Off the top of my head I can name Path of Exile. That's the bluescreen-happy one. I think I can remember having seen "Creative drivers are known to cause trouble" before, though.
Apple missed a lot of serious issues with this Java patch. The JRE7 security flaw. iOS text message spoofing. The Pentium FDIV bug. The Prius stuck accelerator problem. PHP's inherent design flaws. Unity.
I salute the efforts of Mr. What'shisname to warn us of Apple's disastrous negligience. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to demonstrate against the Vatican for not having achieved break-even with fusion power yet.
Basically, OS X has a really nice user interface. Or, more precisely, it has a user interface and technical design some people just really take to. When people switch it may be less "Gnome sucks so I'm abandoning Linux altogether and relearning everything" and more "I've been using my Mac a lot lately and with Gnome going bad I may as well make OS X my primary OS".
In the end every major OS has upsides and downsides. When I switched to OS X (just before 10.4 came out) it had a UI sophistication unmatched by Linux or the aging Windows XP, especially in terms of consistency. Back then third-party apps were derided if their UI wasn't "Mac-like" enough. While this reduced diversity it did mean that someone who got along well with Apple's programs got along well with all OS X programs. Today that has been greatly watered down. Apple is pushing for a program-specific look-and-feel and "Mac-like" is no longer as neccessary as it used to be.
Linux has come a long way since then, even despite Gnome 3 and Unity. And while Apple has elegant (if storage-inefficient) tricks like "a program is a self-contained folder", Linux still makes arcane low-level hacks a tad easier (not to mention installing and uninstalling non-GUI programs). A Linux box with Xfce isn't exciting but it's a reliable workhorse - even if I do miss BSD top's ability to take parameters. I just prefer typing `top -ocpu` over typing `top` and then hitting O-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-Enter. Of course I could just take a BSD and install Xfce there but that'd be too simple.
As for Windows... Well, I never really understood Microsoft's design decisions. Some people swear by it, though, so apparently it does have some merit. And at least a lot of the under-the-hood suckiness has been worked out with 7.
I find it amusing that your line immediately caused a coherent image to form in my mind* while I took half a minute to parse the story's headline (and initially did it the wrong way).
* I think that the combination of Rainbow Dash, spatulas and BDSM is weird but hey, so is the thought of mortgages displaying factories...
Apple: Okay, I've got an offensive patent war chest, standard DD build with some bling thrown in. Who's the tank? Who's on healing duty? Samsung: I've... got a DD build, too. HTC: Same here. Sony: I always play DD. Nokia: Microsoft taught me Cannibalize so I put all my skill points into that. HTC: How's that working out? Nokia: Pretty good, although I can only use it on myself. Apple: We're all DDs? We can't all be DDs! Nokia: Except me! Apple: Okay, we're all DDs except for Nokia who's special. Yeah, that's much better. I can practically feel the boss battle whiz by. In the wrong direction. Sony: Now don't be mean. I mean, Nokia still makes decent rubber boots. Apple: You know what? Screw this. I'm going to go tank the European Union and you do whatever it is you think you do best. Samsung: As much as I enjoy watching you bleed, don't you think that- Apple: LEEROY JENKINS!
And then the entire mobile phone industry was wiped.
Not just Linux. I've encountered games that HEAVILY recommend uninstalling all Creative sound drivers and using generic Windows drivers instead because the engines tend to trigger bugs in Creative's drivers that result in bluescreens. (And yes, I do have a game that ends up crashing my computer about one every two hours. Unfortunatly, my sound setup requires me to use Creative's drivers.)
'Cause we all just wanna be code rock stars
And live in suburb houses, drivin' hybrid cars
Mod points come easy and ideas come late
We'll all stay horny 'cause we just won't mate
And we'll hang out in the coolest threads
About kernel scheduler overheads
Every bitcoin miner's gonna wind up there
Every ESR fanboy with his unwashed hair
And well, hey, hey, I wanna be a rock star
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rock star!
That plus there are always applicants who seem very smart and capable until they actually get to coding, at which point they will completely fall apart as their "years of experience with PHP" turn out to mean "I spent half an hour with PHP 3 back in 2001".
Coding tests won't allow you to perfectly gauge the coding abilities of an applicant but they will at least give you a rough idea on how familiar they are with the language and how they approach a problem in the time allotted. (Plus honesty; an applicant who starts out with "I don't know the language but I'm willing to learn it" leaves a much better impression than one who spends most of the test trying to find out how to display a string without ever having mentioned thay they have no clue about the language.)
