The Galaxy S II sells for about the same price has sold as well as the iPhone and Samsung has larger profit margins on it due to not having to resort to 3rd parties to manufacture and sell it components like Apple does. On that alone that figure makes no sense, and that's before you include every other handset and handset manufacturer in the market taking their share.
Without a doubt Apple focus on the high profit segment of the market, and have a reasonable share of that but 90% is just made up bollocks that doesn't even make any sense. Any story stating such is probably based on Apple's usual abuse of statistics, where they include iTunes profits as part of their cell phone profits or something equally messed up as that, rather than pure handset sales profits vs. pure handset sales profits. Certainly companies like HTC, Samsung, RIM, Huwaei, ZTE, Sony, aren't just squabbling over 10% when Apple only owns 17% of the smartphone market.
It's of course complicated, to analyse quarterly profits to judge how well a firm is doing on smartphones, for example Motorola mobility made a loss last quarter but that was because of costs stemming from it's split from Motorola solutions, rather than because it's smartphones weren't making it any money, however Apple's Q3 2011 profits were $7.3bn, Samsung's smartphone profits were $2.3bn for the same period and HTC's profits $1.6bn, so against Samsung and HTC's profits alone Apple only got 75% of the profits and that's assuming Apple made no money from iTunes, iPads, Macs and so forth too which is of course bollocks.
Realistically when you factor in RIM, Sony, Motorola, Nokia, ZTE, Huwaei and so forth and reduce Apple's profits to be only those from smartphones it seems Apple didn't even grab half the smartphone market, let alone just over half the overall phone market as someone responding to you rather ludicrously claimed. At a rough guess taking into account profits from all these companies on smartphones weighted against Apple's smartphone profits something like 35% may be a more reasonable figure - still an extremely respectable number and still the envy of the competition, but not quite the FUDlike level of bullshit the fanboys would have you believe.
Well said, pretty much cuts right to the point. beating the bottom 10% or so isn't a hard target, I have little sympathy for those who fail to do so because ultimately it tends to come down to things like incompetence and laziness at that point.
I have more sympathy for people in countries like Spain where unemployment is at 20%, where 1 in 5 are unemployed it's harder goal, although not that much more so.
In IT unemployment is much much lower though, particularly software development, and in fact software development seems to have improved through the recession as more companies prefer software systems be developed to automate tasks that would otherwise require multiple people to do.
To struggle in IT in this market means you have to be real bottom of the pile.
That depends on what you've achieved. If you're at 50 and you've done nothing worthwhile and not really gone very far in life then yes there are going to be questions why.
If you've actually achieved something and gone somewhere you're not really going to be looking anyway most likely the work will find you by the time you're that age, and have made decent contacts through life.
The problem with people who have this view is simply that they're not as good as they think, they think they're top dollar being offered bottom dollar pay, but the reality is they're just bottom dollar. Top dollar people are having no problem finding top dollar work right now.
I changed jobs twice in the recession, there doesn't seem to be a problem if you know what you're doing. Only if you don't have any competitive skills or a decent level of competence.
Chrome is gaining and Firefox isn't because Chrome brings performance and features people actually want even though it breaks things, whereas Firefox just breaks things and brings crap people don't want whilst managing to remain a massive memory hog.
It doesn't really matter though, if a company doesn't have pure American roots, isn't "made in America" or at least not seen that way by the xenophobes then for all intents and purposes it may as well have originated purely in Iran.
The problem isn't the real, actual grounding of a company, it's the perceived patriotic merit the company has, and BP historically always being known as British Petroleum there just isn't much patriotic merit in that. You only have to look at how many commentators and even Obama himself referred to it as that when trying to score political points with the xenophobes in a "hey, I'm slapping this evil foreign company down!" kind of way even though that hasn't been it's real name for some time.
"I figure there actually has to be something substantial in those patents to merit virtually all the big names in Android phones agreeing to license them at the amount MIcrosoft has been asking."
Agreed, IMO the issue at hand isn't whether Microsoft has valid patents, I think it very likely does else firms would be less likely to sign agreements with it, I think the issue is that Microsoft is abusing NDAs and so forth to prevent anyone telling the world what the patents are so that they can re-write software to not infringe on Microsoft's payments.
Effectively Microsoft is doing it's best to encourage continued infringement so that people have to license. IMO that should be grounds to lose rights to a patent - you should either be open about infringement and give people the opportunity to avoid it or license it, or lose the right to the patent altogether, not trap people into infringing and then force them to pay up. That really is protection racket type tactics.
No it's even better this time, you can already buy a pass for something like £40 which will give you access to all and any map packs they release in the future!
