I dont know much more than you about the current situation, but in the interviews of The Force Unleashed (360/PS3 versions), thats pretty much how they described their physics engine... so I'm guessing its not a new idea. Something about all of the objects being made of "molecules", and the physics engine had information about these "molecules" and how to break/bend/move them.
I don't think we can fix it that much. Humans are basically programmed at the genetic level to give high value to social relations. That means that a lot of things, including all of our sences, the parts of our bodies that detect pheromones, and more, are stimulated by having someone in our face. That means even a perfect hologram will still not "feel the same".
Maybe once it IS a perfect hologram, and after a few generations living in a world that uses such technologies constantly, our biology will change enough that it will "feel" normal, but I don't think its as simple as an engineering fix of the technologies employed.
Of course, thats not to say better technology won't help, but It still won't feel "right".
Disclaimer: I'm a software developer who works for a distributed company where -everyone- telecommute. We all work from home, remotely connecting to servers spread out around, and using a linked VoIP system and a mix of headsets and video conferencing to do our work. It is amazingly efficient (if only because the lack of normal commute helps everyone getting a fair amount of sleep, so we're all "more awake"), but its still nothing like being in the same room together.
You know that Access isn't a database, yes? And that its quite often used on "real" databases? And that if you start with the "toy" database, it can easily later be upgraded to a "real" one? Which is a fairly large part of its usefulness.
He's talking about a 4th gen RAD front end, so yeah, like MS Access, eDeveloper, Oracle Developer (is that still how its called?), etc. There are a few up and coming one in the open source world, but none really that are feature complete.
Rather, it usually seems to be a balance between sticking with old, working code that has more and more hacks and workarounds versus actually rewriting some chunk of code cleanly with a new design that accounts for all the new use cases and then exhaustively testing it.
Which is exactly what the previous poster said. He said that "radical" changes are a bad idea. Incremental rewrites on an existing codebase is by far the best solution, and is far from "radical", thus you two are actually agreeding with each other.
My girlfriend purchased a new computer from a big name OEM a few weeks back (I won't name it to keep things simple, but everyone here heard of it).
So, turn on the computer. Out of the box, the control panel was totally empty, games wouldn't start, etc. Yes, you can trace back the issue to the DRM subsystem. Now, one would blame Microsoft, evil DRM, etc, until you figure out that its Nvidia's drivers that were making it go out of wack. Looking more closely, the drivers were -severly- out of date. Latest drivers worked peachy fine. Why didn't the OEM catch that? It wasn't working out of the box. The -control panel-.
Then continue using it... file browsing slow as hell, and keep getting COM exceptions. Dig into it, the pre-installed version of Nero was -officialy- not compatible with Vista, installed codecs that are made to be used by the video folders, and is severly out of date too. Update Nero, everything's fine again. Obviously codecs that are -documented- as incompatible will make the features that use em run like crap.
Now, unrelated to Windows software, but the motherboard firmware was also a FULL YEAR out of date, and dated from before the CPU she got even existed. Windows reliability monitor warned about it in full bright letters. Again, OEM missed that. Update the firmware, now the CPU can go to its full clockspeed by allowing an extra 3x required modifier. So a 3ghz Core 2 Duo was running at 2 ghz.
The manufacturer missed all that, and more. Once all fixed, the machine zoomed like there's no tomorrow, no crash, no bugs, no assles. We're both software engineers who work with computers all day long, so it was easy to fix (2-3 hours top), but an average user would see:
A dog slow computer (2 ghz instead of 3 that was purchased, big diff on a Core2Duo), a desktop that constantly crash, a control panel with nothing in it, games that refuse to start, music that doesn't play, a mediaplayer that can blue screen the computer... And all that OUT OF THE BOX, from a machine that costed as much as a Mac Pro with similar specs.
All of these problems were documented 6-12 months before the computer was -built-, ALL of them had to do with using Vista compatible drivers and software as documented by the developers of these softwares, none of them should have been there.
==All of them will be blamed on Microsoft by the users.==
A) Having users that don't need to be able to do everything to run in a sandbox. And I don't mean like running as a normal user in Unix. but seriously a sandbox, with extremely limited priviledges, appliance-style.
B) Education, education, and more education (good luck with that one, but its the only solution). Even if tomorrow everyone switch to super locked down Linux boxes, it won't help. Users will figure out a way to recompile their kernels (even grandma) to run the attachment. Computers are quickly becoming a responsability, like cars.
