The wording of the contract is such that it is implying that, should you not be employed by Google in the near future, or at least up until the point that you are, you do not go around telling all and sundry that you were interviewed by Google, or even "the big search engine company [wink]", because in the end this can and does lead to possible interest by other companies who want to know what Google are doing.
The fear is that you'll go interview at Google, they'll show you something they're working on they think you're fit for, and don't want you telling your friends and subsequent interviewers at other jobs about it, who will make a quick buck telling Microsoft or Yahoo! to hire you because you interviewed at Google.
This NDA reads like it is solely for the interview process. This means basically they can meet up with you, talk to you, tell you all their dirty search engine secrets and see if you want to work there to develop their software. And then you can't just go and sell it (or sell themselves) to Microsoft the moment the interview is over!
I would expect the recruitment process is pretty much their failure point for leaking information as employment endears loyalty, whereas a fancy meal and a trip to the local Google HQ probably does not.
I don't see this as "evil", merely covering their asses from "evil people" - unscrupulous blabbermouths who will use Google and any secrets they gained from the recruitment interview for profit.
Also; this guy threw away a job at Google. What a dick!
That's really what UAC is, after all: sudo with a fancy display mechanism (to make it hard to spoof) and extra monitoring to pick up on "suspicious" behavior.'"
right, so a fancy display mechanism for sudo, hard to spoof, and extra monitoring to pick up on suspicious behaviour is somehow bad because Microsoft did it?
I think other OS's should have all this. I always thought the Synaptic/package management password entries were a bit fakeable in Ubuntu last time I tried. I wonder if there's any room for progress in getting distros to sign and encrypt executables running on the system. A signed and encrypted (or explicitly trusted) executable could run whenever the user clicked it or it was automated from certain accounts. If it is not signed (self-compiled for instance) then this can flag up a warning that this application may cause trouble. However, of course, users could self-sign their applications to work around the warnings. The signing application itself would be obviously signed and checked against a public key copy (say, Ubuntu servers) so that it cannot be tampered with. Everything else would be arbitrarily local.
Is it such a bad idea to code-sign the stuff that runs on your machine, rather than just the packages they came in?
The Saturn, I think is an odd one. Half of Sega didn't even know it was going to be released.. but pretty much after it was out, the Genesis wasn't re-released. The SNES also was just very in-stock with retailers when the N64 was hyped to be nearly out, and continued to sell fairly well.
I think the PSOne is the only one of the lot that was explicitly released after it's supposed successor had been launched worldwide. I'm talking about selling PSOnes brand new, in the UK, after PS2 launch - the last leg of it all. You never saw Genesis or SNES boxes coming in brand new while the N64 was released.
However we did still have one Genesis and one SNES in stock, and a Saturn on the show floor with a couple in the back room. It was fun to check out the boss' new mobile phone specs, and find it was actually more powerful than the Genesis. Oh man those were the days..
They push out about a million units a month from the factory, so I doubt "1000s" of units on eBay (which really is is the low thousands) is actually consumer demand.
The PS2 thing is odd; but it may be that buying a PS2 is simply a cheaper option than the PS3 - a lot of the high-profile games I see advertised on TV right now, and sponsoring TV shows, are Playstation 2 games. There's no need for a PS3 unless you want the great HD experience nobody sees the need for yet.
You DID see it in the previous generation though. Right after the Playstation 2 came out, Sony created the PSOne - a curvy, white version of the Playstation original console, with a Dual Shock pad in it. It sold like hotcakes in the face of the hundreds-of-dollars-more Playstation 2, and with 90% of the new games still being Playstation 1 games at the time. Demand did outstrip supply for a couple of weeks.. this was with me working at a games store in my youth. It got annoying for people to ask for a PSOne, because then it was our job to try and sell them a PS2.. a little difficult to get them to justify tripling their outlay just to play some games (people did though:)
You've seen it in handhelds too; the Gameboy Advance SP sold a lot of units, and when people couldn't get the fliptop model with the integrated battery and the brighter, better screen.. they just went and bought the still readily available and still in-production original Gameboy Advance. I believe they did bring out a new colour of the original Gameboy Advance, before they killed it off in favor of the SP.
And they're still selling the SP even though the DS is the hotcake, and even though it is not intended as a console replacement..
Indeed but pick a toolkit and take.. say.. Windows Vista. All of the APIs you wanted are there in the base OS install. Whether you use.NET or unmanaged code, the.NET stuff basically is a special language interface; it's no different to using a Python binding for GTK under Linux. The effect is, that you get to compile code in for the CLI, using managed code framework, rather than poke at the OS as low as you can go.
Sure, there are variants and wrappers but we are talking about the whole Windows windowing system basically layering substantial improvements in usability on top of the same basic Windows UI. Windows provides - since a long, long time ago - little utility functions so that if you DO want to draw a pretty looking button that matches system style, it is in fact a simple call away.
