I'm not sure there is a standard in the industry - or atleast a single standard.
On your brace style question, about the only agreed thing in the industry is that each dev team/company should pick a standard. Preferably with reasons for each decision.
Its not just about braces either, what about constants, variables, upper/lower case, underscores, sub routine calls, tab indenting, spaces vs tabs, the lsit goes on.
I'd recommend that you read Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices (O'Reilly) - not to say that those rules map to C, but for a guide as to sensible reasoning behind such decisions.
Rather than teaching your class a particular set of rules, why not cover several of the rules or guidelines others suggest, then as a group have them sit down and decide on their "department" coding standard. The excercise in itself will be more valuable than simply saying where to put a curly brace. Quite possibly as a precursor to the group colaberative effort I suggested above.
I wouldn't worry so m uch about the choice of language.
As long as its a relatively strict langauage that doesn't encourage lazy coding styles then its useful to teach it. Having a good understanding of pointers, passing by reference, memory management and basic datastructures will never hurt - even if in later life you leave all of that to the compiler and garbage collector.
Languages I would consider as teaching tools
C, C++, Java, Ada, LISP, Pascal
Languages I would avoid until they know atleast one of the above
Perl (never ever ever ever let someone learn perl as their first langauge, I'm a perl dev by trade and love the language but please teach them something stricter before you let them near a perl interpreter), VB, PHP, python, javascript
I've never used C# so I wouldn't know which list to put it in.
Oh I'd also avoid IDE's, such as visual studio or eclipse. Just use a simple text editor and a compiler, don't let other things get in the way of the simple lessons you will be trying to teach them at first.
Don't try to teach the language, any more than you teach someone how to use a pen when writing.
Teach the mentality, the methodology of problem solving.
Teach basic algorithms, data structures and coding theory - give them an understanding of where the libraries they are suing will come from.
More importantly for modern world working teach colaberation, give them a real group project to do, each of them writing different interfaces or different parts of an interface for a whole program (something like a simple game such as tron is ideal for this)
By doing all of this the language becomes almost incidental - which is really what you want, who knows what the demand for C, C++, javam C# will be in a few years time, but learning the right methodology and colaberative practices will stand them in good stead for years to come.
apt and rpm don't compete - they are not even similar in purpose - each fill a different role and are cooperative ratehr than competative.
In fact apt can work quite well with rpms (the apt for rpm project springs to mind)
Maybe you are confusing the issue with.deb files and dpkg?
Personally I find.debs a slightly better package structure/file structure than rpms, and dpkg a more flexible and easier to use (getting both is quite an achievement I think) command line.
However those are personal preference and while not quite as contentious as emacs vs vi I'm sure they won't be solved any time soon.
You are right to bring up apt though - its apt that makes distros like ubuntu and debian shine. Or more importabltly its the repository organisation and discipline that sits behind apt. Without this organisation server side, the package files clearly listing each package which dependancies and conflicts, then the system is all but meaningless, and thats where apt for rpm has fallen down (not that it doesn't work, I've used it with several rpm respositories, its not bad but several times I've had to hand resolve large messy conflicts, I've had to do that on debian true, but only when doing really messy mixtures of sid sarge and woody all on one box during times of serious upheaval - gnome 1.4 to gnome 2 springs to mind)
Getting rpm and apt to run better together is not really about code changes or design changes to either apt or rpm (or the existing apt for rpm software). Its about making good rpm respositories and the package files that go with them - that would be a huge improvement for starters.
The main fustration people feel with rpm is dependancy resolving, being able to type rpm -i gcc-4.1.rpm and having it just work would be nice. People don't associate the same problem with the.deb system as they very rarely run somehting like dpkg -i gcc-4.1.deb - usually they will type apt-get install build-essentials or apt-get install gcc and it will "just work" (or they will use dselect but thats another topic)
I think that is what really colours peoples perceptions. They feel pain frequently when they use rpm (I know I do). They don't feel pain when using.deb files via apt (and lets face it - if you are sing a distro with.deb you are almost certainly using apt or dselect). This perception causes the view that rpm is crap and.deb/dpkg is far superior. The real problem is though not the package management tool at all. Its the repository management policy, something that debian and debian based projects has had right for a long time.
We had a similar setup in a previous department I worked in.
A problem occurred when there was a bit of a mix up of which logs came from where.
