Before the launch of Windows 98, Microsoft did had a promotional thing where they sold "Windows 98 Roast" at Borders bookstore locations. Here's a good article about it. When I saw it at the counter, it was too good of an opportunity to not crack a joke.
"Who the hell wants coffee with bugs in it?
The clerk wasn't amused, but I was chuckling for the rest of the evening.
So, don't let anyone ever tell you that Microsoft didn't support java.
I am the apostle of the "leave me the fuck alone" tao of programming
I share your frustration totally (sometimes Word expands my selection to include the punctuation at the end of a word... wtf!?). However, when people say "I don't need any help from my computer!" I feel they aren't thinking it through -- your computer is always assisting you to some degree. This notion of "overzealous assistance" is all relative. My mom needs AOL in order to "see the Internet" (it's like fingernails on a chalkboard when she says that to me), but I find the level of "help" that AOL provides as frustrating and cumbersome.
Perhaps that's where this technology could be put to it's best use: correctly intuiting exactly how much assistance you may need. So, for example, Clippy v2.0 would ask you if you need help with that letter when you are a newbie, but scale back the assistance when it intuits that you don't need help.
And in ten years, when natural language parsing and voice recognition are perfected, it could go like this.
Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to write a letter, would y--"
Imagine the conundrum: Slashdotter cannot be satisfied until making obligatory it-doesn't-have Ogg-support-so-I-wont-buy-it rant.... but it does have Ogg support.
All we need now is for the Microsoft is to file a brief against SCO. Have you ever seen the movie Scanners?
his device promises Playstation 2 level graphics, a compact 1.8GB media, Wireless 802.11, USB 2.0, 7.1 channel Audio, and a 24bit 16x9 screen TFT LCD screen
This thing is a concoction of pure fantasy, or..
This is going to be the most colossal failure since ET for the 2600.
The specs of this thing if present in a system using todays technology (presumably a laptop), would be no less than $1000. Sony says they are going to introduce this thing in less than a year. I would be stunned if this thing had a sticker price of less than $450.
Also keep in mind that this thing *must* have a rechargeable battery...using some technology we haven't heard of yet (unless they thing the average gamer will cotton to 5 hours of battery life).
7.1 sound? Are you fucking kidding me? How the hell are you going to put a damn subwoofer in a handheld. They must be talking about jacking this thing up to an external speaker system. So, try to envision being tethered to both a power cord *and* external speakers.
One thing that has started to really bother me with the current crop of RTS games is the "Paper, Rock, Scissors" element ( Archers kill swordsmen, swordsmen kill infantry, infantry kill archers, etc. etc.). There was always some of that in the the older games such as Starcraft and AoM, but you also had units that were mostly "general purpose". For example, a terran marine dealt out an equal amount of damage to all it's enemies. In AoM, you could spend a huge amount of money on myth units... only to watch them get slaughtered by the cheapest hero unit (which have a 7x damage multiplier against myth units) available.
have amplified Personally, I hate micro-managing large scale battles. I think I'm in the minority though, as newer games have seemed to play up this aspect. The RTS games of the past seemed to favor players that were good mayors, whereas the rts of today favor good generals. Oh well.
Do *any* of the browsers have SVG rendering support by default? Mozilla, IE, and Firebird don't. The adobe plug-in is free, but it'd be nice if it was ready from the get-go.
The *idea* of SVG is great, but I don't want to invest alot of time learning a spec for something that no one will use.
The parent posts exemplify why I dislike these declarations of minimum specs for a game: it's a spec that is based upon a subjective opinion on what is minimally acceptable. Someone made a call based on a framerate that they figured people will tolerate. This criteria doesn't really mean that much to me: I want to be able to gauge whether *I* will be happy with the performance.
In my mind, the only way to do this is to give people some context. If someone said to me, "If you want to play at 640x480 at 30 fps with x/y/z features turned on, you will need the following specs...", that would be much more worthwhile. Even if my minimimum was better or worse than the scenario presented, I'd still be able to factor in my system performance and decide whether it was worth it.
