You made the choice to buy it, knowing that ahead of time. So not evil. Unethical, perhaps.
And yes, I use Gilette razors. And am willing to spend the extra cash to get their blades. That is exactly my point, that because they are upfront about it, I was capable of making an informed decision, and decide for myself if the product was worth the extra upkeep cost. In my eyes, there is nothing worse than the "oh, by the way, now that you've purchased our product..." bullshit.
Yes. That is something that should have been mentioned at time of purchase. And it still could have been said with a positive spin, so that you might not have minded- but at least, you would have known.
As I'm not "up" on all the benefits of signed mails, isn't there a way to "man-in-the-middle" signed mail here? I seem to recall seeing this mentioned a lot when people use signed mail as an end-all to secure communication.
Rikku?? As long as I can repeatedly kill her off within 10 seconds of any voice acting...what possessed them to use Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls as a voice (at least for the American market)?
Gimmie more Celes and Terra all the way! Maybe a little Evil Princess Sara?/me removes tongue from cheek
The first one was supposed to be the last one. The company wasn't doing well, it was a "let's go out with a bang!" kind of decision, and they didn't even research the market. Suprise, suprise, when you let people who are creative and like gaming make the game, it turns into something other gamers like. Who'da thunk it?
Granted, none of them have come close to the awe of the original (graphics aside), and perhaps it's time for a new franchise. Then again, why bother? The name is a freaking icon in EB, GameStop, and other gaming stores. It stands out among the sea of horrendous RPGs. Square (and now, Square/Enix) has always produced solid FF titles (with the exception of Mystic Quest, and perhaps the GB ones- but a little research explains those anomalies) and as long as they don't start producing utter crap, and calling it FF, I hope they hit FF XLV. It'll probably be more innovative than Madden 2k78.
I'm not trying to flame or anything here, I just get a little irritated everytime I see a reference to "why are their sequals to Final Fantasy"-esque comments.
Shouldn't you be happy that they're doing anything at all, rather than saying its not enough? I mean, if XYZ Corp pays its developers 5k to develop an awesome open source app, even though it has 25k free in the budget that it could have spent, and they made 500k on support, does it really matter? Are you going to give them grief too?
That they're trying to contribute at all should be seen as a Good Thing(tm). Yeah, maybe the could have spent more, but we're better off that they're allocating anything, no matter what the amount, than we would be if they didn't spend any money...
We need people to quit smoking! Lets raise the tax so that they have more incentive to do so!
(At this point, Jon Q. Smoker goes about business as normal. The addiction is much more powerful than the extra $0.40 a pack he's now paying.)
It didn't wo...oh, look at all that money! Hmmm...The general public didn't go into an uproar...shall we try it again?
(John Q. Smoker proceeds to grab his ankles next time he buys a pack.)
LOOK AT ALL THE MONEY!!! ITS EVERYWHERE!! LET'S DO IT AGAIN!
(John Q. Smoker proceeds to voluntarily bend over twice for his pack.)
/me talking now
This is what the logic is in my state (Michigan). Tax the smokers because they are a minority and therefore, we don't have to worry about being kicked out of office.
This "cost of healthcare" stuff is interesting. You know what? I didn't ask for the government to support my healthcare, and frankly, I'd rather it didn't. I accept that I am paying for it through my taxes, paying to help others, yada yada yada. I understand that some people can't afford healthcare, and for them this is a Good Thing. You know what? I even accept that someone may..gasp..have to have medical attention for something that they willing inflicted on themselves, and that even though I would never do that, that I'm going to help support those expenses. You want national healthcare? You take the good with the bad. You pay for the people who don't live as sterile or as good of a life as you. You pay for the people with poor judgement. You pay for everyone, and everyone paying tax pays.
BTW, I am a smoker, but even before I became one, I could see the flaw in the Michigan Government's logic. You can't expect a government to receive more revenue from a tax and honestly try to help the people that are paying the tax on something the government deems bad, can you? That would destroy the revenue!
You're probably right about it being the parents, really. If the parents would project more of a concern, the students would probably be more interested (this would almost have to be an "across the board" kind of thing, I remember many students who looked at the kids whose parents didn't care with a great deal of envy). I had supportive parents in that regard, so my desire to learn probably had a direct correlation.
I went to the only High School in the county. The problem wasn't so much the campaigning, as it was the distribution of population. Large number of senior citizens who felt like it was unnecessary because "my children aren't in school". I don't say this out of spite, more on second-hand evidence. My grandparents tried to be vocal in their communities (senior center, etc) but that was the counter argument they always got.
