"Everything on BBC television is informed by the need to be entertainment, if you expect to be informed by their output you are delusional."
What are you on about? Have you ever even watched the likes of Planet Earth or Horizon?
"The BBC is just a branch of the Labour party anyway judging by their recent shutdown of the Have your Say website because they didn't like the overwhelming anti Labour viewpoint of the visitors coming up to the election."
What you mean this "Have your say?" that er, isn't actually shut down?:
They've changed the format for the same reason Have your say switched to this format a few years ago- it doesn't scale well, they need to fix that and so have changed the format to one that can better cope for now. See here for the temporary page:
"If you look back at the history of legislation you will find that the Labour party always pass deeply unpopular and badly written bills just before elections. They don't like doing it when people might notice their truly evil bills."
Well no, not really. Why would they pass terrible bills when they most need support? it makes no sense at all. It's just business as usual, do you really believe the digital economy bill is somehow worse than the anti-terror bills, RIPA and the bills that gave us the DNA database, contactpoint, and so forth? If so then you don't seem to actually really know much about British politics over this last few decades. Labour have ALWAYS passed bad bills, but worse, so do the Tories meaning that's generally all we ever get now.
The BBC is clearly separated from the BBC, suggesting it has some link to it is laughable, it was after all the Labour party that gave the BBC a kicking after the Hutton enquiry- the BBC have no reason to have any allegiance to Labour, nor have they ever demonstrated it.
Look, I hate Labour, I hate the Tories too in all honesty, I'm not even keen on the Lib Dems now, although they seem the best of a bad bunch, but your ramblings just come across as nonsensical paranoid fantasies. Suggesting there's no merit in anything the BBC produces and suggesting it's simply entertainment, and suggesting it's controlled by Labour, are both laughably ignorant viewpoints. The BBC aren't perfect- I think Jonathan Ross, Jeremy Clarkson and some others should've been disposed of long ago, not given the millionaire wages they are, I hate Panorama too, I'm not keen on Newsnight, but that's such a small amount of the BBC's content it's hard to suggest it's an illustration for me of the whole- there's clearly a lot of good stuff the BBC produces or shows.
Yeah, I don't know why the BBC struggles with serious current affairs programs so much. Particularly when you look at programs like Horizon and series like Planet Earth, and Life which are generally nothing short of outstanding. They clearly can do serious programs well, they can clearly do comedy current affairs programs well, it's not as if their news site and the current affairs stuff on there isn't generally excellent either. They just can't seem to mix it all together to provide serious TV based current affairs shows without ending up in an epic fail.
That's actually a pretty handy diagram, haven't stumbled across it before.
As you say I do wonder then if there's much point Norway being outside the EU, although even if you did join I assume you'd want to keep your own currency as it's always seemed pretty strong and I assume it still is? I haven't paid so much attention to it in the last year or two.
I've always liked Norway, although I've never made it across to Oslo yet, I did go to Narvik a few years ago to watch Orcas for a couple of days. It'd be really sad if the EU ever did influence Norway the wrong way in terms of rights, freedoms, privacy and so forth as I've always felt that it's one of the few bastions of sanity left in Europe- I'm not even sure about Sweden since the whole pirate bay police raid and court case debacle and the judge being a clear supporter of the IFPI, but at least the people of Sweden have made a strong point with The Pirate Party, even if the government and court system hasn't particularly shown itself to be very trustworthy.
Here in Britain, well, it feels like our government and half the population are a lost cause, and there's not even any sign of that changing with vast amounts of the general public still supporting things like CCTV, ID cards, net censorship and so forth and no sign of a political movement with any strenth yet willing to stand up for our rights.
As a Lib Dem voter, this disgust me too, but I'm still concerned that they're the best option, partly because it is Lib Dem Lords that have done this, rather than the parliamentary party for which you'd be voting, and partly because the Lib Dems goal of doing away with our horrendously undemocratic first past the post system is simply more important. I think this latter point is prominent, because first past the post is the reason we have these untouchable, unaccountable parties holding all the power in the first place. If we get rid of our stupid first past the post system, then it's at least the first step towards more sane government.
So yeah, it disgusts me too, but I'm not sure withdrawing your vote is the solution sadly. I would at very least however recommend you contact Nick Clegg to make your point heard, and to ensure the parliamentary party rather than the Lords don't follow this line at least.
It's not a suprise. Panorama is probably one of the few things I hate the BBC for. Panorama is basically the BBC's answer to the Daily Mail.