It was my understanding that NOLF was, in fact, fairly successful but that the sequel did poorly.
Anyway, though I thought that the graphics were much, much improved in NOLF2, the gameplay suffered a bit (but not terribly so). I remember the gameplay and mechanics of NOLF were quite solid (it reminded me of goldeneye), but I felt that gunplay element was not near as polished in the sequel -- enemies would "dodge" by instantly appearing to the left/right of your crosshair when shooting. Also, while the addition of skill points was a good idea, I thought that the hiding system seemed counter-intuitive at times. Also, while I like the stealth elements, I felt that the sequel was at times too stealthy -- sometimes I felt arbitrarily forced to be stealthy when a small amount of ass-kicking would have been just as effective and far less time consuming.
It's also worth noting the multiplayer component of both NOLF and NOLF2 were generally considered to be lacking (this was almost by design as to focus more on the single-player element). I've played both online and I must agree. My guess is that NOLF2 would have done much better in the market had the multiplayer experience been as good as, say, Unreal Tournament.
Still, it was a great game either way and it's a bummer that it didn't do better.
Keep in mind that Blizzard experienced a similar defection about four years ago. Patrick Wyatt, Mike O'Brien, and Jeff Strain (One was a biz guy, the other two wrote battle.net and worked as leads on diablo and starcraft... if memory serves) took off to form a startup called TriForge. They then became Arena.net and finally were swallowed by NCSoft. They are now working on Guild Wars.
So, Blizzard has survived a previous walkout... they have since churned out Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, a few expansion packs, and are nearly done with WoW. Will they survive this? I believe so. I'm wondering if they will be able to come up with original content, or if it will be infected by suits who continue to pimp out the the Warcraft/Diablo franchise ad infinum.
No Function overloading?
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 1
I was looking to get someone's opinion on this because I'm still pretty ignorant of PHP.
I've heard that PHP does not have (or did not have) support for function overloading and that this omission was intentional.
Personally, I really like function overloading. API's get pretty hairy when you have multiple functions that all pretty much do the same thing but do it with slightly different inputs. For example, let's say you have I want to get the bank balance... it looks cleaner (to me at least) to have something like this...
int a, b; a = bankObject.getBalance(12345); b = bankObject.getBalance("jdoe");
Than something like this
int a, b; a = bankObject.getBalanceInt(12345); b = bankObject.getBalanceString("jdoe");
This isn't a great example, but I've seen Java classes with a huge number of methods, with each method overloaded around 3 times. Seems like a pain to bloat your API by not using overloading. Obviously the developer of the API has just as much work either way but the consumer of the API would have a much more consusing time.
So, could someone from PHP crowd explain why overloading is bad? Not trying to troll, just honestly curious. This might be a moot point -- can you overload functions now in PHP5?
Fair enough... and I don't disagree with anything that you've stated. I don't doubt that the major labels benefit from the indie labels... but this isn't necessarily good for the indie labels. Indie label discovers band, band gets relatively popular, big label poaches band from small label . Big label wins, band wins, but I don't see the smaller label as a winner.
Anyway, "squashed" was probably not the best word to use, but "permanently subjugated" doesn't have the same ring to it;-)
Don't get me wrong -- this set up looks freaking awesome. However, the only pet-peeve is the gap between the monitors. With flight similator it's not as glaring because pilots have kindof a similar visibility.
However, couldn't you do much better if you decided to take some LCD monitors out of their casing? Don't LCD panels have a lot less unused space on the side? I'm surprised more case modders haven't done this for a poor mans widescreen.
You raise a good point. Here's a quote from Mike Viscelglia (he played bass for Suzanne Vega, I believe). His website has some good insight into the industry from sort of an "everyday joe" perspective.
