I cam imagine an open ended game where simple rules built some fairly unrepetative missions.
Also general crime fighting and helping old ladies across the road could add some longevity.
To be honest, stick some downloadable waypoint function and try racing through the city to beat scores.
Looks like a fine game, better than previous spiderman games, although on the whole, spiderman has not been so badly bitten by the licensed game genre.
I remember playing spiderman on my 2600! It rocked!!
You have the benefit os spider-sense if used correctly - the graphics look great, I just hope you will be able to mod it with new challenges and boss characters. Perhaps some comic book cut sceens like Max Payne?
Sorry, meant to add 'must be viewed in a fixed width font'
If you view it in the reply box, you should get the point, the width is about 195% for the decimal version.
try it yourself by drawing around one of your cashcards, and then drawing two horizontal lines dividing it horizontally into 3 rows.
then draw three vertical lines, then in each vertical section, draw two vertical lines.
You now have 30 boxes.
You can try and fit your finger on them.
If you now draw a fair sized point in the center of each square, and try hitting each point by itself, should be much easier! 30 keys should be enough for a a/qwerty/z keyboard. (space might take up 2 keys, but you can squeeze some of the keys up a little)
You don't even need sticky back plastic! (Reference to a British show)
I guess this will cause similar problems with thumb wear as game pads do. Still anything is better than hunched up typing over a keyboard...
The key to good miniature keyboard design is limit the contact space between the digit (finger) and the key.
By making a meyboard out of 1mm diameter 'nipples' with the letter printed larger behing, the total distance between the pressable surface of each key becomes much greater:
The test:
Press the following five boxes with your grubby finger (will need to wipe monitor afterwards)
[ ][ ][ ][ ]. etc
Now press the following smaller dots.
. . . . ..etc Easier huh? But takes up the same room, but each button eare is bigger, as they over lap. (almost double the size)
It is possible to fit a usable keyboard onto a creditcard in this way. Usable meaning, you can type fairly fast with thumbs, index and middle fingers without getting too cramped.
An MDA is a PDA with mobile (voice) and connectivity, a SmartPhone is a mobile phone with PDA capability.
Are these converging or diverging and trying to control the markets with double speak? I would suggest that MDAs are more powerful, but the only real SmartPhones that are around are the Sony P900s, which looks fantastic.
Do you really want to lug an MDA around just for voice? I think seperating the application of a voice unit and a computing unit is best left alone, and a standard PDA and mobile is better, but that is me, and because I haven't seen anyone talking into one.
What you have to ask yourself, is why the govenrment are litterally pushing people to buy SUV's. Easy enough to try and build up the plausability for expending living people to protect, not oil (as how can you class it as protecting, when you are taking it?) but the interests of the oil companies.
I think an invenstigation needs to go underway, it is, or should be, illegal for this kind of law to be put in place.
I am shocked that this hasn't been a source of massive outcry, and protest, but hey, you don't want to be anti-patriotic.
Thanks for posting this, the fact that it hasn't been modded up, and the only AC reply is you are jealous of car sizes, shows what kind of a sick and twisted world this is!
I am inclined to agree with you! IANATT (telco-techie).
IP != phone number (except where it did in the old days, or still does in some backwaters)
DNS = phone numbers, a routing layer on top of an assigned network that provides physical addressing (albeit dynamically addressable (dns tables, and trunk exchanges))
Of course, if I have any mistakes in this, I would just reffer you to some more intelligible post by someone who knows much more than I do about this, but my point is dns is like phone numbers, and we should keep our phone number
ip is like line id, we should not care about it.
If the plaintiff can given himself a problem with configuring ip's, perhaps he has brought it upon himself for hardwiring his connections so. It would be like giving everyone your line id instead of your phone number!:-) (which is the case in some backwaters, and in fact, in areas where you cannot keep your phone number)
Now all telcos may switch to VOIP, will we see a third level of phone numbers. Who will get the phone number 'tod' ?:-) (i.e. with VOIP, will they use DNS, or some hidden your-number-here.our.dns.for.our.classa.ipv6 (like newnet does)
Please read my other post where I state that ip = trunk exchange id (more like a physical line address, which, like ip's, can be dynamically assigned) and dns is like a phone number.
so 555-your-mum (sorry!) is the marketting way of saying www.your-mum.com but the same as www.555-1234-3456.com (or whatever it should have been!)
dns = phone number. ip = line id (address)
IP is not like a zip code at all! Phone numbers can be placed anywhere on a phone network, technically you could take your number with you, moving house and keeping provider.