Panorama is frequently wrong, and the BBC frequently has to publish apologies, but these apologies are always hidden away, or non-obvious, and occur long after the BBC has already shown said episode of Panorama anyway. It was Panorama for example that started the BBC's push about Wifi being dangerous and giving teachers headaches, even though all of this was entirely unproven by them. It was later found that the BBC was indeed out of line, but the apology was merely published online and the damage was already done- countless schools around the country were adamant that Wifi was dangerous and started removing it from all the classrooms. I was working in Education IT at the time, and it was hard work trying to make the schools realise Panorama was wrong, even after they had issued the apology.
Panorama has similarly done shock stories full of inaccuracies on things like children using the internet too.
It's just a bad, bad TV series, and the BBC should be embarassed for even allowing it to continue. It's really a horrible stain on their otherwise generally good reputation.
If Norway isn't a member of the EU why would they have to implement the EU's data storage directive? Does the Norwegian government often implement EU laws anyway despite not being a member, or does this come under some separate agreement like the EFTA of which Norway is a signatory?
In a way, I'd like Norway in the EU, it'd add another more sane voice to the party, we could do with a few more of those. It'd probably be a bad thing for Norway though, as I imagine the benefits we'd gain, would be equal to the benefits Norwegians would lose I guess, so staying out is understandable!
"Apple actually opens the app, looks at it, and runs some tests against it."
Like what? They don't have the source code. There's only so many tests you can do on an arbitrary application, none of which will test for the sort of things Apple might want to protect against with any level of reliability.
Google doesn't need to test because they do not censor based on content, but most importantly because unlike the iPhone, the security layer at device level is strong- not perfect, no system ever is, but much stronger than the iPhone. A good example is the fact that Apple are unhappy with people who use private APIs in their iPhone apps, but here's the question, if Apple doesn't like people using private APIs, why can developers even make calls to them in the first place?
"I can't tell if you're freaking out because you like Apple and resent the fact that they have tighter controls around their app store, or because you hate Apple and think I'm supporting them."
I'm not sure what you mean by "freaking out", I'm merely pointing out some facts. Does it matter if I'm pro-Apple or anti-Apple exactly? Is it impossible to just be objective and recognise Apple does some things right, and some things wrong?
I understand the approach they took too. What I don't like however is the way Apple misleads about the reasons for their approach, they tell the user it's good for them, but in reality, the only entity it's good for is Apple- to ensure they control YOUR phone. It provides no benefit to the vast majority of iPhone users, although many mistakenly believe it gives them increased application quality, or more secure software, neither of which is true.
What kind of functional testing and automated suites do you think they use? There's only so much they can do without the source code, and it requires people who have a strong understanding of low level computing, "a bunch of devs in India" will simply never cut it for Apple to ensure the app store provides anything other than censorship.
Ah, so your comments are based entirely on some completely unfounded theory?
Do you really not have any actual solid evidence to back up your point? I think you'll find that most 'experts' are happy using Java, because it's the best tool for the job- if you can find any other cross platform, language with as big an abundance of solid, secure, well tested libraries, and with as secure a virtual machine that performs well as C++ in the majority of cases then let me know.
The problem is, you wont find such things, hence why Java is the language of choice. The closest you've got is C#, the CLR and.NET which is IMO a better language, but is limited to Microsoft only so loses a lot of points for that.
If Java is horrible for beginners and too restrictive for experts, then why is it both the most popular teaching language, and the most popular business language? See here:
"It's like watching latter-day Marines field-strip and assemble their weapons."
Well no actually, it looked like any normal IT support guy putting a machine back together, except most people don't even fumble and drop the RAM.
Really, that was fast? I'd be inclined to believe anyone here on Slashdot whose built a machine a few times could do it faster than that. It's not like they even had to build half the machine, the fiddliest components were already in place anyway.
If it's anything like the rest of public sector from when I worked in it for a while some years ago, then "lost" means "I left my laptop perfectly visible in the back seat of my car which I left parked outside on the street overnight in a not exactly crime-free part of town".
So if they want to find them, eBay, or the house with the dodgy people in down the street are probably the best places to look.
What auditing do you think Apple does exactly that Google doesn't?
Apple claims there are 140,000+ apps on the app store, the app store has been around less than 600 days, so that's at least 230 apps per day they have to vet. Do you think they really do anything other than load up the application, see what it's about, have a quick play around with it, then reject or approve it with that kind of volume? Even if they have 100 employees on it, which they wont because that would be unnaffordable for the amount the app store brings them in, then that still only leaves 2 apps a day which will let them maybe do some network monitoring, use the app a fair bit, maybe do a brief look at it, but still nothing more, and even that's assuming all their staff work every day 365 days a year and don't ever take leave or have time off sick.
