"The first person to land on Mars, and to live there some specified minimum duration (such as a year), and to return alive owns the entire Red Planet."
That's a _great_ idea! This will guarantee that the whole planet will turn into a big death-match arena, giving all us Earth-dwellers plenty of entertainment!
I suggest you stop your condescending whining and try learning something about programming. Why in the world would anyone want to yield() at _any_ time?
Ah wait. You must be one of those old-skool programmers who has never encountered preemptive multitasking / threading before. Well, I cannot blame you - it has only been around since 1995 (Windows) or 1985 (AmigaOS) or 1975 (UNIX)...
If you find yourself calling yield() all the time, _please_ visit a programming refresher course. It is the 21st century now, and Windows has actually implemented some modern programming techniques. Your "programming by numbers" you probably picked up in the sixties no longer has any relevance.
There is a distinct overuse of the 'advanced' button in GUI's these days. You click to open a config window, and immediately click again to see _all_ the options because some asshat decided that you should initially see only three instead of all four.
Slightly better GUI design for config windows would help a great deal. What we need:
- make the damn windows resizable already! Especially if you want to put in a three-line selection box with 3000+ items! (this is of course a point mostly aimed at Windows).
- Do NOT use tabs, *especially* if you need more than one row of them. Instead, use a Mozilla-style category list on the left side of the window. That allows you to group together related 'tabs', and use longer (and more descriptive) names.
- Group options together in a logical fashion. Disable controls that are made irrelevant by other choices.
- Provide a fscking help option for EVERYTHING, describing the finer nuances of setting or unsetting that option. Don't write "LPGR: sets the LPGR option". Describe what it is, why I want it, what happens if I set it and what happens if I do not set it. If a value is a string, provide examples and full BNF syntax.
- Do NOT use acronyms or abbreviations unless you are REALLY certain they are common words. And even then it is probably better not to.
- Never invert the meaning of a checkbox. Checkboxes ENABLE things. If you check them something should be turned ON, not OFF. "Disable debugging" is incorrect. "Enable debugging" (with inverted state) is. If you do it right you will find you can drop the "enable" without losing meaning.
- While I'm on the subject anyway, checkboxes are for on/off choices. There are plenty of things that masquerade like on/off choices but really aren't (for example, the choice between 22KHz and 44KHz sound has only two options but a checkbox is utterly inappropriate since 22KHz is not the logical opposite of 44KHz even if your application only has those two options). Use radiobuttons or a combobox for those, even if there are only two options.
- Do not hide options behind three layers of windows, tabs, subwindows, and more tabs. You are allowed one layer only. It is provided by the navigation choices in the left-hand column. This allows any user to navigate to his option of choice in ONE click.
- Remember the last location of the user. Select it for him, next time he opens the configuration window. This will probably save another click.
And most importantly, there is this:
- Work with your own software. Try to _feel_ what is annoying; what works, and what doesn't. If some task is unpleasant to accomplish, redesign the GUI so it is no longer a problem.
You could simply be trying to fit too much activity in a day. That means you are too tired when doing things, and will easily drift off to sleep, but when you are in bed you feel anxiety about all the things you should be doing, but aren't.
If that is true, one thing you should try to do it cut down on the number of activities you take part in. An easy one is reading the web...
Yes, but Metal Gear was a game whose gameplay was flushed out on the NES
Metal Gear originated on the MSX2. The two original Metal Gear games were works of absolute genius - and completely in 2D. The "Solid" part of the title of the Playstation game was there to indicate the move to 3D, and should really have been dropped for the GBC conversion...
..."troll"? Get real. I'm making an honest point here, supported by arguments. To be the "father" of videogaming he would need to be part of the group that started it, and to do that he needed to be around at the time it started. He wasn't; therefore he isn't.
He is an overal genius, but just like van Gogh is NOT the father of painting (seeing there were numerous genius pointers before him), Miyamoto is NOT the father of videogaming.
