Visual C# Express is free XNA's Game Studio Express is free
Q: How much will XNA Game Studio Express/XNA Framework cost? A: The XNA Game Studio Express tools and runtime environment for Windows is completely free. To develop, debug and/or play games on the Xbox 360 you will be required to purchase a XNA "Creator's Club" subscription on the Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Marketplace. The subscription is available in 2 options, $99 a year or $49 for 4 months.
On Windows, if you are using a Right-to-left language (such as Hebrew) the scroll bar appears on the left side. It should be possible to customize any locale to put the scroll bar on the left. You'll probably have to resource hack your locale file.
This article is rediculous FUD and increadibly bias. But yea, I know "you must be new here"....
A feature they wanted in the Ribbon from the start, but were afraid they would not have time for, got bumped in the priority queue due to customer feedback. Basically, the ribbon always could collapse, but now it can AutoHide. Whooopie! Let's bash Microsoft.
"You need to upgrade to the newer version, this problem is fixed in the upgrade." "So what do I have to do?" "Go to.com and click 'Stay up to date' and follow the instructions." "Isn't that a web site?" "Um, Yes..." "Well, I don't have the internet. Can I get the upgrade some other way?" "We can mail you an Upgrade CD, no charge. It will take about three weeks." "Oh, thats too slow. Can you fax it to me?"
I know that you are also trolling, but whatever, I'll bite.
Microsoft has 70,000 employees world wide. About 60,000 of them are based in Redmond, WA and live in the Puget Sound area (i.e. Seattle). Some people like to work 9 to 5, so they rather a 15 to 60 minute bike ride to avoid rush hour traffic. Not to mention they then have to sit in front of a computer for the rest of their lives; better get your exercise in wherever you can.
There are also employee intramural leagues. Many people may play a game of soccer after a day of work (there are on campus fields), take a shower, and then DRIVE home.
Saying that the only victory is the return of the towels is so naive that is appears to be intentionally trolling.
The real victory was the change of the review system. Mini-Msft fought for two primary reasons: 1) To eliminate stack ranking 2) To layoff under performers
If you read the farewell posts at all, you would know that the performance review system has been changed to no longer utilize stack ranking and that clear identification of under performers has been made easier. Whether or not Mini helped, goal #1? rocked it. goal #2? Hopefully going to follow from goal #1
The towels are a symbolic victory. The towel benefit was revoked in an attempt to save money; not even really all that much. There are a fair number of msft/redmond employees who bike to work. The lack of towels actually setup a significant barrier to performance for these people because if they forgot a towel, they need to travel several extra miles to the PRO Club to shower when they could have taken a shower in their building and gotten right to working. The symbolism is that Microsoft's leadership had forgotten the importance of these benefits and reinstated the towels indicating that the loss of productivity or employee satisfaction wasn't worth the few million bucks.
If there is a strong remote verification system, then a no warning, single offense, permanent ban policy can make it virtually impossible to circumvent.
In order to craft an undetectable hack, one will almost certainly get detected through failure. It would be prohibitively costly for a hacker to consistently sign up for a new Live account each time they get banned.
Note that I am talking about a ban of the Live user account, not the serial number. It is pointless to ban a serial number because one could spoof that as well.
Xbox 360 related coverage will be available here on Microsoft's Xbox site. I also believe that you will be able to download demos and videos via Xbox Live Marketplace directly from your 360.
I'm not asking you to agree with me in the details, but you must, in good conscience, accept that it's reasonable for someone to view Microsoft's Embrace and Extend policy as subversive and ultimately countrary to the common good.
First of all, I applaud you. This statement makes me honestly feel as though I did not waste my time with my previous post; it is uncommon for someone to argue on the internet with your degree of professionalism. Thank you.
I can understand your view. It is most definitely reasonable to view the Embrace and Extend policy as subversive and ultimate contrary to the common good, however I feel that view is incorrect.
You have made a compelling argument for the adherence to standards. I agree that Microsoft's failure to adequately support web standards has done some harm to the common good. Microsoft's support for web standards is poor, however Microsoft is working towards fixing it. I am using currently IE7, it is way better, but by no means perfect. The IE team has decided to fix THE BIG ISSUES that plague developers rather than strive for perfect standards compatibility. Sadly, "broken code" (that doesn't meet web standards, but works on IE) is the de facto standard and Microsoft is working hard to ensure that this de facto standard is not violated (i.e. working "broken code" will continue to work under IE7).