Really, it is the same type of walled garden. For Apple to be able to do proper vetting of apps they'd need to employ a few hundred people all pretty nifty with a disassembler and able to spot Malware, who all understand Apple's policies on what is and isn't allowed (i.e. use of OSS licenses, acceptable levels of smut, wifi libraries not allowed) and can interpret them as needed. You need extremely skilled people, you couldn't just fob it off to India in bulk, and you'd be needing to pay a decent wage for each member of staff. The sort of staff, that you'd be better off passing over to R&D and letting get on with the next great product and not really caring about quality of apps approved in fact. It's not even the sort of thing you can automate because AI just isn't that good yet.
No, the app store is about control and nothing more, it's not a quality check, it's not a security barrier. Google's marketplace is in contrast about giving people the same easy access to applications but without the control, and that's really only the key difference between them. Google doesn't care who developes for Android, they'll welcome any decent app. In contrast, Apple wants full control of who developers and what sort of app they develop- hence lack of competing browsers, problems getting Google voice and so forth on, blocking of porn apps from small developers whilst allowing major porn coporations to continue publishing etc.
PHP for anything other than web stuff is a bad idea simply because PHP is just a horrendously bad language, it's truly awful. The only reason you'd use it on the web is because it's so well supported in terms of libraries and so forth, and generally available on cheap hosting options.
It doesn't have these advantages outside the web- the libraries aren't as common or well tested, and it's less available on say, desktop PCs than Java,.NET or native binary support is. Examples of problems with it are it's terrible hacked on OOP support, lack of proper namespaces, clunky syntax. Why would you put yourself through that when you can just use C, C++, Java, or one of the.NET languages? It's best to just leave PHP where it belongs.
C/C++ may be more than a little faster than Python certainly, but they're barely faster if at all than Java/JVM or C++,C#,VB,etc./CLR. See this site, which is now 6 years old (things have moved on even more since then) to better understand why C/C++ do not have much of an advantage in performance anymore, and have no advantage whatsoever when you factor in ease of development against performance:
The idea that things that require high performance are written in C/C++ is a little bit of a straw man. Games are written in C++ because it's the only langauge that's portable across the Wii, the PS3, the Xbox 360, the PC, Mac, Linux and because it's what companies have been using for decades and as such have millions of lines of libraries written for and have developer teams skilled up in. It's certainly not about performance nowadays, head to java.com and look up their case studies list for high performance computing for example. The fundamental problem is that when you compile C/C++ code you're generally compiling for a generic chipset so that's the best that the compiler can optimise for, with VM based languages like Java and the.NET languages, they use JIT compilation so that the bytecode is compiled into natively executable code and optimised for the specific abilities of the system on which it is being run- this gives it an inherent advantage in terms of optimisation because it does not have that disadvantage of needing to be generic enough to run on any compatible system like compiled C/C++ generally does. You could get the same benefits with C/C++ and allow it to keep it's slight edge by distributing an executable optimised for each type of AMD processors with 1gb, 2gb, 3gb, 4gb RAM and so on and then the same for Intel and other factors, but you get a combinatorial explosion of the amount of executables you'd need to distribute and the user would probably struggle to know which one to use.
There is also a lot of iPhone software that phones home, and here's the problem, the app store as a security measure is a complete and utter myth. The app store is NOT about security, it does not make you magically protected. It's also worth noting that Apple boasts about having hundreds of thousands applications on it's app store- is anyone really naive enough to believe that Apple is capable of doing a full security audit on each and every one of these applications?
The app store brings convenience, uniformity and ease of use to buying, downloading and installing applications on the iPhone and gives Apple a method of controlling what users can do with their iPhone, and controlling whether developers can produce competing products to those Apple provides or instead block them to retain a monopoly on said application type on their platform.
So how did the Guitar Hero and Rockband series manage to pull off being some of the top selling titles ever then? Even the Wii Balance board has done well.
The problem is, most aftersales addons are just complete afterthoughts. Well designed, fun addons do just fine.
What exactly would they hold patent ownership on that they can't exercise already?
XNA mimics what's at the core of basically any game engine written in the last decade or two. If Microsoft were interested in such patent enforcement they'd have done it against much existing middleware by now, or perhaps even OpenGL if it was API specific. Besides, there are already Mono XNA implementations underway and have been for some time, so it's quite clear people can in fact produce FOSS implementations of XNA if they so choose.
You're right that the XBox isn't the only console, but it is the only console that people can publish for without having to be a professional development studio. No other modern console has a path that allows indies to publish to the console's userbase so it's the sensible choice for indies right now. You could write a game and submit it to XNA tommorrow if you so chose to- with the PS3 or Wii it would take months to even barter the relevant SDKs and dev kits required out of Sony and Nintendo before you could even start developing, and that's assuming you could manage to get it out of them at all.