Wait; I forget rabid Nintendo fan-boy'ism. What was I thinking...
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. He has been exceptionally influential and productive, but there were many years of videogaming before he ever arrived on the scene (around 1980 or so).
Since I live and work there, I suppose I could add a few things...
Leiden is a small (110,000 inhabitants) city in the west of the Netherlands. Its main claim to fame is its university (430 years old now and going strong). We get a lot of american tourists since Leiden was the location where the pilgrim fathers lived before taking ship to what would one day be the USA. Every year I get to disappoint a couple of americans coming over for a visit: only a few remnants of walls remain of that church (and for some reason they are always asking _me_ where it is!?). But do keep coming - there is lots of other stuff to see;-)
The area to the north of Leiden has a lot of open water (small connected lakes), and makes for excellent sailing. Around the lakes is where we grow all those flower bulbs. For a rural area it has one of the highest population densities in the world, which helps explain the proliferation of wireless access spots I guess.
The office where I work is just about on top of one of the access points: "Rabo" is about 20m away from where I sit. When we tried last year we couldn't pick up any signals, but I'll try again today, see if it actually works now.
So, let us assume that I want to access a work that is in the public domain and reproduce it - say, broadcast it myself. How will I get a copy? Either I need to grab one of the existing copies flying around, or I need access to the source material.
The source material will be lying safely in a safe, somewhere. The owner is not in any way required to give me access to it. This effectively stops my ability to access the public domain work through this route.
Of course, any other copies will now be covered with copyright! In the past I could grab _any_ copy of the work, and do with it whatever I like. Now I cannot get any of the second-tier copies, and the chances of the original source material being available are negligible.
Effectively, this creates an eternal copyright. All that is needed to maintain it is to carefully lock up the original source material.
It could be argued that I could tape whatever I wanted to have, wait 50 years, and _then_ use it. This is both extremely impractical and, in combination with technical restrictions on taping things, unfeasible as well.
AmigaOS 3.0 was released in 1992. "Datatypes" was a system of filters used to convert between the standard internal types for bitmaps, sound, movies, text documents, etc. and any external type.
Datatypes were OS objects and could be embedded in windows. Multiview used this to display files of any type, but the same system was also used by Amiga webbrowsers like AWeb, IBrowse, or Voyager. Thus Amiga was the first system to support.PNG files in all of its browsers - simply because a datatype for.PNG was written.
The web came into existence about a year later - 1993 saw the first graphical webbrowser, Mosaic, being released as an alpha version.
Rosetta will actually harpoon its comet. The less well-publicized last phase is to haul the captured comet back to Earth, where it will be cut up and eaten by "scientific experts" across the world...
I cannot read french, so I cannot comment on the article, but I can tell you that Occam's razor only applies to theories that explain all phenomena. If a theory is extremely simple, but fails to explain certain phenomena, then despite the razor, it is wrong.
Since the more usually accepted theory fails to account for certain phenomena (where is all that mass?), it is conceivable that a more complex theory is required instead.
Anyway, I'll go back to pretending I'm a software engineer now;-)
This is why the Japanese games are so much better. They keep their teams apart, and thus keep their knowledge and experience in the company instead of taking it out with the trash after every project.
They have not taken out Apple because they need a token competitor. It is a politically motivated choice to keep Apple alive, nothing else. Indeed, the rise of Linux may yet be enough reason to finally destroy Apple (to keep the number of "competitors" down to one).
Now can we please have a version of Oracle for Linux that just installs out of the box, so to speak? So far every version I have tried either fails to install completely, or installs only on highly specific versions of Linux (like Red Hat 7.1), or requires arcane knowledge of the installation process to complete.
I have developed several large applications that involve an Oracle database as one of their components, but the idea of actually having to install Oracle anywhere sends shivers down my back (and not from joy). If this keeps up I can see future work centering around PostgreSQL, just to avoid the endless hassle associated with the installation.
