Im fairly sure that Microsoft would have sold an extra 3 to 5 million consoles at least if that problem had been fixed promptly... So there must be one -hell- of a reason they didn't. I'm quite curious what it is, but considering the rep Microsoft is getting on this one, and how many lost sales they are eating (not counting how many publishers are a bit annoyed at this and may decide not to to invest in the 360), something's up...
Indeed. Im sure Microsoft would have quite a bigger market share if it wasn't for the hardware issues. I know I personally really want to play current and upcoming 360 games, but I hate dealing with customer services and repairs with a passion, so I'm not touching one until its semi-reliable. I doubt I'm the only one thinking that way.
One issue with.NET that slowed down its growth, was poor support for enterprise projects. That is,.NET was quite the ideal platform for mid size project, but when you start needing reliable services (by reliable, I mean queueing, availability contracts, etc), distributed transactions for things other than DBs, handling encapsulated business processes, etc, it was way, -way- behind Java.
Now with.NET 3.0, it caught up, and with.NET 3.5 its quite impressive: however, 3.5 isn't officially out, and 3.0 doesn't have Visual Studio support, and for the most part in the.NET world, if its not in Visual Studio, it doesn't exists. Once VS2008 comes out (at the end of this year), things should spice up a bit...
MS' presence on codeplex is also helping the community side a bit, especially with Patterns & Practices (which a lot of things done by that team, altered by the community, eventually makes it in the real things, like Project Acropolis).
Thats mostly speculation mind you, but it should be interesting...
Hehe, no I wouldn't be surprised, like I said, I've done stuff like that, and I am in IT (I'm in consulting, development and architecture, so I've tried just about every schedule in existance, for one company or another, at one point in time).
I've really never seen IT people who could be productive for more than a few hours straight, aside for my ex boss (who worked something rediculous like 80 hours a week and was still faster than most...crazy). Doing it here and there is awesome (when I work for places that have flexible schedules, sometimes I'll work a few more hours some day to have days off where its nice, like in the schedule you mentionned), but its when its continuous, its just not productive (at least for me and everyone I've ever worked with in similar conditions, which is a lot).
It -is- possible that there are semi-cultural things going on, too, so what would work for employes of one company in a given city might not in another, depending on how people think and live there.
Hey, to each their own:) Thats why there are hundreds of different workplaces out there.
Microsoft left VB6 with an incredibly easy upgrade path to.NET. The problem is, VB6 programmers in general really sucked, and their code didn't follow the architecture VB6 had in mind. So the big fat corporations that actually understood how the tool worked upgraded to VB6 as easily as you can expect switching major environments (not saying it was -easy-, but having done it myself a few time, its not hell either).
The others with their spagetti code got left in the dust and got screwed. Of course, considering that was probably the majority, MS could have thought about it more...
But there isn't much more they can do beyond "just about any DLL you made will run as is, and we have a wizard that will convert a lot of the code not in DLL, including legacy compatibility classes".
The fact that VB6 code was difficult to maintain just on its own... not many upgrade paths could have dealt with it. But again, "real" VB6 or ASP code, done using the appropriate development standards, was quite a breeze to port...mainly because you could compile it and run it as is in a.NET environment...
I'd personally commit suicide if I had to work like that for too long. Long days, in my opinion, can't be recovered by days off. The strain becomes "permanent" after a while. I have fridays off right now, with a similar schedule, and when you had commuting (to me it doesn't cut on anything because I don't hit rush hour anyway with a normal schedule), I have 4 days of the week where I can virtually do nothing, then I have to cram all of the house chores, groceries, shopping, and everything else in the last 3 days, plus recovering from the longer days. It simply doesn't work (for me at least, though my immediate coworkers complain about it a lot too).
Added to that, from what I've seen, people simply cannot be efficient (in this line of work at least) for that long in a day. By 3 in the afternoon, no one has the energy to get anything done anymore.
The best schedule I had was a regular monday to friday, BUT with much shorter days and starting early. I'd be home at like 3:00 pm, leaving me all the time in the world to do all I have to do when it needs to get done, and never having to put it off. By the time the weekend comes, I'd have it completly, 100% free. Now that was great, I was never tired. Too bad that job otherwised sucked so bad, I had to quit.
Thats why flexible schedules are the best... everyone have different preferences, and different internal clocks (in contradiction to what I said above... I'm personally as much as twice as efficient if I work nights instead of day), so there really isn't a one size fit all.
