Ok, I'm getting a bit sick of this same old boring Vista bashing (yes I know I'm on/. where MS bashing is a almost national sport). I have just been playing F.E.A.R. using a shock-horror NVidia card and it plays fine - I simply had to download the Vista driver from Nvidia's site (maybe some of the newer DX10 cards have problems, my DX9 is fine). In fact, it actually seems to play faster than in XP!
Though a great advocate of Open Source and Linux, I'd like to think we can appreciate the good in Vista instead of taking cheap shots every 10 seconds. These people probably had very specific problems and threw their toys out of the pram. I'm not even reading TFA, this is just annoying now. Rationality people! Us intelligent Linux-loving Lisp-defending geeks need to show the masses rationality!!!
Surely we're forgetting something important here? If we prevent terrorists from blowing up planes, won't they just go elsewhere? Hell, they could even get to the airport and blow themselves up before they get to the security check.
Also, if they get to the detector at say a London tube station and it goes off, who's to say they can't just knife the bloke operating it, run in and blow themselves up in the crowds? Are they gonna put armed police at every single detector? Even at an airport they could just blow themselves up at the security desk which is bound to have a massive queue behind it and loads of people surrounding it in general.
Terrorism will only be properly dealt with when certain countries admit to their own terrorist acts around the world and realise violence answered with violence only spews forth more.. you guessed it, violence. Such a simple principal with an enormous historical precident, and yet people never learn.
I've found over 90% of the tab books I've bought have been inaccurate, some ridiculously so. One even advised I play a riff that is literally physically impossible to play, at 200bpm. Hmm.
Peer-reviewed tabs written by people who have worked it out by ear, tried it out to see if it's right then published their work for recognition and to help facilitate others to play the song produces tabs of far, far better quality than tab books. Perhaps Olga's tabs weren't always reliable, but there are other sites with peer reviewing that far, far superior to tab books which cost >$20 and aren't even correct (I won't link them because the RIAA are probably reading this and I don't particularly want to give them any more ideas).
In fact, shoudn't music labels be sued for producing tab books that are incorrect?! Perhaps someone should get on with doing that, maybe that'll shut them up?
This is just yet another damn example of corporate greed ruining all that is good in the world. Let's hope there's an outbreak of sanity soon. Please people. These are the same sort of people who sue Open Source projects for patent infringement.
I was under the impression that prior art was only established if you actually file for a patent. Otherwise why would anyone bother filing patents? Additionally, as he says in the article plenty of other people have used the technology, effectively establishing prior art themselves.
You really owe it to yourself to actually read TFA:-)
What I want to know is whether or not ID will patent this technology, and of course as to whether it actually is patentable. I know John is a major advocate of abolishment of software patents (he famously drew a parallel between software patents and being mugged), but surely with new technology like this he's put in a position where if he doesn't patent it other people will.
The question is: can using a very large texture with fragment shaders on top be patented? I'm not qualified to answer that but if so surely John & ID are put in a difficult position.
Personally, I think software patents are a terrible thing, which could potentially leave software innovation in the hands of the few largest most litigious software companies in the world which benefits nobody (except their stockholders).
You must be blind or stupid to think there are no alternatives to Office -- in fact, Microsoft even sells one of them (MS Works)! In addition to that, Lotus and Corel still sell their office suites, not to mention StarOffice. Trust me, MS doesn't have to force anybody to use Office.
Semantics - there are literally alternatives, but none that currently match the functionality. Works is a God-awful piece of crap surely you aren't serious? Lotus + Corel offer no competition, OOo ain't quite there yet. But I like your use of belligerence my son!
The way Office got its marketshare was by actually being better than the competition. Lotus and WordPerfect had good DOS versions of their software, but made crappy Windows versions, while MS had crappy DOS versions but made excellent Windows versions. MS then bought PowerPoint and created Access by looking back at the mistakes made by dBase and Paradox, to create a very powerful suite. Lotus and Borland-then-Novell-then-Corel eventually caught up, but by then it was too late.
