I think it's just a slap at Apple for it's CEO daring to come out of the closet (it's not like no one knew about the fact that he was gay either - I was surprised when he cam out, because I thought everyone already knew). It feels like an entirely political move meant to garner nods of approval from like-minded voters, even if it makes zero sense.
Well, the danger of "ramping it up" too soon is the collapse of the entire project due to some engineering oversight. The larger an engineering project, the tighter tolerances tend to be, and the harder it is to correct any flaws found midway through the project. Also, if a massive project collapses, you risk losing support for similar projects in the future because "see, look at that disaster there!"
Starting small and working your way up is the smart way to go.
If you can build them reasonably cheaply and out of non-toxic materials, maybe it's more economical to simply let the sea reclaim them, assuming the operational period pays for itself. We're essentially talking about underwater windmills and generators attached to big blocks of concrete. These things would only require a lot of high-tech if you're trying to make them last a really long time.
Can a single windmill pay for itself in 5 years? Would they last 10 unmaintained? If the answers to both questions are yes, maybe that's the way to go.
I was sort of including actually playing the game in that figure. Honestly, it wasn't a terrible review (7/10), but you could sort of tell the reviewer was sort of bored and rambling about a lot of non-related stuff, making bad puns, etc. It's just a bit frustrating when you've spent two years of your life working on something... well, you'd hope that whoever reviews your product at least makes a pretense at taking it seriously.
The point I was trying to make is, there's nothing you can do about it. Reviews are completely subjective, and obviously our game didn't grab his fancy enough to get a 8 or 9 instead of a 7. You may disagree with his result, but you can't really say it's "wrong". So, you grumble about it a bit with your co-workers over a beer, move on, and then try to improve things on your next project.
Heh, yeah, it was IGN. I hope you don't mind, but I'd rather not say, as I'd prefer to stay somewhat anonymous. Plus, I don't want to bring my personal biases into things and draw more attention to the review itself, which I think is exactly the mistake I think Lazic made.
I've seen a game I worked on reviewed by someone who obviously had no interested in reviewing it seriously. That game represented nearly two years of very hard work for me and a reasonably sized team of developers. I'm pretty sure the reviewer shat out that review in a few hours. Of course, since the game was in a genre he admittedly didn't care for to begin with, he not surprisingly didn't find it to his liking, and instead peppered the review with lame and bizarre jokes.
Yeah, reviews are sometimes harsh or unfair, and of course, they're massively subjective, but there's not a lot you can do about that. We made our share of mistakes during development as well - the game certainly wasn't perfect, and it's important to take criticisms to heart and try to improve yourself so that you can displace those old, less-flattering reviews with new, glowing ones.
Still, Lazic should really learn that lesson and focus on improving his performance rather than fretting about old reviews.
I think more stringent budgeting rules are far more critical than term limits. If you limit the power to spend limitless amounts of pork money, you're taking away a lot of their power, period. Less need for the term limits then. Congress has demonstrated time and time and time again that it doesn't have the political will to reign in the budget.
Of course, I don't think we have a snowball's chance in hell over either of these things happening.
Am I the only one who actually laughed out loud at the utter pretentiousness of this review?
detailing chords with a jeweler's precision, then laying little curls of notes atop a cushion of sound like diamonds nestled on velvet.
Amazing. It tells me absolutely nothing except that the writer is in love with her own prose. It's a shame Mr. Lazic couldn't see this review with the proper humor and irreverence it deserves. I think I'd wear it as a badge of honor if I was criticized with this sort of pomposity. Instead, he's gone and done something for which he should be rightfully shamed - much worse than an apparently decent but lackluster performance.
It's an instrumented build that's only been released to the wild for the purpose of testing and improving the OS itself. There's nothing shady about a piece of beta software reporting on what the user was doing shortly before a crash or other bug causes it to phone home. This is how they fix bugs and make improvements. There's won't be a real "keylogger" in Windows 10, per se.
That being said, from a privacy standpoint, I'd be much more concerned about how OSes are now sending local search data out to the net (Windows 8 and Ubuntu) to be directly monetized by personalized ads, or how Google, Facebook, and the NSA probably know more about your personal life than your mother at this point thanks to their relentless mass data collection and aggregation. Or how major carriers like Verizon and AT&T are embedding tracking cookies directly into served HTML in order to collect information about you that they sell directly to advertisers.
Not quite keylogging, but getting pretty fucking close, if you ask me.
I'm curious - do you use a touch-screen system? Because obviously the OS is designed primarily for that form factor. I'd imagine it would be a pretty good experience there. If not, congratulations... you're a very tolerant person who can adapt well to less-than-optimal UI experiences.
A few of the annoyances, since you asked: Unnecessarily hidden-by-default UI is very sensible on small or touch form factors, but unfortunately, utterly retarded on giant screens with plenty of real estate and using a mouse and keyboard, which represents about 99% of the market (I'd guess). How about the idiocy of putting popup menus in the corners of the screen - right in the place where your mouse happens to land to close a window? Full screen metro apps that can't be resized? On a 27" high-resolution monitor... seriously? The start button was just a convenient focus for consumer annoyance, but yeah, normal people actually still use that button, even if the cool kids don't. How brilliant was it for them to completely remove a convenient, functional, and well-known design element that people have literally been using for a good portion of their entire lives? No, Windows 8 was a mountain of fail from a design and usability standpoint. There's absolutely no getting around this.