Really, I like Oracle a lot, but I wish they would fix the endless installation issues...
As I recall, the original went something like this: "Space is big. Space is dark. It's hard to find a place to park.". This little poem was one of many that appeared in a simple desktop game for the Amiga. You had a spacecraft, floating free on the desktop, and a window (little more than a title bar in fact), and had to land the spacecraft on top of that window. Landing it too hard, or moving off the screen, destroyed the spacecraft. Ahh, memories;-)
Slashdot Mirror
That's a _great_ idea! This will guarantee that the whole planet will turn into a big death-match arena, giving all us Earth-dwellers plenty of entertainment!
Ah wait. You must be one of those old-skool programmers who has never encountered preemptive multitasking / threading before. Well, I cannot blame you - it has only been around since 1995 (Windows) or 1985 (AmigaOS) or 1975 (UNIX)...
If you find yourself calling yield() all the time, _please_ visit a programming refresher course. It is the 21st century now, and Windows has actually implemented some modern programming techniques. Your "programming by numbers" you probably picked up in the sixties no longer has any relevance.
Slightly better GUI design for config windows would help a great deal. What we need:
- make the damn windows resizable already! Especially if you want to put in a three-line selection box with 3000+ items! (this is of course a point mostly aimed at Windows).
- Do NOT use tabs, *especially* if you need more than one row of them. Instead, use a Mozilla-style category list on the left side of the window. That allows you to group together related 'tabs', and use longer (and more descriptive) names.
- Group options together in a logical fashion. Disable controls that are made irrelevant by other choices.
- Provide a fscking help option for EVERYTHING, describing the finer nuances of setting or unsetting that option. Don't write "LPGR: sets the LPGR option". Describe what it is, why I want it, what happens if I set it and what happens if I do not set it. If a value is a string, provide examples and full BNF syntax.
- Do NOT use acronyms or abbreviations unless you are REALLY certain they are common words. And even then it is probably better not to.
- Never invert the meaning of a checkbox. Checkboxes ENABLE things. If you check them something should be turned ON, not OFF. "Disable debugging" is incorrect. "Enable debugging" (with inverted state) is. If you do it right you will find you can drop the "enable" without losing meaning.
- While I'm on the subject anyway, checkboxes are for on/off choices. There are plenty of things that masquerade like on/off choices but really aren't (for example, the choice between 22KHz and 44KHz sound has only two options but a checkbox is utterly inappropriate since 22KHz is not the logical opposite of 44KHz even if your application only has those two options). Use radiobuttons or a combobox for those, even if there are only two options.
- Do not hide options behind three layers of windows, tabs, subwindows, and more tabs. You are allowed one layer only. It is provided by the navigation choices in the left-hand column. This allows any user to navigate to his option of choice in ONE click.
- Remember the last location of the user. Select it for him, next time he opens the configuration window. This will probably save another click.
And most importantly, there is this:
- Work with your own software. Try to _feel_ what is annoying; what works, and what doesn't. If some task is unpleasant to accomplish, redesign the GUI so it is no longer a problem.
If that is true, one thing you should try to do it cut down on the number of activities you take part in. An easy one is reading the web...
Not for another 70 or 80 years. But if you do not sell the image but just hang them on your own walls you are probably covered under fair use.
Just get used to it: you will _never_ see anything that you care about go into the public domain.
Metal Gear originated on the MSX2. The two original Metal Gear games were works of absolute genius - and completely in 2D. The "Solid" part of the title of the Playstation game was there to indicate the move to 3D, and should really have been dropped for the GBC conversion...
He is an overal genius, but just like van Gogh is NOT the father of painting (seeing there were numerous genius pointers before him), Miyamoto is NOT the father of videogaming.
Wait; I forget rabid Nintendo fan-boy'ism. What was I thinking...
Hey, at least they got all the would be Star Trek officers covered with just a single article...
I suppose a /. book review of that book would be out of the question?
