Socialism is not about taxing the rich and providing a security net. America, thank your stars, has never actually faced socialism. The golden period you describe was one of balance - between the rights of business owners and society at large. Your government wasn't over regulating in such a manner as to hamper business, nor was it the way it is now, entirely on the side of Wall Street. If America was socialist, everything would've been nationalized. I can quote India as an example - the Congress party here ruled the country for about half a century, nationalized all the banks and notably Air India (which went from one of the best airlines in the 60s under its original owners, the Tata group, to the utter shambles it is in today) and you require a million licenses and permits to set up any sort of business. The reforms of the 90s have been halted since the Congress returned to power in 2004, and they continue with idiotic taxpayer funded welfare programs. Tax payers are a minority here, and nobody ever raises the question of wasting taxpayer money on 'employment generation schemes' such as this.
Ironically despite sticking to socialism for so long, there's no equivalent of social security in India, nor, as in Europe, do we get to enjoy subsidized healthcare or education equally across society. The few government hospitals that exist are overstaffed, and government run schools prefer admitting children of govt. employees.
Robbing the electorally indifferent middle class to prop up welfare schemes for the masses of poor who actually vote - this has been the modus operandi since the country became independent. The average middle class Indian has been screwed for so long s/he now accepts it as a part of life.
one where people assert that eclipse is some how "required" for productive java programming (or any other language for that matter) are absolutely wrong
It's the market, that's what it is. Both Eclipse & Netbeans are mature platforms backed by IBM and Oracle, and there's a whole industry thriving on these IDEs, including commercial plugins. So if one is looking for a job with commercial Java development, one has to be familiar with either of these. And well..I was working on IBM's JVM before, so yeah, 16 GB RAM on a 6 core AMD running RHEL, but I digress:)
Perhaps Google may succeed in putting the idea of a fully owned phone into the minds of the general American public. We in India and Europe have long since been accustomed to buying cellphones off the shelf from the manufacturer's shop without any contract or any carrier crippling the internals.
Reminds me of an old Soviet Russia joke(more here):
A Polish tourist comes back home after visiting the USSR. He carries two very large and heavy suitcases. On his wrist is a new Soviet-made watch. He tells the customs man: "This is a new Soviet watch. It's a wonder unknown in the capitalist countries. You see, it shows time, the rate of your pulse beats, the phases of the Moon, the weather in Warsaw, Moscow, and New York, and more and more!"
"Yes, it's a wonder," the customs man agrees. "And what is it you have in these big suitcases?"
Why should it be a problem when it's aimed at what Java is mostly used for - complex multi tier business applications? This is like saying why use any library at all when you can code in barebones C, or even assembler. These frameworks are based on well known design patterns, and help, say, keep the presentation layer separate from the data layer. More abstraction = more complexity, but it frees up programmers to focus on business logic rather than set up housekeeping functions on their own. Or, very roughly speaking, these frameworks are to Java what Java is to C++ (in the sense of using garbage collection versus expecting the programmers to manage memory on their own).
If you download Eclipse, you can get started with all the features I mentioned without requiring additional plugins. There's no concept of 'compiling' your program, it used incremental compilation so that your classes are compiled as you type, and errors/warnings show up underlined in red/yellow. You can refactor code, connect to version control (CVS only though, SVN, GIT etc require plugins) and search the codebase all without any extra setup. Same goes for powerful debugging(local and remote), it supports hot code swapping so that you can make minor changes to the code without having to restart the VM. You can jump to any level of the stack frame, set up conditional breakpoints, run the memory analyzer to get a realtime snapshot of your VM for tracing memory leaks...
It's way, way beyond just editing source files.
How exactly would you go about setting all that up in vi/emacs? Maybe you could, if you had the time and patience, but that depends upon you, and may work for you if you freelance. Large software development teams would just jump right in with an IDE that has nearly everything built in, and then further customize it to their liking. Why sit and reinvent the wheel?
You don't need a big bloated "IDE" to write code, not even Java.
Yes, because heaven forbid anyone would want to run a debugger, profile their code for performance, run static analysis tools or even run a remote debug session on another machine without terminating the remote VM. All IDEs are just glorified text editors after all and are only used for 'writing code' as you put it.