Well, my understanding is that the GPL is a -distribution- license, not a user license...so to the user its SUPPOSED to be pointless, and putting it in a click through is dumb, because you dont need to agree to the GPL to use the software, but only to redistribute it (which a normal end user will not do)
I doubt they did much. Making a plugin for a browser, well, its been done a lot before, so I doubt that was all that hard. And all the.NET stuff, well, any.NET assembly can be decompiled, and most decompilers for.NET even stick the comments at the right place, so the darn code can be copy pasted. So its 21 days to stick copy pasted code in a skeleton thats been done a million times before. Faster than -I- could do it for sure, but not amazingly special.
Now, I hope Im wrong and they didnt go around copy pasting code, copyright and all...
I highly doubt this game has "graphic sexual content"
Hmm... I'm among those who think its a bit silly that a AO game is indirectly banned, and I wish they would be allowed to release it in its current form, but... did you actually read about whats in that game? Graphic sexual content is in, and not the nice fap fap fap kind.
Though a carefully designed web site for mobile devices tend to hike up usuability quite a bit... just reorganising how much info is displayed at a time, reformating tabular data, adding lower resolution pictures for devices that load em, and other usuability things help a lot. Also, making a web site -just- for mobile devices, if your code is loosely coupled to the UI, is often a matter of hours, top, plus testing on a few standard devices. Much, MUCH easier than developing for the "real" web, so its not much effort at all, and thus its cost effective (if mobile users are in your target demographic)
Of course, it is important to note that currently, the whole anti-american thing is quite generalized in, well, the entire world (give or take), so I doubt its a French thing.
It actually doesn't cost more. Vista Business costs the same XP Pro does, Vista Basic costs the same as XP Home. Vista Home Premium and Ultimate are equivalents of things that were OEM only before, so its tricky to compare on that side though.
Yes and yes. Its not as high demand as some other IT jobs that are exploding lately, but once you nail a Oracle DBA job, you're rolling on gold still. The only issue is that considering the cost of an Oracle install, on top of the DBA, everyone who pays the bills will be wishing you're dead. But until you are, you'll be raking in.
You're right. Sony, Nintendo...they all did things like this. Its -common practice- even. Maybe not as blunt as straight out paying for exclusivity, but waving royalties in exchange for exclusivity wasn't uncommon.
And well, during the PS era, Sony -mendated- that most multi-platform games had something exclusive on the playstation, or go to hell. They didn't even pay for it, they just used their influence, most of the time. Thats how console gaming business work, hehe.
It tends to be about how the person doing said act has control over it. Pretty hard to decide -when- your girlfriend breaks up on you. I have totally insane, untreatable (or almost) insomnia. So wether I like it or not, I'll be drowsy. (Before you jump at me though, I take public transportation even though I'm more than old enough to drive, I don't feel like killing myself). On the other hand, you seriously can control when you use your cell or when you drink.
I don't know... I'm sure i'm not along when I say I want things to be standard, regardless of the environment. If I'm on Linux, I don't want anything to look like Windows (which is why when I used Linux as a desktop, I couldn't stand running windows programs in Wine, etc). If I had a Mac, I'd much prefer everything to integrate with the Mac look&feel, and same for Windows.
IMO, by far the largest portion of the market share for Safari Mac will be web developers finally being able to conveniently test their web sites for the rendering engine.
Modded flamebait maybe because of the tone of the post, but its actually pretty god damn true.
My computer had 1 gig of a ram when I decided to give Vista a shot, and to my surprise, it worked just peachy. I now upgraded my videocard and my ram, but that was to help run newer games without having to replace my motherboard, not because of Vista =P
Sorry, but I think you took my comment out of context. I did say that the open formats were fine, just that implying that Office doesn't have PDF support, like I keep seeing it, is a bit silly. And well, you won't need to upgrade computer either, since Open Office has always been pretty much slower. My 6 years old lap-top runs Office fine too:) AND talking about "tens of thousands" of computers is pretty irrelevent -too-, since after a few hundreds, Office comes at a flat fee for unlimited licenses.
So again: not to say there aren't savings to be made with a free format. Not saying its not worth switching either. Not saying states shouldn't ditch office.
All I'm saying is, there are hundreds of reasons to hate Office and ditch it, no need to make up some that don't exist.
How much are you going to spend to be able to write pdfs
Not even considering the free pdf printers, Office 2007 gets a plugin to save as pdf the first time you try. Easy enough. For the rest, the company I work for just finished putting together a php + perl script (they did, I'm not touching those with a 10 foot pole, mind you) to extract data from office documents to push it in a database, and thats with the pre-2007, harder to read format, and it was done -without- using any of the COM components made by MS.
So while there a re arguments about OpenOffice file format, and I wouldn't brush aside saying that its pretty good, the arguments you gave aren't really valid.
Yeah, who would have thought. 2 individuals with vastly different biological features would end up being different in various ways in their daily lives::gasps::
Slashdot Mirror
Thats good news, because indeed, the games are hard to pass up. I'm a Wii guy, but i'm not going to ignore the gems that are popping up on the 360.
