I was working for a videogame company that essentially went under because Microsoft canceled our next anticipated contract. This was one of two businesses to drop out from under me during my career. I've had a couple of cancelled projects as well, which are also somewhat disheartening. One was, oddly enough, also at Microsoft while working as a contractor. They put together an entire team before someone crunched the numbers and realized that the licensing for the game we were working on was so expensive, the project would likely not make any money. Seriously, no one did this before they actually hired an entire dev team? I spent about a week doing nothing while waiting for a computer to show up, and then worked for about a week. Then the project was cancelled. The project manager felt pretty bad about that, so kept me on for another few weeks as a makeshift "severance", as well as buying me and the other contract programmer an Xbox and a few games to go with it, which was pretty nice of him.
This sort of thing happens all the time in this industry. I suppose you just sort of have to roll with the punches with that sort of thing. Fortunately, after you've got a few years under your belt, it's not too difficult to find another job, especially if you're willing to relocate. I'm fairly lucky that way, being in an area with plenty of great companies to choose from.
I wish all the displaced devs at that company the best of luck. I've definitely been there, and know it's not a lot of fun to suddenly find yourself searching for a new job. Fortunately, studios are always anxious to grab experienced development talent, so hopefully they'll all land on their feet.
Ah, I see... ok, that makes a bit more sense then. So Roslyn is more or less the front end of the compiler tool chain, while LLVM is the back end, so to speak. Thanks for the clarification.
I completely agree with everything you've written... if you're a.net programmer, you're fine. But if you're a C programmer sitting directly on top of Win32, you're screwed
Lots of cutting-edge applications are still written in C or C++ and directly use the Windows API (it's not called Win32 anymore). In fact, I'd go so far as to say the majority of large commercial applications you can think of are native apps: Photoshop, Microsoft Office, most videogames, web browsers, media players, etc, etc. Nearly all the new APIs released with new versions of Windows are available to native applications. There's no reason a company has to abandon their legacy C codebase if they don't want to. BTW, the "way forward" for C developers is called C++, and it's conveniently backwards compatible with your C codebase.
The major reason one would consider switching to.NET from native code is productivity, not new functionality. The.NET APIs are much easier to use than the much older Windows APIs, and the languages.NET supports like C# are far easier to use as well. You don't even have to completely abandon your C or C++ code either. It's pretty simple to write interop layers to communicate between C# and C, and have done so many times at work.
Since 'literally' literally no longer means literally, I'm wondering if they guy actually jumped up out of his seat and sprinted to the toilets after each move. Maybe it wouldn't have been so suspicious-looking if he just casually walked to the facilities.
Note that in the story people are using a VPN to bypass country restriction. If they were just torrenting the content without wishing to pay for it, they wouldn't need to worry about this.
I could easily torrent the media content I regularly watch, but I find it a lot easier to simply subscribe to a few streaming services, most of which cost less than eight or nine dollars a month. If a service is convenient and affordable, many people will use it, for practical reasons and/or the fact that they recognize that doing so supports the creators of the content they wish to see.
Obviously, there's always going to be some people that will never pay for it.
Hrm... I think your numbers may be a bit off. Do you have a source for that? Everywhere I've read mentions that in a suitable climate, each person only needs about 1/3 to 1/2 of an acre for subsistence needs. So, most families would need only two to five acres, assuming a good growing climate and nearby irrigation sources.
40 acres sounds a bit more like what you'd see for a typical cash-crop farm. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?
That's not how statistical probability works. Even if the machine lost a million times in a row, the odds of it hitting payola on the next pull is the same as on the first. You don't need anything except a good random number generator and time to ensure the payout rate is exactly where it's supposed to be.
Geographical restrictions on digital content is an anachronistic holdover from from physical markets as applied to digital markets - from back in the days you couldn't just grab any sort of media from anywhere at any time off the internet. It's amazing how ridiculously non-adaptable the media companies have proven themselves to be. If you try to restrict a region, they'll just pirate the stuff anyhow, or (naturally) use a VPN to bypass country restrictions.