Because each of them are ubiquitous on their respective platforms, not because Notepad is in any way equivalent to the other two. Says a lot though, if you see that Windows just has a bare bones editor vs. the other two with much more functionality.
Let me know when vi/emacs can do everything you mentioned out of the box, and also refactor code. Convert a local variable into a field, move a method from one class to another, rename a class and auto update all references to it, auto-externalize all hard coded strings, auto generate code based on templates..want more?
And finally, who exactly is using emacs/vi in the way you mentioned for a large project in a commercial environment? I'm talking about big software development firms, not something one might use to fix an open source project during one's spare time.
Code generation is an offshoot of cut-and-paste coding,
Um, no. Try one of the various Java frameworks, starting with J2EE and moving onto Spring, which uses a combination of XML and reflection to set bean properties via dependency injection. It's much easier to manage when your IDE can generate the boilerplate code for you. Java the language is one thing, separate APIs and frameworks are another. You can hardly blame the structure of the Java language for complexity of 3rd party frameworks.
he thing about such shoddy programming practices is that they kind of get you by, until they don't. Brute force and ignorance will only take you so far, and leave you with a system that has a ton of moving parts, many of which are malfunctioning at any given time. It leads to a "Oh just restart that server" mentality.
The problem you describe is when people just jump into code generating tools without an understanding of the underlying framework or language. As someone else here recommended, a newbie programmer (I'll take the case of Java here) is better off learning to code with a minimal text editor and learning to compile stuff on the commandline. To this day there are plenty of people who have used nothing but IDEs and don't know how to even compile a java class manually.
This however is hardly a case to throw out the baby with the bathwater and ditch using IDEs altogether.
Depends on what you mean by 'coding'. Try a large software project with hundreds of source files, multiple geographically separated teams working on different modules. Obviously if you're working on your own or something small, vi or whatever you prefer to use would suffice.
Funny, whenever I see that on slashdot, by brain always translates it into something like...massive chip on my shoulder
Arguments over Haskell and other obscure languages being superior to the mainstream ones are exactly that, academic. Sure, go ahead and invent your own language by all means, but don't knock what's being used reliably for years. For another example, PHP is often criticized, but nearly every large website runs on LAMP or some combination thereof. You could do what Paul Graham did and build your entire application in LISP, but good luck finding people to maintain it. And well, I'm quite happy coding in Java and Perl both as part of work and outside of it, while I respect the fact that theoretical computer science is what advances the field, supposedly better designed languages don't hold my interest.
The best technology doesn't necessarily translate into the most widely used technology, Microsoft is a prime example of the latter despite there being multiple arguably superior ways to implement operating systems and security models..
TL;DR - Let's all ditch IDEs and go back to Notepad/vi/emacs/edlin.
Code generation in Eclipse is a breeze, it easily creates framework classes where you can plug in your code. Directly jump to classes, view javadoc when you mouseover any element, jump between occurrences of text within a file, seamlessly integrate with the version control system of your choice - it has everything to properly work with a modern software project that can have hundreds or thousands of classes and files. And the same goes for Netbeans or Visual Studio or any other IDE of choice.
Finally, tell me how many real world projects use Haskell, Clojure or Scala as compared to ones using Java/C/C++/Python/Ruby/PHP/Perl. I don't exactly see dozens of job openings for the former on various job boards. You work with what you've got, unless you're an ivory tower academic who's only concerned with the design of a language as opposed to its real world usage.
This has come up time and again even with nVidia hardware on Windows. They "fix" something so a new, important game works and your old game stops working. And you can't buy too new a card to solve the problem either, because if you do the old driver that works "properly" won't support it. I've had similar problems on Linux, so, like I said — feature-parity.
Do you have any examples? I have a i7 running 64bit Windows 7 (Windows 8 since yesterday) and the latest nVidia drivers on a 560 Ti and I've not faced any problem with any of the games, be they recent or upto a decade old - Elder scrolls (Skyrim & Oblivion), Fallout 3/New Vegas, Rage, Dishonored, Deus Ex (all 3 of them, spanning ten years), Quake 1 to 4... Unreal Tournament (1999 vintage).