You see we had populated our entire test database with well known names, sports people, movies stars and well known film characters. The first two overlapped in places and film characters gave rather useful mappings (these were set up in relations from other fields)
After checking one days "database access logs" an internal auditor almost had the entire dev department on disciplinary charges for looking at famour peoples data we should not be looking at. After stopping himself from laughing our manager stepped in and slowly, patiently and using words of two sylables or less explained the concept of test data to this auditor demonstrating his point by retreiving data from influential customers such as William Shatner, Christopher Lee, Patrick Stewart, Yoda, Darth Vader and Obi Wan Kenobi (yes we are an IT department) - he nearly started frothing at the mouth on the first few accounts then left rather sheepishly after the film character accounts were pulled up. Didn't hear anythign else from him on the matter...
Perhaps auditors/compliance officers should also be supplied with the specs of dev->production deployments
I agree with you completely about a single bad pixel and I would take it back - especially at that price!!
However the law/technical specs do not.
There were a few court cases about this over the last 2 years (and it put me on my gaurd regards buying one) what it comes down to is the difference between class 1 and class 2 LCD devices and the % of bad pixels. The class 2 specifications were really aimed at screens up to 240*320 size, and for "faulty" they don't define a fixed number of pixels as bad, but rather a percentage of the screen and also split it into 3 difference classes of fault, dead pixels, pixels fixed to a single colour and clusters of pixels in either of the former two categories.
In theory thats fine. But a lot of companies labeled their much large LCDs as class 2, on much larger resolutions by the class 2 specs you could have several dead pixels - or colour fixed pixels - on the screen and it still not be faulty by the official specs, which then means its not faulty by a legal definition so companies have no obligation to cover you under warranty.
Class 1 is a far stricter definition, I honestly can't rememebr for certain if any dead pixels are allowed - but I think the answer is no - if what you would expect of a high quality device.
Admittedly if you just bought it from a store and then took it home you would probably be able to return it for a refund if it had any bad pixels - depending on your local laws (the sale of goods act and the distance selling act would protect uk customers for example) even if it was a class 2 lcd display and not "faulty" by that definition.
The problem you would hit is if the screen went faulty or got a couple of bad pixels after the first few weeks, you would then have to get it repaired/replaced under the warranty, and not all companies honour the spirit of the warranty, many prefering to take the cheaper option of following the minium requiredment the law demands.
Given dell are one of the only 2 suppliers I know of for the 30" screen, and given their reputation on customer service issues I'd be very wary if they still considered their 30" screen as a class 2 device. (I'm not certain what they are treated as however, or if they off a zero dead pixel policy, they may do but I'd want to be certain before parting with that kind of cash)
iirc there was a/. article on this quite some time ago - though it could have been a different website....
Sorry, I should have been more clear on my comment with regard to LCD TVs, I wa refering to the bottom end of the market - ie trying to get a 1440*900 19" LCD TV screen for a cheap price is stangely difficuly (or was when I looked a few weeks ago) anything other than 14" or 17" seems very inflated in price - especially compared to PC screens.
The PC LCD market has been notorious have having a "sweet spot" (the biggest screen you can buy before the prices jumps stupidly)
Right now its 1440*900 19" wide screens - for about 130GBP last time I looked - yet 20" 1680*1080 displays start around 350GBP and go through the roof from there (1500 for the rather nice dell/apple 30" widescreen displays)
Also LCD TVs have not even remotely kept pace with PC screen prices - they still seem to be at prices PC screens were 1-2 years ago for equivalent sizes.
The top end of hardware is usually more expsive - CPUs/GPUs/RAM - the top 1-2 models are never on the same price/performace curve as the rest of the product line, but LCDs really do seem to be extracting the urine.
I'd love to see a little leveling in the fields - especially since I really to want one of the 30" displays - preferably for about half the current price!
I cant rememebr if its right or not - but I seem to recall using a metric of 1 hop adding 1ms latency - ie the same as 2km of fibre (to receive the laser transmission, switch/route and retransmit) not idea how accurate this was but since most of our kit was rated for a max distance of 15km it seemed a sensible measurement.
But then thinking on those terms 4000km of fibre is going to add 20ms in each direction or about the same as 20 hops (if the above metric is correct)
(oh and just incase my math looks odd you have to use 2/3 C rather than C for calculating transmission of light in fibre, which iirc is about the same as the transmission of electrical signals in wire also)
I guess thats probably my san background showing... always tend to think that hops are bad, but then we are usually dealing with much shorter distances...
Know a decent reference that covers international style networks in terms of performace - ie a decent technical overview without going into too much low level detail? Wouldn't mind refreshing myself..