How is any of this disagreeing with me? Yep they beat the competition, then they just stopped bothering. Also - Access is a piece of shit, and I'm sorry, no offence, I just can't believe you've really used it properly if you think it's a 'very powerful suite'. Did you not read the parent post properly? It claims 255 maximum concurrent users under Jet, I found it corrupted and ground to a halt at 2 concurrent users. Go figure.
Office is clearly "good enough" for the vast majority of the 200+ million people who use it on a daily basis.
Sorry no, I disagree strongly. There are no alternatives, if your choice is limited to one piece of software, "good enough" is basically anything really. 200+ million people use it on a daily basis I'm sure. Microsoft outdid the competition at an early stage, then haven't bothered fixing even simple problems with it.
The fact is, there are massive systems built on top of Office - some companies use Excel with VBA macros to handle everything from expense tracking to payroll.
Such companies are being a bit silly to be honest. I come across application-based bugs on a daily basis, especially in VBA - which additionally has appalling help with a crappy F1 system whose functionality seems to be spotty at best. I understand what you're saying about office being pushed too far to do things it wasn't designed for - but I think a lot of that is due to microsoft's overactive PR office claiming Office is the only software offices need to use full stop. I would expect though VBA to be less of a clunky badly-documentated vault of horrors given it's meant to be a multipurpose scripting language. But hey that's just me.
Yes, Office is a buggy product. But no more so than any other software product of its size. Hell, there were several releases of OOo where spellchecking was laughably broken.
I disagree. That's a cheap excuse, especially given the proliferation of bugs and design faults that are very blatent and quite fundamental to the Office operation - it wouldn't take very much at all to put them right but they simply don't out of choice (multitabs in access come to mind as a trivial example). Like I said I still don't think OOo is there, and I think it unfair to compare a product with 99% of the market share against one with 1% then say well, they both have bugs and it's acceptable in both circumstances. No it's not acceptable for either of them, but surely the one with larger market share should be in a better position to not have serious issues, let alone more than their smaller rival?
Look at Photoshop, Maya, C compilers (which have millions of lines of code), Linux (>10x more code), etc. etc. they managed to not have blatent stupid bugs that recur in every single version of the products; because their customers actually demand quality software and there's wow knock me down with a feather, actually competition in the market.
You sir and people like you are part of the problem, simply tolerating broken products. If we were talking about an x86 CPU for example, which is arguably infinitely more complicated than an office productivity suite, Intel or AMD would simply not be able to get away with saying 'oh look at all the features, sorry just going to ignore your complaint about that 5% error in floating point division'. That's because they wouldn't be able to get away with doing that because that would be unacceptable to their customers (not to mention the fact that the computer just wouldn't work - and before you say office does despite its bugs, in my experience a lot of features it claims don't work properly without hacking it to death so I would in fact argue Office is simply broken). The competition would eat them up. Again I come back to the point that customers, like you, bend over and take it from MS when it comes to software issues. You virtually do their PR work for them because, hey you're good at using their software and so it must be good!!
Part of the problem is that Office is so powerful. Word is not a graphic design program, but it's used as one. Excel isn't a database, but you'd be amazed at how many political campaigns run on huge Excel 'call/walk lists'.
It aims to be powerful, but the more you try to exploit its documented (badly) and hyped features the more you find problems and bugs. That's not pushing it beyond what it's meant to do - that's simply using all the features it claims to have. Word has drawing feature
ah yes no i don't like it:-) but i don't have the power to change this at the moment unfortunately. I'd prefer openoffice but hey there it is. I am doing my best to move away from using office as much as possible, and although it's still ms should be using asp.net and sql server - infinitely preferable to Access which is the most appallingly buggy horrible piece of software I've ever had the misfortune to use (n.b. ms legal - this is my opinion which anyone in their right mind would share but hey from a legal perspect I say nothing!). Generally just trying to grind them down into using proper software. Rome wasn't built in a day!
I am constantly amazed by the sort of mass-delusion people seem to have about MS office, intentionally perpetuated by ms - the idea that ms office is a framework of acceptably workable office productivity applications. Wrong wrong wrong.
