Mobile devices are not a problem. Looked how locked down the iPad and iPhone are. That fits right in with the spirit of trusted computing.
You realize that according to figures that you can on the web jailbroken iPhones constitute from 10 to 30% of the market? And those are certainly "conservative" estimates, because judging from iOS piracy rate ([1][2]) percentage of jailbroken iDevices should be much larger!
BASIC is a high level "assembly" language, it allows programming in every style: structured, unstructured, whatever you want. Every line is addressed by its number, and some versions of BASIC even allowed self-modifying code (e.g. renumbering lines).
"Modern" languages are much less expressive than assembly or BASIC: e.g. you cannot [easily] have functions that jump from one to another, or have multiple points of entry.
What's more important though, BASIC (and assembly, once newbie gets accustomed with it) is closer to the way non-programmers think about programs (i.e. "Step 1. Do this, Step 2. Do that, Step 3. Goto step 1 if wrong" etc), so it is easier to learn for beginners.
BASIC is simpler and - as funny as it sounds - closer to assembler than "modern languages". I mean, each line has an "address" (number) and you can happily jump back and forth with GOTO, you don't have "local" vars nor scopes (I'm talking about ZX Spectrum-like BASIC). This is closer to way beginners think about programming.
(And no, I don't think that learning to use "goto" is a bad thing. Goto may make code harder to optimize for compiler or harder to understand for humans, but when not abused, it can simplify things for both compilers and humans: e.g. using goto to break out of nested loop is certainly better than introducing artificial booleans which have to be checked (implicitly relying on good branch prediction to avoid performance penalty) on each iteration).
Well, that's how the market works: someone wants to gain an edge over competition and provides you with a better product. I don't need any other "answers" - I wouldn't believe in them anyway.
Maybe I'm just old, but I think the current direction of development has lost sight of the reason XWindows was created in the first place. The client and server shouldn't have to be on the same host. The User should be able to customize their own environment in whatever way makes it easier for them to work.
"Client-server" approach for a desktop UI looks like an old attempt to solve problems that never became common. I would prefer to have direct (except for kernel-level abstraction) hardware access, memory efficiency and low sound latency instead. Network transparency can be added on top of that (see Windows & Mac OS X) for those who need it.
I don't understand people who bash Linux. I am not talking about trolls like OP, but there are people who are serious about hating Linux.
Why would one want to demotivate people who work on an "indie" OS? Would he/she also bash amateur music bands for making "indie" music and not working for a major record label? What kind of person are such people?
This data looks weird, especially the part where movies and music generate less revenue than games (and books!).
Anyway, I cannot speak for the whole industry, but from POV of a single company it becomes harder to make profitable games, not easier. You need many more people for an AAA project - so many that in fact few studios can produce an AAA game single-handedly, most need to outsource grunt work (like content creation). This increases costs and risks, and thus prices.
People play less these days (lack of time - damn, we get older!), and those who play the most (teenagers) usually pirate, so they want it free. F2P is the natural answer. You don't have to pay up front, so you may invite all of your friends. You pay either with time or money, so if you can't play 10 hours a week, you can pay and get the same result. You don't pay for something you don't need, so it's even more fair than 'classic' games.
Sure, players' behavior is analyzed to make the game more attractive for them, but hey - that's natural. People want to influence the game, they provide a lot of feedback (mostly asking for new stuff or complaining), so game developers consider all the input - both explicit and implicit - when making decisions.
You don't earn that kind of money by implementing someone else's ideas (which rules out 99% of jobs) and hoping that your employer will reward you appropriately.
Instead, you try to make people around you implement your ideas - including the idea to get insanely rich.
Sun wanted to kill OpenOffice, the very project they started? I am afraid I don't follow...
I may be misinformed, but I don't really get it what was so unreasonable in Sun's behavior. After all, when working on regular (non-FOSS) software, we happily agree to transfer copyright to our employer, so what was wrong with transferring copyright to Sun when contributing to Sun-funded open source project?
It will take time to regain the same popularity/recognizability. Of course, since most Linux users have probably already switched (unless they are using an older distro), I'm talking about Windows/Mac world (which is 90% of users of OO.o).
Thanks, this is helpful. I always wondered what that go-oo was about, but never bothered to check.
But again, most people think about Linux distros only. And according to Wikipedia, even for LibreOffice (not OpenOffice.org), Windows installations are 90% of its userbase. I can't find stats for OpenOffice.org, but I think that Linux installs should amount to even smaller percentage. And Windows users noticed split much later (and many probably still haven't).