Regarding Windows mobile penetration, that's a really horribly poor argument. TFA is referring to Windows Mobile 7 which isn't even released yet, and is Microsoft's attempt at getting back on the ball in the smartphone marketplace. They were the second biggest player previously after Symbian but they let their position slip by ignoring development of the platform, there's no reason Windows Mobile couldn't reach that position again. XNA doesn't even work on the current platform, so arguing that the poor penetration of current Windows Mobile which is inferior to all other offerings out there shows complete ignorance of the market and where XNA4 comes in- you can't make claims about the potential penetration of something that's not even out there yet.
That's pretty interesting, it leaves me something to think about!
I've certainly doodled a fair bit in the past myself, but I've never conciously tried to reflect on those doodles, why I did them or what they meant. It's possible that at the time then that like you they actually had some useful benefits to my thought process for me without me really even noticing. I don't tend to doodle nowadays much because I tend to keep my desks paperless. I wonder if there's some benefit to having paper handy to doodle on when thinking or talking on the phone or similar, even if for nothing else?
I agree, I was dissapointed too, shocked, stunned in fact. I agree it's not worthy of anything close to the money it made if I base my feelings on historic development of indie games
But that's really the point- XNA is such a great step forward for indies that even trash like that can make a small fortune. Developing, publishing and porting are so easy with it, even trash can make developers a fortune. If people want to pay for it then let them, as I say, it's great news for indies as it's a great path to easy income for them.
I think most people paid a dollar because they found the soundtrack amusing. A few other games including a terrible RC flight sim have made similar amounts though.
"So this is just a kind of interface / helper interface to D3D for.Net. Great, now you're stuck to both D3D and.Net - how does that help portability?"
It's really a wrapper, but it provides more than that- the content pipeline being one example, but it also provides other useful core game classes, whilst DirectX just provides the raw APIs.
It assists portability because it's basically providing what DirectX doesn't. It basically handles the abstraction layers you'd have to otherwise right yourself for you.
It's just an extra step of game development that is now simply done for you rather than having to waste time with yourself, a step that lets you write a game once, and have it run on a console, a desktop PC, a media player, and a phone. That's how it helps portability.
I assume you're hinting at the fact that it's not portable outside Windows, but as I say, that's not something that Microsoft have any interest or would receive any benefit from investing in so why would they? Mono or similar open source projects can always deal with that side of things if they deem it worthwhile.
3D on a phone isn't really the news here to be honest. It's the fact that it's done with XNA which means you can build for Windows, Zune, XBox, Windows Mobile with a negligible amount of per-platform code.
XNA like DirectX encompasses your graphics, math, audio libraries and so on so you can actually concentrate on writing the game, rather than writing code to support the creation of a game.
It's a good thing for those who just want to build games whatever the platform, because it means they get to use probably the easier professional grade development toolset yet, with a decent professional grade language, and then publish for 4 platforms from the start- 2 of which are pretty major.
The guy behind "I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1" released some stats lately stating he'd sold 200,000 copies on XBox indie games at $1 each, minus Microsoft's $30 cut (which is actually extremely reasonable as industry figures go) he's made $140,000 off a game that could be made in less than a week. With this news he can now port to Windows Mobile 7 phones.
If you just want to concentrate on writing game code, and would like to monetise that, it's probably the single best path for indies right now because you've got such a large potential userbase - Windows users (100s of millions), XBox 360 users (40mill), Windows 7 Phone users (potentially tens of millions), Zune users (all 4 of them).
I don't even think Mac/Linux users should despair either really. Indies don't generally have the resources to create a massive multi-platform game from the off, and although XNA wont port straight to these platforms it does as I say provide indie developers an awesome and easy path to market. When they achieve success, porting to other platforms becomes less of a problem for them because they've got the income and experience needed to do it if they so choose. This is somewhat what happened with Popcap- they started out with just Flash and then Windows games, but their success was such that porting the likes of Bejewelled to every other possible platform became feasible to them.
Spectacular, no. Good thing? I'd say yes, particularly for indies.
Slashdot Mirror
"Everything on BBC television is informed by the need to be entertainment, if you expect to be informed by their output you are delusional."
What are you on about? Have you ever even watched the likes of Planet Earth or Horizon?
"The BBC is just a branch of the Labour party anyway judging by their recent shutdown of the Have your Say website because they didn't like the overwhelming anti Labour viewpoint of the visitors coming up to the election."
