Alot of people don't care if they got it for free. They are going to bitch, moan, whine and complain as soon as whatever it is that they got suddenly breaks or no longer 'does it' for them unexpectedly. The only thing money does is amplify the amount of complaints there are.
And, the sad part? It doesn't even matter if its their fault. They will STILL demand SOMETHING even if THEY broke it.:)
Dang... you're actually right on this one... Somehow, I'm a professional programmer and yet I forget how dumb the user can be...:-(... actually, it's mostly because we have good customer support people, and they filter out the dumbasses with generic replies, and I only hear about the *real* problems... but you're right, there are a whole lot of whiners out there:-(
How about a focus group research to see what people outside Japan really want to play.
What I'd actually like to see is more japanese games being released outside of Japan. Japanese game designers have very, very weird ideas (think Katamari), and that's what makes a cool varied set of games. Unfortunately, only a small portion of those games ever get officially distributed out of Japan.
I could imagine that Nintendo wouldn't allow infinite savestates since people would abuse them like there's no tomorrow and finish the games in one or two days, then start complaining.
What would people complain about if they abuse the save state feature? Nintendo is giving the games away, they shouldn't care about how people use the savestate.
Agreed, it seems that all too often the old games are too easily forgotten. Ive always said that corporate sponsored emulation would be well accepted.
The one feature I really hope they will include in their "emulator" for NES and SNES is the ability to save the state. Not "save game", but really "save state", as in "dump the current status of the memory so I can restore this exact same position". Considering the very very small amount of memory required for those old games, compared to the size of the hard drive, I don't think it would be quite hard to implement (heck, NES emulators on PC already have that...)
The model of using lock-in as nearly the only way to force customers into staying with the product family may be over. It has been frustrating too many paying customers for too long.
Unfortunately, I don't think things will change very soon, this sounds much more like a PR coup to me. Let's say company X buys the latest version of MS-Office with XML documents, but company X has several clients that still use MSO2k or MSO-XP, which don't support the new XML format... Company X will then use it's shiny new MS-Office to produce standard.doc files and there goes the "open" format...
The reason why OpenOffice.org has trouble getting into corporations is because so many clients use MS-Office, so it's easier to use the.doc file format... things won't magically change because MS is doing it, clients will still use older versions of MS-Office, so.doc will still be the dominant document file format for quite a while.
Re:So, you programmers ready to give up your code?
on
McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
To date no one has ever offered to give me food or shelter to write software who's code was open.
I have, however, been paid to customize an open-source software (namely osCommerce) to fit the very specific needs of a company, and gave some of the modifications back to the community, even though we didn't have to.
While it probably should have been rated AO for violence. I cant see how an M rating could possibly ever be thought of as appropriate for children.
Although I can easily see why some games are T (Teens, 13+) and other are M (Mature, 17+), I still fail to see why there is such a big deal between M (Mature, 17+) and AO (Adult, 18+).
I mean, yeah, one does learn a lot about life between 13 and 17, and you understand things differently at 17 than at 13, so it's good to have those two ratings, but what does one magically learn on his 18th birthday that he couldn't understand a couple of months before? How fine-grained does the rating need to be? "This game is not suitable for people under 14 years 7 months and 3 days old"???
Businesses running critical infrastructure or with large numbers of desktops do not blindly use apt-get / up2date / yum to install patches.
They don't set Windows Update to download and install patches automatically either. If they feel the need to check and verify every available patch on a Linux box, they also need to check and verify every available patch on their Windows box.
Ok... last year, Microsoft sued Lindows because the name had a 1 letter difference from their own Windows... and now, they're making an OS code-named Eiger.........
I can only hope Apple sues the hell out of them...
It was either a programming error (human) or an operator error (human) or some other cause.
I love this quote:
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
I tried really hard to get the first post and try to stop the hordes of clueless people from posting jokes about nuclear exposure to the crotch, but a silly slowdown on slashdot cost me those crucial few seconds. Plus, I guess people want to be stupid anyways.
D'uh...... but TV told me that tritium was dangerous... it's what Dr. Octavius uses in Spiderman 2 to explode things... uhhh.... TV good, me dumb...
