I hate product announcements that don't include any information about the price of the product, when it will be available, and from where. Does anyone have any of that information? I'd love to buy one if it's not too expensive.
Downloaded from where? Only EA runs their own servers, and they had to really twist MS's arm to get that to happen. I don't think Xbox Live today could handle a large amount of downloads per game, and that's what would happen if we had user-created content.
If some game company told MS, "here are 200 maps that we want you to offer for download for our game", MS would say no. Even the Xbox Live user interface couldn't handle that.
Today, making something available on Xbox live for others to download is completely under the control of Microsoft. They probably don't have an open system for adding content, since it could overwhelmed very easily. So they need to design a new system that allows for hundreds of thousands of people offering things for download, maybe even for a fee. That is what's new.
Does the coffee shop have a problem with people buying one drink and staying there for more than 4 hours?!?!?!!? I doubt it.
Ugh, I just noticed the part about students sitting there for 6-10 hours. Sorry about that.
Wouldn't it be easier just to kick the students out after 3-4 hours if they don't buy another drink? Whether they use the network or not, I think the coffee shop needs to do that. A lot of restaurants already have that policy. Just have the wait staff keep track of these tables.
The management wants to implement a system that, upon buying a drink, grants a time-limited connection for that customer of 3 or 4 hours. If the customer wants more access, another drink will need to be purchased.
Looks to me like the management is a bunch of assholes. No other coffee shop does this, so why do you think customers will tolerate it?
Does the coffee shop have a problem with people buying one drink and staying there for more than 4 hours?!?!?!!? I doubt it. The extra complications and customer confusion aren't worth the one or two people who leech of the network.
A local coffee shop recently implemented a policy where wireless access is turned off from 11:30am to 1:30pm. They already get tons of business during lunch hours, so they don't need to attract any more.
Any decent programmer should be able to pick up a new language quickly. Not only that, but change is part of the industry. If you can't deal with changing technologies, then you shouldn't be a programmer.
Besides, we're talking about Visual Basic! VB programmers who complain about having to do more work and learn more stuff deserve to have their jobs outsourced.
The software developers working on a video game are no more "creative" than any other software developers. The guy optimizing a 3D drawing algorithm is doing the same kind of work as the guy optimizing an operating system's memory manager.
The level designers are doing creative work, because their job is a lot like architecture. But if only creative people get to work normal hours, then the software developers will be the only ones working late nights.
A lot of the back-ported features are just renaming functions or replacing them with some equivalents. In other words, you don't get any new capability, but you have to change your code anyway.
And yes, my driver DOES need to support the oldest kernels of a stable series. Our customers use a wide variety of 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
I don't need to pay someone else to do my job. What I would like is to have kernel development make more sense, so that I don't have to go through so many hoops to get my drivers to compile.
The problem with major development trees like 2.4.x vs 2.5.x was that the release cycles were too long, and that people hated the back- and forward-porting.
This is my #1 complaint with the Linux version numbering scheme as it is now. Basically, the version number means nothing. Features are being back-ported to older releases, so that you have "feature gaps" in the releases. For instance, a new feature that was introduced in 2.6.5 could be ported to 2.4.20. What that means is that this feature would exist in versions 2.4.20 through 2.4.29, and 2.6.5 through 2.6.11, but not in 2.6.0 through 2.6.4. The current numbering scheme makes this kind of behavior too tempting.
I would love to see an end to back-porting of features, from both Linus and the distributions.
What difference does that make? Someone will still need to be paid to examine the game and decide the minimum age. It would just be a finer granularity than it is now.
Why bother with all these abbreviations? Why don't they just specify a number from 0 to 18 on the box, indicating the minimum age. If they had done that in the beginning, they wouldn't have need to introduce this new rating level. They could have just used "10".
We are in the commercial space flight industry and would like to testify that at least one out of two of all the actual entrepreneurs involved in this industry has been inspired by Star Trek
It's more than that. James Doohan, the actor who plays Scotty, was given an honorary degree in Engineering by the Milwaukee School of Engineering where over half of the students polled said they were inspired to study engineering by his role in "Star Trek".
Let me repeat that: half of the engineering students were inspired by one Star Trek actor. Granted, I don't think that anyone will be inspired by Trip, but it still speaks volumes to the power of Star Trek.