What you mean this "Have your say?" that er, isn't actually shut down?:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/default.stm
They've changed the format for the same reason Have your say switched to this format a few years ago- it doesn't scale well, they need to fix that and so have changed the format to one that can better cope for now. See here for the temporary page:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/haveyoursay/
"If you look back at the history of legislation you will find that the Labour party always pass deeply unpopular and badly written bills just before elections. They don't like doing it when people might notice their truly evil bills."
Well no, not really. Why would they pass terrible bills when they most need support? it makes no sense at all. It's just business as usual, do you really believe the digital economy bill is somehow worse than the anti-terror bills, RIPA and the bills that gave us the DNA database, contactpoint, and so forth? If so then you don't seem to actually really know much about British politics over this last few decades. Labour have ALWAYS passed bad bills, but worse, so do the Tories meaning that's generally all we ever get now.
The BBC is clearly separated from the BBC, suggesting it has some link to it is laughable, it was after all the Labour party that gave the BBC a kicking after the Hutton enquiry- the BBC have no reason to have any allegiance to Labour, nor have they ever demonstrated it.
Look, I hate Labour, I hate the Tories too in all honesty, I'm not even keen on the Lib Dems now, although they seem the best of a bad bunch, but your ramblings just come across as nonsensical paranoid fantasies. Suggesting there's no merit in anything the BBC produces and suggesting it's simply entertainment, and suggesting it's controlled by Labour, are both laughably ignorant viewpoints. The BBC aren't perfect- I think Jonathan Ross, Jeremy Clarkson and some others should've been disposed of long ago, not given the millionaire wages they are, I hate Panorama too, I'm not keen on Newsnight, but that's such a small amount of the BBC's content it's hard to suggest it's an illustration for me of the whole- there's clearly a lot of good stuff the BBC produces or shows.
Yeah, I don't know why the BBC struggles with serious current affairs programs so much. Particularly when you look at programs like Horizon and series like Planet Earth, and Life which are generally nothing short of outstanding. They clearly can do serious programs well, they can clearly do comedy current affairs programs well, it's not as if their news site and the current affairs stuff on there isn't generally excellent either. They just can't seem to mix it all together to provide serious TV based current affairs shows without ending up in an epic fail.
That's actually a pretty handy diagram, haven't stumbled across it before.
As you say I do wonder then if there's much point Norway being outside the EU, although even if you did join I assume you'd want to keep your own currency as it's always seemed pretty strong and I assume it still is? I haven't paid so much attention to it in the last year or two.
I've always liked Norway, although I've never made it across to Oslo yet, I did go to Narvik a few years ago to watch Orcas for a couple of days. It'd be really sad if the EU ever did influence Norway the wrong way in terms of rights, freedoms, privacy and so forth as I've always felt that it's one of the few bastions of sanity left in Europe- I'm not even sure about Sweden since the whole pirate bay police raid and court case debacle and the judge being a clear supporter of the IFPI, but at least the people of Sweden have made a strong point with The Pirate Party, even if the government and court system hasn't particularly shown itself to be very trustworthy.
Here in Britain, well, it feels like our government and half the population are a lost cause, and there's not even any sign of that changing with vast amounts of the general public still supporting things like CCTV, ID cards, net censorship and so forth and no sign of a political movement with any strenth yet willing to stand up for our rights.
But the problem is, who do you vote for instead?
As a Lib Dem voter, this disgust me too, but I'm still concerned that they're the best option, partly because it is Lib Dem Lords that have done this, rather than the parliamentary party for which you'd be voting, and partly because the Lib Dems goal of doing away with our horrendously undemocratic first past the post system is simply more important. I think this latter point is prominent, because first past the post is the reason we have these untouchable, unaccountable parties holding all the power in the first place. If we get rid of our stupid first past the post system, then it's at least the first step towards more sane government.
So yeah, it disgusts me too, but I'm not sure withdrawing your vote is the solution sadly. I would at very least however recommend you contact Nick Clegg to make your point heard, and to ensure the parliamentary party rather than the Lords don't follow this line at least.
It's not a suprise. Panorama is probably one of the few things I hate the BBC for. Panorama is basically the BBC's answer to the Daily Mail.
Panorama is frequently wrong, and the BBC frequently has to publish apologies, but these apologies are always hidden away, or non-obvious, and occur long after the BBC has already shown said episode of Panorama anyway. It was Panorama for example that started the BBC's push about Wifi being dangerous and giving teachers headaches, even though all of this was entirely unproven by them. It was later found that the BBC was indeed out of line, but the apology was merely published online and the damage was already done- countless schools around the country were adamant that Wifi was dangerous and started removing it from all the classrooms. I was working in Education IT at the time, and it was hard work trying to make the schools realise Panorama was wrong, even after they had issued the apology.