What if you want GTK and Qt apps to look the same? Well, there is no underlying standard X GUI toolkit, most applications have zero concept of what window manager is running around their window canvas, and when they draw a button border, they do it on their own special little GUI toolkit.
From a usability standpoint I think it's awful. Any OS that purposefully lets people install themes like a Denon HiFi (all black, with tiny charcoal-grey lettering, tiny blue lights and no contrast) means the system is basically totally unusable. I applauded Microsoft when they said they were code-signing themes and only allowing the two basic ones in XP; I love the way Apple apps pretty much all have to look the same way (even if they do change their mind every 5 minutes between candy and brushed aluminum). You get a button that looks like everyone else's buttons, so everyone can see a button and know it is a button.
FreeDesktop should, I think, define a standard "Window System Look" API and library somewhere which allows these things to be plugged together. A single and simple theming API which arbitrarily enforces certain usability points (standard window toolbar icons for example) maybe based around Cairo or something. Then, GTK and Qt and whatever else on the planet can just USE it. Want to draw a button? Yeah sure, do it in your own GUI toolkit API, after all there are some advantages of using either. But let's make them look the same and act the same without having to meticulously recreate theming on every toolkit known to man..
Simply put, he's right in a way. After all, developing software for an environment you choose, means anyone who didn't choose your environment who wants to run your software has to switch, or install more software, and deal with the problems possibly associated with such a thing.
Remember when KDE, GNOME, Xfce and Enlightenment didn't share a desktop API? Look now at how Enlightenment reinvents everything using it's own special libraries? While Enlightenment has some distinct advantages over the way the others are designed, it is a DIFFERENT system. Want to install a GNOME core application on KDE? Well, you have to drag in most of GNOME, still. The same in reverse. Install Enlightenment tools on top? Well you have to drag in the rest of the E17 framework.
Install X on my system, and it still pulls in 5 different sound daemons.. yikes, and yikes again. Xine, MPlayer and GStreamer/Totem too. They all use the same libraries after all, but do I need 3 different ways to play a movie?
I personally prefer GNOME and Xfce if only because they use the same GTK toolkit - however I personally loathe GTK and the GTK API. I don't want to even get started in Enlightenment.
So, when you sit down and use Windows, what do you do? Well, you're pretty much stuck using Windows. And for all intents and purposes, there is a strict set of toolkits and APIs they provide for you (DLL hell wipes that off the map though). There is no "which API do I use to open a window and add a button" if you are using VisualC++ and reading the documentation, it will pretty much railroad you into one choice. But there ARE other choices.. they are just less obvious and less relevant.
I think this is why I like the concept of RAD stuff like Ruby On Rails, however I do hate Ruby, and Python, and I never got into Perl in a big way, and while I'm stuck with PHP, it's because it's closer to C++, which I absolutely love. If I had a choice I'd be coding everything in C++, with a single toolkit, but unfortunately because everyone else makes other choices, I can't.
Does my life deserve to be made this difficult by virtue of the freedom of choice? Probably;D
Mozilla/Firefox is a cross platform application by design. If there is no ability to implement these same functions on non-Windows machines and if there is no guarantee that they will be able to freely do so in the future depending upon Windows licensing, why should the Mozilla team support it? More importantly, when there is an open standard alternative available why shouldn't Mozilla intentionally ignore the inferior solution in the hopes that they will discourage its use and benefit everyone?
Because the vast majority of Firefox users use Windows, and the vast majority of Firefox users on Windows probably want ActiveX controls so they never have to use Internet Explorer (or IETabs) ever again.
While a lot of organisations may do better out of providing XPConnect alternatives, we are looking at the here and now, and "why are websites still forcing people to use IE?" - well, they are because they have significant resources invested over the past 8 or 9 years in supporting Internet Explorer as a browser with ActiveX controls for banking security and suchlike, or using IE as the "benchmark, always present browser" on a Windows system (for a Windows-based virus checker, this is not a 'bad' assumption to make to give 100% support to users of their online checkers).
They could of course create plugins for XPConnect, and Safari, and ActiveX too, and maybe a Java version, and deal with the problems of integrating different security models, capabilities and APIs across many browsers, but for those people who pretty much use Windows, who pretty much used IE, but pretty much want to go to Firefox because of some perceived "better" browsing. Moving 100% to Firefox is restricted by the fact that Firefox doesn't support, even as a 3rd party plugin, ActiveX controls which 99% of the 'needs a plugin to use' in-browser application suites need.
I want to use Firefox for everything, and I can't. It's not my choice to use IE, my hand is forced by the people who write ActiveX controls. But that can be fixed by supporting ActiveX controls in Firefox.
As for;
Wow. I'm not sure quite what to say to someone who considers that security.
What, code signing isn't security now? Yeah, so when Synaptic pops up on your Ubuntu install and complains that the packages aren't signed to a trusted key, that is not security?
Asking the user to confirm trust in unsigned code, or to install trusted keys is not security?
