The very first thing I thought of when I read the summary was those annoying cursors, graphical emotes, and the ton of Smiley Central-like websites that did the rounds a few years ago.
If Microsoft having a patent on this idea stops us having to put up with:
lol!! i just got an email with all the letters dancing and singing, and doing a poo on each other!! lol!! i'm going to forward on to everyone i know who won't give a fuck!!1 hahahaha!! lol!!!!
"The board "highly recommended" switching to Pascal/Delphi because it is stable and was designed to teach programming and problem solving. Teachers planning to use Java are warned that many universities are considering dropping it from their first year computer science programmes, "as has happened in the US"."
Okay, seriously - in London, where I work, I don't think any of these guys would be able to get a job once they had graduated. Job listings I have looked at demand the following skills:
Java (with Spring, Hibernate, Multi-threading, low latency, Swing, Junit)
C#
C/C++ (financial organizations still turn to C for high volume number crunching)
Unix / Linux (are they going to drop this next???)
SQL (Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server)
Subversion, Clearcase, CVS
None of this stuff can be picked up quickly, so the earlier you start, the better. And, no offense, but I rarely - if ever - see a job listing requesting Pascal/Delphi.
Is this a case of dumbing down or are students just becoming lazy(-er)..?
So that's gone MIA, then? What's the current obsession with removing menu bars, creating "ribbon" interfaces and taking away stuff that has served us well for over 20 years..?
Not sure I like the look of that new interface. Aint broke, don't fix it.
God, have I learned that lesson the painful way. Two weeks post-release seems to be the best bet. That way, one avoids the entire downgrade to the previous version, when you recover something has gone hideous wrong.
Problem is that I'm often like a little kid at Christmas when it comes to releases. I usually want to install it RIGHT NOW, so I can enjoy all the cool new features and benefits...
... and then find myself up till about 2am on a school night, waiting for the crawling downloads to complete, since the repos are being banged harder than a barn door in a heavy wind.
"I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach"
Are you sure they were talking to Stephen Hawking and not Roland Emmerich? Because I swear this is the plot of Independence Day...
A lot of companies get themselves into a nice little rut where they will refuse to budge, unless their security / profits are affected. Give them a helping hand by forcing them to drop IE 6. After a while, the number of websites that will be throwing up road blocks in their faces will force them to upgrade.
Or migrate to Firefox, which would probably be better.
If you administer an Apache server, it's more-or-less as easy as,
Okay, I realise it's often more complicated than that, since they need to test / upgrade from WinXP, etc., there are costs and man power involved, but unless webmasters act on this, we could still be asking people to upgrade IE6 in 2015. Yes, even 9 months after official support ends on XP.
One of the major advantages that PSN has over Xbox is the fact that the online play is free.
I actually don't play games online a lot, but it's nice that it's there, so that I can dip in and out of it. It came in VERY handy during Demon's Souls.
What would be better is if the online play remained free and Sony offered a subscription model that allowed players access to game and movie rentals.
What if, for £5 per month, you could rent one PSN game and a couple of movies? Once you'd finished playing the game, you could relinquish your "lease" on it and download another. Something like this would likely have saved the Calling All Cars servers, which were shut down because no one was playing the game!
There are lots of games on PSN that I would play, but given that they cost about £10, are non-refundable and may actually turn out to be crap, I can't justify the risk.
The movie rental feature would be a great incentive, too. PSN offers a hell of a lot of movies to rent, but given that you can actually BUY a physical copy for less (Aliens: £3 on DVD; £6.99!!!! on PSN), it's not worth it.
Also, PSN needs to make renting movies the priority over selling-to-own. There are many films on there that I would much prefer to rent than buy.
One thing I see happening soon will be designer glasses to watch these TVs, etc. I imagine that brands such as Oakley, Police and Ray Ban will offer some damn expensive 3D specs to wear to the cinema, or to keep at home. Of course, being designer labels, they won't offer anything special over the cheap Real3D plastic ones that are dispensed already. They'll just be... fashionable.
