Depends on the context... or was that english? Arg! When you have 3 languages, each with thier own culture and syntax floating about in your head you can get them mixed up sometimes. This can be quite embaressing...
In order to take advantage of the new controller the game would have to be specificly designed to take advantage of it. Thus adding proper support for the controller to old games would require a compete re-write of the game. Mapping gestures to actions is really the only way add new controller support to old games. In most cases this will feel gimicy and nowhere as good as the original control method, however in some cases this will probably work.
E.G. If you map the D-pad to it's corresponding controller pointing gestures (point controller up a bit for up, etc) and the a and b buttons to thier corresponding equivelents you end up with quite a nice set-up to play most old RPGs.
The DS is doing amazingly well in Japan. I got mine outside of Osaka in early December and boy am I glad - there are places selling used machines for $200 American dollars. Kids are using their New Year's money to snap up the machines (If I weren't so convinced that Nintendo will soon have a handle on production again, I'd buy a load of the machines in the U.S. and bring them over).
For comparison I got my DS (blue) shortly after they came out for aprox. $150 US in Okayama, Japan. I also had the option of getting a second hand one for $100 instead, so that is like 100% markup. Not bad...
This is about Japan and Japanese right? Last I was there some restraunts had a few 'V's in thier English menu. As for the language, Japanese does have a word for meat. 'niku'. Mind you by default it only includes animal meat, but you can expand it's meaning to include bird meat with a few phrases. So I'm afraid in this case it's your friend's girlfriend's japanese language skill that is at fault rather than the language itself... But you're right about the culture being fundamentaly different from western cultures and that not eating meat or fish is quite alien to them.
It's probably not coincidence that this study came out of Japan. Anyone who has worked in a lab with a variety of different people will notice Asians, in general, tend to be more detached from "cruelty to animals" issues. They just don't seem to have the same amount of compassion for animals as the average European/American. Not meant to be racist, just an observation. There must be a cultural component here.
Erm... Being able to be detached from "cruelty to animals" doesn't mean they don't have compassion. Most Japanese people I know are very compassionate about animals (especially cute ones), more so infact that a lot of europeans I know. On the other hand the europeans I know are far more vocal when it comes to using animals for science, so I'm not sure the 2 issues are directly linked.
All Nintendo has to do to make old games fully playable with the new controler is to provide a way to map the new controler's movements to old controler buttons. That way as far as the game was concerned you would be using an ordinary old controler. Thus 100% compatible with old games.
Ofcourse the gameplay would differ, but as for whether it would be better or worse, that would depend on the game.
Commenting and documenting code is something all programmers should do. Not doing it is highly unprofessional and should not be allowed in any self-respecting firm. Making sure the documentation/comments are upto date is included in that statement.
On the other hand just because code is well documented that doesn't mean it's easily maintainable. There are various techniques used to generate good maintainable code. But without documentation any code more complex that 'hello world' tends to be a pain to maintain no matter what techniques you use.
I personaly also find the formating of code (and comments) just as important as commenting it. Reading code formated in a way you're not used to can be a pain and reading code formated in different ways doubly so. So a company-wide standard for formating code/comments would be a good idea.
I wouldn't say it's the *only* reason, but it's the main one. I don't think anyone will agrue with you if you say Free Software should be efficient and easy to use. FS proponents just view that efficiency secondary to Freedom.
In a way it's just a fight for equality. We want to be able to do the same things you can do with non-free software with Free software.
As for RMS, he is an activist. Activists tend to paint a much more black & white picture than it actually is. They also tend to simplify what they preach to make it easier to put thier message across. The majority of FS supporters whould probably agree that efficiency and freedom go hand in hand and in-efficient software is not a pleasure to use Free or not. We just think sometimes it better to suffer with in-efficient Free software if it will lead to efficient free software in the future.
I am well aware of the distinction between Free Software and OSS. However what I said aplies to both, so I didn't think in making a distinction.
As for politics and Rights, well.. RMS has the right to believe what he wants. He also has the right to preach those beliefs. Just as you have a right to voice yours. Niether of you have the right to force your beliefs on each other. He has no right to force you to use Free software and you don't have the right to force him to use 'non-Free' software.
The problem is that he believes you, as a user of non-free software, are forcing him to use the said non-free software. By attaching a word document, you are forcing the reader to use word. By streaming video in RealMedia format you are forcing people to use RealPlayer.