I also never condoned the removal of ip's, I infact stated that they shoudl be transparent, and we should try and ignore them! (except when we are administrating our own 'trunk exchanges' ie networks (LANS, WANS) and we give out 192.168's and also join networks together, although the joining can be done with a dns lookup.
Now apart form those corrections, I agree entirely with your post, whatever is left of it !:-)
I never said otherwise - I just found the architecture (COM, ActiveX, blergh) and the API's infuriating. (as I remember!)
Also many eeky bugs and strange behaviours. And being tied down to one product. I wrote a fairly cool game in VB! I would love to use it to teach my Nephew to write a snake game, or a bomberman game.
I like the freedom and open feeling of Java, and the instant accessibility of thousands of very cool libraries.
Again, if I had more experience in VB and VB.NET I would probably find a similar thing.
I used C# with sharp-develop, and found it ok, until I tried to do some more advanced templating and other things.
Page.DataBind is a cool idea - I hate the case usage of C#, everything is capitalised. I really find it odd coming from java world! (of and that 'value' keyword in accessors, erm, bizzaro!)
Anyone agree/disagree on the case?
Also, I lost faith when trying to synchronize some methods, it was about 5 different code snippets I analysed, none of them seemed to work, and all used different syntax, I was a bit bemused! Again this is probably related to my 6 months of C# experience only. (The syntax was also on how to lock and notify threads)
Different speaks for different geeks!:-) (as apposed to strokes and blokes!)
Perhaps we are already doing this for spam, but there are many more SMTP servers than telco exchanges.
Perhaps all telco exchanges should run a SPEWSesque system, so they can bloke all these fraudulent telephone scams from all countries.
I would like to see a quick way of combatting fraud, even if it is the uneducated who suffer.
Of course, the solutions of blocking works if you want to send an email to a person, akin to calling them (via an operator) but to stop recieving them (lets talk about telemarketing and spam shall we?) we need a numeric block list, at a small charge, someone can call via an operator, and have their name and intention announced to you, and you can decide to accept the call.
A legitimate caller would do such a thing, and be on your accept list. Telemarketting people wouldn't!
Now can we open up the exchange API's and slot in 3rd party services and give free subscriptions?
Imagine, no spam, no telephone spam, no junk mail, no dialers.
Interesting, phone systems across waters are incompatible, uses different tones and basically seem to have stemmed from several completely different inventions of a telecommunications device:-)
The internet ip system should be transparent, if anything is working on fixed ip's, then it needn't.
dns is a layer above. if you register your.ip.in.numbers.com and point it to the same ip, then you can fiddle anything behind it.
Why does he want his IP? wierd. It is more akin to wanting to keep the same phone number (here I am saying a phone number is like a dns) but also the same phone line and system addressing numbers (the numbers that the exchange sees you as.
So he should keep his dns, but forget how the ip is running. my opinion.
IMHO I would have to say that there is a distinct disadvantage in using VB over Java in terms of the support for many newer standards and security packages that are available.
Not in being able to sanity check your own code.
I find Java to be more readily opened and accessible to new packages and ways of doing things, whereas in my limited experience of VB, I found there to be too much that was too easy, and too much that was too impossible.
But this is speculation, and I do not even value my opinion on VB too highly, as I have only ever spend 18 month using 5/6.
> Is this what you think might/should be the case, or what research has told you is the case?
I was just saying, the drag drop GUI builder does in fact give a realistic interface that will allow you to assess the accessibility, suitability, possible functionality and usability of an interface.
> You might be suprised at just how many VB-coded projects are out in the real world.
Suprised? no. Shocked? Yes! I know there are far too many VB programs out there, I wrote a lot of them! Well, a small percent, about 5 serious ones actually... ahem.
> Not everyone gives a shit about using every last clock cycle in the CPU.
If they did they would be running SETI!:-)
> Usually the tender is won by having a solution in n months, not a solution which requires only a 1.6 ghz CPU and 256MB of ram as opposed to needing a 2.1ghz/512MB PC.
That is why I program in Java (oh dear!) Java can tackle larger projects more efficiently than VB, that is my opinion, in my experience, and the experiences and opinions of those I know in the same field.
