Great. Once we have a robots that sits around on his sofa all day, watching TV, drinking beer and eating junk-food... 90% of the planet's male population will become obsolete!
The worst you have the right to say is "I hope they take care of it in the next release".
No. You can hope that the next release will fix <insert bug/problem here>. If you can't patch the thing yourself that is all you can do, apart from reporting the bug/problem.
What you can't do is to expect them to fix it. They have no obligation to do so.
So, if you say "I hope they'll take care of it" and mean it like you said it, there's nothing wrong with that. If you actually mean "I expect those lazy bums to fix my problem, even though I never paid them for their product", yes, that justifies a big STFU.
The most important thing is that it be based on open non-patent encumered algorithms... otherwise it will never be accepted broadly enough.
Yeah, right. Microsoft just needs to build it into their programs. Bam, instant adoption. If it's enabled by default the rest of the world will follow or be left behind, as everyone and their mother will be using it, most of them without even knowing that this new feature might be patented - or that that is a Bad Thing.
Yeah, that's great, especially when you're recording the mail at home, watching your children play...
"To: sales-at-mycompany.net
I just wanted to ask you about the shipment dates for the i500 series and put that down! If you touch that again you'll get into big trouble, my friend!...Is this thing still running?"
Unless you already have a pool of developers to work with - for example, the game I'm currently developing the network stuff for (unfortunately about the only OSS part of the game) was started by a thread in the IT section of a German gaming forum. Developers were gathered by pointing people to the thread until all positions were filled.
While most of the game will be proprietary (mostly due to the fact that the main coders couldn't find an OSS rendering engine for Delphi), I do plan on making an opensourced Linux port of the game. I will probably be able to use most or all of the resources and I can ask the original client's developers if I have questions about the its design.
So basically I have everything already laid out: There are some decent engines on SourceForge, the resources are there, the game logic itself is already done and the netcode is a dynamic library that will be portable from the beginning. And I can probably recruit one or two of the original game's coders for the port.
The point I'm trying to make is: You don't need to be able to make the entire game yourself if you know where to find people who have enough spare time to help you. Especially the techies in non-techie environments sometimes have more than enough time at their hands and are often quite willing to learn something about a certain subject if you ask them to work on it. It's a chance for them to learn about a subject they normally wouldn't have looked into due to inertia.
If you can provide an idea and know someone who can provide something else and he knows someone... you can reach that critical mass pretty fast.
BTW, the idea does not necessarily have to be good as long as it has enough hooks to let the team plug in good ideas. Our game's concept started as "Let's clone Spellcast!" and then evolved into a tournament-style thingie involving two-dimensional spells and whatnot, mostly through the concept of "Yeah, that sounds great, but how does this sound?".
I think that you need nothing but a basic concept and a few people who are willing to invest their time into it. Once you have people assigned to the various positions, they can (help you) work out stuff file formats, communication protocols, etc. If you draw your team members from a sufficiently large pool, you'll find someone for every position you'd ever need, whether it be modeler, 2D artist or coding Linux geek. (That last position is important, but then again this is Slashdot, so the position will likely be already filled in your projects.)
Longhorn is what drove me to Linux... And yes, having XP in a VMWare box is really nice. Sure, it's a bit slow, but then again that also applies to any Windows installation that has been in constant use for six months.
OTOH the way the Explorer handles pictures and refuses to open them in a graphics app by default unless you play around with obscure settings in obscure places is a good reason why XP is the most annoying Windows ever.
The thing is, Win XP is suited for people who think that IE == the Internet. It's friendly, it wants to take you by the hand and slowly walk you over to where you want to go.
Which is annoying if you exactly know what you want to do and how to do it. Especially because making it stop is usually extremly un-intuitive - settings are only accessibly if you open five different dialog windows, some of XPs bad behavior can only be fixed by adding undocumented values to the registry...
XP is a dream for casual users who use their Peecee without knowing much about it. For powerusers who have experience with previous versions of Windows and who just want to do some serious work it's a nightmare.
Yeah, but the "OMG! The Internet is integrated with your PC! Active Desktop! Internet Explorer built in! Amazing new security flaws!" thing was Windows 98. 95 hardly even knew thst the Internet existed.
It will not, but the way it's broken will be declared the standard and the XP release will be retconned to an experimental beta preview demonstration teaser that was never spposed to "work" anyway.
The market is in new systems. The natural (non-)decision is to get the newest version available, and that will eventually be Longhorn. Microsoft would save themselves a lot of money by not bothering to produce a new version of Windows. Then again, how long has WinXP been on sale? Maybe they are doing exactly that.