People who used OpenOffice.org on Linux have already switched to LibreOffice. However, those are probably a small percent among OpenOffice users - I guess that the most of its userbase are Windows users, people who work in (or themselves run) small companies, where OO.o is/was a reasonable choice because it is free but still mostly compatible. At least this is the case with my friends - most of them aren't Linux users:) It's not like OO.o is a necessity for them - MS Office is affordable these days, but OO.o saved them money, even if complicating their life by occasional compatibility problems.
Such people do not follow FOSS news closely and rarely, if ever, upgrade for the sake of upgrade. Headlines like this one ("OpenOffice.org is dying") is likely to confuse them. They probably won't switch right away (already isntalled OO.o works for them after all), but OO.o brand will be penalized as "unreliable" and this will affect their attitude and later upgrade choices.
From what I know, the split happened because some people were afraid of Oracle doing something bad to OO.o, and started to act first - effectively creating a self-fullfilling prophecy.
I think that OpenOffice.org owes a lot to Sun and its StarOffice heritage, while bottom-up activity didn't promote brands like KOffice or AbiWord, did it?
Whatever the reasons for its popularity were, OpenOffice.org is the most successful open office suite at the time being, and it's not wise to start from scratch with LibreOffice, being in worse position than OO.o was in the beginning.
Winning? LibreOffice shines by light reflected off OpenOffice brand. Use Google Trends or any other metric (including absense of any mention of LO in TFA) to estimate how popular LO is vs OO.o.
Guess what happens when OO.o is pronounced 'dead'? All those users who only wanted free beer, grudgingly tolerating OO.o's 90+% compability with MS Office, aren't likely to continue experiments with yet another underdog.
And this is not accidental. LibreOffice is not attractive for those OpenOffice.org users who prefer free beer to free speech (and unfortunately, they are the majority, at least judging from people I know, YMMV), because:
- It is not backed by any commercial entity and is not perceived as able to keep pace with MS Office.
- It looks like it was created because of some childish ego-war or other bullshit - no one guarantees that the project won't be split again
- It has a weird name, which does not appeal to people from non-Latin-speaking countries.
Unwarranted LibreOffice split is what killed it, not Oracle. And LibreOffice is unlikely to create a brand of its own - it will be just another obscure office suite with funny name.
This is the price one pays for not making compromises.
Death of OpenOffice.org will damage LibreOffice, too. Only geeks around me know (and care) about the split, whereas most other users I know just use "open Office" because it's free and don't want to be educated about the situation (they simply don't care). News about OpenOffice.org dying will probably result in them considering the "open Office" idea a failure and switching to MS Office, not LibreOffice, since LibreOffice is a scary and not widely known name.
You already see that headlines like these make news, and you will see that overall population of Libre/OpenOffice will dwindle if brand is considered "dead".
They actually want, if you carefully educate (a very slow process) how useful it can be for them. And this is what Apple is/was basically doing, step by step.
Apple products are scaled down to "mass user" needs - so just avoid them if you think that you are on higher level of human development. There will *always* be more sophisticated devices (like, say, N900), albeit the higher level they target, the more skills they require to use them, and the fewer (and the costlier) they are.
He said that there was no version control for compiled executables. And I know a lot of companies that have version-controlled source tree yet they don't v-c compiled files and data.
It happens that I also use Qt (note it's Qt, since QT is for QuickTime) for my pet projects (like programming N900 phone). And as much as I like Qt Creator, it has much less features than VS and is severely limited by underlying qmake. While you can create something like "solution" by using nested qmake projects, you cannot easily control which configuration (a set of compiler options, with Debug and Release being predefined) you want to build for a particular project in a solution - and none of these can be done from QtCreator GUI. In fact, you cannot even rebuild a single (nested) project from withing QtCreator GUI, let alone edit dependencies between them. Also, QtCreator doesn't allow you to arrange project files differently than they are laid out on filesystem and does not expose compiler options, relying on hand-editing.pro files.
This is all basic usage, but this haven't been improved in more than 2 years (since 1.0 version).
Oh come on, please automate testing whether the player can complete the level without being stuck in a progression blocker, when level designers keep changing it daily. You will either need really smart level designers (more like scripters) or will need to "automate" testing again after each change.
Even better example is automating tests that "AI does not behave erratically/stupid when players does something unexpected".