Seems to me it might have been a problem before, I wouldn't know, but for 2012 hardware and Windows 7 things are absolutely fine.
While I concede that to each their own, there's some things with which I want to counter your arguments-
Console games are just...you just start playing already, no need for all the driver-installation fuzz. Very practical.
What's different about PCs? I have installed my graphics driver exactly once - when I first built my PC and installed Windows on it. The time when games required complex setup (IRQ/DMA settings on Soundblaster cards in the DOS days, remember?) is long gone, like with anything else you just install the game and play.
The PC is much more forgiving when it comes to BUG fixes, PC versions tend to have more bugs and bug-patch releases, on consoles - you can't afford this so the games actually comes with less bugs in my experience.
I agree.. but when console games DO wind up with bugs they're much more expensive and time consuming for the developer to fix. As an example, there's talk of a third DLC for Skyrim after Dawnguard and Hearthfire, but the first one is yet to make an appearance for the PS3 after earlier reports that it might not be even made available because it was more complicated to port to the PS3.
Less cheating: One of my no#1 pet peeves when it comes to online gaming, are cheating bastards, they destroy the fun for everyone else, and they can literally WIPE out an entire planet of avid gamers with their stupid aimbots...
100% agree.
Games last longer: This might sound a bit odd, but I love to keep my games forever, and so I keep the consoles forever as well. I still have my Atari 2600, repaired the joystick a 100+ times, but enough OT. The games last longer because the games ages with the consoles. When you purchase NEW PC's or upgrade, you need endless patches and driver updates - buzz killington right there!
One word - virtualization! I use D-Fend Reloaded, a DOSBox front-end to play ancient DOS games like Commander Keene, Fallout 1 and System Shock. I've played several games made over the last 10 years without any problems on Windows 7 64bit, some of them require XP compatibility mode.
If you have a decent graphics card there's no end to gaming on Windows, there aren't as many bugs or driver/hardware issues as there might have been about 6-7 years ago.
..so that in a couple of years when Apple announces its competing product we see what he has to say. Apple has a history of dissing other products and then quietly incorporating those very features into their own ones later.
2007 - iPhone launches without the ability to install apps. According to Jobs, web apps should be more than sufficient. Same goes for cut n paste - 'Who needs it anyway?' until it appeared on the next model. And most recently, 'Who needs a 7" tablet?' Voila - the iPad Mini.
But if people install crap they have only themselves to blame. Android gives you a fair warning when you enable the 'allow non market apps' option. Every product comes with a warranty disclaimer, that if you open up and mess with the internals you void your warranty. Why couldn't Apple simply do the same if 'security' was the reason to lockdown devices?
Why does everything have to be the size of a sardine can? The module shown is so cramped because of payload restrictions for the launch vehicles. Why can't they send up a handful of these into LEO and assemble the spacecraft there? Let it be designed to remain in space, there's no need for heat shielding or aerodynamics in that case and it can be made larger. It may take longer but you'll have fewer constraints. Bigelow already has inflatable modules in orbit..add a couple of those and you get much more room for the crew. Cabin fever sets in for submariners anyway, imagine being in that situation with the additional knowledge of being millions of miles away from everything you've ever known.
It should have! It would have been the first Meego device with a hardware keyboard, to complement the touch only N9. Both these devices would have sold like hot cakes, in fact the n9 alone sold more in a month the Windows phones did in a quarter. A responsible CEO would have recognised the demand and ramped up production, instead he was too busy making sure that these devices wouldn't steal the non existent thunder of Windows phone.
..but the original plan before Elop appeared on the scene was sound. Yes, Symbian was showing its age but it still had a good couple of years to it, and they were planning on introducing mid to low end models based on Symbian for their traditionally strong markets - India, Africa and China. Meego was to have been the OS of the future with its Linux underpinnings, and Qt would be the bridge for developers to easily migrate to it from Symbian. In fact, by the end of 2010 there were quite a few Qt apps starting to appear on the Ovi store. Speaking of 'ecosystems', Nokia had a nice little one of its own from since long before mobile was anywhere on Steve Jobs' horizon.
Along comes Elop with his idiotic burning platform memo, and publicly declares that Symbian is dead.