These companies need to realize that there's really only ONE digital market. If they just made it convenient and affordable for customers to get their product instead of trying to control and coerce the markets, and they'd have a lot more success in the long run. They should be using the internet's strengths to reach more customers more easily, not fighting against it. Idiots.
Don't conflate "open source" with "good guys". There's nothing inherently bad about a business wanting their own products and platforms to succeed. You'd be a pretty lousy business if that wasn't your goal. It's the *methods* they use to achieve succeed which are the critical factor in that determination.
It's clear they're serious about their open source strategy, but that's because it makes good business sense, not because they're suddenly embracing all things FOSS. It's just an acknowledgement that they're not the dominant player anywhere except on the desktop. Thus, they want to make it easy for developers using their tools to port code to Linux on servers, or Android and iOS for mobile, along with Windows on the desktop. If they didn't do that, Windows as a platform would appear increasingly isolated and irrelevant to a broader development strategy.
So, don't misunderstand, this is just Microsoft working to improve their own products. Since MS themselves are now cross-platform developers, they need Visual Studio to have good cross-platform capabilities as well. Of course, this also benefits their developer customers who are doing cross-platform work as well. The fact that this is actually a benefit to other operating systems is likely completely irrelevant to them - it's just the reality of the current market.
I think it's important to understand that the.NET JIT compiler should probably be considered more part of the.NET *runtime*, not necessarily part of the development platform for.NET. Since they want to port.NET to non-Microsoft operating systems, it makes sense to utilize LLVM to target those platforms for the JIT compiler rather than trying to write a new one from scratch. They needed a solid compiler to accompany their open source.NET platform for it to be a more complete open-source solution. Moreover, they've been extending Visual C++'s support for alternative platforms like Android, so it also makes sense that they'd be gaining expertise with LLVM.
It's probably not the end of their proprietary compiler, or even necessarily an indication they're thinking this way, but it may make more sense for them to utilize LLVM so as to target a larger number of platforms. They just recently rewrote their own.NET compiler a couple of years ago and released it as open source, so it's sort of odd to see a new project so soon. I'm guessing they figured it would be more work to extend that project to support all the platforms they're releasing CoreCLR for than using LLVM. Hard to say.
Also, there's still the native compiler, used for C/C++, and they've been sinking an enormous amount of development resources into making it compliant with the recent advances in those languages, so it also seems unlikely they're going to toss that work.
People keep missing the point of these things. These are not practical devices like an iPhone that just happens to also be sleek and fashionable. These are fashion items first and foremost (a universally acceptable jewelry item for both men and women) that also happen to have some clever tech-related features. No one buys an Apple watch so they can tell the time. They're buying it so they can show off something interesting and fashionable on their wrist.
I'd suggest they'd have a far better chance at doing so.
It seems fairly difficult to design a good interface for a device with a lot of advanced functionality when your budget only allows push buttons and a limited resolution B&W LCD screen. Moreover, the user trying to set the thermostat is leaning against the wall and squinting at the screen and the tiny button labels, and so has a limited tolerance threshold for trying to figure the thing out.
By contrast, any application for smartphone or PC has the benefit of a powerful device to render the interface, and can take advantage of excellent input hardware and standardized controls for entering numbers, picking dates and times, and so on. It's far easier to create an easy-to-use interface in this environment.
Good to see it's not just the US that wastes money on expensive technology-related boondoggles that don't appreciably translate to improved education.
With China’s recent plan for education, the ball is now clearly in Obama’s court. With a little under two years left in his final term, will he follow suit and fund a similar program to the one China has planned? We can only hope!
Uh, no. Why does this have anything to do with Obama anyhow? Don't just buy millions of dollars worth of hardware and dump it in the hands of teachers. At least first create a small pilot program to see if this is a worthwhile idea before spending millions of dollars on a device that remains unused. Nothing good comes from wholesale adoption of technology without first checking to see if it will actually be of any use to students and teachers. See: California iPad program scandal / disaster.