Im fairly sure that Microsoft would have sold an extra 3 to 5 million consoles at least if that problem had been fixed promptly... So there must be one -hell- of a reason they didn't. I'm quite curious what it is, but considering the rep Microsoft is getting on this one, and how many lost sales they are eating (not counting how many publishers are a bit annoyed at this and may decide not to to invest in the 360), something's up...
Indeed. Im sure Microsoft would have quite a bigger market share if it wasn't for the hardware issues. I know I personally really want to play current and upcoming 360 games, but I hate dealing with customer services and repairs with a passion, so I'm not touching one until its semi-reliable. I doubt I'm the only one thinking that way.
One issue with .NET that slowed down its growth, was poor support for enterprise projects. That is, .NET was quite the ideal platform for mid size project, but when you start needing reliable services (by reliable, I mean queueing, availability contracts, etc), distributed transactions for things other than DBs, handling encapsulated business processes, etc, it was way, -way- behind Java.
.NET 3.0, it caught up, and with .NET 3.5 its quite impressive: however, 3.5 isn't officially out, and 3.0 doesn't have Visual Studio support, and for the most part in the .NET world, if its not in Visual Studio, it doesn't exists. Once VS2008 comes out (at the end of this year), things should spice up a bit...
Now with
MS' presence on codeplex is also helping the community side a bit, especially with Patterns & Practices (which a lot of things done by that team, altered by the community, eventually makes it in the real things, like Project Acropolis).
Thats mostly speculation mind you, but it should be interesting...
Hehe, no I wouldn't be surprised, like I said, I've done stuff like that, and I am in IT (I'm in consulting, development and architecture, so I've tried just about every schedule in existance, for one company or another, at one point in time).
:) Thats why there are hundreds of different workplaces out there.
I've really never seen IT people who could be productive for more than a few hours straight, aside for my ex boss (who worked something rediculous like 80 hours a week and was still faster than most...crazy). Doing it here and there is awesome (when I work for places that have flexible schedules, sometimes I'll work a few more hours some day to have days off where its nice, like in the schedule you mentionned), but its when its continuous, its just not productive (at least for me and everyone I've ever worked with in similar conditions, which is a lot).
It -is- possible that there are semi-cultural things going on, too, so what would work for employes of one company in a given city might not in another, depending on how people think and live there.
Hey, to each their own
Microsoft left VB6 with an incredibly easy upgrade path to .NET. The problem is, VB6 programmers in general really sucked, and their code didn't follow the architecture VB6 had in mind. So the big fat corporations that actually understood how the tool worked upgraded to VB6 as easily as you can expect switching major environments (not saying it was -easy-, but having done it myself a few time, its not hell either).
.NET environment...
The others with their spagetti code got left in the dust and got screwed. Of course, considering that was probably the majority, MS could have thought about it more...
But there isn't much more they can do beyond "just about any DLL you made will run as is, and we have a wizard that will convert a lot of the code not in DLL, including legacy compatibility classes".
The fact that VB6 code was difficult to maintain just on its own... not many upgrade paths could have dealt with it. But again, "real" VB6 or ASP code, done using the appropriate development standards, was quite a breeze to port...mainly because you could compile it and run it as is in a
I'd personally commit suicide if I had to work like that for too long. Long days, in my opinion, can't be recovered by days off. The strain becomes "permanent" after a while. I have fridays off right now, with a similar schedule, and when you had commuting (to me it doesn't cut on anything because I don't hit rush hour anyway with a normal schedule), I have 4 days of the week where I can virtually do nothing, then I have to cram all of the house chores, groceries, shopping, and everything else in the last 3 days, plus recovering from the longer days. It simply doesn't work (for me at least, though my immediate coworkers complain about it a lot too).
Added to that, from what I've seen, people simply cannot be efficient (in this line of work at least) for that long in a day. By 3 in the afternoon, no one has the energy to get anything done anymore.
The best schedule I had was a regular monday to friday, BUT with much shorter days and starting early. I'd be home at like 3:00 pm, leaving me all the time in the world to do all I have to do when it needs to get done, and never having to put it off. By the time the weekend comes, I'd have it completly, 100% free. Now that was great, I was never tired. Too bad that job otherwised sucked so bad, I had to quit.
Thats why flexible schedules are the best... everyone have different preferences, and different internal clocks (in contradiction to what I said above... I'm personally as much as twice as efficient if I work nights instead of day), so there really isn't a one size fit all.
Waaaaaaaah >..
Well, my understanding is that the GPL is a -distribution- license, not a user license...so to the user its SUPPOSED to be pointless, and putting it in a click through is dumb, because you dont need to agree to the GPL to use the software, but only to redistribute it (which a normal end user will not do)
err, IE7 runs as an unpriviledged user AND in a sandbox. It can't even freagin trigger Notepad on its own anymore. This isn't Win95.