Slashdot Mirror
Mobile devices are not a problem. Looked how locked down the iPad and iPhone are. That fits right in with the spirit of trusted computing.
You realize that according to figures that you can on the web jailbroken iPhones constitute from 10 to 30% of the market? And those are certainly "conservative" estimates, because judging from iOS piracy rate ([1] [2]) percentage of jailbroken iDevices should be much larger!
BASIC is a high level "assembly" language, it allows programming in every style: structured, unstructured, whatever you want. Every line is addressed by its number, and some versions of BASIC even allowed self-modifying code (e.g. renumbering lines).
"Modern" languages are much less expressive than assembly or BASIC: e.g. you cannot [easily] have functions that jump from one to another, or have multiple points of entry.
What's more important though, BASIC (and assembly, once newbie gets accustomed with it) is closer to the way non-programmers think about programs (i.e. "Step 1. Do this, Step 2. Do that, Step 3. Goto step 1 if wrong" etc), so it is easier to learn for beginners.
BASIC is simpler and - as funny as it sounds - closer to assembler than "modern languages". I mean, each line has an "address" (number) and you can happily jump back and forth with GOTO, you don't have "local" vars nor scopes (I'm talking about ZX Spectrum-like BASIC). This is closer to way beginners think about programming.
(And no, I don't think that learning to use "goto" is a bad thing. Goto may make code harder to optimize for compiler or harder to understand for humans, but when not abused, it can simplify things for both compilers and humans: e.g. using goto to break out of nested loop is certainly better than introducing artificial booleans which have to be checked (implicitly relying on good branch prediction to avoid performance penalty) on each iteration).
Well, that's how the market works: someone wants to gain an edge over competition and provides you with a better product. I don't need any other "answers" - I wouldn't believe in them anyway.
Maybe I'm just old, but I think the current direction of development has lost sight of the reason XWindows was created in the first place. The client and server shouldn't have to be on the same host. The User should be able to customize their own environment in whatever way makes it easier for them to work.
"Client-server" approach for a desktop UI looks like an old attempt to solve problems that never became common. I would prefer to have direct (except for kernel-level abstraction) hardware access, memory efficiency and low sound latency instead. Network transparency can be added on top of that (see Windows & Mac OS X) for those who need it.
I don't understand people who bash Linux. I am not talking about trolls like OP, but there are people who are serious about hating Linux.
Why would one want to demotivate people who work on an "indie" OS? Would he/she also bash amateur music bands for making "indie" music and not working for a major record label? What kind of person are such people?
This will change. Crytek (those guys who did FarCry & Crysis) has already announced their first AAA F2P.
You can also find quite a few console games priced 40 USD and less (like Homefront) - which was unheard of a generation ago.
This data looks weird, especially the part where movies and music generate less revenue than games (and books!).
Anyway, I cannot speak for the whole industry, but from POV of a single company it becomes harder to make profitable games, not easier. You need many more people for an AAA project - so many that in fact few studios can produce an AAA game single-handedly, most need to outsource grunt work (like content creation). This increases costs and risks, and thus prices.
Bullshit, that has nothing to do with greed.
People play less these days (lack of time - damn, we get older!), and those who play the most (teenagers) usually pirate, so they want it free. F2P is the natural answer. You don't have to pay up front, so you may invite all of your friends. You pay either with time or money, so if you can't play 10 hours a week, you can pay and get the same result. You don't pay for something you don't need, so it's even more fair than 'classic' games.
Sure, players' behavior is analyzed to make the game more attractive for them, but hey - that's natural. People want to influence the game, they provide a lot of feedback (mostly asking for new stuff or complaining), so game developers consider all the input - both explicit and implicit - when making decisions.
Where's greed here?
You don't earn that kind of money by implementing someone else's ideas (which rules out 99% of jobs) and hoping that your employer will reward you appropriately.
Instead, you try to make people around you implement your ideas - including the idea to get insanely rich.
Sun wanted to kill OpenOffice, the very project they started? I am afraid I don't follow...
I may be misinformed, but I don't really get it what was so unreasonable in Sun's behavior. After all, when working on regular (non-FOSS) software, we happily agree to transfer copyright to our employer, so what was wrong with transferring copyright to Sun when contributing to Sun-funded open source project?
It will take time to regain the same popularity/recognizability. Of course, since most Linux users have probably already switched (unless they are using an older distro), I'm talking about Windows/Mac world (which is 90% of users of OO.o).