The only "appliances" I think would be useful to have some integrated smarts is heating and cooling systems, and possibly lighting systems. If you can *reliably* determine where people are in the house at all times, then there's no reason to heat, cool, or light areas of the house where people are not currently residing. This, of course, would only make sense in a fairly large house in which areas of it regularly go unused (so probably not my own house). The same personal detection functionality would also make a good security system. Even without the fanciness all all that, I think it would be nice to have a simple app to control and program the thermostat instead of trying to decipher what the hell all those buttons and functions do, as those are some of the worst-designed devices I've ever seen.
Beyond that, I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would want a smart fridge, washing machine, oven, or other device. The "smart" portions of those devices will become embarrassingly obsolete long before the rest of the machine dies from old age, assuming a reasonably high quality machine. And "find a recipe online? You need an appliance to do that? Yeesh, talk about a solution in search of a problem.
Sort of off-topic, but your post reminded me of a little factoid. In Japan, they call the green traffic light "blue". It has to do with the fact that the older term "ao" refers to both green and blue. They have a distinct word for green "midori", but it's understood as a specific shade of blue, and the color boundaries are not the same as what most others would call green. Thus, they have "blue" traffic lights in Japan. They're often the same green as found in other countries, but sometimes they're pushed a bit more towards the blue spectrum.
Patents are equally useless for protecting against copying the look and feel of a game. You can only patent specific concepts or technologies, say, the way Zynga tried to patent the the use of in-game virtual currency. You're telling me you think the proper way for these indie devs to handle this is to go out, patent their own code and algorithms, and then fight it out in court with Zynga? Insanity.
The AAA game industry isn't "ignoring" the patent issue. They're simply declining to participate in the patent war madness that everyone else seems to be currently engaged in. Companies like Zynga are the exception to the general trend, and may end up forcing everyone else to do the same goddamned thing. Do you know who'll be left behind here? Yeah, the indie devs, because they can't afford patent lawyers and ridiculous lawsuits.
Read the massive list of Zynga patents. It makes me weep as a game developer. The USPTO seems to be rubberstamping whatever the hell Zynga sends their way, so long as it's couched in enough confusing terminology and legalese (oh, and "online" is mentioned anywhere). If you actually read the patents in detail, they're essentially the sort of thing any competent developer would think.
Seriously, this is madness, and it has to stop. Software patents need to die.
Ok, obviously there were some tape drives offered on consumer models. I'd imagine that the *vast* majority of consumer PCs didn't have tape drive hardware on them, but yes, they certainly were available.
That's just my own personal experience. You don't have to look very far to see the many, many other unbelievably stupid litigations that have made the news (hint: they all seem to resolve around the courts in a certain East Texas district). And the one failure I pointed out happened to cost my company a lot of money to resolve. Why should we keep putting businesses through the wringer for the sake of lawyers and patent trolls?
So, yeah, I wouldn't mind tossing the concept of software patents altogether. By any reasonable standard, it's been a disaster for the software development industry over the past few decades. How many more years of failure would you like to see before you're convinced it's a bad idea? Maybe another few decades of patchwork fixes and band-aids?
The idea of patenting software is and always has been a dubious notion at best. Just because it's the law of the land now doesn't make it a good idea in the slightest. We should follow New Zealand's example and simply assert that software is not an invention and therefore shouldn't be patentable.
So... what makes the NSA think that anyone could actually keep these ultimate "keys to the kingdom" secret? I mean, just about everything else of theirs that was secret has leaked out thanks to a single contractor. Can you imagine how valuable these keys are, and how much money could be made by selling them? Hell, the US couldn't even keep our nuclear weapon plans under wraps.
And what's awesome about this scheme is that once the secret is out, every single smartphone in the US is compromised all at once. Whee!