Yes, you can get used to just about anything if you use it long enough, of course. It's not like Windows 8 is unusable, but frankly, it's just more annoying to use (and uglier) than Windows 7, and as such, why the heck would I "upgrade"? There are obviously a lot of folks who feel the same way too. There are some nice new features, but none of them are really compelling enough to get past the annoyances.
Windows 10 looks to fix just about all the major complaints people currently have with 8 (except for the ugly visual theme). Really, they should have fixed all this stuff with Windows 8 - they had to have gotten a crapload of early feedback that users were not happy with it, but they arrogantly decided that they knew better, I guess. Microsoft is looking a lot more humble these days, and that's a good thing for users.
It's a first step, not and end to itself, as stated by the company. They won't just stop at sub-orbital hops if they can figure out how to go further and faster over time. And frankly, it doesn't matter if the goals are not "space R&D". That's almost never a goal anyhow, because that's not what inspires people. When we went to the moon, the goal was not "space R&D", it was to get to the damn moon. The R&D was a means to an end, not the end itself, just like for this project. If you're working to build a sub-orbital taxi, as you put it, you're still going to learn an awful lot, and you'll be able to apply that to future, more ambitious projects.
Meh, whatever. If you want to dump on the project or the company, that's fine. Obviously, it's not like I can change your mind. I'm not sure why you're so vehemently opposed to this since they're not spending any of your money for their "unexploited pseudospace tourist segment" project.
Oh, I absolutely agree. I'm not arguing it's a good reason, but I think that's probably the executive's reasoning. Given the fact that, short of requiring persistent online connectivity, there's no real way to make uncrackable DRM that sits entirely on a client's PC, this is the only reasonable explanation I can think of - just to slow down the cracking to make it through that first sales period.
The fact is that there is probably a *percentage* of people who, in the absence of a free version would reluctantly cough up the money to buy it at or soon after release. People are enamored with getting that new game or gadget or gizmo as fast as possible, as is obvious by the lines that form for whatever hot new product or game is being released. But like you, my guess is that it's probably a pretty low percentage. Even if the percentage is high enough to justify the licensing and integration of the DRM software (after all, a low percentage of a million sales of a $60 game is still a lot of money), I certainly don't believe it's worthwhile to antagonizing your paying customers with a sub-standard experience. Penny-wise and pound-foolish, as the saying goes.
I suppose the other explanation is that the executives are desperate to simply "do something" about all the piracy, which they probably calculate as a high percentage of lost sales (again, probably wrong), and they get suckered by the snake-oil salemen selling the latest DRM schemes time and time again.
That's the thing: I would argue we don't have perfectly usable ways of getting into orbit. It's extremely expensive and extremely dangerous, as traditional rockets still occasionally blow up on launch and return vehicles disintegrate on return-entry. A single launch costs millions of dollars, so it's completely out of reach for all but the wealthiest of governments or corporations.
This company is trying to solve some of those problems. Any lessons learned about safely and efficiently getting vehicles to extremely high altitudes is a net win for our comprehensive dream of space exploration on a much more vast scale. Even if these first few steps are small, they'll eventually take bigger and bigger steps. Just because they're re-treading some existing ground doesn't mean they aren't learning a hell of a lot and advancing the state of the art in a lot of ways.
Your argument is akin to: We already knew how to make PCs perfectly well in the 90's. They were "perfectly usable", so why do we continue to spend money on research and development? Obvious answer: we can make them faster, smaller, more capable, more reliable, more secure, and more functional. Maybe we could even eventually shrink those PCs down to the size where you could fit them into the palm of your hand and take them anywhere. Crazy, right? Today anyone can buy a smartphone or tablet for a few hundred dollars that's more powerful than a vintage supercomputer like the Cray-2 or Deep Blue from just a few decades ago.
Or perhaps a better example wold be to look at the airline industry to see how it's possible to create unbelievably high-tech and extremely reliably vehicles if there's a reasonable commercial incentive, along with the proper government regulatory agencies to help ensure safety. Think about how rickety and unreliable early aircraft and airships were to their modern counterparts. I see no reason why this same evolution can't happen for the commercial space industry.
Because many game's sales over time tends to look like a logarithmic curve. Sales are stacked at the launch and drop dramatically after that, flattening into a long tail. My guess is they don't care about what happens after a few weeks, so long as they can maximize the profits during the initial sales period.
Still, from my perspective (as a game developer and player), it's not really worth it. Any sort of reasonably effective PC-based DRM is, by nature, going to be intrusive, because it's not built in as a seamless part of the platform (which is why fewer gamers mind the less intrusive DRM of console games or even Steam's DRM, IMO). I'm certainly not planning on releasing my game with any DRM, since I think that's a selling point for many players. Honestly, I'm more interested in the long tail anyhow, since my games have lower up-front development costs than big AAA games.
