Third answer, they ran into opera bugs and didnÂt have the finding to spend the necessary time to work around them. I recently had to do a degrated version of a site for opera because I ran into bugs and speedbumps not easily fixable and fixed by opera already in their alpha version of version 10. Sorry to say that while opera in its 9.x incarnation does not have many bugs it has some and some of them are really severe and not easy to bypass because opera does not allow conditional css includes like ie does and it is not everyones idea to hack css via javascript for hours just to support that browser!
Wrong games: Trine, excellent puzzle jump and run although too short Wallace and Grommit: Excellent adventure capturing the spirit of the movies perfectly Tales of Monkey Island so far very promising Ceville, excellent comit adventure World of goo, probably the best puzzle game of the last years Braid excellent mixture of jump and run and puzzle game
I have mostly given up on the high profile area, independend games is currently my interest and the revived adventure game genre and so far the last year and this year have been excellent. The turning point for avoiding high profile games as much as possible (with exceptions, I also play currently Drankensang and the Witcher) was the latest prince of persia, fine graphics but they forgot the game!
Depends on your taste, this year for me so far has been great with two monkey island games having come out and Wallace and Grommit as adventure game. Btw. it is really amazing how many adventure games generally have come out lately.
On what basis would you expect it to have marketshare even remotely close to XP's ?
The pirates would have moved to Vista right away if it was worth a damn. That's half of the market right there. By Microsoft's own licensing numbers, Vista should have passed XP sometime last year. Apparently a whole lot of people bought Vista who didn't want it. Why is that?
Microsofts bundeling tactics, I also bought a notebook two years ago, it had vista on it, well lets say it that way, after the license sticker was lost at a repair, I never even inquired another license, I could not even be bothered to phone in, too much work for a system which basically was unbearable! So you can count me for one Vista license which is basically lost and unused and the harddrive formatted!
I think the excitement comes from the speed, it finally again is more or less at the same speed levels as XP (how well this will work out if you have myriads of files on your machine, only time will tell) It is not that Vista per se was bad, it just was such a resource hog that it was unbearable (I remember horribly the 20 minutes disk thrashing on my notebook hd after startup). But I agree there are still a load of stupid things in Windows, and instead of becoming less they just shift to other areas! I personally found windows7
a) The humor has not become less, it is still there and the genres which had it still have it in the same amount. Look at the myriad of adventure games released in the last 2 years and about 30% of them have been on the comical side, while the other genres occasionally have a humorous game. Same situation as ever!
b) Grossman does not work at Lucasarts (I think he used to work there) he works at Telltale Games and they just do exactly that, comical adventure games!
There ones was a nice little tool, AtGuard it did what it was supposed to do with a lean user interface which did not get in the way, it had 5 MB. One day the atguard people said Symantec has bought them and it came out as Norton Whatever, the next version was 150 MB with a bloated UI from hell which was supposed to make things easier, but made it unusable, it bogged down the machine and deep hidden somewhere was still an option to reach the original ui. Needless to say, after that I never touched any Symantec software anymore. As for Norton Antivirus, I scrape it off from any machine where I can find it, it is simply the worst of almost all of them, not that the others are better but there are at least leaner alternatives which do not have the UI-ritis from hell!
I'm do more Java development, but that sounds more like bad design than.NET's fault.
Why are you creating so much garbage that it takes tens or hundreds of milliseconds to resolve?
One severe hit by the garbage collector or the kernel swapping out and you have the problem. You cannot really have a dedicated response time in VM based systems less even in systems with swapping behavior like windows! Realtime is realtime, everything else is not!
I have no real issue with Windows as the OS under the platform, really for a trading system the OS is providing a TCP stack and some IPC and thats about it. Everything else and the vast majority of the bottlenecks are in your application stack, whether it be tools or application code you are writing for your specific problem domain. Although one might argue that the Microsoft IPC tools can be argued as
Dont get me wrong but dont you need realtime systems for such tasks, especially if you have to rely on dedicated response times, you neither can use an OS with scheduling from hell which often thrashes the disk out of nowhere, nor you can use a VM based system with garbage collecting with unpredictable results. There are vm based systems which have more predictable results but they usually turn off garbage collecting for exactly those kind of reasons!
Actually who planned the entire system that way should get a headsmack, if you need dedicated response times you gotta go with a realtime system, no matter what. You cannot push an os which clearly is not realtime (by Microsofts definition it is soft realtime which means sometimes it reaches it) and on top a vm based system which is not even closely realtime in its garbage collection strategies and then expect to get something useful out of it!