MS actually stops these things from getting into the build now, using tools such as FxCops and variations. The issue comes from legacy code that is still part of their newer products (and refactoring such mammoth code bases doesn't happy overnight), on top of deep architectural issues that cannot be caught by simple rules... If they started from scratch enforcing their current policies, it would be much better.
However, the world isn't so simple... so Microsoft has to pay the price.
What the previous poster was refering to is that serious development shops will use code analysis tools to inforce it: that is, the code will not be allowed to be checked in (or to be integrated to the trunk, or whatever) if the rules are not followed, and they are inforced at the source control level (or something).
Variations include having the code analysis tool throw "compiler" warnings, and make the compilation to consider warnings as errors and fail the build.
Once you start working in an environment that does such things, you don't go back: the code quality goes up 10x.
Except that not all onboard audio steals RAM, not all onboard audio catches all the surrounding noise (you didn't say that, but everyone else does), and not all onboard audios cause stuttering. Most do come with a slight FPS loss (OH NOES! Crappy non-optimised games like Hellgates:London run at 97 fps on my machine, so they could do 100~! big freagin woohoo).
Seems like getting a decent motherboard may matter in this case. Investing in better speakers is probably more important than the sound card... unless you have a top notch 5/7.1 system, the soundcard will not be the bottleneck.
According to the article, its some of the least popular programs around, part of why its getting cut. According to my girlfriend who passed the test with flying colors in a relatively large school, less than 10% of her class actually succeeded (anecdotal, but it could give a clue).
As much as peopl eare more and more computer fluent, anything beyond using a word processor and MySpace is still voodoo to most.
The point is that Creative could do it all along: what this guy did was remove OS checks from the drivers. That is, the drivers literally did: "IF OS == Vista, break the cool features so we can force people to upgrade hardware and other nasty things". He took that out, more or less, and thus the drivers worked.
I have a feeling its exactly what they'll do. Vista will be getting XP SP2 level updates for a long time, while they come out with Windows 7 and sell both concurrently (willingly, unlike the current XP/Vista situation). So Vista will be the "compatibility" build, and Windows 7 the "new thing". Think Windows 2k and 9x/ME (both were being sold at the same time), but more aggressive, until XP replaced the 9x line for real.
If by copy Apple you mean "Copy an obvious process that every freagin software development companies in existance have had/will have to consider eventually". When Windows 95 had its success, they already knew that someday they'd have to break everything and then some. It wasn't a question of IF, just a question of WHEN. And of course that WHEN is later when 80% of your customers are only customers for backward compatibility reasons.
I didnt check, but it depends. Did he make modified drivers available, or did he make diff/patch availables that users can apply themselves? If the former, he played in dangerous territory.
The assertion from the previous poster basically meant "You can have a working, full featured computer without having to care about buying a sound card, a bit like you can do the same with network cards".
Last time this subject came up, I said that onboard sound was more than good enough: multiple people proved me wrong, and indeed, i was, so I'm not going to try and argue that. However, point is, for 90% of people, the computer will be functional as is. Games will run fine, their MP3s will play fine (and I can't hear any noise introduced by the board during playback, and its quite limited and hard to notice during recording... of course, not viable for professional work), everything will be "good enough" to the average joe (as opposed to videocards, where even Joe will realise really quickly that his onboard video isn't good enough when he can't even run a 3 years old game on his machine).
So that means that ALMOST EVERYONE who buys a sound card, knows what they want. Low noise, professional features, instrument ports, specific encoder/decoders support, and they'll want quality (and the tone of your post is quite in line with this statement).
So Creative cannot sell shitty feature-less cards easily. They have to have a LOT over an onboard card for someone to want it.
I see a lot of people saying things like that (in other situations), but it is rare that it is actually significant. Its hot air or isolated. But in this case (and even before this current event... but speaking about Creative's screw up in general), it is actually fairly visible... I've started boycotted these products, and got a lot of people to do the same (a -lot- of people), and I've seen an impressive amount of people doing the same, and not just online.
Seems like Creative is actually going to feel a hit on this one. Maybe not a very significant one, but they'll notice it.
Because there are some real people behind companies. Those people have names, I know many of them, and have talked with many of them, and support them and their work. Obviously, Ballmer isn't one of those people, though.
I beleive in a large part of what they do and want them to continue, and beleive in their ideas. Thats it. This is a forum and obviously I cannot (and would not, even if I could) write an entire book describing in detail my exact meaning, lawyer style, so don't take me too literally on this. I hate Ballmer as much as the next guy, and a lot of what MS does is complete bull, but thats true of everything of a certain size.
