MIT's material you probably wouldn't be posting on Slashdot asking for some assistance. I don't mean this as an insult in the slightest; I'm not one to learn this type of material on my own, either!
In summary: hit iTunesU and get some FULL courses to fill you in. Go get some used, older textbooks either online or at a local used bookstore if you have such a resource in your area. Outside of these self-help options, you can always enroll at a local community college to basically start over. I know the Dallas area colleges sometimes have rolling enrollment and/or compressed schedule courses. You may find that you can plow through classes like College Algebra, Trigonometry and Precalculus in a shorter time since you're basically refreshing your knowledge.
Good luck!
Um, the Towers of Hanoi?
Actually, he skates for a living.
http://www.nhl.com/players/8459534.html
It's said comments are like sex - even when they're bad, they're still pretty good.
No, programming is like sex. Make one mistake and you end up supporting it the rest of your life.
I think it's a legitimate business strategy to let demand for a popular product continue into a fiscal period that normally experiences slow sales. The fourth quarter of the year (calendar year, that is) always experiences a boost due to the extra gift purchasing, with the quarter after seeing a downturn due to spenders paying off their holiday debts. If you have a product that is in such high demand that people will continue to pay for it well after your normally profitable period, why not let that natural demand continue a while longer and let your company experience a more-profitable-than-usual quarter after that holiday season?
In short, I don't think that EA, Harmonix, Nintendo, et al deliberately create this false demand for their products, but I definitely can see them sitting back with current supply levels thinking that customers that miss December will likely make the purchase in January or February (or even later). Since these are publicly traded companies, anything they can do to boost sales in an otherwise slow quarter is a good thing.
Besides, ramping up production at this point is probably not possible, nor may it be cost effective. Production increases generally takes months to be seen in the wild, and by then the demand may have waned as purchasers find what they're looking for. At that point, you have to bear the cost of scaling back your production again, and the cycle starts all over.
Care to explain then how my local EB took several times more orders for the collectors edition of Burning Crusade then it was actually getting?
I'll take a stab at this one.
1. The publisher miscommunicated the number of copies when the pre-order program started. They said 200,000 but the number was more like 50,000. Gamestop can't really do much about that other than communicate that pre-orders should be stopped when that information becomes known.
2. Your particular store kept taking pre-orders long past the cut-off. Call it miscommunication, bad management, etc. I would say that this is not the norm, but I'm not longer at Gamestop.
3. Miscommunication from the DM/corporate on how many copies your store was to receive. Again, this happens, though it's not the norm.
I would be willing to bet that it's human error at some point, and nothing sinister. From working on the other side, I was always surprised to see the number of people that insisted a store deliberately went out of its way to harm a customer. I'm sure there are dipshit managers around (name a retail establishment that DOESN'T have that problem), but most try to take care of their customers.
have to say, the thing I've always wondered about is the business side of things. I've heard, although I have no hard evidence, that Gamestop/EB stores don't make any significant profit off new games, which is why they're always pushing used games. Their profit sources are "used games" and "product placement" - publishers pay big bucks to have things like Halo 3 in the front-and-center of stores.
You are correct. The margin on new games (systems as well) is razor thin. Everyone wants to maximize their profit from the developer and publisher all the way out to the retailer. I only have experience with Gamestop; other retailers, I would have to assume, operate under the same margin constraints.
This is one of the major reasons behind used games and accessories. The margins are much higher (in some instances; not if you take a trade on out-of-date systems and titles) on used items, and you also gain the possibility of repeatedly making money off of the same physical game if your customers trade-in on a regular basis.
As far as product placement, sure, Gamestop works with publishers to advertise their products. They are no different that any other retailer. The next time you visit Target or Wal-Mart look at the end caps. Do you REALLY think they just happened to have a whole load of extra Coca-Cola products sitting around that they wanted to discount? Companies help subsidize their profit margins with marketing dollars all the time; Gamestop is no different.
What I'm curious about is what they would do if you went to them and said "I have a game, I would like you to sell it, we've been doing advertising and it should sell quite a bit, we can't afford to pay you for placement but we'll sell the actual copies to you for $15 less so you can actually make a profit on it". Would they give some of that front-and-center space over to it in the hopes of selling more, or would they just relegate it to the back shelves because it's not paying the bucks?
I think this would be a complex business transaction. Gamestop is a corporation that exists to make money -- it's not going to shell out hundreds of thousands (or millions) in marketing dollars for someone that walks in off the street saying, "Hey, I've got this great game, but no money". They mostly deal with publishers, so for a developer to get a game like that out they would first need to convince a publisher that it's worth their time. At that point the publisher could then use their muscle to potentially get better product placement. Keep in mind, too, that games generally do well because they're good, not because of marketing. Sure you can find exceptions, but I've can't think of a title that went from zero to AAA with millions of sales just because Gamestop stuck in it in their window and hung signs from the ceiling.
I'm no longer an insider, and this is my personal opinion, but hopefully it helps.
