Seconded. This is rubbish in every sense - writing, grammar, analysis... it's all crap.
While Microsoft was battling with Vista that is a dog slow and resource-hungry Apple it would seem was focusing on speed, performance and elegance.
Since when have Microsoft OSs not been slow and resource-hungry? And when did Apple ever not prioritize elegance and performance?
The upcoming "Leopard" OS is expected to be even slicker and faster than its predecessor OS X.
Careful - your fanboyism's showing.
And with Macs running on Intel hardware, how long will it be before Mac OS "Leopard" or its successor spreads out into the PC realm?
Erm, a long time. Apple needs to differentiate itself from Microsoft to retain its market share. Moving to an Intel architecture was a risky step, as it deprived them of one of their major differentiating factors, PPC architecture.
The minute Apple runs on commodity PC hardware no-one has any reason to buy expensive Mac hardware, so they won't. This takes Apple out of the hardware game, and makes them entirely reliant on software and iPods. Mac OS/X will then compete directly with Windows, and though it's faster, more stable and more secure, Windows has that whole 90%+ market share thing going for it. Apple would be squished in short order.
Some think this would never happen, but I have a feeling that it will. When Microsoft attributes a bunch of its Vista problems to backwards compatibility issues Apple would not suffer the same when expanding to PC platform.
Sorry? If Apple wants to make OS/X run on commodity PC hardware it's going to have exactly the same problems. Sure, it could arbitrarily draw a line in the sand and refuse to support hardware older than X years, but that's not going to impress anyone used to Windows' (at least passable) support for legacy PC peripherals.
And even if the problems weren't as severe as MS's in the short term, by giving up control over the hardware OS/X runs on, Apple will be ensuring it only gets worse in the future, until within a few years they'll be just as stuffed as MS.
Perhaps transition to Intel's hardware was the first step for Apple. Perhaps Jobs wants to strike Microsoft when it is the weakest and not as paranoid as ever (due to stepping down of Gates).
Riiiiight, because Ballmer et al are reknowned industry-wide as cuddly, fluffy-wuffy teddy-bears.
Certainly MS is looking shakier than it has for a long time, but I doubt the paranoia level's decreased much since Bill left.
Perhaps a mouse will overcome a dinosaur repeating the course of natural history in the IT arena.
Very poetic.
Except, of course, the dinosaurs actually kept the "mice" down for millions of years, and it was only once the dinosaurs had already naturally gone extinct on their own that the mice even had a chance. There's nothing like a bad analogy to really demonstrate you don't know what you're talking about...
Who knows. But I think that the departure of Gates and Vista debacle proves that the time is ripe for someone to seriously take on Microsoft's monopoly.
This is probably the only mildly sensible thing in the entire article.
And can anybody name a better candidate than Apple?
What, you mean the guys who failed to put a dent in it for the last twenty years? Sorry Mac guys and girls, but when a cash-poor FOSS operating system written by a bunch of hobbyists frightens MS more than a long-term competitor, you obviously aren't competing quite as hard as you think.
A better candidate than Apple?
Linux (free, doesn't have to worry about profits or budgets, has been eating MS's lunch for years on the server-side
Well, I think that being forced to open their protocols and APIs was considered punishment enought for that.
The >1 billion USD fine is for being found guilty of the above, and then not even complying with their legally-decided punishment.
This is important - MS are not being fined >1 billion for their antitrust issues. They're being fined because they clearly consider themselves above the law, and will quite happily disobey the legal authority of an entire continent.
So... do you think Microsoft has gathered all it's employees and instructed them to collectively deceive the public ?
Why would they need to do that? Microsoft hasn't deceived anyone - they just haven't been open and forthright about their protocols... after being instructed to do so by the highest legal court in Europe.
It's not like they have done nothing, they have actually gone to some expense to comply with many of the anti-trust rulings, and information they have been required to produce is available, just not to the satisfaction of the EU's technical/legal advisors.
Yes, but the information they've released
1. Is a punishment for anticompetitive behaviour, intended to allow competitors to interoperate with Microsoft systems. 2. Is incomplete (so the interoperability requirement is not adequately met) 3. Was wrapped in restrictive licences which basically excluded OSS, one of their most feared competitors (so the competitor requirement was not adequately met) 4. Was offered for-pay (so the punishment requirement was not adequately met).
What part of this don't you get?
You can find info on Microsoft's Communication Protocols here There's also a program which gives access to source code specifically trying to appease the EU here
No, they've released incomplete information, when the order was to allow competitors to compete on a level playing field. That means the competitors should know as much about the protocols and APIs as Microsoft's other divisions do. As long as the information is incomplete Microsoft knows something no-one else does, so they have an advantage. This is supposed to remove the avantage. It has not in fact done so. Are we getting it yet?
A simple analogy:
I have been stealing from your bank account for years. The court orders me to give it my PIN number so it can withdraw funds from my account and redress the balance a bit. I look it up in my paperwork, find it, smile earnestly and tell them my PIN number is "6-something-something-2"
There - I've released information on my PIN number, I've spent time doing so. That time, and any e-mails/letters/employee hours I use to comply have a monetary value associated with them, so I can even claim I've spent money doing it.
Nevertheless, what I've given you is incomplete, useless, and the resources I put into producing it are negligible compared to what I gain by not actually doing what I've been ordered to.
If the court now fines me for my downright fucking cheek, do I have a right to sympathy?
I mean it's pretty hard for Microsoft to defend themselves in this circumstance, where the group they are in dispute with is also the judge and jury.
If you're in court and you're ordered to do something by a judge, and you refuse, and the judge penalises you for it, is that unfair?
The judge isn't the plaintiff here - that's Real Networks (etc). The judge is only "one side" in this argument because Microsoft have already disobeyed a direct order given by the judge. It was a dispute between two normal parties, and Microsoft lost. They then refused (or, more accurately, did squat-all then stood around with expressions of injured innocence) after being instructed to make reparations. The judge then fined them for their actions.
There's no sympathy for Microsoft appropriate here - they were ruled against, then petulantly decided to take the fight to the presiding legal authority rather than just accepting their loss and getting on with it.
Have you thought perhaps maybe just maybe the EU has decided it'd like a slice of Microsoft war chest and has just decided it'll make up whatever excuse and take some.
That has to be the single most uninformed, baseless statement I've ever read, even on Slashdot. Thank you - you have now set a new all-time low for uninformed opinion in my experience.
Of course it is all a joke. #1 NSA survelliance has been well known since the late 1970s. Anyone who thinks this is new is a young punk born sometime after 1980 who never read a newspaper or had an intelligent conversation until 1990 and then had the misfortune of coming of age in the Clinton administration, master of the big lie.
Define "well-known". Echelon wasn't "well known" until the French government sued the USA, forcing the whole thing into the public spotlight.
Well known to conspiracy buffs and spookwatchers != well known to the general public.
Thus, attempting to divert scandal by claiming everyone already knew about it is invalid, because "everyone" didn't.
#2 The headline is misleading. Once again these are INTERNATIONAL communications between someone in a foreign country and someone in the US.
So what? By having to point to 9/11 as the reason for the program, the US govt. basically admitted that even monitoring calls which only had one end in the USA was unacceptable without a bloody good reason.
You don't get to side-step the issue by claiming "oh, well, it's justified anyway". If the majority of the US population thought that it would be justified then Bush et al wouldn't have had to invoke 9/11 - they would just have gone ahead and done it and everyone would have approved. The fact they offered 9/11 as a justification shows:
1) According to the majority of people, it's not alright for the government to baselessly listen in to their calls, even if they're doing something treasonous like daring to talk to someone in another country.
2) America is (or at least, is supposed to be) a democracy. If something's totally unacceptable to the majority of people, it shouldn't be allowed, period.
3) The Bush government knew this, and tried to weasel out of it by presenting the NSA wiretapping effort as a response to 9/11, when in fact it was already operational and 9/11 was just a convenient excuse.
Again: if the country agreed with you it was justified, 9/11 wouldn't have entered into the discussion.
That's a lot different than two US Citizens being spied on in real time making a land line call across town.