He starts the process of selling the crown jewels to Microsoft - lay off half the staff, shut down plants and get the entire company on board with an unproven OS from Microsoft of all people, who have never really succeeded at anything mobile. In one stroke, he alienated the long time Symbian users by launching an OS that was even more crippled than iOS, and the developers by declaring that they would not support it anymore. This doesn't even take into account the poisonous hatchet job that was relentlessly done by US tech sites (Gizmodo, Techcrunch etc) who kept sneering at every Nokia innovation in-between going down on Apple. They have always had disproportionate influence in the mobile space compared to their experience with anything other than Apple.
What's even worse - he launches awesome devices like the N9 and N950, then refuses to sell them in Europe or India despite the demand for fear that it will expose the fact that people would rather prefer them to the Windows phone. And I haven't even gotten started on Nokia's swansong, the Symbian based PureView 808, that uses a 41 megapixel sensor to take ultra detailed 8 MP photos!
Look at where Nokia is today, losses of more than a billion euro, and long since forgotten in the mobile space, which has become a 2 horse race between iOS & Android. Samsung has taken the crown of world's largest mobile manufacturer, and in the low to mid range segment where Nokia traditionally ruled, you just have crappy Android devices from a hundred manufacturers trying to cram a resource hungry OS onto puny specs - 256 MB RAM, 800 MHz CPU - when any Symbian phone with the same specs at the same price would just zip along.
Had they stuck to the original plan, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be in as dire straits as they are now.
Even the glory days of Nokia hardware are getting over. They shut down manufacturing everywhere but (where else) China, and the current Windows phones are just subcontracted to generic Chinese assemblers who slap a Nokia sticker on top.
No trick. This is a browser suite aimed at power users(hence the inclusion of IRC and newsgroup support and a host of extra options), and in everyday use it does startup and run faster than Firefox. It employs the same Gecko rendering engine and incorporates modern features ( SPDY support was recently added). I use Gmail via IMAP on the built in client, and it still takes up less memory than running Firefox and Thunderbird together. The Seamonkey devs don't fuck around with the UI as the Firefox ones keeps doing, and for nostalgia you even can theme it to look like the old Netscape Communicator (if that counts). All popular extensions (Adblock Plus included) have Seamonkey ports. Out of the box you get better control over tab and link behavior, disable loading 3rd party images, mouse wheel integration, Firefox user agent compatibility and several other features.
Story poster here - my favorite part about Seamonkey is the integration between browser and mail client. Click a link in an email message in the client and it opens in a new browser tab. Click a mailto link in the browser and it pops up a new compose mail window - all in a jiffy without the overhead of starting an external Outlook or Thunderbird process. Same goes even for IRC links - they directly launch the IRC server in Chatzilla.
We're stuck here for good, destined to just keep looking at extra solar planets via telescope and speculating about whether they could support life as we know it. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light years away. The farthest man made object is just roughly 17 light hours from home after 35 years of travel; so forget about sending spaceships physically to the stars unless someone invents warp drive. It's laughable to talk of Alpha Centauri when no one in power is showing interest in returning to the moon, let alone Mars. And leaving aside that, we're stuck with the reality of NASA facing budget cuts despite its overall budget being a drop in the ocean compared to what's been spent on war in the last 10 years. Space exploration should've been incremental, start with a lunar refuelling base at the pole where there's water ice that can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, and use that as a staging area for further exploration. Build a spacecraft for travelling to Mars in LEO stage by stage, and send a bunch of robots to assemble a modular base well before the first humans are sent (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series describes this approach).
While Curiosity, Opportunity & Spirit are testimony to NASA's engineering prowess, it still can't beat an actual geologist (areologist?) on Mars with a field laboratory who's able to directly analyse rocks and figure out what it was like in the past.
Want some perspective? Just the annual airconditioning budget for the US Army in Iraq/Afghanistan far exceeds that of NASA's.
Given how everything's being outsourced to China these days, I'm sure the fact that this is US built also adds to the price tag. Maybe they can also play up the patriotism factor a bit - 'buy an innovative honest to goodness American built ATV!'
Slashdot Mirror
Socialism is not about taxing the rich and providing a security net. America, thank your stars, has never actually faced socialism. The golden period you describe was one of balance - between the rights of business owners and society at large. Your government wasn't over regulating in such a manner as to hamper business, nor was it the way it is now, entirely on the side of Wall Street.