But they can't go on like this forever, because at some point someone will be able to say "Well, our operating system is not from 2001" and people will want that instead of windows. The age of Windows XP makes it a good target for FUD - especially if you take apps like the Internet Explorer, whose only upgrades in the last few years have been bugfixes, as examples.
People often think that new == good and XP is certainly not new.
By the way, if there is one feature I'd like to see getting built into Windows XP it's ext3 support; Windows' current file systems are both sub-optimal (FAT32 is too limited and NTFS is too quirky).
BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow. That claim almost always gets trotted out in this kind of context. This is a kind of academic urban legend that just won't die. The linguist Geoff Pullum thoroughly debunked this whole fable some time back, and traced the series of misunderstandings and exaggerations which had given rise to it. In fact, it appears that Inuktitut has just two words for snow.
#define HUGENUMBER = 2
Problem solved, Inuit do have HUGENUMBER words for snow.
Even weirder, I have to keep myself from lapsing back into English when I talk about my work to Germans. This never happens when I talk about anything else. Seems like my work is intimately associated with English.
Sounds familiar. When I'm coding I always think in English, which has the side effect of the entire comments and debug output being in English, which is not always optimal, especially when I'm working on a library which then gets integrated into a non-english project.
And no, I'm not an native English speaker.
Take the German "doch". It's the answer you give when you were asked a negative question and want to unambiguously answer it positively.
Example: "Weren't you at the party?" might mean "I assume that you were not at the party" or "I assume that you were at the party". If you say "Yes", your answer might have either meaning. Germans can use "doch", which always means "I was at the party".
I actually had quite a hard time writing this - explaining conepts ina a language that doesn't have them is pretty hard.
Quote from the Wikipedia article: [The theory] states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native languages.
I wonder how someone who was raised to speak C++ natively would think.
Oh yeah. He wouldn't think much because as soon as he reads something like "five + 2" his brain would crash because you can't add integers and char*s.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. Once we have a robots that sits around on his sofa all day, watching TV, drinking beer and eating junk-food... 90% of the planet's male population will become obsolete!
Wake me up when they've gotten to the Ethical Treatment of Lint.
Well, we haven't got to Soviet Russia yet...
And we would have been perfectly fine without going there, you insensitive clod!
How about "Robot Eats Lies to Generate Power"? SCO and AdTI could become big players in the energy market...
For some reason I can't imagine today's robotic dogs eating more than one page a day.
That would allow the US Army to reclassify Firendly Fire as "adaptively refilling our fuel reserves".
Damn. And I thought we were safe from it...
Aaaiiieeeee! Top-posting makes its debut on Slashdot! [head explodes, intarweb collapses]
The worst you have the right to say is "I hope they take care of it in the next release".
No. You can hope that the next release will fix <insert bug/problem here>. If you can't patch the thing yourself that is all you can do, apart from reporting the bug/problem.
What you can't do is to expect them to fix it. They have no obligation to do so.
So, if you say "I hope they'll take care of it" and mean it like you said it, there's nothing wrong with that. If you actually mean "I expect those lazy bums to fix my problem, even though I never paid them for their product", yes, that justifies a big STFU.
The most important thing is that it be based on open non-patent encumered algorithms... otherwise it will never be accepted broadly enough.
Yeah, right. Microsoft just needs to build it into their programs. Bam, instant adoption. If it's enabled by default the rest of the world will follow or be left behind, as everyone and their mother will be using it, most of them without even knowing that this new feature might be patented - or that that is a Bad Thing.
Yeah, that's great, especially when you're recording the mail at home, watching your children play...
...Is this thing still running?"
"To: sales-at-mycompany.net
I just wanted to ask you about the shipment dates for the i500 series and put that down! If you touch that again you'll get into big trouble, my friend!
Unless you already have a pool of developers to work with - for example, the game I'm currently developing the network stuff for (unfortunately about the only OSS part of the game) was started by a thread in the IT section of a German gaming forum. Developers were gathered by pointing people to the thread until all positions were filled.
While most of the game will be proprietary (mostly due to the fact that the main coders couldn't find an OSS rendering engine for Delphi), I do plan on making an opensourced Linux port of the game. I will probably be able to use most or all of the resources and I can ask the original client's developers if I have questions about the its design.
So basically I have everything already laid out: There are some decent engines on SourceForge, the resources are there, the game logic itself is already done and the netcode is a dynamic library that will be portable from the beginning. And I can probably recruit one or two of the original game's coders for the port.
The point I'm trying to make is: You don't need to be able to make the entire game yourself if you know where to find people who have enough spare time to help you. Especially the techies in non-techie environments sometimes have more than enough time at their hands and are often quite willing to learn something about a certain subject if you ask them to work on it. It's a chance for them to learn about a subject they normally wouldn't have looked into due to inertia.
If you can provide an idea and know someone who can provide something else and he knows someone... you can reach that critical mass pretty fast.