Giving people MORE information does NOT mean they can make any better, informed decisions about it. When I hit a website with a bad SSL certificate, Firefox gives me a dialog box that takes up half of my screen. it has buttons and boxes and checkmarks and the data in the SSL certificate shown to me is quite comprehensive; does it tell me anything that a simple "This website's security certificate is invalid" box doesn't? Not really. Mostly I click through because I am confident that I really want to view that site regardless. If I did not click on a secure link, was not expecting SSL certificate as a requirement, I click "no" and find something else to do. That is about as far as the informed decision most consumers need to make goes; Did You Want To Do This? Yes, Go Ahead - No, Quit It!.
It may sound like Vista's shitty UAC feature but all in all the method it requests confirmation is not the issue that makes UAC shitty - it's that it requests user confirmation every time you click the mouse on anything. People don't like being *bombarded* with information. Symantec etc. virus checkers all have a "turn off for an hour, 5 hours, until I reboot" feature on them for this exact reason. If they know it is just going to complain because you did an action it thinks it should protect against, but you don't give a crap, you can turn it off until you are done. Then it turns back on again and sits in the background, actively protecting you against stuff you don't know should be happening.
ActiveX as a plugin system is not patent encumbered insofar as you can't be sued for implementing ActiveX controls in an application that runs on Windows. The technology that allows ActiveX controls to run inside browser windows is no different to that which enables it in any COM-supporting application. Microsoft hardly have to approve every use of COM objects inside Windows applications for patent usage.
As a feature of the Windows version of Firefox or Mozilla, be it Mozilla Foundation sanctioned official plugin, or a 3rd party one (http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm) it can't be faulted as something people need. Of course, writing XPConnect controls would be one solution *if* the web designing profession decided to be hypocritical and not support ActiveX and IE in favor of only supporting Mozilla.
Certainly supporting ActiveX controls inside Firefox to get banking authentication, online virus checkers and suchlike working in other browsers than IE would be a noble goal and improve the acceptance of Firefox itself. It would not reduce the ties to Microsoft Windows but I hardly think that should be the goal of a web browser any more than IE should have been used to tie people *to* Microsoft Windows.
The aforementioned ActiveX plugin seems to be derelict, however, for no good reason. I don't think ActiveX is inherently any less secure than XPConnect - well, not think, but KNOW it isn't. Most ActiveX foibles are down to mis-signed and mis-featured controls published by software vendors (marked "safe for scripting" when they pretty much are not). It's perfectly possible for a badly written XPConnect plugin to do bad things to your system. The fix is simple (and ActiveX employs the same security and has for years) - code signing and user confirmation. Before it runs ActiveX controls or installs an XPI, ask the user. Check the code signing. Do you trust this source? Did you want to run the virus checker in this browser window? Did you click on a link that said "install PornBrowse Deluxe"??
Until we see a way to embed ActiveX controls so that they work the same in IE or Firefox, most sites that use this technology (rather than Java) are going to fall down.
So far all the ActiveX embedding plugins I have for Firefox just don't work, even if you fake the browser as much as technologically possible to "be" Internet Explorer.
I don't see why it would be a big problem to implement; Mozilla staff may consider ActiveX a security risk but it is NOT up to Mozilla staff to dictate to users what add-on plugins they run. You can't have a free and open API for plugins, and a huge plugin website, and then start saying "you can do everything except this"
Apple have taken a different route. It is not legal whatsoever to run any Apple MacOS inside a virtualisation, however much money you pay for the OS. You also have to pay full price for any upgrades unless you buy a copy of the previous OS within a certain time period of the major update release being put on sale. That's once every year to two years, not every 4 or 5 like Microsoft like to think they'll do it.
I don't think there is any philosophical difference, just a different pricing scheme. MacOS is arguably more limited than Windows; Desktop or laptop, with a focus on playing things through iTunes.
What you get in Windows Business is not a business OS with a remote control and a media center app whether you like it or not. You get a Business OS. What you get with a Media Center OS is the Media Center OS. What you get in Home Basic is all the basic stuff. There is a set of options to choose - depending on what PC you have. There are a ton of crazy variants of the PC around to choose from and a more suitable version of Windows for each. Tablet PC Edition is required to keep the Tablet PC editions out of the main editions of Windows. Why would you want touchpanel handwriting recognition features and all the other handy features on a desktop Mac? Do Apple even MAKE a tablet pc? No!
Why would you need 8 versions of the OS if you only had two targets?
I don't see why they shouldn't charge more for the right (not just ability) to run virtualised on a system. It applies to ALL virtualisation options (VirtualPC, VMWare, not just Macs) and virtualisation is in fact more a business than it is a home user's domain.
So why not tell people they need the business version, and only offer real support for the business version?
As for the security issues of virtualisation, sure.. well.. I can't think of any, but if I could, there are probably issues you could easily skirt around by using the disk encryption features inside the virtualisation (therefore your virtualised disk is not prone to attack from the host OS's myriad bugs and trojans) and other cute features they dropped from the Home and Home Basic edition.
