Well, if EVERYBODY started to torrent porn or Top Gear(same thing, really) for one day and watched all of this then indeed Europe would come to a standstill.
Would anybody notice? I won't, because I will be torrenting porn and Top Gear.
The EU Parliament is elected. But the election is very low-key. Almost under the radar. Voting for the local mayor has a bigger campaign. When have you last seen campaign posters with that blue and circle of stars logo? I don't even know if the UK sends MPs to the EU Parliament. Seems like a political dead-end to me, anyway.
The EU Parliamant is a rather toothless, feeble thing due to the EU member countries not wanting to sign over sovereign rights. There are a couple of treaties for signing EU stuff into national law but most countries simply drag their feet. The process how this EU law-making process works is also not quite ideal...
The EU Commission is elected by gorvernments who themselves are elected. That's barely legitimate when it comes to democracy.
Oh god! I had hoped never to hear another story about Kim Schmitz again. He is a fraud. He claims to be an expert hacker, financial genious(even had his own dodgy investment company KimVestor...) and all around wonderful person when all he is is a globulous fraud.
He is at the bottom of this? That explains a lot. The only surprise is that he is out of prison or not bankrupted beyond all financial redemption. The only reason he isn't a German citizen anymore is because he is a household name here and nobody would touch him with a 10' pole or throw money his way.
Whatever the leagal status of Megaupload.com was and if what they do is legal or should be legal, all these questions aside:
Given his track record it is safe to assume it was set up with fraudulent intent or has shifted to fraudulent operations because this fat fly only gets attracted by the biggest turds.
The bummer is, if you want copyright law reform of any kind you'll have to stand in his corner of the ring even if you'd feel like having a shower afterwards and are constantly vomiting into his direction.
Keystores...and a lot of potential candidates for the keystore where the app might consider looking in.
That's like searching for a specific egg in a chicken farm. You need to break it to find the right one. Even thinking about it makes me butthurt.
Yeah, that's the theory.
And then somebody comes up with a new and improved
public boolean isTrue(boolean b) {
boolean returnValue;
if(b != true) {
returnValue = false;
} else {
if(b == true) {
returnValue = true;
}
}
return returnValue;
}
I don't want to live on this planet anymore. I actually found one of those in SVN. I didn't even bother looking at who checked it in. I simply deleted it,
didn't bother to fix the code so the whole thing didn't compile. Instead I sent this snippet to everybody on the team and asked for suggestions why
I shouldn't fire that person since I couldn't think of one.
So asking for knowing how things like references work might be a bit too much to ask.
Memory leaks in any auto GC environment means that references to stuff are being leaked out to placed where they shouldn't go to.
You need to be careful to pass Collections, arrays and the likes out of their application architecture scope.
But I do see a lot of current generation Java developers who don't understand the basic concept of pointers and the GC. Without that you WILL get memory leak issues. But guess what, the same coders would cause the same troubles in any other language. And even if you HAD some sort of relyable free() mechanism and you would cause NullPointerExceptions then these same coders would hunt down your.free() on the offending object, simply comment it out and proudly close the NullPointer issue in whatever issue tracking system(most commonly Excel or email...which is another issue) you use.
I've had developers who referenced JSF Session Beans in generated Hibernate entities. It took quite a little bit of reeducation* to stop them from doing that again.
reeducation I had fully planned beat them up. HR told me that was against policy and firing them would mean I'd have to teach another set of otherwise competent coders how to do stuff. Grrrrr.
The BASF facilities at Limburgerhof are quite nice, actually. Lots of wild rabbit hopping around unused lots, a pond in front of the main building and quite new buildings whereas the offices at the main facilities(30k employees in one spot, they even have their own bus service on the main campus, can you imagine that?) seem to be 50-100 years old.
I wonder who calls dibs on Limburgerhof. BASF even had an annual farmer's market at Limburgerhof. Pity, I'll miss them.
If you think any of the 200 employees who don't want to relocate will be let go, than you are mistaken. That's not how BASF rolls.
Pick up anything at random on your desk. Just about anything. If it doesn't have at least 5% of its material produced by BASF then I would consider it a miracle. BASF is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, chemical companies in the world. Their employees worldwide could fill easily a small country. So calling it a German company might be a little bit off. I doubt this move even made headlines in their corporate newspaper.
They got into realy hot water for producing GM potatoes in Scandinavia in the open next to stuff that was to be used for food. Their potatoes were GMed for production of starch.
Detection of dead code is something you can automate.