Really, I see little difference between a company like MS and an organisation like GNU. Just replace $$ with personal ego gain. They still contain people with visions and ideals that they want to see fullfil, regardless of the primary aspects (cash vs open source movement vs whatever). So supporting one, supporting the other...whatever floats your boat. Of course, that is a very different kind of "support" than supporting a cancer foundation or something (but is very similar to supporting a sports team, yes).
Of course, english is far, FAAAR from being my first language, so if you know of a better way to express what I mean, please feel free to enlighen me. In any case, if it helps, no its not the kind of "support" that would make me shed a tear if they went bankrupt.
Because a monoculture is never a good thing, and because ODF and OOXML have a different featureset. Microsoft should implement both, and so should Open Office (assuming OOXML gets ISO cert).
Then companies can standardise on whatever suits their internal need bests, while still being able to interroperate with everyone else, and the tools everyone will have will be able to convert from one to the other while only losing features that are unique to their format.
I think this is the ideal world. Though thats a big "should". I don't think the world will go that way, especially not on microsoft's side, but it would be ideal.
Indeed, and it doesn't stop there. Until recently, a version of Nero shipped with drivers that were not compatible with Vista. Well, they were, but not completly, giving out pretty weird behaviors. As people found the issues and renamed the drivers/uninstalled Nero, problems were fixed.
Really, what Vista did is force devs to code better. Unfortunately, Vista doesnt make it obvious whom's fault it is, and MS should take a bit of blame for that: if an Nvidia control panel applet is buggy, the whole control panel goes away. That makes it look like an MS issue (and in a way, it is). If only the Nvidia applet would act weird, people would blame Nvidia a lot faster.
That does explain why some of us had a wonderful experience with Vista from day one (I downloaded it and installed it the day the release version hit MSDN to try it out), and others had completly horrid experience. Aside for my creative sound card, I never installed any of the softwares and such that have been shown as culprit for Vista's issues. And behold behold, never had any problems (until SP1, where the creative sound card started being officialy not supported, in which case Vista stayed. The card did not.)
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I dont know much more than you about the current situation, but in the interviews of The Force Unleashed (360/PS3 versions), thats pretty much how they described their physics engine... so I'm guessing its not a new idea. Something about all of the objects being made of "molecules", and the physics engine had information about these "molecules" and how to break/bend/move them.
I don't think we can fix it that much. Humans are basically programmed at the genetic level to give high value to social relations. That means that a lot of things, including all of our sences, the parts of our bodies that detect pheromones, and more, are stimulated by having someone in our face. That means even a perfect hologram will still not "feel the same".
Maybe once it IS a perfect hologram, and after a few generations living in a world that uses such technologies constantly, our biology will change enough that it will "feel" normal, but I don't think its as simple as an engineering fix of the technologies employed.
Of course, thats not to say better technology won't help, but It still won't feel "right".
Disclaimer: I'm a software developer who works for a distributed company where -everyone- telecommute. We all work from home, remotely connecting to servers spread out around, and using a linked VoIP system and a mix of headsets and video conferencing to do our work. It is amazingly efficient (if only because the lack of normal commute helps everyone getting a fair amount of sleep, so we're all "more awake"), but its still nothing like being in the same room together.
Well, TECHNICALLY, all the racial issues will go away once we ARE fucking each other over... as in, literally so :)
You know that Access isn't a database, yes? And that its quite often used on "real" databases? And that if you start with the "toy" database, it can easily later be upgraded to a "real" one? Which is a fairly large part of its usefulness.
He's talking about a 4th gen RAD front end, so yeah, like MS Access, eDeveloper, Oracle Developer (is that still how its called?), etc. There are a few up and coming one in the open source world, but none really that are feature complete.
Even more than the video drivers are the OEM.
My girlfriend purchased a new computer from a big name OEM a few weeks back (I won't name it to keep things simple, but everyone here heard of it).
So, turn on the computer. Out of the box, the control panel was totally empty, games wouldn't start, etc. Yes, you can trace back the issue to the DRM subsystem. Now, one would blame Microsoft, evil DRM, etc, until you figure out that its Nvidia's drivers that were making it go out of wack. Looking more closely, the drivers were -severly- out of date. Latest drivers worked peachy fine. Why didn't the OEM catch that? It wasn't working out of the box. The -control panel-.