I find that starting with a short general interview, then doing a coding test for an hour or so and following that up with another interview where you discuss what the applicant did and how they did it is a fairly reasonable way of doing things. You can see whether they're familiar with the language and how they approach the problem in general. I'd rather not try to hire someone without a test. (Look at me, less than two years of total work experience and I'm talking like I know what I'm doing. Startupish companies put you in weird positions...)
Of all the races in Star Trek you chose Q as the role model? Okay, so at least it's not the Ferengi but still there has to be a better goal to shoot for.
Except if you actually propose a race of John de Lancie clones.
It always depends on where you live. The fastest speed I can get is 3 Mbit/s while the cheapest plan is for 6 Mbit. I'm too far away from the DSLAM for the telco to deliver the speed I pay for; while the town is too big to really cover with one DSLAM it's not big enough for the telcos to build more than one. (For the record, this is in Germany where internet is either DSL or mobile.)
It's a rural area; I live about 40 km away from the next large city and 10 km from the next small one. That's far enough out that the villages of the region have recently teamed up with the small city such that any future network speed upgrade has to be offered everywhere - the telcos are notorious for upgrading the cities' networks every few years and then declaring widespread high-speed internet coverage while upgrading rural networks only if absolutely neccessary. In fact, some villages in the area still have nothing faster than ISDN for landline internet. (Luckily, mobile connectivity is more strictly regulated and thus places without usable DSL can end up having decent enough HSPA.)
What Europe does have is more competition in the telco market so we don't get things like the ridiculously bad mobile plans Americans use.
I don't want to play devil's advocate but the last sea pony sighting was three generations ago. Try as you might but calling upon them might simply no longer work.
German law has the concept of fining X days' earnings. Just apply that. If the judge finds the lawsuit to be without merit, the plaintiff is fined, let's see... a week's earnings. An individual person won't like it but they can stomach the loss. A corporation will also live but they now have angry shareholders who'd like to know whether losing those heaps of money was really neccessary.
And no, the corporations can't decide how much money that're making; the judge does. Hollywood accounting wouldn't fly. "We make a lot of money but don't have any" (used by a shell company) wouldn't fly either; then the proper course of action would be to seize the company's assets, which would be great fun in the case of a patent shell company.
They briefly considered the name "M#.net" but decided that Dotnet was no longer the wave of the future. Then rumors said that they wanted to rename themselves to "Metrosoft" but now they insist that they have always been "Modern UIsoft".
It cuts both ways. In the equivalent of high school I had a math teacher I was entirely incompatible with. I dropped from a B to a D in math and stayed there as I failed to learn anything from that man and even lost all enthusiasm for mathematics. Having a teacher you can't work with can be disastrous - not just because of the missed material; you can always learn that on your own. It's because they can suck all the fun out of a field of knowledge until the point where you don't want to make up for what you missed. Yes, you can force yourself to learn it but it's not going to be very effective if you dislike the field (unless you posses a great amount of willpower, which I don't believe I do).
On the other hand, in university, in Practical CS 1 and 2 (aka "Java for beginners" and "Java for slightly more advanced beginners") we had a setup where students would form groups that do the written homework together and would enter an oral exam at the end where their individual proficiency would be evaluated. In both cases I came out with a good grade while the others of my groups failed. In both cases I was the only one of the group who actually cared about the subject. You can certainly be a bad student without external influences.
Normal end users want to use the user interface they know that operates according to exactly the same rules it has been since 1995. Windows 98 looked like Windows 95. Windows XP could look like Windows 95. Windows can look like Windows 95. Windows 2008 should be able to look like Windows 95. And this should be an easil accessible setting under the display options where someone without training can find them.
Only power users (aka neckbeards) can be expected to relearn the UI every time Microsoft decides to change things around. Only power users (aka neckbeards) can be expected to follow Microsoft's reasoning when they decide that the classic UI should be hidden under advanced performance options. Make no mistake: Microsoft already offers choices that only make sense to neckbeards. They might as well offer industry-standard neckbeard choices while they're at it.
Of course Microsoft will implement their version of RTC in IE10/11 and once the W3C gets the spec nailed down it will have to wait until IE12 to be implemented, requiring people wanting to support IE to code against Microsoft's beta spec until Windows 7 has been EOL'd because backporting those changes would be an unbearable burden on Microsoft. If we're lucky we might get a polyfill we have to manually track down and include.