If America was socialist, everything would've been nationalized. I can quote India as an example - the Congress party here ruled the country for about half a century, nationalized all the banks and notably Air India (which went from one of the best airlines in the 60s under its original owners, the Tata group, to the utter shambles it is in today) and you require a million licenses and permits to set up any sort of business.
The reforms of the 90s have been halted since the Congress returned to power in 2004, and they continue with idiotic taxpayer funded welfare programs. Tax payers are a minority here, and nobody ever raises the question of wasting taxpayer money on 'employment generation schemes' such as this.
Ironically despite sticking to socialism for so long, there's no equivalent of social security in India, nor, as in Europe, do we get to enjoy subsidized healthcare or education equally across society. The few government hospitals that exist are overstaffed, and government run schools prefer admitting children of govt. employees.
Robbing the electorally indifferent middle class to prop up welfare schemes for the masses of poor who actually vote - this has been the modus operandi since the country became independent.
The average middle class Indian has been screwed for so long s/he now accepts it as a part of life.
..and direct French users to a page informing them that this ban was brought on by French publishers. See how they like that.
one where people assert that eclipse is some how "required" for productive java programming (or any other language for that matter) are absolutely wrong
It's the market, that's what it is. Both Eclipse & Netbeans are mature platforms backed by IBM and Oracle, and there's a whole industry thriving on these IDEs, including commercial plugins. So if one is looking for a job with commercial Java development, one has to be familiar with either of these. :)
And well..I was working on IBM's JVM before, so yeah, 16 GB RAM on a 6 core AMD running RHEL, but I digress
Perhaps Google may succeed in putting the idea of a fully owned phone into the minds of the general American public. We in India and Europe have long since been accustomed to buying cellphones off the shelf from the manufacturer's shop without any contract or any carrier crippling the internals.
Reminds me of an old Soviet Russia joke(more here):
A Polish tourist comes back home after visiting the USSR. He carries two very large and heavy suitcases. On his wrist is a new Soviet-made watch. He tells the customs man: "This is a new Soviet watch. It's a wonder unknown in the capitalist countries. You see, it shows time, the rate of your pulse beats, the phases of the Moon, the weather in Warsaw, Moscow, and New York, and more and more!"
"Yes, it's a wonder," the customs man agrees. "And what is it you have in these big suitcases?"
"Oh, it's just the batteries for that watch."
Why should it be a problem when it's aimed at what Java is mostly used for - complex multi tier business applications? This is like saying why use any library at all when you can code in barebones C, or even assembler.
These frameworks are based on well known design patterns, and help, say, keep the presentation layer separate from the data layer. More abstraction = more complexity, but it frees up programmers to focus on business logic rather than set up housekeeping functions on their own.
Or, very roughly speaking, these frameworks are to Java what Java is to C++ (in the sense of using garbage collection versus expecting the programmers to manage memory on their own).
If you download Eclipse, you can get started with all the features I mentioned without requiring additional plugins. There's no concept of 'compiling' your program, it used incremental compilation so that your classes are compiled as you type, and errors/warnings show up underlined in red/yellow. You can refactor code, connect to version control (CVS only though, SVN, GIT etc require plugins) and search the codebase all without any extra setup. Same goes for powerful debugging(local and remote), it supports hot code swapping so that you can make minor changes to the code without having to restart the VM. You can jump to any level of the stack frame, set up conditional breakpoints, run the memory analyzer to get a realtime snapshot of your VM for tracing memory leaks...
It's way, way beyond just editing source files.
How exactly would you go about setting all that up in vi/emacs? Maybe you could, if you had the time and patience, but that depends upon you, and may work for you if you freelance. Large software development teams would just jump right in with an IDE that has nearly everything built in, and then further customize it to their liking. Why sit and reinvent the wheel?
You don't need a big bloated "IDE" to write code, not even Java.
Yes, because heaven forbid anyone would want to run a debugger, profile their code for performance, run static analysis tools or even run a remote debug session on another machine without terminating the remote VM. All IDEs are just glorified text editors after all and are only used for 'writing code' as you put it.