Yes, that's right, they haven't even released the map packs yet and they're already overpriced. Genius no?
The problem for companies like Samsung and HTC is that because they are American companies they suffer greatly in US courts as frankly American courts are extremely biased towards American companies, presumably stemming from it's national disease of over the top patriotism and general high levels of xenophobia. That's not to say this is always the case, but if you're a foreign company going up against a US firm in US courts, then the odds are stacked far more greatly against you than say a foreign company fighting a native firm in Canadian, or European courts which is again not to say it doesn't happen there too - just not so frequently.
It's no coincidence really that the firms that have folded against Microsoft are the foreign ones, and the ones fighting it are the American ones - Google, Motorola, B&N. If you want a slice of America's consumer pie, you have to accept that you'll play second place to American companies.
Other industries have been used to this for decades- you only have to ask companies like Airbus and BP about that, or any of the companies that led to complaints against the US via the WTO which have resulted in rulings against the US but which the US has chosen to completely ignore be it lumber from Canada or cotton from Brazil, but with the patent war hotting up it's becoming a painful reality for the mobile industry now too.
"These 6-week updates are quick, but they do change functionality in ways that break stuff (that is, websites render differently, potentially wrongly)."
Right, which demonstrates why getting changes to users quicker is stupid, because you're effectively saying "Well, we've basically just decided to break stuff more frequently".
This is why software historically has stuck such breaking changes in together in a single large update, rather than releasing them regularly as updates. It makes it a nightmare for the enterprise if they're having to fix stuff you break every fucking month, even worse when Mozilla has put absolutely no real effort into enterprise support in the first place.
Breaking stuff often isn't something to be proud of. It's something to be ashamed of. That's why Firefox is losing ground again now.
Britain "hates" the French in the way that we've got a long history of wars with them, but that if there were ever a problem they faced we'd be first to jump on our warships with them, or turf Germany out their back yard again, or back them up politically in the UN, or sunbathe on their beaches and visit their lovely country on holiday, or buy second homes in their rural areas nowadays.
I'm concerned that this friendly neighbourhood rivalry between our two countries has spread into something more bitter in our ex-colonies, it's like they didn't get the joke, that when we said "remember, we hate the French" they missed the grin and the wink that went with it, because okay, we say we hate them, but we don't really.
Though Sarkozy, we do actually really hate him, just not France in general.
Which is scary in itself because it runs the risk of trivialising precisely that.
It's precisely the sort of thing that's led to me hearing people more than once in my life only half jokingly coming out with things like "Well maybe Hitler was right about them".
When people resort to that kind of logic to justify their actions they seem completely oblivious to how self harming and dangerous it is. It's just the same as the continued demonisation of certain words as being offensive being precisely what makes them offensive- they're only offensive because people allow them to be.
Abuse of the offensive to further your agenda is probably the most self-damaging thing you can do to your agenda in the long run.
I don't think age has anything to do with it really, they're both just good fun games, especially if you like the military setting.
Personally some years back I was crying out for modern military games like the then WWII CoD, Medal of Honour, Brothers in Arms etc. clones because WWII had been done to death then and now they're here I can't get enough of them.
Some have been dissapointing though, frankly I though MW2 was nowhere near as good as MW1, and Black Ops was a complete joke, Medal of Honour was the far better game, albeit much too short, and Bad Company 2 showed Black Ops up something rotten too.
But this year the stakes are raised, frankly BF3 fucking rocked, I was happy because it was something to make up for the CoD decline, personally I think CoD peaked at CoD4 (MW), was still pretty good with CoD5 (WaW) even though it was WWII yet again, but then steadily went downhill from there. Even multiplayer got silly, nukes in MW2 multiplayer were dumb and Black Ops multiplayer felt half finished, even the zombie mode in Black Ops was shit compared to the one in WaW.
I've only played one level of MW3 so far but not much to go on however it feels to me like the franchise is back, I thought the Battlefield series (including Bad Company) was taking the reigns from CoD with it's repeated decline, and BF3 confirmed this for me, until MW3 arrived last night. So far it's been absolutely brilliant, it feels as good as MW did so far, and is as good as Battlefield single player, whether it'll remain that way we'll see.
The multiplayer is different as you say, BF is more tactical and squad based, MW3 is more solo ninja rambo style. BF3's coop mode was it's weakest part, and I suspect MW3's spec ops mode will beat that, but I think all in all, the BF3/MW3 single player modes will be equally as good, MW3 will win out on coop, but I think BF3 has the edge on multiplayer if not only because of it's massive maps, and not just the variation that vehicles brings, but the way different maps are populated with different vehicles, from the french subway station maps with their complete lack of vehicles giving the close quarter combat fast action infantry only CoD style combat to the open warfare of operation firestorm, kharg island and so forth with their cobras, a10s, f18s, M1s, aircraft carriers and much more.