Panorama has similarly done shock stories full of inaccuracies on things like children using the internet too.
It's just a bad, bad TV series, and the BBC should be embarassed for even allowing it to continue. It's really a horrible stain on their otherwise generally good reputation.
If Norway isn't a member of the EU why would they have to implement the EU's data storage directive? Does the Norwegian government often implement EU laws anyway despite not being a member, or does this come under some separate agreement like the EFTA of which Norway is a signatory?
In a way, I'd like Norway in the EU, it'd add another more sane voice to the party, we could do with a few more of those. It'd probably be a bad thing for Norway though, as I imagine the benefits we'd gain, would be equal to the benefits Norwegians would lose I guess, so staying out is understandable!
"Apple actually opens the app, looks at it, and runs some tests against it."
Like what? They don't have the source code. There's only so many tests you can do on an arbitrary application, none of which will test for the sort of things Apple might want to protect against with any level of reliability.
Google doesn't need to test because they do not censor based on content, but most importantly because unlike the iPhone, the security layer at device level is strong- not perfect, no system ever is, but much stronger than the iPhone. A good example is the fact that Apple are unhappy with people who use private APIs in their iPhone apps, but here's the question, if Apple doesn't like people using private APIs, why can developers even make calls to them in the first place?
"I can't tell if you're freaking out because you like Apple and resent the fact that they have tighter controls around their app store, or because you hate Apple and think I'm supporting them."
I'm not sure what you mean by "freaking out", I'm merely pointing out some facts. Does it matter if I'm pro-Apple or anti-Apple exactly? Is it impossible to just be objective and recognise Apple does some things right, and some things wrong?
I understand the approach they took too. What I don't like however is the way Apple misleads about the reasons for their approach, they tell the user it's good for them, but in reality, the only entity it's good for is Apple- to ensure they control YOUR phone. It provides no benefit to the vast majority of iPhone users, although many mistakenly believe it gives them increased application quality, or more secure software, neither of which is true.
What kind of functional testing and automated suites do you think they use? There's only so much they can do without the source code, and it requires people who have a strong understanding of low level computing, "a bunch of devs in India" will simply never cut it for Apple to ensure the app store provides anything other than censorship.
Ah, so your comments are based entirely on some completely unfounded theory?
Do you really not have any actual solid evidence to back up your point? I think you'll find that most 'experts' are happy using Java, because it's the best tool for the job- if you can find any other cross platform, language with as big an abundance of solid, secure, well tested libraries, and with as secure a virtual machine that performs well as C++ in the majority of cases then let me know.
The problem is, you wont find such things, hence why Java is the language of choice. The closest you've got is C#, the CLR and .NET which is IMO a better language, but is limited to Microsoft only so loses a lot of points for that.
Even then there's the Java Native Interface though, so even worst case you can do anything in Java that you could do in C.
Of course, if you were using Java in the first places then you really wouldn't want to, because as you say, Java's restrictions exist for good reason.
If Java is horrible for beginners and too restrictive for experts, then why is it both the most popular teaching language, and the most popular business language? See here:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
What exactly is it about Java that makes you think it's too restrictive for 'experts'?
"It's like watching latter-day Marines field-strip and assemble their weapons."
Well no actually, it looked like any normal IT support guy putting a machine back together, except most people don't even fumble and drop the RAM.
Really, that was fast? I'd be inclined to believe anyone here on Slashdot whose built a machine a few times could do it faster than that. It's not like they even had to build half the machine, the fiddliest components were already in place anyway.
Yes, even Ron Paul.
If it's anything like the rest of public sector from when I worked in it for a while some years ago, then "lost" means "I left my laptop perfectly visible in the back seat of my car which I left parked outside on the street overnight in a not exactly crime-free part of town".
So if they want to find them, eBay, or the house with the dodgy people in down the street are probably the best places to look.
What auditing do you think Apple does exactly that Google doesn't?
Apple claims there are 140,000+ apps on the app store, the app store has been around less than 600 days, so that's at least 230 apps per day they have to vet. Do you think they really do anything other than load up the application, see what it's about, have a quick play around with it, then reject or approve it with that kind of volume? Even if they have 100 employees on it, which they wont because that would be unnaffordable for the amount the app store brings them in, then that still only leaves 2 apps a day which will let them maybe do some network monitoring, use the app a fair bit, maybe do a brief look at it, but still nothing more, and even that's assuming all their staff work every day 365 days a year and don't ever take leave or have time off sick.