But removing deprecated code is a totally different matter. I spent yesterday replacing methods and calls to them. I netted -10k lines of code.
What really aggravates me is when people keep dead code around just in case it would come in handy again. It never does. And if it did, that's what code repositories are for.
Every time I hire a new coder the first thing I teach them is how to deal with Subversion and how to use diff. Hand in hand with that comes the simple refactoring that comes with every modern IDE. It's not rocket surgery. Code needs to be simple and maintainable.
Actually the worst is optimization. I don't care if my code is near O(n^3). I only iterate over a list of 5 values. Every five minutes. there's no need to replace my 10 lines of code with 100. That's especially aggravating when this is done by a guy who saves the same stuff into the database five times, all in new transactions, when somebody presses the save button. Now THAT'S criminal.
Having the TSA around is like paying Nobby Nobbs to fundle your bum and nick all your coin.
At least that's what the article wants us to believe.
The TSA is our last line of defense against everything that is against us and we might not even be aware of. These heroic, chisel jawed Nightwatchmen, these brave, well not soldiers, but heroic nonetheless persons of unknown qualification, descent or even species heroicly probe where no probe had dared to probe before. ...also fondle, slap, tickle and squeeze.
These artisans of the prostate, minions of the fearful, these rubber-gloved black-clad connaisseurs of the sphincters shall ever be remembered by a Monument of Massive Proportions made of other people's previous luncheons.
So they find money while you desperately try to get rid of any metal or lubricants and some of that gets even sent to the main office? Sort of an involuntary tip? Like a mugger, but with a receipt?
I do remember the dot com bust. Before that everybody and his uncle claimed to be a coder after having read HTML for Dummies and Java for Dummies. It was terrible.
Why did they do it? Because there was gold in the hills. Proper coding takes a special kind of structured thinking. You've got a goal, you've got requirements and you need to break it down into subproblems of subproblems while not forgetting the overall goal. Not everybody is cut out to be a lawyer. Not everybody is cut out to be an artisan. Not everybody is cut out to be a business owner. Not everybody is cut out to be a coder.
And coders are not all the same. Some thrive in the front end and are very very good anticipating how users willl use the system(which is never how they told you). Others are very good in layers that involve logic. Others are optimization wizards. Others are very good when it comes to communicating with interface owners. And so on.
I really, really hate it when news outlets publish that there is gold in the hills when there isn't. Everybody rushes out and most of those that rush out will never make it.
Heh, once I figured out that IL-2 Sturmovik had quite a bit of Java in it I immediately wanted to know how much. Encrypted JARs, propably custom class loader, oh I really wanted to know how they did it.
Then there was that old Oracle Java database lib that slowed the system down whenever we wanted to use a connection pool. A quick profiler run unearthed that it spent 98% of its time in Thread.yield(). Called from within the Oracle drivers. If I hadn't had some McKinzey dude breathing down my eck at that moment I would have set the guns to very disassemble.If you see that kind of train wreck then you really want to witness the extent of the carnage.
Yeah, I'm planning on checking it out. I just managed to train my people in JSF 2.0 but we will be needing GWT sooner or later.
Right tool for the job. When I see the job.
We mostly do web applications with about 140 forms and just as clever as the customer wants to pay..
Turns out simple is simple enough.
Bastion is as far as I can tell written in.NET. At least when I installed it I also got a huge.NET update. Was too lazy to investigate it, so I may be full of bull.
If you have a netbook or anything then you should really give it a whirl. Its just a couple of bucks on steam so there is no real risk involved.
Roger Ebert convincingly argued a couple of years ago that computer games never could be art. Bastion may very well be the game that proves him wrong. It's fun, too.
And to be honest I'm not too fond of console players. That's propably unfair, but hey, it's just my opinion. Not a big deal.
It does seem a bit unfair, may I ask why?
.because I heard bad things about them and only play PC games so, as I said, that's unfair and most likely bs.
I usd a game controller with Deus Ex: Human revolution(even tho I played it through on "Tell me a story mode"). Aiming a gun for a quick head shot was bad. I'd be in cover, aim while in cover(which took ages), pop out and pop a cap in EVERY F*CKING BELLTOWER OP because mercs need to die.
Since that that was a bit tedious and inefficient I thought I could aim with the mouse and if needs be move with the controller. Nope. Didn't work.
I would even be prepared to re-learn using a trackball for aiming. Moving with keyboard is bad. Aiming with a thumb stick is bad. Could we please combine the best of two worlds? Pretty please?