Thin end of the wedge, anyone? Just like the PATRIOT Act and all the new anti-terrorism powers were only to be used to stop terrorism... not to clamp down on demonstrators, compile dossiers on known dissidents, prevent people exercising their rights to free speech and peaceable assembly, etc, etc, etc.
NO law insures privacy for international calls especially from a government trying to protect us from mass murderers.
Lightning kills more people a year in the USA than terrorism, even now. More young soldiers were killed in Iraq II and Afghanistan than in several decades of sustained terrorist action on US soil. Where are the NSA wiretaps on weather stations, and natty US government "weather threat level" traffic-lights?
Get a sense of proportion.
And although I'm not an American, I believe that your laws are supposed to guarantee your rights except in very specific cases - ie, "you can do what you like, and the government can only interfere in situations X and Y".
You seem to be implying that your entire legal code is framed in terms of "The government can do what it likes to you, except for situations X and Y". This is a very different system, and one which makes it almost impossible to have a free, democratic society.
AOL always sucked balls. They invented nothing of consequence, and offered a bastardised, censored parody of "being online" to people who didn't know any better. Plus, for every "someone's mom" they helped get onto the internets, they also allowed on a spammer, a script kiddie and at least three forum-fuckwits.
Oh, except that they didn't get people onto the net - they got them onto their own proprietary walled garden, and then dragged their feet for years about giving people proper unfiltered net access. Seriously dude - if AOL was so great why have people left it in droves since its heyday to go and get "real" ISPs?
And had AOL never come along of course you'd still be e-mailing your mum now. You'd have just had to get her a slightly more complex setup that would have required her to learn to click on three or four icons to send a message, rather than just on two or three. My aunty's online and has been for years - she knows next to nothing about computers, but after a couple of demos and one or two post-it notes she never had trouble dialling in through WinSock and using Eudora to send mail.
Zip disks weren't a bad idea, but excessive prices (who'd you have to sleep with to get 100MB for $10?), crappy marketing and a communicable hardware failure is easily enough for their position. FWIW I had a Zip drive and always got on well with it, but you can't claim they were brilliant product.
Pointcast sucked from day 1 - it was all marketing hype about "push" technology, and rapidly got banned from its own target market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast
Seriously dude - just because something's an interesting idea doesn't make it a good product. A good product achieves success by being well-executed and useful, and I don't think anyone can claim those properties for AOL, Zip drives or Pointcast.
When you say "somewhat short time frame" are you possibly referring to the 19-year gap between when Compuserve first started offering online services to customers in 1978, and when they were purchased by AOL, c.1997
BASIC was designed as a teaching language, and while it was easy to learn its use of things like GOTOs meant it even sucked at that, encouraging bad programming practice long after it was generally recognised to be bad. Ok, maybe BASIC only allowed (and didn't punish) bad programming practice, but in the context of a teaching language the two things are pretty much equivalent.
VB was always a shitty language, that carried on teaching bad programming practice. VB encouraged an entire generation of bad coders to write bad code, and because it was so easy the coders often never even realised how bad they truly were. (Contrast in C/C++, where if you're a bad coder you know all about it, because the language doesn't try to hold your hand and wipe your arse all the time).
The only thing MS could do to make VB.NET remotely credible as a "serious" language (C/C++/C#/Java/whatever) was to... break backwards-compatibility and re-write it completely so it looked almost exactly like all the other serious languages.
Every new version of VB seems a little more credible, and every version tends it more in the direction of C/C++/C#/Java.
Indeed. However, in my personal experience I often end up spending longer patching up, bug-fixing and extending somebody's lame two-hour lashed-up "my first database" or "my first VB app" than it would take me to re-write it from scratch, to more reliably make available the current functionality and allow for quicker modifications in the future.
By way of illustration, by all means bring in a plumber to sort out your pipework - it's his job to ensure you the user get the water you need. Just don't expect him to be happy or complimentary when you get him in to fix up some ham-fisted uneducated idiot's attempt to rig up your pipework using cardboard tubes and Krazy Glue.
Again, what the GPP said: I don't try to fix my car with elastic bands and wood-glue, and if I'm uneducated enough to do so I don't blame the mechanic for getting irritated with me for making his job harder than if he'd done the whole thing.
Nobody said programmers are smarter than the average person, only that (good) programmers are trained to think more clearly and rigorously.
They generally do better at task decomposition, follow trains of thought to their conclusion (instead of subconsciously going "well, that looks like it'll work" and stopping) and recognise assumptions as liabilities (unlike many people, who often view "assumptions" as equivalent to "facts").
I've mixed with programmers and non-programmers for many years, and (without wanting to make a value judgement) have noticed that while there isn't necessarily a difference in intelligence or creativity, people with a history of writing code often just think more clearly.
They can often decompose a task more quickly and completely[1], they make fewer irreversible mistakes when making plans (or producing initial designs), and they can lay out solutions more clearly.
This could be caused by one of two things (or, I suppose, a combination thereof):
1) They say if you want to be sure you know a subject try to explain it to someone else. The stupider or more naive the target of the explanation, the better you have to know the subject, and you won't find a student a lot more stupid (or with fewer built-in assumptions) than a computer. Thus, programmers are forced to analyse problems down to the very lowest level, and to ensure they've considered all the edge-cases and "what ifs".
Non-programmers generally interact with other people, who (already full of assumptions and prior knowledge) simply never force them to analyse things to that degree.
If I want you to make a cup of tea, I say "Make a cup of tea?". If I want a computer to make me a cup of tea I have to consider everything from the hardware design of the system's effectors to how to encapsulate the concept of "cup" in the computer's processing. Don't tell me one doesn't require clearer thinking than the other, and don't tell me practice doesn't make perfect.
2) Alternatively, maybe people who are good at task-decomposition and clear-thinking are naturally attracted to programming.
Either way, though, you've got a class of people who are statistically likely to be better than average at these skills.
Thus, encouraging people who lack these skills is going to bring the average quality of code down, and from the viewpoint of a programmer is going to result in the existence of a lot of ugly code.
I have to say, I'm not against the idea of opening up the shallow end of the development process to less-technical users, and other analytical professions may teach the same skills (almost?) just as well. However, if you're claiming Joe Average Sixpack can write code or design systems as well as a good, experienced programmer then I'd guess you've either never seen a really good programmer at work or you've bought into the trendy modern War on Expertise that Western culture has been waging in the background[2].
Sure, make the tools available so even Joe Q. Public can write code. Just accept that he's going to write an awful lot of inefficient, bug-ridden shit and accept that he's going to have even less respect for an often-difficult profession because "he's a programmer now too, and it's easy"[3].
Footnotes:
[1] Give a non-programmer and a programmer a sheet of paper each, and ask them to write out the instructions for making a cup of tea in as much detail as possible - five gets you ten the programmer's list of instructions is at least three times longer than the Average Joe's. Any one of those assumed steps could stuff up the whole process (who says there's water in the kettle? Who says there's even a kettle in the kitchen?), and programmers have been trained by experience to assume nothing (well, to know which assumptions are reasonable, and how to handle ones which aren't met).
[2] Also known as "everyone has an opinion, so any opinion is as good as any other".
"shouldn't an os have the ability to play common files though?"
No, that's an application's job.
There's no reason your application can't interface with your window manager so it looks like part of the "OS" to uneducated users, but fundamentally an OS should sit between the apps and the metal, and that's it. The moment your OS starts doing app-like stuff it's getting bloated, and then where do you stop? Displaying images? Videos? Allowing you to browse the web? Rendering CAD scenes?
"playing a file that renders moving pictures on my screen seems like natural ability to an operating system to me. maybe i'm just spoiled and brainwashed by MS."
I'm afraid so.
"i also can see how that is an abuse of a monopoly, but why is the EU so freaked out about it? you'd think WMP comes bundled with kiddie porn or something."
It's an abuse of their monopoly, so it's bad by definition - your statement is like asking (subtract the hyperbole) "what's wrong with murder?". Monopolies restrict choice, and effectively replace the self-improving evolution of a free market with a single, compulsory choice. With no competition there's no impulse to improve, so the entire field tends to stagnate; just look at IE between burying Netscape and the widespread adoption of Firefox - there was almost zero real improvement for years.