Mac users are paranoid, that's all. Linux users too. Anything that costs more than what came free with their OS is a "rip off". Sorry, but people have to make money, and you guys have to spend it to get all the features.
Near me in San Antonio there are a couple of Universities, state funded and private. One of them is most definitely a Catholic university. Another is private. UTSA everyone else goes to. The add the colleges into the mix.
If you go poll the Catholic university, and ask them if Creation was fact or if Evolution is a better concept, aren't you going to get skewed results, like one third of them towing the line from scripture?
I'd really like to see the data rather than a news story, basically.
As for the >90% believe in God thing, that's not too surprising, however, WHICH God? Did they just interview white Christians, or did they pull out Muslims, Jews, (arguably the same God but.. different concepts of it) pick another religion if you need to.
In a country like the UK where I am from, a LOT of people believe in God. However a LOT of people also don't go to church every Sunday. In fact very few people do. That doesn't mean they are not Christian and don't believe in God. It means we have less wild-eyed evangelists, and keep it to ourselves, maybe. I think any poll of any country would throw a 90% value of some degree.
Me, I don't give a shit. I think the universe was created when a couple of superdimensional membranes collided and the probability of some waveform occurring hit a certain level. Whether that is God, or it's a white dude with a white beard, I dunno. Believing the Earth was created 10,000 years ago is a bit silly, but then the Bible is nothing more than allegory in this sense; the idea is that it was a long time ago, longer than anyone alive can possibly remember and possibly imagine. Does it matter that they beleive 10,000 rather than 4 billion? Isn't that just math? Okay.. now I am thinking about when they tried to redefine Pi..
Re:Perceived Intelligence - Simple is better?
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Most Impressive Game AI?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
AI in games is mostly triggers and actions.
It's still AI if those triggers are hardcoded or based on statistical analysis.
It *is* intelligent for an NPC to realise a grenade was thrown by the player into it's general area, and throw it back at the player. That's not to say it shouldn't be ranked highly or that it is a crappy AI.
If an enemy hops over a wall next to him for cover it's the enemy realising that he needs cover and there is an easily hoppable wall. He could just as well duck behind a barrel, but the barrel may be made of soft shitty wood, the wall is nice and made of brick. It makes an education decision just like we do. They may well be SCRIPTED.. if near wall hop over wall else if near barrel duck under barrel else if player is actually in effective firing range, run the hell away else sit there and taunt them into the minefield..
Think of your thought process when you would be in the firing line and you have the choice between ducking behind a worm-riddled barrel to avoid gunfire, or a solid brick wall that you can hop over. How many seconds does it take? Can you remember every microdecision you made? No, you think "ohshit I'm being shot at" and probably duck behind the barrel under stress, when it starts to splinter then you scramble over the wall and realise you dropped your gun hopping over the wall..
Does that make it crappy AI that it did not break out scientific analysis of the situation and count variables or do complex physics?
Make sure you have the development lifecycle and procedures down, and learn as much science as you can other than computer science. You may get paid to develop software but that software has to do things - and usually that has a lot to do with maths, science, research, data processing, and all of that needs testing.
If you train yourself to be a project manager, study the development PROCESS rather than the menial low-level grunt work, the project will come out better for it. You needn't be a great coder - as when you are a great project manager, you get to tell other people to write great code for you:)
But you should also get a box on your desk running Solaris.. it would be easy to convince them to buy you another $800 box to sit under your desk (the Ultra 20 is hardly expensive) for development work. Development work is the key; if you want to make any crazy changes to the server, you don't want to do it live and screw up. Maybe you want to test out some configurations or so and are happy to trash the box under your desk. That's a great justification. And for the meagre sum of (starting at) $800! How can they say no?
That the world's easiest Linux has the world's most ANNOYING menu bar on their website. You can't get from the button you hovered over to the link you want to click without it disappearing or changing.
Considering a lot of the guys at Valve used to work for Microsoft, I don't think anyone there has any reason to be scared, nor have a lack of trust; they know what it's like from the inside and have their internal contacts. None of them were fired or ousted, but were valued employees that went to do other things - I am sure Microsoft misses them (especially considering the success they've had, wouldn't MS be riding a high right now if Half-Life and Steam had been their product?:)
Such a capable player in terms of hardware, but you can only use the WiFi to share songs if you know someone else who has a Zune!?
Granted there may be some security aspects to having a player which can synchronise over the network or do rudimentary web browsing even if it's just to browse the URGE store, what about the ability to plug it right into your digital camera and offload the photos, does it do TV output like the iPod, could it play standard MPEG4/AAC video (like the iPod) rather than WMA (no reason why all the Zune tools can't stick to WMV/WMA though, the same way nobody has to play URGE WMA rather than MP3). What about plugging it into your HiFi and streaming from Windows Media Player 11?
I wonder if they could automate the process the same way you track the shipment of your PC.