Slashdot Mirror
I was working for a videogame company that essentially went under because Microsoft canceled our next anticipated contract. This was one of two businesses to drop out from under me during my career. I've had a couple of cancelled projects as well, which are also somewhat disheartening. One was, oddly enough, also at Microsoft while working as a contractor. They put together an entire team before someone crunched the numbers and realized that the licensing for the game we were working on was so expensive, the project would likely not make any money. Seriously, no one did this before they actually hired an entire dev team? I spent about a week doing nothing while waiting for a computer to show up, and then worked for about a week. Then the project was cancelled. The project manager felt pretty bad about that, so kept me on for another few weeks as a makeshift "severance", as well as buying me and the other contract programmer an Xbox and a few games to go with it, which was pretty nice of him.
This sort of thing happens all the time in this industry. I suppose you just sort of have to roll with the punches with that sort of thing. Fortunately, after you've got a few years under your belt, it's not too difficult to find another job, especially if you're willing to relocate. I'm fairly lucky that way, being in an area with plenty of great companies to choose from.
I wish all the displaced devs at that company the best of luck. I've definitely been there, and know it's not a lot of fun to suddenly find yourself searching for a new job. Fortunately, studios are always anxious to grab experienced development talent, so hopefully they'll all land on their feet.
For the past thirty years, experts have told us that Moore's Law is likely to end within ten years.
What do the experts today think? Predictions are in: Moore's Law will probably end in about ten years.
Good to see some things never change.
Ah, I see... ok, that makes a bit more sense then. So Roslyn is more or less the front end of the compiler tool chain, while LLVM is the back end, so to speak. Thanks for the clarification.
I completely agree with everything you've written... if you're a .net programmer, you're fine. But if you're a C programmer sitting directly on top of Win32, you're screwed
Lots of cutting-edge applications are still written in C or C++ and directly use the Windows API (it's not called Win32 anymore). In fact, I'd go so far as to say the majority of large commercial applications you can think of are native apps: Photoshop, Microsoft Office, most videogames, web browsers, media players, etc, etc. Nearly all the new APIs released with new versions of Windows are available to native applications. There's no reason a company has to abandon their legacy C codebase if they don't want to. BTW, the "way forward" for C developers is called C++, and it's conveniently backwards compatible with your C codebase.
The major reason one would consider switching to .NET from native code is productivity, not new functionality. The .NET APIs are much easier to use than the much older Windows APIs, and the languages .NET supports like C# are far easier to use as well. You don't even have to completely abandon your C or C++ code either. It's pretty simple to write interop layers to communicate between C# and C, and have done so many times at work.
Since 'literally' literally no longer means literally, I'm wondering if they guy actually jumped up out of his seat and sprinted to the toilets after each move. Maybe it wouldn't have been so suspicious-looking if he just casually walked to the facilities.
Chess is not a no-win scenario.
Note that in the story people are using a VPN to bypass country restriction. If they were just torrenting the content without wishing to pay for it, they wouldn't need to worry about this.
I could easily torrent the media content I regularly watch, but I find it a lot easier to simply subscribe to a few streaming services, most of which cost less than eight or nine dollars a month. If a service is convenient and affordable, many people will use it, for practical reasons and/or the fact that they recognize that doing so supports the creators of the content they wish to see.
Obviously, there's always going to be some people that will never pay for it.
shoreline communities... problem is finding salt to preserve the fish
You're excluding the sea as a source of salt?
Hrm... I think your numbers may be a bit off. Do you have a source for that? Everywhere I've read mentions that in a suitable climate, each person only needs about 1/3 to 1/2 of an acre for subsistence needs. So, most families would need only two to five acres, assuming a good growing climate and nearby irrigation sources.
40 acres sounds a bit more like what you'd see for a typical cash-crop farm. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?
That's not how statistical probability works. Even if the machine lost a million times in a row, the odds of it hitting payola on the next pull is the same as on the first. You don't need anything except a good random number generator and time to ensure the payout rate is exactly where it's supposed to be.
Geographical restrictions on digital content is an anachronistic holdover from from physical markets as applied to digital markets - from back in the days you couldn't just grab any sort of media from anywhere at any time off the internet. It's amazing how ridiculously non-adaptable the media companies have proven themselves to be. If you try to restrict a region, they'll just pirate the stuff anyhow, or (naturally) use a VPN to bypass country restrictions.