Monopolies are harmful by definition, but they can be tolerated as long as they stay in their niche, and there's no a lot anyone can do about Microsoft's current desktop monopoly. By illegally leveraging that to gain a monopoly in other areas they extend their monopoly and squeeze out choice in yet another field.
If you still don't see the point take it to absurd lengths and imagine a world where every product, service and media item is produced by one single monolithic corporation. Most people would instinctively be uncomfortable with this idea - power corrupts..., and all that.
"and didn't quicktime and realplayer both suck pretty bad? i know i hated realplayer."
RealPlayer and Quicktime have crappy user-interfaces, but the underlying codecs are actually very well-designed.
They just let the marketing wonks design (and in Quicktime's case, artificially limit) the user-interface, and their crappy design decisions (what, no fullscreen in QT unless I buy it? Fuck off) combined with MS's improvements to WMP effectively relegated them to niche applications.
I've got to say, I don't have a lot of sympathy for Apple or Real on this point - sure it's nice to see Microsoft getting reined in a bit, but the QT and RealPlayer applications were so shitty that one half-decent alternative player should have toppled them anyway, even without free bundling and a desktop monopoly behind it.
I don't even think it's his directing abilities that actually executes the coup-de-grace, it's his complete failure to grasp that filmmaking should be an art, not an exercise in fucking economics.
From TFA:
Boll says the point is that his movies get better as his career progresses - Dungeon Siege is "ten times better" than BloodRayne, which is ten times better than House of the Dead, and so on.
So fucking what? Since when, outside of primary school, did grown-up adults get "points for trying"?
Grow up and stop whining. If you're producing art and it's shit, you're a shit artist, end of story. As a paying punter I don't give a fuck if your latest film is only one tenth as crap as the one before it - it's still crap, and I'm out of pocket because of it. Add to that the fact that you've also effectively just destroyed the chance of anyone ever using $MY_FAVOURITE_FRANCHISE again, to make a good film that I'd actually like to see, and you've actually managed made a negative artistic contribution to the world, you tool.
"People say BloodRayne has a very bad IMDB rating - yes, but how many votes of zero points were made before the movie was out, by people who hate me but haven't even seen the movie?
Well, let's see, shall we? Hmmm, picking Halo, somebody else's currently-in-production film mentioned later in the article...
Ah yes, as I suspected, I can't even find a way to rate it because it's not released yet and it would be fucking retarded if IMDB let you rate unreleased films.
More baseless "poor little me" whining. Moving on...
And besides, says Boll, what exactly is it that we are expecting from him? After all, he is using videogames as his source material, and they're hardly reknowned for their complex characterisations and sophisticated narratives.
Yes, but that's why successful adaptations take the source material and weave a story into it. Games are not big on story, but movies are. Here's a hint: do you distribute the movie with a keyboard so the audience can click menu-options to advance dialogue? To you make movies which have multiple, branching storylines? How about movies where you can download free content from the producer after you buy it, and get extra goodies to extend the life of the film?
No, because movies and games are different media. What works for one doesn't work for another, and as the adapter it's up to you as director or screenwriter to make that adaptation. Nobody makes TV adverts showing a 30-second clip of a really good magazine advert, so why the fuck do you think it's appropriate to claim the same is justified for games?
Us games journalists, Boll argues, should be pleased that videogame-based movies are getting made at all. "It's tough to convince someone from the studio system to believe in a videogame-based movie.
Yes, because of fucking tools like you who ensure that every one that manages to get crapped out by a studio is shallow, mindless shite. They look at game adaptations in the past, see they're ill-received shit and run scared. And you're seeking to address this by squatting out movies you've as good as admitted are crap?
"And all my movies, no matter what reviewers are saying, are getting sold."
"Apparently Boll is "number one in the market" as far as paying investors back goes, and that's "Not because I make the best movies on earth, but I make movies for a minimal amount of budget compared to what major companies are spending,"
"This is the main point - if the movie is really, really bad, why are a hundred territories buying it?"
"So if people are writing on the Internet about how my movies were big failures, it's because these people are amateurs and they have no idea of the reality of film-making and film selling.
"I personally think that with the budget they've planned, Halo will be a failure
Yeah, this means nothing at all, right? I mean, everyone knows Perl's just as hard to learn as C/C++, right? And it takes you exactly the same amount of time to jump through all the hoops coding something in strictly-typed, anally-retentive, compiled C/C++ than hacking it together quickly in a loosely-typed Perl script.
Oh, and scripted languages' memory management saves exactly zero development and testing time over non-memory-managed languages, too, while simultaneously not helping you at all to avoid memory leaks and other nasty hard-to-debug errors. And CPAN stores phenomenally huge amounts of pre-written plug-in-and-go code for both Perl and C/C++, right? And...
Either we haven't ever written a line of code in C/C++ or Perl, or we didn't think before we posted...
Disclaimer: I first learned to code in C/C++, so I harbour it no ill-will at all. Nevertheless, anyone seriously suggesting that Perl won't save you time over C/C++ in the short-term is insane. Of course, a non-trivial project where C/C++'s strict typing and formal style produces big wins is another matter, but when the context's "getting something up on the screen and working" it's simply no contest.
"Honestly I have never really had a problem with the FUD. There are so many articles and studies surrounding Linux that its fairly simple to dig up better studies, or facts showing why the biased ones are biased."
The problem I always run into is that your average Board-member (hell, even managers) would rather believe the FUD they read in their respectable paper Business trade publication from some highly-paid Microsoft PR shill, than the advice of a whole continent full of talented, educated "on-line technical types", or articles from "techie magazines".
The problem is that PR shills wear suits, write for prestigious (or prestigious-sounding) magazines and give incorrect but extremely simple answers. Technical types then have to politely but firmly disabuse their bosses of these beguiling-but-wrong misconceptions.
Many mangement types don't rate idea on a scale from good to bad, but on a scale from "this makes me happy" to "this makes me uncomfortable/fearful/confused". Thus, the PR shills make them Happy, because they get a simple, (incorrect) and understandable answer, which makes them feel like they've got a handle on the situation, and are therefore empowered and In Control. Technical types then have to explain some of the intricacies of the issue to demonstrate why this "solution" is wrong, causing Uncomfortableness. This process introduces details (which makes them Confused), and confronts the manager with the fact they've believed pretty stories which aren't actually true (which makes them Fearful - what else is wrong with their opinions?).
At this point they have a choice - either drop their opinion, knuckle down and learn about the subject (which requires effort and discomfort), drop their opinion and follow the advice of whoever is paid to know the stuff (which means they lose Control), or keep their opinion, stay In Control and mentally dismiss anything that doesn't fit with their position.
A depressingly large fraction of managers will therefore simply refuse to be proven wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, because it's psychologically more comfortable for them to live in a warm, pink fluffy world of denial. Importantly, as long as they can justify this to another person in their own warm pink denial bubble with beguiling-but-irrelevant arguments (eg, "We should always use Microsoft/IBM, because they're the industry leader", "We avoid open-source because it's produced by amateurs and hobbyists") they'll get away with it forever - the only people who actually experience any problem as a result are the technical types who actually have to abide by the decision, and any resulting project failures can then safely be blamed on them. In fact, by passing on these wrong-but-comfortable memes to colleagues and superiors who don't know any better the denier also gives that person a false sense of being more in control, further propagating the process.
This often happens at the subconscious level - they aren't completely aware they're thinking emotionally instead of logically, so logical arguments will merely bounce off their bubble and leave nary a dent. Importantly, the act of having their beliefs challenged also makes them uncomfortable (since it pushes closer to their conscious mind the fact that those opinions are based in emotion rather than logic), and this discomfort is then automatically (and subconsciously) blamed on the technical type who tried to correct their opinion. Or even worse, on "all technical types" as a group - they're stigmatised (and hence ignored) as obstructive detail-obsessed nit-pickers, when in actual fact some of those details can determine the success or failure of an entire project.
And once you're identified as "a member of that group that makes them feel uncomfortable, fearful and confused" they'll automatically trivialise anything that comes from that group, allowing them to sink further into denial and making it harder to reach them next time.