Really, it is the same type of walled garden. For Apple to be able to do proper vetting of apps they'd need to employ a few hundred people all pretty nifty with a disassembler and able to spot Malware, who all understand Apple's policies on what is and isn't allowed (i.e. use of OSS licenses, acceptable levels of smut, wifi libraries not allowed) and can interpret them as needed. You need extremely skilled people, you couldn't just fob it off to India in bulk, and you'd be needing to pay a decent wage for each member of staff. The sort of staff, that you'd be better off passing over to R&D and letting get on with the next great product and not really caring about quality of apps approved in fact. It's not even the sort of thing you can automate because AI just isn't that good yet.
No, the app store is about control and nothing more, it's not a quality check, it's not a security barrier. Google's marketplace is in contrast about giving people the same easy access to applications but without the control, and that's really only the key difference between them. Google doesn't care who developes for Android, they'll welcome any decent app. In contrast, Apple wants full control of who developers and what sort of app they develop- hence lack of competing browsers, problems getting Google voice and so forth on, blocking of porn apps from small developers whilst allowing major porn coporations to continue publishing etc.
PHP for anything other than web stuff is a bad idea simply because PHP is just a horrendously bad language, it's truly awful. The only reason you'd use it on the web is because it's so well supported in terms of libraries and so forth, and generally available on cheap hosting options.
It doesn't have these advantages outside the web- the libraries aren't as common or well tested, and it's less available on say, desktop PCs than Java, .NET or native binary support is. Examples of problems with it are it's terrible hacked on OOP support, lack of proper namespaces, clunky syntax. Why would you put yourself through that when you can just use C, C++, Java, or one of the .NET languages? It's best to just leave PHP where it belongs.
C/C++ may be more than a little faster than Python certainly, but they're barely faster if at all than Java/JVM or C++,C#,VB,etc./CLR. See this site, which is now 6 years old (things have moved on even more since then) to better understand why C/C++ do not have much of an advantage in performance anymore, and have no advantage whatsoever when you factor in ease of development against performance:
http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Computer/javaCbenchmark.html
The idea that things that require high performance are written in C/C++ is a little bit of a straw man. Games are written in C++ because it's the only langauge that's portable across the Wii, the PS3, the Xbox 360, the PC, Mac, Linux and because it's what companies have been using for decades and as such have millions of lines of libraries written for and have developer teams skilled up in. It's certainly not about performance nowadays, head to java.com and look up their case studies list for high performance computing for example. The fundamental problem is that when you compile C/C++ code you're generally compiling for a generic chipset so that's the best that the compiler can optimise for, with VM based languages like Java and the .NET languages, they use JIT compilation so that the bytecode is compiled into natively executable code and optimised for the specific abilities of the system on which it is being run- this gives it an inherent advantage in terms of optimisation because it does not have that disadvantage of needing to be generic enough to run on any compatible system like compiled C/C++ generally does. You could get the same benefits with C/C++ and allow it to keep it's slight edge by distributing an executable optimised for each type of AMD processors with 1gb, 2gb, 3gb, 4gb RAM and so on and then the same for Intel and other factors, but you get a combinatorial explosion of the amount of executables you'd need to distribute and the user would probably struggle to know which one to use.
Another two: SMS exploits
There is also a lot of iPhone software that phones home, and here's the problem, the app store as a security measure is a complete and utter myth. The app store is NOT about security, it does not make you magically protected. It's also worth noting that Apple boasts about having hundreds of thousands applications on it's app store- is anyone really naive enough to believe that Apple is capable of doing a full security audit on each and every one of these applications?
The app store brings convenience, uniformity and ease of use to buying, downloading and installing applications on the iPhone and gives Apple a method of controlling what users can do with their iPhone, and controlling whether developers can produce competing products to those Apple provides or instead block them to retain a monopoly on said application type on their platform.
"I'd like to see someone do this with SONAR or LIDAR so that it didn't matter if your clothes were the same color as the background."
Sounds like Natal is what you're looking for then as that's one of the problems it solves.
Whether it'll be any good in practice we'll have to wait and see. I'm guessing E3 will be the best bet for decent news on Natal and for more on this.
So how did the Guitar Hero and Rockband series manage to pull off being some of the top selling titles ever then? Even the Wii Balance board has done well.
The problem is, most aftersales addons are just complete afterthoughts. Well designed, fun addons do just fine.
What exactly would they hold patent ownership on that they can't exercise already?
XNA mimics what's at the core of basically any game engine written in the last decade or two. If Microsoft were interested in such patent enforcement they'd have done it against much existing middleware by now, or perhaps even OpenGL if it was API specific. Besides, there are already Mono XNA implementations underway and have been for some time, so it's quite clear people can in fact produce FOSS implementations of XNA if they so choose.