Expect sometime over the next ten years to hear someone talking about his £85 Police 3D shades, to a girl who will suddenly want her own.
Seriously, it might sound really "anti-Microsoft" or being pathetic, but everyone should really either be blacklisting or reducing the available functionality of websites to users still browsing with MSIE 6.0
Reducing functionality and putting up a message to let users know that they need to upgrade, would be the best decision.
During 2003, when the whole dot com bubble bursting thing was going on, I was out of work. I'd been out of work for about 4 months, when I got a telephone interview request for a major online company that offers last minute deals.
I took the interview and talked to the hiring manager about all my experience, etc. I also spoke with the team lead and another developer, who all seemed very impressed with what I had done (I had previously worked for nearly 3 years at a retail bank). They asked me if I could come up to London the next day for a face to face interview, and for what would be the final round.
Great, eh? Pleased, I said I would see them the next day at 2pm. About 5 minutes after ending the call, the hiring manager called me back. He had one question for me.
"Sorry, Stephen, but could you tell me what degree you got?"
I told him I received a pass in Environmental Biology.
"Oh," he said. "Well, we're really looking for someone with a degree in computer science."
I was stunned. After answering all their question perfectly, THAT was the issue?!!
"So, you don't want me to come up tomorrow?" I said.
... if they'd simply added a clause to the End User License agreement to state that the hardware still belonged to them and the "owner" was merely "renting it":)
... a number of other OSS word processors support Open Document, so it'll be easy to just move over to one of those. KWord would be a good choice, since it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows, and the KDE developers would never do anything so radical and alienate their core users.
"as he's the sole administrator for the centos.org domain, the IRC channels, and apparently, CentOS funds"
That's a lot of responsibility for a single person. What would happen if, for example, he were to be hit by a bus one day?
I think this was a major argument Microsoft once had against open source projects: that the maintainer or whoever could just get up and leave it one day, because they got bored and decided to move on. There again, I guess that's true of real life jobs too. And, whilst it's possible for someone else to take over the role, the transition of knowledge and bringing said replacement up to speed wouldn't be an overnight thing.
"There are many better games to make movies from. (Deus Ex, Thief, Zelda, Golden Axe, heck - even Pitfall or Pac Man would be better)."
Dude, you're forgetting one thing - this is Hollywood making a movie out of a game. It matters little how good the original game was, the result will always be bad.
I've not seen a lot of them, but in the world of game-to-movie conversions I think that Mortal Kombat was the only half decent effort; and even that still made for eye watering viewing throughout most of it.
I'm one of those freaks that happily still pays for the music and movies that I love, but even I won't pay £25 for Dark Knight on Blu-Ray. The HMV stores that I go into have things like Kung Fu Panda, Iron Man, HellBoy 2 and a bunch of other films for £30 each. That's just fucking insane pricing.
I'd rather see newly released DVDs at £9.99 and Blu-Rays at £14.99 or lower, each. That way the stores could enjoy their little price wars and then I could pick up things like Watchmen and Star Trek for £12 or so each on Blu-Ray. I'd probably walk out the store with three films.
I appreciate that Blu-Ray is new(ish), but they really need to more readily adopt the pile-it-high and see-it-low approach now.
Either that or regularly offer 2 for £25 on Blu Rays, even for new releases.
Slashdot Mirror
The very first thing I thought of when I read the summary was those annoying cursors, graphical emotes, and the ton of Smiley Central-like websites that did the rounds a few years ago.
If Microsoft having a patent on this idea stops us having to put up with:
lol!! i just got an email with all the letters dancing and singing, and doing a poo on each other!! lol!! i'm going to forward on to everyone i know who won't give a fuck!!1 hahahaha!! lol!!!!
then they can keep it. It'll likely be about as successful and world changing as the Zune was, anyway.