When an artist negotiates a contract (preferably through a music attorney) he or she must come to terms as to what share of the price of the CD goes to the artist and what share goes to the company. This is referred to as "points" or a percentage of sales. An industry standard point allocation to the artist is usually 10 to 12. This means that the artist will get 10 to 12 percent of the sale of the CD. But 10 to 12 percent of what number? Is it the retail price? The wholesale price? The manufacturer's price? For this there is no standard and different companies will try to enforce different numbers.
So, it would seem that the online price is in-line with cd sales. To be honest, though, I find myself torn as to whether this is fair or not.
In the extreme example, take a band like N' Sync. These bands are obviously manufactured by the record label. They came into existense as a result of casting calls. Their music was written for them. They were provided with singing coaches, dancing lessons, etc. The record company promoted them, booked their concert dates, paid for their recording time, food, lodging, and transportation. The record company also handled virtually every angle of CD manufacturing and distribution. And don't forget the marketing machine that ensured that there would be enough radio play and media exposure such that enough pre-teens would want the CD in the first place.
So, in this instance most people would agree that the record company did at least 82% of the work (probably more). So is it unfair that some of these artists make 12%? In my estimation, the majority of major label artists fall into this category -- they weren't "discovered" so much as they were developed, honed, and trained by a music executive who knew what people would buy.
Am I over-generalizing? Yes. Do I think the music industry has become a cartel that will squash independent music and technological innovation? Most definitely. But let's be real. I like REM, but my guess is that Michael Stipe has as much business acumen as a piece of toast, and that without a major lable he'd still be plugging away at some bar in Athens, GA.
My point? I'm not sure I even have a point other than to say that 12% does sound unfair, buy maybe not THAT unfair depending on a host of other factors. I'm really more concerned about the chilling effect that the industry has on technology and the consumers' access to truly unique and different music.
ah, good point. As with most Americans, I tend to forget the scope of issues on the internet. My apologies.
Still though, I think that lack of intent does not necesarily mean that no crime was committed. I'm sure that this idea is manifest in several countries.
There's no malicious intent here. There's no targetting here...
That would make it negligence, which is not as bad as the outright intent to send spam to children but it still should be illegal.
Let's change up the "old man outside a candystore" scenario with something more plausible: a vending machine outside a candystore. It's illegal to stock it with booze regardless of the intent, because you can't ensure that underage people won't have access.
However the release of Safari for windows is probably just a huge pipe dream. I thought the decision to go with konquerer over mozilla as the base of safari was based on the fact that they sacrificed cross-platform deployment in favor of speed and a small footprint.
Anyway, this settlement seems to help aol and microsoft but mozilla seems to be the overall loser.
Your point is.... what exactly? That it's a worthwhile adventure to have my taxes to go towards a team of Phd's futzing around with 65 ps2 boot cd's? That they should be employed for the sake of being employed?
Look... keep the NCSA. Just spend the money on something worthwhile. After clustering 65 ps2's the only thing you've learned is that the NCSA must have way more spare time than they know what to do with.
At the very least please tell me that grad students were working on this or something.
The hardware costs are negligible whether NCSA paid for the units or not. I doubt Sony paid the salaries of the people working on this -- and this is where the real money is spent. I'm all for people working on projects like this even if it's for no better reason than to see if it can be done. But when my tax dollars are involved, and we are in an economic downturn, and the nation and many states are facing huge budget deficits, my hacker ethic gives way to my pissed-off-taxpayer ethic.
Really, there is no tangible scientific benefit to doing this, so I don't know why they bothered. The only leg they have to stand on is if they argued they were trying to see if a terrorist-friendly nation could build a supercomputer out of toys, but we know this is true already so I still don't like it. If they wan't to play around, they can do it on somebody elses dime... not mine.
I work in the product support department of a pretty big company. In all, we support 100+ applications/systems, developed by a host of other business units. Each business unit creates it's own documentation and come up with their own storage mechanism (custom web site, shared windows folder, etc.) Some of these are in Microsoft word, pdf, and html format. Finding documentation for a particular system when it goes down can be a real nightmare sometimes.