"Remember, these are the same fuckers that sued the Boy Scounts over a red cross on their "Emergency Preparedness" merit badge; the cross is now green, and has been since 1980."
How stupid of the Scouts. Next time just claim your badge/computer game healthpack/first-aid kit is labelled with an English flag, and tell them to fuck off.
Be fair - this wasn't constructive criticism, or suggestions as to how to improve the product before launch. And even if it had been, the professional/correct forum to express such feelings in in a private meeting, to another employee who can effect change.
Bitching to another employee who can't do anything is counter-productive and reduces morale (and should be handled with a polite request not to disillusion colleagues), and bitching in a public forum should be slapped for gross indiscretion.
This was an out-and-out hatchet job on the new console and everything it stood for, is exactly the kind of thing that could sway early adopters and opinion-formers, and was issued by a fundamentally unqualified artist who was merely looking on, not even one of the dev guys working on the actual system.
I don't know about you, but I'll quite often swear at and really slate whatever I'm working on when I hit a bug or get frustrated, even if (otherwise) I actually quite like/respect the system.
This goes double for when I'm learning a new system (y'know, like how the Cell is a fundamentally different architecture to the entire X86 line), since everything that works differently to the way I expect it to is initially labelled a "fuck up" or "stupid idea", then may later be downgraded to "acceptable difference" (or sometimes even "wonderful idea sorely lacking from $old_system") once I'm more familiar with it and understand why it's been done that way.
Hell, I hated RegExps when I first ran across them - over-complicated, opaque and bizarre. Now I can hardly bear to code in a language without them. Does that mean RegExps are actually stupid?
If someone listened to what I said and gave it the credence of a carefully considered, authoritative opinion, they'd decide that whatever I was working on was shit, when in actual fact it might be pretty good, I'm just not Getting It yet, and I'm just sounding off to relieve frustration.
Taking these second-hand comments, treating them as authoritative statements of fact about the system and broadcasting them to the world with the added authority of "an insider" is Just fucking Stupid.
Did he deserve to lose his job? Maybe not. Did he pretty much ask for some kind of smack-down? Hell yes.
Ah, but why do those people form small groups? Why, after living in a small, tightly-knit community for many years, do they fragment into smaller, family-based groups? Why do these groups then exhibit hostility towards each other?
Possibly because the presence of those elected officials establish the expectation of a "safe" society that allows these groups to mix, and then police their interactions?
I know you were going for a cheap "hah, aren't scientists stupid - look what else it could have been" poo-fling, but:
1) The example you give ties in with the example they give, and 2) Did you really think they didn't think of this too, if it was remotely likely?
FWIW, monkeys in the wild may have "friends" or family members killed at any moment. Put a modern family in that situation and you'll have a lifestyle dominated by paranoia, fortification and aggression beyond anything you see in monkey-culture.
Hey, he invented a wheel. Apparently without knowing that it had already been invented, or anything about how it worked. From first principles. What have you invented recently?
Sure, people don't find invention as impressive if someone else's already done it before, but if the re-inventor didn't know about it, and came up with it himself from first principles, it's still deserving of respect.
True. However, flaunting their stupendous cash reserves by spending $120 million a year in a vain attempt to "look smaller" isn't going to do anything but give people ammunition.
Aside from Wal-Mart, the MPAA/RIAA (and IBM, but only really to techies), Microsoft is practically synonymous with big business. News stories about them spending huge multiples of what the average person earns in a lifetime, every year, to try to give the opposite impression... well, it isn't really going to work...
"First of all, i'd like to make it clear that believing in Intelligent Design or in Creationism does NOT in any way prohibit ideas such as evolution, understanding how bees fly, or any other scientific fact that you want to explain."
It depends how you define "Creationism". If you take it to mean "the idea that God, through some unspecified mechanism, created the universe and hence, transitively, everything in it", you're right. However, you're also in the minority.
If you take it to mean "God created the earth in 4004 BC, provided a bunch of fake evidence to convince the most intelligent of us that the world is really much older, and made Adam and Eve from clay literally as it depicts in Genesis", then you're not.
The problem is that while there are plenty of intelligent religious people who take the first position, the idiot vocal minority who stage confrontational headline-grabbing stunts like pushing ID (philosophy!) into science lessons (or having evolution removed from them) mean that when most people hear the words "creationist" or "ID" they think of the second.
To compound this, most religious people I know don't self-identify as "Creationist" or "ID", because, when you think about it, everyone who believes in a mainstream religion believes God created and designed them. A "Creationist Christian" is therefore a tautology. In contrast, the headline-grabbing lunatic fringe are always identified (and self-identify) as "Creationists", or "Intelligent Design" proponents.
Thus, to the majority of people "Creationist" means one of those "dinosaurs coexisted with cavemen and the appendix is just god's little joke" idiots who wouldn't know a metaphorical account of man's acquisition of self-awareness if someone helpfully wrote it out in a big book and gave it to them to learn from.
Is it fair that popular perception has twisted the meaning, so that people like you who self-identify as Creationist/ID are now assumed to be literal-interpretation idiots? No it isn't, but then it's hardly new either - try talking to a "hacker", or anyone who thought of themself as cheerful and "gay".
In fact, it's probably even fairer than the examples I just gave, because the term "Creationist" and "Intelligent Design" didn't really exist until they was coined to describe the lunatic fringe they currently do, whereas the other examples are labels whose meanings were twisted many years after they were first used.
"Does it really matter if I interpret the Genesis story to be a bit less literal than some ID proponents might claim?"
To us? Not even a little bit. I don't think you'll find anyone who has a problem with someone who believes that Genesis is a metaphor for God creating the universe. Sure, you might get flack from some hard-line athiests for beliving in god at all but nobody had a problem with the idea that "god created man in some way" (since it's essentially unprovable) until a bunch of crazy fuckwits started a concerted political campaign to impose their particular literal interpretation of the same on everyone else.
To the Creationists? You'd better believe it - why else would they spend years (and millions of dollars) campaigning to get evolutions replaced with their pet dogma? Everyone's got to believe exactly the same baseless irrational minority interpretation as them, period. Not only that, but they have to dress their favourite dogmas up and besmirch the good name of "science" to do it.
"Also, the thing about say studying stem cells has NOTHING to do with Intelligent Design. It has to do with something called medical ethics - and something called the Hippocratic oath. The issue at stake is when is a person a person by legal rights - does using stem cells from aborted fetuses or harvesting them constitute abuse of someone's human rights or are they not really a human yet because they haven't been born?"
Well, the utilitarian in me says that if they've already been aborted then the harm has a
"First of all, blindly jumping on the "lets all use xhtml even though we don't know why" bandwagon doesn't improve your site, or its ranking."
Actually, in this thread I and others have given several reasons why to use XHTML, although this is an irrelevent side-point to my original post that you've taken out of context and straw-manned into its central point.
You'll notice I only even mentioned XHTML once in my entire first post, and even then the central point was to give the OP a language which (because of its strict semantics) makes it easier for him to ensure his code validates.
Validation is the key, not XHTML, but your knee-jerk "I believe that XHTML has no purpose in existing therefore anyone who recommends it for anything ever must be a raving XHTML bigot" reaction has successfully skewed the entire ensuing debate round to your pet irritation.
"Just repeating the "search engines prefer valid xhtml" lie doesn't magically make it so."
Nope, but when you've spent 18 months working as an SEOer, monitoring the forums and message-boards daily and hanging on the mysterious GoogleGuy's every word, then I'll be inclined to believe you're up to speed on current developments, and aren't just spouting off from some half-remembered bit of knowledge picked up a year ago and still assumed to be current.
So far you've disagreed with several assertions I've made which are also the assertions of the majority of the competent SEO industry, impugned my technical abilities, insulted me personally and made several statements I know from my own experience to be incorrect and/or outdated. You've also failed to provide a single coherent argument to support a single thing you've said, a single piece of evidence, or even claimed an (admittedly easily-faked) background in SEO to give your words the slightest iota of credibility.
I doubt I'll be replying to any more of your posts, unless you become a lot more compelling in your approach.
"Second, its easy to stuff your site with keywords using any tag, why do you think the alt attribute of img tags is so special?"