These companies need to realize that there's really only ONE digital market. If they just made it convenient and affordable for customers to get their product instead of trying to control and coerce the markets, and they'd have a lot more success in the long run. They should be using the internet's strengths to reach more customers more easily, not fighting against it. Idiots.
Don't conflate "open source" with "good guys". There's nothing inherently bad about a business wanting their own products and platforms to succeed. You'd be a pretty lousy business if that wasn't your goal. It's the *methods* they use to achieve succeed which are the critical factor in that determination.
It's clear they're serious about their open source strategy, but that's because it makes good business sense, not because they're suddenly embracing all things FOSS. It's just an acknowledgement that they're not the dominant player anywhere except on the desktop. Thus, they want to make it easy for developers using their tools to port code to Linux on servers, or Android and iOS for mobile, along with Windows on the desktop. If they didn't do that, Windows as a platform would appear increasingly isolated and irrelevant to a broader development strategy.
So, don't misunderstand, this is just Microsoft working to improve their own products. Since MS themselves are now cross-platform developers, they need Visual Studio to have good cross-platform capabilities as well. Of course, this also benefits their developer customers who are doing cross-platform work as well. The fact that this is actually a benefit to other operating systems is likely completely irrelevant to them - it's just the reality of the current market.
I think it's important to understand that the .NET JIT compiler should probably be considered more part of the .NET *runtime*, not necessarily part of the development platform for .NET. Since they want to port .NET to non-Microsoft operating systems, it makes sense to utilize LLVM to target those platforms for the JIT compiler rather than trying to write a new one from scratch. They needed a solid compiler to accompany their open source .NET platform for it to be a more complete open-source solution. Moreover, they've been extending Visual C++'s support for alternative platforms like Android, so it also makes sense that they'd be gaining expertise with LLVM.
It's probably not the end of their proprietary compiler, or even necessarily an indication they're thinking this way, but it may make more sense for them to utilize LLVM so as to target a larger number of platforms. They just recently rewrote their own .NET compiler a couple of years ago and released it as open source, so it's sort of odd to see a new project so soon. I'm guessing they figured it would be more work to extend that project to support all the platforms they're releasing CoreCLR for than using LLVM. Hard to say.
Also, there's still the native compiler, used for C/C++, and they've been sinking an enormous amount of development resources into making it compliant with the recent advances in those languages, so it also seems unlikely they're going to toss that work.
Pfft, why ruin a perfectly good meme with facts?
That was a fascinating show. Thanks for the link.
People keep missing the point of these things. These are not practical devices like an iPhone that just happens to also be sleek and fashionable. These are fashion items first and foremost (a universally acceptable jewelry item for both men and women) that also happen to have some clever tech-related features. No one buys an Apple watch so they can tell the time. They're buying it so they can show off something interesting and fashionable on their wrist.
Surpricing: Unexpected news that affects a company's stock value.
I'd suggest they'd have a far better chance at doing so.
It seems fairly difficult to design a good interface for a device with a lot of advanced functionality when your budget only allows push buttons and a limited resolution B&W LCD screen. Moreover, the user trying to set the thermostat is leaning against the wall and squinting at the screen and the tiny button labels, and so has a limited tolerance threshold for trying to figure the thing out.
By contrast, any application for smartphone or PC has the benefit of a powerful device to render the interface, and can take advantage of excellent input hardware and standardized controls for entering numbers, picking dates and times, and so on. It's far easier to create an easy-to-use interface in this environment.
Good to see it's not just the US that wastes money on expensive technology-related boondoggles that don't appreciably translate to improved education.
With China’s recent plan for education, the ball is now clearly in Obama’s court. With a little under two years left in his final term, will he follow suit and fund a similar program to the one China has planned? We can only hope!