Parents really should be the ones to do this, but seeing as they are clearly failing, or negligent, in their duty, I think the schools really have a responsibility to instill this.
Personally, I don't think we want any government run/backed/invlved institution stepping in to handle the responsiblities that parents today aren't fulfilling. I wouldn't want someone else trying to teach my children what is right or wrong. These values are a combination of the upbringing at home, at school, and from their own thought process. Putting it in the hands of an institution just encourages abuse, potentially leading to all children having the values that institution deems appropriate.
As an example, what's to stop them from deciding that all children should learn that it is bad to speak out about their beliefs? We would be making the efforts of many to improve the quality of life by the very act of speaking out against something they thought was wrong meaningless.
We don't need an institution to tell our children, or our children's children, what is right or wrong. We need a society in which the parents are not so busy with work/social life that they actually can raise children, instead of depending on the electronic babysitter (in all of its forms), or on others around them to do the job properly. If people were held as responsible for the raising of their children as they are for the quality of their work, things might change. At one point, people took pride in the quality of the child they had raised. Now, I hear more about how "horrible" the youth of today are- but they were raised by their parents- the youth of yesterday.
On top of all this, schools have enough to do as it is. They have to try to teach to children who are growing more and more apathetic about learning, they have to act as babysitter/disciplinarian, and they have to do it on a budget that seems to be able to support the system less and less. I lost count of how many times while I was in school that millages were voted down that would have expanded our school. One reason I heard while I was in high school: "The building is in fine shape." Yes, yes, it is. Fine physical shape. Still, I was sharing a locker with 2 other people, when there were only 2 shelves in the locker, and one person's books filled a shelf, and we regularly had 35 or more students to a classroom. The hallways were so packed that you were routinely late for class. And to top it all off, my class graduated with 215 people. The freshmen class that came in the next year had 450.
Let's not put any more burden on a system that needs renovation just to perform the duties it already has.
You could follow The Linux Mentality, and write your own kernel to run on your WizBang! Toaster 3000, complete with a blinking LED to say the toast is done...
Wait...had to buy the toaster...I guess nothing man creates is "free" as in beer- somebody had to pay for it, somehow.
Wonder if I can get the details on the electrical schematic WizBang! Toaster 3k...sounds like a fun project...
I, for one, would rather pay for Ad-Aware than use the MS one. I just don't trust them to keep up the support as I would like. I trust Ad-Aware a great deal, while the MS one is new to me, and until I see a reason to switch, why bother? Spybot S&D will also stay installed on my PC, as well as HijackThis (helps with stray issues here and there, and has found a couple things Spybot and Ad-Aware left out- not spyware per se, but just system hogs that I could do without), and PeerGuardian will stay running in my system tray as well.
On a side note, I don't run the "background" process portion of Spybot, just weekly checks. PeerGuardian gets rid of a large amount of annoying Internet crap (it just quietly drops packets from IPs/domains that are "blacklisted", which includes most tracking advertisers and the wonderful RIAA), so if I'm doing any web browsing, actually speeds up the process of page loading.
Also, PG doesn't seem to slow the system down that much at all- World of Warcraft runs just fine, as does UT2k3, and even huge compiles from the Cygwin Bash shell.
That aside, there are no hard and fast rules for programming. Often, I find that grouping things into objects can help readability and maintainability, but there are times when that added layer of abstraction is just more complication than its worth.
Its sort of like the "never use goto" and "no global variables" rule. They have their uses. Granted, they might not be that often, but they do. Personally, I'd rather read a 100+ line function that was commented in sections- the following does this, the following does that- if these actions only occur in that one function. Splitting them out just means I have to jump around in the source to follow what was probably not that complex anyway. You still might want to think long and hard about the algorithm itself, though.
However, if those "sub-sections" are used/repeated elsewhere...good gods, man, do yourself a favor and split'em out. Its bad enough trying to maintain slight function differences in languages that don't support templates (which have their own problems) but its even worse when the functions are huge and almost entirely the same.
As far as OSS and documenation...don't make me laugh. Some projects are great- make, emacs, vi come to mind instantly. Others...well, lets just say that the next time I see RTFM when there is no man page, I'm gonna snap. We need to shape up, buckle down, and write the documenation. Maybe even as you add functionality, so you aren't writing some massive document at the end of a project. Closed projects aren't always much better- to me, MSDN is a waste of my time- but sometimes they're a little more likely to document, because people that aren't likely to use something that they can't understand, and they don't have the ability to just "peek at the source".