Given US laws these days I suspect companies would prefer their data OUTSIDE of US jurisdiction....
That aside latency is not really a distance issue - its a network design issue.
If you put a big trunk of fiber (as my original comment was saying) from iceland to NY and iceland to london (thus making a nice redundant triangle with the current transatlantic connections) and connected it the the existing back bones sensibly the extra distance would not really be noticed.
Hops add far more latency than distance, most of the hops being to get up from your home/office connection to the back bone, then back down from the back bone to the company - hence why data centers are built where its very easy to get trunk connections - the proximity is a cost issue - fiber is expensive to lay.
Given the abundance of geothermal power in iceland (hence why aluminium ore is transported there for refinement) perhaps a few trucks of fibre need to be put in place - Reykjavik becoming the next big hub for data centers... Lots of power on tap, lots of cooling easily available (ie its bloody freezing there), and the good old days of meetings in hot tubs could come back too - though obviously thermal springs rather than hot tubs....
So windows now has as part of the default configuration a tool that allows you to control the performace of different networking applications....
How long until malware takes advantage of this to slow down your connection (litterally) until you pay for their new "tool" to fix your system....
I hope vista security on this feature is well designed, otherwise this is an easy target for malware to trick more naive users into parting with their cash.
Though to be fair, with this feature and others in vista MS is actually approaching having a real OS - rather than just a GUI + disk manager... I wonder which BSD licensed code they used....
Yes, email them back, thank them for finding this and inform them your wireless network has obviously been compromised and that you are grateful for their assistance in noticing it.
Then inform them you have changed your wep key (keep it with wep though, easier to claim its been hacked again next time WPA take a little more cracking) and that hopefully it wont happen again....
There is a problem in doing this with MPEG4 clibs in that you have to start at a key frame otherwise it gets a little messy
Its a little easier with DVDs since there are usually 2 key frames per second (or more) where as MPEG4 will usually only have a key frame once every 10 seconds (240 frames) or on scene changes.
If you want to take a section of a MPEG4 clip (or even from a DVD if you are getting problems) you can tell mplayer to re-encode a larger section of the file (atleast 30 seconds either side of what you want) using raw audio and a key frame every frame. This will produce a very large file - but its only temporary and will enable you to grab the subsection that you want without the usual video mess the above command will give you.
Mplayer also has a method of printing out exactly where the key frames are, I can't remember it exactly off hand but its in the man page so shouldn't be hard to find. One problem I have found with mplayer is its granularity is seconds - atleast on the version I last used. I don't know of a way to specify timings by frame number (I would love to hear of a way if there is one!)
The 2 are not necessarily related.
Lets say I have a choice of 2 panels
Panel A is 1sqm and is 80% effiecient due to some new process someone has come up with (this is hypothetical remember) but due to it using nano tech to make it it costs $10,000 to buy this panel and fit it
Panel B on the other hand is fairly old technology, has 10% efficiency but costs $125 for a 1sqm panel inc fitting
You would need 8 of panel B, costing $1000 to have the same wattage capacity of panel A, but panel A would cost 10 times more - so efficency does not necessary improve the wattage/cost ratio.
The more efficient panels do have one major advantage though - they increase the maximum power generation capability for a given square area.
And over time the cost of manufactoring the more efficient panels is likely to drop
Yes but do I get to press the F button to tell them exactly what I think to their interactive adds when I don't like the add itself, the placement or the distraction?;)
I probably shouldn't say this too loudly but the notorius server queues/initial zone in times for games like WoW would probably end up being prime candidates...
At least there it would not be in your way too much...
And yes - that kind of contractual lock in really wouldn't surprise me, much as that fact is rather saddening.... lets just hope that "annoying your customers" is weighed up on the opposite side of the balance sheet appropriately
I get very worried about this whole idea.
Ok if its a FPS set in a city or somethign similar and they want to have live add on the bill boards and TVs around the city - then fine - I don't see a problem.
But if they want to try and replace a loading scree with a "commercial break" or "a word from our sponsors" then I for one will be looking for a crack to disable it - or taking the game back to the store!
I wonder what the biggest distrobution vector will be; friends and family known through real life in other countries or friends though online games/worlds in other countries...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure there is a standard in the industry - or atleast a single standard.
On your brace style question, about the only agreed thing in the industry is that each dev team/company should pick a standard. Preferably with reasons for each decision.
Its not just about braces either, what about constants, variables, upper/lower case, underscores, sub routine calls, tab indenting, spaces vs tabs, the lsit goes on.