Im guessing he only was arrested on the piracy (copyright...) things. The rest was just thrown in as a description of his activity.
I doubt they did much. Making a plugin for a browser, well, its been done a lot before, so I doubt that was all that hard. And all the .NET stuff, well, any .NET assembly can be decompiled, and most decompilers for .NET even stick the comments at the right place, so the darn code can be copy pasted. So its 21 days to stick copy pasted code in a skeleton thats been done a million times before. Faster than -I- could do it for sure, but not amazingly special.
Now, I hope Im wrong and they didnt go around copy pasting code, copyright and all...
Though a carefully designed web site for mobile devices tend to hike up usuability quite a bit... just reorganising how much info is displayed at a time, reformating tabular data, adding lower resolution pictures for devices that load em, and other usuability things help a lot. Also, making a web site -just- for mobile devices, if your code is loosely coupled to the UI, is often a matter of hours, top, plus testing on a few standard devices. Much, MUCH easier than developing for the "real" web, so its not much effort at all, and thus its cost effective (if mobile users are in your target demographic)
Of course, it is important to note that currently, the whole anti-american thing is quite generalized in, well, the entire world (give or take), so I doubt its a French thing.
It actually doesn't cost more. Vista Business costs the same XP Pro does, Vista Basic costs the same as XP Home. Vista Home Premium and Ultimate are equivalents of things that were OEM only before, so its tricky to compare on that side though.
Yes and yes. Its not as high demand as some other IT jobs that are exploding lately, but once you nail a Oracle DBA job, you're rolling on gold still. The only issue is that considering the cost of an Oracle install, on top of the DBA, everyone who pays the bills will be wishing you're dead. But until you are, you'll be raking in.
You're right. Sony, Nintendo...they all did things like this. Its -common practice- even. Maybe not as blunt as straight out paying for exclusivity, but waving royalties in exchange for exclusivity wasn't uncommon.
And well, during the PS era, Sony -mendated- that most multi-platform games had something exclusive on the playstation, or go to hell. They didn't even pay for it, they just used their influence, most of the time. Thats how console gaming business work, hehe.
It tends to be about how the person doing said act has control over it. Pretty hard to decide -when- your girlfriend breaks up on you. I have totally insane, untreatable (or almost) insomnia. So wether I like it or not, I'll be drowsy. (Before you jump at me though, I take public transportation even though I'm more than old enough to drive, I don't feel like killing myself). On the other hand, you seriously can control when you use your cell or when you drink.
I don't know... I'm sure i'm not along when I say I want things to be standard, regardless of the environment. If I'm on Linux, I don't want anything to look like Windows (which is why when I used Linux as a desktop, I couldn't stand running windows programs in Wine, etc). If I had a Mac, I'd much prefer everything to integrate with the Mac look&feel, and same for Windows.
IMO, by far the largest portion of the market share for Safari Mac will be web developers finally being able to conveniently test their web sites for the rendering engine.
What the hell, someone who actualy -knows- what they are talking about on Slashdot? The server's going to overload, you shouldn't be here!
Modded flamebait maybe because of the tone of the post, but its actually pretty god damn true.
My computer had 1 gig of a ram when I decided to give Vista a shot, and to my surprise, it worked just peachy. I now upgraded my videocard and my ram, but that was to help run newer games without having to replace my motherboard, not because of Vista =P
Sorry, but I think you took my comment out of context. I did say that the open formats were fine, just that implying that Office doesn't have PDF support, like I keep seeing it, is a bit silly. And well, you won't need to upgrade computer either, since Open Office has always been pretty much slower. My 6 years old lap-top runs Office fine too :) AND talking about "tens of thousands" of computers is pretty irrelevent -too-, since after a few hundreds, Office comes at a flat fee for unlimited licenses.
So again: not to say there aren't savings to be made with a free format. Not saying its not worth switching either. Not saying states shouldn't ditch office.
All I'm saying is, there are hundreds of reasons to hate Office and ditch it, no need to make up some that don't exist.
Not even considering the free pdf printers, Office 2007 gets a plugin to save as pdf the first time you try. Easy enough.
For the rest, the company I work for just finished putting together a php + perl script (they did, I'm not touching those with a 10 foot pole, mind you) to extract data from office documents to push it in a database, and thats with the pre-2007, harder to read format, and it was done -without- using any of the COM components made by MS.
So while there a re arguments about OpenOffice file format, and I wouldn't brush aside saying that its pretty good, the arguments you gave aren't really valid.
Yeah, who would have thought. 2 individuals with vastly different biological features would end up being different in various ways in their daily lives ::gasps::