The poor sods ad accenture (I assume as well some outsourced engineers) now will get the smacking but they are probably the ones who said for the beginning this cannot work!
Did the project. They needed a dedicated response time in the 1/100th second range and used a combination of Windows, SQL Server and.Net! The project was doomed from day 0! The article is at fault here, Windows alone is not at fault it is the entire stack beginning from the OS up to the implementation language which is at fault!
I can remember several cases ( MacBooks, iMacs, what have you) where they've had overheating issues... pretty sloppy engineering if you ask me.
Citation needed? How many different models have had overheating issues, and what was the failure rate?
I know some of their laptops would become noticeably warm, but some of that is specifically because they're leading heat away from the device by using parts of the case as a heat sink. I remember reading that some people had problems where the MacBook Air would run slowly at times because, when it started running too hot, it would go into some kind of "reduced power mode". Neither of those things are really sloppy engineering, but only design choices.
Some people is good, the threads regarding the air have been in the top 10 of the support forum for almost a year now, and no it is not a reduced power mode! The problem is following, once the air reaches a certain combination of heat sensor triggers the kernel task goes haywire (seems like a software cooling measure) and locks the machine up literally for 10-15 minutes, you cannot even type without a 1 minute delay if it hits that mode! Dont tell me this is a design choice. The deadly thing about this is, that you have a high chance that you are not hit within your 2 weeks grace period because the chances are high that if you work in an air conditioned surrounding the problem wont byte you, but as soon as summer arrives, boom there it is!
The funny thing is apple obviously knows about all this, they ran two additional versions which reduced the problem more and more (some are still hit but no as frequently as first generation owners which were hit really hard by the problem) But no word from apple so far, they left their first generation customers hanging in the "air" litterally! I also called apple support and they played we dont know anything about the problem, although the threads in the forums were there for more than a year in the top 10!
Ok if this is a design choice then tell me what a broken by manufacturing machine is, one which does not switch on if you have started it the first time?
It is a wonder if you ask me that Apple so far has not been hit really hard with a class action lawsuit on this!
Tell that to me, I am left here hanging with an overheating first gen macbook air, a 3000 Euro machine and literally threads in the official apple support forum hanging for more than one year reporting the problem, and so far no fix from apple except pushing out the next generation 4 months after the first! Sorry to say that it makes a difference if you get burned for a 100ÃY$ machine or a 4000$ machine!
Actually apple has done a lot of machines with thermal problems in the last 20 years, the most recent examples are the macbook airs and iphones! but if you read it up the first one was the famous apple 3, one of the biggest factors why ibm won over apple in those days and one of the biggest failures where jobs personal ego went against the law of physics and physics won, as always!
Haha if you read that up the best quote was, that Stevie insulted one of his engineers that he did not deserve a raise because he was just a lowly engineer, and the guy figured out what the problem was, he was so insulted that he was telling just smash the machine on the table (because he knew the machine became so hot that the chips went out of their sockets due to thermal bending) and the support then was telling exactly that for weeks to the angry customers!
But for apples sake in the case of the Apple3 they did a general recall and fixed the problem in later cases they often did nothing than leaving the customers hanging dry in the air unless they were hit with a class action lawsuit!
It seems Apple has a hard time learning that electronics cause heat and that this heat needs to be led away from the device.
I can remember several cases ( MacBooks, iMacs, what have you) where they've had overheating issues... pretty sloppy engineering if you ask me.
Well the first batch of Macbook Airs also had severe overheating issues, mostly crawling up in summer, Apple never fixed it, well they did, the fix was to sell a second generation after a few months where the heating issues occur less frequently! So the list of Apples thermal design failures is pretty long starting btw. with the famous Apple 3 whichs thermal problems back then was Steve Jobs personal fault, because he refused to listen to his engineers and demanded a fanless machine!
Would be to kill finally the caps lock key and replace it with a hard to reach key combination! I dont know how many times I fell over the caps lock key in my life.
Problem is that the game prices are so high that preventing used sales, might effect new game sales hugely in a negative way! Simply if you cannot sell the game anymore you think twice even buying it new. I am rather sure it will backfire big time!
Slashdot Mirror
Third answer, they ran into opera bugs and didnÂt have the finding to spend the necessary time to work around them.
I recently had to do a degrated version of a site for opera because I ran into bugs and speedbumps not easily fixable and fixed
by opera already in their alpha version of version 10.