Each and every office application is buggy, has gaping holes in terms of usability (for example the Access report designer makes adding columns to data a nightmare - you have to align line elements to the pixels manually, or use the severely clunky grid system), and makes any use beyond bare minimum severely frustrating (my job is to work with Microsoft Office and I'm at expert level with it so I know those only too well).
Microsoft dominate the market, and they have abused it as most public companies in a monopoly would do. The software is incomplete and as far as I'm concerned unacceptably faulty but it's the best out there given that they have had virtually no competition. Now that's changing, they act as if their so-far monopolised customer base would find other software unacceptably bad. It's ridiculous.
Thank God for open source giving people a more usable, workable solution not only for portability's sake but to finally give us an alternative so we can all show ms what is and isn't acceptable. In my opinion it isn't there yet - but it's only a matter of time before Openoffice exceeds MS in terms of functionality I'm convinced of it.
I know I'm probably gonna be modded down for trolling/off-topic/etc. but I feel so strongly about this - please can we all stop acting as if their software is acceptable. In any other industry a company producing such faulty goods would have gone out of business, and rightly so from the customer's point of view. We're only encouraging Microsoft to not bother fixing anything time and time again if we stay complacent, and yet again us customers' will be cheated out of decent software. They could do it. They have very talented people working for them. But they only understand the language of commerce - so let's make the competition strong and force them to change their ways. It's time for change.
/rant
i sowed wings on my cat, +5 INSIGHTFUL PLEASE!
on
Here There Be Dragons
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I sowed some wings I took off a pigeon on to my cat - nice quick and easy mythological creature, screw all that genetic engineering stuff!
True genius - +5 Insightful please mr. mod!
Re:same as hardware really, ms laziness?
on
Why Windows is Slow
·
· Score: 1
I didn't realize that things like HyperTransport, USB 2, Firewire 800, PCI Express, and Serial ATA were decades old
Yes obviously those are what I meant *rolls eyes* adding features on top of a legacy architecture doesn't make it modern. hang on do you work for microsoft?;-)
Re:same as hardware really, ms laziness?
on
Why Windows is Slow
·
· Score: 1
No there are reports from inside Microsoft. Costs of compatibility testing, special cases in the code run in the billions annually
we're not talking about ms compatibility though, we're talking about culling code for legacy hardware & software. most of compatibility testing, etc. will be done with modern software/hardware i would have thought.
Having a bunch of people clean the code wouldn't cost anywhere near that.
cleaning >50M lines of code? are you sure that wouldn't be expensive? and time consuming?
same as hardware really, ms laziness?
on
Why Windows is Slow
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
firstly i think the same could be said of pc hardware - we are still limited to the pc architecture designed decades ago, noone is willing to go out on a limb and produce truly flexible hardware given that it simply won't work with anything else. This is partly the reason why games consoles can put out much more power than an equivilent pc - they can be designed from ground up to be super-efficient without any legacy concerns at all (obviously the fact their hardware never varies makes it easier to code things more close to the steel)
secondly, i wonder whether it's not microsoft being obsessed with legacy support, more that they don't want to spend $$$ on getting windows developers to root through the code and take it out. They simply carry legacy support through windows versions as they're always working from the same base. As always with ms it's $$$ >> quality. I'm sure a lot of their coders get irritated with legacy issues..
yes and as far as I'm concerned we're simply early on in the road towards interactive movies - to me games are just an embryonic form of a future media form. eventually consumers will demand nothing less than movies where you can take an active part.
and yes it is annoying that actors get paid far too much.. much like sports men:-)
I'm so sick and tired of TV and the media in general making out that games are just for kids. With the level of technology games currently have and the sheer joyful fun you can have with them, and the fact that this survey proves a lot of adults know this already it's about time the world at large accepted it.
I have to agree. My job involves administrating a business critical database designed in access from ground up.
I think there's a lot of denial about the problems access has - searching on the web there seems to be a lot of supporters for it. I
suppose part of that is that they feel that there's no other viable 'RAD' databases available as replies to this post discuss.
