We whine when they delay and push back release dates of their OS over and over again but when they finally do come out with something "on time" (whatever that means) and it's not up to par we give them shit.
A game released late, may eventually be good. A game that sucks just after release will suck forever. (or something around these lines. Same applies to hardware.) Instead of constantly pushing back the release dates, they can always provide one single realistic release date (no matter how far), taking all the possible delays into account and potentially spending any extra time remaining on more thorough betatesting and adding extra features. Not like they are so short on money, having some huge loan to pay, so they must sell it NOW. At the moment they are short on good reputation though, and premature release certainly doesn't help their case.
Steve Ballmer: WHAT? XBOX 360 CRASHES?! WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY TELL ME?! engineer: we didn't know... Steve Ballmer: I'M SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS! WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? engineer: that should have been caught by beta testers... Steve Ballmer: CUT THEIR OXYGEN SUPPLY OFF! engineer: umm... I think... Steve Ballmer: I'M NOT PAYING YOU FOR THINKING! JUST DO IT! engineer [turns off the circuit of air conditioning for beta testing facility] - done!
Mysteriously the problems with overheating of the third generation console of XBOX 720 have been resolved before the release.
...about non-breaking bubbles. Replace water or surfacant with quickly drying glue. Keep the bubble in air till the shell hardens. For more effect, dye lightly with phosphorescent paint and inflate with helium instead of air...
Yes, with Linux it's a constant struggle. With Windows it's a smooth ride that ends you with your face composed into the wall. The curves of perceivedDifficulty(actualDifficulty) function for Linux are like perceivedDifficulty=sqrt(actualDifficulty) and for Windows, perceivedDifficulty=actualDifficulty^2. That is: simple things on Linux are immediately rather hard, but extremely hard things aren't much harder. Meanwhile on Windows easy and medium-difficulty things are trivial, anything harder is just impossible. If your work isn't mission-critical, if your tasks will be within well-defined and well-tested ruleset, go for windows, all the way. It will make your life easier. But if you are even to dip your toe in uncharted waters, stay away from Windows as far as you can.
This is the basic problem with Microsoft products. As long as you follow the protocol, everything goes smoothly. But try straying a step away, making a single thing YOUR WAY or just let it happen to be (willingly or not) and you're left out in the cold. Add a button to your GUI in Visual Something, please, here you are, with all the neat code snipplets just ready for you to edit. But decide it should be something different then, delete it, the button vanishes but the code contains several pieces of dead functions that don't refer to any existing objects, and you have to clean up manually. Remember the beautiful long-standing bug in checkdisk of Win98 (SE too)? Want an undo floppy? [Drive A] [No, thanks] [Cancel], pick "no backup" and see "Sorry no backup floppy found in drive A:" or "the floppy has not enough free space. 1.3 gigabytes required". Usually you hit a dead end and there's nothing you can do. No such option, game over. In Linux it is opposite. Some tasks are harder, but there ALWAYS is some way ahead, at worst you can download the source and fix the bug yourself, you can always check internals in the manuals, you can always seek a new way to solve a problem and eventually one of them will lead you to the solution. As long as Microsoft follows standarized tests, it will come up ahead. As soon as they try some real life application, they fail.
your friend was lucky he got a good phone. I bought a phone and the USB data cable. Then I install the software and try to upload a wav... "this is not a generic COM: port". oops. so I look up in the docs, nothing. I look in the user support. "We support only our brand cables. Third party cables don't work." Yep, mine is 3rd party, official cables are unavailable in my country and inporting one would cost twice the price of the phone. So I keep looking on forums. People say nobody got the USB cable to work, but some of their serial cables are working. I even find schematics. So I whip out the soldering iron, a MAX232-alike cable, some old power supply and after half a hour of soldering I have something that looks like a working interface cable. I try it with 3rd party programs, succesfully edit the flash to uncripple one of menu buttons set to "pay us a lot of money if you click it accidentially", then try the official program to upload some music. Sorry, wrong cable. So I double-check the schematics and find some redundant connections in the plug. I make an extra dongle for rs232 that applies modifications to the line. Now the program correctly recognizes the cable. So I upload my first wav. "Unrecognized". Wha? Oh, it must be 8-bit single channel and a specific bitrate. So I transform it. and re-try. It worked, but sounds ugly. I try with some other file. "failed". Seems the phone refuses to receive certain files at random. After 3h I come up with a set of ringtones and songs I could upload to the phone and sound relatively okay.