Or to really sum it up, they're both good games, EA's return to competitiveness in the military FPS arena seems to have really pushed Activision to stop being sloppy this year and stop releasing ever worse crap. They've turned it around and I'm glad.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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You've not really taken in a word I've said have you?
Come back when your response has even the closest resemblance to anything I said, or you said originally for that matter.
As an aside I'm not sure what you mean by this:
"I am hard pressed to think of a single country that deserves even one US soldier's death in their defense."
Almost all US military action in the last few decades has been offensive, I think most other countries would be glad if you kept the fuck out of their business so that they didn't have to kill your soldiers too.
"There's a ton of stuff in academic CS that just isn't that useful in the real world"
That depends on the quality of the person using it. Good people do use this stuff and put it to work, but they're few and far between, and for something like a whole OS, finding enough people who are good enough and understand enough why something should be done differently is much harder than finding a bunch of people who are willing to jump into and hack away at an easier to understand solution.
There are however times where the good people do win out, where the academic is put to good use by good people, and a superior product comes along. I would argue Google's initial search engine was an example of this - it outshone the competition precisely because it put decent original academic theory into practice. You might similarly argue about the Wii - motion controls were always a cool concept but they certainly weren't new - they never worked very well in practice before, but Nintendo got it right, and implemented a good solution just as Microsoft have with controller free gaming with Kinect - and Kinect builds on a lot of VERY academic concepts that have been pushed through to fruition by some very clever people.
I almost feel guilty using this example twice in one day, but what the hell, personally I think HTML5 is an example of what can go wrong - HTML5 makes bad markup the standard, rather than the standard being good and something people should strive to improve their abilities to adhere to. Whilst it's giving us lots of shiny new features the damage HTML5 will do with it's focus back towards non-XML parsable markup and lack of care for accessibility and so forth will IMO set the web back some years in these aspects. People may not have served XHTML as XML but it was at least parsable and that did wonders for interop, maintainability and so forth.
I think there's a lot to be said for striving for the academic option - sure they're more difficult, but if you have the skill to pursue that option you'll produce a better produce. Settling for second best may allow you to get a product to market if your team isn't as skilled, and it may work out for you, but said products do not tend to be the sort of products that change the world, and circling back to the example of Linux I would argue that the fact Linux pursued a monolithic architecture is one of it's stumbling blocks in failing to unseat Windows to a greater degree than it has. It is by and large really the switch towards the NT kernel which borrows some microkernel concepts (even though not a true microkernel) that has allowed Microsoft to close the performance and security gap against Linux over the last 10 years.
It is I believe the pursuit and implementation of the academic that offers the difference between evolution, and revolution. It's a high stakes road - you can lose a lot of time and money if you don't pull it off, but if you do, you'll have something new and much better to offer the world.
I disagree, the problem is that historically kids have had too little power, having everything decided for them by adults who supposedly know better.
What we're seeing is a backlash from this, when kids finally find a way of gaining freedom whether it's through something like the internet or simply by becoming old enough to get away from their parents, then they don't know how to handle the responsibility of that freedom.
This is for example why England's young have such a binge drinking problem, because we have a culture of not letting kids near alcohol whatsoever under any circumstances, whilst those countries such as in Europe who may let their young have a glass of wine at christmas, or slowly drink alcohol in a relaxed manner at other times, have far less problems with it as the kids become old enough to buy their own.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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Sorry but your analysis of the Falklands is almost completely wrong, the only true bit is "Thatcher contacted the French president at the time requesting the missile codes and making all kinds of subtle threats about what would happen if those codes were not immediately forthcoming.".
It's certainly not the case that "Argentina was sinking British ships with little effort" either, they sank the HMS Sheffield - probably their biggest score of the battle, with an exocet, though it took some days before it finally sank. The Atlantic Conveyor was hit by two exocets, killing 12 sailors, but was still afloat and the decision was made to scuttle it by the Royal Navy as it wasn't worth towing back home for repair from all the fire damage by that point. HMS Glamorgan was hit by one but survived. By and large, the two ships the exocets caused to go under did so because of poor fire control practices on the ship rather than because the missile itself inherently damaged the boats enough to send them under, many believe the exocet that hit HMS Sheffield didn't even detonate, it was simply the fires that started onboard that gutted it.
