Technically you can tell MS Word to output HTML, but what you get is really bad HTML.
That's the problem with most WSYWIG HTML editors. HTML doesn't lend itself well to WSYWIG editing and so what you always get is really bad HTML. If you want to do it well, you have to learn some HTML and use a good text editor.
If you don't mind shitty HTML then you have more options, but you're not going to find many people advocating them here.
That might not be a bad idea if it was all in one tool, but the artificial split between Visual Studio and the Expression stuff is unforgivable nonsense. It's even more galling with WPF then it is with web stuff though, as the VS WPF editor is really bad and basically forces you to do stuff by hand or go spend a boatload of money on Expression Blend (or do what seems to be the new thing to do: not bother with WPF).
The first article made more sense, because Silverlight is something that MS has been waffling on for quite a while now and HTML 5 is a realistic replacement for it. But all of.net? Now we're getting out into WTF territory.
The core of the problem here is that there's no competing narrative. Microsoft's response that "oh we'll address it in September" only fuels the fire because for someone who is already worried, silence only acts as confirmation. It's baffling just how badly they're bungling the PR on this for a company that used to be very good at developer relations.
Maybe now it's time to jump on the "Fire Ballmer" bandwagon because no CEO should be letting this go on for this long without having the company get involved.
.net on the server is doing pretty well, particularly in Windows shops. We're not at the point where you can write application tier logic in HTML yet.:)
The "bullshit" part is them now claiming that removing DRM is a customer friendly thing they're doing for us. It's not. The DRM was only there in the first place because they wanted to give their own store a competitive advantage.
They're removing it now because the DRM is *breaking the game* for too many customers. They should be honest about it rather then giving out the marketing bullshit.
(And yes, I did get the GOG version. That doesn't make this something other then marketing bullshit.)
Tossing out all the "be a parent" bullshit posted here since parents have to do stuff like go earn a living sometimes, the correct answer is also in some other posts. Doing this correctly requires a lot more manual intervention then "normal" Google does. You can't automate this without mistakes happening (and that's even if you discount pranksters trying to sneak adult stuff into it deliberately), and the cost of a mistake is a lot higher then it is with the safe search option.
That means they need a staff manually rating stuff. It means checking back on stuff already rated periodically. It means a lot more $$$ then normally spent on a subset of search results. I highly doubt that Google can make that back off special advertising in that section, and I also doubt many people are willing to pay for it.
Something like this would work better if websites were rated and you could set controls in the browser. That was tried once but wasn't widely supported and ICRA (the rating system bundled with IE) appears to have shut down: http://www.icra.org/
This has actually been going around for a couple of weeks and picking up steam long before Slashdot ever saw it. The really baffling thing is that Microsoft's response is "we're not talking about that until September", when the perception is out there now that they're going to abandon these things. How tone-deaf they are on this issue is part of the problem in general.
And it wouldn't be believable, except they've done it so many times before.
It'd be nice if WPF did survive, but for it to do well it needs more attention from MS and a better designer in Visual Studio. Telling everybody who wants to use the designer to go shell out a few hundred bucks more for another program (Expression Blend) is a horrible idea.
WPF also needs improvements in performance and in localization capability, where it's surprisingly lacking compared to say WinForms. But all in all there's a lot of decent stuff in it. The main problem WPF is having right now above all else is that there seems to be nobody paying any attention to it inside MS.
Going by that logic, WinForms is still viable too. I mean it's still there and it still works.
The problem is that MS basically doesn't acknowledge its existence anymore and doesn't improve it. The fear here is that Silverlight is going the same way into the "you can use that but we're not investing any effort into improvements" dead end pile.
And it's pretty justified. MS' committment to Silverlight has been all over the map (fortunately my shop didn't jump onboard with Silverlight so we don't have anything to lose there). WPF is facing similar issues on the desktop, we looked at it but MS seems to have lost interest in it and is now onto some newer and sparklier stuff. WPF isn't even that old (and doesn't have a new replaement for.net desktop apps).
In terms of their offerings in the last couple of years, MS has a severe case of schitzophrenia. They're constantly throwing stuff out and reinventing it as something new, and expecting everybody to play along. People in MS shops are getting sick of it, and that's the absolute last group of people MS should be pissing off.
I was thinking the same thing. This is version numbers run amok. We're going from 3 to 5 and getting "rapid releases" like browsers, only there's nothing being changed. Maybe Thunderbird 6 will feature more rounded corners or something?
There's no substance here. If they were adding integrated calendar support THAT would be a feature worth upgrading for.