Additionally, I feel a large part of this is that a lot of people who didn't previously posess programming skills work with access and are
able to create a fairly sophisticated application relatively easily, and are therefore more likely to jealously defend the application that
gave them such productivity (which has perhaps resulted in kudos for them in the eyes of their superiors).They gloss over the bugs and
limitations and the horrible UI (especially the report designer), the crippling limitations and un-intuitive query design tool (I love that
error saying something's 'too complicated' for access to understand - I don't know about you but when an application running on a system
that can do 2 billion odd floating point ops a second tells you something's too complicated I begin to worry), because they know of no
better, which although this isn't their fault I think results in a large degree of near-sightedness on this issue.
In my opinion, given ms's backward-compatibility obsession and general tendency to never fix even the smallest bugs they'll probably
keep things the way they are, which means access ends up not being a rapid development application at all! I am of the opinion
that one could achieve results far quicker in something like MySQL and perhaps a PHP front end or somesuch if only they took the time to
learn it in advance. I know this is something a large part of access users are unlikely to want to dedicate business time to, but I think it'd
pay big dividends in the long term, especially in terms of scalability (and sanity).
Another issue with access (I could go on all day with this) is the rather worrying corruption issues that can arise in multi-user mode.
Keeping in mind ms say it can handle 255 users odd with a 2 gig db then this is rather worrying:
"
Microsoft Jet, the database engine that is used in Microsoft Access, is a file sharing database system. When Microsoft Jet is used in a
multi-user environment, multiple client processes are using file read, write, and locking operations on a shared database. Because multiple
client processes are reading and writing to the same database and because Jet does not use a transaction log (as do the more advanced
database systems, such as SQL Server), it is not possible to reliably prevent any and all database corruption"
Keeping business critical applications in an environment where even the software developer admits that you "cannot reliably
prevent any and all database corruption" seems to me a rather bad idea. This coupled with the fact that multi-user access additionally
results in big slowdown (let's download the whole table!!) means that access has no real uses beyond utterly trivial desktop databases. I
could so easily go into vba's atrocious limitations (I'm often simply inclined to build a.dll with any non-trivial functionality in it written in
lovely c++ and do the minimal amount of work possible in vba), the horrible horrible help system that just doesn't work and re-highlight
the parent thread's discussion on nasty obdc sql queries but it all just adds up to the conclusion that access just isn't fit for purpose at
all.
Given the raft of class action lawsuits launched against Sony, and the subsequent restrictions on TPM (technological protection measures) software they can use, would any company dare risk including root-kit like TPM's? At the end of the day the risk-benefit analysis will rule it out without the need for legal intervention surely?
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I'm getting a bit sick of this same old boring Vista bashing (yes I know I'm on /. where MS bashing is a almost national sport). I have just been playing F.E.A.R. using a shock-horror NVidia card and it plays fine - I simply had to download the Vista driver from Nvidia's site (maybe some of the newer DX10 cards have problems, my DX9 is fine). In fact, it actually seems to play faster than in XP!
Though a great advocate of Open Source and Linux, I'd like to think we can appreciate the good in Vista instead of taking cheap shots every 10 seconds. These people probably had very specific problems and threw their toys out of the pram. I'm not even reading TFA, this is just annoying now. Rationality people! Us intelligent Linux-loving Lisp-defending geeks need to show the masses rationality!!!
Surely we're forgetting something important here? If we prevent terrorists from blowing up planes, won't they just go elsewhere? Hell, they could even get to the airport and blow themselves up before they get to the security check.
Also, if they get to the detector at say a London tube station and it goes off, who's to say they can't just knife the bloke operating it, run in and blow themselves up in the crowds? Are they gonna put armed police at every single detector? Even at an airport they could just blow themselves up at the security desk which is bound to have a massive queue behind it and loads of people surrounding it in general.
Terrorism will only be properly dealt with when certain countries admit to their own terrorist acts around the world and realise violence answered with violence only spews forth more.. you guessed it, violence. Such a simple principal with an enormous historical precident, and yet people never learn.
I've found over 90% of the tab books I've bought have been inaccurate, some ridiculously so. One even advised I play a riff that is literally physically impossible to play, at 200bpm. Hmm.