/me gets on soapbox, slightly offtopic
I may get flamed for this, but it needs to be said:
OO is not the end-all of programming. Often a well-designed OO project can be a godsend, but sometimes it's like swatting a fly with a Buick. If the project is intuitively functional, go ahead and do it in a procedural manner. Over-engineering a project to make it OO when it doesn't need it can contribute to making it difficult to maintain. Which is why I'm glad Python has tuples. Group the variables without bringing in the complexity of a class itself. While you're at it, through in a comment describing the values at each index. It'll help six months down the road.
And regarding the whole "the code is the best documentation" bit- if I can't understand the code at 3am, when drunk, it isn't the best documentation. And this is usually the kind of code that I'm trying to find documentation for in the first place. Comment your code to describe the process it follows, not the mechanism, unless the mechanism would not be intuitive to the average user of the language: text = ' '.join(text.split()) in Python comes to mind- and no, it is not a redunant function call, it replaces all tabs/newlines with the space character. And by "average user" I don't mean "IT Professional with 10 years of experience." I mean someone who has an average ability to write code with it- maybe not efficient or good quality, but code that performs some function. I don't need to know that function bar() calls this and that internally (unless they're part of a different library), I need to know:
What are legal parameters
What expected output is on success and failure
What can create undefined behavior (which you should know from the item above
Granted, this is a tongue-firmly-in-cheek article, but the points it raises are quite valid. Ignore the parts about software patents for now, as that is a whole seperate discussion, but it does explain why movies/music are not patentable.
Ditto the hard-core player who just doesn't have time to play...
Every reason I've seen can be condensed down into one of the following:
Lack of time
Need to feel "leet"
Lack of motivation
Now, for #1:
The only potentially legitimate reason. I've got a 50 hour a week job, so I can sort of sympathize here, but I have the mentality of wanting to earn the rewards myself, and am willing to grind away at it until I do. If that means only doing high-level instances (in WoW, for example) on weekends, so be it.
#2: I have no sympathy here. I don't respect any character, high-level or not, cool "leet" items or not, if I can tell they don't know squat about cooperating in the group correctly, which is exactly what occurs time and time again with things they didn't earn "in-game". these people, along with those who can't generate a chat message that is even somewhat based on real English, go in my Ignore list. They are also dropped from the group about as fast as new pop singers come out...
#3: A friend of mine uses this, actually. He just doesn't want to take the time to do it. He has the time, just feels it better spent elsewhere. He also jumps from MMORPG to the next quicker than a used car salesman changes pitches. Can't say I can back this one, but hey, at least these people usually don't stick around long enough to cause in-game economy problems.
Of course, this is just what I've noticed, so I'm sure others have different views of things. After all, I'm only one of the many, many, many WoW and EQ players out there.
I'm not familiar with the Steam system itself, as I am not a big HL fan. However, this whole concept of "system requirements" on the box does need to be looked at in general, including "minimum requirements" that leave the game/software in a barely playable state.
As for the Steam issue, I have heard nothing but good things about it yet, in terms of game distribution, so I would have to agree that the distribution part should stick around. Maybe they should look into different authentication methods, and I can agree with the frustation about a 180 MB patch that I am required to get so I can play offline? Sounds bogus to me.
I also play WoW, and I wouldn't say garbage heap 100% of the time...maybe 90%. Blizzard has its own problems to deal with, but I'm quite happy still.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, I use Gilette razors. And am willing to spend the extra cash to get their blades. That is exactly my point, that because they are upfront about it, I was capable of making an informed decision, and decide for myself if the product was worth the extra upkeep cost. In my eyes, there is nothing worse than the "oh, by the way, now that you've purchased our product..." bullshit.
Yes. That is something that should have been mentioned at time of purchase. And it still could have been said with a positive spin, so that you might not have minded- but at least, you would have known.
As I'm not "up" on all the benefits of signed mails, isn't there a way to "man-in-the-middle" signed mail here? I seem to recall seeing this mentioned a lot when people use signed mail as an end-all to secure communication.
Gimmie more Celes and Terra all the way! Maybe a little Evil Princess Sara? /me removes tongue from cheek
That was TIC, sorry that I forgot to label it so. I currently am running Linux (Whitebox) so its all sort of moot...
The question is, will my UberCDToaster software that XP routinely uses to coaster CD's be available, or will I have to get real CD burning software? ;)
Granted, none of them have come close to the awe of the original (graphics aside), and perhaps it's time for a new franchise. Then again, why bother? The name is a freaking icon in EB, GameStop, and other gaming stores. It stands out among the sea of horrendous RPGs. Square (and now, Square/Enix) has always produced solid FF titles (with the exception of Mystic Quest, and perhaps the GB ones- but a little research explains those anomalies) and as long as they don't start producing utter crap, and calling it FF, I hope they hit FF XLV. It'll probably be more innovative than Madden 2k78. I'm not trying to flame or anything here, I just get a little irritated everytime I see a reference to "why are their sequals to Final Fantasy"-esque comments.