Is the anwser for both parties to use only Free software? Well that's one way. The other is to use standard platform-independant formats for data interchange. That way neither party is force to use the others tool of choice.
As for morallity of it all... I tend towards RMS's view, but I'm far less fanatical about it. At home I'm 100% Free, at work I do what my employer asks. Naturaly I push FOSS at every opertunity and grumble when I have to use non-free software, but I'll use it. Kindof like wearing cloths that are made in chinese/african sweat-shops that utilise child labour. You don't want to buy it because it'll be supporting something you don't believe in and/or despise, but on the other hand it will get pretty chilly if you don't.
I think you're getting things mixed up. He never said you have to hire GNU programmers to write free programs, just that you could hire someone to do it. Be it your child-hood friend, a local software company or your well-tried IT sweatshop in India. Providing the company releases the code under the GPL (or another Free licence) the result will be the same.
This is actaully one of the major pluses with FOSS. If a company wants to add feature X to programm Y under the proprietary model then they had to bug program Y's developers to add the feature and hope that other companies did the same or it might never see the light of day. Under the FOSS model however they can ask ANYBODY to do it for them and thus guarantee that their feature will be implemented.
The company I work for are gradualy moving onto OSS for that reason. Features we need are not available or are buggy in commercial offerings and they are too slow at add fixing/adding them. It works out both cheaper and faster to hire someone else to enhance OSS offerings to suit our needs.
I'm in complete agreement with you. I've too had experience with well-maintained perl code. I've also had experience with poorly maintained perl code and java code. Out of the 2, the perl code was far harder to understand. The reason for this was due to perl's free-formness. That's not to say free-formness is bad, just if misused it can cause nightmares for later maintainers of the code.
What I meant in my original statement was that while it's possible to have easily maintainable code in any language, it's easier to mess up in some that in others. And since you should always asume the worst, especially with small companys...
are PHP, Perl and MySQL push out because they lack scalability and are hard to maintain?
I mean they are fine for small buisnesses, but when the buisness grows, so do their IT assests (databases, website, in-house software, etc). Large amounts of PHP & Perl code can be hard to maintain when compared to other languages like say Java. And as for MySQL... I'll let the other comments deal with that as I'm sure they will.
I should also be quick to point out that this doesn't mean OSS is bad, just that some of it's more visible members are overhyped and rely on thier brand-name to 'sell'. A good example of scalable OSS tech would be PostgreSQL as a DB, Plone/python for the web and java for large server/desktop apps.
And before someone mentions that java isn't opensource, I'll point out it is a language with an open(ish) specification and has an open source compiler/runtime which is good enough.
Re:Everything since HTML has been too complex
on
The Future of HTML
·
· Score: 1
Any error handling adds complexity, but I suspect that guessing what the author meant is a bit harder than ignoring/throwing an error.
I don't follow you on the 'increases likelihood of bugs' part. The more complex the code, the higher the likelihood of bugs.
As for other software thier aproch should be the same. 1) Inform user/developer of error. 2)If there is an error handling algorithm in the spec, follow it. 3) If not, then ignore damaged code. They should not 'fix' code, that leads to broken documents which will only work properly on said piece of software.
Slashdot isn't really a news site anymore. Not sure if it ever was. If you want news goto a news site agregator (e.g. news.google.com). Slashdot is about the comments that come after the articule, not the articule (or summary itself), that is where the real information lies. Sure it would be nice if there were no dupes or spelling mistakes, but since that isn't why I come to slashdot I don't really care.
Dude! Where have you been these past few months (longer?)?. Jack Thompson is this stupid lawyer dude who hates violent video games. He thinks it turns kids into monsters you see, violent monsters. Among his many exploits, he is most famous at the moment for not honouring his word about giving $10,000 to charity if someone made a game to his specifications. He has also been know to be argued into the ground by a 12yr old, aswell as attempt to sue penny-arcade for harasment (they gave the $10,000 to charity in his name).
I guess penny-arcade were too big for him, so he's gone after kids instead. I wonder if the kid could counter-sue JT for slander?
PS It's late, I have work tommorrow. If you want links http://www.google.com/ is your friend.
heh. even after the correction you still seem to be threatening the English language with murder. No matter how hard we try those pesky typos will always be one step ahead eh?:)
And definitly not the outcome I'd expected. Let's hope this sets a good precident for fan games to come. Yey for KQ!
Now I just have to hope for a Space Quest continuation...