Peer-reviewed tabs written by people who have worked it out by ear, tried it out to see if it's right then published their work for recognition and to help facilitate others to play the song produces tabs of far, far better quality than tab books. Perhaps Olga's tabs weren't always reliable, but there are other sites with peer reviewing that far, far superior to tab books which cost >$20 and aren't even correct (I won't link them because the RIAA are probably reading this and I don't particularly want to give them any more ideas).
In fact, shoudn't music labels be sued for producing tab books that are incorrect?! Perhaps someone should get on with doing that, maybe that'll shut them up?
This is just yet another damn example of corporate greed ruining all that is good in the world. Let's hope there's an outbreak of sanity soon. Please people. These are the same sort of people who sue Open Source projects for patent infringement.
640kb is enough for anyone! RAM, Disk space, meh it's all the same.
I was under the impression that prior art was only established if you actually file for a patent. Otherwise why would anyone bother filing patents? Additionally, as he says in the article plenty of other people have used the technology, effectively establishing prior art themselves.
You really owe it to yourself to actually read TFA :-)
What I want to know is whether or not ID will patent this technology, and of course as to whether it actually is patentable. I know John is a major advocate of abolishment of software patents (he famously drew a parallel between software patents and being mugged), but surely with new technology like this he's put in a position where if he doesn't patent it other people will.
The question is: can using a very large texture with fragment shaders on top be patented? I'm not qualified to answer that but if so surely John & ID are put in a difficult position.
Personally, I think software patents are a terrible thing, which could potentially leave software innovation in the hands of the few largest most litigious software companies in the world which benefits nobody (except their stockholders).
Great idea though John!
Semantics - there are literally alternatives, but none that currently match the functionality. Works is a God-awful piece of crap surely you aren't serious? Lotus + Corel offer no competition, OOo ain't quite there yet. But I like your use of belligerence my son!
The way Office got its marketshare was by actually being better than the competition. Lotus and WordPerfect had good DOS versions of their software, but made crappy Windows versions, while MS had crappy DOS versions but made excellent Windows versions. MS then bought PowerPoint and created Access by looking back at the mistakes made by dBase and Paradox, to create a very powerful suite. Lotus and Borland-then-Novell-then-Corel eventually caught up, but by then it was too late.How is any of this disagreeing with me? Yep they beat the competition, then they just stopped bothering. Also - Access is a piece of shit, and I'm sorry, no offence, I just can't believe you've really used it properly if you think it's a 'very powerful suite'. Did you not read the parent post properly? It claims 255 maximum concurrent users under Jet, I found it corrupted and ground to a halt at 2 concurrent users. Go figure.
Sorry no, I disagree strongly. There are no alternatives, if your choice is limited to one piece of software, "good enough" is basically anything really. 200+ million people use it on a daily basis I'm sure. Microsoft outdid the competition at an early stage, then haven't bothered fixing even simple problems with it.
The fact is, there are massive systems built on top of Office - some companies use Excel with VBA macros to handle everything from expense tracking to payroll.
Such companies are being a bit silly to be honest. I come across application-based bugs on a daily basis, especially in VBA - which additionally has appalling help with a crappy F1 system whose functionality seems to be spotty at best. I understand what you're saying about office being pushed too far to do things it wasn't designed for - but I think a lot of that is due to microsoft's overactive PR office claiming Office is the only software offices need to use full stop. I would expect though VBA to be less of a clunky badly-documentated vault of horrors given it's meant to be a multipurpose scripting language. But hey that's just me.
Yes, Office is a buggy product. But no more so than any other software product of its size. Hell, there were several releases of OOo where spellchecking was laughably broken.
I disagree. That's a cheap excuse, especially given the proliferation of bugs and design faults that are very blatent and quite fundamental to the Office operation - it wouldn't take very much at all to put them right but they simply don't out of choice (multitabs in access come to mind as a trivial example). Like I said I still don't think OOo is there, and I think it unfair to compare a product with 99% of the market share against one with 1% then say well, they both have bugs and it's acceptable in both circumstances. No it's not acceptable for either of them, but surely the one with larger market share should be in a better position to not have serious issues, let alone more than their smaller rival?