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. He has been exceptionally influential and productive, but there were many years of videogaming before he ever arrived on the scene (around 1980 or so).
Go on. Be a man and click that link.
Leiden is a small (110,000 inhabitants) city in the west of the Netherlands. Its main claim to fame is its university (430 years old now and going strong). We get a lot of american tourists since Leiden was the location where the pilgrim fathers lived before taking ship to what would one day be the USA. Every year I get to disappoint a couple of americans coming over for a visit: only a few remnants of walls remain of that church (and for some reason they are always asking _me_ where it is!?). But do keep coming - there is lots of other stuff to see ;-)
The area to the north of Leiden has a lot of open water (small connected lakes), and makes for excellent sailing. Around the lakes is where we grow all those flower bulbs. For a rural area it has one of the highest population densities in the world, which helps explain the proliferation of wireless access spots I guess.
The office where I work is just about on top of one of the access points: "Rabo" is about 20m away from where I sit. When we tried last year we couldn't pick up any signals, but I'll try again today, see if it actually works now.
Because it extends beyond the city limits, obviously!
The source material will be lying safely in a safe, somewhere. The owner is not in any way required to give me access to it. This effectively stops my ability to access the public domain work through this route.
Of course, any other copies will now be covered with copyright! In the past I could grab _any_ copy of the work, and do with it whatever I like. Now I cannot get any of the second-tier copies, and the chances of the original source material being available are negligible.
Effectively, this creates an eternal copyright. All that is needed to maintain it is to carefully lock up the original source material.
It could be argued that I could tape whatever I wanted to have, wait 50 years, and _then_ use it. This is both extremely impractical and, in combination with technical restrictions on taping things, unfeasible as well.
Datatypes were OS objects and could be embedded in windows. Multiview used this to display files of any type, but the same system was also used by Amiga webbrowsers like AWeb, IBrowse, or Voyager. Thus Amiga was the first system to support .PNG files in all of its browsers - simply because a datatype for .PNG was written.
The web came into existence about a year later - 1993 saw the first graphical webbrowser, Mosaic, being released as an alpha version.
I think he kinda mentioned that when he said "not funneling wealth abroad". They get it alright. Now I wish my country would as well...
Rosetta will actually harpoon its comet. The less well-publicized last phase is to haul the captured comet back to Earth, where it will be cut up and eaten by "scientific experts" across the world...
Since the more usually accepted theory fails to account for certain phenomena (where is all that mass?), it is conceivable that a more complex theory is required instead.
Anyway, I'll go back to pretending I'm a software engineer now ;-)
This is why the Japanese games are so much better. They keep their teams apart, and thus keep their knowledge and experience in the company instead of taking it out with the trash after every project.
They have not taken out Apple because they need a token competitor. It is a politically motivated choice to keep Apple alive, nothing else. Indeed, the rise of Linux may yet be enough reason to finally destroy Apple (to keep the number of "competitors" down to one).
Care to explain the shovelware Shrek 2 GBA ROM that appeared on supernova the other day?
I have developed several large applications that involve an Oracle database as one of their components, but the idea of actually having to install Oracle anywhere sends shivers down my back (and not from joy). If this keeps up I can see future work centering around PostgreSQL, just to avoid the endless hassle associated with the installation.
Really, I like Oracle a lot, but I wish they would fix the endless installation issues...
What!? Are you saying Slashdot summaries, my sole source of tech and political news for the last four years, are inaccurate?
I have been living a lie...
Doesn't the Windows licensing prohibit the use of Windows in situations where human lifes are at stake?
As I recall, the original went something like this: "Space is big. Space is dark. It's hard to find a place to park.". This little poem was one of many that appeared in a simple desktop game for the Amiga. You had a spacecraft, floating free on the desktop, and a window (little more than a title bar in fact), and had to land the spacecraft on top of that window. Landing it too hard, or moving off the screen, destroyed the spacecraft. Ahh, memories ;-)