Then continue using it... file browsing slow as hell, and keep getting COM exceptions. Dig into it, the pre-installed version of Nero was -officialy- not compatible with Vista, installed codecs that are made to be used by the video folders, and is severly out of date too. Update Nero, everything's fine again. Obviously codecs that are -documented- as incompatible will make the features that use em run like crap.
Now, unrelated to Windows software, but the motherboard firmware was also a FULL YEAR out of date, and dated from before the CPU she got even existed. Windows reliability monitor warned about it in full bright letters. Again, OEM missed that. Update the firmware, now the CPU can go to its full clockspeed by allowing an extra 3x required modifier. So a 3ghz Core 2 Duo was running at 2 ghz.
The manufacturer missed all that, and more. Once all fixed, the machine zoomed like there's no tomorrow, no crash, no bugs, no assles. We're both software engineers who work with computers all day long, so it was easy to fix (2-3 hours top), but an average user would see:
A dog slow computer (2 ghz instead of 3 that was purchased, big diff on a Core2Duo), a desktop that constantly crash, a control panel with nothing in it, games that refuse to start, music that doesn't play, a mediaplayer that can blue screen the computer... And all that OUT OF THE BOX, from a machine that costed as much as a Mac Pro with similar specs.
All of these problems were documented 6-12 months before the computer was -built-, ALL of them had to do with using Vista compatible drivers and software as documented by the developers of these softwares, none of them should have been there.
==All of them will be blamed on Microsoft by the users.==
Personaly, for 5 elements, I'd just use the sort extension method. You know, like myData.Sort();
Oh wait, you guys still coding in C++ or something like that?
(Thisisajokedontkillme)
The only real solution is
A) Having users that don't need to be able to do everything to run in a sandbox. And I don't mean like running as a normal user in Unix. but seriously a sandbox, with extremely limited priviledges, appliance-style.
B) Education, education, and more education (good luck with that one, but its the only solution). Even if tomorrow everyone switch to super locked down Linux boxes, it won't help. Users will figure out a way to recompile their kernels (even grandma) to run the attachment. Computers are quickly becoming a responsability, like cars.
MS actually stops these things from getting into the build now, using tools such as FxCops and variations. The issue comes from legacy code that is still part of their newer products (and refactoring such mammoth code bases doesn't happy overnight), on top of deep architectural issues that cannot be caught by simple rules... If they started from scratch enforcing their current policies, it would be much better.
However, the world isn't so simple... so Microsoft has to pay the price.
What the previous poster was refering to is that serious development shops will use code analysis tools to inforce it: that is, the code will not be allowed to be checked in (or to be integrated to the trunk, or whatever) if the rules are not followed, and they are inforced at the source control level (or something).
Variations include having the code analysis tool throw "compiler" warnings, and make the compilation to consider warnings as errors and fail the build.
Once you start working in an environment that does such things, you don't go back: the code quality goes up 10x.
Except that not all onboard audio steals RAM, not all onboard audio catches all the surrounding noise (you didn't say that, but everyone else does), and not all onboard audios cause stuttering. Most do come with a slight FPS loss (OH NOES! Crappy non-optimised games like Hellgates:London run at 97 fps on my machine, so they could do 100~! big freagin woohoo).
Seems like getting a decent motherboard may matter in this case. Investing in better speakers is probably more important than the sound card... unless you have a top notch 5/7.1 system, the soundcard will not be the bottleneck.
A) One trying to befriend another 15 yo girl.
B) A sexual predator with a sexual predator fetish.
According to the article, its some of the least popular programs around, part of why its getting cut. According to my girlfriend who passed the test with flying colors in a relatively large school, less than 10% of her class actually succeeded (anecdotal, but it could give a clue).
As much as peopl eare more and more computer fluent, anything beyond using a word processor and MySpace is still voodoo to most.
The point is that Creative could do it all along: what this guy did was remove OS checks from the drivers. That is, the drivers literally did: "IF OS == Vista, break the cool features so we can force people to upgrade hardware and other nasty things". He took that out, more or less, and thus the drivers worked.
I have a feeling its exactly what they'll do. Vista will be getting XP SP2 level updates for a long time, while they come out with Windows 7 and sell both concurrently (willingly, unlike the current XP/Vista situation). So Vista will be the "compatibility" build, and Windows 7 the "new thing". Think Windows 2k and 9x/ME (both were being sold at the same time), but more aggressive, until XP replaced the 9x line for real.
If by copy Apple you mean "Copy an obvious process that every freagin software development companies in existance have had/will have to consider eventually". When Windows 95 had its success, they already knew that someday they'd have to break everything and then some. It wasn't a question of IF, just a question of WHEN. And of course that WHEN is later when 80% of your customers are only customers for backward compatibility reasons.