Re:Everything since HTML has been too complex
on
The Future of HTML
·
· Score: 1
True, HTML isn't a programming language, it's a markup language. It's job is to define a document's stucture. The problem is that if you make a tiny error, like forget to close a tag, then the structure of the document is different from the one you intended. This in turn leads onto other problems. Not to mention that the document is now off spec, so not all parsers will parse it the same. It doesn't have to look the same, but it should be parsed the same.
As for being easily writen and read by a computer. It is far easier to write a xml/sgml parser that reads only valid xml/sgml than it is to write one to read invalid xml/sgml. It is also not hard to write a proper xml/sgml writer if you wish, however I see nothing wrong with using a simple library. If your code is small enough for you not to want to import one, then it's probably also simple enough for you not to make unexpected mistakes. If on the other hand it is sizable and complex, using a library would simplify things.
I can kind of see your point about minor errors causing the entire document to become unusable, but the answer should not be to guess what you meant. It would be better to replace the offending node with an error marker or something. That way the error is visible and only the buggy part pf the document is affected. My agrument is not that parsers shouldn't have error handling code, but that they shouldn't ignore errors and do best guesses instead of notifying the viewer/coder that there is an error, so that he can fix it. How many authors of bad HTML don't know thier code has an error ("But it works doesn't it?")?
And as for a testing mode, if you're using Firefox and XHTML, then set your document mime-type to application/xhtml+xml (don't forget the xmlns on the html tag though or you'll not get the expected results). That way you get a nice yellow/orange screen everytime you do something stupid.
Re:Everything since HTML has been too complex
on
The Future of HTML
·
· Score: 1
I still don't agree. Everybody does the simple 'look at the page' test before they publish, any error on hand-made once off code would be seen straight away as apposed to be hidden by the browser.
Also why should the browser make up for people's inability to code? If you miss a ';' in c or perl do you see the compiler add it on silently? no, you get a big fat error complaining that it isn't there. Do you think they do that just out of spite? They do it because by enforcing well-formednes they simplify the parser and catch possible typos and other minor errors early. I'd hate to see what would happen if they started guessing whether we meant to have a ';' there or not. It would lead to unexpected behaviour, kind of like what we see with poorly formed HTML. I don't see why HTML should be treated in any other way to other languages.
Also since there is no correct way to display incorrectly formed pages what we see is the browsers best guess at how it's displaying them, there is no wrong way or right way here, since there is no mention in the spec how code like <p><span></p><span> should be displayed. If browsers just showed an error on such pages the web would be a lot cleaner place.
If you have an error in your forum code, that's your fault, not the browsers and you should have picked it up during testing. Programming is nothing more that giving instructions to a computer. The computer should follow those instructions as ordered and according to spec. It should not have to guess what you meant when you gave those instructions. And there are ways of reducing programmer error, use them and don't expect the computer to clean up the mess you made for you.
Re:Everything since HTML has been too complex
on
The Future of HTML
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The only reason "a child could do" HTML is that it doesn't matter if they screw it up, the browser will still display things, and do a pretty good approximation of what they want. With XML, one misplaced & or > kills the whole page, and plenty of people who use it professionally still mess up, especially in dynamic environments, and especially when outside content is being used, like allowing comments.
And that is bad? One of the reasons alot of websites are so broken is because thier developers didn't realise they had made mistakes. If an error is made in an XML doc it is found quickly because the parser complians, an HTML doc will just be rendered by the browser alot of the time exactly how you expected it, so the error lingers, just to rear it's ugly head at the least expected moment.
Is using XML that much harder? I mean there are only those 4 things to look out for (closing tags, &, < and >). I mean now they have 4 more things to look out for no kid will be able to do it right?
DISCLAMER: yes, you should pass your code through a w3c validator which will find the mistakes for you, but that is not the point. XML strictness makes XHTML more robust, not to mention easier to be read by machines. Less overhead is good you know.
It is such a useless buzz word that nobody will use in a year or so. Whats next ? slashdot ?
Well to a certain extent slashdot has already entered our language. Most people in the IT profession know what a 'slashdot effect' is for instance. It's just not officialy in a dictionary yet. Most modern scientific terms aren't.
I thought he said free? According to AVG's website it's subscription based.
As for Free AV software, the only one I know of is ClamWin(based on ClamAV), which is decent. ClamAV is widely used on Linux mail servers aswell, so it has a decent user base and thus a decent virus database.