Thanks, this is helpful. I always wondered what that go-oo was about, but never bothered to check.
But again, most people think about Linux distros only. And according to Wikipedia, even for LibreOffice (not OpenOffice.org), Windows installations are 90% of its userbase. I can't find stats for OpenOffice.org, but I think that Linux installs should amount to even smaller percentage. And Windows users noticed split much later (and many probably still haven't).
People who used OpenOffice.org on Linux have already switched to LibreOffice. However, those are probably a small percent among OpenOffice users - I guess that the most of its userbase are Windows users, people who work in (or themselves run) small companies, where OO.o is/was a reasonable choice because it is free but still mostly compatible. At least this is the case with my friends - most of them aren't Linux users :) It's not like OO.o is a necessity for them - MS Office is affordable these days, but OO.o saved them money, even if complicating their life by occasional compatibility problems.
Such people do not follow FOSS news closely and rarely, if ever, upgrade for the sake of upgrade. Headlines like this one ("OpenOffice.org is dying") is likely to confuse them. They probably won't switch right away (already isntalled OO.o works for them after all), but OO.o brand will be penalized as "unreliable" and this will affect their attitude and later upgrade choices.
From what I know, the split happened because some people were afraid of Oracle doing something bad to OO.o, and started to act first - effectively creating a self-fullfilling prophecy.
I think that OpenOffice.org owes a lot to Sun and its StarOffice heritage, while bottom-up activity didn't promote brands like KOffice or AbiWord, did it?
Whatever the reasons for its popularity were, OpenOffice.org is the most successful open office suite at the time being, and it's not wise to start from scratch with LibreOffice, being in worse position than OO.o was in the beginning.
Winning? LibreOffice shines by light reflected off OpenOffice brand. Use Google Trends or any other metric (including absense of any mention of LO in TFA) to estimate how popular LO is vs OO.o.
Guess what happens when OO.o is pronounced 'dead'? All those users who only wanted free beer, grudgingly tolerating OO.o's 90+% compability with MS Office, aren't likely to continue experiments with yet another underdog.
And this is not accidental. LibreOffice is not attractive for those OpenOffice.org users who prefer free beer to free speech (and unfortunately, they are the majority, at least judging from people I know, YMMV), because:
Unwarranted LibreOffice split is what killed it, not Oracle. And LibreOffice is unlikely to create a brand of its own - it will be just another obscure office suite with funny name.
This is the price one pays for not making compromises.
Death of OpenOffice.org will damage LibreOffice, too. Only geeks around me know (and care) about the split, whereas most other users I know just use "open Office" because it's free and don't want to be educated about the situation (they simply don't care). News about OpenOffice.org dying will probably result in them considering the "open Office" idea a failure and switching to MS Office, not LibreOffice, since LibreOffice is a scary and not widely known name.
You already see that headlines like these make news, and you will see that overall population of Libre/OpenOffice will dwindle if brand is considered "dead".
They actually want, if you carefully educate (a very slow process) how useful it can be for them. And this is what Apple is/was basically doing, step by step.
Apple products are scaled down to "mass user" needs - so just avoid them if you think that you are on higher level of human development. There will *always* be more sophisticated devices (like, say, N900), albeit the higher level they target, the more skills they require to use them, and the fewer (and the costlier) they are.
He said that there was no version control for compiled executables. And I know a lot of companies that have version-controlled source tree yet they don't v-c compiled files and data.
It happens that I also use Qt (note it's Qt, since QT is for QuickTime) for my pet projects (like programming N900 phone). And as much as I like Qt Creator, it has much less features than VS and is severely limited by underlying qmake. While you can create something like "solution" by using nested qmake projects, you cannot easily control which configuration (a set of compiler options, with Debug and Release being predefined) you want to build for a particular project in a solution - and none of these can be done from QtCreator GUI. In fact, you cannot even rebuild a single (nested) project from withing QtCreator GUI, let alone edit dependencies between them. Also, QtCreator doesn't allow you to arrange project files differently than they are laid out on filesystem and does not expose compiler options, relying on hand-editing .pro files.
This is all basic usage, but this haven't been improved in more than 2 years (since 1.0 version).
Oh come on, please automate testing whether the player can complete the level without being stuck in a progression blocker, when level designers keep changing it daily. You will either need really smart level designers (more like scripters) or will need to "automate" testing again after each change.
Even better example is automating tests that "AI does not behave erratically/stupid when players does something unexpected".