It's going to burst at some point simply because many of the people who joined the genre with WoW never play anything else. When they get bored with WoW (and given how badly Cataclysm is doing in North America, they ARE getting bored with WoW) they leave the genre entirely instead of going for another game. That spirals downward the same way it spiraled upward: as your friends leave, you have less and less reason to keep playing. So you leave. That in turn gives your friends who are still there less reason to play. Almost my entire network of friends is gone from the game now, and I didn't hold out all that long without them because farming loot with strangers who don't talk just isn't very interesting.
You keep that trend going for a while and the whole genre shrinks. Which is probably a good thing. These games are a lot more fun when they're about doing stuff with friends instead of competing to get loot before some other random people. If companies don't all aim for 5 million subs we'd probably be better off.
This one is next on the death list, after Guitar Hero already died. They're going to milk it to death, and they're pretty much hitting the tip over point now.
They're also hard at work killing WoW with nickel and dime "premium" fees instead of stuff players want, like say new heroics that aren't recycled troll dungeons from previous expansions.
They don't mention that when the game first went on sale, the main selling point for the GOG version was that it "was the exclusive DRM-free version!"
This excuse is bullshit. It was marketing. They wanted more sales on the service they own, so they stuck everybody else with an inferior version and finally had to back down when it turned out to be breaking the game for too many customers.
The 360s hardware is less impressive then the PS3's hardware, but it's done pretty well for itself. You can build a powerful system without blowing the budget on a whiz-bang effort that's overly expensive to produce and overly complicated for developers to leverage (ie: the PS3).
All I read from this is that Sony's learned something from what went wrong last time and is more committed to building something they can sell for a realistic price without taking huge losses. Why is that a bad thing?
Honestly I'm having a hard time trusting Google these days as a developer. They have a nasty habit of putting out half-baked stuff, and yanking other, useful stuff without much notice. Like this.
I don't know that I want to keep following their stuff when they're so damn unreliable about it.
They could start by sending the token that lets me change my password to my email account instead of simply throwing it up to whoever happens to hit the website with the data that was already stolen. They don't even need my old password to do this FFS.
Bothering to have people change their passwords at all with security that week is just theatre.
And I don't mean a list of great ideas. This will be on one of those "top 10 stupid Internet ideas" lists.
There is no upside here. We take something that is simple and works, and make it complicated. We make it FAR more expensive to build. We open it up to attack where it previously wasn't. We use more energy in the process. And we get nothing of value out of it.
The only way this has any hope of succeeding as an idea is if they can convince the government to make a law requiring it in the name of "green energy" or "safety" or some other bullshit reason that governments like to use to create stupid laws.
Do they need one? Probably not. People say they "need" a lot more things then they actually do need. I was developing just fine on my laptop today out of the office with only one monitor (and the small laptop one at that!). It clearly isn't required.
Is it nice to have? Absolutely! Does it help me get more done by letting me have more screen space? Yep! IMO the second one is a productivity booster, particularly in cases where you're trying to monitor the results of doing something and you need to use a program and see a profiler/tracer/performance counter/log/whatever result at the same time. Put one on each monitor and you're set.
But if it wasn't there I could still do my job, so I don't "need" it.
They probably think that the PS3 version will fly because the competition for a PS3 MMO is so much weaker then in the PC MMO market. That and FF XIII proved a lot of people will buy anything that says "Final Fantasy" on the box no matter how bad it is, but relying on that is a great way to destroy your franchise in the long term.
Square's problem is that the market has changed, and they refuse to move with it. FF XIV is the best example there is: they basically remade FF XI and ignored every lesson learned in the genre since it came out. Unfortunately in that period of time World of Warcraft came out in there and redefined player expectations.
It's kind of silly, really. Rift came out from an unknown company with a fraction of the budget and managed to blow FF XIV out of the water simply because they looked at what everybody else was doing that worked, and refined it a bit. Square on the other hand is too bloody arrogant to do that, and now they're paying the price.
I do agree with you though, the game is beyond redemption. Even if they performed a miracle and made it worth playing, the name is so tainted in the market that they'll never get players back.
Slashdot Mirror
"an fps is not a cultural work like Meet the Spartans."
Fixed that for you.
Sometimes something is just a bad game, and you shouldn't reward companies for putting out bad games by spending money on them.
This is one of those times.
Forget about Duke Nukem entirely. This fails as any kind of shooter.
Technically you can tell MS Word to output HTML, but what you get is really bad HTML.