"And they didn't run out of them"
This is false, this is exactly what happened for a number of reasons: - Political pressure against France by Britain stopped France selling them for some time limiting Argentina's supply - MI6 operations to act as weapons suppliers screwed up Argentina's attempts to find actual valid suppliers of exocet missiles, gutting their ability to find new supplies - Britain's harrier force (not Tornados) were effective in downing many Argentine aircraft, and destroying them on the ground, causing the loss of some exocets this way - Low flying sea king helicopters acted as decoys for the primitive tracking system of the exocet with some success making the missiles aim for the helicopter instead resulting in them missing the helicopter AND the ship - SAS missions crippled some eventual land based exocet capability
Really, the technology capabilities then were still somewhat primitive, harrier pilots were still using guns to down some of the argentinian aircraft and you don't really see that now. It wasn't the great technology espionage victory you claim, more than anything it was down to very primitive, yet very succesful methods that thwarted the exocet threat - political pressure, military intelligence operations, destroying the missiles before they were even launched, and distracting them with helicopters.
It probably really was the last serious war where technology wasn't such a massive factor and people's individual skill contributed much to win the day, after that we moved towards the first gulf war where stealth bombers and cruise missiles started to seriously change the game.
"Many people, even some IDEs, insist on generating getters and setters, even when there isn't a JavaBean in sight."
Yes, but that's precisely to cater to the case that in future, there may be a need to do something else. It's partly more problematic with Java because in C# it's quick and easy to do:
public string Name { get; set; }
Whilst in Java, it of course takes longer and creates more code clutter to do:
private string _name;
public getName() { return this._name; } public setName(string name) { this._name = name; }
Of course, C# properties aren't perfect, unless you do things in a more Java-esque way and don't use the automatic properties feature of C# 3.0 they force you to instantiate back in the constructor which is one of my bugbears with it, although some would argue that's how it should be done anyway.
The issue is largely that if you change simple fields into properties (or getter/setter pairs in Java) later on because you genuinely do need to do something when the variable is read or set then it can be a breaking change, by doing it from the outset then that's not the case. It's about minimising the potential impact of future changes, and you simply never know how long your code will be out there how it will be used, how it's use will change. Getters and setters insulate from that.
"The database open assignment was a case in point. It should just have been something like conn.dbOpen()"
This IMHO was an example of bad use of properties, see point 3 of shutdown -p's original response to you as to why, not to mention the risks you potential face by way of resource cleaning in doing this sort of thing. Anything can be misused, but I do not believe it's a fair argument against the feature, because the feature in the hands of competent developers certainly leads to much better code. I'm not a fan of catering to the lowest common denominator, HTML5 does this and it's an awful spec with so many missed opportunities (i.e. it makes accessibility worse, it lowers software development quality standards reducing maintainability etc.) - effectively it makes crap markup standard make crap, poorly maintainable, poorly accessible markup standards compliant, rather than raising the standard to allow things to move forward as XHTML has done by increasing the amount of XML parsable (even if not served as XML) markup out there.
Yep, I bought my ZTE Blade for £90 with no contract shortly after the iPhone 4 release and despite being about £400 - £500 cheaper it was still specced somewhere between the 3GS (roughly 3GS equivalent performance, but with a nicer AMOLED screen) and the 4.
It's still running today, but it's not got the greatest build quality, phones like this are bound to have a higher failure rate than the £500 phones like the Galaxy S II, and the iPhone 4S certainly but a touchscreen hardware accelerated handset with camera, AMOLED screen, iPhone 3GS specs and so forth then what can you expect?
I wouldn't be suprised to hear that the likes of the Galaxy S2 are probably comparable to the iPhone 4S, Samsung produces much of the iPhone 4S anyway, and it's not like they're going to give their own competing flagship handsets second rate treatment and frankly Apple doesn't exactly have a great history of hardware design anyway from fire hazard magsafe power adapters, to easily scratched iPod Nanos to expanding and cracking iPhone 3GS to flawed iPhone 4 antennas - Apple has always been more about style in design, than technical competence. Companies like Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Sony? They've got a much better track record in hardware design quality.
So it really all comes down to how much the product costs, if you've buying a cheap product that does a lot then hell yeah corners are going to have to have been cut, but if you're paying for high end? All manufacturers will have spent a decent amount of time focussing on quality, no one wants their high end flagship phone to have some nasty fault, Apple learnt all too well with the iPhone 4 antenna how embarrasing that can be.
Bundling in the cheap with the high end to bring down the average against Android just stinks of typical shill trolling.
Slashdot Mirror
It's completely false.
The Galaxy S II sells for about the same price has sold as well as the iPhone and Samsung has larger profit margins on it due to not having to resort to 3rd parties to manufacture and sell it components like Apple does. On that alone that figure makes no sense, and that's before you include every other handset and handset manufacturer in the market taking their share.