Sorry? Almost all attributes of almost all tags are completely ignored by any half-competent spider, that's why. "Alt attributes" is a convenient shorthand for "ALT", "TITLE" and a handful of other attributes spread over several different tags which aren't ignored out-of-hand, that's why I'm only talking about "alt attributes".
So, no, you can't "stuff your site with keywords with any tag", since most tags don't have attributes which are even indexed by spiders.
It's also not immediately clear whether you're even differentiating here between "text wrapped in tags" (which is normal content) and "text occurring in attributes of tags" (which isn't normal content, and is the object of this debate). I assume you know the difference, but if not I really can't be bothered to start trying to educate you on something so basic.
Oh, and alt is a mandatory attribute for img and area tags (and is optional for input and applet) - it's not just "the alt attribute of img tags", it's "the alt attribute in general" we're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Hahahahahah. Good one.
Since when have Microsoft OSs not been slow and resource-hungry? And when did Apple ever not prioritize elegance and performance?
Careful - your fanboyism's showing.
Erm, a long time. Apple needs to differentiate itself from Microsoft to retain its market share. Moving to an Intel architecture was a risky step, as it deprived them of one of their major differentiating factors, PPC architecture.
The minute Apple runs on commodity PC hardware no-one has any reason to buy expensive Mac hardware, so they won't. This takes Apple out of the hardware game, and makes them entirely reliant on software and iPods. Mac OS/X will then compete directly with Windows, and though it's faster, more stable and more secure, Windows has that whole 90%+ market share thing going for it. Apple would be squished in short order.
Sorry? If Apple wants to make OS/X run on commodity PC hardware it's going to have exactly the same problems. Sure, it could arbitrarily draw a line in the sand and refuse to support hardware older than X years, but that's not going to impress anyone used to Windows' (at least passable) support for legacy PC peripherals.
And even if the problems weren't as severe as MS's in the short term, by giving up control over the hardware OS/X runs on, Apple will be ensuring it only gets worse in the future, until within a few years they'll be just as stuffed as MS.
Riiiiight, because Ballmer et al are reknowned industry-wide as cuddly, fluffy-wuffy teddy-bears.
Certainly MS is looking shakier than it has for a long time, but I doubt the paranoia level's decreased much since Bill left.
Very poetic.
Except, of course, the dinosaurs actually kept the "mice" down for millions of years, and it was only once the dinosaurs had already naturally gone extinct on their own that the mice even had a chance. There's nothing like a bad analogy to really demonstrate you don't know what you're talking about...
This is probably the only mildly sensible thing in the entire article.
What, you mean the guys who failed to put a dent in it for the last twenty years? Sorry Mac guys and girls, but when a cash-poor FOSS operating system written by a bunch of hobbyists frightens MS more than a long-term competitor, you obviously aren't competing quite as hard as you think.
A better candidate than Apple?
Linux (free, doesn't have to worry about profits or budgets, has been eating MS's lunch for years on the server-side
Well, I think that being forced to open their protocols and APIs was considered punishment enought for that.
The >1 billion USD fine is for being found guilty of the above, and then not even complying with their legally-decided punishment.
This is important - MS are not being fined >1 billion for their antitrust issues. They're being fined because they clearly consider themselves above the law, and will quite happily disobey the legal authority of an entire continent.
Why would they need to do that? Microsoft hasn't deceived anyone - they just haven't been open and forthright about their protocols... after being instructed to do so by the highest legal court in Europe.
Yes, but the information they've released
1. Is a punishment for anticompetitive behaviour, intended to allow competitors to interoperate with Microsoft systems.
2. Is incomplete (so the interoperability requirement is not adequately met)
3. Was wrapped in restrictive licences which basically excluded OSS, one of their most feared competitors (so the competitor requirement was not adequately met)
4. Was offered for-pay (so the punishment requirement was not adequately met).
What part of this don't you get?
No, they've released incomplete information, when the order was to allow competitors to compete on a level playing field. That means the competitors should know as much about the protocols and APIs as Microsoft's other divisions do. As long as the information is incomplete Microsoft knows something no-one else does, so they have an advantage. This is supposed to remove the avantage. It has not in fact done so. Are we getting it yet?
A simple analogy:
I have been stealing from your bank account for years.
The court orders me to give it my PIN number so it can withdraw funds from my account and redress the balance a bit.
I look it up in my paperwork, find it, smile earnestly and tell them my PIN number is "6-something-something-2"
There - I've released information on my PIN number, I've spent time doing so. That time, and any e-mails/letters/employee hours I use to comply have a monetary value associated with them, so I can even claim I've spent money doing it.
Nevertheless, what I've given you is incomplete, useless, and the resources I put into producing it are negligible compared to what I gain by not actually doing what I've been ordered to.
If the court now fines me for my downright fucking cheek, do I have a right to sympathy?
If you're in court and you're ordered to do something by a judge, and you refuse, and the judge penalises you for it, is that unfair?
The judge isn't the plaintiff here - that's Real Networks (etc). The judge is only "one side" in this argument because Microsoft have already disobeyed a direct order given by the judge. It was a dispute between two normal parties, and Microsoft lost. They then refused (or, more accurately, did squat-all then stood around with expressions of injured innocence) after being instructed to make reparations. The judge then fined them for their actions.
There's no sympathy for Microsoft appropriate here - they were ruled against, then petulantly decided to take the fight to the presiding legal authority rather than just accepting their loss and getting on with it.
That has to be the single most uninformed, baseless statement I've ever read, even on Slashdot. Thank you - you have now set a new all-time low for uninformed opinion in my experience.
Define "well-known". Echelon wasn't "well known" until the French government sued the USA, forcing the whole thing into the public spotlight.
Well known to conspiracy buffs and spookwatchers != well known to the general public.
Thus, attempting to divert scandal by claiming everyone already knew about it is invalid, because "everyone" didn't.
So what? By having to point to 9/11 as the reason for the program, the US govt. basically admitted that even monitoring calls which only had one end in the USA was unacceptable without a bloody good reason.
You don't get to side-step the issue by claiming "oh, well, it's justified anyway". If the majority of the US population thought that it would be justified then Bush et al wouldn't have had to invoke 9/11 - they would just have gone ahead and done it and everyone would have approved. The fact they offered 9/11 as a justification shows:
1) According to the majority of people, it's not alright for the government to baselessly listen in to their calls, even if they're doing something treasonous like daring to talk to someone in another country.
2) America is (or at least, is supposed to be) a democracy. If something's totally unacceptable to the majority of people, it shouldn't be allowed, period.
3) The Bush government knew this, and tried to weasel out of it by presenting the NSA wiretapping effort as a response to 9/11, when in fact it was already operational and 9/11 was just a convenient excuse.
Again: if the country agreed with you it was justified, 9/11 wouldn't have entered into the discussion.
Thin end of the wedge, anyone? Just like the PATRIOT Act and all the new anti-terrorism powers were only to be used to stop terrorism... not to clamp down on demonstrators, compile dossiers on known dissidents, prevent people exercising their rights to free speech and peaceable assembly, etc, etc, etc.
NO law insures privacy for international calls especially from a government trying to protect us from mass murderers.
Lightning kills more people a year in the USA than terrorism, even now. More young soldiers were killed in Iraq II and Afghanistan than in several decades of sustained terrorist action on US soil. Where are the NSA wiretaps on weather stations, and natty US government "weather threat level" traffic-lights?
Get a sense of proportion.
And although I'm not an American, I believe that your laws are supposed to guarantee your rights except in very specific cases - ie, "you can do what you like, and the government can only interfere in situations X and Y".
You seem to be implying that your entire legal code is framed in terms of "The government can do what it likes to you, except for situations X and Y". This is a very different system, and one which makes it almost impossible to have a free, democratic society.
Are you sure you mean what you're implying?
What, the Dutch Mariah Carey Association? What do they have to do with it?
;-p
Basically, yes.
AOL always sucked balls. They invented nothing of consequence, and offered a bastardised, censored parody of "being online" to people who didn't know any better. Plus, for every "someone's mom" they helped get onto the internets, they also allowed on a spammer, a script kiddie and at least three forum-fuckwits.