So, are tests a substitute for good design? Not even close.
Tests alone cannot be a substitute for good design, because tests should be part of the design.
After you finish with the code, its doubtful you will ever go back and generate enough tests to have good coverage on your code, and even if you did, the quality of the tests (number of assertions, correctness of assertions, etc) will likely not be very high.
In good design, test cases should be generated before the code is written. After the code is finished is way too late to start thinking about testing.
You just described normal IE behavior of disregarding "text/plain" on Windows.
Nope, just like I said, a.html page served as text/plain was being displayed as plain text on all semi-decent browsers on Windows (Firefox, Opera, Netscape, IE, Mozilla), and also on IE/Mac. It was only Safari who screwed it up. The first time I saw that, I actually thought I had accidentally launched IE, but then was really surprised that it was a "better" browser that couldn't do it.
Your post mostly refers to home users.
What about word processing and other office applications, which is the #2 application in my office (after Email/Outlook)?
Haven't you heard of OpenOffice.org lately? You don't need Microsoft to do word processing.
In Windows, Exploder will drop the zip file on the desktop - we expect Windows to do stupid things like that, but Safari should not.
Slightly offtopic, but Safari has deceived me a great deal last week, with its strange "default behaviors". I was testing some web script, and I often serve a page as text/plain for debugging purposes. IE, Firefox and Opera all displayed the debug page as plain text when required to do so, but Safari, even when the server explicetly sent a Content-Type: text/plain, just because the page had a.html extension, displayed it as html, as if the webserver didn't know what it was talking about.
Safari may pass the Acid2 test now, but its current default behavior doesn't make it a good browser to me.
I haven't tested what is claimed in the article because I don't have a Mac (yet), but didn't they just screw the design with widgets auto-install? I think more than 10 years of Microsoft bashing have proven that prompting "Are you sure you want to install this spyware? Yes/No" is not an acceptable security feature, because people are stupid.
I know that I've gotten zero pieces of spyware on my Powerbook, and I clean it out daily on the PCs at work.
Just like the many people who say that "if you click yes on every popup that appears, you deserve what you get", I just don't understand how people can get that many spyware even with Windows. I've been working here for 16 months now, with an administrator Windows account, and have yet to have a single spyware / virus on my machine. They run weekly scans with several spyware checkers and anti-virus (not just the free ones), and never found squat on my system. If you know how to use a computer, be it a Mac, a Windows or a Linux, you remain in control and stuff doesn't install automagically.
So few people use Safari when compared to IE and FF (and maybe Opera).
That is exactly what MS is claiming, and you seem to agree. "The reason there are no viruses on Mac (and Linux) is because there are fewer users, not because it's more secure". Well it shouldn't be that way. OSX used to be way more secure than Windows (being based on Unix and all), but now they're trying to do it the easy way, no matter what the security implications are?
Aren't they trying to take a bite out of Microsoft's market share? What if they succeed? People will start writing all sorts of virii and spywares for OSX, and it'll be easy for them if people at Apple begin to sacrifice security for coolness.
You can't say that security doesn't matter because so very few people use your software, and then try to get more and more people to use it.
I'm willing to bet the team wanted to disrupt the surrounding area around the craft as little as poissible. If you wait for a an extended force, that's time that the craft is on the group firing it's rockets into the ground doing nothing but churning up the landscape.
From the images and the scale shown, the lander's rockets already burned a surface of approx. 450 square meters (30m x 15m) and they stopped while still 40 meters above ground. If you have your rockets burning the ground all the way down, it's not a couple extra seconds that will make a difference, the ground will already be churned as much as it possibly can...
But when your house is on fire, those tiny fibres within the concrete block would lost strength when temperature go around 200 C.
I'm actually more worried about the flexibility of the concrete... Somehow, I like my concrete rigid, cause I like my walls straight. Build a skyscraper out of this concrete, then what happens to the beams and walls on the first floor? Will they simply bend under the weight of the building?
This thing might be ok for roads and such, but I'm not sure I would trust a building with flexible materials...