Without a doubt Apple focus on the high profit segment of the market, and have a reasonable share of that but 90% is just made up bollocks that doesn't even make any sense. Any story stating such is probably based on Apple's usual abuse of statistics, where they include iTunes profits as part of their cell phone profits or something equally messed up as that, rather than pure handset sales profits vs. pure handset sales profits. Certainly companies like HTC, Samsung, RIM, Huwaei, ZTE, Sony, aren't just squabbling over 10% when Apple only owns 17% of the smartphone market.
It's of course complicated, to analyse quarterly profits to judge how well a firm is doing on smartphones, for example Motorola mobility made a loss last quarter but that was because of costs stemming from it's split from Motorola solutions, rather than because it's smartphones weren't making it any money, however Apple's Q3 2011 profits were $7.3bn, Samsung's smartphone profits were $2.3bn for the same period and HTC's profits $1.6bn, so against Samsung and HTC's profits alone Apple only got 75% of the profits and that's assuming Apple made no money from iTunes, iPads, Macs and so forth too which is of course bollocks.
Realistically when you factor in RIM, Sony, Motorola, Nokia, ZTE, Huwaei and so forth and reduce Apple's profits to be only those from smartphones it seems Apple didn't even grab half the smartphone market, let alone just over half the overall phone market as someone responding to you rather ludicrously claimed. At a rough guess taking into account profits from all these companies on smartphones weighted against Apple's smartphone profits something like 35% may be a more reasonable figure - still an extremely respectable number and still the envy of the competition, but not quite the FUDlike level of bullshit the fanboys would have you believe.
Well said, pretty much cuts right to the point. beating the bottom 10% or so isn't a hard target, I have little sympathy for those who fail to do so because ultimately it tends to come down to things like incompetence and laziness at that point.
I have more sympathy for people in countries like Spain where unemployment is at 20%, where 1 in 5 are unemployed it's harder goal, although not that much more so.
In IT unemployment is much much lower though, particularly software development, and in fact software development seems to have improved through the recession as more companies prefer software systems be developed to automate tasks that would otherwise require multiple people to do.
To struggle in IT in this market means you have to be real bottom of the pile.
That depends on what you've achieved. If you're at 50 and you've done nothing worthwhile and not really gone very far in life then yes there are going to be questions why.
If you've actually achieved something and gone somewhere you're not really going to be looking anyway most likely the work will find you by the time you're that age, and have made decent contacts through life.
Again, as I said to the OP, if you suck.
The problem with people who have this view is simply that they're not as good as they think, they think they're top dollar being offered bottom dollar pay, but the reality is they're just bottom dollar. Top dollar people are having no problem finding top dollar work right now.
Yes, if you're any good.
I changed jobs twice in the recession, there doesn't seem to be a problem if you know what you're doing. Only if you don't have any competitive skills or a decent level of competence.
Chrome is gaining and Firefox isn't because Chrome brings performance and features people actually want even though it breaks things, whereas Firefox just breaks things and brings crap people don't want whilst managing to remain a massive memory hog.
It doesn't really matter though, if a company doesn't have pure American roots, isn't "made in America" or at least not seen that way by the xenophobes then for all intents and purposes it may as well have originated purely in Iran.
The problem isn't the real, actual grounding of a company, it's the perceived patriotic merit the company has, and BP historically always being known as British Petroleum there just isn't much patriotic merit in that. You only have to look at how many commentators and even Obama himself referred to it as that when trying to score political points with the xenophobes in a "hey, I'm slapping this evil foreign company down!" kind of way even though that hasn't been it's real name for some time.
"I figure there actually has to be something substantial in those patents to merit virtually all the big names in Android phones agreeing to license them at the amount MIcrosoft has been asking."
Agreed, IMO the issue at hand isn't whether Microsoft has valid patents, I think it very likely does else firms would be less likely to sign agreements with it, I think the issue is that Microsoft is abusing NDAs and so forth to prevent anyone telling the world what the patents are so that they can re-write software to not infringe on Microsoft's payments.
Effectively Microsoft is doing it's best to encourage continued infringement so that people have to license. IMO that should be grounds to lose rights to a patent - you should either be open about infringement and give people the opportunity to avoid it or license it, or lose the right to the patent altogether, not trap people into infringing and then force them to pay up. That really is protection racket type tactics.
No it's even better this time, you can already buy a pass for something like £40 which will give you access to all and any map packs they release in the future!
Yes, that's right, they haven't even released the map packs yet and they're already overpriced. Genius no?