That they're trying to contribute at all should be seen as a Good Thing(tm). Yeah, maybe the could have spent more, but we're better off that they're allocating anything, no matter what the amount, than we would be if they didn't spend any money...
We need people to quit smoking! Lets raise the tax so that they have more incentive to do so!
(At this point, Jon Q. Smoker goes about business as normal. The addiction is much more powerful than the extra $0.40 a pack he's now paying.)
It didn't wo...oh, look at all that money! Hmmm...The general public didn't go into an uproar...shall we try it again?
(John Q. Smoker proceeds to grab his ankles next time he buys a pack.)
LOOK AT ALL THE MONEY!!! ITS EVERYWHERE!! LET'S DO IT AGAIN!
(John Q. Smoker proceeds to voluntarily bend over twice for his pack.)
This is what the logic is in my state (Michigan). Tax the smokers because they are a minority and therefore, we don't have to worry about being kicked out of office.
This "cost of healthcare" stuff is interesting. You know what? I didn't ask for the government to support my healthcare, and frankly, I'd rather it didn't. I accept that I am paying for it through my taxes, paying to help others, yada yada yada. I understand that some people can't afford healthcare, and for them this is a Good Thing. You know what? I even accept that someone may..gasp..have to have medical attention for something that they willing inflicted on themselves, and that even though I would never do that, that I'm going to help support those expenses. You want national healthcare? You take the good with the bad. You pay for the people who don't live as sterile or as good of a life as you. You pay for the people with poor judgement. You pay for everyone, and everyone paying tax pays.
BTW, I am a smoker, but even before I became one, I could see the flaw in the Michigan Government's logic. You can't expect a government to receive more revenue from a tax and honestly try to help the people that are paying the tax on something the government deems bad, can you? That would destroy the revenue!
I went to the only High School in the county. The problem wasn't so much the campaigning, as it was the distribution of population. Large number of senior citizens who felt like it was unnecessary because "my children aren't in school". I don't say this out of spite, more on second-hand evidence. My grandparents tried to be vocal in their communities (senior center, etc) but that was the counter argument they always got.
Personally, I don't think we want any government run/backed/invlved institution stepping in to handle the responsiblities that parents today aren't fulfilling. I wouldn't want someone else trying to teach my children what is right or wrong. These values are a combination of the upbringing at home, at school, and from their own thought process. Putting it in the hands of an institution just encourages abuse, potentially leading to all children having the values that institution deems appropriate.
As an example, what's to stop them from deciding that all children should learn that it is bad to speak out about their beliefs? We would be making the efforts of many to improve the quality of life by the very act of speaking out against something they thought was wrong meaningless.
We don't need an institution to tell our children, or our children's children, what is right or wrong. We need a society in which the parents are not so busy with work/social life that they actually can raise children, instead of depending on the electronic babysitter (in all of its forms), or on others around them to do the job properly. If people were held as responsible for the raising of their children as they are for the quality of their work, things might change. At one point, people took pride in the quality of the child they had raised. Now, I hear more about how "horrible" the youth of today are- but they were raised by their parents- the youth of yesterday.
On top of all this, schools have enough to do as it is. They have to try to teach to children who are growing more and more apathetic about learning, they have to act as babysitter/disciplinarian, and they have to do it on a budget that seems to be able to support the system less and less. I lost count of how many times while I was in school that millages were voted down that would have expanded our school. One reason I heard while I was in high school: "The building is in fine shape." Yes, yes, it is. Fine physical shape. Still, I was sharing a locker with 2 other people, when there were only 2 shelves in the locker, and one person's books filled a shelf, and we regularly had 35 or more students to a classroom. The hallways were so packed that you were routinely late for class. And to top it all off, my class graduated with 215 people. The freshmen class that came in the next year had 450.
Let's not put any more burden on a system that needs renovation just to perform the duties it already has.
You could follow The Linux Mentality, and write your own kernel to run on your WizBang! Toaster 3000, complete with a blinking LED to say the toast is done... Wait...had to buy the toaster...I guess nothing man creates is "free" as in beer- somebody had to pay for it, somehow. Wonder if I can get the details on the electrical schematic WizBang! Toaster 3k...sounds like a fun project...