Oh, except that they didn't get people onto the net - they got them onto their own proprietary walled garden, and then dragged their feet for years about giving people proper unfiltered net access. Seriously dude - if AOL was so great why have people left it in droves since its heyday to go and get "real" ISPs?
And had AOL never come along of course you'd still be e-mailing your mum now. You'd have just had to get her a slightly more complex setup that would have required her to learn to click on three or four icons to send a message, rather than just on two or three. My aunty's online and has been for years - she knows next to nothing about computers, but after a couple of demos and one or two post-it notes she never had trouble dialling in through WinSock and using Eudora to send mail.
Zip disks weren't a bad idea, but excessive prices (who'd you have to sleep with to get 100MB for $10?), crappy marketing and a communicable hardware failure is easily enough for their position. FWIW I had a Zip drive and always got on well with it, but you can't claim they were brilliant product.
Pointcast sucked from day 1 - it was all marketing hype about "push" technology, and rapidly got banned from its own target market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast
Seriously dude - just because something's an interesting idea doesn't make it a good product. A good product achieves success by being well-executed and useful, and I don't think anyone can claim those properties for AOL, Zip drives or Pointcast.
When you say "somewhat short time frame" are you possibly referring to the 19-year gap between when Compuserve first started offering online services to customers in 1978, and when they were purchased by AOL, c.1997
Also:
BASIC was designed as a teaching language, and while it was easy to learn its use of things like GOTOs meant it even sucked at that, encouraging bad programming practice long after it was generally recognised to be bad. Ok, maybe BASIC only allowed (and didn't punish) bad programming practice, but in the context of a teaching language the two things are pretty much equivalent.
VB was always a shitty language, that carried on teaching bad programming practice. VB encouraged an entire generation of bad coders to write bad code, and because it was so easy the coders often never even realised how bad they truly were. (Contrast in C/C++, where if you're a bad coder you know all about it, because the language doesn't try to hold your hand and wipe your arse all the time).
The only thing MS could do to make VB.NET remotely credible as a "serious" language (C/C++/C#/Java/whatever) was to... break backwards-compatibility and re-write it completely so it looked almost exactly like all the other serious languages.
Every new version of VB seems a little more credible, and every version tends it more in the direction of C/C++/C#/Java.
You do the math.
Indeed. However, in my personal experience I often end up spending longer patching up, bug-fixing and extending somebody's lame two-hour lashed-up "my first database" or "my first VB app" than it would take me to re-write it from scratch, to more reliably make available the current functionality and allow for quicker modifications in the future.
By way of illustration, by all means bring in a plumber to sort out your pipework - it's his job to ensure you the user get the water you need. Just don't expect him to be happy or complimentary when you get him in to fix up some ham-fisted uneducated idiot's attempt to rig up your pipework using cardboard tubes and Krazy Glue.
Again, what the GPP said: I don't try to fix my car with elastic bands and wood-glue, and if I'm uneducated enough to do so I don't blame the mechanic for getting irritated with me for making his job harder than if he'd done the whole thing.
Amen to that, on every single point.
Nobody said programmers are smarter than the average person, only that (good) programmers are trained to think more clearly and rigorously.
They generally do better at task decomposition, follow trains of thought to their conclusion (instead of subconsciously going "well, that looks like it'll work" and stopping) and recognise assumptions as liabilities (unlike many people, who often view "assumptions" as equivalent to "facts").
I've mixed with programmers and non-programmers for many years, and (without wanting to make a value judgement) have noticed that while there isn't necessarily a difference in intelligence or creativity, people with a history of writing code often just think more clearly.
They can often decompose a task more quickly and completely[1], they make fewer irreversible mistakes when making plans (or producing initial designs), and they can lay out solutions more clearly.
This could be caused by one of two things (or, I suppose, a combination thereof):
1) They say if you want to be sure you know a subject try to explain it to someone else. The stupider or more naive the target of the explanation, the better you have to know the subject, and you won't find a student a lot more stupid (or with fewer built-in assumptions) than a computer. Thus, programmers are forced to analyse problems down to the very lowest level, and to ensure they've considered all the edge-cases and "what ifs".
Non-programmers generally interact with other people, who (already full of assumptions and prior knowledge) simply never force them to analyse things to that degree.
If I want you to make a cup of tea, I say "Make a cup of tea?". If I want a computer to make me a cup of tea I have to consider everything from the hardware design of the system's effectors to how to encapsulate the concept of "cup" in the computer's processing. Don't tell me one doesn't require clearer thinking than the other, and don't tell me practice doesn't make perfect.
2) Alternatively, maybe people who are good at task-decomposition and clear-thinking are naturally attracted to programming.
Either way, though, you've got a class of people who are statistically likely to be better than average at these skills.
Thus, encouraging people who lack these skills is going to bring the average quality of code down, and from the viewpoint of a programmer is going to result in the existence of a lot of ugly code.
I have to say, I'm not against the idea of opening up the shallow end of the development process to less-technical users, and other analytical professions may teach the same skills (almost?) just as well. However, if you're claiming Joe Average Sixpack can write code or design systems as well as a good, experienced programmer then I'd guess you've either never seen a really good programmer at work or you've bought into the trendy modern War on Expertise that Western culture has been waging in the background[2].
Sure, make the tools available so even Joe Q. Public can write code. Just accept that he's going to write an awful lot of inefficient, bug-ridden shit and accept that he's going to have even less respect for an often-difficult profession because "he's a programmer now too, and it's easy"[3].
Footnotes:
[1] Give a non-programmer and a programmer a sheet of paper each, and ask them to write out the instructions for making a cup of tea in as much detail as possible - five gets you ten the programmer's list of instructions is at least three times longer than the Average Joe's. Any one of those assumed steps could stuff up the whole process (who says there's water in the kettle? Who says there's even a kettle in the kitchen?), and programmers have been trained by experience to assume nothing (well, to know which assumptions are reasonable, and how to handle ones which aren't met).
[2] Also known as "everyone has an opinion, so any opinion is as good as any other".
[3] I think this is where most of
"shouldn't an os have the ability to play common files though?"
No, that's an application's job.
There's no reason your application can't interface with your window manager so it looks like part of the "OS" to uneducated users, but fundamentally an OS should sit between the apps and the metal, and that's it. The moment your OS starts doing app-like stuff it's getting bloated, and then where do you stop? Displaying images? Videos? Allowing you to browse the web? Rendering CAD scenes?
"playing a file that renders moving pictures on my screen seems like natural ability to an operating system to me. maybe i'm just spoiled and brainwashed by MS."
I'm afraid so.
"i also can see how that is an abuse of a monopoly, but why is the EU so freaked out about it? you'd think WMP comes bundled with kiddie porn or something."
It's an abuse of their monopoly, so it's bad by definition - your statement is like asking (subtract the hyperbole) "what's wrong with murder?". Monopolies restrict choice, and effectively replace the self-improving evolution of a free market with a single, compulsory choice. With no competition there's no impulse to improve, so the entire field tends to stagnate; just look at IE between burying Netscape and the widespread adoption of Firefox - there was almost zero real improvement for years.
Monopolies are harmful by definition, but they can be tolerated as long as they stay in their niche, and there's no a lot anyone can do about Microsoft's current desktop monopoly. By illegally leveraging that to gain a monopoly in other areas they extend their monopoly and squeeze out choice in yet another field.
If you still don't see the point take it to absurd lengths and imagine a world where every product, service and media item is produced by one single monolithic corporation. Most people would instinctively be uncomfortable with this idea - power corrupts..., and all that.
"and didn't quicktime and realplayer both suck pretty bad? i know i hated realplayer."
RealPlayer and Quicktime have crappy user-interfaces, but the underlying codecs are actually very well-designed.
They just let the marketing wonks design (and in Quicktime's case, artificially limit) the user-interface, and their crappy design decisions (what, no fullscreen in QT unless I buy it? Fuck off) combined with MS's improvements to WMP effectively relegated them to niche applications.
I've got to say, I don't have a lot of sympathy for Apple or Real on this point - sure it's nice to see Microsoft getting reined in a bit, but the QT and RealPlayer applications were so shitty that one half-decent alternative player should have toppled them anyway, even without free bundling and a desktop monopoly behind it.