You a programmer? I think our opinions may not be at odds as you might think.
to agree with you on the elite-programmer bullshit.:-)
VB and VB.NET I assume are different. Having used VB and ASP.NET [C#] I am in no position to compare them.
I speak form about 18 months of experience developing some fair sized apps in VB and macros, and so forth.
I found initially that I was able to learn quite a bit, and copy examples. However I soon hit a point where some components of the application were only solvable through some cut and paste 'magic code'.
Blame the API's, blame the archtecture, or blame me! I was certainly a less experience programmer all that time ago (VB 5, then 6).
I wrote a great bomberman clone in VB! I loved it! VB is a great little tool, decent enough, but there is a distinction between developing a good program, and developing a good maintainable program. Of course, like I said, the line fuzzes, at a certain project complexity, I would certainly shy away from VB (6.0) but cannot comment on VB.NET.
If you are puzzled with my lack of appeciation for VB as a tool for larger projects, you can put it down to my lack of experience when I used it.
You are correct, there is a certain temptation to keep what you have done, as the application is capable of pushing it further, I would use an even less technical solution such as DENIM, which has a disadvantage of being less realistic.
I am glad you University is running HCI courses, I am sure Jakob would approve:-)
By much faster - do you mean performance? I can hardly believe that a lowly kiosk program would need performance tweaking:-)
But as you say, it is useful for that one step in prototyping, show to the customer, fix, even run some tests (metrics etc) on it.
If average people cannot vote and decide about nuclear power, however uneducated they may be, who should decide?
If the average person has the power to vote for a leader, and that leader has the power to implement nuclear power, then there isn't much difference in putting anything to the vote.
The reality is, we have to respect everyones opinions for what they are, no matter how irrelevant they may be.
I agree with you though about the judge, in terms of law, this is about right and wrong, and in terms of is someone entitled to keep an IP address, isn't it simply a case that it never belonged to his ISP in the first place? only through licensing?
IP addresses are like phone numbers. Except on the other end, there can be anything. In fact the Internet used to run by dialing the exact computer you wanted to talk to didn't it? Or was that pre-Internet? I am too young to remember:-)
I say we hope he is a bit slow, and let him keep 1 class B and on class D address, two for the price of one.
I once used *twiches* VB and Microsoft Studio and Microsoft Office, Access et al, to write programs for companies.
Summary of my experiences:
If 99% of tasks required are 1 day jobs, then yes, you can comlete those tasks in VB, in a cost effective and managemable way.
If the tasks are more technically involved, or require more advanced security, then you should forget it!
In terms of the GUI, yes you can indeed make it clean, but perhaps many people muddy good model/view seperation with the way they program in VB (I know I did!)
Sorry to cite Java, but it is possible to develop a Java [windowed] GUI in as much time as a VB GUI, and the number of excellent and mature packages to solve almost any development task, and the simple and powerful network transparency make it a developers dream.
When you apply the concerns of distributed applications or server side development, you can only increase the advantages of the J2EE platform.
Now that doesn't say that VB cannot be used for all problems, but I believe there is a cut off point where a tool like VB no longers becomes effective, and this probably is difficult to define.
I would also like to point out, that a tool is only as good as the person who wields it!
For students in the UK (at certain Universities) Visual Studio is given away for free to Students, they are allowed to use it for personal use even after they graduate.
Man, I ain't got time to waste on waiting for a cheaper stripped down version, I just ripped the iso off some warez server, erm, I think it was ftp.suse.com:-)
Alternative to Visual Studio: Eclipse
That is it! You can develop in C++, Python, PERL, XSP, Eiffel and even *gasp* Java:-)
Microsoft do have decent development software, you cannot deny that it is that, decent.
Slashdot Mirror
Fontier was a great game.
I cam imagine an open ended game where simple rules built some fairly unrepetative missions.
Also general crime fighting and helping old ladies across the road could add some longevity.
To be honest, stick some downloadable waypoint function and try racing through the city to beat scores.
Looks like a fine game, better than previous spiderman games, although on the whole, spiderman has not been so badly bitten by the licensed game genre.
I remember playing spiderman on my 2600! It rocked!!
You have the benefit os spider-sense if used correctly - the graphics look great, I just hope you will be able to mod it with new challenges and boss characters. Perhaps some comic book cut sceens like Max Payne?
And you should draw 3 horizontal lines, which gives you 36 boxes :-)
Hot sunny days and math don't mix well.