Uploading a "real voice" ringtone procedure: Plug the dongle into rs232. Plug the MAX232 cable into the dongle. Plug the power supply connector into the MAX232 cable Plug the power supply to mains. Kick it so it retains connection on loose plug. Plug the piece of wire with proprietary phone plug, cut off from the USB cable into the power supply wire. Plug the the phone into the proprietary connector. Boot, launch "sound recorder". Record the sound. While saving, pick correct wav format. Press C on the phone to take it off the sleep mode. Load the upload program on the computer. Pick the file in somewhat awkward file selector. Click "upload". Wait for the upload to finish. Click "close connection". Dismantle the facility.
Well, why impractical? Say, the functions provided by LGPL'd lib are just a small part of your program functionality. As it's big, you use dynamic linking, so the fact the users can legally replace one dll, as opposed to replacing it illegally isn't that much of a deal. If you link statically, your program is small, so not much a deal to provide the functionality by yourself, or provide the program on some open-source (even if non-GPL) license, or even rewrite the parts of the lib by yourself using the original as a clue. If you statically link something big, you're a moron, get a clue and learn to program. Last option, your system is very big single-run work comissioned by some big fish. Then it's unlikely your customer would ever want the lib sources to hack them by themselves, and if they do, you provide them with a tool set usable for replacing the lib, that is a programmer employed by you, who will link the modified sources provided and integrate the changed binaries with the system, it's too big for them to do it by themselves anyway.
Well, hard to call coffee with addition of coffee "caffeinated", if you dropped pure caffeine pills, then yes:) And that caffeinated water... Well, yes, coffee made of it would be definitely caffeinated, but why on earth would you brew decaf coffee with caffeinated water?! (just to make difference between non-caffeinated and caffeinated decaf)??:)
Especially that it's doubly redundant: No coffee is ever caffeinated. Coffee, as opposed to "caffeinated drinks" contains natural caffeine, different doses depending on brand, preparation, etc. but I haven't heard yet of coffee that would have to be caffeinated. Decaffeinated coffee on the other hand is subject to decaffeination, process opposite to caffeination - removing the drug.
my BMI is way over "reasonable" index, I drink beer, sometimes liquors, normal coffee, a range of foods including these rather unhealthy, don't move too much, yet my blood pressure is perfectly within norm, the "bad cholesterol" detector device displayed LO meaning the levels were undetectably low, I don't have any serious health problems... I wonder why:)
1) easy access 2) price 3) robustness, total cost.
If it takes 4 weeks to sign the deal of $80.000 and write dedicated software that will finish the single-run computation on the cluster overnight, while running the same task on your own company computers using currently available software would take 3 weeks and for free, the choice is pretty obvious. But if you had an option that for $3 billed to your credit card or micropayments account you just upload the usual data of your work and have the result in 30 seconds instead of waiting overnight using domestic hardware, I think this could be reasonable.
Re:How about an OS that just plays a music CD
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 1
Once upon a time quite a few games (notably, Half-Life 1) used that format for keeping the soundtracks. First track was the game installation, the remaining were played as soundtrack for the game (and the CD wasn't just a useless CD drive stuffer as auth key)
Some friendly hacker souls up there somewhere in the ladder of Sony lower management and upper programming divisions decided they have a way to finally murder DRM and DMCA by creating a copyright protection tool so inherently evil (and still legal) that everyone would get pissed off and move towards killing the conceptions that allowed for creation of it.
Re:So who's really breaking the law here?
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 1
Yep, removing the rootkit is circumventing copy protection countermeasures. DMCA. Just proves how broken the law is. Bundle your malicious virus with DRM software and sue everyone removing it. Will pay back 10 times the fine you'd be charged for creating the virus.
Re:I already hated MS, now I also hate sony... Gam
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 1
Come on, the new Nintendo controller is totally cool, and the games are pretty promising too!
The distribution roughly corresponds to distribution of computers per km^2 minus piracy level average. Note France and England were full. And the border between Poland and Germany was pretty clearly drawn. Not that there's that much less computers in Poland, but because everyone downloads pirated music here and nobody bothers to buy Sony CDs, while in Germany the law is way more strict, and people more rich, able to afford expensive CDs easier.
And pay you for selling your CPU time, ad-words style. Think a global paralell computing network that is available for public use. 3D animation rendering software that takes less than a minute to render a fully-featured half-hour movie (for a small fee of course, paid by your employer, gfx studio), advanced programs sponsored by government, a small rural house with 30 PCs running 24/7 in the basement just to earn living for the redneck upstairs, computational grid like power grid encompassing whole world. And there will never be enough of CPU power and shortage of demand for it, because there will be DNA-engineering projects, more detailed simulations of the Earth, maybe finally some "real" AI, and many, many such.
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Look, just save some of the photocopies and alcohol for the technician. Or even invite them to the party.
We whine when they delay and push back release dates of their OS over and over again but when they finally do come out with something "on time" (whatever that means) and it's not up to par we give them shit.