Because each of them are ubiquitous on their respective platforms, not because Notepad is in any way equivalent to the other two. Says a lot though, if you see that Windows just has a bare bones editor vs. the other two with much more functionality.
Let me know when vi/emacs can do everything you mentioned out of the box, and also refactor code. Convert a local variable into a field, move a method from one class to another, rename a class and auto update all references to it, auto-externalize all hard coded strings, auto generate code based on templates..want more?
And finally, who exactly is using emacs/vi in the way you mentioned for a large project in a commercial environment? I'm talking about big software development firms, not something one might use to fix an open source project during one's spare time.
Code generation is an offshoot of cut-and-paste coding,
Um, no.
Try one of the various Java frameworks, starting with J2EE and moving onto Spring, which uses a combination of XML and reflection to set bean properties via dependency injection. It's much easier to manage when your IDE can generate the boilerplate code for you. Java the language is one thing, separate APIs and frameworks are another. You can hardly blame the structure of the Java language for complexity of 3rd party frameworks.
he thing about such shoddy programming practices is that they kind of get you by, until they don't. Brute force and ignorance will only take you so far, and leave you with a system that has a ton of moving parts, many of which are malfunctioning at any given time. It leads to a "Oh just restart that server" mentality.
The problem you describe is when people just jump into code generating tools without an understanding of the underlying framework or language. As someone else here recommended, a newbie programmer (I'll take the case of Java here) is better off learning to code with a minimal text editor and learning to compile stuff on the commandline. To this day there are plenty of people who have used nothing but IDEs and don't know how to even compile a java class manually.
This however is hardly a case to throw out the baby with the bathwater and ditch using IDEs altogether.
Depends on what you mean by 'coding'. Try a large software project with hundreds of source files, multiple geographically separated teams working on different modules. Obviously if you're working on your own or something small, vi or whatever you prefer to use would suffice.
Funny, whenever I see that on slashdot, by brain always translates it into something like...massive chip on my shoulder
Arguments over Haskell and other obscure languages being superior to the mainstream ones are exactly that, academic. Sure, go ahead and invent your own language by all means, but don't knock what's being used reliably for years. For another example, PHP is often criticized, but nearly every large website runs on LAMP or some combination thereof. You could do what Paul Graham did and build your entire application in LISP, but good luck finding people to maintain it.
And well, I'm quite happy coding in Java and Perl both as part of work and outside of it, while I respect the fact that theoretical computer science is what advances the field, supposedly better designed languages don't hold my interest.
The best technology doesn't necessarily translate into the most widely used technology, Microsoft is a prime example of the latter despite there being multiple arguably superior ways to implement operating systems and security models..
TL;DR - Let's all ditch IDEs and go back to Notepad/vi/emacs/edlin.
Code generation in Eclipse is a breeze, it easily creates framework classes where you can plug in your code. Directly jump to classes, view javadoc when you mouseover any element, jump between occurrences of text within a file, seamlessly integrate with the version control system of your choice - it has everything to properly work with a modern software project that can have hundreds or thousands of classes and files.
And the same goes for Netbeans or Visual Studio or any other IDE of choice.
Finally, tell me how many real world projects use Haskell, Clojure or Scala as compared to ones using Java/C/C++/Python/Ruby/PHP/Perl. I don't exactly see dozens of job openings for the former on various job boards. You work with what you've got, unless you're an ivory tower academic who's only concerned with the design of a language as opposed to its real world usage.
This has come up time and again even with nVidia hardware on Windows. They "fix" something so a new, important game works and your old game stops working. And you can't buy too new a card to solve the problem either, because if you do the old driver that works "properly" won't support it. I've had similar problems on Linux, so, like I said — feature-parity.
Do you have any examples? I have a i7 running 64bit Windows 7 (Windows 8 since yesterday) and the latest nVidia drivers on a 560 Ti and I've not faced any problem with any of the games, be they recent or upto a decade old - Elder scrolls (Skyrim & Oblivion), Fallout 3/New Vegas, Rage, Dishonored, Deus Ex (all 3 of them, spanning ten years), Quake 1 to 4... Unreal Tournament (1999 vintage).