I feel that formal standards in general can hurt the common good in many cases. Take for example, OpenGL. OpenGL 2.0 is looong overdue. OpenGL is a horribly old standard and it has only survived in modern games through extensions that replace a large portion of the core functionality of OpenGL. ATI and nVidia are constantly adding extensions (and publishing documentation) which the competitor is copying. As a result, OpenGL has remained a standard and you can trust most extensions to work cross-card. If ATI and nVidia did not embrace and extend OpenGL, Microsoft's Direct3D would have destroyed it.
Standards have their uses, but they can very easily impede innovation. OpenGL was lucky to have implemented a clear extension mechanism. Maybe the W3C should have done the same for HTML.
Someone on the IE team dropped the ball way back in time (hell, Bill Gates has public apologized for it!), but Microsoft continues to pick and choose which standards it will support with the goal of providing the best possible products. Sure they have made mistakes, but it isn't right to misconstrue those mistakes as deliberate attempts to cause harm while ignoring the benefits sought and often achieved.
"The 'Embrace and Extend' strategy on which Microsoft has relied since about 1998 is designed to be divisive and ultimately to support Microsoft's one interest: by hook or by crook, to land everyone on the Microsoft platform."
Don't like Microsoft's extensions? Don't use them. I've been developing software on Microsoft platforms for years and as far as I know, all Microsoft extensions are clearly labeled as such in the documentation.
"So feel free to act as apologist for the soulless corporate machine if you must"
Real people work at Microsoft. I'm proud to say that I am one of them. These are smart people that are doing their damnedest to produce world class software. The truth of the matter is that Microsoft routinely produces extensions that ADD VALUE to Microsoft products. I often use a variety of the MSXML extensions to the DOM because I am developing for Microsoft platforms and they SAVE ME TIME as a developer. I use the __finally construct in my C++ code because it saves me from creating dozens of trivial wrapper objects for simple memory allocations.
"That last point is the key. Why on earth would MS build an entirely new way to get one's email when secure IMAP or POP3 already exist?"Lots of reasons:
It's web based (Why would Yahoo build its web mail? Why would Google build GMail?)
Outlook web access also provides access to all features of exchange which include...
calendar
address book
tasks
notes
public folders (such as email distribution list archives)
If you should be mad at anyone, be mad at those who create applications with no reguard for alternative platforms. You might argue that Microsoft is in that category, but you would be wrong. Outlook Web Access has had a "Basic" version since 1.0 that has always been compatible with alternative browsers. If you are going to build a cross-platform product, don't use Microsoft extensions. The sad truth is that since Microsoft owns the desktop market, the "soulless" 3rd-party corporate machines that produce software and web pages that only run on Microsoft's browsers and technologies do so because the small market share of other platforms does not justify testing against other platforms and more importantly, Microsoft extensions SAVE THEM MONEY in development time.
I agree that W3C compliant sites should render correctly and you are correct that IE does not always do so.
However...
In this case, this is an extension to HTML. And as much as standards compliance freaks hate extensions, your argument is not valid in this particular instance. You do not need to develop a workaround for a feature you would not be using if your page is W3C complaint because you would not have used this feature to begin with.
IE extensions have proven to be a very good thing for the web overall. It has always been IE that has pushed the limits of dynamic web pages through the inclusion of similar extensions (primarily for the development of Outlook Web Access) which have given birth to the technologies that fuel AJAX and other modern web techniques.
This, however, does not preclude you from hating conditional comments for other reasons.
Save yourself n-1 round_down calls and this will be faster assuming the cost of floating point comparisons is roughly equivilant to integer comparisons.
Right, so whatever hocky game my friend has is NOT GOOD SOFTWARE.
Geometry wars, Call of Duty 2, Halo 2, Full Auto, and the various other games do not exhibit this behavior. Shitty, buggy games exist on all platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, clearly what I ment :-)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/faq/
Visual C# Express is free
XNA's Game Studio Express is free
Q: How much will XNA Game Studio Express/XNA Framework cost?
A: The XNA Game Studio Express tools and runtime environment for Windows is completely free. To develop, debug and/or play games on the Xbox 360 you will be required to purchase a XNA "Creator's Club" subscription on the Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Marketplace. The subscription is available in 2 options, $99 a year or $49 for 4 months.
He'll be calling you before the PS3 hits store shelves...
Oh, but it's not free: it is $99/hr (free for Windows)
On Windows, if you are using a Right-to-left language (such as Hebrew) the scroll bar appears on the left side. It should be possible to customize any locale to put the scroll bar on the left. You'll probably have to resource hack your locale file.
