I would not mind playing Starcraft 2 on a MacBook when I am abroad.
IIRC, but Steam is more or less a front-end for the publishers and their ego. Highly likely, as it was always before, Mac ports would require a different key thus one has to purchase the Mac version separately. This is long standing tradition, mainly due to the fact that Mac porting is licensed/subcontracted to another company and has different money trail. Since it means -in theory- more profit for publishers, highly likely Mac v. PC on Steam would be the same as it is with boxed version of games.
testing and architecting (building frameworks) etc.
Ironically, I have seen more self-taught architects. What I think reflects the fact that the architects with academic background tend to over-architect and over-design.
To testing, I would confirm that. At least in my experience, many self-taught developers have the attitude that their code works perfectly.
On my list the biggest gap is actually the little things. Most books and references often concentrate on answering the "how" part of question, but the much harder part of question "why" often goes unanswered. That leads to the effect that self-taught specialists tend to have more "it works that way" dark places in their code they do not understand why it actually works.
Are games so lazily programmed that they don't take advantage of that either?
Some games now are multi-threaded.
The problem from perspective of game software is that it has to be near real-time. Synchronizing multiple threads in the time available to render a single frame (e.g. at 25fps that 40ms, or at 40fps - 25ms) is a very tricky task. It is more rewarding to invest into optimizing single-threaded engine, while optimizing multi-threaded variant is quite risky, often with bugs showing up only after the game reaches wide masses.
Smith says he was already "seated WITH ARM RESTS DOWN." IOW, he didn't take two places as they attempt to paint it.
For slim people out there who do not understand what the "arm rests down" in context means: the person already fits into the place just fine.
And heck, that Kevin Smith we're are talking here about. That dude is SHORT. His BMI has to be off the charts for him to not to fit a single place - even in the economy class.
IOW, Apple is bad at creating new markets: because first of all they want to sell a product. They are OEM, they are content providers. It's all snappy and smooth and intergrated - except number of missing features and the feature to allow users to add features themselves.
MSFT is good at it, because they want to be a platform supplier, eternal irreplaceable proxy between OEMs, content providers and end users. But the products - allowing OEMs and content providers greater degree of freedom - always seem to lack integration and usability. Because there are too many 3rd parties involved.
I thought by now people understood the difference between the two. But the iPad pre-release hype seem to suggest otherwise...
Enterprises often have silly inconceivable requirements originated from some out-dated corporate policies.
That's IMO one of the reasons why pretty much all PC OEMs has to have multitude of product lines - to satisfy as many customers as possible. That's why feature lists grow so obscurely long while no real effort is put to make them more accessible. Features there are not to be useful - they are to satisfy corporate requirements.
Enterprise market remains very backward, while private market advances according to fashion of the day. And since Apple tries to ride on the wave of innovation, supporting the private buyers is in line with their product strategy - supporting enterprise buyers would require them to add serial/parallel/PS2 ports to MacBooks....
True. But when they refuse to do so when offered money for it - then it might become a different matter.
Context? Not sure what you mean here.
After ODF was ratified, some gov'ts were asking M$ what would it take for them to implement ODF support. Requests were refused based on M$' past mantra - "nobody needs ODF support."
happens when they refuse to make their product interoperable with rest of industry what hampers competition.
It already is.
e.g.
[ File Reader for.doc ] -> [ MS Word Editing Engine/App ] -> [ File Writer for.doc ]
No, you wont get support for your own pet format for free from MS. You have to write the plugin yourself like many people have.
Uhm... What are you smoking???
For all the time WinWord exists, M$ was asked/begged/etc to release the filter API. They consistently refused.
Again: there is no filter API published/available to 3rd parties which would allow to implement seamless integration of another file format into M$O suit.
There is a lot of crap floating around, but most of it works through various hacks. (E.g. my friends did implement special import/export for one company - through clipboard copy/paste functions. Sun's ODF plug-in does it by telling M$O that it actually has an EOOXML and does the translation on the fly.)
.. happens when they bundle stuff nobody asked them for,
Untrue. Customers were demanding PDF support. MS puts it in, and Adobe threatens to sue or collect money from MS, while there already exist thousands of PDF writers, commercial and opensource outside of Word.
Likewise customers were asking for ODF and M$ was flat out refusing even acknowledge existence of such requests.
Later they were pressed against the wall and forced to do something on their own - and did it extremely poorly.