Dell has in-house hardware and BIOS developers that do exactly what I said. Those BIOS developers spend a significant portion of their time updating the BIOS to support whatever new motherboard the hardware engineers develop. The BIOS developers update the BIOS based on the specs of the new motherboard (chips and all). Then they wait for the hardware engineers to deliver the first prototypes of the new board, and the developers then try to get the BIOS to boot.
So, why can't the manufacturer be part of the open source fraternity?
Because it doesn't gain the manufacturer anything.
They already have to spend money to develop and test the BIOS for each new motherboard, and that's their main cost. The rest of the BIOS has already been written and has a long history of working. All those stupid DOS interrupt APIs, the PCI code, the USB keyboard support, bla bla bla.
If a manufacturer wanted to use OpenBIOS, they would have to undergo a massive testing effort that would probably cost them millions. Then there would be all sorts of bugs in the OpenBIOS code that isn't in the legacy code that the manufacturer is responsible for.
But the worst part is what happens when the manufacturer wants to add a new feature. It's unlikely that they would be able to just add that one feature they want. Instead, they would need to update to the latest version of OpenBIOS, which would require them to restart their expensive, comprehensive testing cycle, because so much code will have changed.
Not only that, but whatever changes the manufacturer made to support their particular motherboard would probably not be compatible with changes made to support other motherboards. The motherboard is not like a regular device. It doesn't have a PCI device ID. It doesn't have any standard interfaces. It's just a bunch of chips slapped onto a board, and each chips needs to be powered up, configured, and enabled in its own special way. Sometimes you need to enable one chip part-way, enable another chip after that, and then enable the rest of the previous chip. A large chunk of the BIOS code is hacked up to support mistakes made by the hardware engineers. There is no way that a generic BIOS can handle all these variations.
It should boot windows as well as linux, so no need to support anything else.
There is no way a motherboard that can't boot DOS will ever make it to the marketplace.
Yes, because the majority of devices on the motherboard need to be configured and enabled in order for the device drivers to see them at all. There are no standards for this kind of interface, so each BIOS is custom written to the specific motherboard. If even a single chip changes, the BIOS needs to be changed as well.
It's a side effect of the nature of the PC architecture. As long as you the motherboard needs to be compatible with legacy operating systems, we'll have these problems. And there's no way anyone will be able to sell a motherboard that can't boot DOS.
Could the open source fratenity actually produce a workable product across a large number of motherboards?
As someone who used to be a BIOS developer for a major PC manufacturer, I can tell you the answer to this question is a resounding NO. Creating a BIOS for a new motherboard is something that only the motherboard manufacturer can do.
... to type in text? For instance, can I use it to type in a Gamer Tag, or to enter my information when I want to create a new account? This review (or any other review I've found) doesn't appear to address that issue. My guess is that the answer is no.
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I hate product announcements that don't include any information about the price of the product, when it will be available, and from where. Does anyone have any of that information? I'd love to buy one if it's not too expensive.
If some game company told MS, "here are 200 maps that we want you to offer for download for our game", MS would say no. Even the Xbox Live user interface couldn't handle that.
Today, making something available on Xbox live for others to download is completely under the control of Microsoft. They probably don't have an open system for adding content, since it could overwhelmed very easily. So they need to design a new system that allows for hundreds of thousands of people offering things for download, maybe even for a fee. That is what's new.
Ugh, I just noticed the part about students sitting there for 6-10 hours. Sorry about that.
Wouldn't it be easier just to kick the students out after 3-4 hours if they don't buy another drink? Whether they use the network or not, I think the coffee shop needs to do that. A lot of restaurants already have that policy. Just have the wait staff keep track of these tables.
Looks to me like the management is a bunch of assholes. No other coffee shop does this, so why do you think customers will tolerate it?
Does the coffee shop have a problem with people buying one drink and staying there for more than 4 hours?!?!?!!? I doubt it. The extra complications and customer confusion aren't worth the one or two people who leech of the network.
A local coffee shop recently implemented a policy where wireless access is turned off from 11:30am to 1:30pm. They already get tons of business during lunch hours, so they don't need to attract any more.
Probably because it costs too much money to join the BSA.
Besides, we're talking about Visual Basic! VB programmers who complain about having to do more work and learn more stuff deserve to have their jobs outsourced.
The DOM inspector and Chatzilla are optional.
That still discriminates against fat people, but they would still pay more than skinny people to fly.
The level designers are doing creative work, because their job is a lot like architecture. But if only creative people get to work normal hours, then the software developers will be the only ones working late nights.