In short, content management is huge. CVS with a web-based front end would be good start (and much better than what we have), but even that doesn't come close to solving all the associated problems. There's issues like implementing approval processes and format conversion, but the number one issue is searching. When you get to a point to where you have thousands of documents to manage, there is no fixed organizational structure that will ensure that everyone will be able to find the particular document they need. You could write a perl script to string search a text file or even an html file, but what about word, or pdf, or (better yet) image-based content?
This book may be off base (I haven't read it yet), but content management is a bigger problem than can be solved by CVS alone. And anyone who's found a good system can feel more than welcome to drop me a line.
As a snippy aside, I'll close by saying "I told you so" to the many folks who kept insisting that I was an idiot when I suggested that Microsoft probably wasn't going to significantly increase the price of the service after the first year.
I'm inclined to agree with your post, but the starter kit is 40% more expensive than one year ago.
Generally speaking, kudos to Microsoft for an online scheme that rages over it's competitors at a good price. However, I don't get the decision to announce a price hike one week before E3. Most people are cutting prices.
Slashdot Mirror
So, don't let anyone ever tell you that Microsoft didn't support java.
There's the rub. I'm not.
Um, yeah. We just did. I'm getting about 2kbits/sec just before the connection gets reset.
Man, that's gotta be embarassing -- their ass is being saved by the OS they are trying to kill. Good thing they paid SCO for that Linux license.
I share your frustration totally (sometimes Word expands my selection to include the punctuation at the end of a word... wtf!?). However, when people say "I don't need any help from my computer!" I feel they aren't thinking it through -- your computer is always assisting you to some degree. This notion of "overzealous assistance" is all relative. My mom needs AOL in order to "see the Internet" (it's like fingernails on a chalkboard when she says that to me), but I find the level of "help" that AOL provides as frustrating and cumbersome.
Perhaps that's where this technology could be put to it's best use: correctly intuiting exactly how much assistance you may need. So, for example, Clippy v2.0 would ask you if you need help with that letter when you are a newbie, but scale back the assistance when it intuits that you don't need help.
And in ten years, when natural language parsing and voice recognition are perfected, it could go like this.
Imagine the conundrum: Slashdotter cannot be satisfied until making obligatory it-doesn't-have Ogg-support-so-I-wont-buy-it rant.... but it does have Ogg support.
All we need now is for the Microsoft is to file a brief against SCO. Have you ever seen the movie Scanners?
Is configuring every *just right* so that the hapless character gets pole-vaulted clean over the wall. Anyone else have some favorites?
One thing that has started to really bother me with the current crop of RTS games is the "Paper, Rock, Scissors" element ( Archers kill swordsmen, swordsmen kill infantry, infantry kill archers, etc. etc.). There was always some of that in the the older games such as Starcraft and AoM, but you also had units that were mostly "general purpose". For example, a terran marine dealt out an equal amount of damage to all it's enemies. In AoM, you could spend a huge amount of money on myth units... only to watch them get slaughtered by the cheapest hero unit (which have a 7x damage multiplier against myth units) available.
have amplified Personally, I hate micro-managing large scale battles. I think I'm in the minority though, as newer games have seemed to play up this aspect. The RTS games of the past seemed to favor players that were good mayors, whereas the rts of today favor good generals. Oh well.
Do *any* of the browsers have SVG rendering support by default? Mozilla, IE, and Firebird don't. The adobe plug-in is free, but it'd be nice if it was ready from the get-go.
The *idea* of SVG is great, but I don't want to invest alot of time learning a spec for something that no one will use.
The parent posts exemplify why I dislike these declarations of minimum specs for a game: it's a spec that is based upon a subjective opinion on what is minimally acceptable. Someone made a call based on a framerate that they figured people will tolerate. This criteria doesn't really mean that much to me: I want to be able to gauge whether *I* will be happy with the performance.
In my mind, the only way to do this is to give people some context. If someone said to me, "If you want to play at 640x480 at 30 fps with x/y/z features turned on, you will need the following specs...", that would be much more worthwhile. Even if my minimimum was better or worse than the scenario presented, I'd still be able to factor in my system performance and decide whether it was worth it.