I don't even think it's his directing abilities that actually executes the coup-de-grace, it's his complete failure to grasp that filmmaking should be an art, not an exercise in fucking economics.
From TFA:
Boll says the point is that his movies get better as his career progresses - Dungeon Siege is "ten times better" than BloodRayne, which is ten times better than House of the Dead, and so on.
So fucking what? Since when, outside of primary school, did grown-up adults get "points for trying"?
Grow up and stop whining. If you're producing art and it's shit, you're a shit artist, end of story. As a paying punter I don't give a fuck if your latest film is only one tenth as crap as the one before it - it's still crap, and I'm out of pocket because of it. Add to that the fact that you've also effectively just destroyed the chance of anyone ever using $MY_FAVOURITE_FRANCHISE again, to make a good film that I'd actually like to see, and you've actually managed made a negative artistic contribution to the world, you tool.
"People say BloodRayne has a very bad IMDB rating - yes, but how many votes of zero points were made before the movie was out, by people who hate me but haven't even seen the movie?
Well, let's see, shall we? Hmmm, picking Halo, somebody else's currently-in-production film mentioned later in the article...
Ah yes, as I suspected, I can't even find a way to rate it because it's not released yet and it would be fucking retarded if IMDB let you rate unreleased films.
More baseless "poor little me" whining. Moving on...
And besides, says Boll, what exactly is it that we are expecting from him? After all, he is using videogames as his source material, and they're hardly reknowned for their complex characterisations and sophisticated narratives.
Yes, but that's why successful adaptations take the source material and weave a story into it. Games are not big on story, but movies are. Here's a hint: do you distribute the movie with a keyboard so the audience can click menu-options to advance dialogue? To you make movies which have multiple, branching storylines? How about movies where you can download free content from the producer after you buy it, and get extra goodies to extend the life of the film?
No, because movies and games are different media. What works for one doesn't work for another, and as the adapter it's up to you as director or screenwriter to make that adaptation. Nobody makes TV adverts showing a 30-second clip of a really good magazine advert, so why the fuck do you think it's appropriate to claim the same is justified for games?
Us games journalists, Boll argues, should be pleased that videogame-based movies are getting made at all. "It's tough to convince someone from the studio system to believe in a videogame-based movie.
Yes, because of fucking tools like you who ensure that every one that manages to get crapped out by a studio is shallow, mindless shite. They look at game adaptations in the past, see they're ill-received shit and run scared. And you're seeking to address this by squatting out movies you've as good as admitted are crap?
"And all my movies, no matter what reviewers are saying, are getting sold."
"Apparently Boll is "number one in the market" as far as paying investors back goes, and that's "Not because I make the best movies on earth, but I make movies for a minimal amount of budget compared to what major companies are spending,"
"This is the main point - if the movie is really, really bad, why are a hundred territories buying it?"
"So if people are writing on the Internet about how my movies were big failures, it's because these people are amateurs and they have no idea of the reality of film-making and film selling.
"I personally think that with the budget they've planned, Halo will be a failure
Yeah, this means nothing at all, right? I mean, everyone knows Perl's just as hard to learn as C/C++, right? And it takes you exactly the same amount of time to jump through all the hoops coding something in strictly-typed, anally-retentive, compiled C/C++ than hacking it together quickly in a loosely-typed Perl script.
Oh, and scripted languages' memory management saves exactly zero development and testing time over non-memory-managed languages, too, while simultaneously not helping you at all to avoid memory leaks and other nasty hard-to-debug errors. And CPAN stores phenomenally huge amounts of pre-written plug-in-and-go code for both Perl and C/C++, right? And...
Either we haven't ever written a line of code in C/C++ or Perl, or we didn't think before we posted...
Disclaimer: I first learned to code in C/C++, so I harbour it no ill-will at all. Nevertheless, anyone seriously suggesting that Perl won't save you time over C/C++ in the short-term is insane. Of course, a non-trivial project where C/C++'s strict typing and formal style produces big wins is another matter, but when the context's "getting something up on the screen and working" it's simply no contest.
"Honestly I have never really had a problem with the FUD. There are so many articles and studies surrounding Linux that its fairly simple to dig up better studies, or facts showing why the biased ones are biased."
The problem I always run into is that your average Board-member (hell, even managers) would rather believe the FUD they read in their respectable paper Business trade publication from some highly-paid Microsoft PR shill, than the advice of a whole continent full of talented, educated "on-line technical types", or articles from "techie magazines".
The problem is that PR shills wear suits, write for prestigious (or prestigious-sounding) magazines and give incorrect but extremely simple answers. Technical types then have to politely but firmly disabuse their bosses of these beguiling-but-wrong misconceptions.
Many mangement types don't rate idea on a scale from good to bad, but on a scale from "this makes me happy" to "this makes me uncomfortable/fearful/confused". Thus, the PR shills make them Happy, because they get a simple, (incorrect) and understandable answer, which makes them feel like they've got a handle on the situation, and are therefore empowered and In Control. Technical types then have to explain some of the intricacies of the issue to demonstrate why this "solution" is wrong, causing Uncomfortableness. This process introduces details (which makes them Confused), and confronts the manager with the fact they've believed pretty stories which aren't actually true (which makes them Fearful - what else is wrong with their opinions?).
At this point they have a choice - either drop their opinion, knuckle down and learn about the subject (which requires effort and discomfort), drop their opinion and follow the advice of whoever is paid to know the stuff (which means they lose Control), or keep their opinion, stay In Control and mentally dismiss anything that doesn't fit with their position.
A depressingly large fraction of managers will therefore simply refuse to be proven wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, because it's psychologically more comfortable for them to live in a warm, pink fluffy world of denial. Importantly, as long as they can justify this to another person in their own warm pink denial bubble with beguiling-but-irrelevant arguments (eg, "We should always use Microsoft/IBM, because they're the industry leader", "We avoid open-source because it's produced by amateurs and hobbyists") they'll get away with it forever - the only people who actually experience any problem as a result are the technical types who actually have to abide by the decision, and any resulting project failures can then safely be blamed on them. In fact, by passing on these wrong-but-comfortable memes to colleagues and superiors who don't know any better the denier also gives that person a false sense of being more in control, further propagating the process.
This often happens at the subconscious level - they aren't completely aware they're thinking emotionally instead of logically, so logical arguments will merely bounce off their bubble and leave nary a dent. Importantly, the act of having their beliefs challenged also makes them uncomfortable (since it pushes closer to their conscious mind the fact that those opinions are based in emotion rather than logic), and this discomfort is then automatically (and subconsciously) blamed on the technical type who tried to correct their opinion. Or even worse, on "all technical types" as a group - they're stigmatised (and hence ignored) as obstructive detail-obsessed nit-pickers, when in actual fact some of those details can determine the success or failure of an entire project.
And once you're identified as "a member of that group that makes them feel uncomfortable, fearful and confused" they'll automatically trivialise anything that comes from that group, allowing them to sink further into denial and making it harder to reach them next time.
"Remember, these are the same fuckers that sued the Boy Scounts over a red cross on their "Emergency Preparedness" merit badge; the cross is now green, and has been since 1980."
How stupid of the Scouts. Next time just claim your badge/computer game healthpack/first-aid kit is labelled with an English flag, and tell them to fuck off.
Be fair - this wasn't constructive criticism, or suggestions as to how to improve the product before launch. And even if it had been, the professional/correct forum to express such feelings in in a private meeting, to another employee who can effect change.
Bitching to another employee who can't do anything is counter-productive and reduces morale (and should be handled with a polite request not to disillusion colleagues), and bitching in a public forum should be slapped for gross indiscretion.
This was an out-and-out hatchet job on the new console and everything it stood for, is exactly the kind of thing that could sway early adopters and opinion-formers, and was issued by a fundamentally unqualified artist who was merely looking on, not even one of the dev guys working on the actual system.
I don't know about you, but I'll quite often swear at and really slate whatever I'm working on when I hit a bug or get frustrated, even if (otherwise) I actually quite like/respect the system.