Sorry, meant to add 'must be viewed in a fixed width font'
If you view it in the reply box, you should get the point, the width is about 195% for the decimal version.
try it yourself by drawing around one of your cashcards, and then drawing two horizontal lines dividing it horizontally into 3 rows.
then draw three vertical lines, then in each vertical section, draw two vertical lines.
You now have 30 boxes.
You can try and fit your finger on them.
If you now draw a fair sized point in the center of each square, and try hitting each point by itself, should be much easier! 30 keys should be enough for a a/qwerty/z keyboard. (space might take up 2 keys, but you can squeeze some of the keys up a little)
You don't even need sticky back plastic! (Reference to a British show)
I guess this will cause similar problems with thumb wear as game pads do. Still anything is better than hunched up typing over a keyboard...
.etc
The key to good miniature keyboard design is limit the contact space between the digit (finger) and the key.
By making a meyboard out of 1mm diameter 'nipples' with the letter printed larger behing, the total distance between the pressable surface of each key becomes much greater:
The test:
Press the following five boxes with your grubby finger (will need to wipe monitor afterwards)
[ ][ ][ ][ ]. etc
Now press the following smaller dots.
. . . . .
Easier huh? But takes up the same room, but each button eare is bigger, as they over lap. (almost double the size)
It is possible to fit a usable keyboard onto a creditcard in this way. Usable meaning, you can type fairly fast with thumbs, index and middle fingers without getting too cramped.
Cool huh?
An MDA is a PDA with mobile (voice) and connectivity, a SmartPhone is a mobile phone with PDA capability.
Are these converging or diverging and trying to control the markets with double speak? I would suggest that MDAs are more powerful, but the only real SmartPhones that are around are the Sony P900s, which looks fantastic.
Do you really want to lug an MDA around just for voice? I think seperating the application of a voice unit and a computing unit is best left alone, and a standard PDA and mobile is better, but that is me, and because I haven't seen anyone talking into one.
Care to share a link to them? I would be very interested in the functions you described.
What you have to ask yourself, is why the govenrment are litterally pushing people to buy SUV's. Easy enough to try and build up the plausability for expending living people to protect, not oil (as how can you class it as protecting, when you are taking it?) but the interests of the oil companies.
I think an invenstigation needs to go underway, it is, or should be, illegal for this kind of law to be put in place.
I am shocked that this hasn't been a source of massive outcry, and protest, but hey, you don't want to be anti-patriotic.
Thanks for posting this, the fact that it hasn't been modded up, and the only AC reply is you are jealous of car sizes, shows what kind of a sick and twisted world this is!
> you know nothing about telephone routing.
:-) (which is the case in some backwaters, and in fact, in areas where you cannot keep your phone number)
:-) (i.e. with VOIP, will they use DNS, or some hidden your-number-here.our.dns.for.our.classa.ipv6 (like newnet does)
I am inclined to agree with you! IANATT (telco-techie).
IP != phone number (except where it did in the old days, or still does in some backwaters)
DNS = phone numbers, a routing layer on top of an assigned network that provides physical addressing (albeit dynamically addressable (dns tables, and trunk exchanges))
Of course, if I have any mistakes in this, I would just reffer you to some more intelligible post by someone who knows much more than I do about this, but my point is dns is like phone numbers, and we should keep our phone number
ip is like line id, we should not care about it.
If the plaintiff can given himself a problem with configuring ip's, perhaps he has brought it upon himself for hardwiring his connections so. It would be like giving everyone your line id instead of your phone number!
Now all telcos may switch to VOIP, will we see a third level of phone numbers. Who will get the phone number 'tod' ?
Well that is that.
Very informative, and yes, I agree that DNS is for soft routing.
:-)
IP should really stay quiet and transparent, but the way DNS is administrated, it is a PITA, thanks to no-ip.com and others though.
Please read my other post where I state that ip = trunk exchange id (more like a physical line address, which, like ip's, can be dynamically assigned) and dns is like a phone number.
:-)
so 555-your-mum (sorry!) is the marketting way of saying www.your-mum.com but the same as www.555-1234-3456.com (or whatever it should have been!)
dns = phone number.
ip = line id (address)
IP is not like a zip code at all! Phone numbers can be placed anywhere on a phone network, technically you could take your number with you, moving house and keeping provider.