Seems to me it might have been a problem before, I wouldn't know, but for 2012 hardware and Windows 7 things are absolutely fine.
While I concede that to each their own, there's some things with which I want to counter your arguments-
Console games are just...you just start playing already, no need for all the driver-installation fuzz. Very practical.
What's different about PCs? I have installed my graphics driver exactly once - when I first built my PC and installed Windows on it. The time when games required complex setup (IRQ/DMA settings on Soundblaster cards in the DOS days, remember?) is long gone, like with anything else you just install the game and play.
The PC is much more forgiving when it comes to BUG fixes, PC versions tend to have more bugs and bug-patch releases, on consoles - you can't afford this so the games actually comes with less bugs in my experience.
I agree.. but when console games DO wind up with bugs they're much more expensive and time consuming for the developer to fix. As an example, there's talk of a third DLC for Skyrim after Dawnguard and Hearthfire, but the first one is yet to make an appearance for the PS3 after earlier reports that it might not be even made available because it was more complicated to port to the PS3.
Less cheating: One of my no#1 pet peeves when it comes to online gaming, are cheating bastards, they destroy the fun for everyone else, and they can literally WIPE out an entire planet of avid gamers with their stupid aimbots...
100% agree.
Games last longer: This might sound a bit odd, but I love to keep my games forever, and so I keep the consoles forever as well. I still have my Atari 2600, repaired the joystick a 100+ times, but enough OT. The games last longer because the games ages with the consoles. When you purchase NEW PC's or upgrade, you need endless patches and driver updates - buzz killington right there!
One word - virtualization! I use D-Fend Reloaded, a DOSBox front-end to play ancient DOS games like Commander Keene, Fallout 1 and System Shock. I've played several games made over the last 10 years without any problems on Windows 7 64bit, some of them require XP compatibility mode.
If you have a decent graphics card there's no end to gaming on Windows, there aren't as many bugs or driver/hardware issues as there might have been about 6-7 years ago.
..so that in a couple of years when Apple announces its competing product we see what he has to say. Apple has a history of dissing other products and then quietly incorporating those very features into their own ones later.
2007 - iPhone launches without the ability to install apps. According to Jobs, web apps should be more than sufficient. Same goes for cut n paste - 'Who needs it anyway?' until it appeared on the next model.
And most recently, 'Who needs a 7" tablet?' Voila - the iPad Mini.
But if people install crap they have only themselves to blame. Android gives you a fair warning when you enable the 'allow non market apps' option. Every product comes with a warranty disclaimer, that if you open up and mess with the internals you void your warranty. Why couldn't Apple simply do the same if 'security' was the reason to lockdown devices?
Why does everything have to be the size of a sardine can? The module shown is so cramped because of payload restrictions for the launch vehicles. Why can't they send up a handful of these into LEO and assemble the spacecraft there? Let it be designed to remain in space, there's no need for heat shielding or aerodynamics in that case and it can be made larger. It may take longer but you'll have fewer constraints. Bigelow already has inflatable modules in orbit..add a couple of those and you get much more room for the crew.
Cabin fever sets in for submariners anyway, imagine being in that situation with the additional knowledge of being millions of miles away from everything you've ever known.
It should have! It would have been the first Meego device with a hardware keyboard, to complement the touch only N9. Both these devices would have sold like hot cakes, in fact the n9 alone sold more in a month the Windows phones did in a quarter. A responsible CEO would have recognised the demand and ramped up production, instead he was too busy making sure that these devices wouldn't steal the non existent thunder of Windows phone.
..but the original plan before Elop appeared on the scene was sound. Yes, Symbian was showing its age but it still had a good couple of years to it, and they were planning on introducing mid to low end models based on Symbian for their traditionally strong markets - India, Africa and China. Meego was to have been the OS of the future with its Linux underpinnings, and Qt would be the bridge for developers to easily migrate to it from Symbian. In fact, by the end of 2010 there were quite a few Qt apps starting to appear on the Ovi store. Speaking of 'ecosystems', Nokia had a nice little one of its own from since long before mobile was anywhere on Steve Jobs' horizon.
Along comes Elop with his idiotic burning platform memo, and publicly declares that Symbian is dead.