A game released late, may eventually be good. A game that sucks just after release will suck forever. (or something around these lines. Same applies to hardware.)
Instead of constantly pushing back the release dates, they can always provide one single realistic release date (no matter how far), taking all the possible delays into account and potentially spending any extra time remaining on more thorough betatesting and adding extra features. Not like they are so short on money, having some huge loan to pay, so they must sell it NOW. At the moment they are short on good reputation though, and premature release certainly doesn't help their case.
Steve Ballmer: WHAT? XBOX 360 CRASHES?! WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY TELL ME?!
engineer: we didn't know...
Steve Ballmer: I'M SURROUNDED BY IDIOTS! WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?
engineer: that should have been caught by beta testers...
Steve Ballmer: CUT THEIR OXYGEN SUPPLY OFF!
engineer: umm... I think...
Steve Ballmer: I'M NOT PAYING YOU FOR THINKING! JUST DO IT!
engineer [turns off the circuit of air conditioning for beta testing facility] - done!
Mysteriously the problems with overheating of the third generation console of XBOX 720 have been resolved before the release.
Yes, really hardened, as thin elastic or stiff, but dry film. Like the one used for rubber string propelled ultra-light airplane models
...about non-breaking bubbles. Replace water or surfacant with quickly drying glue. Keep the bubble in air till the shell hardens. For more effect, dye lightly with phosphorescent paint and inflate with helium instead of air...
Yes, with Linux it's a constant struggle. With Windows it's a smooth ride that ends you with your face composed into the wall. The curves of perceivedDifficulty(actualDifficulty) function for Linux are like perceivedDifficulty=sqrt(actualDifficulty) and for Windows, perceivedDifficulty=actualDifficulty^2. That is: simple things on Linux are immediately rather hard, but extremely hard things aren't much harder. Meanwhile on Windows easy and medium-difficulty things are trivial, anything harder is just impossible.
If your work isn't mission-critical, if your tasks will be within well-defined and well-tested ruleset, go for windows, all the way. It will make your life easier. But if you are even to dip your toe in uncharted waters, stay away from Windows as far as you can.
This is the basic problem with Microsoft products. As long as you follow the protocol, everything goes smoothly. But try straying a step away, making a single thing YOUR WAY or just let it happen to be (willingly or not) and you're left out in the cold. Add a button to your GUI in Visual Something, please, here you are, with all the neat code snipplets just ready for you to edit. But decide it should be something different then, delete it, the button vanishes but the code contains several pieces of dead functions that don't refer to any existing objects, and you have to clean up manually. Remember the beautiful long-standing bug in checkdisk of Win98 (SE too)? Want an undo floppy? [Drive A] [No, thanks] [Cancel], pick "no backup" and see "Sorry no backup floppy found in drive A:" or "the floppy has not enough free space. 1.3 gigabytes required".
Usually you hit a dead end and there's nothing you can do. No such option, game over.
In Linux it is opposite. Some tasks are harder, but there ALWAYS is some way ahead, at worst you can download the source and fix the bug yourself, you can always check internals in the manuals, you can always seek a new way to solve a problem and eventually one of them will lead you to the solution.
As long as Microsoft follows standarized tests, it will come up ahead. As soon as they try some real life application, they fail.
your friend was lucky he got a good phone.
I bought a phone and the USB data cable.
Then I install the software and try to upload a wav... "this is not a generic COM: port".
oops. so I look up in the docs, nothing. I look in the user support. "We support only our brand cables. Third party cables don't work." Yep, mine is 3rd party, official cables are unavailable in my country and inporting one would cost twice the price of the phone.
So I keep looking on forums. People say nobody got the USB cable to work, but some of their serial cables are working. I even find schematics.
So I whip out the soldering iron, a MAX232-alike cable, some old power supply and after half a hour of soldering I have something that looks like a working interface cable. I try it with 3rd party programs, succesfully edit the flash to uncripple one of menu buttons set to "pay us a lot of money if you click it accidentially", then try the official program to upload some music. Sorry, wrong cable.
So I double-check the schematics and find some redundant connections in the plug. I make an extra dongle for rs232 that applies modifications to the line. Now the program correctly recognizes the cable.
So I upload my first wav. "Unrecognized". Wha? Oh, it must be 8-bit single channel and a specific bitrate. So I transform it. and re-try.
It worked, but sounds ugly. I try with some other file. "failed". Seems the phone refuses to receive certain files at random. After 3h I come up with a set of ringtones and songs I could upload to the phone and sound relatively okay.
Uploading a "real voice" ringtone procedure:
Plug the dongle into rs232.
Plug the MAX232 cable into the dongle.
Plug the power supply connector into the MAX232 cable
Plug the power supply to mains. Kick it so it retains connection on loose plug.