I'd recommend that you read Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices (O'Reilly) - not to say that those rules map to C, but for a guide as to sensible reasoning behind such decisions.
Rather than teaching your class a particular set of rules, why not cover several of the rules or guidelines others suggest, then as a group have them sit down and decide on their "department" coding standard. The excercise in itself will be more valuable than simply saying where to put a curly brace. Quite possibly as a precursor to the group colaberative effort I suggested above.
I wouldn't worry so m uch about the choice of language.
As long as its a relatively strict langauage that doesn't encourage lazy coding styles then its useful to teach it. Having a good understanding of pointers, passing by reference, memory management and basic datastructures will never hurt - even if in later life you leave all of that to the compiler and garbage collector.
Languages I would consider as teaching tools
C, C++, Java, Ada, LISP, Pascal
Languages I would avoid until they know atleast one of the above
Perl (never ever ever ever let someone learn perl as their first langauge, I'm a perl dev by trade and love the language but please teach them something stricter before you let them near a perl interpreter), VB, PHP, python, javascript
I've never used C# so I wouldn't know which list to put it in.
Oh I'd also avoid IDE's, such as visual studio or eclipse. Just use a simple text editor and a compiler, don't let other things get in the way of the simple lessons you will be trying to teach them at first.
Don't try to teach the language, any more than you teach someone how to use a pen when writing.
Teach the mentality, the methodology of problem solving.
Teach basic algorithms, data structures and coding theory - give them an understanding of where the libraries they are suing will come from.
More importantly for modern world working teach colaberation, give them a real group project to do, each of them writing different interfaces or different parts of an interface for a whole program (something like a simple game such as tron is ideal for this)
By doing all of this the language becomes almost incidental - which is really what you want, who knows what the demand for C, C++, javam C# will be in a few years time, but learning the right methodology and colaberative practices will stand them in good stead for years to come.
you mean other than tarballs? ;)
apt and rpm don't compete - they are not even similar in purpose - each fill a different role and are cooperative ratehr than competative.
.deb files and dpkg?
.debs a slightly better package structure/file structure than rpms, and dpkg a more flexible and easier to use (getting both is quite an achievement I think) command line.
.deb system as they very rarely run somehting like dpkg -i gcc-4.1.deb - usually they will type apt-get install build-essentials or apt-get install gcc and it will "just work" (or they will use dselect but thats another topic)
.deb files via apt (and lets face it - if you are sing a distro with .deb you are almost certainly using apt or dselect). This perception causes the view that rpm is crap and .deb/dpkg is far superior. The real problem is though not the package management tool at all. Its the repository management policy, something that debian and debian based projects has had right for a long time.
In fact apt can work quite well with rpms (the apt for rpm project springs to mind)
Maybe you are confusing the issue with
Personally I find
However those are personal preference and while not quite as contentious as emacs vs vi I'm sure they won't be solved any time soon.
You are right to bring up apt though - its apt that makes distros like ubuntu and debian shine. Or more importabltly its the repository organisation and discipline that sits behind apt. Without this organisation server side, the package files clearly listing each package which dependancies and conflicts, then the system is all but meaningless, and thats where apt for rpm has fallen down (not that it doesn't work, I've used it with several rpm respositories, its not bad but several times I've had to hand resolve large messy conflicts, I've had to do that on debian true, but only when doing really messy mixtures of sid sarge and woody all on one box during times of serious upheaval - gnome 1.4 to gnome 2 springs to mind)
Getting rpm and apt to run better together is not really about code changes or design changes to either apt or rpm (or the existing apt for rpm software). Its about making good rpm respositories and the package files that go with them - that would be a huge improvement for starters.
The main fustration people feel with rpm is dependancy resolving, being able to type rpm -i gcc-4.1.rpm and having it just work would be nice. People don't associate the same problem with the
I think that is what really colours peoples perceptions. They feel pain frequently when they use rpm (I know I do). They don't feel pain when using
We had a similar setup in a previous department I worked in.
A problem occurred when there was a bit of a mix up of which logs came from where.
You see we had populated our entire test database with well known names, sports people, movies stars and well known film characters. The first two overlapped in places and film characters gave rather useful mappings (these were set up in relations from other fields)
After checking one days "database access logs" an internal auditor almost had the entire dev department on disciplinary charges for looking at famour peoples data we should not be looking at. After stopping himself from laughing our manager stepped in and slowly, patiently and using words of two sylables or less explained the concept of test data to this auditor demonstrating his point by retreiving data from influential customers such as William Shatner, Christopher Lee, Patrick Stewart, Yoda, Darth Vader and Obi Wan Kenobi (yes we are an IT department) - he nearly started frothing at the mouth on the first few accounts then left rather sheepishly after the film character accounts were pulled up. Didn't hear anythign else from him on the matter...