He starts the process of selling the crown jewels to Microsoft - lay off half the staff, shut down plants and get the entire company on board with an unproven OS from Microsoft of all people, who have never really succeeded at anything mobile.
In one stroke, he alienated the long time Symbian users by launching an OS that was even more crippled than iOS, and the developers by declaring that they would not support it anymore. This doesn't even take into account the poisonous hatchet job that was relentlessly done by US tech sites (Gizmodo, Techcrunch etc) who kept sneering at every Nokia innovation in-between going down on Apple. They have always had disproportionate influence in the mobile space compared to their experience with anything other than Apple.
What's even worse - he launches awesome devices like the N9 and N950, then refuses to sell them in Europe or India despite the demand for fear that it will expose the fact that people would rather prefer them to the Windows phone. And I haven't even gotten started on Nokia's swansong, the Symbian based PureView 808, that uses a 41 megapixel sensor to take ultra detailed 8 MP photos!
Look at where Nokia is today, losses of more than a billion euro, and long since forgotten in the mobile space, which has become a 2 horse race between iOS & Android. Samsung has taken the crown of world's largest mobile manufacturer, and in the low to mid range segment where Nokia traditionally ruled, you just have crappy Android devices from a hundred manufacturers trying to cram a resource hungry OS onto puny specs - 256 MB RAM, 800 MHz CPU - when any Symbian phone with the same specs at the same price would just zip along.
Had they stuck to the original plan, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be in as dire straits as they are now.
Even the glory days of Nokia hardware are getting over. They shut down manufacturing everywhere but (where else) China, and the current Windows phones are just subcontracted to generic Chinese assemblers who slap a Nokia sticker on top.
No trick. This is a browser suite aimed at power users(hence the inclusion of IRC and newsgroup support and a host of extra options), and in everyday use it does startup and run faster than Firefox. It employs the same Gecko rendering engine and incorporates modern features ( SPDY support was recently added).
I use Gmail via IMAP on the built in client, and it still takes up less memory than running Firefox and Thunderbird together. The Seamonkey devs don't fuck around with the UI as the Firefox ones keeps doing, and for nostalgia you even can theme it to look like the old Netscape Communicator (if that counts).
All popular extensions (Adblock Plus included) have Seamonkey ports.
Out of the box you get better control over tab and link behavior, disable loading 3rd party images, mouse wheel integration, Firefox user agent compatibility and several other features.
What's not to like?
Story poster here - my favorite part about Seamonkey is the integration between browser and mail client. Click a link in an email message in the client and it opens in a new browser tab. Click a mailto link in the browser and it pops up a new compose mail window - all in a jiffy without the overhead of starting an external Outlook or Thunderbird process. Same goes even for IRC links - they directly launch the IRC server in Chatzilla.
Let Google simply stop showing any search results for these sites. I'd like to see how long they last before they stop acting like fools.
We're stuck here for good, destined to just keep looking at extra solar planets via telescope and speculating about whether they could support life as we know it. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light years away. The farthest man made object is just roughly 17 light hours from home after 35 years of travel; so forget about sending spaceships physically to the stars unless someone invents warp drive. It's laughable to talk of Alpha Centauri when no one in power is showing interest in returning to the moon, let alone Mars.
And leaving aside that, we're stuck with the reality of NASA facing budget cuts despite its overall budget being a drop in the ocean compared to what's been spent on war in the last 10 years.
Space exploration should've been incremental, start with a lunar refuelling base at the pole where there's water ice that can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, and use that as a staging area for further exploration. Build a spacecraft for travelling to Mars in LEO stage by stage, and send a bunch of robots to assemble a modular base well before the first humans are sent (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series describes this approach).
While Curiosity, Opportunity & Spirit are testimony to NASA's engineering prowess, it still can't beat an actual geologist (areologist?) on Mars with a field laboratory who's able to directly analyse rocks and figure out what it was like in the past.
Want some perspective? Just the annual airconditioning budget for the US Army in Iraq/Afghanistan far exceeds that of NASA's.
Given how everything's being outsourced to China these days, I'm sure the fact that this is US built also adds to the price tag. Maybe they can also play up the patriotism factor a bit - 'buy an innovative honest to goodness American built ATV!'