"The board "highly recommended" switching to Pascal/Delphi because it is stable and was designed to teach programming and problem solving. Teachers planning to use Java are warned that many universities are considering dropping it from their first year computer science programmes, "as has happened in the US"."
Okay, seriously - in London, where I work, I don't think any of these guys would be able to get a job once they had graduated. Job listings I have looked at demand the following skills:
Java (with Spring, Hibernate, Multi-threading, low latency, Swing, Junit)
C#
C/C++ (financial organizations still turn to C for high volume number crunching)
Unix / Linux (are they going to drop this next???)
SQL (Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server)
Subversion, Clearcase, CVS
None of this stuff can be picked up quickly, so the earlier you start, the better. And, no offense, but I rarely - if ever - see a job listing requesting Pascal/Delphi.
Is this a case of dumbing down or are students just becoming lazy(-er)..?
So that's gone MIA, then? What's the current obsession with removing menu bars, creating "ribbon" interfaces and taking away stuff that has served us well for over 20 years..?
Not sure I like the look of that new interface. Aint broke, don't fix it.
God, have I learned that lesson the painful way. Two weeks post-release seems to be the best bet. That way, one avoids the entire downgrade to the previous version, when you recover something has gone hideous wrong.
Problem is that I'm often like a little kid at Christmas when it comes to releases. I usually want to install it RIGHT NOW, so I can enjoy all the cool new features and benefits...
... and then find myself up till about 2am on a school night, waiting for the crawling downloads to complete, since the repos are being banged harder than a barn door in a heavy wind.
"I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach"
Are you sure they were talking to Stephen Hawking and not Roland Emmerich? Because I swear this is the plot of Independence Day...
throws a chair at Google, using SuperPoke!
... and just start BLOCKING IT.
A lot of companies get themselves into a nice little rut where they will refuse to budge, unless their security / profits are affected. Give them a helping hand by forcing them to drop IE 6. After a while, the number of websites that will be throwing up road blocks in their faces will force them to upgrade.
Or migrate to Firefox, which would probably be better.
If you administer an Apache server, it's more-or-less as easy as,
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} MSIE\ ([56])\. /denied.php [R=302,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/denied.php$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$
Okay, I realise it's often more complicated than that, since they need to test / upgrade from WinXP, etc., there are costs and man power involved, but unless webmasters act on this, we could still be asking people to upgrade IE6 in 2015. Yes, even 9 months after official support ends on XP.
One of the major advantages that PSN has over Xbox is the fact that the online play is free.
I actually don't play games online a lot, but it's nice that it's there, so that I can dip in and out of it. It came in VERY handy during Demon's Souls.
What would be better is if the online play remained free and Sony offered a subscription model that allowed players access to game and movie rentals.
What if, for £5 per month, you could rent one PSN game and a couple of movies? Once you'd finished playing the game, you could relinquish your "lease" on it and download another. Something like this would likely have saved the Calling All Cars servers, which were shut down because no one was playing the game!
There are lots of games on PSN that I would play, but given that they cost about £10, are non-refundable and may actually turn out to be crap, I can't justify the risk.
The movie rental feature would be a great incentive, too. PSN offers a hell of a lot of movies to rent, but given that you can actually BUY a physical copy for less (Aliens: £3 on DVD; £6.99!!!! on PSN), it's not worth it.
Also, PSN needs to make renting movies the priority over selling-to-own. There are many films on there that I would much prefer to rent than buy.
One thing I see happening soon will be designer glasses to watch these TVs, etc. I imagine that brands such as Oakley, Police and Ray Ban will offer some damn expensive 3D specs to wear to the cinema, or to keep at home. Of course, being designer labels, they won't offer anything special over the cheap Real3D plastic ones that are dispensed already. They'll just be... fashionable.
Expect sometime over the next ten years to hear someone talking about his £85 Police 3D shades, to a girl who will suddenly want her own.
Damn... maybe I should start selling some!