I think that 19 hours is pretty much on the spot for me. I usually browse late in the evening, looking at stuff, what I want, what I need, what I really want but don't need, etc.
But somehow, I don't like spending money late. There might be some strange psychological explanation, or it's just the moonlight, but I don't trust myself when I'm tired and sleepy. Instead, I just sleep on it, and the next day, early afternoon, I might be more inclined to spend the money.
Even if it's at home (or at the office during the break), it feels more "natural" to buy something during the day than during the night. I just don't have as much time to browse and compare during the day.
é is mapped to / (bottom right of keyboard) è à ù can be either a combination of two keys (` followed by the vowel, known as the French-Canadian variant), or to a single key, è being mapped to `, à to \ (above the Enter key) and ù usually left of z (known as the French keyboard). â ê î ô û are always a combination of two keys (^ followed by the vowel, ^ being mapped to [). Same goes for ä ë ü, with mapped to }. Finally, ç is also either two characters for the French-Canadian variant ( followed by c), or a single key for the French keyboard. In both cases, ç is mapped to ].
With the accents mapped as default for the/'[]}\ characters, we can still get them with Alt-* combinations (which is still more convenient, since any non-programmer is more likely to need accentuated letters much more than those special characters.
The same reason why dvorak did not replace qwerty: People are used to the proprietary shit
I always find this funny when people wonder why dvorak didn't conquer the world. Dvorak was optimized for typing in English. Well guess what, not everybody types in English. I will probably never use dvorak because I do most of my typing in French (that is, when I'm not on/.), and dvorak would suck in French. Other languages are probably just as bad.
Then why not have a different keyboard layout for every language? Most people I know that support dvorak also claim that things should be standard. Well guess what, qwerty is a standard that everybody is used to, and there is no reason for the whole world to change that standard just because it would make typing English faster. I already type fast enough that I sometimes make typos where I type two letters so fast that they get inverted. Typing any faster for me would just simply increase the number of typos, which is bad.
If we can get a keyboard layout that is optimized for every language (or at least the languages that use the same alphabet), AND that is optimized for programming (don't hide all those []{}()$&|! too far away), *then* it will be time for a change. Till then, I'm pretty much happy with my qwerty thank you.
Every time innovation is mentioned, Nintendo's name pops up. Not to be a complete troll here, but explain to me what exactly have they been innovating recently?
uhhh... a dual-screen handheld, one of which is a touchscreen? If game developers really made an effort, they could use such a feature to create new genres of games, but they won't do it because they're afraid of the change.
Nintendo says that their Revolution console will be different enough that games designed for it won't run on the PS3 and the Xbox2, and vice-versa. So game designers will have to make a choice between doing the same old type of games again and again and get them on the PS3 and Xbox2, or to actually try to do something different and get it on the Revolution. Try and guess which one they'll choose? They won't base their decision on which console is better, they'll base it on what is less *risky*.
What is killing Nintendo is game companies lack of guts when it comes to trying new stuff, and that's what make the N consoles have fewer titles available than the other "classic" consoles. Just look at the launch lineup for the DS and the PSP. PSP, they just had to port their ol' PS2 games and call it a day. DS, they would actually have to work... get come coding done, redesign some stuff to provide a different experience... be innovative (ack!)
Slashdot Mirror
It all started with a power outage... I guess you *need* the hardware to read the email...
Dang... you're actually right on this one... Somehow, I'm a professional programmer and yet I forget how dumb the user can be... :-( ... actually, it's mostly because we have good customer support people, and they filter out the dumbasses with generic replies, and I only hear about the *real* problems... but you're right, there are a whole lot of whiners out there :-(
What I'd actually like to see is more japanese games being released outside of Japan. Japanese game designers have very, very weird ideas (think Katamari), and that's what makes a cool varied set of games. Unfortunately, only a small portion of those games ever get officially distributed out of Japan.
What would people complain about if they abuse the save state feature? Nintendo is giving the games away, they shouldn't care about how people use the savestate.
The one feature I really hope they will include in their "emulator" for NES and SNES is the ability to save the state. Not "save game", but really "save state", as in "dump the current status of the memory so I can restore this exact same position". Considering the very very small amount of memory required for those old games, compared to the size of the hard drive, I don't think it would be quite hard to implement (heck, NES emulators on PC already have that...)