A DRM-based fight is really a no-win battle in the long run, so it seems pointless to fight such a war in the first place to me, especially 100% of the collateral damage is your paying customers. Just make peace with the fact that some people won't want to pay for the game. Instead, focus on building a community that wants to support your development efforts in order to encourage development of more of the games they like. You know... don't be jerks, don't be greedy, listen to your customers, and build quality products. Radical stuff, I know.
To be honest, one of the things that's baffled me over the years is how entertainment-focused companies and even entire industries can generate such hatred and loathing. You would think it wouldn't be so hard to have a favorable public opinion when your entire business is delivering entertainment products that people willingly spend their discretionary income on.
My impression is businesses are doing this more because employees enjoy that additional freedom. It's a great perk with little downside for many types of jobs. It has a practical side-effect as well, which is to avoid pushing everyone onto the freeways at the same time twice each day. That's pretty much a guaranteed way to cause daily gridlock, as no freeway system is built for absolute maximum capacity.
Obviously, this doesn't work for some types of jobs, but it seems to be pretty much standard practice in my industry. Most companies I've worked for either had explicit or implied "core hours" where you need to be at the office, so that people can schedule meetings, etc, but other than that, it's up to you when you come in and get your work done. Some people preferred being at the office at 7am, while others came in at 11am. Nearly everyone avoided the rush hour if they could possibly help it, of course.
I think the fact that the author neglected to research modern Hypercard alternatives / derivatives and instead wants to see Hypercard(tm) again demonstrates this is largely a nostalgia/pining piece, nothing more.
I'll always have a soft spot for AppleBASIC in my heart, since it was the first computer language I learned (on an Apple II+) when I was a youngster. It work great for me as an introduction to programming languages, especially since there was a fantastic, kid-friendly book* for me to learn from. But all that aside, I have no wish to bring back AppleBASIC. Technology has marched on. Nostalgia is best when it's remembered and not relived, because then you tend to see all its warts and flaws you didn't remember from twenty years ago.
* I don't suppose anyone remembers the name of that book? It's an AppleBASIC tutorial for the Apple II+. I believe it had a red soft cover, and it had amusing illustrations of a cartoonish robot character throughout the book.
Thanks for the blog link and detailed responses - that gives me a lot more information than the summary for digestion.
After an admittedly quick read over the blog post, I would suspect that perhaps most of what Taos3D does could be done through libraries, but it would probably sacrifice some elegance and require a lot more boilerplate code. Domain-specific languages do have the advantage of being able to tailor the language for specific use cases, of course, and XLR seems like a pretty interesting way to do that. You're right that the code samples feel very concise and "native", as you put it. For example, generally speaking, it's relatively difficult for many languages to deal with events over time in an elegant fashion.
Does that balance out the hurdle imposed of learning a language for a specific application? Hard to say, really. I suppose it's a bit like ActionScript in that regard, as it demonstrates a language that fits its specific domain environment pretty well, and was useful enough that it got a good amount of traction.
Regarding getting this onto the web: I think you're right in that creating a plug-in is very 90's (probably not a good idea just for the security implications alone), and directly adding it to the browser is a no-go unless it's mainline and standardized across all of them - unlikely to happen. So you're left with trying to reimplement this for the web using HTML-5 standards, which is pretty difficult if all your work to date has been in C++.
Maybe the solution isn't necessarily porting the entire spec, but taking the work you've done and creating a web-specific product that's a bit easier to port to that platform. You can then use your native tools to perform a subset of what you can currently do natively and export it to the web - maybe even generate Javascript from Tao3D instead of trying to write a runtime interpreter.
Another alternative idea: Maybe it's feasible to use a server-based runtime component to translate OpenGL and Javascript instructions based on Tao3D and then send that to a client as Javascript and WebGL. Again, this could theoretically bypass the need to port the entire engine, which seems like it would be a pretty huge endeavor.
I'll trade you for a "-1 no sense of humor" mod. Sheesh.
You're point is well taken that the US has blocked China's inclusion into the ISS program. Politics is everywhere, of course, and probably to be expected when states are funding things. Russia is now threatening to no longer take US astronauts to the ISS in retaliation for our sanctions against them. Unfortunately, it appears that with the reality of politics being what it is, depending too much on anyone else for technology simply leaves you vulnerable to political machinations. We probably did China a favor by forcing them to implement their own space program.
In my defense, your post made it sound like we weren't collaborating with anyone like in the days of the US/Soviet space race, and that's clearly not the case.
Well, nothing wrong with that, but if that's the case, I think that a link to a blog post or article that introduces or describes the language along with it's features and benefits would be a lot more interesting than posting a link to sourceforge and saying "look, new language". The marketing video is slick, but tells us zero about the language, which seemed to be the point of the posting.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being inquisitive either. I'm not sure why you denied that, since you're wanting to solicit feeedback - sort of the definition of inquisitive.
Seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity for some good exposure. It's hard enough getting people to read TFA. Asking readers to search for info on their own goes means most of them won't bother.
Where did you see an example of the language? The links went to sourceforge (I didn't want to install the package just to see the language) and a marketing video.
Defining if-then-else is literally a couple of lines of code.