Enter your order ID. Enter your Vista key.. and then a refund is processed. The Vista key could be submitted to Microsoft such that it no longer authenticates copies of Vista on Dell PC's (XP/Vista activation and WGA knows the difference somehow, somewhere) and Dell can have the money sent to the user without tying up their customer support line.
Microsoft might be concerned that they don't get their money for this, but then again it would be against the law for them to do anything like force Dell not to do it, or insist that users do not get a refund anyway (the EU would have a field day and think up some higher billion dollar amounts for fines).
I bet it costs more to process it through 'Veronika' than clicking a website button would.
The uptake on this? I dunno. Maybe a lot of people would use it.. but a far higher number would not give a crap and carry on running Vista. I think shipping a naked/bare PC is extremely user-unfriendly and it also gives Dell a burn-in-test nightmare (how do you burn in a laptop which is supposed to have never had an OS installed on it? Do you then perform a military-grade disk wipe after you put the burn-in software on there? I dunno..). Putting the most popular, most needed for most people OS on the system (Vista I guess) is an okay thing to do. But I do think if you don't actually want Vista, you should be able to go through and click the Refund button..
Aww but I love the click in IE. Sometimes when I click in Firefox I wonder if it's actually DOING anything.. it does seem to sit there and churn a lot in the background. When I click in IE and it's locked up because of some dumb flash anim and not responding to my button press, it doesn't make any sound.
The click makes it very clear when the browser is sucking ass, and when it is not:)
Slashdot Mirror
The wording of the contract is such that it is implying that, should you not be employed by Google in the near future, or at least up until the point that you are, you do not go around telling all and sundry that you were interviewed by Google, or even "the big search engine company [wink]", because in the end this can and does lead to possible interest by other companies who want to know what Google are doing.
The fear is that you'll go interview at Google, they'll show you something they're working on they think you're fit for, and don't want you telling your friends and subsequent interviewers at other jobs about it, who will make a quick buck telling Microsoft or Yahoo! to hire you because you interviewed at Google.
This NDA reads like it is solely for the interview process. This means basically they can meet up with you, talk to you, tell you all their dirty search engine secrets and see if you want to work there to develop their software. And then you can't just go and sell it (or sell themselves) to Microsoft the moment the interview is over!
I would expect the recruitment process is pretty much their failure point for leaking information as employment endears loyalty, whereas a fancy meal and a trip to the local Google HQ probably does not.
I don't see this as "evil", merely covering their asses from "evil people" - unscrupulous blabbermouths who will use Google and any secrets they gained from the recruitment interview for profit.
Also; this guy threw away a job at Google. What a dick!
from article:
right, so a fancy display mechanism for sudo, hard to spoof, and extra monitoring to pick up on suspicious behaviour is somehow bad because Microsoft did it?
I think other OS's should have all this. I always thought the Synaptic/package management password entries were a bit fakeable in Ubuntu last time I tried. I wonder if there's any room for progress in getting distros to sign and encrypt executables running on the system. A signed and encrypted (or explicitly trusted) executable could run whenever the user clicked it or it was automated from certain accounts. If it is not signed (self-compiled for instance) then this can flag up a warning that this application may cause trouble. However, of course, users could self-sign their applications to work around the warnings. The signing application itself would be obviously signed and checked against a public key copy (say, Ubuntu servers) so that it cannot be tampered with. Everything else would be arbitrarily local.
Is it such a bad idea to code-sign the stuff that runs on your machine, rather than just the packages they came in?
The Saturn, I think is an odd one. Half of Sega didn't even know it was going to be released.. but pretty much after it was out, the Genesis wasn't re-released. The SNES also was just very in-stock with retailers when the N64 was hyped to be nearly out, and continued to sell fairly well.
I think the PSOne is the only one of the lot that was explicitly released after it's supposed successor had been launched worldwide. I'm talking about selling PSOnes brand new, in the UK, after PS2 launch - the last leg of it all. You never saw Genesis or SNES boxes coming in brand new while the N64 was released.
However we did still have one Genesis and one SNES in stock, and a Saturn on the show floor with a couple in the back room. It was fun to check out the boss' new mobile phone specs, and find it was actually more powerful than the Genesis. Oh man those were the days..
How does 3,700 Wii systems on eBay US today artificially limit availability of 1,000,000 units produced per month?
That's not even a third of a single percentage point.
They push out about a million units a month from the factory, so I doubt "1000s" of units on eBay (which really is is the low thousands) is actually consumer demand.
:)
The PS2 thing is odd; but it may be that buying a PS2 is simply a cheaper option than the PS3 - a lot of the high-profile games I see advertised on TV right now, and sponsoring TV shows, are Playstation 2 games. There's no need for a PS3 unless you want the great HD experience nobody sees the need for yet.