Perhaps auditors/compliance officers should also be supplied with the specs of dev->production deployments
I agree with you completely about a single bad pixel and I would take it back - especially at that price!!
/. article on this quite some time ago - though it could have been a different website....
However the law/technical specs do not.
There were a few court cases about this over the last 2 years (and it put me on my gaurd regards buying one) what it comes down to is the difference between class 1 and class 2 LCD devices and the % of bad pixels. The class 2 specifications were really aimed at screens up to 240*320 size, and for "faulty" they don't define a fixed number of pixels as bad, but rather a percentage of the screen and also split it into 3 difference classes of fault, dead pixels, pixels fixed to a single colour and clusters of pixels in either of the former two categories.
In theory thats fine. But a lot of companies labeled their much large LCDs as class 2, on much larger resolutions by the class 2 specs you could have several dead pixels - or colour fixed pixels - on the screen and it still not be faulty by the official specs, which then means its not faulty by a legal definition so companies have no obligation to cover you under warranty.
Class 1 is a far stricter definition, I honestly can't rememebr for certain if any dead pixels are allowed - but I think the answer is no - if what you would expect of a high quality device.
Admittedly if you just bought it from a store and then took it home you would probably be able to return it for a refund if it had any bad pixels - depending on your local laws (the sale of goods act and the distance selling act would protect uk customers for example) even if it was a class 2 lcd display and not "faulty" by that definition.
The problem you would hit is if the screen went faulty or got a couple of bad pixels after the first few weeks, you would then have to get it repaired/replaced under the warranty, and not all companies honour the spirit of the warranty, many prefering to take the cheaper option of following the minium requiredment the law demands.
Given dell are one of the only 2 suppliers I know of for the 30" screen, and given their reputation on customer service issues I'd be very wary if they still considered their 30" screen as a class 2 device. (I'm not certain what they are treated as however, or if they off a zero dead pixel policy, they may do but I'd want to be certain before parting with that kind of cash)
iirc there was a
Sorry, I should have been more clear on my comment with regard to LCD TVs, I wa refering to the bottom end of the market - ie trying to get a 1440*900 19" LCD TV screen for a cheap price is stangely difficuly (or was when I looked a few weeks ago) anything other than 14" or 17" seems very inflated in price - especially compared to PC screens.
There seems a fair basis for these claims.
The PC LCD market has been notorious have having a "sweet spot" (the biggest screen you can buy before the prices jumps stupidly)
Right now its 1440*900 19" wide screens - for about 130GBP last time I looked - yet 20" 1680*1080 displays start around 350GBP and go through the roof from there (1500 for the rather nice dell/apple 30" widescreen displays)
Also LCD TVs have not even remotely kept pace with PC screen prices - they still seem to be at prices PC screens were 1-2 years ago for equivalent sizes.
The top end of hardware is usually more expsive - CPUs/GPUs/RAM - the top 1-2 models are never on the same price/performace curve as the rest of the product line, but LCDs really do seem to be extracting the urine.
I'd love to see a little leveling in the fields - especially since I really to want one of the 30" displays - preferably for about half the current price!
I cant rememebr if its right or not - but I seem to recall using a metric of 1 hop adding 1ms latency - ie the same as 2km of fibre (to receive the laser transmission, switch/route and retransmit) not idea how accurate this was but since most of our kit was rated for a max distance of 15km it seemed a sensible measurement.
But then thinking on those terms 4000km of fibre is going to add 20ms in each direction or about the same as 20 hops (if the above metric is correct)
(oh and just incase my math looks odd you have to use 2/3 C rather than C for calculating transmission of light in fibre, which iirc is about the same as the transmission of electrical signals in wire also)
I guess thats probably my san background showing... always tend to think that hops are bad, but then we are usually dealing with much shorter distances...
Know a decent reference that covers international style networks in terms of performace - ie a decent technical overview without going into too much low level detail? Wouldn't mind refreshing myself..
well the mod seems to have been removed - thanks!!
Given US laws these days I suspect companies would prefer their data OUTSIDE of US jurisdiction....
That aside latency is not really a distance issue - its a network design issue.