You should really check out ProFX from Allegorithmic: http://allegorithmic.com/v2/ProFX_1.htm
It's a proceedural texture generation toolkit and I've seen some impressive demos.
They aren't changing shit.
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d rive.mspx
This article is rediculous FUD and increadibly bias. But yea, I know "you must be new here"....
A feature they wanted in the Ribbon from the start, but were afraid they would not have time for, got bumped in the priority queue due to customer feedback. Basically, the ribbon always could collapse, but now it can AutoHide. Whooopie! Let's bash Microsoft.
Watch the movies here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/20/
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/24/
And the Ribbon does not take up all that much space, see the comparisons and pixel height counts here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/
I've been a Office 2007 Beta 2 user since it's release. The new UI is fantastic. Try it out for yourselves:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/test
Won't work: this will simply create more gravity that will suck in all the skinny people. Fatsville will collapse into dark matter.
Google for "search" with the non-accessable search page:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=search
You get MSN anyway.
"You need to upgrade to the newer version, this problem is fixed in the upgrade." .com and click 'Stay up to date' and follow the instructions."
"So what do I have to do?"
"Go to
"Isn't that a web site?"
"Um, Yes..."
"Well, I don't have the internet. Can I get the upgrade some other way?"
"We can mail you an Upgrade CD, no charge. It will take about three weeks."
"Oh, thats too slow. Can you fax it to me?"
Recording a smell for playback is a little bit different than designing a smell for playback...
The editors would not have had this problem if they were using Word 2007 Beta 2 :-)6 29124.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/13/
I know that you are also trolling, but whatever, I'll bite.
Microsoft has 70,000 employees world wide. About 60,000 of them are based in Redmond, WA and live in the Puget Sound area (i.e. Seattle). Some people like to work 9 to 5, so they rather a 15 to 60 minute bike ride to avoid rush hour traffic. Not to mention they then have to sit in front of a computer for the rest of their lives; better get your exercise in wherever you can.
There are also employee intramural leagues. Many people may play a game of soccer after a day of work (there are on campus fields), take a shower, and then DRIVE home.
Saying that the only victory is the return of the towels is so naive that is appears to be intentionally trolling.
The real victory was the change of the review system. Mini-Msft fought for two primary reasons:
1) To eliminate stack ranking
2) To layoff under performers
If you read the farewell posts at all, you would know that the performance review system has been changed to no longer utilize stack ranking and that clear identification of under performers has been made easier. Whether or not Mini helped, goal #1? rocked it. goal #2? Hopefully going to follow from goal #1
The towels are a symbolic victory. The towel benefit was revoked in an attempt to save money; not even really all that much. There are a fair number of msft/redmond employees who bike to work. The lack of towels actually setup a significant barrier to performance for these people because if they forgot a towel, they need to travel several extra miles to the PRO Club to shower when they could have taken a shower in their building and gotten right to working. The symbolism is that Microsoft's leadership had forgotten the importance of these benefits and reinstated the towels indicating that the loss of productivity or employee satisfaction wasn't worth the few million bucks.
The automatic volume leveling feature works great for me in Windows Media Player :-)
If there is a strong remote verification system, then a no warning, single offense, permanent ban policy can make it virtually impossible to circumvent.
In order to craft an undetectable hack, one will almost certainly get detected through failure. It would be prohibitively costly for a hacker to consistently sign up for a new Live account each time they get banned.
Note that I am talking about a ban of the Live user account, not the serial number. It is pointless to ban a serial number because one could spoof that as well.
Go ahead, make all sorts of assumptions and develop a bunch of theories. Or look up the facts:
1 /472407.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/marcelolr/archive/2005/09/2
Windows will have standardized spell checking in Vista (and down level on XP).
Thank you! The grand parent poster is a moron.
If the meeting isn't important, decline it.
**WHOOSH**
Xbox 360 related coverage will be available here on Microsoft's Xbox site. I also believe that you will be able to download demos and videos via Xbox Live Marketplace directly from your 360.
I'm not asking you to agree with me in the details, but you must, in good conscience, accept that it's reasonable for someone to view Microsoft's Embrace and Extend policy as subversive and ultimately countrary to the common good.
First of all, I applaud you. This statement makes me honestly feel as though I did not waste my time with my previous post; it is uncommon for someone to argue on the internet with your degree of professionalism. Thank you.
I can understand your view. It is most definitely reasonable to view the Embrace and Extend policy as subversive and ultimate contrary to the common good, however I feel that view is incorrect.