Nope. It does mean that most inefficiencies are introduced by bad programming. Write inefficient C code and it will be slow. Write inefficient Java code and it will be slow.
If you are paid for the results(ie an application) and have to compete over price then you will not write code that is optimal(as in: the fastest way to run things) but rather whatever you can do with your budget. And writing optimal code has a very low priority when compared to writing maintainable code. Testable code. If you write a cutsom application for Enterprises(aka Big Corps, has been around for 100 years will be around for another 100) then you will have to plan ahead for the guys who have to extend your code 5 years down the line. Or port it. Also those applications tend to be broing as shit. All UI, data gets dumped into the database and somebody compiles a report. Job done. Well payd drudgery. You could write something like that in TCL/TK and it would be fast enough.
Speed only matters when you have a lot of computation.
Speed also matters when doing data analysis. But that is what databases are for nowadays. No need to reinvent the wheel.Simply drink the Oracle BI cool aid and weep into your drink after hours. It's hard to be challenged anymore.
If I had a dollar for whenever I saw some novice doing IO or expensive computation in the Swing event thread I'd be...well...not rich but it would be sufficient for a night-out for me and my friends. It's amazing how many "experts" don't know how to do threads in any way, shape or form. They are quite trivial to implement in Java but being threds they need some kind of planning.
But you are wrong about the Swing API. Now I have to say I haven't done real(as in paid for and a couple of hundreds of thousands of tedious UI code) any Swing work in the last 10 years since we all jumped on the web application bandwagon. But I can compare things like WPF(which was a bit crap at the beginning) to Swing back then. WPF is better. I wouldn't do pure Swing today. The API was great at the turn of the century when compared to other GUI APIs back then. I always felt like it had been neglected after that. It got a lot of improvements like hardware accelleration and optimizations but real changes and improvements in the API are far and in between.
But one thing has been a fundamental truth whenever somebody cracks a joke about Java speed: that person doesn't have the slightest clue and propably is a bad programmer. I've seen my fair share of use of JNI calls to C code because the perceived advantage of native code. In one case the C code were just a series of trivial integer operations that didn't take any measurable time to compute. The "optimization" was percieved as "necessary" because this used quite often. The JNI call was called thousands to millions of times within a series of loops. It didn't perform as expected because Java was slow. I did away with it and got a huge speed increase. What a surprise. The other time I saw something insane was when somebody used JNI to call a C function that sent XML over vanilla sockets because "Java doesn't do TCP, only RMI".
Could we just get the morons out of the way, please?
That's something I can't understand.
Relying on health insurance as a benefit feels like putting all eggs into one basket. If you are suddenly out of a job you are also cut off from your health insurance? Is that how it works?
Even if you simply change employers the paperwork vor the new insurance must be horrible.
I have no clue how that works.
But if you try to implement the German system as is in the US people will indeed show up on your doorstep with torches and pitchforks. We nearly did. Even though for completely different reasons.
Aren't there even drivers for run-of-the-mill Bluetooth XBox controllers? Those things and the demo videos in the Tegra Zone are amazing! I don't know if they are as of yet on par with XBox360/PS3 but they sure aren't far away from these.
So in typical Blizzard style they'll confirm it once they actually have a beta or at least an alpha release.
Say whatever you think about those guys: they won't be rushed.
I remember the amount of complaints when they pushed back what was speculated the release date for D3. If it makes the game worthwhile and it doesn't require day one patches to even get you past the menu screen then all power to them. I'll be busy playing something else due to a huge gaming backlog.
I'll file this possible console port under mildly interesting and be done with it. As long as it isn't a port FROM console I couldn't care less.
Gauntlet is what defined the genre. The only thing those games have in common with rogue likes is that they are set in a dungeon and you have character advancement. Which of course will also make Skyrim a rogue-like. And Orcs Must Die.
Nope, I'm not buying the gp's claim either.
...and tweaks to some skills, targeting and how potions work. It's not just interface overhauls. They want to do this properly.
At least these are the stated goals.
Kicking back and playing with a controller is actually quite relaxing if it fits the game genre. Hack-n-slash is a genre lifted from the arcade machines so I'm not surprised by that.
I wouldn't want to play a first person shooter with a controller, tho. Aiming is atrocious with a fidlle stick. I wouldn't want to play SC2 or HoMM with a controller because, well, my mind would simply implode.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if EVERYBODY started to torrent porn or Top Gear(same thing, really) for one day and watched all of this then indeed Europe would come to a standstill.