The problem for companies like Samsung and HTC is that because they are American companies they suffer greatly in US courts as frankly American courts are extremely biased towards American companies, presumably stemming from it's national disease of over the top patriotism and general high levels of xenophobia. That's not to say this is always the case, but if you're a foreign company going up against a US firm in US courts, then the odds are stacked far more greatly against you than say a foreign company fighting a native firm in Canadian, or European courts which is again not to say it doesn't happen there too - just not so frequently.
It's no coincidence really that the firms that have folded against Microsoft are the foreign ones, and the ones fighting it are the American ones - Google, Motorola, B&N. If you want a slice of America's consumer pie, you have to accept that you'll play second place to American companies.
Other industries have been used to this for decades- you only have to ask companies like Airbus and BP about that, or any of the companies that led to complaints against the US via the WTO which have resulted in rulings against the US but which the US has chosen to completely ignore be it lumber from Canada or cotton from Brazil, but with the patent war hotting up it's becoming a painful reality for the mobile industry now too.
"These 6-week updates are quick, but they do change functionality in ways that break stuff (that is, websites render differently, potentially wrongly)."
Right, which demonstrates why getting changes to users quicker is stupid, because you're effectively saying "Well, we've basically just decided to break stuff more frequently".
This is why software historically has stuck such breaking changes in together in a single large update, rather than releasing them regularly as updates. It makes it a nightmare for the enterprise if they're having to fix stuff you break every fucking month, even worse when Mozilla has put absolutely no real effort into enterprise support in the first place.
Breaking stuff often isn't something to be proud of. It's something to be ashamed of. That's why Firefox is losing ground again now.
The 4 frontpage Slashdot stories that have been shoved in my face since Firefox 4 came out?
Britain "hates" the French in the way that we've got a long history of wars with them, but that if there were ever a problem they faced we'd be first to jump on our warships with them, or turf Germany out their back yard again, or back them up politically in the UN, or sunbathe on their beaches and visit their lovely country on holiday, or buy second homes in their rural areas nowadays.
I'm concerned that this friendly neighbourhood rivalry between our two countries has spread into something more bitter in our ex-colonies, it's like they didn't get the joke, that when we said "remember, we hate the French" they missed the grin and the wink that went with it, because okay, we say we hate them, but we don't really.
Though Sarkozy, we do actually really hate him, just not France in general.
Which is scary in itself because it runs the risk of trivialising precisely that.
It's precisely the sort of thing that's led to me hearing people more than once in my life only half jokingly coming out with things like "Well maybe Hitler was right about them".
When people resort to that kind of logic to justify their actions they seem completely oblivious to how self harming and dangerous it is. It's just the same as the continued demonisation of certain words as being offensive being precisely what makes them offensive- they're only offensive because people allow them to be.
Abuse of the offensive to further your agenda is probably the most self-damaging thing you can do to your agenda in the long run.
I don't think age has anything to do with it really, they're both just good fun games, especially if you like the military setting.
Personally some years back I was crying out for modern military games like the then WWII CoD, Medal of Honour, Brothers in Arms etc. clones because WWII had been done to death then and now they're here I can't get enough of them.
Some have been dissapointing though, frankly I though MW2 was nowhere near as good as MW1, and Black Ops was a complete joke, Medal of Honour was the far better game, albeit much too short, and Bad Company 2 showed Black Ops up something rotten too.
But this year the stakes are raised, frankly BF3 fucking rocked, I was happy because it was something to make up for the CoD decline, personally I think CoD peaked at CoD4 (MW), was still pretty good with CoD5 (WaW) even though it was WWII yet again, but then steadily went downhill from there. Even multiplayer got silly, nukes in MW2 multiplayer were dumb and Black Ops multiplayer felt half finished, even the zombie mode in Black Ops was shit compared to the one in WaW.
I've only played one level of MW3 so far but not much to go on however it feels to me like the franchise is back, I thought the Battlefield series (including Bad Company) was taking the reigns from CoD with it's repeated decline, and BF3 confirmed this for me, until MW3 arrived last night. So far it's been absolutely brilliant, it feels as good as MW did so far, and is as good as Battlefield single player, whether it'll remain that way we'll see.
The multiplayer is different as you say, BF is more tactical and squad based, MW3 is more solo ninja rambo style. BF3's coop mode was it's weakest part, and I suspect MW3's spec ops mode will beat that, but I think all in all, the BF3/MW3 single player modes will be equally as good, MW3 will win out on coop, but I think BF3 has the edge on multiplayer if not only because of it's massive maps, and not just the variation that vehicles brings, but the way different maps are populated with different vehicles, from the french subway station maps with their complete lack of vehicles giving the close quarter combat fast action infantry only CoD style combat to the open warfare of operation firestorm, kharg island and so forth with their cobras, a10s, f18s, M1s, aircraft carriers and much more.