It was my understanding that NOLF was, in fact, fairly successful but that the sequel did poorly.
Anyway, though I thought that the graphics were much, much improved in NOLF2, the gameplay suffered a bit (but not terribly so). I remember the gameplay and mechanics of NOLF were quite solid (it reminded me of goldeneye), but I felt that gunplay element was not near as polished in the sequel -- enemies would "dodge" by instantly appearing to the left/right of your crosshair when shooting. Also, while the addition of skill points was a good idea, I thought that the hiding system seemed counter-intuitive at times. Also, while I like the stealth elements, I felt that the sequel was at times too stealthy -- sometimes I felt arbitrarily forced to be stealthy when a small amount of ass-kicking would have been just as effective and far less time consuming.
It's also worth noting the multiplayer component of both NOLF and NOLF2 were generally considered to be lacking (this was almost by design as to focus more on the single-player element). I've played both online and I must agree. My guess is that NOLF2 would have done much better in the market had the multiplayer experience been as good as, say, Unreal Tournament.
Still, it was a great game either way and it's a bummer that it didn't do better.
Keep in mind that Blizzard experienced a similar defection about four years ago. Patrick Wyatt, Mike O'Brien, and Jeff Strain (One was a biz guy, the other two wrote battle.net and worked as leads on diablo and starcraft... if memory serves) took off to form a startup called TriForge. They then became Arena.net and finally were swallowed by NCSoft. They are now working on Guild Wars.
So, Blizzard has survived a previous walkout... they have since churned out Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, a few expansion packs, and are nearly done with WoW. Will they survive this? I believe so. I'm wondering if they will be able to come up with original content, or if it will be infected by suits who continue to pimp out the the Warcraft/Diablo franchise ad infinum.
I've heard that PHP does not have (or did not have) support for function overloading and that this omission was intentional.
Personally, I really like function overloading. API's get pretty hairy when you have multiple functions that all pretty much do the same thing but do it with slightly different inputs. For example, let's say you have I want to get the bank balance... it looks cleaner (to me at least) to have something like this...Than something like this This isn't a great example, but I've seen Java classes with a huge number of methods, with each method overloaded around 3 times. Seems like a pain to bloat your API by not using overloading. Obviously the developer of the API has just as much work either way but the consumer of the API would have a much more consusing time.
So, could someone from PHP crowd explain why overloading is bad? Not trying to troll, just honestly curious. This might be a moot point -- can you overload functions now in PHP5?
Fair enough... and I don't disagree with anything that you've stated. I don't doubt that the major labels benefit from the indie labels... but this isn't necessarily good for the indie labels. Indie label discovers band, band gets relatively popular, big label poaches band from small label . Big label wins, band wins, but I don't see the smaller label as a winner.
;-)
Anyway, "squashed" was probably not the best word to use, but "permanently subjugated" doesn't have the same ring to it
I stick by the cartel theory, though.
Don't get me wrong -- this set up looks freaking awesome. However, the only pet-peeve is the gap between the monitors. With flight similator it's not as glaring because pilots have kindof a similar visibility.
However, couldn't you do much better if you decided to take some LCD monitors out of their casing? Don't LCD panels have a lot less unused space on the side? I'm surprised more case modders haven't done this for a poor mans widescreen.
So, it would seem that the online price is in-line with cd sales. To be honest, though, I find myself torn as to whether this is fair or not.
In the extreme example, take a band like N' Sync. These bands are obviously manufactured by the record label. They came into existense as a result of casting calls. Their music was written for them. They were provided with singing coaches, dancing lessons, etc. The record company promoted them, booked their concert dates, paid for their recording time, food, lodging, and transportation. The record company also handled virtually every angle of CD manufacturing and distribution. And don't forget the marketing machine that ensured that there would be enough radio play and media exposure such that enough pre-teens would want the CD in the first place.