Look at Photoshop, Maya, C compilers (which have millions of lines of code), Linux (>10x more code), etc. etc. they managed to not have blatent stupid bugs that recur in every single version of the products; because their customers actually demand quality software and there's wow knock me down with a feather, actually competition in the market.
You sir and people like you are part of the problem, simply tolerating broken products. If we were talking about an x86 CPU for example, which is arguably infinitely more complicated than an office productivity suite, Intel or AMD would simply not be able to get away with saying 'oh look at all the features, sorry just going to ignore your complaint about that 5% error in floating point division'. That's because they wouldn't be able to get away with doing that because that would be unacceptable to their customers (not to mention the fact that the computer just wouldn't work - and before you say office does despite its bugs, in my experience a lot of features it claims don't work properly without hacking it to death so I would in fact argue Office is simply broken). The competition would eat them up. Again I come back to the point that customers, like you, bend over and take it from MS when it comes to software issues. You virtually do their PR work for them because, hey you're good at using their software and so it must be good!!
Part of the problem is that Office is so powerful. Word is not a graphic design program, but it's used as one. Excel isn't a database, but you'd be amazed at how many political campaigns run on huge Excel 'call/walk lists'.
It aims to be powerful, but the more you try to exploit its documented (badly) and hyped features the more you find problems and bugs. That's not pushing it beyond what it's meant to do - that's simply using all the features it claims to have. Word has drawing feature
ah yes no i don't like it :-) but i don't have the power to change this at the moment unfortunately. I'd prefer openoffice but hey there it is. I am doing my best to move away from using office as much as possible, and although it's still ms should be using asp.net and sql server - infinitely preferable to Access which is the most appallingly buggy horrible piece of software I've ever had the misfortune to use (n.b. ms legal - this is my opinion which anyone in their right mind would share but hey from a legal perspect I say nothing!). Generally just trying to grind them down into using proper software. Rome wasn't built in a day!
I am constantly amazed by the sort of mass-delusion people seem to have about MS office, intentionally perpetuated by ms - the idea that ms office is a framework of acceptably workable office productivity applications. Wrong wrong wrong.
Each and every office application is buggy, has gaping holes in terms of usability (for example the Access report designer makes adding columns to data a nightmare - you have to align line elements to the pixels manually, or use the severely clunky grid system), and makes any use beyond bare minimum severely frustrating (my job is to work with Microsoft Office and I'm at expert level with it so I know those only too well).
Microsoft dominate the market, and they have abused it as most public companies in a monopoly would do. The software is incomplete and as far as I'm concerned unacceptably faulty but it's the best out there given that they have had virtually no competition. Now that's changing, they act as if their so-far monopolised customer base would find other software unacceptably bad. It's ridiculous.
Thank God for open source giving people a more usable, workable solution not only for portability's sake but to finally give us an alternative so we can all show ms what is and isn't acceptable. In my opinion it isn't there yet - but it's only a matter of time before Openoffice exceeds MS in terms of functionality I'm convinced of it.
I know I'm probably gonna be modded down for trolling/off-topic/etc. but I feel so strongly about this - please can we all stop acting as if their software is acceptable. In any other industry a company producing such faulty goods would have gone out of business, and rightly so from the customer's point of view. We're only encouraging Microsoft to not bother fixing anything time and time again if we stay complacent, and yet again us customers' will be cheated out of decent software. They could do it. They have very talented people working for them. But they only understand the language of commerce - so let's make the competition strong and force them to change their ways. It's time for change.
/rant
I sowed some wings I took off a pigeon on to my cat - nice quick and easy mythological creature, screw all that genetic engineering stuff!
True genius - +5 Insightful please mr. mod!
I didn't realize that things like HyperTransport, USB 2, Firewire 800, PCI Express, and Serial ATA were decades old
Yes obviously those are what I meant *rolls eyes* adding features on top of a legacy architecture doesn't make it modern. hang on do you work for microsoft? ;-)
No there are reports from inside Microsoft. Costs of compatibility testing, special cases in the code run in the billions annually
we're not talking about ms compatibility though, we're talking about culling code for legacy hardware & software. most of compatibility testing, etc. will be done with modern software/hardware i would have thought.