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is not a technology in itself, but is a term that describes a "new" approach to using a number of existing technologies together, including: HTML or XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, The Document Object Model, XML, XSLT, and the XMLHttpRequest object. When these technologies are combined in the AJAX model, web applications are able to make quick, incremental updates to the user interface without reloading the entire browser page. This makes the application faster and more responsive to user actions.
In otherwords the technology is not new and isn't a Microsoft Technology. Although to give them due credit they did invent the XMLHttpRequest object which makes AJAX possible.
Personaly I think the article is nothing more a than an annoying rant. Every technology has it's weeknesses and it's strengths. And just as you should do with any technology you must weigh up the pros and the cons of using it for your specific goal before you do. Saying something is trash and that it should not be used at all for anything is down right stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the context... or was that english? Arg! When you have 3 languages, each with thier own culture and syntax floating about in your head you can get them mixed up sometimes. This can be quite embaressing...
In order to take advantage of the new controller the game would have to be specificly designed to take advantage of it. Thus adding proper support for the controller to old games would require a compete re-write of the game. Mapping gestures to actions is really the only way add new controller support to old games. In most cases this will feel gimicy and nowhere as good as the original control method, however in some cases this will probably work.
E.G. If you map the D-pad to it's corresponding controller pointing gestures (point controller up a bit for up, etc) and the a and b buttons to thier corresponding equivelents you end up with quite a nice set-up to play most old RPGs.
For comparison I got my DS (blue) shortly after they came out for aprox. $150 US in Okayama, Japan. I also had the option of getting a second hand one for $100 instead, so that is like 100% markup. Not bad...
-_-
This is about Japan and Japanese right? Last I was there some restraunts had a few 'V's in thier English menu. As for the language, Japanese does have a word for meat. 'niku'. Mind you by default it only includes animal meat, but you can expand it's meaning to include bird meat with a few phrases. So I'm afraid in this case it's your friend's girlfriend's japanese language skill that is at fault rather than the language itself... But you're right about the culture being fundamentaly different from western cultures and that not eating meat or fish is quite alien to them.
Erm... Being able to be detached from "cruelty to animals" doesn't mean they don't have compassion. Most Japanese people I know are very compassionate about animals (especially cute ones), more so infact that a lot of europeans I know. On the other hand the europeans I know are far more vocal when it comes to using animals for science, so I'm not sure the 2 issues are directly linked.
Just an observation.
All Nintendo has to do to make old games fully playable with the new controler is to provide a way to map the new controler's movements to old controler buttons. That way as far as the game was concerned you would be using an ordinary old controler. Thus 100% compatible with old games.
Ofcourse the gameplay would differ, but as for whether it would be better or worse, that would depend on the game.
Commenting and documenting code is something all programmers should do. Not doing it is highly unprofessional and should not be allowed in any self-respecting firm. Making sure the documentation/comments are upto date is included in that statement.
On the other hand just because code is well documented that doesn't mean it's easily maintainable. There are various techniques used to generate good maintainable code. But without documentation any code more complex that 'hello world' tends to be a pain to maintain no matter what techniques you use.
I personaly also find the formating of code (and comments) just as important as commenting it. Reading code formated in a way you're not used to can be a pain and reading code formated in different ways doubly so. So a company-wide standard for formating code/comments would be a good idea.
I wouldn't say it's the *only* reason, but it's the main one. I don't think anyone will agrue with you if you say Free Software should be efficient and easy to use. FS proponents just view that efficiency secondary to Freedom.
In a way it's just a fight for equality. We want to be able to do the same things you can do with non-free software with Free software.
As for RMS, he is an activist. Activists tend to paint a much more black & white picture than it actually is. They also tend to simplify what they preach to make it easier to put thier message across. The majority of FS supporters whould probably agree that efficiency and freedom go hand in hand and in-efficient software is not a pleasure to use Free or not. We just think sometimes it better to suffer with in-efficient Free software if it will lead to efficient free software in the future.
I am well aware of the distinction between Free Software and OSS. However what I said aplies to both, so I didn't think in making a distinction.
As for politics and Rights, well.. RMS has the right to believe what he wants. He also has the right to preach those beliefs. Just as you have a right to voice yours. Niether of you have the right to force your beliefs on each other. He has no right to force you to use Free software and you don't have the right to force him to use 'non-Free' software.
The problem is that he believes you, as a user of non-free software, are forcing him to use the said non-free software. By attaching a word document, you are forcing the reader to use word. By streaming video in RealMedia format you are forcing people to use RealPlayer.