Seriously, it might sound really "anti-Microsoft" or being pathetic, but everyone should really either be blacklisting or reducing the available functionality of websites to users still browsing with MSIE 6.0
Reducing functionality and putting up a message to let users know that they need to upgrade, would be the best decision.
After all, it's not as if there aren't any alternatives available...
Otherwise I might be really annoyed.
... that Google is now being held accountable to what is available on the internet. That should take them down a peg or two.
During 2003, when the whole dot com bubble bursting thing was going on, I was out of work. I'd been out of work for about 4 months, when I got a telephone interview request for a major online company that offers last minute deals.
I took the interview and talked to the hiring manager about all my experience, etc. I also spoke with the team lead and another developer, who all seemed very impressed with what I had done (I had previously worked for nearly 3 years at a retail bank). They asked me if I could come up to London the next day for a face to face interview, and for what would be the final round.
Great, eh? Pleased, I said I would see them the next day at 2pm. About 5 minutes after ending the call, the hiring manager called me back. He had one question for me.
"Sorry, Stephen, but could you tell me what degree you got?"
I told him I received a pass in Environmental Biology.
"Oh," he said. "Well, we're really looking for someone with a degree in computer science."
I was stunned. After answering all their question perfectly, THAT was the issue?!!
"So, you don't want me to come up tomorrow?" I said.
"No, sorry," he replied, and hung up.
"c'mon man, that's just gay. We don't do gay here."
Said the anonymous coward.
... if they'd simply added a clause to the End User License agreement to state that the hardware still belonged to them and the "owner" was merely "renting it" :)
... a number of other OSS word processors support Open Document, so it'll be easy to just move over to one of those. KWord would be a good choice, since it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows, and the KDE developers would never do anything so radical and alienate their core users.
Oh... wait...
"As if by magic, the Cent OS Admin appeared."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Benn
"as he's the sole administrator for the centos.org domain, the IRC channels, and apparently, CentOS funds"
That's a lot of responsibility for a single person. What would happen if, for example, he were to be hit by a bus one day?
I think this was a major argument Microsoft once had against open source projects: that the maintainer or whoever could just get up and leave it one day, because they got bored and decided to move on. There again, I guess that's true of real life jobs too. And, whilst it's possible for someone else to take over the role, the transition of knowledge and bringing said replacement up to speed wouldn't be an overnight thing.
"or are even suspected of file-sharing."
That's a blatant infringement on one's human rights, which states that everyone is entitled to a fair trial.
The ISP could get into a lot of shit over that alone.
You know, with odds like this the popcorn fun will come from watching how badly it bombs at box office.
"There are many better games to make movies from. (Deus Ex, Thief, Zelda, Golden Axe, heck - even Pitfall or Pac Man would be better)."
Dude, you're forgetting one thing - this is Hollywood making a movie out of a game. It matters little how good the original game was, the result will always be bad.
I've not seen a lot of them, but in the world of game-to-movie conversions I think that Mortal Kombat was the only half decent effort; and even that still made for eye watering viewing throughout most of it.
I'm one of those freaks that happily still pays for the music and movies that I love, but even I won't pay £25 for Dark Knight on Blu-Ray. The HMV stores that I go into have things like Kung Fu Panda, Iron Man, HellBoy 2 and a bunch of other films for £30 each. That's just fucking insane pricing.
I'd rather see newly released DVDs at £9.99 and Blu-Rays at £14.99 or lower, each. That way the stores could enjoy their little price wars and then I could pick up things like Watchmen and Star Trek for £12 or so each on Blu-Ray. I'd probably walk out the store with three films.
I appreciate that Blu-Ray is new(ish), but they really need to more readily adopt the pile-it-high and see-it-low approach now.
Either that or regularly offer 2 for £25 on Blu Rays, even for new releases.
Things I'd like to get my hands on...
It does make a good point, http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=282
In Soviet Nintendo, game plays you!
... and laughs all the way to the bank.