On the other hand the web developers' infatuation with using -webkit-* (and other WebKit-specific things) everywhere will mean that all other browsers will have to code against Google's beta spec in order to get any support.
Ultimately we might end up using Flash for this until the current generation of web developers have died off and the next generation realizes that there are people besides the WebKit dev team involved in web standards. At that time Win7/IE10 can be safely ignored and we can finally implement the RPC spec as finalized by the W3C. (For the record, I am a web developer and both -webkit-itis and Microsoft tying IE to Windows versions are annoying trends.)
You forgot one step: "Wonder why Microsoft can't throw the user a bone and simplify things by moving configuration to Unix-style text files"
Honestly, "edit ~\.explorer\ui.conf and comment out the 'useAero' line" isn't much less intuitive than "navigate to [context menu of Computer]/Properties/Advanced System Settings/Performance and tell Windows to 'Adjust for best performance'" when what you want is to switch to the classic Windows look and feel.
And how does the government having a monopoly on taking people's money away preclude the RIAA from taking people's money away? I was under the impression that the three branches of the American government are the RIAA, the MPAA and Monsanto.
Well, SDL can be finicky on non-Linux platforms. It runs well enough but on Windows you have to deal with no package management so you need to set up stuff by hand in order to develop for it. On OS X the development resources (headers etc.) were nontrivial to install properly the last time I tried but work as expected once you've got them.
That's really a big advantage of having a package manager: Getting (supported) libraries set up for development is dead easy.
Actually, OS X still has Firewire support and new non-retina MBPs ship with a FireWire 800 port if I remember correctly. Apple's strategy is more along the lines of "let's fold everything into Thunderbolt so we can get fewer and smaller connectors", which at least makes some sense if you buy into the premise that thinner is better.
they pull the plug on their ill-conceive[d] monstrosity.
This seems to be a very common last step in Microsoft product philosophy. Examples would be ActiveX, the Zune and.net as the preferred application platform.
First someone accidentally misspells "moron". Then people write "moran" as a reference. Ten years down the road "moran" has become the new standard spelling and Joe Q. Public could (sic) care less.
Slashdot Mirror
Off the top of my head I can name Path of Exile. That's the bluescreen-happy one. I think I can remember having seen "Creative drivers are known to cause trouble" before, though.
Oh come on, you apologist. Stop splitting hairs.
Apple missed a lot of serious issues with this Java patch. The JRE7 security flaw. iOS text message spoofing. The Pentium FDIV bug. The Prius stuck accelerator problem. PHP's inherent design flaws. Unity.
I salute the efforts of Mr. What'shisname to warn us of Apple's disastrous negligience. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to demonstrate against the Vatican for not having achieved break-even with fusion power yet.
Basically, OS X has a really nice user interface. Or, more precisely, it has a user interface and technical design some people just really take to. When people switch it may be less "Gnome sucks so I'm abandoning Linux altogether and relearning everything" and more "I've been using my Mac a lot lately and with Gnome going bad I may as well make OS X my primary OS".
In the end every major OS has upsides and downsides. When I switched to OS X (just before 10.4 came out) it had a UI sophistication unmatched by Linux or the aging Windows XP, especially in terms of consistency. Back then third-party apps were derided if their UI wasn't "Mac-like" enough. While this reduced diversity it did mean that someone who got along well with Apple's programs got along well with all OS X programs. Today that has been greatly watered down. Apple is pushing for a program-specific look-and-feel and "Mac-like" is no longer as neccessary as it used to be.
Linux has come a long way since then, even despite Gnome 3 and Unity. And while Apple has elegant (if storage-inefficient) tricks like "a program is a self-contained folder", Linux still makes arcane low-level hacks a tad easier (not to mention installing and uninstalling non-GUI programs). A Linux box with Xfce isn't exciting but it's a reliable workhorse - even if I do miss BSD top's ability to take parameters. I just prefer typing `top -ocpu` over typing `top` and then hitting O-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-Enter. Of course I could just take a BSD and install Xfce there but that'd be too simple.
As for Windows... Well, I never really understood Microsoft's design decisions. Some people swear by it, though, so apparently it does have some merit. And at least a lot of the under-the-hood suckiness has been worked out with 7.
I find it amusing that your line immediately caused a coherent image to form in my mind* while I took half a minute to parse the story's headline (and initially did it the wrong way).
* I think that the combination of Rainbow Dash, spatulas and BDSM is weird but hey, so is the thought of mortgages displaying factories...