BTW, the idea does not necessarily have to be good as long as it has enough hooks to let the team plug in good ideas. Our game's concept started as "Let's clone Spellcast!" and then evolved into a tournament-style thingie involving two-dimensional spells and whatnot, mostly through the concept of "Yeah, that sounds great, but how does this sound?".
I think that you need nothing but a basic concept and a few people who are willing to invest their time into it. Once you have people assigned to the various positions, they can (help you) work out stuff file formats, communication protocols, etc. If you draw your team members from a sufficiently large pool, you'll find someone for every position you'd ever need, whether it be modeler, 2D artist or coding Linux geek. (That last position is important, but then again this is Slashdot, so the position will likely be already filled in your projects.)
Now things like keyboard key are obviously safe, but motherboards are another thing.
By the way, keyboards are usually among the items in the household that have the highest density of germs.
I guess I should stop licking my shattered HDD magnets then.
On the contrary, when it comes to their OS, they are pricing so high because there are no competitors.
What about Linux and Apple?
Oh, right...
You can tell XP to use 2000's search interface, but I prefer the Windows "port" of locate.
Longhorn is what drove me to Linux... And yes, having XP in a VMWare box is really nice. Sure, it's a bit slow, but then again that also applies to any Windows installation that has been in constant use for six months.
OTOH the way the Explorer handles pictures and refuses to open them in a graphics app by default unless you play around with obscure settings in obscure places is a good reason why XP is the most annoying Windows ever.
The thing is, Win XP is suited for people who think that IE == the Internet. It's friendly, it wants to take you by the hand and slowly walk you over to where you want to go.
Which is annoying if you exactly know what you want to do and how to do it. Especially because making it stop is usually extremly un-intuitive - settings are only accessibly if you open five different dialog windows, some of XPs bad behavior can only be fixed by adding undocumented values to the registry...
XP is a dream for casual users who use their Peecee without knowing much about it. For powerusers who have experience with previous versions of Windows and who just want to do some serious work it's a nightmare.
Yeah, but the "OMG! The Internet is integrated with your PC! Active Desktop! Internet Explorer built in! Amazing new security flaws!" thing was Windows 98. 95 hardly even knew thst the Internet existed.
It will not, but the way it's broken will be declared the standard and the XP release will be retconned to an experimental beta preview demonstration teaser that was never spposed to "work" anyway.
The market is in new systems. The natural (non-)decision is to get the newest version available, and that will eventually be Longhorn. Microsoft would save themselves a lot of money by not bothering to produce a new version of Windows. Then again, how long has WinXP been on sale? Maybe they are doing exactly that.
But they can't go on like this forever, because at some point someone will be able to say "Well,
our operating system is not from 2001" and people will want that instead of windows. The age of Windows XP makes it a good target for FUD - especially if you take apps like the Internet Explorer, whose only upgrades in the last few years have been bugfixes, as examples.
People often think that new == good and XP is certainly not new.
By the way, if there is one feature I'd like to see getting built into Windows XP it's ext3 support; Windows' current file systems are both sub-optimal (FAT32 is too limited and NTFS is too quirky).
Wouldn't his string class just overload operator + to convert strings that represent spelled-out numerals into rationals before adding them?
Hmm, good point. Depends on the implementation, I guess.
BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow. That claim almost always gets trotted out in this kind of context. This is a kind of academic urban legend that just won't die. The linguist Geoff Pullum thoroughly debunked this whole fable some time back, and traced the series of misunderstandings and exaggerations which had given rise to it. In fact, it appears that Inuktitut has just two words for snow.
#define HUGENUMBER = 2
Problem solved, Inuit do have HUGENUMBER words for snow.
Even weirder, I have to keep myself from lapsing back into English when I talk about my work to Germans. This never happens when I talk about anything else. Seems like my work is intimately associated with English.
Sounds familiar. When I'm coding I always think in English, which has the side effect of the entire comments and debug output being in English, which is not always optimal, especially when I'm working on a library which then gets integrated into a non-english project.
And no, I'm not an native English speaker.
Take the German "doch". It's the answer you give when you were asked a negative question and want to unambiguously answer it positively.
Example: "Weren't you at the party?" might mean "I assume that you were not at the party" or "I assume that you were at the party". If you say "Yes", your answer might have either meaning. Germans can use "doch", which always means "I was at the party".
I actually had quite a hard time writing this - explaining conepts ina a language that doesn't have them is pretty hard.
Quote from the Wikipedia article: [The theory] states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native languages.
I wonder how someone who was raised to speak C++ natively would think.
Oh yeah. He wouldn't think much because as soon as he reads something like "five + 2" his brain would crash because you can't add integers and char*s.