You DID see it in the previous generation though. Right after the Playstation 2 came out, Sony created the PSOne - a curvy, white version of the Playstation original console, with a Dual Shock pad in it. It sold like hotcakes in the face of the hundreds-of-dollars-more Playstation 2, and with 90% of the new games still being Playstation 1 games at the time. Demand did outstrip supply for a couple of weeks.. this was with me working at a games store in my youth. It got annoying for people to ask for a PSOne, because then it was our job to try and sell them a PS2.. a little difficult to get them to justify tripling their outlay just to play some games (people did though
You've seen it in handhelds too; the Gameboy Advance SP sold a lot of units, and when people couldn't get the fliptop model with the integrated battery and the brighter, better screen.. they just went and bought the still readily available and still in-production original Gameboy Advance. I believe they did bring out a new colour of the original Gameboy Advance, before they killed it off in favor of the SP.
And they're still selling the SP even though the DS is the hotcake, and even though it is not intended as a console replacement..
Indeed but pick a toolkit and take.. say.. Windows Vista. All of the APIs you wanted are there in the base OS install. Whether you use .NET or unmanaged code, the .NET stuff basically is a special language interface; it's no different to using a Python binding for GTK under Linux. The effect is, that you get to compile code in for the CLI, using managed code framework, rather than poke at the OS as low as you can go.
Sure, there are variants and wrappers but we are talking about the whole Windows windowing system basically layering substantial improvements in usability on top of the same basic Windows UI. Windows provides - since a long, long time ago - little utility functions so that if you DO want to draw a pretty looking button that matches system style, it is in fact a simple call away.
What if you want GTK and Qt apps to look the same? Well, there is no underlying standard X GUI toolkit, most applications have zero concept of what window manager is running around their window canvas, and when they draw a button border, they do it on their own special little GUI toolkit.
From a usability standpoint I think it's awful. Any OS that purposefully lets people install themes like a Denon HiFi (all black, with tiny charcoal-grey lettering, tiny blue lights and no contrast) means the system is basically totally unusable. I applauded Microsoft when they said they were code-signing themes and only allowing the two basic ones in XP; I love the way Apple apps pretty much all have to look the same way (even if they do change their mind every 5 minutes between candy and brushed aluminum). You get a button that looks like everyone else's buttons, so everyone can see a button and know it is a button.
FreeDesktop should, I think, define a standard "Window System Look" API and library somewhere which allows these things to be plugged together. A single and simple theming API which arbitrarily enforces certain usability points (standard window toolbar icons for example) maybe based around Cairo or something. Then, GTK and Qt and whatever else on the planet can just USE it. Want to draw a button? Yeah sure, do it in your own GUI toolkit API, after all there are some advantages of using either. But let's make them look the same and act the same without having to meticulously recreate theming on every toolkit known to man..
Simply put, he's right in a way. After all, developing software for an environment you choose, means anyone who didn't choose your environment who wants to run your software has to switch, or install more software, and deal with the problems possibly associated with such a thing.
;D
Remember when KDE, GNOME, Xfce and Enlightenment didn't share a desktop API? Look now at how Enlightenment reinvents everything using it's own special libraries? While Enlightenment has some distinct advantages over the way the others are designed, it is a DIFFERENT system. Want to install a GNOME core application on KDE? Well, you have to drag in most of GNOME, still. The same in reverse. Install Enlightenment tools on top? Well you have to drag in the rest of the E17 framework.
Install X on my system, and it still pulls in 5 different sound daemons.. yikes, and yikes again. Xine, MPlayer and GStreamer/Totem too. They all use the same libraries after all, but do I need 3 different ways to play a movie?
I personally prefer GNOME and Xfce if only because they use the same GTK toolkit - however I personally loathe GTK and the GTK API. I don't want to even get started in Enlightenment.
So, when you sit down and use Windows, what do you do? Well, you're pretty much stuck using Windows. And for all intents and purposes, there is a strict set of toolkits and APIs they provide for you (DLL hell wipes that off the map though). There is no "which API do I use to open a window and add a button" if you are using VisualC++ and reading the documentation, it will pretty much railroad you into one choice. But there ARE other choices.. they are just less obvious and less relevant.
I think this is why I like the concept of RAD stuff like Ruby On Rails, however I do hate Ruby, and Python, and I never got into Perl in a big way, and while I'm stuck with PHP, it's because it's closer to C++, which I absolutely love. If I had a choice I'd be coding everything in C++, with a single toolkit, but unfortunately because everyone else makes other choices, I can't.
Does my life deserve to be made this difficult by virtue of the freedom of choice? Probably
ActiveX as a plugin system is not patent encumbered insofar as you can't be sued for implementing ActiveX controls in an application that runs on Windows. The technology that allows ActiveX controls to run inside browser windows is no different to that which enables it in any COM-supporting application. Microsoft hardly have to approve every use of COM objects inside Windows applications for patent usage.
As a feature of the Windows version of Firefox or Mozilla, be it Mozilla Foundation sanctioned official plugin, or a 3rd party one (http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm) it can't be faulted as something people need. Of course, writing XPConnect controls would be one solution *if* the web designing profession decided to be hypocritical and not support ActiveX and IE in favor of only supporting Mozilla.