Uh, no. Why does this have anything to do with Obama anyhow? Don't just buy millions of dollars worth of hardware and dump it in the hands of teachers. At least first create a small pilot program to see if this is a worthwhile idea before spending millions of dollars on a device that remains unused. Nothing good comes from wholesale adoption of technology without first checking to see if it will actually be of any use to students and teachers. See: California iPad program scandal / disaster.
The only "appliances" I think would be useful to have some integrated smarts is heating and cooling systems, and possibly lighting systems. If you can *reliably* determine where people are in the house at all times, then there's no reason to heat, cool, or light areas of the house where people are not currently residing. This, of course, would only make sense in a fairly large house in which areas of it regularly go unused (so probably not my own house). The same personal detection functionality would also make a good security system. Even without the fanciness all all that, I think it would be nice to have a simple app to control and program the thermostat instead of trying to decipher what the hell all those buttons and functions do, as those are some of the worst-designed devices I've ever seen.
Beyond that, I can't for the life of me imagine why anyone would want a smart fridge, washing machine, oven, or other device. The "smart" portions of those devices will become embarrassingly obsolete long before the rest of the machine dies from old age, assuming a reasonably high quality machine. And "find a recipe online? You need an appliance to do that? Yeesh, talk about a solution in search of a problem.
Sort of off-topic, but your post reminded me of a little factoid. In Japan, they call the green traffic light "blue". It has to do with the fact that the older term "ao" refers to both green and blue. They have a distinct word for green "midori", but it's understood as a specific shade of blue, and the color boundaries are not the same as what most others would call green. Thus, they have "blue" traffic lights in Japan. They're often the same green as found in other countries, but sometimes they're pushed a bit more towards the blue spectrum.
Patents are equally useless for protecting against copying the look and feel of a game. You can only patent specific concepts or technologies, say, the way Zynga tried to patent the the use of in-game virtual currency. You're telling me you think the proper way for these indie devs to handle this is to go out, patent their own code and algorithms, and then fight it out in court with Zynga? Insanity.
The AAA game industry isn't "ignoring" the patent issue. They're simply declining to participate in the patent war madness that everyone else seems to be currently engaged in. Companies like Zynga are the exception to the general trend, and may end up forcing everyone else to do the same goddamned thing. Do you know who'll be left behind here? Yeah, the indie devs, because they can't afford patent lawyers and ridiculous lawsuits.
Read the massive list of Zynga patents. It makes me weep as a game developer. The USPTO seems to be rubberstamping whatever the hell Zynga sends their way, so long as it's couched in enough confusing terminology and legalese (oh, and "online" is mentioned anywhere). If you actually read the patents in detail, they're essentially the sort of thing any competent developer would think.
Seriously, this is madness, and it has to stop. Software patents need to die.
Holy crap, I give! I give!
Ok, obviously there were some tape drives offered on consumer models. I'd imagine that the *vast* majority of consumer PCs didn't have tape drive hardware on them, but yes, they certainly were available.
That's just my own personal experience. You don't have to look very far to see the many, many other unbelievably stupid litigations that have made the news (hint: they all seem to resolve around the courts in a certain East Texas district). And the one failure I pointed out happened to cost my company a lot of money to resolve. Why should we keep putting businesses through the wringer for the sake of lawyers and patent trolls?
So, yeah, I wouldn't mind tossing the concept of software patents altogether. By any reasonable standard, it's been a disaster for the software development industry over the past few decades. How many more years of failure would you like to see before you're convinced it's a bad idea? Maybe another few decades of patchwork fixes and band-aids?
The idea of patenting software is and always has been a dubious notion at best. Just because it's the law of the land now doesn't make it a good idea in the slightest. We should follow New Zealand's example and simply assert that software is not an invention and therefore shouldn't be patentable.
So... what makes the NSA think that anyone could actually keep these ultimate "keys to the kingdom" secret? I mean, just about everything else of theirs that was secret has leaked out thanks to a single contractor. Can you imagine how valuable these keys are, and how much money could be made by selling them? Hell, the US couldn't even keep our nuclear weapon plans under wraps.
And what's awesome about this scheme is that once the secret is out, every single smartphone in the US is compromised all at once. Whee!