I'm curious how anyone thought that if/then/else was a difficult enough construct in popular languages such that it needed improving. I mean, it's a couple of lines of code in *any* language, isn't it? Anyone know how this language supposedly improved on the concept?
The syntax to pass pass blocks of code to functions is completely transparent.
So, functions are first class data members? Is it weakly typed then, like Lua? In that language, defining a function is just syntactic sugar for assigning a chunk of code to a variable of the assigned name, so you can use it just like any other variable.
I'm also curious what this particular brings to the table that a library couldn't have accomplished. Learning a new language is a fairly big hurdle for someone to take to develop for a particular platform. Part of the reason I think we have so many computer languages is that programmers simply love writing new languages, not that it really solved any new problem. Nothing wrong with that, but then again, don't expect us to care unless there was a good reason for the new language.
I appreciate that (and back at you), and I do in fact wish this particular issue wasn't so politicized, since that seems to cast a haze over just about anything it touches.
Frankly, I think the whole AGW issue can largely be bypassed anyhow. Instead, I think people should argue for phasing out fossil fuels for a variety of reasons that are hard to disagree with:
* Reduce funding to and reliance on middle east, where most of our terrorists are exported from or other less-than-friendly nations. (national security focus) * We're going to run out eventually, so let's use those resources exclusively for things that have no near-term reasonable alternative. (conservation focus) * Pollution-free and nature-fueled power is objectively better than the alternative. No one likes pollution/smog, nor acidification of the ocean. (health / pollution focus)
I think people are perhaps too hung up on the science-related debate when there really should be little opposition in moving to cleaner and sustainable power generation in principle. Much of the disagreement seems focused on the speed and degree of change rather than the direction itself, so it's probably more advantageous to focus on a common destination that everyone can agree on. There are going to be disagreements on the rate of change, of course, but as time moves on and proves or disproves the current theories and predictions, we'll naturally have a better idea of how fast the rate of change really needs to occur.
The author, of course, seems to believe the most extreme predictions are the more likely to occur, and so believes that extreme action must be taken right now. I'm of the opinion that truth is typically found in the middle (that and the fact that the warming trends were overestimated by 100% over just two decades), and as such, I believe the danger is not quite as immanent as that, and as such, a reasonable pace of progression is justified.
Actually, "global warming skeptics" should hopefully be rare. There's zero doubt we're in a warming trend, and of course, if someone denies this, then we can just dismiss them as being completely ignorant on the topic and move on. It's better to clarify and say there are doubt as to whether humans are causing this or if it's a natural trend - more more precisely still, to what degree humans versus nature are causing the changes. That, of course, then leads into how much we'll have to correct our current behavior to halt the trend.
Still, when 97% of the scientific papers out there are saying that humans are causing global warming in a significant way, you'd better have some solid research to back up a contrary position, and I haven't really seen that either. I call myself an agnostic on this position simply because the results I've seen have all been based on still very theoretical models which can't themselves be empirically tested. If, over time, they models prove reasonably accurate, I'll accordingly modify my status away from "agnostic" and toward "belief" - simple as that.
You know the answer perfectly well, I think; this is the sort of question one asks to make the opponent look silly. No I didn't compare climate modelling to elementary maths; I compare the socalled 'skeptics', with their deliberate 'misunderstanding' of what climatologists are telling us, to a child's behaviour, when a child does not want to listen to a 'boring' explanation and spitefully tries to avoid the issue.
Yes, of course I know the answer, and with all due respect, I think comparing climate change skeptics to a spiteful child refusing to acknowledge an elementary math problem also falls in the realm of "making an opponent look silly", don't you? Anyhow, I'll ignore your bad example if you ignore mine, and we can move on, ok?
You claim we can make accurate predictions about the climate. My understanding is that current forecasts didn't even predict the trends of the last two decades all that accurately (it was roughly half of what was predicted, if I recall correctly). If you're talking about new models... well, you can't really claim they're accurate until we get a few decades down the road and see what the results are, right?
Predicting weather is similar to climate change predictions, but has some key differences. The reason predicting weather works so well nowadays is that the methods and algorithms used to predict it have excellent data, and have a rapid, testable cycle in which to gauge it's accuracy and make refinements to the model. As such, I've found the five-day forecast to be incredibly accurate in recent years, especially since just a few decades ago. The other reason it works well is that the forecast is typically fairly constrained in terms of forward prediction. My hunch is that anything beyond a week out ends up being pure guesswork.
I think what makes predicting the long-term climate harder is that it doesn't have the same opportunity to continuously refine the model through real-world data, since it's all about long-term predictions. So, whereas weather prediction models can be refined on a weekly basis, climate change models can only be refined on a yearly basis. There's also the fact that long-term prediction of any sort of chaotic system is unbelievably difficult due to general chaos theory, in which minor deviations will tend to grow exponentially over time and completely wreck the model.
Phishing attacks are not only used to target large numbers of people. Extremely targeted phishing attacks (directed at a specific company or even a particular person) are known as "spear-phishing". For additional irony I'll point you to the FBI's site that describes this cyber-crime in detail.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's just a slap at Apple for it's CEO daring to come out of the closet (it's not like no one knew about the fact that he was gay either - I was surprised when he cam out, because I thought everyone already knew). It feels like an entirely political move meant to garner nods of approval from like-minded voters, even if it makes zero sense.