Having a bunch of people clean the code wouldn't cost anywhere near that.
cleaning >50M lines of code? are you sure that wouldn't be expensive? and time consuming?
firstly i think the same could be said of pc hardware - we are still limited to the pc architecture designed decades ago, noone is willing to go out on a limb and produce truly flexible hardware given that it simply won't work with anything else. This is partly the reason why games consoles can put out much more power than an equivilent pc - they can be designed from ground up to be super-efficient without any legacy concerns at all (obviously the fact their hardware never varies makes it easier to code things more close to the steel)
secondly, i wonder whether it's not microsoft being obsessed with legacy support, more that they don't want to spend $$$ on getting windows developers to root through the code and take it out. They simply carry legacy support through windows versions as they're always working from the same base. As always with ms it's $$$ >> quality. I'm sure a lot of their coders get irritated with legacy issues..
yes and as far as I'm concerned we're simply early on in the road towards interactive movies - to me games are just an embryonic form of a future media form. eventually consumers will demand nothing less than movies where you can take an active part. and yes it is annoying that actors get paid far too much.. much like sports men :-)
I'm so sick and tired of TV and the media in general making out that games are just for kids. With the level of technology games currently have and the sheer joyful fun you can have with them, and the fact that this survey proves a lot of adults know this already it's about time the world at large accepted it.
Whoops sorry forgot to log in.. lstoakes at gmail dot com if you wanna discuss further!!
I have to agree. My job involves administrating a business critical database designed in access from ground up.
I think there's a lot of denial about the problems access has - searching on the web there seems to be a lot of supporters for it. I suppose part of that is that they feel that there's no other viable 'RAD' databases available as replies to this post discuss.
Additionally, I feel a large part of this is that a lot of people who didn't previously posess programming skills work with access and are able to create a fairly sophisticated application relatively easily, and are therefore more likely to jealously defend the application that gave them such productivity (which has perhaps resulted in kudos for them in the eyes of their superiors).They gloss over the bugs and limitations and the horrible UI (especially the report designer), the crippling limitations and un-intuitive query design tool (I love that error saying something's 'too complicated' for access to understand - I don't know about you but when an application running on a system that can do 2 billion odd floating point ops a second tells you something's too complicated I begin to worry), because they know of no better, which although this isn't their fault I think results in a large degree of near-sightedness on this issue.
In my opinion, given ms's backward-compatibility obsession and general tendency to never fix even the smallest bugs they'll probably keep things the way they are, which means access ends up not being a rapid development application at all! I am of the opinion that one could achieve results far quicker in something like MySQL and perhaps a PHP front end or somesuch if only they took the time to learn it in advance. I know this is something a large part of access users are unlikely to want to dedicate business time to, but I think it'd pay big dividends in the long term, especially in terms of scalability (and sanity).
Another issue with access (I could go on all day with this) is the rather worrying corruption issues that can arise in multi-user mode. Keeping in mind ms say it can handle 255 users odd with a 2 gig db then this is rather worrying :
Keeping business critical applications in an environment where even the software developer admits that you "cannot reliably prevent any and all database corruption" seems to me a rather bad idea. This coupled with the fact that multi-user access additionally results in big slowdown (let's download the whole table!!) means that access has no real uses beyond utterly trivial desktop databases. I could so easily go into vba's atrocious limitations (I'm often simply inclined to build a .dll with any non-trivial functionality in it written in
lovely c++ and do the minimal amount of work possible in vba), the horrible horrible help system that just doesn't work and re-highlight
the parent thread's discussion on nasty obdc sql queries but it all just adds up to the conclusion that access just isn't fit for purpose at
all.
Given the raft of class action lawsuits launched against Sony, and the subsequent restrictions on TPM (technological protection measures) software they can use, would any company dare risk including root-kit like TPM's? At the end of the day the risk-benefit analysis will rule it out without the need for legal intervention surely?
Ideal. I always wanted my 4ghz pc to simulate the clock speed of a 286!