Plug the piece of wire with proprietary phone plug, cut off from the USB cable into the power supply wire.
Plug the the phone into the proprietary connector.
Boot, launch "sound recorder".
Record the sound.
While saving, pick correct wav format.
Press C on the phone to take it off the sleep mode.
Load the upload program on the computer.
Pick the file in somewhat awkward file selector.
Click "upload".
Wait for the upload to finish.
Click "close connection".
Dismantle the facility.
Coca Cola + E.coli = deadli e-CocaColi.
Well, why impractical? Say, the functions provided by LGPL'd lib are just a small part of your program functionality. As it's big, you use dynamic linking, so the fact the users can legally replace one dll, as opposed to replacing it illegally isn't that much of a deal.
If you link statically, your program is small, so not much a deal to provide the functionality by yourself, or provide the program on some open-source (even if non-GPL) license, or even rewrite the parts of the lib by yourself using the original as a clue. If you statically link something big, you're a moron, get a clue and learn to program.
Last option, your system is very big single-run work comissioned by some big fish. Then it's unlikely your customer would ever want the lib sources to hack them by themselves, and if they do, you provide them with a tool set usable for replacing the lib, that is a programmer employed by you, who will link the modified sources provided and integrate the changed binaries with the system, it's too big for them to do it by themselves anyway.
Well, hard to call coffee with addition of coffee "caffeinated", if you dropped pure caffeine pills, then yes :) And that caffeinated water... Well, yes, coffee made of it would be definitely caffeinated, but why on earth would you brew decaf coffee with caffeinated water?! (just to make difference between non-caffeinated and caffeinated decaf)?? :)
Nearing 30.
Yep, like study of the single and only known instance of planet Earth.?
You may be a junkie on anything, harmful or not. Most diehard altoid junkies chew on mint urinal cakes.
Especially that it's doubly redundant: No coffee is ever caffeinated.
Coffee, as opposed to "caffeinated drinks" contains natural caffeine, different doses depending on brand, preparation, etc. but I haven't heard yet of coffee that would have to be caffeinated. Decaffeinated coffee on the other hand is subject to decaffeination, process opposite to caffeination - removing the drug.
Well, right up until old age gets you;
:)
too much of time kills too
my BMI is way over "reasonable" index, I drink beer, sometimes liquors, normal coffee, a range of foods including these rather unhealthy, don't move too much, yet my blood pressure is perfectly within norm, the "bad cholesterol" detector device displayed LO meaning the levels were undetectably low, I don't have any serious health problems... I wonder why :)
1) easy access 2) price 3) robustness, total cost.
If it takes 4 weeks to sign the deal of $80.000 and write dedicated software that will finish the single-run computation on the cluster overnight, while running the same task on your own company computers using currently available software would take 3 weeks and for free, the choice is pretty obvious. But if you had an option that for $3 billed to your credit card or micropayments account you just upload the usual data of your work and have the result in 30 seconds instead of waiting overnight using domestic hardware, I think this could be reasonable.
Once upon a time quite a few games (notably, Half-Life 1) used that format for keeping the soundtracks. First track was the game installation, the remaining were played as soundtrack for the game (and the CD wasn't just a useless CD drive stuffer as auth key)
Some friendly hacker souls up there somewhere in the ladder of Sony lower management and upper programming divisions decided they have a way to finally murder DRM and DMCA by creating a copyright protection tool so inherently evil (and still legal) that everyone would get pissed off and move towards killing the conceptions that allowed for creation of it.
Yep, removing the rootkit is circumventing copy protection countermeasures. DMCA.
Just proves how broken the law is. Bundle your malicious virus with DRM software and sue everyone removing it. Will pay back 10 times the fine you'd be charged for creating the virus.
Come on, the new Nintendo controller is totally cool, and the games are pretty promising too!
The distribution roughly corresponds to distribution of computers per km^2 minus piracy level average. Note France and England were full. And the border between Poland and Germany was pretty clearly drawn. Not that there's that much less computers in Poland, but because everyone downloads pirated music here and nobody bothers to buy Sony CDs, while in Germany the law is way more strict, and people more rich, able to afford expensive CDs easier.
And pay you for selling your CPU time, ad-words style.
Think a global paralell computing network that is available for public use. 3D animation rendering software that takes less than a minute to render a fully-featured half-hour movie (for a small fee of course, paid by your employer, gfx studio), advanced programs sponsored by government, a small rural house with 30 PCs running 24/7 in the basement just to earn living for the redneck upstairs, computational grid like power grid encompassing whole world. And there will never be enough of CPU power and shortage of demand for it, because there will be DNA-engineering projects, more detailed simulations of the Earth, maybe finally some "real" AI, and many, many such.
anti-thrust jury panel: For great justice.