Well, the danger of "ramping it up" too soon is the collapse of the entire project due to some engineering oversight. The larger an engineering project, the tighter tolerances tend to be, and the harder it is to correct any flaws found midway through the project. Also, if a massive project collapses, you risk losing support for similar projects in the future because "see, look at that disaster there!"
Starting small and working your way up is the smart way to go.
If you can build them reasonably cheaply and out of non-toxic materials, maybe it's more economical to simply let the sea reclaim them, assuming the operational period pays for itself. We're essentially talking about underwater windmills and generators attached to big blocks of concrete. These things would only require a lot of high-tech if you're trying to make them last a really long time.
Can a single windmill pay for itself in 5 years? Would they last 10 unmaintained? If the answers to both questions are yes, maybe that's the way to go.
I was sort of including actually playing the game in that figure. Honestly, it wasn't a terrible review (7/10), but you could sort of tell the reviewer was sort of bored and rambling about a lot of non-related stuff, making bad puns, etc. It's just a bit frustrating when you've spent two years of your life working on something... well, you'd hope that whoever reviews your product at least makes a pretense at taking it seriously.
The point I was trying to make is, there's nothing you can do about it. Reviews are completely subjective, and obviously our game didn't grab his fancy enough to get a 8 or 9 instead of a 7. You may disagree with his result, but you can't really say it's "wrong". So, you grumble about it a bit with your co-workers over a beer, move on, and then try to improve things on your next project.
Heh, yeah, it was IGN. I hope you don't mind, but I'd rather not say, as I'd prefer to stay somewhat anonymous. Plus, I don't want to bring my personal biases into things and draw more attention to the review itself, which I think is exactly the mistake I think Lazic made.
I've seen a game I worked on reviewed by someone who obviously had no interested in reviewing it seriously. That game represented nearly two years of very hard work for me and a reasonably sized team of developers. I'm pretty sure the reviewer shat out that review in a few hours. Of course, since the game was in a genre he admittedly didn't care for to begin with, he not surprisingly didn't find it to his liking, and instead peppered the review with lame and bizarre jokes.
Yeah, reviews are sometimes harsh or unfair, and of course, they're massively subjective, but there's not a lot you can do about that. We made our share of mistakes during development as well - the game certainly wasn't perfect, and it's important to take criticisms to heart and try to improve yourself so that you can displace those old, less-flattering reviews with new, glowing ones.
Still, Lazic should really learn that lesson and focus on improving his performance rather than fretting about old reviews.
I think more stringent budgeting rules are far more critical than term limits. If you limit the power to spend limitless amounts of pork money, you're taking away a lot of their power, period. Less need for the term limits then. Congress has demonstrated time and time and time again that it doesn't have the political will to reign in the budget.
Of course, I don't think we have a snowball's chance in hell over either of these things happening.
Am I the only one who actually laughed out loud at the utter pretentiousness of this review?
detailing chords with a jeweler's precision, then laying little curls of notes atop a cushion of sound like diamonds nestled on velvet.
Amazing. It tells me absolutely nothing except that the writer is in love with her own prose. It's a shame Mr. Lazic couldn't see this review with the proper humor and irreverence it deserves. I think I'd wear it as a badge of honor if I was criticized with this sort of pomposity. Instead, he's gone and done something for which he should be rightfully shamed - much worse than an apparently decent but lackluster performance.
It's an instrumented build that's only been released to the wild for the purpose of testing and improving the OS itself. There's nothing shady about a piece of beta software reporting on what the user was doing shortly before a crash or other bug causes it to phone home. This is how they fix bugs and make improvements. There's won't be a real "keylogger" in Windows 10, per se.
That being said, from a privacy standpoint, I'd be much more concerned about how OSes are now sending local search data out to the net (Windows 8 and Ubuntu) to be directly monetized by personalized ads, or how Google, Facebook, and the NSA probably know more about your personal life than your mother at this point thanks to their relentless mass data collection and aggregation. Or how major carriers like Verizon and AT&T are embedding tracking cookies directly into served HTML in order to collect information about you that they sell directly to advertisers.
Not quite keylogging, but getting pretty fucking close, if you ask me.
I'm curious - do you use a touch-screen system? Because obviously the OS is designed primarily for that form factor. I'd imagine it would be a pretty good experience there. If not, congratulations... you're a very tolerant person who can adapt well to less-than-optimal UI experiences.
A few of the annoyances, since you asked: Unnecessarily hidden-by-default UI is very sensible on small or touch form factors, but unfortunately, utterly retarded on giant screens with plenty of real estate and using a mouse and keyboard, which represents about 99% of the market (I'd guess). How about the idiocy of putting popup menus in the corners of the screen - right in the place where your mouse happens to land to close a window? Full screen metro apps that can't be resized? On a 27" high-resolution monitor... seriously? The start button was just a convenient focus for consumer annoyance, but yeah, normal people actually still use that button, even if the cool kids don't. How brilliant was it for them to completely remove a convenient, functional, and well-known design element that people have literally been using for a good portion of their entire lives? No, Windows 8 was a mountain of fail from a design and usability standpoint. There's absolutely no getting around this.