So, in this instance most people would agree that the record company did at least 82% of the work (probably more). So is it unfair that some of these artists make 12%? In my estimation, the majority of major label artists fall into this category -- they weren't "discovered" so much as they were developed, honed, and trained by a music executive who knew what people would buy.
Am I over-generalizing? Yes. Do I think the music industry has become a cartel that will squash independent music and technological innovation? Most definitely. But let's be real. I like REM, but my guess is that Michael Stipe has as much business acumen as a piece of toast, and that without a major lable he'd still be plugging away at some bar in Athens, GA.
My point? I'm not sure I even have a point other than to say that 12% does sound unfair, buy maybe not THAT unfair depending on a host of other factors. I'm really more concerned about the chilling effect that the industry has on technology and the consumers' access to truly unique and different music.
It's nice to see that a murderous thug can market himself so successfully. I'm sure the families of his victims are happy.
ah, good point. As with most Americans, I tend to forget the scope of issues on the internet. My apologies.
Still though, I think that lack of intent does not necesarily mean that no crime was committed. I'm sure that this idea is manifest in several countries.
Let's change up the "old man outside a candystore" scenario with something more plausible: a vending machine outside a candystore. It's illegal to stock it with booze regardless of the intent, because you can't ensure that underage people won't have access.
However the release of Safari for windows is probably just a huge pipe dream.
I thought the decision to go with konquerer over mozilla as the base of safari was based on the fact that they sacrificed cross-platform deployment in favor of speed and a small footprint.
Anyway, this settlement seems to help aol and microsoft but mozilla seems to be the overall loser.
Your point is.... what exactly? That it's a worthwhile adventure to have my taxes to go towards a team of Phd's futzing around with 65 ps2 boot cd's? That they should be employed for the sake of being employed?
Look... keep the NCSA. Just spend the money on something worthwhile. After clustering 65 ps2's the only thing you've learned is that the NCSA must have way more spare time than they know what to do with.
At the very least please tell me that grad students were working on this or something.
The hardware costs are negligible whether NCSA paid for the units or not. I doubt Sony paid the salaries of the people working on this -- and this is where the real money is spent. I'm all for people working on projects like this even if it's for no better reason than to see if it can be done. But when my tax dollars are involved, and we are in an economic downturn, and the nation and many states are facing huge budget deficits, my hacker ethic gives way to my pissed-off-taxpayer ethic.
Really, there is no tangible scientific benefit to doing this, so I don't know why they bothered. The only leg they have to stand on is if they argued they were trying to see if a terrorist-friendly nation could build a supercomputer out of toys, but we know this is true already so I still don't like it. If they wan't to play around, they can do it on somebody elses dime... not mine.
I work in the product support department of a pretty big company. In all, we support 100+ applications/systems, developed by a host of other business units. Each business unit creates it's own documentation and come up with their own storage mechanism (custom web site, shared windows folder, etc.) Some of these are in Microsoft word, pdf, and html format. Finding documentation for a particular system when it goes down can be a real nightmare sometimes.
In short, content management is huge. CVS with a web-based front end would be good start (and much better than what we have), but even that doesn't come close to solving all the associated problems. There's issues like implementing approval processes and format conversion, but the number one issue is searching. When you get to a point to where you have thousands of documents to manage, there is no fixed organizational structure that will ensure that everyone will be able to find the particular document they need. You could write a perl script to string search a text file or even an html file, but what about word, or pdf, or (better yet) image-based content?
This book may be off base (I haven't read it yet), but content management is a bigger problem than can be solved by CVS alone. And anyone who's found a good system can feel more than welcome to drop me a line.
As a snippy aside, I'll close by saying "I told you so" to the many folks who kept insisting that I was an idiot when I suggested that Microsoft probably wasn't going to significantly increase the price of the service after the first year.
I'm inclined to agree with your post, but the starter kit is 40% more expensive than one year ago.
Generally speaking, kudos to Microsoft for an online scheme that rages over it's competitors at a good price. However, I don't get the decision to announce a price hike one week before E3. Most people are cutting prices.