That's the problem with most WSYWIG HTML editors. HTML doesn't lend itself well to WSYWIG editing and so what you always get is really bad HTML. If you want to do it well, you have to learn some HTML and use a good text editor.
If you don't mind shitty HTML then you have more options, but you're not going to find many people advocating them here.
That might not be a bad idea if it was all in one tool, but the artificial split between Visual Studio and the Expression stuff is unforgivable nonsense. It's even more galling with WPF then it is with web stuff though, as the VS WPF editor is really bad and basically forces you to do stuff by hand or go spend a boatload of money on Expression Blend (or do what seems to be the new thing to do: not bother with WPF).
The first article made more sense, because Silverlight is something that MS has been waffling on for quite a while now and HTML 5 is a realistic replacement for it. But all of .net? Now we're getting out into WTF territory.
The core of the problem here is that there's no competing narrative. Microsoft's response that "oh we'll address it in September" only fuels the fire because for someone who is already worried, silence only acts as confirmation. It's baffling just how badly they're bungling the PR on this for a company that used to be very good at developer relations.
Maybe now it's time to jump on the "Fire Ballmer" bandwagon because no CEO should be letting this go on for this long without having the company get involved.
.net on the server is doing pretty well, particularly in Windows shops. We're not at the point where you can write application tier logic in HTML yet. :)
The "bullshit" part is them now claiming that removing DRM is a customer friendly thing they're doing for us. It's not. The DRM was only there in the first place because they wanted to give their own store a competitive advantage.
They're removing it now because the DRM is *breaking the game* for too many customers. They should be honest about it rather then giving out the marketing bullshit.
(And yes, I did get the GOG version. That doesn't make this something other then marketing bullshit.)
Tossing out all the "be a parent" bullshit posted here since parents have to do stuff like go earn a living sometimes, the correct answer is also in some other posts. Doing this correctly requires a lot more manual intervention then "normal" Google does. You can't automate this without mistakes happening (and that's even if you discount pranksters trying to sneak adult stuff into it deliberately), and the cost of a mistake is a lot higher then it is with the safe search option.
That means they need a staff manually rating stuff. It means checking back on stuff already rated periodically. It means a lot more $$$ then normally spent on a subset of search results. I highly doubt that Google can make that back off special advertising in that section, and I also doubt many people are willing to pay for it.
Something like this would work better if websites were rated and you could set controls in the browser. That was tried once but wasn't widely supported and ICRA (the rating system bundled with IE) appears to have shut down: http://www.icra.org/
This has actually been going around for a couple of weeks and picking up steam long before Slashdot ever saw it. The really baffling thing is that Microsoft's response is "we're not talking about that until September", when the perception is out there now that they're going to abandon these things. How tone-deaf they are on this issue is part of the problem in general.
And it wouldn't be believable, except they've done it so many times before.
It'd be nice if WPF did survive, but for it to do well it needs more attention from MS and a better designer in Visual Studio. Telling everybody who wants to use the designer to go shell out a few hundred bucks more for another program (Expression Blend) is a horrible idea.
WPF also needs improvements in performance and in localization capability, where it's surprisingly lacking compared to say WinForms. But all in all there's a lot of decent stuff in it. The main problem WPF is having right now above all else is that there seems to be nobody paying any attention to it inside MS.
Going by that logic, WinForms is still viable too. I mean it's still there and it still works.
The problem is that MS basically doesn't acknowledge its existence anymore and doesn't improve it. The fear here is that Silverlight is going the same way into the "you can use that but we're not investing any effort into improvements" dead end pile.
And it's pretty justified. MS' committment to Silverlight has been all over the map (fortunately my shop didn't jump onboard with Silverlight so we don't have anything to lose there). WPF is facing similar issues on the desktop, we looked at it but MS seems to have lost interest in it and is now onto some newer and sparklier stuff. WPF isn't even that old (and doesn't have a new replaement for .net desktop apps).
In terms of their offerings in the last couple of years, MS has a severe case of schitzophrenia. They're constantly throwing stuff out and reinventing it as something new, and expecting everybody to play along. People in MS shops are getting sick of it, and that's the absolute last group of people MS should be pissing off.
I was thinking the same thing. This is version numbers run amok. We're going from 3 to 5 and getting "rapid releases" like browsers, only there's nothing being changed. Maybe Thunderbird 6 will feature more rounded corners or something?
There's no substance here. If they were adding integrated calendar support THAT would be a feature worth upgrading for.