Is the anwser for both parties to use only Free software? Well that's one way. The other is to use standard platform-independant formats for data interchange. That way neither party is force to use the others tool of choice.
As for morallity of it all... I tend towards RMS's view, but I'm far less fanatical about it. At home I'm 100% Free, at work I do what my employer asks. Naturaly I push FOSS at every opertunity and grumble when I have to use non-free software, but I'll use it. Kindof like wearing cloths that are made in chinese/african sweat-shops that utilise child labour. You don't want to buy it because it'll be supporting something you don't believe in and/or despise, but on the other hand it will get pretty chilly if you don't.
I think you're getting things mixed up. He never said you have to hire GNU programmers to write free programs, just that you could hire someone to do it. Be it your child-hood friend, a local software company or your well-tried IT sweatshop in India. Providing the company releases the code under the GPL (or another Free licence) the result will be the same.
This is actaully one of the major pluses with FOSS. If a company wants to add feature X to programm Y under the proprietary model then they had to bug program Y's developers to add the feature and hope that other companies did the same or it might never see the light of day. Under the FOSS model however they can ask ANYBODY to do it for them and thus guarantee that their feature will be implemented.
The company I work for are gradualy moving onto OSS for that reason. Features we need are not available or are buggy in commercial offerings and they are too slow at add fixing/adding them. It works out both cheaper and faster to hire someone else to enhance OSS offerings to suit our needs.
I'm in complete agreement with you. I've too had experience with well-maintained perl code. I've also had experience with poorly maintained perl code and java code. Out of the 2, the perl code was far harder to understand. The reason for this was due to perl's free-formness. That's not to say free-formness is bad, just if misused it can cause nightmares for later maintainers of the code.
What I meant in my original statement was that while it's possible to have easily maintainable code in any language, it's easier to mess up in some that in others. And since you should always asume the worst, especially with small companys...
are PHP, Perl and MySQL push out because they lack scalability and are hard to maintain?
I mean they are fine for small buisnesses, but when the buisness grows, so do their IT assests (databases, website, in-house software, etc). Large amounts of PHP & Perl code can be hard to maintain when compared to other languages like say Java. And as for MySQL... I'll let the other comments deal with that as I'm sure they will.
I should also be quick to point out that this doesn't mean OSS is bad, just that some of it's more visible members are overhyped and rely on thier brand-name to 'sell'. A good example of scalable OSS tech would be PostgreSQL as a DB, Plone/python for the web and java for large server/desktop apps.
And before someone mentions that java isn't opensource, I'll point out it is a language with an open(ish) specification and has an open source compiler/runtime which is good enough.
Any error handling adds complexity, but I suspect that guessing what the author meant is a bit harder than ignoring/throwing an error.
I don't follow you on the 'increases likelihood of bugs' part. The more complex the code, the higher the likelihood of bugs.
As for other software thier aproch should be the same. 1) Inform user/developer of error. 2)If there is an error handling algorithm in the spec, follow it. 3) If not, then ignore damaged code. They should not 'fix' code, that leads to broken documents which will only work properly on said piece of software.
Slashdot isn't really a news site anymore. Not sure if it ever was. If you want news goto a news site agregator (e.g. news.google.com). Slashdot is about the comments that come after the articule, not the articule (or summary itself), that is where the real information lies. Sure it would be nice if there were no dupes or spelling mistakes, but since that isn't why I come to slashdot I don't really care.
Dude! Where have you been these past few months (longer?)?. Jack Thompson is this stupid lawyer dude who hates violent video games. He thinks it turns kids into monsters you see, violent monsters. Among his many exploits, he is most famous at the moment for not honouring his word about giving $10,000 to charity if someone made a game to his specifications. He has also been know to be argued into the ground by a 12yr old, aswell as attempt to sue penny-arcade for harasment (they gave the $10,000 to charity in his name).
I guess penny-arcade were too big for him, so he's gone after kids instead. I wonder if the kid could counter-sue JT for slander?
PS It's late, I have work tommorrow. If you want links http://www.google.com/ is your friend.
heh. even after the correction you still seem to be threatening the English language with murder. No matter how hard we try those pesky typos will always be one step ahead eh? :)
And definitly not the outcome I'd expected. Let's hope this sets a good precident for fan games to come. Yey for KQ!
Now I just have to hope for a Space Quest continuation...