Would anybody notice? I won't, because I will be torrenting porn and Top Gear.
The EU Parliament is elected. But the election is very low-key. Almost under the radar. Voting for the local mayor has a bigger campaign. When have you last seen campaign posters with that blue and circle of stars logo? I don't even know if the UK sends MPs to the EU Parliament. Seems like a political dead-end to me, anyway.
The EU Parliamant is a rather toothless, feeble thing due to the EU member countries not wanting to sign over sovereign rights. There are a couple of treaties for signing EU stuff into national law but most countries simply drag their feet. The process how this EU law-making process works is also not quite ideal...
The EU Commission is elected by gorvernments who themselves are elected. That's barely legitimate when it comes to democracy.
Will Wikipedia, Google and TotalBiscuit black out for us?
No?
Damn, we're screwed.
Picketing the EU Parliament won't work because most representatives don't show up anyway
:(
Oh god! I had hoped never to hear another story about Kim Schmitz again. He is a fraud. He claims to be an expert hacker, financial genious(even had his own dodgy investment company KimVestor...) and all around wonderful person when all he is is a globulous fraud.
He is at the bottom of this? That explains a lot. The only surprise is that he is out of prison or not bankrupted beyond all financial redemption. The only reason he isn't a German citizen anymore is because he is a household name here and nobody would touch him with a 10' pole or throw money his way.
Whatever the leagal status of Megaupload.com was and if what they do is legal or should be legal, all these questions aside:
Given his track record it is safe to assume it was set up with fraudulent intent or has shifted to fraudulent operations because this fat fly only gets attracted by the biggest turds.
The bummer is, if you want copyright law reform of any kind you'll have to stand in his corner of the ring even if you'd feel like having a shower afterwards and are constantly vomiting into his direction.
Keystores...and a lot of potential candidates for the keystore where the app might consider looking in.
That's like searching for a specific egg in a chicken farm. You need to break it to find the right one. Even thinking about it makes me butthurt.
Yeah, that's the theory.
And then somebody comes up with a new and improved
public boolean isTrue(boolean b) {
boolean returnValue;
if(b != true) {
returnValue = false;
} else {
if(b == true) {
returnValue = true;
}
}
return returnValue;
}
I don't want to live on this planet anymore. I actually found one of those in SVN. I didn't even bother looking at who checked it in. I simply deleted it, didn't bother to fix the code so the whole thing didn't compile. Instead I sent this snippet to everybody on the team and asked for suggestions why I shouldn't fire that person since I couldn't think of one.
So asking for knowing how things like references work might be a bit too much to ask.
Also Slashdot confuses me.
You need to keep references to stuff in a local scope and need to be extra careful not to pass these out of the local scope.
Memory leaks in any auto GC environment means that references to stuff are being leaked out to placed where they shouldn't go to.
.free() on the offending object, simply comment it out and proudly close the NullPointer issue in whatever issue tracking system(most commonly Excel or email...which is another issue) you use.
You need to be careful to pass Collections, arrays and the likes out of their application architecture scope.
But I do see a lot of current generation Java developers who don't understand the basic concept of pointers and the GC. Without that you WILL get memory leak issues. But guess what, the same coders would cause the same troubles in any other language. And even if you HAD some sort of relyable free() mechanism and you would cause NullPointerExceptions then these same coders would hunt down your
I've had developers who referenced JSF Session Beans in generated Hibernate entities. It took quite a little bit of reeducation* to stop them from doing that again.
reeducation
I had fully planned beat them up. HR told me that was against policy and firing them would mean I'd have to teach another set of otherwise competent coders how to do stuff. Grrrrr.
The BASF facilities at Limburgerhof are quite nice, actually. Lots of wild rabbit hopping around unused lots, a pond in front of the main building and quite new buildings whereas the offices at the main facilities(30k employees in one spot, they even have their own bus service on the main campus, can you imagine that?) seem to be 50-100 years old.
I wonder who calls dibs on Limburgerhof. BASF even had an annual farmer's market at Limburgerhof. Pity, I'll miss them.
If you think any of the 200 employees who don't want to relocate will be let go, than you are mistaken. That's not how BASF rolls.
Pick up anything at random on your desk. Just about anything. If it doesn't have at least 5% of its material produced by BASF then I would consider it a miracle. BASF is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, chemical companies in the world. Their employees worldwide could fill easily a small country. So calling it a German company might be a little bit off. I doubt this move even made headlines in their corporate newspaper.