Yes, you can get used to just about anything if you use it long enough, of course. It's not like Windows 8 is unusable, but frankly, it's just more annoying to use (and uglier) than Windows 7, and as such, why the heck would I "upgrade"? There are obviously a lot of folks who feel the same way too. There are some nice new features, but none of them are really compelling enough to get past the annoyances.
Windows 10 looks to fix just about all the major complaints people currently have with 8 (except for the ugly visual theme). Really, they should have fixed all this stuff with Windows 8 - they had to have gotten a crapload of early feedback that users were not happy with it, but they arrogantly decided that they knew better, I guess. Microsoft is looking a lot more humble these days, and that's a good thing for users.
It's a first step, not and end to itself, as stated by the company. They won't just stop at sub-orbital hops if they can figure out how to go further and faster over time. And frankly, it doesn't matter if the goals are not "space R&D". That's almost never a goal anyhow, because that's not what inspires people. When we went to the moon, the goal was not "space R&D", it was to get to the damn moon. The R&D was a means to an end, not the end itself, just like for this project. If you're working to build a sub-orbital taxi, as you put it, you're still going to learn an awful lot, and you'll be able to apply that to future, more ambitious projects.
Meh, whatever. If you want to dump on the project or the company, that's fine. Obviously, it's not like I can change your mind. I'm not sure why you're so vehemently opposed to this since they're not spending any of your money for their "unexploited pseudospace tourist segment" project.
Oh, I absolutely agree. I'm not arguing it's a good reason, but I think that's probably the executive's reasoning. Given the fact that, short of requiring persistent online connectivity, there's no real way to make uncrackable DRM that sits entirely on a client's PC, this is the only reasonable explanation I can think of - just to slow down the cracking to make it through that first sales period.
The fact is that there is probably a *percentage* of people who, in the absence of a free version would reluctantly cough up the money to buy it at or soon after release. People are enamored with getting that new game or gadget or gizmo as fast as possible, as is obvious by the lines that form for whatever hot new product or game is being released. But like you, my guess is that it's probably a pretty low percentage. Even if the percentage is high enough to justify the licensing and integration of the DRM software (after all, a low percentage of a million sales of a $60 game is still a lot of money), I certainly don't believe it's worthwhile to antagonizing your paying customers with a sub-standard experience. Penny-wise and pound-foolish, as the saying goes.
I suppose the other explanation is that the executives are desperate to simply "do something" about all the piracy, which they probably calculate as a high percentage of lost sales (again, probably wrong), and they get suckered by the snake-oil salemen selling the latest DRM schemes time and time again.
That's the thing: I would argue we don't have perfectly usable ways of getting into orbit. It's extremely expensive and extremely dangerous, as traditional rockets still occasionally blow up on launch and return vehicles disintegrate on return-entry. A single launch costs millions of dollars, so it's completely out of reach for all but the wealthiest of governments or corporations.
This company is trying to solve some of those problems. Any lessons learned about safely and efficiently getting vehicles to extremely high altitudes is a net win for our comprehensive dream of space exploration on a much more vast scale. Even if these first few steps are small, they'll eventually take bigger and bigger steps. Just because they're re-treading some existing ground doesn't mean they aren't learning a hell of a lot and advancing the state of the art in a lot of ways.
Your argument is akin to: We already knew how to make PCs perfectly well in the 90's. They were "perfectly usable", so why do we continue to spend money on research and development? Obvious answer: we can make them faster, smaller, more capable, more reliable, more secure, and more functional. Maybe we could even eventually shrink those PCs down to the size where you could fit them into the palm of your hand and take them anywhere. Crazy, right? Today anyone can buy a smartphone or tablet for a few hundred dollars that's more powerful than a vintage supercomputer like the Cray-2 or Deep Blue from just a few decades ago.
Or perhaps a better example wold be to look at the airline industry to see how it's possible to create unbelievably high-tech and extremely reliably vehicles if there's a reasonable commercial incentive, along with the proper government regulatory agencies to help ensure safety. Think about how rickety and unreliable early aircraft and airships were to their modern counterparts. I see no reason why this same evolution can't happen for the commercial space industry.
Because many game's sales over time tends to look like a logarithmic curve. Sales are stacked at the launch and drop dramatically after that, flattening into a long tail. My guess is they don't care about what happens after a few weeks, so long as they can maximize the profits during the initial sales period.
Still, from my perspective (as a game developer and player), it's not really worth it. Any sort of reasonably effective PC-based DRM is, by nature, going to be intrusive, because it's not built in as a seamless part of the platform (which is why fewer gamers mind the less intrusive DRM of console games or even Steam's DRM, IMO). I'm certainly not planning on releasing my game with any DRM, since I think that's a selling point for many players. Honestly, I'm more interested in the long tail anyhow, since my games have lower up-front development costs than big AAA games.