Unfortunately, I don't think things will change very soon, this sounds much more like a PR coup to me. Let's say company X buys the latest version of MS-Office with XML documents, but company X has several clients that still use MSO2k or MSO-XP, which don't support the new XML format... Company X will then use it's shiny new MS-Office to produce standard .doc files and there goes the "open" format...
The reason why OpenOffice.org has trouble getting into corporations is because so many clients use MS-Office, so it's easier to use the .doc file format... things won't magically change because MS is doing it, clients will still use older versions of MS-Office, so .doc will still be the dominant document file format for quite a while.
I have, however, been paid to customize an open-source software (namely osCommerce) to fit the very specific needs of a company, and gave some of the modifications back to the community, even though we didn't have to.
Although I can easily see why some games are T (Teens, 13+) and other are M (Mature, 17+), I still fail to see why there is such a big deal between M (Mature, 17+) and AO (Adult, 18+).
I mean, yeah, one does learn a lot about life between 13 and 17, and you understand things differently at 17 than at 13, so it's good to have those two ratings, but what does one magically learn on his 18th birthday that he couldn't understand a couple of months before? How fine-grained does the rating need to be? "This game is not suitable for people under 14 years 7 months and 3 days old"???
They don't set Windows Update to download and install patches automatically either. If they feel the need to check and verify every available patch on a Linux box, they also need to check and verify every available patch on their Windows box.
Up2Date for Redhat alright, but doesn't Fedora use yum instead?
I can only hope Apple sues the hell out of them...
I love this quote :
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
D'uh...... but TV told me that tritium was dangerous... it's what Dr. Octavius uses in Spiderman 2 to explode things... uhhh.... TV good, me dumb...
Tests alone cannot be a substitute for good design, because tests should be part of the design.
After you finish with the code, its doubtful you will ever go back and generate enough tests to have good coverage on your code, and even if you did, the quality of the tests (number of assertions, correctness of assertions, etc) will likely not be very high.
In good design, test cases should be generated before the code is written. After the code is finished is way too late to start thinking about testing.
Nope, just like I said, a .html page served as text/plain was being displayed as plain text on all semi-decent browsers on Windows (Firefox, Opera, Netscape, IE, Mozilla), and also on IE/Mac. It was only Safari who screwed it up. The first time I saw that, I actually thought I had accidentally launched IE, but then was really surprised that it was a "better" browser that couldn't do it.
Haven't you heard of OpenOffice.org lately? You don't need Microsoft to do word processing.
Slightly offtopic, but Safari has deceived me a great deal last week, with its strange "default behaviors". I was testing some web script, and I often serve a page as text/plain for debugging purposes. IE, Firefox and Opera all displayed the debug page as plain text when required to do so, but Safari, even when the server explicetly sent a Content-Type: text/plain, just because the page had a .html extension, displayed it as html, as if the webserver didn't know what it was talking about.
Safari may pass the Acid2 test now, but its current default behavior doesn't make it a good browser to me.
I haven't tested what is claimed in the article because I don't have a Mac (yet), but didn't they just screw the design with widgets auto-install? I think more than 10 years of Microsoft bashing have proven that prompting "Are you sure you want to install this spyware? Yes/No" is not an acceptable security feature, because people are stupid.
I know that I've gotten zero pieces of spyware on my Powerbook, and I clean it out daily on the PCs at work.
Just like the many people who say that "if you click yes on every popup that appears, you deserve what you get", I just don't understand how people can get that many spyware even with Windows. I've been working here for 16 months now, with an administrator Windows account, and have yet to have a single spyware / virus on my machine. They run weekly scans with several spyware checkers and anti-virus (not just the free ones), and never found squat on my system. If you know how to use a computer, be it a Mac, a Windows or a Linux, you remain in control and stuff doesn't install automagically.
That is exactly what MS is claiming, and you seem to agree. "The reason there are no viruses on Mac (and Linux) is because there are fewer users, not because it's more secure". Well it shouldn't be that way. OSX used to be way more secure than Windows (being based on Unix and all), but now they're trying to do it the easy way, no matter what the security implications are?