On a side note, I don't run the "background" process portion of Spybot, just weekly checks. PeerGuardian gets rid of a large amount of annoying Internet crap (it just quietly drops packets from IPs/domains that are "blacklisted", which includes most tracking advertisers and the wonderful RIAA), so if I'm doing any web browsing, actually speeds up the process of page loading.
Also, PG doesn't seem to slow the system down that much at all- World of Warcraft runs just fine, as does UT2k3, and even huge compiles from the Cygwin Bash shell.
Glad I'm awake at work.
That aside, there are no hard and fast rules for programming. Often, I find that grouping things into objects can help readability and maintainability, but there are times when that added layer of abstraction is just more complication than its worth.
Its sort of like the "never use goto" and "no global variables" rule. They have their uses. Granted, they might not be that often, but they do. Personally, I'd rather read a 100+ line function that was commented in sections- the following does this, the following does that- if these actions only occur in that one function. Splitting them out just means I have to jump around in the source to follow what was probably not that complex anyway. You still might want to think long and hard about the algorithm itself, though.
However, if those "sub-sections" are used/repeated elsewhere...good gods, man, do yourself a favor and split'em out. Its bad enough trying to maintain slight function differences in languages that don't support templates (which have their own problems) but its even worse when the functions are huge and almost entirely the same.
As far as OSS and documenation...don't make me laugh. Some projects are great- make, emacs, vi come to mind instantly. Others...well, lets just say that the next time I see RTFM when there is no man page, I'm gonna snap. We need to shape up, buckle down, and write the documenation. Maybe even as you add functionality, so you aren't writing some massive document at the end of a project. Closed projects aren't always much better- to me, MSDN is a waste of my time- but sometimes they're a little more likely to document, because people that aren't likely to use something that they can't understand, and they don't have the ability to just "peek at the source".
I may get flamed for this, but it needs to be said: OO is not the end-all of programming. Often a well-designed OO project can be a godsend, but sometimes it's like swatting a fly with a Buick. If the project is intuitively functional, go ahead and do it in a procedural manner. Over-engineering a project to make it OO when it doesn't need it can contribute to making it difficult to maintain. Which is why I'm glad Python has tuples. Group the variables without bringing in the complexity of a class itself. While you're at it, through in a comment describing the values at each index. It'll help six months down the road.
And regarding the whole "the code is the best documentation" bit- if I can't understand the code at 3am, when drunk, it isn't the best documentation. And this is usually the kind of code that I'm trying to find documentation for in the first place. Comment your code to describe the process it follows, not the mechanism, unless the mechanism would not be intuitive to the average user of the language: text = ' '.join(text.split()) in Python comes to mind- and no, it is not a redunant function call, it replaces all tabs/newlines with the space character. And by "average user" I don't mean "IT Professional with 10 years of experience." I mean someone who has an average ability to write code with it- maybe not efficient or good quality, but code that performs some function. I don't need to know that function bar() calls this and that internally (unless they're part of a different library), I need to know:
/me gets off soapbox
Granted, this is a tongue-firmly-in-cheek article, but the points it raises are quite valid. Ignore the parts about software patents for now, as that is a whole seperate discussion, but it does explain why movies/music are not patentable.
Every reason I've seen can be condensed down into one of the following:
Now, for #1:
The only potentially legitimate reason. I've got a 50 hour a week job, so I can sort of sympathize here, but I have the mentality of wanting to earn the rewards myself, and am willing to grind away at it until I do. If that means only doing high-level instances (in WoW, for example) on weekends, so be it.
#2: I have no sympathy here. I don't respect any character, high-level or not, cool "leet" items or not, if I can tell they don't know squat about cooperating in the group correctly, which is exactly what occurs time and time again with things they didn't earn "in-game". these people, along with those who can't generate a chat message that is even somewhat based on real English, go in my Ignore list. They are also dropped from the group about as fast as new pop singers come out...
#3: A friend of mine uses this, actually. He just doesn't want to take the time to do it. He has the time, just feels it better spent elsewhere. He also jumps from MMORPG to the next quicker than a used car salesman changes pitches. Can't say I can back this one, but hey, at least these people usually don't stick around long enough to cause in-game economy problems.
Of course, this is just what I've noticed, so I'm sure others have different views of things. After all, I'm only one of the many, many, many WoW and EQ players out there.
As for the Steam issue, I have heard nothing but good things about it yet, in terms of game distribution, so I would have to agree that the distribution part should stick around. Maybe they should look into different authentication methods, and I can agree with the frustation about a 180 MB patch that I am required to get so I can play offline? Sounds bogus to me.
I also play WoW, and I wouldn't say garbage heap 100% of the time...maybe 90%. Blizzard has its own problems to deal with, but I'm quite happy still.