I didnt check, but it depends. Did he make modified drivers available, or did he make diff/patch availables that users can apply themselves? If the former, he played in dangerous territory.
The assertion from the previous poster basically meant "You can have a working, full featured computer without having to care about buying a sound card, a bit like you can do the same with network cards".
Last time this subject came up, I said that onboard sound was more than good enough: multiple people proved me wrong, and indeed, i was, so I'm not going to try and argue that. However, point is, for 90% of people, the computer will be functional as is. Games will run fine, their MP3s will play fine (and I can't hear any noise introduced by the board during playback, and its quite limited and hard to notice during recording... of course, not viable for professional work), everything will be "good enough" to the average joe (as opposed to videocards, where even Joe will realise really quickly that his onboard video isn't good enough when he can't even run a 3 years old game on his machine).
So that means that ALMOST EVERYONE who buys a sound card, knows what they want. Low noise, professional features, instrument ports, specific encoder/decoders support, and they'll want quality (and the tone of your post is quite in line with this statement).
So Creative cannot sell shitty feature-less cards easily. They have to have a LOT over an onboard card for someone to want it.
It comes from the NT line.
NT 4.0, Win 2k (NT 5.0), Win XP (NT 5.1), Vista (NT 6.0).
Notice that XP -officially- used the same major version number as 2k.
I see a lot of people saying things like that (in other situations), but it is rare that it is actually significant. Its hot air or isolated. But in this case (and even before this current event... but speaking about Creative's screw up in general), it is actually fairly visible... I've started boycotted these products, and got a lot of people to do the same (a -lot- of people), and I've seen an impressive amount of people doing the same, and not just online.
Seems like Creative is actually going to feel a hit on this one. Maybe not a very significant one, but they'll notice it.
Seriously. It is so close to the corportate equivalent of "dumb suicide" that it should deserve a Darwin Award
Because there are some real people behind companies. Those people have names, I know many of them, and have talked with many of them, and support them and their work. Obviously, Ballmer isn't one of those people, though.
I beleive in a large part of what they do and want them to continue, and beleive in their ideas. Thats it. This is a forum and obviously I cannot (and would not, even if I could) write an entire book describing in detail my exact meaning, lawyer style, so don't take me too literally on this. I hate Ballmer as much as the next guy, and a lot of what MS does is complete bull, but thats true of everything of a certain size.
Really, I see little difference between a company like MS and an organisation like GNU. Just replace $$ with personal ego gain. They still contain people with visions and ideals that they want to see fullfil, regardless of the primary aspects (cash vs open source movement vs whatever). So supporting one, supporting the other...whatever floats your boat. Of course, that is a very different kind of "support" than supporting a cancer foundation or something (but is very similar to supporting a sports team, yes).
Of course, english is far, FAAAR from being my first language, so if you know of a better way to express what I mean, please feel free to enlighen me. In any case, if it helps, no its not the kind of "support" that would make me shed a tear if they went bankrupt.
Because a monoculture is never a good thing, and because ODF and OOXML have a different featureset. Microsoft should implement both, and so should Open Office (assuming OOXML gets ISO cert).
Then companies can standardise on whatever suits their internal need bests, while still being able to interroperate with everyone else, and the tools everyone will have will be able to convert from one to the other while only losing features that are unique to their format.
I think this is the ideal world. Though thats a big "should". I don't think the world will go that way, especially not on microsoft's side, but it would be ideal.
Indeed, and it doesn't stop there. Until recently, a version of Nero shipped with drivers that were not compatible with Vista. Well, they were, but not completly, giving out pretty weird behaviors. As people found the issues and renamed the drivers/uninstalled Nero, problems were fixed.
Really, what Vista did is force devs to code better. Unfortunately, Vista doesnt make it obvious whom's fault it is, and MS should take a bit of blame for that: if an Nvidia control panel applet is buggy, the whole control panel goes away. That makes it look like an MS issue (and in a way, it is). If only the Nvidia applet would act weird, people would blame Nvidia a lot faster.
That does explain why some of us had a wonderful experience with Vista from day one (I downloaded it and installed it the day the release version hit MSDN to try it out), and others had completly horrid experience. Aside for my creative sound card, I never installed any of the softwares and such that have been shown as culprit for Vista's issues. And behold behold, never had any problems (until SP1, where the creative sound card started being officialy not supported, in which case Vista stayed. The card did not.)