True, HTML isn't a programming language, it's a markup language. It's job is to define a document's stucture. The problem is that if you make a tiny error, like forget to close a tag, then the structure of the document is different from the one you intended. This in turn leads onto other problems. Not to mention that the document is now off spec, so not all parsers will parse it the same. It doesn't have to look the same, but it should be parsed the same.
As for being easily writen and read by a computer. It is far easier to write a xml/sgml parser that reads only valid xml/sgml than it is to write one to read invalid xml/sgml. It is also not hard to write a proper xml/sgml writer if you wish, however I see nothing wrong with using a simple library. If your code is small enough for you not to want to import one, then it's probably also simple enough for you not to make unexpected mistakes. If on the other hand it is sizable and complex, using a library would simplify things.
I can kind of see your point about minor errors causing the entire document to become unusable, but the answer should not be to guess what you meant. It would be better to replace the offending node with an error marker or something. That way the error is visible and only the buggy part pf the document is affected. My agrument is not that parsers shouldn't have error handling code, but that they shouldn't ignore errors and do best guesses instead of notifying the viewer/coder that there is an error, so that he can fix it. How many authors of bad HTML don't know thier code has an error ("But it works doesn't it?")?
And as for a testing mode, if you're using Firefox and XHTML, then set your document mime-type to application/xhtml+xml (don't forget the xmlns on the html tag though or you'll not get the expected results). That way you get a nice yellow/orange screen everytime you do something stupid.
I still don't agree. Everybody does the simple 'look at the page' test before they publish, any error on hand-made once off code would be seen straight away as apposed to be hidden by the browser.
Also why should the browser make up for people's inability to code? If you miss a ';' in c or perl do you see the compiler add it on silently? no, you get a big fat error complaining that it isn't there. Do you think they do that just out of spite? They do it because by enforcing well-formednes they simplify the parser and catch possible typos and other minor errors early. I'd hate to see what would happen if they started guessing whether we meant to have a ';' there or not. It would lead to unexpected behaviour, kind of like what we see with poorly formed HTML. I don't see why HTML should be treated in any other way to other languages.
Also since there is no correct way to display incorrectly formed pages what we see is the browsers best guess at how it's displaying them, there is no wrong way or right way here, since there is no mention in the spec how code like <p><span></p><span> should be displayed. If browsers just showed an error on such pages the web would be a lot cleaner place.
If you have an error in your forum code, that's your fault, not the browsers and you should have picked it up during testing. Programming is nothing more that giving instructions to a computer. The computer should follow those instructions as ordered and according to spec. It should not have to guess what you meant when you gave those instructions. And there are ways of reducing programmer error, use them and don't expect the computer to clean up the mess you made for you.
And that is bad? One of the reasons alot of websites are so broken is because thier developers didn't realise they had made mistakes. If an error is made in an XML doc it is found quickly because the parser complians, an HTML doc will just be rendered by the browser alot of the time exactly how you expected it, so the error lingers, just to rear it's ugly head at the least expected moment.
Is using XML that much harder? I mean there are only those 4 things to look out for (closing tags, &, < and >). I mean now they have 4 more things to look out for no kid will be able to do it right?
DISCLAMER: yes, you should pass your code through a w3c validator which will find the mistakes for you, but that is not the point. XML strictness makes XHTML more robust, not to mention easier to be read by machines. Less overhead is good you know.
Well to a certain extent slashdot has already entered our language. Most people in the IT profession know what a 'slashdot effect' is for instance. It's just not officialy in a dictionary yet. Most modern scientific terms aren't.
I thought he said free ? According to AVG's website it's subscription based.
As for Free AV software, the only one I know of is ClamWin(based on ClamAV), which is decent. ClamAV is widely used on Linux mail servers aswell, so it has a decent user base and thus a decent virus database.
Mod parent Offtopic, Flamebait, Overrated or any other moderation that has a '-1' score!
lol, no I am not an agent from the Department of Homeland Security
Shit! It's self-mutating! All AOL kids AND thier grannies are doomed now!
-- quoted from http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX
In otherwords the technology is not new and isn't a Microsoft Technology. Although to give them due credit they did invent the XMLHttpRequest object which makes AJAX possible.
Personaly I think the article is nothing more a than an annoying rant. Every technology has it's weeknesses and it's strengths. And just as you should do with any technology you must weigh up the pros and the cons of using it for your specific goal before you do. Saying something is trash and that it should not be used at all for anything is down right stupid.