You're right that the XBox isn't the only console, but it is the only console that people can publish for without having to be a professional development studio. No other modern console has a path that allows indies to publish to the console's userbase so it's the sensible choice for indies right now. You could write a game and submit it to XNA tommorrow if you so chose to- with the PS3 or Wii it would take months to even barter the relevant SDKs and dev kits required out of Sony and Nintendo before you could even start developing, and that's assuming you could manage to get it out of them at all.
Regarding Windows mobile penetration, that's a really horribly poor argument. TFA is referring to Windows Mobile 7 which isn't even released yet, and is Microsoft's attempt at getting back on the ball in the smartphone marketplace. They were the second biggest player previously after Symbian but they let their position slip by ignoring development of the platform, there's no reason Windows Mobile couldn't reach that position again. XNA doesn't even work on the current platform, so arguing that the poor penetration of current Windows Mobile which is inferior to all other offerings out there shows complete ignorance of the market and where XNA4 comes in- you can't make claims about the potential penetration of something that's not even out there yet.
That's pretty interesting, it leaves me something to think about!
I've certainly doodled a fair bit in the past myself, but I've never conciously tried to reflect on those doodles, why I did them or what they meant. It's possible that at the time then that like you they actually had some useful benefits to my thought process for me without me really even noticing. I don't tend to doodle nowadays much because I tend to keep my desks paperless. I wonder if there's some benefit to having paper handy to doodle on when thinking or talking on the phone or similar, even if for nothing else?
Sorry, I meant 30%, that was a typo!
He sold 200,000 copies at $1 each, Microsoft took $60,000 of that $200,000 leaving him $140,000. Hope that makes more sense!
I agree, I was dissapointed too, shocked, stunned in fact. I agree it's not worthy of anything close to the money it made if I base my feelings on historic development of indie games
But that's really the point- XNA is such a great step forward for indies that even trash like that can make a small fortune. Developing, publishing and porting are so easy with it, even trash can make developers a fortune. If people want to pay for it then let them, as I say, it's great news for indies as it's a great path to easy income for them.
I think most people paid a dollar because they found the soundtrack amusing. A few other games including a terrible RC flight sim have made similar amounts though.
"So this is just a kind of interface / helper interface to D3D for .Net. Great, now you're stuck to both D3D and .Net - how does that help portability?"
It's really a wrapper, but it provides more than that- the content pipeline being one example, but it also provides other useful core game classes, whilst DirectX just provides the raw APIs.
It assists portability because it's basically providing what DirectX doesn't. It basically handles the abstraction layers you'd have to otherwise right yourself for you.
It's just an extra step of game development that is now simply done for you rather than having to waste time with yourself, a step that lets you write a game once, and have it run on a console, a desktop PC, a media player, and a phone. That's how it helps portability.
I assume you're hinting at the fact that it's not portable outside Windows, but as I say, that's not something that Microsoft have any interest or would receive any benefit from investing in so why would they? Mono or similar open source projects can always deal with that side of things if they deem it worthwhile.
3D on a phone isn't really the news here to be honest. It's the fact that it's done with XNA which means you can build for Windows, Zune, XBox, Windows Mobile with a negligible amount of per-platform code.
XNA like DirectX encompasses your graphics, math, audio libraries and so on so you can actually concentrate on writing the game, rather than writing code to support the creation of a game.
It's a good thing for those who just want to build games whatever the platform, because it means they get to use probably the easier professional grade development toolset yet, with a decent professional grade language, and then publish for 4 platforms from the start- 2 of which are pretty major.
The guy behind "I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1" released some stats lately stating he'd sold 200,000 copies on XBox indie games at $1 each, minus Microsoft's $30 cut (which is actually extremely reasonable as industry figures go) he's made $140,000 off a game that could be made in less than a week. With this news he can now port to Windows Mobile 7 phones.
If you just want to concentrate on writing game code, and would like to monetise that, it's probably the single best path for indies right now because you've got such a large potential userbase - Windows users (100s of millions), XBox 360 users (40mill), Windows 7 Phone users (potentially tens of millions), Zune users (all 4 of them).
I don't even think Mac/Linux users should despair either really. Indies don't generally have the resources to create a massive multi-platform game from the off, and although XNA wont port straight to these platforms it does as I say provide indie developers an awesome and easy path to market. When they achieve success, porting to other platforms becomes less of a problem for them because they've got the income and experience needed to do it if they so choose. This is somewhat what happened with Popcap- they started out with just Flash and then Windows games, but their success was such that porting the likes of Bejewelled to every other possible platform became feasible to them.
Spectacular, no. Good thing? I'd say yes, particularly for indies.