In the United States, physical mail is provided by a federal institution, the US Postal Service. This is why tampering with standard mail is a crime. AFAIK, tampering with packages from other carriers (FedEx, DHL, UPS, etc) does not carry a federal penalty, though other laws may apply. Digital mail is the same -- it's not a service provided by a federal office (and neither are the networks through which digital mail flows) so there is no federal crime. Again, unless there is some sort of particular law that applies. I imagine that tampering with e-mail from a federal government establishment would be a problem
I don't think Stroustrup is in denial at all. Read his book The Design and Evolution of C++ for insight into his decision making process. You may not always agree with it, but at least he's thought things through. When developers start launching complaints about missing features from C++, they generally miss the point of why C++ exists in the first place. It's not a be-all-things-to-all-programmers language. It's a tool to help you get many different types of jobs done.
No thread management : this is an OS-specific issue. Yes, almost all modern operating systems use threads, but C++ isn't designed to do OS tasks. It's a tool so that you can design your own management of threads in a way that suits your projects and style. Use Boost if you want a widely-supported, cross-platform set of thread management classes.
No memory management : again, OS-specific. What if I don't want garbage collection? I like the fact that C++ has deterministic destruction of objects, and I can use that to my advantage. If you want memory management, use boost::shared_ptr and it's siblings. Yes, auto_ptr is broken for various activities, but if you aren't aware of the freely available and widely supported alternatives that work just fine, then you need to update your C++ skill set. Stating that templates are a bolt-on solution for memory management is way off base and shows that you don't really understand that templates are a generic programming construct. And to state that we have buffer overruns in C++ because of bad language features is, again, attempting to assign the problem to the wrong source. If developers would use smart pointers and other safe development tactics, a lot of the problems would go away. Hell, I work with a guy now that refuses to use 'const' in parameters because it involves typing 6 extra characters. It's attitudes like this that cause runtime issues, not the choice of language.
C++ is still a great language. If programmers would take time to familiarize themselves with quick and easy ways to start tightening up their code, we wouldn't have so much problematic software. Instead, everyone sits around and looks at Java, C# and their ilk and demand that the same do-everything-for-me features be brought over. That's not the spirit of C++, and frankly I don't want to see C++ messed with that way. When I want those features, I use those tools and understand why both exist.
Laws that allow a crowd to intervene, maybe? I dunno about you, but I wouldn't want to go to jail for assaulting an officer. And whether or not you think it would be justified doesn't matter. AFAIK citizens aren't allowed to directly intervene in the affairs of a police officer. That's what the courts are for.
Try downloading from MSDN during the day. I get rates that are more in line with a baseline DSL connection than the OC3 my company provides. I never have this problem from sites like Apple (connect.apple.com, not sure from where the downloads for developers actually originate), Akamai, etc. Maybe other parts of Microsoft's network offer fast download rates, but not MSDN. At least not in my recent experience.
$99 is an incredibly small barrier to entry compared to past offerings from Sony. How about the Net Yaroze at $750? Sure you got some hardware with it, but does that really matter when $99 still lets you create games that could be played on Xbox 360s worldwide? I hear you about being a college student. $99 can be a lot when your income stream is virtually non-existent. You could always do what my roomie and I did in college : sell blood and plasma. We got around $50 every few weeks for doing that, only we spent it on booze and not developing video games.
Companies tend to have these low-cost barriers to entry simply to keep every random person with a game idea from throwing stuff onto their development site. In addition, if it's free, one is more likely to sign up, piddle around and then never create anything. At least with a small entry fee there is a slight financial incentive for you to actually go through with creating and deploying something. To me, $99 is nothing, but it seems like this is targeted at younger kids in their late teens/early twenties. Depending on your family's financial background, $99 is a lot of money to a student with little to no income stream and will ensure that you at least have a vested interest in their program.
Weight Watchers (the only example I can think of right now) has the same principle. They charge you $10-12 a week for their program whether you attend or not. They don't really do anything but weigh you and give you some rah-rah speeches to keep you motivated. The financial cost is there because, psychologically, people who have a vested financial interest in something tend to follow through with it more often and more completely.
I'm sure that's the explanation. I heard that, in order not to seem like a snobby CEO, he's also assigned every Microsoft employee their own personal staff to read and summarize their email for them.
Almost any company that I've worked in, whether the size of MS or the size of one TEAM at MS, has assigned helpers for e-mail, scheduling, etc. to the high level executives. Small companies might have one person for the whole senior leadership team whereas companies as large as MS might have a few people per exec. This isn't uncommon and does nothing to indicate that he's a snobby CEO. I would be willing to wager that senior managers/directors on up @ MS all have staff to assist with e-mail and such.