Certainly supporting ActiveX controls inside Firefox to get banking authentication, online virus checkers and suchlike working in other browsers than IE would be a noble goal and improve the acceptance of Firefox itself. It would not reduce the ties to Microsoft Windows but I hardly think that should be the goal of a web browser any more than IE should have been used to tie people *to* Microsoft Windows.
The aforementioned ActiveX plugin seems to be derelict, however, for no good reason. I don't think ActiveX is inherently any less secure than XPConnect - well, not think, but KNOW it isn't. Most ActiveX foibles are down to mis-signed and mis-featured controls published by software vendors (marked "safe for scripting" when they pretty much are not). It's perfectly possible for a badly written XPConnect plugin to do bad things to your system. The fix is simple (and ActiveX employs the same security and has for years) - code signing and user confirmation. Before it runs ActiveX controls or installs an XPI, ask the user. Check the code signing. Do you trust this source? Did you want to run the virus checker in this browser window? Did you click on a link that said "install PornBrowse Deluxe"??
Until we see a way to embed ActiveX controls so that they work the same in IE or Firefox, most sites that use this technology (rather than Java) are going to fall down.
So far all the ActiveX embedding plugins I have for Firefox just don't work, even if you fake the browser as much as technologically possible to "be" Internet Explorer.
I don't see why it would be a big problem to implement; Mozilla staff may consider ActiveX a security risk but it is NOT up to Mozilla staff to dictate to users what add-on plugins they run. You can't have a free and open API for plugins, and a huge plugin website, and then start saying "you can do everything except this"
Apple have taken a different route. It is not legal whatsoever to run any Apple MacOS inside a virtualisation, however much money you pay for the OS. You also have to pay full price for any upgrades unless you buy a copy of the previous OS within a certain time period of the major update release being put on sale. That's once every year to two years, not every 4 or 5 like Microsoft like to think they'll do it.
I don't think there is any philosophical difference, just a different pricing scheme. MacOS is arguably more limited than Windows; Desktop or laptop, with a focus on playing things through iTunes.
What you get in Windows Business is not a business OS with a remote control and a media center app whether you like it or not. You get a Business OS. What you get with a Media Center OS is the Media Center OS. What you get in Home Basic is all the basic stuff. There is a set of options to choose - depending on what PC you have. There are a ton of crazy variants of the PC around to choose from and a more suitable version of Windows for each. Tablet PC Edition is required to keep the Tablet PC editions out of the main editions of Windows. Why would you want touchpanel handwriting recognition features and all the other handy features on a desktop Mac? Do Apple even MAKE a tablet pc? No!
Why would you need 8 versions of the OS if you only had two targets?
I don't see why they shouldn't charge more for the right (not just ability) to run virtualised on a system. It applies to ALL virtualisation options (VirtualPC, VMWare, not just Macs) and virtualisation is in fact more a business than it is a home user's domain.
So why not tell people they need the business version, and only offer real support for the business version?
As for the security issues of virtualisation, sure.. well.. I can't think of any, but if I could, there are probably issues you could easily skirt around by using the disk encryption features inside the virtualisation (therefore your virtualised disk is not prone to attack from the host OS's myriad bugs and trojans) and other cute features they dropped from the Home and Home Basic edition.
Mac users are paranoid, that's all. Linux users too. Anything that costs more than what came free with their OS is a "rip off". Sorry, but people have to make money, and you guys have to spend it to get all the features.
Near me in San Antonio there are a couple of Universities, state funded and private. One of them is most definitely a Catholic university. Another is private. UTSA everyone else goes to. The add the colleges into the mix.
If you go poll the Catholic university, and ask them if Creation was fact or if Evolution is a better concept, aren't you going to get skewed results, like one third of them towing the line from scripture?
I'd really like to see the data rather than a news story, basically.
As for the >90% believe in God thing, that's not too surprising, however, WHICH God? Did they just interview white Christians, or did they pull out Muslims, Jews, (arguably the same God but.. different concepts of it) pick another religion if you need to.
In a country like the UK where I am from, a LOT of people believe in God. However a LOT of people also don't go to church every Sunday. In fact very few people do. That doesn't mean they are not Christian and don't believe in God. It means we have less wild-eyed evangelists, and keep it to ourselves, maybe. I think any poll of any country would throw a 90% value of some degree.
Me, I don't give a shit. I think the universe was created when a couple of superdimensional membranes collided and the probability of some waveform occurring hit a certain level. Whether that is God, or it's a white dude with a white beard, I dunno. Believing the Earth was created 10,000 years ago is a bit silly, but then the Bible is nothing more than allegory in this sense; the idea is that it was a long time ago, longer than anyone alive can possibly remember and possibly imagine. Does it matter that they beleive 10,000 rather than 4 billion? Isn't that just math? Okay.. now I am thinking about when they tried to redefine Pi..
AI in games is mostly triggers and actions.