I also never condoned the removal of ip's, I infact stated that they shoudl be transparent, and we should try and ignore them! (except when we are administrating our own 'trunk exchanges' ie networks (LANS, WANS) and we give out 192.168's and also join networks together, although the joining can be done with a dns lookup.
Now apart form those corrections, I agree entirely with your post, whatever is left of it !
I never said otherwise - I just found the architecture (COM, ActiveX, blergh) and the API's infuriating. (as I remember!)
:-)
Also many eeky bugs and strange behaviours. And being tied down to one product. I wrote a fairly cool game in VB! I would love to use it to teach my Nephew to write a snake game, or a bomberman game.
I like the freedom and open feeling of Java, and the instant accessibility of thousands of very cool libraries.
Again, if I had more experience in VB and VB.NET I would probably find a similar thing.
I used C# with sharp-develop, and found it ok, until I tried to do some more advanced templating and other things.
Page.DataBind is a cool idea - I hate the case usage of C#, everything is capitalised. I really find it odd coming from java world! (of and that 'value' keyword in accessors, erm, bizzaro!)
Anyone agree/disagree on the case?
Also, I lost faith when trying to synchronize some methods, it was about 5 different code snippets I analysed, none of them seemed to work, and all used different syntax, I was a bit bemused! Again this is probably related to my 6 months of C# experience only. (The syntax was also on how to lock and notify threads)
Different speaks for different geeks!
(as apposed to strokes and blokes!)
Perhaps we are already doing this for spam, but there are many more SMTP servers than telco exchanges.
Perhaps all telco exchanges should run a SPEWSesque system, so they can bloke all these fraudulent telephone scams from all countries.
I would like to see a quick way of combatting fraud, even if it is the uneducated who suffer.
Of course, the solutions of blocking works if you want to send an email to a person, akin to calling them (via an operator) but to stop recieving them (lets talk about telemarketing and spam shall we?) we need a numeric block list, at a small charge, someone can call via an operator, and have their name and intention announced to you, and you can decide to accept the call.
A legitimate caller would do such a thing, and be on your accept list. Telemarketting people wouldn't!
Now can we open up the exchange API's and slot in 3rd party services and give free subscriptions?
Imagine, no spam, no telephone spam, no junk mail, no dialers.
Of course, you are correct - democracy works if you can elect via majority an intelligent person with the best interests of all concerned in his mind.
Lets hope no country goes and votes in a dumb-ass warmongering liar, else we are all screwed!
*thinks*
son of a bi...
Interesting, phone systems across waters are incompatible, uses different tones and basically seem to have stemmed from several completely different inventions of a telecommunications device :-)
The internet ip system should be transparent, if anything is working on fixed ip's, then it needn't.
dns is a layer above. if you register your.ip.in.numbers.com and point it to the same ip, then you can fiddle anything behind it.
Why does he want his IP? wierd. It is more akin to wanting to keep the same phone number (here I am saying a phone number is like a dns) but also the same phone line and system addressing numbers (the numbers that the exchange sees you as.
So he should keep his dns, but forget how the ip is running. my opinion.
IMHO I would have to say that there is a distinct disadvantage in using VB over Java in terms of the support for many newer standards and security packages that are available.
Not in being able to sanity check your own code.
I find Java to be more readily opened and accessible to new packages and ways of doing things, whereas in my limited experience of VB, I found there to be too much that was too easy, and too much that was too impossible.
But this is speculation, and I do not even value my opinion on VB too highly, as I have only ever spend 18 month using 5/6.
I love emacs. Great, but I find the wholesome, wholegrain ide goodness of eclipse too much of a draw.
:-)
And did I mention refactoring? no I didn't.
> Is this what you think might/should be the case, or what research has told you is the case?
:-)
I was just saying, the drag drop GUI builder does in fact give a realistic interface that will allow you to assess the accessibility, suitability, possible functionality and usability of an interface.
> You might be suprised at just how many VB-coded projects are out in the real world.
Suprised? no. Shocked? Yes! I know there are far too many VB programs out there, I wrote a lot of them! Well, a small percent, about 5 serious ones actually... ahem.
> Not everyone gives a shit about using every last clock cycle in the CPU.
If they did they would be running SETI!
> Usually the tender is won by having a solution in n months, not a solution which requires only a 1.6 ghz CPU and 256MB of ram as opposed to needing a 2.1ghz/512MB PC.