You have made a compelling argument for the adherence to standards. I agree that Microsoft's failure to adequately support web standards has done some harm to the common good. Microsoft's support for web standards is poor, however Microsoft is working towards fixing it. I am using currently IE7, it is way better, but by no means perfect. The IE team has decided to fix THE BIG ISSUES that plague developers rather than strive for perfect standards compatibility. Sadly, "broken code" (that doesn't meet web standards, but works on IE) is the de facto standard and Microsoft is working hard to ensure that this de facto standard is not violated (i.e. working "broken code" will continue to work under IE7).
I feel that formal standards in general can hurt the common good in many cases. Take for example, OpenGL. OpenGL 2.0 is looong overdue. OpenGL is a horribly old standard and it has only survived in modern games through extensions that replace a large portion of the core functionality of OpenGL. ATI and nVidia are constantly adding extensions (and publishing documentation) which the competitor is copying. As a result, OpenGL has remained a standard and you can trust most extensions to work cross-card. If ATI and nVidia did not embrace and extend OpenGL, Microsoft's Direct3D would have destroyed it.
Standards have their uses, but they can very easily impede innovation. OpenGL was lucky to have implemented a clear extension mechanism. Maybe the W3C should have done the same for HTML.
Someone on the IE team dropped the ball way back in time (hell, Bill Gates has public apologized for it!), but Microsoft continues to pick and choose which standards it will support with the goal of providing the best possible products. Sure they have made mistakes, but it isn't right to misconstrue those mistakes as deliberate attempts to cause harm while ignoring the benefits sought and often achieved.
"The 'Embrace and Extend' strategy on which Microsoft has relied since about 1998 is designed to be divisive and ultimately to support Microsoft's one interest: by hook or by crook, to land everyone on the Microsoft platform."
Don't like Microsoft's extensions? Don't use them. I've been developing software on Microsoft platforms for years and as far as I know, all Microsoft extensions are clearly labeled as such in the documentation.
For some examples, see:
"So feel free to act as apologist for the soulless corporate machine if you must"
Real people work at Microsoft. I'm proud to say that I am one of them. These are smart people that are doing their damnedest to produce world class software. The truth of the matter is that Microsoft routinely produces extensions that ADD VALUE to Microsoft products. I often use a variety of the MSXML extensions to the DOM because I am developing for Microsoft platforms and they SAVE ME TIME as a developer. I use the __finally construct in my C++ code because it saves me from creating dozens of trivial wrapper objects for simple memory allocations.
"That last point is the key. Why on earth would MS build an entirely new way to get one's email when secure IMAP or POP3 already exist?"Lots of reasons:
If you should be mad at anyone, be mad at those who create applications with no reguard for alternative platforms. You might argue that Microsoft is in that category, but you would be wrong. Outlook Web Access has had a "Basic" version since 1.0 that has always been compatible with alternative browsers. If you are going to build a cross-platform product, don't use Microsoft extensions. The sad truth is that since Microsoft owns the desktop market, the "soulless" 3rd-party corporate machines that produce software and web pages that only run on Microsoft's browsers and technologies do so because the small market share of other platforms does not justify testing against other platforms and more importantly, Microsoft extensions SAVE THEM MONEY in development time.
I agree that W3C compliant sites should render correctly and you are correct that IE does not always do so.
However...
In this case, this is an extension to HTML. And as much as standards compliance freaks hate extensions, your argument is not valid in this particular instance. You do not need to develop a workaround for a feature you would not be using if your page is W3C complaint because you would not have used this feature to begin with.
IE extensions have proven to be a very good thing for the web overall. It has always been IE that has pushed the limits of dynamic web pages through the inclusion of similar extensions (primarily for the development of Outlook Web Access) which have given birth to the technologies that fuel AJAX and other modern web techniques.
This, however, does not preclude you from hating conditional comments for other reasons.
Hey! That's building 115! I just started working in there a few weeks ago :-) The building also houses the Managed Solutions teams.
Or better yet:
round_down(min(component_scores))
Save yourself n-1 round_down calls and this will be faster assuming the cost of floating point comparisons is roughly equivilant to integer comparisons.
I concur!
And there is the potential for future optimizations. For example: the CLR could conceivably do profile-guided optimization automatically.
Right, so whatever hocky game my friend has is NOT GOOD SOFTWARE.
Geometry wars, Call of Duty 2, Halo 2, Full Auto, and the various other games do not exhibit this behavior. Shitty, buggy games exist on all platforms.