Sorry to say that while opera in its 9.x incarnation does not have many bugs it has some and some of them are really severe and not easy to bypass
because opera does not allow conditional css includes like ie does and it is not everyones idea to hack css via javascript for hours just to support that browser!
Then independend developers will produce for the PC, Wii and PS3.... :-)
Wrong games:
Trine, excellent puzzle jump and run although too short
Wallace and Grommit: Excellent adventure capturing the spirit of the movies perfectly
Tales of Monkey Island so far very promising
Ceville, excellent comit adventure
World of goo, probably the best puzzle game of the last years
Braid excellent mixture of jump and run and puzzle game
I have mostly given up on the high profile area, independend games is currently my interest and the revived adventure game genre and so far the last year and this year have been excellent.
The turning point for avoiding high profile games as much as possible (with exceptions, I also play currently Drankensang and the Witcher) was the latest prince of persia, fine graphics but they forgot the game!
Ah and add to that Trine one of the best jump and run games in the last years which also came out a few weeks ago.
Depends on your taste, this year for me so far has been great with two monkey island games having come out and Wallace and Grommit as adventure game. Btw. it is really amazing how many adventure games generally have come out lately.
Well only console games are priced so high, pc games cost less!
Yeah everybody is entitled to keep ie6 forever as long as he stays away from the internet :-)
On what basis would you expect it to have marketshare even remotely close to XP's ?
The pirates would have moved to Vista right away if it was worth a damn. That's half of the market right there. By Microsoft's own licensing numbers, Vista should have passed XP sometime last year. Apparently a whole lot of people bought Vista who didn't want it. Why is that?
Microsofts bundeling tactics, I also bought a notebook two years ago, it had vista on it, well lets say it that way, after the license sticker was lost at a repair, I never even inquired another license, I could not even be bothered to phone in, too much work for a system which basically was unbearable!
So you can count me for one Vista license which is basically lost and unused and the harddrive formatted!
I think the excitement comes from the speed, it finally again is more or less at the same speed levels as XP (how well this will work out if you have myriads of files on your machine, only time will tell)
It is not that Vista per se was bad, it just was such a resource hog that it was unbearable (I remember horribly the 20 minutes disk thrashing on my notebook hd after startup). But I agree there are still a load of stupid things in Windows, and instead of becoming less they just shift to other areas!
I personally found windows7
a) The humor has not become less, it is still there and the genres which had it still have it in the same amount. Look at the myriad of adventure games released in the last 2 years and about 30% of them have been on the comical side, while the other genres occasionally have a humorous game. Same situation as ever!
b) Grossman does not work at Lucasarts (I think he used to work there) he works at Telltale Games and they just do exactly that, comical adventure games!
There ones was a nice little tool, AtGuard it did what it was supposed to do with a lean user interface which did not get in the way, it had 5 MB. One day the atguard people said Symantec has bought them and it came out as Norton Whatever, the next version was 150 MB with a bloated UI from hell which was supposed to make things easier, but made it unusable, it bogged down the machine and deep hidden somewhere was still an option to reach the original ui. Needless to say, after that I never touched any Symantec software anymore. As for Norton Antivirus, I scrape it off from any machine where I can find it, it is simply the worst of almost all of them, not that the others are better but there are at least leaner alternatives which do not have the UI-ritis from hell!
I'm do more Java development, but that sounds more like bad design than .NET's fault.
Why are you creating so much garbage that it takes tens or hundreds of milliseconds to resolve?
One severe hit by the garbage collector or the kernel swapping out and you have the problem. You cannot really have a dedicated response time in VM based systems less even in systems with swapping behavior like windows!
Realtime is realtime, everything else is not!
I have no real issue with Windows as the OS under the platform, really for a trading system the OS is providing a TCP stack and some IPC and thats about it. Everything else and the vast majority of the bottlenecks are in your application stack, whether it be tools or application code you are writing for your specific problem domain. Although one might argue that the Microsoft IPC tools can be argued as
Dont get me wrong but dont you need realtime systems for such tasks, especially if you have to rely on dedicated response times, you neither can use an OS with scheduling from hell which often thrashes the disk out of nowhere, nor you can use a VM based system with garbage collecting with unpredictable results. There are vm based systems which have more predictable results but they usually turn off garbage collecting for exactly those kind of reasons!
Actually who planned the entire system that way should get a headsmack, if you need dedicated response times you gotta go with a realtime system, no matter what. You cannot push an os which clearly is not realtime (by Microsofts definition it is soft realtime which means sometimes it reaches it) and on top a vm based system which is not even closely realtime in its garbage collection strategies and then expect to get something useful out of it!