A DRM-based fight is really a no-win battle in the long run, so it seems pointless to fight such a war in the first place to me, especially 100% of the collateral damage is your paying customers. Just make peace with the fact that some people won't want to pay for the game. Instead, focus on building a community that wants to support your development efforts in order to encourage development of more of the games they like. You know... don't be jerks, don't be greedy, listen to your customers, and build quality products. Radical stuff, I know.
To be honest, one of the things that's baffled me over the years is how entertainment-focused companies and even entire industries can generate such hatred and loathing. You would think it wouldn't be so hard to have a favorable public opinion when your entire business is delivering entertainment products that people willingly spend their discretionary income on.
My impression is businesses are doing this more because employees enjoy that additional freedom. It's a great perk with little downside for many types of jobs. It has a practical side-effect as well, which is to avoid pushing everyone onto the freeways at the same time twice each day. That's pretty much a guaranteed way to cause daily gridlock, as no freeway system is built for absolute maximum capacity.
Obviously, this doesn't work for some types of jobs, but it seems to be pretty much standard practice in my industry. Most companies I've worked for either had explicit or implied "core hours" where you need to be at the office, so that people can schedule meetings, etc, but other than that, it's up to you when you come in and get your work done. Some people preferred being at the office at 7am, while others came in at 11am. Nearly everyone avoided the rush hour if they could possibly help it, of course.
I think the fact that the author neglected to research modern Hypercard alternatives / derivatives and instead wants to see Hypercard(tm) again demonstrates this is largely a nostalgia/pining piece, nothing more.
I'll always have a soft spot for AppleBASIC in my heart, since it was the first computer language I learned (on an Apple II+) when I was a youngster. It work great for me as an introduction to programming languages, especially since there was a fantastic, kid-friendly book* for me to learn from. But all that aside, I have no wish to bring back AppleBASIC. Technology has marched on. Nostalgia is best when it's remembered and not relived, because then you tend to see all its warts and flaws you didn't remember from twenty years ago.
* I don't suppose anyone remembers the name of that book? It's an AppleBASIC tutorial for the Apple II+. I believe it had a red soft cover, and it had amusing illustrations of a cartoonish robot character throughout the book.
Thanks for the blog link and detailed responses - that gives me a lot more information than the summary for digestion.
After an admittedly quick read over the blog post, I would suspect that perhaps most of what Taos3D does could be done through libraries, but it would probably sacrifice some elegance and require a lot more boilerplate code. Domain-specific languages do have the advantage of being able to tailor the language for specific use cases, of course, and XLR seems like a pretty interesting way to do that. You're right that the code samples feel very concise and "native", as you put it. For example, generally speaking, it's relatively difficult for many languages to deal with events over time in an elegant fashion.
Does that balance out the hurdle imposed of learning a language for a specific application? Hard to say, really. I suppose it's a bit like ActionScript in that regard, as it demonstrates a language that fits its specific domain environment pretty well, and was useful enough that it got a good amount of traction.
Regarding getting this onto the web: I think you're right in that creating a plug-in is very 90's (probably not a good idea just for the security implications alone), and directly adding it to the browser is a no-go unless it's mainline and standardized across all of them - unlikely to happen. So you're left with trying to reimplement this for the web using HTML-5 standards, which is pretty difficult if all your work to date has been in C++.
Maybe the solution isn't necessarily porting the entire spec, but taking the work you've done and creating a web-specific product that's a bit easier to port to that platform. You can then use your native tools to perform a subset of what you can currently do natively and export it to the web - maybe even generate Javascript from Tao3D instead of trying to write a runtime interpreter.
Another alternative idea: Maybe it's feasible to use a server-based runtime component to translate OpenGL and Javascript instructions based on Tao3D and then send that to a client as Javascript and WebGL. Again, this could theoretically bypass the need to port the entire engine, which seems like it would be a pretty huge endeavor.
Anyhow, best of luck with your endeavors.
I'll trade you for a "-1 no sense of humor" mod. Sheesh.
You're point is well taken that the US has blocked China's inclusion into the ISS program. Politics is everywhere, of course, and probably to be expected when states are funding things. Russia is now threatening to no longer take US astronauts to the ISS in retaliation for our sanctions against them. Unfortunately, it appears that with the reality of politics being what it is, depending too much on anyone else for technology simply leaves you vulnerable to political machinations. We probably did China a favor by forcing them to implement their own space program.
In my defense, your post made it sound like we weren't collaborating with anyone like in the days of the US/Soviet space race, and that's clearly not the case.
Well, nothing wrong with that, but if that's the case, I think that a link to a blog post or article that introduces or describes the language along with it's features and benefits would be a lot more interesting than posting a link to sourceforge and saying "look, new language". The marketing video is slick, but tells us zero about the language, which seemed to be the point of the posting.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being inquisitive either. I'm not sure why you denied that, since you're wanting to solicit feeedback - sort of the definition of inquisitive.
Seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity for some good exposure. It's hard enough getting people to read TFA. Asking readers to search for info on their own goes means most of them won't bother.
Where did you see an example of the language? The links went to sourceforge (I didn't want to install the package just to see the language) and a marketing video.
Defining if-then-else is literally a couple of lines of code.