Only the inexpensive ones have that problem. You can get a 3,000 lumens projector for about $3,500, and that's plenty bright for daytime viewing.
And yes, my driver DOES need to support the oldest kernels of a stable series. Our customers use a wide variety of 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
I don't need to pay someone else to do my job. What I would like is to have kernel development make more sense, so that I don't have to go through so many hoops to get my drivers to compile.
What if you're writing a driver that needs to support all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels?
This is my #1 complaint with the Linux version numbering scheme as it is now. Basically, the version number means nothing. Features are being back-ported to older releases, so that you have "feature gaps" in the releases. For instance, a new feature that was introduced in 2.6.5 could be ported to 2.4.20. What that means is that this feature would exist in versions 2.4.20 through 2.4.29, and 2.6.5 through 2.6.11, but not in 2.6.0 through 2.6.4. The current numbering scheme makes this kind of behavior too tempting.
I would love to see an end to back-porting of features, from both Linus and the distributions.
What difference does that make? Someone will still need to be paid to examine the game and decide the minimum age. It would just be a finer granularity than it is now.
Why bother with all these abbreviations? Why don't they just specify a number from 0 to 18 on the box, indicating the minimum age. If they had done that in the beginning, they wouldn't have need to introduce this new rating level. They could have just used "10".
What's "dl"?
It's more than that. James Doohan, the actor who plays Scotty, was given an honorary degree in Engineering by the Milwaukee School of Engineering where over half of the students polled said they were inspired to study engineering by his role in "Star Trek".
Let me repeat that: half of the engineering students were inspired by one Star Trek actor. Granted, I don't think that anyone will be inspired by Trip, but it still speaks volumes to the power of Star Trek.
Dell has in-house hardware and BIOS developers that do exactly what I said. Those BIOS developers spend a significant portion of their time updating the BIOS to support whatever new motherboard the hardware engineers develop. The BIOS developers update the BIOS based on the specs of the new motherboard (chips and all). Then they wait for the hardware engineers to deliver the first prototypes of the new board, and the developers then try to get the BIOS to boot.
Because it doesn't gain the manufacturer anything.
They already have to spend money to develop and test the BIOS for each new motherboard, and that's their main cost. The rest of the BIOS has already been written and has a long history of working. All those stupid DOS interrupt APIs, the PCI code, the USB keyboard support, bla bla bla.
If a manufacturer wanted to use OpenBIOS, they would have to undergo a massive testing effort that would probably cost them millions. Then there would be all sorts of bugs in the OpenBIOS code that isn't in the legacy code that the manufacturer is responsible for.
But the worst part is what happens when the manufacturer wants to add a new feature. It's unlikely that they would be able to just add that one feature they want. Instead, they would need to update to the latest version of OpenBIOS, which would require them to restart their expensive, comprehensive testing cycle, because so much code will have changed.
Not only that, but whatever changes the manufacturer made to support their particular motherboard would probably not be compatible with changes made to support other motherboards. The motherboard is not like a regular device. It doesn't have a PCI device ID. It doesn't have any standard interfaces. It's just a bunch of chips slapped onto a board, and each chips needs to be powered up, configured, and enabled in its own special way. Sometimes you need to enable one chip part-way, enable another chip after that, and then enable the rest of the previous chip. A large chunk of the BIOS code is hacked up to support mistakes made by the hardware engineers. There is no way that a generic BIOS can handle all these variations.
It should boot windows as well as linux, so no need to support anything else.
There is no way a motherboard that can't boot DOS will ever make it to the marketplace.
Yes, because the majority of devices on the motherboard need to be configured and enabled in order for the device drivers to see them at all. There are no standards for this kind of interface, so each BIOS is custom written to the specific motherboard. If even a single chip changes, the BIOS needs to be changed as well.
It's a side effect of the nature of the PC architecture. As long as you the motherboard needs to be compatible with legacy operating systems, we'll have these problems. And there's no way anyone will be able to sell a motherboard that can't boot DOS.
As someone who used to be a BIOS developer for a major PC manufacturer, I can tell you the answer to this question is a resounding NO. Creating a BIOS for a new motherboard is something that only the motherboard manufacturer can do.
Ignorant customer service representatives are worse than argumentative customers.
... to type in text? For instance, can I use it to type in a Gamer Tag, or to enter my information when I want to create a new account? This review (or any other review I've found) doesn't appear to address that issue. My guess is that the answer is no.