It's still AI if those triggers are hardcoded or based on statistical analysis.
It *is* intelligent for an NPC to realise a grenade was thrown by the player into it's general area, and throw it back at the player. That's not to say it shouldn't be ranked highly or that it is a crappy AI.
If an enemy hops over a wall next to him for cover it's the enemy realising that he needs cover and there is an easily hoppable wall. He could just as well duck behind a barrel, but the barrel may be made of soft shitty wood, the wall is nice and made of brick. It makes an education decision just like we do. They may well be SCRIPTED.. if near wall hop over wall else if near barrel duck under barrel else if player is actually in effective firing range, run the hell away else sit there and taunt them into the minefield..
Think of your thought process when you would be in the firing line and you have the choice between ducking behind a worm-riddled barrel to avoid gunfire, or a solid brick wall that you can hop over. How many seconds does it take? Can you remember every microdecision you made? No, you think "ohshit I'm being shot at" and probably duck behind the barrel under stress, when it starts to splinter then you scramble over the wall and realise you dropped your gun hopping over the wall..
Does that make it crappy AI that it did not break out scientific analysis of the situation and count variables or do complex physics?
Make sure you have the development lifecycle and procedures down, and learn as much science as you can other than computer science. You may get paid to develop software but that software has to do things - and usually that has a lot to do with maths, science, research, data processing, and all of that needs testing.
:)
If you train yourself to be a project manager, study the development PROCESS rather than the menial low-level grunt work, the project will come out better for it. You needn't be a great coder - as when you are a great project manager, you get to tell other people to write great code for you
I'd also heartily recommend Exceed.
But you should also get a box on your desk running Solaris.. it would be easy to convince them to buy you another $800 box to sit under your desk (the Ultra 20 is hardly expensive) for development work. Development work is the key; if you want to make any crazy changes to the server, you don't want to do it live and screw up. Maybe you want to test out some configurations or so and are happy to trash the box under your desk. That's a great justification. And for the meagre sum of (starting at) $800! How can they say no?
Yes that thing where I strain my wrist and fingers trying to use crappy websites all day that profess to have "the world's easiest" something.
My RSI says "no".
That the world's easiest Linux has the world's most ANNOYING menu bar on their website. You can't get from the button you hovered over to the link you want to click without it disappearing or changing.
These guys suck. Fuck Ulteo.
I doubt Newell would let it happen.
And integrating Steam into XBox Live is a bit late.. Steam should have BEEN XBox Live. PopCap Puzzle Pirates FTW.
Considering a lot of the guys at Valve used to work for Microsoft, I don't think anyone there has any reason to be scared, nor have a lack of trust; they know what it's like from the inside and have their internal contacts. None of them were fired or ousted, but were valued employees that went to do other things - I am sure Microsoft misses them (especially considering the success they've had, wouldn't MS be riding a high right now if Half-Life and Steam had been their product? :)
Such a capable player in terms of hardware, but you can only use the WiFi to share songs if you know someone else who has a Zune!?
Granted there may be some security aspects to having a player which can synchronise over the network or do rudimentary web browsing even if it's just to browse the URGE store, what about the ability to plug it right into your digital camera and offload the photos, does it do TV output like the iPod, could it play standard MPEG4/AAC video (like the iPod) rather than WMA (no reason why all the Zune tools can't stick to WMV/WMA though, the same way nobody has to play URGE WMA rather than MP3). What about plugging it into your HiFi and streaming from Windows Media Player 11?
I wonder if they could automate the process the same way you track the shipment of your PC.
Enter your order ID. Enter your Vista key.. and then a refund is processed. The Vista key could be submitted to Microsoft such that it no longer authenticates copies of Vista on Dell PC's (XP/Vista activation and WGA knows the difference somehow, somewhere) and Dell can have the money sent to the user without tying up their customer support line.
Microsoft might be concerned that they don't get their money for this, but then again it would be against the law for them to do anything like force Dell not to do it, or insist that users do not get a refund anyway (the EU would have a field day and think up some higher billion dollar amounts for fines).
I bet it costs more to process it through 'Veronika' than clicking a website button would.
The uptake on this? I dunno. Maybe a lot of people would use it.. but a far higher number would not give a crap and carry on running Vista. I think shipping a naked/bare PC is extremely user-unfriendly and it also gives Dell a burn-in-test nightmare (how do you burn in a laptop which is supposed to have never had an OS installed on it? Do you then perform a military-grade disk wipe after you put the burn-in software on there? I dunno..). Putting the most popular, most needed for most people OS on the system (Vista I guess) is an okay thing to do. But I do think if you don't actually want Vista, you should be able to go through and click the Refund button..
Aww but I love the click in IE. Sometimes when I click in Firefox I wonder if it's actually DOING anything.. it does seem to sit there and churn a lot in the background. When I click in IE and it's locked up because of some dumb flash anim and not responding to my button press, it doesn't make any sound.
:)
The click makes it very clear when the browser is sucking ass, and when it is not