It's going to burst at some point simply because many of the people who joined the genre with WoW never play anything else. When they get bored with WoW (and given how badly Cataclysm is doing in North America, they ARE getting bored with WoW) they leave the genre entirely instead of going for another game. That spirals downward the same way it spiraled upward: as your friends leave, you have less and less reason to keep playing. So you leave. That in turn gives your friends who are still there less reason to play. Almost my entire network of friends is gone from the game now, and I didn't hold out all that long without them because farming loot with strangers who don't talk just isn't very interesting.
You keep that trend going for a while and the whole genre shrinks. Which is probably a good thing. These games are a lot more fun when they're about doing stuff with friends instead of competing to get loot before some other random people. If companies don't all aim for 5 million subs we'd probably be better off.
This one is next on the death list, after Guitar Hero already died. They're going to milk it to death, and they're pretty much hitting the tip over point now.
They're also hard at work killing WoW with nickel and dime "premium" fees instead of stuff players want, like say new heroics that aren't recycled troll dungeons from previous expansions.
They don't mention that when the game first went on sale, the main selling point for the GOG version was that it "was the exclusive DRM-free version!"
This excuse is bullshit. It was marketing. They wanted more sales on the service they own, so they stuck everybody else with an inferior version and finally had to back down when it turned out to be breaking the game for too many customers.
If they really got in by duplicating an RSA token, sealing the hole requires figuring out how they managed to do that. Not as simple as it sounds.
The 360s hardware is less impressive then the PS3's hardware, but it's done pretty well for itself. You can build a powerful system without blowing the budget on a whiz-bang effort that's overly expensive to produce and overly complicated for developers to leverage (ie: the PS3).
All I read from this is that Sony's learned something from what went wrong last time and is more committed to building something they can sell for a realistic price without taking huge losses. Why is that a bad thing?
Honestly I'm having a hard time trusting Google these days as a developer. They have a nasty habit of putting out half-baked stuff, and yanking other, useful stuff without much notice. Like this.
I don't know that I want to keep following their stuff when they're so damn unreliable about it.
They could start by sending the token that lets me change my password to my email account instead of simply throwing it up to whoever happens to hit the website with the data that was already stolen. They don't even need my old password to do this FFS.
Bothering to have people change their passwords at all with security that week is just theatre.
Well, that'll be one way to get some job security.
And I don't mean a list of great ideas. This will be on one of those "top 10 stupid Internet ideas" lists.
There is no upside here. We take something that is simple and works, and make it complicated. We make it FAR more expensive to build. We open it up to attack where it previously wasn't. We use more energy in the process. And we get nothing of value out of it.
The only way this has any hope of succeeding as an idea is if they can convince the government to make a law requiring it in the name of "green energy" or "safety" or some other bullshit reason that governments like to use to create stupid laws.
Do they need one? Probably not. People say they "need" a lot more things then they actually do need. I was developing just fine on my laptop today out of the office with only one monitor (and the small laptop one at that!). It clearly isn't required.
Is it nice to have? Absolutely! Does it help me get more done by letting me have more screen space? Yep! IMO the second one is a productivity booster, particularly in cases where you're trying to monitor the results of doing something and you need to use a program and see a profiler/tracer/performance counter/log/whatever result at the same time. Put one on each monitor and you're set.
But if it wasn't there I could still do my job, so I don't "need" it.
This is the broadband version of IP over Avian Carrier, given the much higher payload capacity of a donkey.
No, in Canada this is the price we pay for "culture" industries being protected and coddled from reality.
There is no connection between this and music copying, at all. It's a cash grab. SD cards have as much to do with pirating music as video cards do.
They probably think that the PS3 version will fly because the competition for a PS3 MMO is so much weaker then in the PC MMO market. That and FF XIII proved a lot of people will buy anything that says "Final Fantasy" on the box no matter how bad it is, but relying on that is a great way to destroy your franchise in the long term.
Square's problem is that the market has changed, and they refuse to move with it. FF XIV is the best example there is: they basically remade FF XI and ignored every lesson learned in the genre since it came out. Unfortunately in that period of time World of Warcraft came out in there and redefined player expectations.
It's kind of silly, really. Rift came out from an unknown company with a fraction of the budget and managed to blow FF XIV out of the water simply because they looked at what everybody else was doing that worked, and refined it a bit. Square on the other hand is too bloody arrogant to do that, and now they're paying the price.
I do agree with you though, the game is beyond redemption. Even if they performed a miracle and made it worth playing, the name is so tainted in the market that they'll never get players back.