If you put a big trunk of fiber (as my original comment was saying) from iceland to NY and iceland to london (thus making a nice redundant triangle with the current transatlantic connections) and connected it the the existing back bones sensibly the extra distance would not really be noticed.
Hops add far more latency than distance, most of the hops being to get up from your home/office connection to the back bone, then back down from the back bone to the company - hence why data centers are built where its very easy to get trunk connections - the proximity is a cost issue - fiber is expensive to lay.
Given the abundance of geothermal power in iceland (hence why aluminium ore is transported there for refinement) perhaps a few trucks of fibre need to be put in place - Reykjavik becoming the next big hub for data centers... Lots of power on tap, lots of cooling easily available (ie its bloody freezing there), and the good old days of meetings in hot tubs could come back too - though obviously thermal springs rather than hot tubs....
So windows now has as part of the default configuration a tool that allows you to control the performace of different networking applications....
How long until malware takes advantage of this to slow down your connection (litterally) until you pay for their new "tool" to fix your system....
I hope vista security on this feature is well designed, otherwise this is an easy target for malware to trick more naive users into parting with their cash.
Though to be fair, with this feature and others in vista MS is actually approaching having a real OS - rather than just a GUI + disk manager... I wonder which BSD licensed code they used....
Yes, email them back, thank them for finding this and inform them your wireless network has obviously been compromised and that you are grateful for their assistance in noticing it.
Then inform them you have changed your wep key (keep it with wep though, easier to claim its been hacked again next time WPA take a little more cracking) and that hopefully it wont happen again....
iirc that is the default behaviour for playback in mplayer - it looks for a key frame to start playing from, starting at the position you specify
However mplayer copies from the exact second you tell it, though you can get mypler to list the numbers for the key frames.
I would be very happy if mencoder simply allowed you to specify start and end frames rather than only seconds
There is a problem in doing this with MPEG4 clibs in that you have to start at a key frame otherwise it gets a little messy
Its a little easier with DVDs since there are usually 2 key frames per second (or more) where as MPEG4 will usually only have a key frame once every 10 seconds (240 frames) or on scene changes.
If you want to take a section of a MPEG4 clip (or even from a DVD if you are getting problems) you can tell mplayer to re-encode a larger section of the file (atleast 30 seconds either side of what you want) using raw audio and a key frame every frame. This will produce a very large file - but its only temporary and will enable you to grab the subsection that you want without the usual video mess the above command will give you.
Mplayer also has a method of printing out exactly where the key frames are, I can't remember it exactly off hand but its in the man page so shouldn't be hard to find. One problem I have found with mplayer is its granularity is seconds - atleast on the version I last used. I don't know of a way to specify timings by frame number (I would love to hear of a way if there is one!)
The 2 are not necessarily related. Lets say I have a choice of 2 panels Panel A is 1sqm and is 80% effiecient due to some new process someone has come up with (this is hypothetical remember) but due to it using nano tech to make it it costs $10,000 to buy this panel and fit it Panel B on the other hand is fairly old technology, has 10% efficiency but costs $125 for a 1sqm panel inc fitting You would need 8 of panel B, costing $1000 to have the same wattage capacity of panel A, but panel A would cost 10 times more - so efficency does not necessary improve the wattage/cost ratio. The more efficient panels do have one major advantage though - they increase the maximum power generation capability for a given square area. And over time the cost of manufactoring the more efficient panels is likely to drop
Yes but do I get to press the F button to tell them exactly what I think to their interactive adds when I don't like the add itself, the placement or the distraction? ;)
I probably shouldn't say this too loudly but the notorius server queues/initial zone in times for games like WoW would probably end up being prime candidates...
At least there it would not be in your way too much...
And yes - that kind of contractual lock in really wouldn't surprise me, much as that fact is rather saddening.... lets just hope that "annoying your customers" is weighed up on the opposite side of the balance sheet appropriately
I get very worried about this whole idea. Ok if its a FPS set in a city or somethign similar and they want to have live add on the bill boards and TVs around the city - then fine - I don't see a problem. But if they want to try and replace a loading scree with a "commercial break" or "a word from our sponsors" then I for one will be looking for a crack to disable it - or taking the game back to the store!
yes when you can no longer mosh properly because your boots stay stuck to the ground there is something very wrong
Ah yes - slimelight.... I've never been there and not ended up with a cold shortly afterwards...
Perhaps the quote should br changed to:
"Sysadmin's aren't born, they are congealed out of the slime of Slimelights dance floor"....
I wonder what the biggest distrobution vector will be; friends and family known through real life in other countries or friends though online games/worlds in other countries...