Key attributes of the OpenFormula specification and development process, many of which are unique to OpenFormula as a recalculated formula format, are:
* Developed by many different implementors. * Developed with experienced users. * Open development. * Fully open standard. * Implementors are already implementing it. * Focused development. * Not rushed. * Future-proofed format * Embedded test cases. * Rigorous definitions * Doesn't mandate mistakes. * Innovations from many sources. * Room for innovation by anyone. * Internationalization. * Subset support.
The "Doesn't mandate mistakes" alone made the whole debacle worth the pains.
BTW Microsoft isn't obliged to bundle support for any formats other than what they want.
True. But when they refuse to do so when offered money for it - then it might become a different matter.
"Ha ha M$ sucks they don't support X,Y,Z formats!"
... happens when they refuse to make their product interoperable with rest of industry what hampers competition.
"M$ monopoly!! Remove support for X,Y,Z format! Antitrust! Antitrust!"
... happens when they bundle stuff nobody asked them for, use that to justify increased prices and later claim to have "90% market penetration thus it is a standard de facto!"
C|Net is way to politically-correct to spell it openly.
Large software standards are hard to conform to. Both OO.o and KOffice have problems complying with ODF here and there too. But they try to and the incompatibilities are treated as bugs.
The crucial difference is that M$ openly stated that they are not going to hold M$O release nor change its development model to ensure conformance to their own still-born standard.
Somebody had forgotten to take into account the difference between average RH customer and average Apple customer.
P.S. In past I have seen (actually helped implementing) a B2B "solution" for a company with lots of partners. Think of a board like Tweeter, but for bids and offers. Most striking part to me was that the company was actually taking 100% passive approach to the B2B portal: goal wasn't to consolidate their market place or monitor the partners but rather create a place for the partners and customers where they can find each other and connect.
But designers for years have become convinced that if the public cannot easily and quickly 'achieve' they will throw down their controllers and keyboards in disgust.
[ "throw down [...] mouse" you meant? ]
It's not about achieving something. Some games I have played in past simply failed at showing me that I make some progress. Achievements are for pro/hardcore-gamers - I as casual gamer I want to see that I make the progress. Otherwise after few hours of grinding (so common to jap games) I simply become bored.
Also, to the "throw down" remark. My own reaction is that I have tendency to stop playing after hour or so of boring gameplay. Not because it's too difficult or I lack patience. (Bit of that too probably - since I have enough challenges 8 to 5 in office.)
But because my spare time is valuable and now more than ever I have plethora of entertainment types actually competing for the spare time and the money I want to spend on it.
To be honest, console games lost me long ago to book-reading/movie-going/internet-surfing/etc. Every time I pick a highly rated console game, few hours into the game play, I constantly getting the feeling that reviewers/fanbois tricked me to pay money for the pleasure to be mind-raped. I stop playing immediately and move on to something more rewarding...
That, to me, shows a rather low opinion of game players in general.
To me it seems more that as game development was finally taken over completely by businesspeople and they simply want to have a sure formula for the profit. More accessible game - more potential sales.
Not well balance difficult game would have puny sales.
Not well balanced casual game - would have at least some sales.
Business risk of developing difficult, challenging game is higher thus is less profitable.
Well, that's rather prejudiced! Germans know how to separate home and work life, and as soon as I find one, I'll give you an example.
Mods, that's not funny, that sarcastic. Germans are extremely protective - almost religious - about the separation of their work and private life. Overworking is even forbidden by law.
But getting back to the topic, over here in Germany I have seen more businesses using OO.o than home users. My data pool not sufficiently large to be any indicative and some people still thank me for suggesting them to check the OO.o at home.
It's not a "great leap" - nor anybody involved claims that it is.
But this is nevertheless important statement from AMD/ATI that they are still on the OSS track. What is IMO rather important and significant.
P.S. Plus it is extremely important to folks who run systems which are not supported by nVidia. Unless you run x86 or x64, nVidia wouldn't even acknowledge your existence.
The worst was back with the original Athlons, I got one and could not make it work with my GeForce 256.
IIRC the problem was caused not by mobo/chipset, but rather GeForce 256 itself which wasn't handling ground properly and simply was jamming other buses. Many vendors later on simply added extra filters to AGP bus to workaround the problem - some people were soldering extra capacitors themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I would not mind playing Starcraft 2 on a MacBook when I am abroad.
IIRC, but Steam is more or less a front-end for the publishers and their ego. Highly likely, as it was always before, Mac ports would require a different key thus one has to purchase the Mac version separately. This is long standing tradition, mainly due to the fact that Mac porting is licensed/subcontracted to another company and has different money trail. Since it means -in theory- more profit for publishers, highly likely Mac v. PC on Steam would be the same as it is with boxed version of games.