Apple: Okay, I've got an offensive patent war chest, standard DD build with some bling thrown in. Who's the tank? Who's on healing duty?
Samsung: I've... got a DD build, too.
HTC: Same here.
Sony: I always play DD.
Nokia: Microsoft taught me Cannibalize so I put all my skill points into that.
HTC: How's that working out?
Nokia: Pretty good, although I can only use it on myself.
Apple: We're all DDs? We can't all be DDs!
Nokia: Except me!
Apple: Okay, we're all DDs except for Nokia who's special. Yeah, that's much better. I can practically feel the boss battle whiz by. In the wrong direction.
Sony: Now don't be mean. I mean, Nokia still makes decent rubber boots.
Apple: You know what? Screw this. I'm going to go tank the European Union and you do whatever it is you think you do best.
Samsung: As much as I enjoy watching you bleed, don't you think that-
Apple: LEEROY JENKINS!
And then the entire mobile phone industry was wiped.
Not just Linux. I've encountered games that HEAVILY recommend uninstalling all Creative sound drivers and using generic Windows drivers instead because the engines tend to trigger bugs in Creative's drivers that result in bluescreens. (And yes, I do have a game that ends up crashing my computer about one every two hours. Unfortunatly, my sound setup requires me to use Creative's drivers.)
'Cause we all just wanna be code rock stars
And live in suburb houses, drivin' hybrid cars
Mod points come easy and ideas come late
We'll all stay horny 'cause we just won't mate
And we'll hang out in the coolest threads
About kernel scheduler overheads
Every bitcoin miner's gonna wind up there
Every ESR fanboy with his unwashed hair
And well, hey, hey, I wanna be a rock star
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rock star!
That plus there are always applicants who seem very smart and capable until they actually get to coding, at which point they will completely fall apart as their "years of experience with PHP" turn out to mean "I spent half an hour with PHP 3 back in 2001".
Coding tests won't allow you to perfectly gauge the coding abilities of an applicant but they will at least give you a rough idea on how familiar they are with the language and how they approach a problem in the time allotted. (Plus honesty; an applicant who starts out with "I don't know the language but I'm willing to learn it" leaves a much better impression than one who spends most of the test trying to find out how to display a string without ever having mentioned thay they have no clue about the language.)
I find that starting with a short general interview, then doing a coding test for an hour or so and following that up with another interview where you discuss what the applicant did and how they did it is a fairly reasonable way of doing things. You can see whether they're familiar with the language and how they approach the problem in general. I'd rather not try to hire someone without a test. (Look at me, less than two years of total work experience and I'm talking like I know what I'm doing. Startupish companies put you in weird positions...)
Of all the races in Star Trek you chose Q as the role model? Okay, so at least it's not the Ferengi but still there has to be a better goal to shoot for.
Except if you actually propose a race of John de Lancie clones.
It always depends on where you live. The fastest speed I can get is 3 Mbit/s while the cheapest plan is for 6 Mbit. I'm too far away from the DSLAM for the telco to deliver the speed I pay for; while the town is too big to really cover with one DSLAM it's not big enough for the telcos to build more than one. (For the record, this is in Germany where internet is either DSL or mobile.)
It's a rural area; I live about 40 km away from the next large city and 10 km from the next small one. That's far enough out that the villages of the region have recently teamed up with the small city such that any future network speed upgrade has to be offered everywhere - the telcos are notorious for upgrading the cities' networks every few years and then declaring widespread high-speed internet coverage while upgrading rural networks only if absolutely neccessary. In fact, some villages in the area still have nothing faster than ISDN for landline internet. (Luckily, mobile connectivity is more strictly regulated and thus places without usable DSL can end up having decent enough HSPA.)
What Europe does have is more competition in the telco market so we don't get things like the ridiculously bad mobile plans Americans use.
I don't want to play devil's advocate but the last sea pony sighting was three generations ago. Try as you might but calling upon them might simply no longer work.
German law has the concept of fining X days' earnings. Just apply that. If the judge finds the lawsuit to be without merit, the plaintiff is fined, let's see... a week's earnings. An individual person won't like it but they can stomach the loss. A corporation will also live but they now have angry shareholders who'd like to know whether losing those heaps of money was really neccessary.
And no, the corporations can't decide how much money that're making; the judge does. Hollywood accounting wouldn't fly. "We make a lot of money but don't have any" (used by a shell company) wouldn't fly either; then the proper course of action would be to seize the company's assets, which would be great fun in the case of a patent shell company.