Aren't they trying to take a bite out of Microsoft's market share? What if they succeed? People will start writing all sorts of virii and spywares for OSX, and it'll be easy for them if people at Apple begin to sacrifice security for coolness.
You can't say that security doesn't matter because so very few people use your software, and then try to get more and more people to use it.
From the images and the scale shown, the lander's rockets already burned a surface of approx. 450 square meters (30m x 15m) and they stopped while still 40 meters above ground. If you have your rockets burning the ground all the way down, it's not a couple extra seconds that will make a difference, the ground will already be churned as much as it possibly can...
I'm actually more worried about the flexibility of the concrete... Somehow, I like my concrete rigid, cause I like my walls straight. Build a skyscraper out of this concrete, then what happens to the beams and walls on the first floor? Will they simply bend under the weight of the building?
This thing might be ok for roads and such, but I'm not sure I would trust a building with flexible materials...
I think that 19 hours is pretty much on the spot for me. I usually browse late in the evening, looking at stuff, what I want, what I need, what I really want but don't need, etc.
But somehow, I don't like spending money late. There might be some strange psychological explanation, or it's just the moonlight, but I don't trust myself when I'm tired and sleepy. Instead, I just sleep on it, and the next day, early afternoon, I might be more inclined to spend the money.
Even if it's at home (or at the office during the break), it feels more "natural" to buy something during the day than during the night. I just don't have as much time to browse and compare during the day.
For typing in French, how are the accents done?
/'[]}\ characters, we can still get them with Alt-* combinations (which is still more convenient, since any non-programmer is more likely to need accentuated letters much more than those special characters.
é is mapped to / (bottom right of keyboard)
è à ù can be either a combination of two keys (` followed by the vowel, known as the French-Canadian variant), or to a single key, è being mapped to `, à to \ (above the Enter key) and ù usually left of z (known as the French keyboard).
â ê î ô û are always a combination of two keys (^ followed by the vowel, ^ being mapped to [). Same goes for ä ë ü, with mapped to }.
Finally, ç is also either two characters for the French-Canadian variant ( followed by c), or a single key for the French keyboard. In both cases, ç is mapped to ].
With the accents mapped as default for the
I always find this funny when people wonder why dvorak didn't conquer the world. Dvorak was optimized for typing in English. Well guess what, not everybody types in English. I will probably never use dvorak because I do most of my typing in French (that is, when I'm not on /.), and dvorak would suck in French. Other languages are probably just as bad.
Then why not have a different keyboard layout for every language? Most people I know that support dvorak also claim that things should be standard. Well guess what, qwerty is a standard that everybody is used to, and there is no reason for the whole world to change that standard just because it would make typing English faster. I already type fast enough that I sometimes make typos where I type two letters so fast that they get inverted. Typing any faster for me would just simply increase the number of typos, which is bad.
If we can get a keyboard layout that is optimized for every language (or at least the languages that use the same alphabet), AND that is optimized for programming (don't hide all those []{}()$&|! too far away), *then* it will be time for a change. Till then, I'm pretty much happy with my qwerty thank you.
uhhh... a dual-screen handheld, one of which is a touchscreen? If game developers really made an effort, they could use such a feature to create new genres of games, but they won't do it because they're afraid of the change.
Nintendo says that their Revolution console will be different enough that games designed for it won't run on the PS3 and the Xbox2, and vice-versa. So game designers will have to make a choice between doing the same old type of games again and again and get them on the PS3 and Xbox2, or to actually try to do something different and get it on the Revolution. Try and guess which one they'll choose? They won't base their decision on which console is better, they'll base it on what is less *risky*.
What is killing Nintendo is game companies lack of guts when it comes to trying new stuff, and that's what make the N consoles have fewer titles available than the other "classic" consoles. Just look at the launch lineup for the DS and the PSP. PSP, they just had to port their ol' PS2 games and call it a day. DS, they would actually have to work... get come coding done, redesign some stuff to provide a different experience... be innovative (ack!)