This goes double for when I'm learning a new system (y'know, like how the Cell is a fundamentally different architecture to the entire X86 line), since everything that works differently to the way I expect it to is initially labelled a "fuck up" or "stupid idea", then may later be downgraded to "acceptable difference" (or sometimes even "wonderful idea sorely lacking from $old_system") once I'm more familiar with it and understand why it's been done that way.
Hell, I hated RegExps when I first ran across them - over-complicated, opaque and bizarre. Now I can hardly bear to code in a language without them. Does that mean RegExps are actually stupid?
If someone listened to what I said and gave it the credence of a carefully considered, authoritative opinion, they'd decide that whatever I was working on was shit, when in actual fact it might be pretty good, I'm just not Getting It yet, and I'm just sounding off to relieve frustration.
Taking these second-hand comments, treating them as authoritative statements of fact about the system and broadcasting them to the world with the added authority of "an insider" is Just fucking Stupid.
Did he deserve to lose his job? Maybe not. Did he pretty much ask for some kind of smack-down? Hell yes.
No, no... I think if you think about it, you'll realise that that's the past.
Ah, but why do those people form small groups? Why, after living in a small, tightly-knit community for many years, do they fragment into smaller, family-based groups? Why do these groups then exhibit hostility towards each other?
Possibly because the presence of those elected officials establish the expectation of a "safe" society that allows these groups to mix, and then police their interactions?
I know you were going for a cheap "hah, aren't scientists stupid - look what else it could have been" poo-fling, but:
1) The example you give ties in with the example they give, and
2) Did you really think they didn't think of this too, if it was remotely likely?
FWIW, monkeys in the wild may have "friends" or family members killed at any moment. Put a modern family in that situation and you'll have a lifestyle dominated by paranoia, fortification and aggression beyond anything you see in monkey-culture.
Humans != monkeys
Human society != monkey lifestyle
Human expectations != monkey expectations
Human reactions != monkey reactions
But, I'll agree, anthropomorphising is fun.
Hey, he invented a wheel. Apparently without knowing that it had already been invented, or anything about how it worked. From first principles. What have you invented recently?
Sure, people don't find invention as impressive if someone else's already done it before, but if the re-inventor didn't know about it, and came up with it himself from first principles, it's still deserving of respect.
True. However, flaunting their stupendous cash reserves by spending $120 million a year in a vain attempt to "look smaller" isn't going to do anything but give people ammunition.
Aside from Wal-Mart, the MPAA/RIAA (and IBM, but only really to techies), Microsoft is practically synonymous with big business. News stories about them spending huge multiples of what the average person earns in a lifetime, every year, to try to give the opposite impression... well, it isn't really going to work...
"First of all, i'd like to make it clear that believing in Intelligent Design or in Creationism does NOT in any way prohibit ideas such as evolution, understanding how bees fly, or any other scientific fact that you want to explain."
It depends how you define "Creationism". If you take it to mean "the idea that God, through some unspecified mechanism, created the universe and hence, transitively, everything in it", you're right. However, you're also in the minority.
If you take it to mean "God created the earth in 4004 BC, provided a bunch of fake evidence to convince the most intelligent of us that the world is really much older, and made Adam and Eve from clay literally as it depicts in Genesis", then you're not.
The problem is that while there are plenty of intelligent religious people who take the first position, the idiot vocal minority who stage confrontational headline-grabbing stunts like pushing ID (philosophy!) into science lessons (or having evolution removed from them) mean that when most people hear the words "creationist" or "ID" they think of the second.
To compound this, most religious people I know don't self-identify as "Creationist" or "ID", because, when you think about it, everyone who believes in a mainstream religion believes God created and designed them. A "Creationist Christian" is therefore a tautology. In contrast, the headline-grabbing lunatic fringe are always identified (and self-identify) as "Creationists", or "Intelligent Design" proponents.
Thus, to the majority of people "Creationist" means one of those "dinosaurs coexisted with cavemen and the appendix is just god's little joke" idiots who wouldn't know a metaphorical account of man's acquisition of self-awareness if someone helpfully wrote it out in a big book and gave it to them to learn from.
Is it fair that popular perception has twisted the meaning, so that people like you who self-identify as Creationist/ID are now assumed to be literal-interpretation idiots? No it isn't, but then it's hardly new either - try talking to a "hacker", or anyone who thought of themself as cheerful and "gay".
In fact, it's probably even fairer than the examples I just gave, because the term "Creationist" and "Intelligent Design" didn't really exist until they was coined to describe the lunatic fringe they currently do, whereas the other examples are labels whose meanings were twisted many years after they were first used.
"Does it really matter if I interpret the Genesis story to be a bit less literal than some ID proponents might claim?"
To us? Not even a little bit. I don't think you'll find anyone who has a problem with someone who believes that Genesis is a metaphor for God creating the universe. Sure, you might get flack from some hard-line athiests for beliving in god at all but nobody had a problem with the idea that "god created man in some way" (since it's essentially unprovable) until a bunch of crazy fuckwits started a concerted political campaign to impose their particular literal interpretation of the same on everyone else.
To the Creationists? You'd better believe it - why else would they spend years (and millions of dollars) campaigning to get evolutions replaced with their pet dogma? Everyone's got to believe exactly the same baseless irrational minority interpretation as them, period. Not only that, but they have to dress their favourite dogmas up and besmirch the good name of "science" to do it.
"Also, the thing about say studying stem cells has NOTHING to do with Intelligent Design. It has to do with something called medical ethics - and something called the Hippocratic oath. The issue at stake is when is a person a person by legal rights - does using stem cells from aborted fetuses or harvesting them constitute abuse of someone's human rights or are they not really a human yet because they haven't been born?"
Well, the utilitarian in me says that if they've already been aborted then the harm has a
"First of all, blindly jumping on the "lets all use xhtml even though we don't know why" bandwagon doesn't improve your site, or its ranking."
Actually, in this thread I and others have given several reasons why to use XHTML, although this is an irrelevent side-point to my original post that you've taken out of context and straw-manned into its central point.
You'll notice I only even mentioned XHTML once in my entire first post, and even then the central point was to give the OP a language which (because of its strict semantics) makes it easier for him to ensure his code validates.
Validation is the key, not XHTML, but your knee-jerk "I believe that XHTML has no purpose in existing therefore anyone who recommends it for anything ever must be a raving XHTML bigot" reaction has successfully skewed the entire ensuing debate round to your pet irritation.
"Just repeating the "search engines prefer valid xhtml" lie doesn't magically make it so."
Nope, but when you've spent 18 months working as an SEOer, monitoring the forums and message-boards daily and hanging on the mysterious GoogleGuy's every word, then I'll be inclined to believe you're up to speed on current developments, and aren't just spouting off from some half-remembered bit of knowledge picked up a year ago and still assumed to be current.
So far you've disagreed with several assertions I've made which are also the assertions of the majority of the competent SEO industry, impugned my technical abilities, insulted me personally and made several statements I know from my own experience to be incorrect and/or outdated. You've also failed to provide a single coherent argument to support a single thing you've said, a single piece of evidence, or even claimed an (admittedly easily-faked) background in SEO to give your words the slightest iota of credibility.
I doubt I'll be replying to any more of your posts, unless you become a lot more compelling in your approach.
"Second, its easy to stuff your site with keywords using any tag, why do you think the alt attribute of img tags is so special?"
Sorry? Almost all attributes of almost all tags are completely ignored by any half-competent spider, that's why. "Alt attributes" is a convenient shorthand for "ALT", "TITLE" and a handful of other attributes spread over several different tags which aren't ignored out-of-hand, that's why I'm only talking about "alt attributes".
So, no, you can't "stuff your site with keywords with any tag", since most tags don't have attributes which are even indexed by spiders.
It's also not immediately clear whether you're even differentiating here between "text wrapped in tags" (which is normal content) and "text occurring in attributes of tags" (which isn't normal content, and is the object of this debate). I assume you know the difference, but if not I really can't be bothered to start trying to educate you on something so basic.
Oh, and alt is a mandatory attribute for img and area tags (and is optional for input and applet) - it's not just "the alt attribute of img tags", it's "the alt attribute in general" we're talking about.