They briefly considered the name "M#.net" but decided that Dotnet was no longer the wave of the future. Then rumors said that they wanted to rename themselves to "Metrosoft" but now they insist that they have always been "Modern UIsoft".
It cuts both ways. In the equivalent of high school I had a math teacher I was entirely incompatible with. I dropped from a B to a D in math and stayed there as I failed to learn anything from that man and even lost all enthusiasm for mathematics. Having a teacher you can't work with can be disastrous - not just because of the missed material; you can always learn that on your own. It's because they can suck all the fun out of a field of knowledge until the point where you don't want to make up for what you missed. Yes, you can force yourself to learn it but it's not going to be very effective if you dislike the field (unless you posses a great amount of willpower, which I don't believe I do).
On the other hand, in university, in Practical CS 1 and 2 (aka "Java for beginners" and "Java for slightly more advanced beginners") we had a setup where students would form groups that do the written homework together and would enter an oral exam at the end where their individual proficiency would be evaluated. In both cases I came out with a good grade while the others of my groups failed. In both cases I was the only one of the group who actually cared about the subject. You can certainly be a bad student without external influences.
Normal end users want to use the user interface they know that operates according to exactly the same rules it has been since 1995. Windows 98 looked like Windows 95. Windows XP could look like Windows 95. Windows can look like Windows 95. Windows 2008 should be able to look like Windows 95. And this should be an easil accessible setting under the display options where someone without training can find them.
Only power users (aka neckbeards) can be expected to relearn the UI every time Microsoft decides to change things around. Only power users (aka neckbeards) can be expected to follow Microsoft's reasoning when they decide that the classic UI should be hidden under advanced performance options. Make no mistake: Microsoft already offers choices that only make sense to neckbeards. They might as well offer industry-standard neckbeard choices while they're at it.
Of course Microsoft will implement their version of RTC in IE10/11 and once the W3C gets the spec nailed down it will have to wait until IE12 to be implemented, requiring people wanting to support IE to code against Microsoft's beta spec until Windows 7 has been EOL'd because backporting those changes would be an unbearable burden on Microsoft. If we're lucky we might get a polyfill we have to manually track down and include.
On the other hand the web developers' infatuation with using -webkit-* (and other WebKit-specific things) everywhere will mean that all other browsers will have to code against Google's beta spec in order to get any support.
Ultimately we might end up using Flash for this until the current generation of web developers have died off and the next generation realizes that there are people besides the WebKit dev team involved in web standards. At that time Win7/IE10 can be safely ignored and we can finally implement the RPC spec as finalized by the W3C. (For the record, I am a web developer and both -webkit-itis and Microsoft tying IE to Windows versions are annoying trends.)
You forgot one step: "Wonder why Microsoft can't throw the user a bone and simplify things by moving configuration to Unix-style text files"
Honestly, "edit ~\.explorer\ui.conf and comment out the 'useAero' line" isn't much less intuitive than "navigate to [context menu of Computer]/Properties/Advanced System Settings/Performance and tell Windows to 'Adjust for best performance'" when what you want is to switch to the classic Windows look and feel.
And how does the government having a monopoly on taking people's money away preclude the RIAA from taking people's money away? I was under the impression that the three branches of the American government are the RIAA, the MPAA and Monsanto.
First the Chipmunks and now Justin the Singing Beaver (and the Chipmunks yet again). Rodents and generic pop really go well together, don't they?
Well, SDL can be finicky on non-Linux platforms. It runs well enough but on Windows you have to deal with no package management so you need to set up stuff by hand in order to develop for it. On OS X the development resources (headers etc.) were nontrivial to install properly the last time I tried but work as expected once you've got them.
That's really a big advantage of having a package manager: Getting (supported) libraries set up for development is dead easy.
Actually, OS X still has Firewire support and new non-retina MBPs ship with a FireWire 800 port if I remember correctly. Apple's strategy is more along the lines of "let's fold everything into Thunderbolt so we can get fewer and smaller connectors", which at least makes some sense if you buy into the premise that thinner is better.
they pull the plug on their ill-conceive[d] monstrosity.
This seems to be a very common last step in Microsoft product philosophy. Examples would be ActiveX, the Zune and .net as the preferred application platform.
First someone accidentally misspells "moron". Then people write "moran" as a reference. Ten years down the road "moran" has become the new standard spelling and Joe Q. Public could (sic) care less.
Hang on. What's a california and how did Apple go from there to computers?
Yeah. Just like "transceiver" and "modem" this term will never catch on.