OpenGL has a history of lagging behind Direct3D when it comes to official extension
I thought the official extensions were normally a vendor extensions before, later granted the official status?
but it will not be able to use this feature on NVIDIA hardware when it comes out.
Not an OpenGL specialist, but I have seen before nVidia OpenGL implementation reporting support for ATI/Matrox extensions and vice versa.
Unless of course nVidia decides to break the tradition.
testing and architecting (building frameworks) etc.
Ironically, I have seen more self-taught architects. What I think reflects the fact that the architects with academic background tend to over-architect and over-design.
To testing, I would confirm that. At least in my experience, many self-taught developers have the attitude that their code works perfectly.
On my list the biggest gap is actually the little things. Most books and references often concentrate on answering the "how" part of question, but the much harder part of question "why" often goes unanswered. That leads to the effect that self-taught specialists tend to have more "it works that way" dark places in their code they do not understand why it actually works.
Are games so lazily programmed that they don't take advantage of that either?
Some games now are multi-threaded.
The problem from perspective of game software is that it has to be near real-time. Synchronizing multiple threads in the time available to render a single frame (e.g. at 25fps that 40ms, or at 40fps - 25ms) is a very tricky task. It is more rewarding to invest into optimizing single-threaded engine, while optimizing multi-threaded variant is quite risky, often with bugs showing up only after the game reaches wide masses.
P.S. Same applied btw to video playback software.
Apparently it is a load of bull.
Smith says he was already "seated WITH ARM RESTS DOWN." IOW, he didn't take two places as they attempt to paint it.
For slim people out there who do not understand what the "arm rests down" in context means: the person already fits into the place just fine.
And heck, that Kevin Smith we're are talking here about. That dude is SHORT. His BMI has to be off the charts for him to not to fit a single place - even in the economy class.
2) a small 'netbook' keyboard/cpu/hd base, with a connector for an external display, which is handled by (1).
Dock station with its own integrated keyboard/cpu/hdd?? Because the way you put it, it is a dock station.
PC components should be really falling low in price now to allow that.
IOW, Apple is bad at creating new markets: because first of all they want to sell a product. They are OEM, they are content providers. It's all snappy and smooth and intergrated - except number of missing features and the feature to allow users to add features themselves.
MSFT is good at it, because they want to be a platform supplier, eternal irreplaceable proxy between OEMs, content providers and end users. But the products - allowing OEMs and content providers greater degree of freedom - always seem to lack integration and usability. Because there are too many 3rd parties involved.
I thought by now people understood the difference between the two. But the iPad pre-release hype seem to suggest otherwise...
Twitter is used for public communication.
E-mail, Gmail is front-end of, is used for private communication.
Why the difference is so hard to understand??
Not really. Prices are only part of it.
Enterprises often have silly inconceivable requirements originated from some out-dated corporate policies.
That's IMO one of the reasons why pretty much all PC OEMs has to have multitude of product lines - to satisfy as many customers as possible. That's why feature lists grow so obscurely long while no real effort is put to make them more accessible. Features there are not to be useful - they are to satisfy corporate requirements.
Enterprise market remains very backward, while private market advances according to fashion of the day. And since Apple tries to ride on the wave of innovation, supporting the private buyers is in line with their product strategy - supporting enterprise buyers would require them to add serial/parallel/PS2 ports to MacBooks....
True. But when they refuse to do so when offered money for it - then it might become a different matter.
Context? Not sure what you mean here.
After ODF was ratified, some gov'ts were asking M$ what would it take for them to implement ODF support. Requests were refused based on M$' past mantra - "nobody needs ODF support."
happens when they refuse to make their product interoperable with rest of industry what hampers competition.
It already is.
e.g.
[ File Reader for .doc ] -> [ MS Word Editing Engine/App ] -> [ File Writer for .doc ]
No, you wont get support for your own pet format for free from MS. You have to write the plugin yourself like many people have.
Uhm... What are you smoking???
For all the time WinWord exists, M$ was asked/begged/etc to release the filter API. They consistently refused.
Again: there is no filter API published/available to 3rd parties which would allow to implement seamless integration of another file format into M$O suit.
There is a lot of crap floating around, but most of it works through various hacks. (E.g. my friends did implement special import/export for one company - through clipboard copy/paste functions. Sun's ODF plug-in does it by telling M$O that it actually has an EOOXML and does the translation on the fly.)
.. happens when they bundle stuff nobody asked them for,
Untrue. Customers were demanding PDF support. MS puts it in, and Adobe threatens to sue or collect money from MS, while there already exist thousands of PDF writers, commercial and opensource outside of Word.