They got into realy hot water for producing GM potatoes in Scandinavia in the open next to stuff that was to be used for food. Their potatoes were GMed for production of starch.
Detection of dead code is something you can automate.
But removing deprecated code is a totally different matter. I spent yesterday replacing methods and calls to them. I netted -10k lines of code.
What really aggravates me is when people keep dead code around just in case it would come in handy again. It never does. And if it did, that's what code repositories are for.
Every time I hire a new coder the first thing I teach them is how to deal with Subversion and how to use diff. Hand in hand with that comes the simple refactoring that comes with every modern IDE. It's not rocket surgery. Code needs to be simple and maintainable.
Actually the worst is optimization. I don't care if my code is near O(n^3). I only iterate over a list of 5 values. Every five minutes. there's no need to replace my 10 lines of code with 100. That's especially aggravating when this is done by a guy who saves the same stuff into the database five times, all in new transactions, when somebody presses the save button. Now THAT'S criminal.
So say you.
But I prefer my gold rush with Blackjack. And Hookers.
In fact, forget about the gold rush.
Having the TSA around is like paying Nobby Nobbs to fundle your bum and nick all your coin.
...also fondle, slap, tickle and squeeze.
At least that's what the article wants us to believe.
The TSA is our last line of defense against everything that is against us and we might not even be aware of. These heroic, chisel jawed Nightwatchmen, these brave, well not soldiers, but heroic nonetheless persons of unknown qualification, descent or even species heroicly probe where no probe had dared to probe before.
These artisans of the prostate, minions of the fearful, these rubber-gloved black-clad connaisseurs of the sphincters shall ever be remembered by a Monument of Massive Proportions made of other people's previous luncheons.
So they find money while you desperately try to get rid of any metal or lubricants and some of that gets even sent to the main office? Sort of an involuntary tip? Like a mugger, but with a receipt?
Heroic AND honourable, I say!
I do remember the dot com bust. Before that everybody and his uncle claimed to be a coder after having read HTML for Dummies and Java for Dummies. It was terrible.
Why did they do it? Because there was gold in the hills. Proper coding takes a special kind of structured thinking. You've got a goal, you've got requirements and you need to break it down into subproblems of subproblems while not forgetting the overall goal. Not everybody is cut out to be a lawyer. Not everybody is cut out to be an artisan. Not everybody is cut out to be a business owner. Not everybody is cut out to be a coder.
And coders are not all the same. Some thrive in the front end and are very very good anticipating how users willl use the system(which is never how they told you). Others are very good in layers that involve logic. Others are optimization wizards. Others are very good when it comes to communicating with interface owners. And so on.
I really, really hate it when news outlets publish that there is gold in the hills when there isn't. Everybody rushes out and most of those that rush out will never make it.
Heh, once I figured out that IL-2 Sturmovik had quite a bit of Java in it I immediately wanted to know how much. Encrypted JARs, propably custom class loader, oh I really wanted to know how they did it.
Then there was that old Oracle Java database lib that slowed the system down whenever we wanted to use a connection pool. A quick profiler run unearthed that it spent 98% of its time in Thread.yield(). Called from within the Oracle drivers. If I hadn't had some McKinzey dude breathing down my eck at that moment I would have set the guns to very disassemble.If you see that kind of train wreck then you really want to witness the extent of the carnage.
Yeah, I'm planning on checking it out. I just managed to train my people in JSF 2.0 but we will be needing GWT sooner or later.
Right tool for the job. When I see the job.
We mostly do web applications with about 140 forms and just as clever as the customer wants to pay..
Turns out simple is simple enough.
If you have a netbook or anything then you should really give it a whirl. Its just a couple of bucks on steam so there is no real risk involved.
Roger Ebert convincingly argued a couple of years ago that computer games never could be art. Bastion may very well be the game that proves him wrong. It's fun, too.
And to be honest I'm not too fond of console players. That's propably unfair, but hey, it's just my opinion. Not a big deal.
It does seem a bit unfair, may I ask why?
.because I heard bad things about them and only play PC games so, as I said, that's unfair and most likely bs.
I usd a game controller with Deus Ex: Human revolution(even tho I played it through on "Tell me a story mode"). Aiming a gun for a quick head shot was bad. I'd be in cover, aim while in cover(which took ages), pop out and pop a cap in EVERY F*CKING BELLTOWER OP because mercs need to die.
Since that that was a bit tedious and inefficient I thought I could aim with the mouse and if needs be move with the controller. Nope. Didn't work.