Or to really sum it up, they're both good games, EA's return to competitiveness in the military FPS arena seems to have really pushed Activision to stop being sloppy this year and stop releasing ever worse crap. They've turned it around and I'm glad.
You've not really taken in a word I've said have you?
Come back when your response has even the closest resemblance to anything I said, or you said originally for that matter.
As an aside I'm not sure what you mean by this:
"I am hard pressed to think of a single country that deserves even one US soldier's death in their defense."
Almost all US military action in the last few decades has been offensive, I think most other countries would be glad if you kept the fuck out of their business so that they didn't have to kill your soldiers too.
"There's a ton of stuff in academic CS that just isn't that useful in the real world"
That depends on the quality of the person using it. Good people do use this stuff and put it to work, but they're few and far between, and for something like a whole OS, finding enough people who are good enough and understand enough why something should be done differently is much harder than finding a bunch of people who are willing to jump into and hack away at an easier to understand solution.
There are however times where the good people do win out, where the academic is put to good use by good people, and a superior product comes along. I would argue Google's initial search engine was an example of this - it outshone the competition precisely because it put decent original academic theory into practice. You might similarly argue about the Wii - motion controls were always a cool concept but they certainly weren't new - they never worked very well in practice before, but Nintendo got it right, and implemented a good solution just as Microsoft have with controller free gaming with Kinect - and Kinect builds on a lot of VERY academic concepts that have been pushed through to fruition by some very clever people.
I almost feel guilty using this example twice in one day, but what the hell, personally I think HTML5 is an example of what can go wrong - HTML5 makes bad markup the standard, rather than the standard being good and something people should strive to improve their abilities to adhere to. Whilst it's giving us lots of shiny new features the damage HTML5 will do with it's focus back towards non-XML parsable markup and lack of care for accessibility and so forth will IMO set the web back some years in these aspects. People may not have served XHTML as XML but it was at least parsable and that did wonders for interop, maintainability and so forth.
I think there's a lot to be said for striving for the academic option - sure they're more difficult, but if you have the skill to pursue that option you'll produce a better produce. Settling for second best may allow you to get a product to market if your team isn't as skilled, and it may work out for you, but said products do not tend to be the sort of products that change the world, and circling back to the example of Linux I would argue that the fact Linux pursued a monolithic architecture is one of it's stumbling blocks in failing to unseat Windows to a greater degree than it has. It is by and large really the switch towards the NT kernel which borrows some microkernel concepts (even though not a true microkernel) that has allowed Microsoft to close the performance and security gap against Linux over the last 10 years.
It is I believe the pursuit and implementation of the academic that offers the difference between evolution, and revolution. It's a high stakes road - you can lose a lot of time and money if you don't pull it off, but if you do, you'll have something new and much better to offer the world.
I disagree, the problem is that historically kids have had too little power, having everything decided for them by adults who supposedly know better.
What we're seeing is a backlash from this, when kids finally find a way of gaining freedom whether it's through something like the internet or simply by becoming old enough to get away from their parents, then they don't know how to handle the responsibility of that freedom.
This is for example why England's young have such a binge drinking problem, because we have a culture of not letting kids near alcohol whatsoever under any circumstances, whilst those countries such as in Europe who may let their young have a glass of wine at christmas, or slowly drink alcohol in a relaxed manner at other times, have far less problems with it as the kids become old enough to buy their own.
Sorry but your analysis of the Falklands is almost completely wrong, the only true bit is "Thatcher contacted the French president at the time requesting the missile codes and making all kinds of subtle threats about what would happen if those codes were not immediately forthcoming.".
It's certainly not the case that "Argentina was sinking British ships with little effort" either, they sank the HMS Sheffield - probably their biggest score of the battle, with an exocet, though it took some days before it finally sank. The Atlantic Conveyor was hit by two exocets, killing 12 sailors, but was still afloat and the decision was made to scuttle it by the Royal Navy as it wasn't worth towing back home for repair from all the fire damage by that point. HMS Glamorgan was hit by one but survived. By and large, the two ships the exocets caused to go under did so because of poor fire control practices on the ship rather than because the missile itself inherently damaged the boats enough to send them under, many believe the exocet that hit HMS Sheffield didn't even detonate, it was simply the fires that started onboard that gutted it.