The poor sods ad accenture (I assume as well some outsourced engineers) now will get the smacking but they are probably the ones who said for the beginning this cannot work!
Btw. the same would apply to a blank linux java stack....
You need realtime stuff to do that!
Did the project. They needed a dedicated response time in the 1/100th second range and used a combination of Windows, SQL Server and .Net!
The project was doomed from day 0!
The article is at fault here, Windows alone is not at fault it is the entire stack beginning from the OS up to the implementation language which is at fault!
I can remember several cases ( MacBooks, iMacs, what have you) where they've had overheating issues ... pretty sloppy engineering if you ask me.
Citation needed? How many different models have had overheating issues, and what was the failure rate?
I know some of their laptops would become noticeably warm, but some of that is specifically because they're leading heat away from the device by using parts of the case as a heat sink. I remember reading that some people had problems where the MacBook Air would run slowly at times because, when it started running too hot, it would go into some kind of "reduced power mode". Neither of those things are really sloppy engineering, but only design choices.
Some people is good, the threads regarding the air have been in the top 10 of the support forum for almost a year now, and no it is not a reduced power mode!
The problem is following, once the air reaches a certain combination of heat sensor triggers the kernel task goes haywire (seems like a software cooling measure) and locks the machine up literally for 10-15 minutes, you cannot even type without a 1 minute delay if it hits that mode!
Dont tell me this is a design choice. The deadly thing about this is, that you have a high chance that you are not hit within your 2 weeks grace period because the chances are high that if you work in an air conditioned surrounding the problem wont byte you, but as soon as summer arrives, boom there it is!
The funny thing is apple obviously knows about all this, they ran two additional versions which reduced the problem more and more (some are still hit but no as frequently as first generation owners which were hit really hard by the problem)
But no word from apple so far, they left their first generation customers hanging in the "air" litterally!
I also called apple support and they played we dont know anything about the problem, although the threads in the forums were there for more than a year in the top 10!
Ok if this is a design choice then tell me what a broken by manufacturing machine is, one which does not switch on if you have started it the first time?
It is a wonder if you ask me that Apple so far has not been hit really hard with a class action lawsuit on this!
Tell that to me, I am left here hanging with an overheating first gen macbook air, a 3000 Euro machine and literally threads in the official apple support forum hanging for more than one year reporting the problem, and so far no fix from apple except pushing out the next generation 4 months after the first!
Sorry to say that it makes a difference if you get burned for a 100ÃY$ machine or a 4000$ machine!
Actually apple has done a lot of machines with thermal problems in the last 20 years, the most recent examples are the macbook airs and iphones!
but if you read it up the first one was the famous apple 3, one of the biggest factors why ibm won over apple in those days and one of the biggest failures where jobs personal ego went against the law of physics and physics won, as always!
Haha if you read that up the best quote was, that Stevie insulted one of his engineers that he did not deserve a raise because he was just a lowly engineer, and the guy figured out what the problem was, he was so insulted that he was telling just smash the machine on the table (because he knew the machine became so hot that the chips went out of their sockets due to thermal bending) and the support then was telling exactly that for weeks to the angry customers!
But for apples sake in the case of the Apple3 they did a general recall and fixed the problem in later cases they often did nothing than leaving the customers hanging dry in the air unless they were hit with a class action lawsuit!
... testing anyone?
It seems Apple has a hard time learning that electronics cause heat and that this heat needs to be led away from the device.
I can remember several cases ( MacBooks, iMacs, what have you) where they've had overheating issues ... pretty sloppy engineering if you ask me.
Well the first batch of Macbook Airs also had severe overheating issues, mostly crawling up in summer, Apple never fixed it, well they did, the fix was to sell a second generation after a few months where the heating issues occur less frequently!
So the list of Apples thermal design failures is pretty long starting btw. with the famous Apple 3 whichs thermal problems back then was Steve Jobs personal fault, because he refused to listen to his engineers and demanded a fanless machine!
wanders through the street with a bell...
XPCollector: "ring ring ring, bring out your corpses..."
Would be to kill finally the caps lock key and replace it with a hard to reach key combination!
I dont know how many times I fell over the caps lock key in my life.
Problem is that the game prices are so high that preventing used sales, might effect new game sales hugely in a negative way!
Simply if you cannot sell the game anymore you think twice even buying it new. I am rather sure it will backfire big time!
Download the Trine game demo from Steam and then lets talk again..