I would even be prepared to re-learn using a trackball for aiming. Moving with keyboard is bad. Aiming with a thumb stick is bad. Could we please combine the best of two worlds? Pretty please?
Nope. It does mean that most inefficiencies are introduced by bad programming. Write inefficient C code and it will be slow. Write inefficient Java code and it will be slow.
If you are paid for the results(ie an application) and have to compete over price then you will not write code that is optimal(as in: the fastest way to run things) but rather whatever you can do with your budget. And writing optimal code has a very low priority when compared to writing maintainable code. Testable code. If you write a cutsom application for Enterprises(aka Big Corps, has been around for 100 years will be around for another 100) then you will have to plan ahead for the guys who have to extend your code 5 years down the line. Or port it. Also those applications tend to be broing as shit. All UI, data gets dumped into the database and somebody compiles a report. Job done. Well payd drudgery. You could write something like that in TCL/TK and it would be fast enough.
Speed only matters when you have a lot of computation.
Speed also matters when doing data analysis. But that is what databases are for nowadays. No need to reinvent the wheel.Simply drink the Oracle BI cool aid and weep into your drink after hours. It's hard to be challenged anymore.
If I had a dollar for whenever I saw some novice doing IO or expensive computation in the Swing event thread I'd be...well...not rich but it would be sufficient for a night-out for me and my friends. It's amazing how many "experts" don't know how to do threads in any way, shape or form. They are quite trivial to implement in Java but being threds they need some kind of planning.
But you are wrong about the Swing API. Now I have to say I haven't done real(as in paid for and a couple of hundreds of thousands of tedious UI code) any Swing work in the last 10 years since we all jumped on the web application bandwagon. But I can compare things like WPF(which was a bit crap at the beginning) to Swing back then. WPF is better. I wouldn't do pure Swing today. The API was great at the turn of the century when compared to other GUI APIs back then. I always felt like it had been neglected after that. It got a lot of improvements like hardware accelleration and optimizations but real changes and improvements in the API are far and in between.
But one thing has been a fundamental truth whenever somebody cracks a joke about Java speed: that person doesn't have the slightest clue and propably is a bad programmer. I've seen my fair share of use of JNI calls to C code because the perceived advantage of native code. In one case the C code were just a series of trivial integer operations that didn't take any measurable time to compute. The "optimization" was percieved as "necessary" because this used quite often. The JNI call was called thousands to millions of times within a series of loops. It didn't perform as expected because Java was slow. I did away with it and got a huge speed increase. What a surprise. The other time I saw something insane was when somebody used JNI to call a C function that sent XML over vanilla sockets because "Java doesn't do TCP, only RMI".
Could we just get the morons out of the way, please?
That's something I can't understand.
Relying on health insurance as a benefit feels like putting all eggs into one basket. If you are suddenly out of a job you are also cut off from your health insurance? Is that how it works?
Even if you simply change employers the paperwork vor the new insurance must be horrible.
I have no clue how that works.
But if you try to implement the German system as is in the US people will indeed show up on your doorstep with torches and pitchforks. We nearly did. Even though for completely different reasons.
Aren't there even drivers for run-of-the-mill Bluetooth XBox controllers? Those things and the demo videos in the Tegra Zone are amazing! I don't know if they are as of yet on par with XBox360/PS3 but they sure aren't far away from these.
So in typical Blizzard style they'll confirm it once they actually have a beta or at least an alpha release.
Say whatever you think about those guys: they won't be rushed.
I remember the amount of complaints when they pushed back what was speculated the release date for D3. If it makes the game worthwhile and it doesn't require day one patches to even get you past the menu screen then all power to them.
I'll be busy playing something else due to a huge gaming backlog.
I'll file this possible console port under mildly interesting and be done with it. As long as it isn't a port FROM console I couldn't care less.
Gauntlet is what defined the genre. The only thing those games have in common with rogue likes is that they are set in a dungeon and you have character advancement. Which of course will also make Skyrim a rogue-like. And Orcs Must Die.
Nope, I'm not buying the gp's claim either.
...and tweaks to some skills, targeting and how potions work. It's not just interface overhauls. They want to do this properly.
At least these are the stated goals.
...and I would totally agree with that.
Kicking back and playing with a controller is actually quite relaxing if it fits the game genre. Hack-n-slash is a genre lifted from the arcade machines so I'm not surprised by that.
I wouldn't want to play a first person shooter with a controller, tho. Aiming is atrocious with a fidlle stick. I wouldn't want to play SC2 or HoMM with a controller because, well, my mind would simply implode.