"And they didn't run out of them"
This is false, this is exactly what happened for a number of reasons:
- Political pressure against France by Britain stopped France selling them for some time limiting Argentina's supply
- MI6 operations to act as weapons suppliers screwed up Argentina's attempts to find actual valid suppliers of exocet missiles, gutting their ability to find new supplies
- Britain's harrier force (not Tornados) were effective in downing many Argentine aircraft, and destroying them on the ground, causing the loss of some exocets this way
- Low flying sea king helicopters acted as decoys for the primitive tracking system of the exocet with some success making the missiles aim for the helicopter instead resulting in them missing the helicopter AND the ship
- SAS missions crippled some eventual land based exocet capability
Really, the technology capabilities then were still somewhat primitive, harrier pilots were still using guns to down some of the argentinian aircraft and you don't really see that now. It wasn't the great technology espionage victory you claim, more than anything it was down to very primitive, yet very succesful methods that thwarted the exocet threat - political pressure, military intelligence operations, destroying the missiles before they were even launched, and distracting them with helicopters.
It probably really was the last serious war where technology wasn't such a massive factor and people's individual skill contributed much to win the day, after that we moved towards the first gulf war where stealth bombers and cruise missiles started to seriously change the game.
Er, each time I've moved it's taken 3 days, although the official time period is 7 days.
Where did you get a month from?
Please don't stick the words "fucking" and "Thatcher" that close together, it's enough to give any man nightmares for life.
"Many people, even some IDEs, insist on generating getters and setters, even when there isn't a JavaBean in sight."
Yes, but that's precisely to cater to the case that in future, there may be a need to do something else. It's partly more problematic with Java because in C# it's quick and easy to do:
public string Name { get; set; }
Whilst in Java, it of course takes longer and creates more code clutter to do:
private string _name;
public getName() { return this._name; }
public setName(string name) { this._name = name; }
Of course, C# properties aren't perfect, unless you do things in a more Java-esque way and don't use the automatic properties feature of C# 3.0 they force you to instantiate back in the constructor which is one of my bugbears with it, although some would argue that's how it should be done anyway.
The issue is largely that if you change simple fields into properties (or getter/setter pairs in Java) later on because you genuinely do need to do something when the variable is read or set then it can be a breaking change, by doing it from the outset then that's not the case. It's about minimising the potential impact of future changes, and you simply never know how long your code will be out there how it will be used, how it's use will change. Getters and setters insulate from that.
"The database open assignment was a case in point. It should just have been something like conn.dbOpen()"
This IMHO was an example of bad use of properties, see point 3 of shutdown -p's original response to you as to why, not to mention the risks you potential face by way of resource cleaning in doing this sort of thing. Anything can be misused, but I do not believe it's a fair argument against the feature, because the feature in the hands of competent developers certainly leads to much better code. I'm not a fan of catering to the lowest common denominator, HTML5 does this and it's an awful spec with so many missed opportunities (i.e. it makes accessibility worse, it lowers software development quality standards reducing maintainability etc.) - effectively it makes crap markup standard make crap, poorly maintainable, poorly accessible markup standards compliant, rather than raising the standard to allow things to move forward as XHTML has done by increasing the amount of XML parsable (even if not served as XML) markup out there.
Yep, I bought my ZTE Blade for £90 with no contract shortly after the iPhone 4 release and despite being about £400 - £500 cheaper it was still specced somewhere between the 3GS (roughly 3GS equivalent performance, but with a nicer AMOLED screen) and the 4.
It's still running today, but it's not got the greatest build quality, phones like this are bound to have a higher failure rate than the £500 phones like the Galaxy S II, and the iPhone 4S certainly but a touchscreen hardware accelerated handset with camera, AMOLED screen, iPhone 3GS specs and so forth then what can you expect?
I wouldn't be suprised to hear that the likes of the Galaxy S2 are probably comparable to the iPhone 4S, Samsung produces much of the iPhone 4S anyway, and it's not like they're going to give their own competing flagship handsets second rate treatment and frankly Apple doesn't exactly have a great history of hardware design anyway from fire hazard magsafe power adapters, to easily scratched iPod Nanos to expanding and cracking iPhone 3GS to flawed iPhone 4 antennas - Apple has always been more about style in design, than technical competence. Companies like Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Sony? They've got a much better track record in hardware design quality.
So it really all comes down to how much the product costs, if you've buying a cheap product that does a lot then hell yeah corners are going to have to have been cut, but if you're paying for high end? All manufacturers will have spent a decent amount of time focussing on quality, no one wants their high end flagship phone to have some nasty fault, Apple learnt all too well with the iPhone 4 antenna how embarrasing that can be.
Bundling in the cheap with the high end to bring down the average against Android just stinks of typical shill trolling.
I was under the impression it had been okay'd now, but after a quick search I can't find anything confirming that so I guess you're probably right.
It wont hurt them much?
You do know Germany is the 4th biggest economy in the world right, the biggest economy in Europe, and the second biggest economy in the West?
I dunno, that sounds like quite a painful economy to lose your ability to sell your products in.