Likewise customers were asking for ODF and M$ was flat out refusing even acknowledge existence of such requests.
Later they were pressed against the wall and forced to do something on their own - and did it extremely poorly.
I have seen also mentions of the Xapian which is written in C++.
No, this, you dummy:
The "Doesn't mandate mistakes" alone made the whole debacle worth the pains.
In the context - file format standardization - your response makes absolutely no sense. Not in slightest.
They changed a standard to make it compliant with a software??????
BTW Microsoft isn't obliged to bundle support for any formats other than what they want.
True. But when they refuse to do so when offered money for it - then it might become a different matter.
"Ha ha M$ sucks they don't support X,Y,Z formats!"
"M$ monopoly!! Remove support for X,Y,Z format! Antitrust! Antitrust!"
LOL. They had to give examples because what supposed to be mathematical and logical is ridden with decades of bugs.
ODF choose wisely to do it right way.
Here you go. Search for "undisclosed information".
M$ Office fails it's own standards test
C|Net is way to politically-correct to spell it openly.
Large software standards are hard to conform to. Both OO.o and KOffice have problems complying with ODF here and there too. But they try to and the incompatibilities are treated as bugs.
The crucial difference is that M$ openly stated that they are not going to hold M$O release nor change its development model to ensure conformance to their own still-born standard.
Don't some of the RFCs do something like this?
RFCs can do it, because they are Request For Comments, not STDs. And only few of RFCs are even designated to be a standard in the future.
Very true.
Somebody had forgotten to take into account the difference between average RH customer and average Apple customer.
P.S. In past I have seen (actually helped implementing) a B2B "solution" for a company with lots of partners. Think of a board like Tweeter, but for bids and offers. Most striking part to me was that the company was actually taking 100% passive approach to the B2B portal: goal wasn't to consolidate their market place or monitor the partners but rather create a place for the partners and customers where they can find each other and connect.
But designers for years have become convinced that if the public cannot easily and quickly 'achieve' they will throw down their controllers and keyboards in disgust.
[ "throw down [...] mouse" you meant? ]
It's not about achieving something. Some games I have played in past simply failed at showing me that I make some progress. Achievements are for pro/hardcore-gamers - I as casual gamer I want to see that I make the progress. Otherwise after few hours of grinding (so common to jap games) I simply become bored.
Also, to the "throw down" remark. My own reaction is that I have tendency to stop playing after hour or so of boring gameplay. Not because it's too difficult or I lack patience. (Bit of that too probably - since I have enough challenges 8 to 5 in office.)
But because my spare time is valuable and now more than ever I have plethora of entertainment types actually competing for the spare time and the money I want to spend on it.
To be honest, console games lost me long ago to book-reading/movie-going/internet-surfing/etc. Every time I pick a highly rated console game, few hours into the game play, I constantly getting the feeling that reviewers/fanbois tricked me to pay money for the pleasure to be mind-raped. I stop playing immediately and move on to something more rewarding...
That, to me, shows a rather low opinion of game players in general.
To me it seems more that as game development was finally taken over completely by businesspeople and they simply want to have a sure formula for the profit. More accessible game - more potential sales.
Not well balance difficult game would have puny sales.
Not well balanced casual game - would have at least some sales.
Business risk of developing difficult, challenging game is higher thus is less profitable.
The reason is, that they both are waaaayyy over their maximum lifespan. They should have had a complete rewrite about 5-10 years ago.
But at least OO.o works. Unlike M$O2k7.
Well, that's rather prejudiced! Germans know how to separate home and work life, and as soon as I find one, I'll give you an example.
Mods, that's not funny, that sarcastic. Germans are extremely protective - almost religious - about the separation of their work and private life. Overworking is even forbidden by law.
But getting back to the topic, over here in Germany I have seen more businesses using OO.o than home users. My data pool not sufficiently large to be any indicative and some people still thank me for suggesting them to check the OO.o at home.
It's not a "great leap" - nor anybody involved claims that it is.
But this is nevertheless important statement from AMD/ATI that they are still on the OSS track. What is IMO rather important and significant.
P.S. Plus it is extremely important to folks who run systems which are not supported by nVidia. Unless you run x86 or x64, nVidia wouldn't even acknowledge your existence.
The worst was back with the original Athlons, I got one and could not make it work with my GeForce 256.
IIRC the problem was caused not by mobo/chipset, but rather GeForce 256 itself which wasn't handling ground properly and simply was jamming other buses. Many vendors later on simply added extra filters to AGP bus to workaround the problem - some people were soldering extra capacitors themselves.