A co-worker of mine and I were discussing this very issue yesterday. I surmised that Boot Camp will actually increase Windows XP piracy. There's a resonable assumption that many Mac users will have access to some sort of Windows XP disc, and finding a Volume License key to avoid registration is not hard at all. Hell, if you work for a large company, run Belarc Advisor on your corporate box and you probably have the VL key there staring you in the face. If you're a developer, chances are you have MSDN-granted VL keys with your subscription. Ask your neighbor's teenager to find one for you if those don't work.
The bottom line : I can't see people spending $200-300 for a license of Windows XP just to dual-boot on their Mac. Sure, you'll have the Boy Scouts out there that will fork over the cash, but I bet you'll find most people end up installing a not-100%-legal copy of Windows XP on their Intel-based Macs.
First, Bill Gates wants a digital whiteboard but won't get one until later this year. You'd think that he'd be able to have one installed today, within the hour, as the richest man in the world.
This is just a guess, but maybe Microsoft has a process whereby you request a new item (such as a digital whiteboard) and are placed in a queue to get one. To not seem like the snobby CEO that always is granted an exception, he put himself in the queue; it will get installed when IT gets around to his turn.
My workplace is like this -- LCD upgrades are being handed out, and it's the project managers and developers that are receiving them before the management. The managers want to make sure that they're employees are taken care of first. Perhaps Microsoft (and Bill Gates) have this sort of culture/philosophy as well.
I just got back from the Apple Compatibility Labs in Cupertino, and I was able to put my code on a MacBook Pro to do some build comparisons. On my current PowerBook G4, with a 7200 RPM drive, 1 GB RAM and a 1.67 G4, it takes about 20-25 minutes to do a full Release rebuild of my code (Universal Binary). It took around 5 on the MacBook Pro. Thank God my boss was with me to help test because that's the easiest convincing that I need a new laptop I ever done.
Bottom line : if you're a developer and you have long compile times on your code (AND you have the need/desire to be mobile), you NEED one of these machines.
If you ever decide to come stateside, move to Dallas. We have AFL, rugby, cricket, and a rather large Aussie ex-pat contingent. I'm a yank and I went to two Aussie Day parties last weekend. What's even more fun is you'll start to mingle more with yarpies and kiwis than ever before! Just don't tell the folks back home. :^)
Gates is in the tradition of Carnegie, right down to his philanthropy. Jobs is in the tradition of....?
...Fidel Castro?
I was thinking more like :
"In other news, Piper Jaffray analyst Les Santiago was last seen driving around New York City in a Ferrari F430 with the license plate 'THXAMD'."
I've done both. I was actually quoted much faster turnaround from the phone support line. In store they said I would have to leave my laptop there for up to 2 weeks while they ordered the parts. When I asked if I could bring my laptop in when the part arrived, they said no. Why on earth would I need/want to leave my laptop sitting at their store waiting for a keyboard when I could just bring it up one day, drop it off for a couple of hours and have them install it. Bad, bad service and support, if you ask me.
I've been an on and off customer of Apple's since my first IIc back in the 80s, and I've never seen a product with so many problems accompanied by such trouble in getting it fixed.
I picked up my custom 15" PowerBook on November 25th from FedEx. By the next weekend, my battery wouldn't hold a charge AT ALL, and you could watch the percentage meter in the menu bar tick down like a bomb about to go off. Called Apple, they sent me into a store here in Dallas. No batteries there, so they overnighted one to the store. Problem solved...
...until the left Shift key decided to not work. Have fun writing C++ code with no shift key. Took it to the Apple Store in Plano, had them adjust the key a bit, seemed to be alright. After a day of use, it totally stopped working. Called Apple, bitched up a storm. They refuse to do anything because the laptop wasn't DOA. By this time, I'm getting failure of keys on the left side of the keyboard and the right Shift key no longer works. Requests to ship a keyboard to a store so they can replace it were denied. My only recourse is to send in the laptop.
So, here I am, a week before Macworld, trying to get a product ready and the lone machine that I have is a pain to work with. I ended up purchasing an iCurve (wonderful stand), an Apple Keyboard and a Mighty Mouse (cool once you get used to it) just to get my work done. We ordered an iMac for testing, but by the time it arrived I wasn't willing to compromise my deadline by setting up all my dev tools on it. Not to mention that I ordered a PowerBook because I have the need to be mobile.
I'm sure that my story is unique. The last PB I owned was a G3 Pismo B, and that think kicked some ass. But it's really disheartening when you tell a company that you're trying to prepare for their largest convention of the year, and they just fall back on their "standard policy" song and dance and refuse to try and help you. Oh yeah, I was offered repeatedly to purchase Apple Pro Care for $99, something I didn't feel like I should have to pay for when I had a virtually non-functional laptop less than 3 weeks after it arrived.
Any other horror stories like this?
I was at the Richardson office for a short time, and the FreeHand team, IMO, had the best engineers and managers, especially on the Mac side. It's more of a shame that Macromedia/Adobe lost the talent there (unless they all moved to Cali or Bangalore) than anything else.
I drive by there everyday on my way to work with fond memories of a great place. RIP Macromedia DAG!