That is why I program in Java (oh dear!) Java can tackle larger projects more efficiently than VB, that is my opinion, in my experience, and the experiences and opinions of those I know in the same field.
You a programmer? I think our opinions may not be at odds as you might think.
to agree with you on the elite-programmer bullshit. :-)
VB and VB.NET I assume are different. Having used VB and ASP.NET [C#] I am in no position to compare them.
I speak form about 18 months of experience developing some fair sized apps in VB and macros, and so forth.
I found initially that I was able to learn quite a bit, and copy examples. However I soon hit a point where some components of the application were only solvable through some cut and paste 'magic code'.
Blame the API's, blame the archtecture, or blame me! I was certainly a less experience programmer all that time ago (VB 5, then 6).
I wrote a great bomberman clone in VB! I loved it! VB is a great little tool, decent enough, but there is a distinction between developing a good program, and developing a good maintainable program. Of course, like I said, the line fuzzes, at a certain project complexity, I would certainly shy away from VB (6.0) but cannot comment on VB.NET.
If you are puzzled with my lack of appeciation for VB as a tool for larger projects, you can put it down to my lack of experience when I used it.
I loved that bomberman game!
You are correct, there is a certain temptation to keep what you have done, as the application is capable of pushing it further, I would use an even less technical solution such as DENIM, which has a disadvantage of being less realistic.
:-)
:-)
I am glad you University is running HCI courses, I am sure Jakob would approve
By much faster - do you mean performance? I can hardly believe that a lowly kiosk program would need performance tweaking
But as you say, it is useful for that one step in prototyping, show to the customer, fix, even run some tests (metrics etc) on it.
Did you like the HCI course?
If average people cannot vote and decide about nuclear power, however uneducated they may be, who should decide?
If the average person has the power to vote for a leader, and that leader has the power to implement nuclear power, then there isn't much difference in putting anything to the vote.
The reality is, we have to respect everyones opinions for what they are, no matter how irrelevant they may be.
I agree with you though about the judge, in terms of law, this is about right and wrong, and in terms of is someone entitled to keep an IP address, isn't it simply a case that it never belonged to his ISP in the first place? only through licensing?
I thought ICANN had the final word?
Seems strange to me!
It isn't really that crazy.
:-)
:-)
IP addresses are like phone numbers. Except on the other end, there can be anything. In fact the Internet used to run by dialing the exact computer you wanted to talk to didn't it? Or was that pre-Internet? I am too young to remember
I say we hope he is a bit slow, and let him keep 1 class B and on class D address, two for the price of one.
May I recommend 192.168.*.* and 127.0.0.1
He can have them!
I once used *twiches* VB and Microsoft Studio and Microsoft Office, Access et al, to write programs for companies.
Summary of my experiences:
If 99% of tasks required are 1 day jobs, then yes, you can comlete those tasks in VB, in a cost effective and managemable way.
If the tasks are more technically involved, or require more advanced security, then you should forget it!
In terms of the GUI, yes you can indeed make it clean, but perhaps many people muddy good model/view seperation with the way they program in VB (I know I did!)
Sorry to cite Java, but it is possible to develop a Java [windowed] GUI in as much time as a VB GUI, and the number of excellent and mature packages to solve almost any development task, and the simple and powerful network transparency make it a developers dream.
When you apply the concerns of distributed applications or server side development, you can only increase the advantages of the J2EE platform.
Now that doesn't say that VB cannot be used for all problems, but I believe there is a cut off point where a tool like VB no longers becomes effective, and this probably is difficult to define.
I would also like to point out, that a tool is only as good as the person who wields it!
They have a decent UI for the mingw C++ compiler. You can package it together with allegro and some nice game apis.
.net c# (I heard this being called C-Pound in the states) ide, that is fairly damn good!
Also try sharp-develop at www.icsharpcode.net/ , a free
For students in the UK (at certain Universities) Visual Studio is given away for free to Students, they are allowed to use it for personal use even after they graduate.
Students of today are the PHB of tommorow!
Man, I ain't got time to waste on waiting for a cheaper stripped down version, I just ripped the iso off some warez server, erm, I think it was ftp.suse.com :-)
:-)
Alternative to Visual Studio:
Eclipse
That is it! You can develop in C++, Python, PERL, XSP, Eiffel and even *gasp* Java
Microsoft do have decent development software, you cannot deny that it is that, decent.