I'm curious how anyone thought that if/then/else was a difficult enough construct in popular languages such that it needed improving. I mean, it's a couple of lines of code in *any* language, isn't it? Anyone know how this language supposedly improved on the concept?
The syntax to pass pass blocks of code to functions is completely transparent.
So, functions are first class data members? Is it weakly typed then, like Lua? In that language, defining a function is just syntactic sugar for assigning a chunk of code to a variable of the assigned name, so you can use it just like any other variable.
I'm also curious what this particular brings to the table that a library couldn't have accomplished. Learning a new language is a fairly big hurdle for someone to take to develop for a particular platform. Part of the reason I think we have so many computer languages is that programmers simply love writing new languages, not that it really solved any new problem. Nothing wrong with that, but then again, don't expect us to care unless there was a good reason for the new language.
Yes, maybe we could do something cool like all build a space station together.
I appreciate that (and back at you), and I do in fact wish this particular issue wasn't so politicized, since that seems to cast a haze over just about anything it touches.
Frankly, I think the whole AGW issue can largely be bypassed anyhow. Instead, I think people should argue for phasing out fossil fuels for a variety of reasons that are hard to disagree with:
* Reduce funding to and reliance on middle east, where most of our terrorists are exported from or other less-than-friendly nations. (national security focus)
* We're going to run out eventually, so let's use those resources exclusively for things that have no near-term reasonable alternative. (conservation focus)
* Pollution-free and nature-fueled power is objectively better than the alternative. No one likes pollution/smog, nor acidification of the ocean. (health / pollution focus)
I think people are perhaps too hung up on the science-related debate when there really should be little opposition in moving to cleaner and sustainable power generation in principle. Much of the disagreement seems focused on the speed and degree of change rather than the direction itself, so it's probably more advantageous to focus on a common destination that everyone can agree on. There are going to be disagreements on the rate of change, of course, but as time moves on and proves or disproves the current theories and predictions, we'll naturally have a better idea of how fast the rate of change really needs to occur.
The author, of course, seems to believe the most extreme predictions are the more likely to occur, and so believes that extreme action must be taken right now. I'm of the opinion that truth is typically found in the middle (that and the fact that the warming trends were overestimated by 100% over just two decades), and as such, I believe the danger is not quite as immanent as that, and as such, a reasonable pace of progression is justified.
Actually, "global warming skeptics" should hopefully be rare. There's zero doubt we're in a warming trend, and of course, if someone denies this, then we can just dismiss them as being completely ignorant on the topic and move on. It's better to clarify and say there are doubt as to whether humans are causing this or if it's a natural trend - more more precisely still, to what degree humans versus nature are causing the changes. That, of course, then leads into how much we'll have to correct our current behavior to halt the trend.
Still, when 97% of the scientific papers out there are saying that humans are causing global warming in a significant way, you'd better have some solid research to back up a contrary position, and I haven't really seen that either. I call myself an agnostic on this position simply because the results I've seen have all been based on still very theoretical models which can't themselves be empirically tested. If, over time, they models prove reasonably accurate, I'll accordingly modify my status away from "agnostic" and toward "belief" - simple as that.
You know the answer perfectly well, I think; this is the sort of question one asks to make the opponent look silly. No I didn't compare climate modelling to elementary maths; I compare the socalled 'skeptics', with their deliberate 'misunderstanding' of what climatologists are telling us, to a child's behaviour, when a child does not want to listen to a 'boring' explanation and spitefully tries to avoid the issue.
Yes, of course I know the answer, and with all due respect, I think comparing climate change skeptics to a spiteful child refusing to acknowledge an elementary math problem also falls in the realm of "making an opponent look silly", don't you? Anyhow, I'll ignore your bad example if you ignore mine, and we can move on, ok?
You claim we can make accurate predictions about the climate. My understanding is that current forecasts didn't even predict the trends of the last two decades all that accurately (it was roughly half of what was predicted, if I recall correctly). If you're talking about new models... well, you can't really claim they're accurate until we get a few decades down the road and see what the results are, right?
Predicting weather is similar to climate change predictions, but has some key differences. The reason predicting weather works so well nowadays is that the methods and algorithms used to predict it have excellent data, and have a rapid, testable cycle in which to gauge it's accuracy and make refinements to the model. As such, I've found the five-day forecast to be incredibly accurate in recent years, especially since just a few decades ago. The other reason it works well is that the forecast is typically fairly constrained in terms of forward prediction. My hunch is that anything beyond a week out ends up being pure guesswork.
I think what makes predicting the long-term climate harder is that it doesn't have the same opportunity to continuously refine the model through real-world data, since it's all about long-term predictions. So, whereas weather prediction models can be refined on a weekly basis, climate change models can only be refined on a yearly basis. There's also the fact that long-term prediction of any sort of chaotic system is unbelievably difficult due to general chaos theory, in which minor deviations will tend to grow exponentially over time and completely wreck the model.
Phishing attacks are not only used to target large numbers of people. Extremely targeted phishing attacks (directed at a specific company or even a particular person) are known as "spear-phishing". For additional irony I'll point you to the FBI's site that describes this cyber-crime in detail.