I agree about copy protection on game saves. I own assassins creed 2 the save games are copy protected and I have to ask why?
With call of duty if you move a save from one account to another you lose the ability to earn trophies. Since game companies can invoke measures like this to stop people skipping things why do we need copy protection on save games?
Last year myself and my Dad both got Uncharted 2 for Christmas, we took it in turns playing the game on one machine. When we finished I took my save home and replayed the game. This year both of us want Assassins Creed 2 : Brotherhood. I won't play it until I get home because there is no point playing for all that time and then having to go back to the beginning.
I don't want pirated games, I care nothing for the "Other OS" feature. Giving me the ability to move all my saves onto a USB stick should be top priority. That an firing the Sony Executive who thought copy protecting game saves was a good idea.
Readers generally dislike book adaptations because Hollywood tends to trample over the book's storyline and do whatever they want.
Harry Potter, LOTR, and Twilight appear to be good adaptations. Just as Spiderman and Watchmen were good adaptations.
Sure there can be cuts and changes, but in those films the directors made changes so they story would work on the screen and they either have the writer enforcing the plot or a director that really cares about the subject.
Hollywood's failure with game conversions is like Star Trek 13, or Thunderbirds. Rather than learn the universe, the rules, care about the characters, etc.. (basically take the time to know what it is that is so loved about the book/game) they will do their own thing. Heck in Thunderbirds they changed the order of age of the brothers. In Star Trek they basically tell us the last 20 year of TV shows didn't happen.
I have a Nokia 5800 and it browses the web pretty well however I've noticed a lot of websites simply aren't designed for mobile access (Domino's and the redesigned BBC News site come to mind). There is nothing stopping Domino's from scrubbing their web content and proving me a simplified view for my phone. The UK News Application in the Ovi store does this pretty well.
The idea isn't to move the web into mobile applications but to stop phone users from loading unnecessary images/javascript. When I browse on my phone I've noticed images/flash can be 99% of the page size, when I'm ordering Pizza I don't want to have to download several 0.5-2Mb images.
I agree companies like Apple are probably hoping for websites accessible through specific applications. But I think companies are trying to use applications for accessability (see Tesco's, Facebook, Pizza Hut, Windows Live Messenger, Wikipedia applications).
I'd say that's too high, my friends are huge fans of CoD and so I have played all of the call of duty's and it doesn't look like the game designer is playing the game because of the the massive problems for the game on the PS3.
My biggest issue has to do with player profiles, on modern warfare 2 importing them from anouther PS3 meant you lost the ability to earn trophies. On Black Ops you can't have multiple profiles, it simply spawns an identical version of the main account. Me and my friends like to get together and play games this aspect of CoD games sucks horribly even resistance 2 did better.
Every iteration of CoD has this problem, and Black Ops has just added the need to sit through 10 loading screens to do anything and everytime you go back to the main menu you have to run the system calibration tests. Let not forget most offline co-op games are now limited to two people for no reason. The only good thing about that game is Zombies.
I thought the Nano along with the iPhone 4 showed an Apple running out of steam.
The new nano has a small screen and I'm sure has made a lot of people go wow! But has completely lost the point of the old nano. It requires more button presses to use and forces the user to look at the screen. Most people seem to use nano's in places like the gym or the car. Adding a touch screen is a disadvantage in those locations. They would have been better off keeping the old nano form factor and increasing the storage.
Likewise the new iPhone 4 seems more what would happen if HTC designed an iPhone. The typical flare for styling present in apple devices doesn't seem to exist in that phone. It's all retinal display, megapixels, video calling, etc.. Which would be fine but the new iPhone isn't that impressive when you compare the specifications with other phones.
Then again I dislike apple products for a host of reasons. But do wonder if I'm right when some of my friends who are fan boys/girls show dislike for the iPad and Nano.
You must be in the US, in the UK wondering into my town centre I can put my hands on it in a O2 store and a Carphone Warehouse.
For an idea of it works try the N8, the interfaces are very similar however the N900 is quicker and the interface is better (think the best parts of Andriod added in). I had a quick look online and the video found here gives a pretty good impression of how it works.
The only downside is it is a heavy phone. For comparison I have a Nokia 5800 the N900 is slightly larger and noticeably heavier.
Why? BP is half American, the rig was run by Americans, the safety mechanism was turned off by Americans, the rig was built by Americans. They followed American standards, yes BP should have properly overseen matters but American Government could not stop falsey referring to BP as British Petrolium so people wouldn't think any Americans were to blame.
How did the exCEO of BP talk himself out of a job? What I saw was a bunch of politicians chase down a British CEO because it would look good with the voters. They didn't perform an inquiry but instead created a stage so they could attack him.
The cynic in me also wonders if forcing out a British CEO for the American who was in charge of the spill area, was done to protect Oil interests (like Iraq). Especially since BP owned up to the spill and have already compensated people while Exxon haven't paid a dime.
I also wonder if Americans realise how much bad will they gained from British public in doing such a thing. Personally I thought Obama's handling showed he was worse than Bush.
I don't know if a creator/god exists but the idea that it would give us higher reasoning skills and then punish us for using them scares the hell out of me.
Most parenting books would argue such behaviour is damaging for a child. Why is it suddenly ok for a creator\god?
True, but in my limited experience people who write inefficient Java code, would write inefficient C++ code and people who write bad code will write bad code in any language, there are more bad Java programmers than C++ because its easier to learn (pointers).
The most common problem I've seen with inefficient Java code is iterating through arrays and lists. That problem wouldn't go away just by using C++.
Java has things like Checkstyle, PMD, Findbugs, etc.. which are free and can be integrated into your IDE. These tools provide management metrics and force proper practices making it easier to do it right. I'd love to know of some C++ equivalents.
Java isn't that much slower than C++ these days, if you do it right Java/C++ performance is so close as to not matter.
It's also more maintainable, has better frameworks and you don't have lots of beginner/intermediate level programmers introducing memory holes left, right and center.
Saying all that I work for a company which has invested millions into Java applications. Considering how Oracle has been acting the tech leads are pushing to moving us back to C++.
Except I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft ran Coverity as part of their build process. I am surprised Google don't.
Where I work any project which is updated has a coverity run performed on it overnight. While Coverity isn't perfect and it can be confused it is a good bit of software.
I agree, I maintain all my family's computers. Some of those people are terrifying with computers.
When doing this sort of thing your doing it as a favour to them. Setup the PC so it is secure and leave basic instructions. If they can't follow them or ignore the work you've done let them pay someone to fix it. Then they start to appreciate what your doing for them, or they become happy paying someone to fix their screw ups.
You realise that's complete non-sense right? I did Computer Engineering (think Electrical Engineering degree with a software programming module instead of digital filter module, and a software project management module instead of microwave electronics pt 2).
I choose my degree because I was uncertain if I wanted to be electrical or software, in the end I choose software because I'm good at it. Spending hours on a software problem wasn't as tedious as spending hours on a Electronics problem. Most of my friends did Electonic and Electrical Degrees and moved into robotics, antenna design, etc.. They hated software programming with a passion, I'm probably the most technology geeky one of the bunch.
People do what makes them happy, people enjoy what they are good at.
Open Office twice as fast? Are you going to try and tell me Firefox is the fastest browser as well?
My personal issue with Open Office is that it is slow to intially load and looks like something from the windows 95 era. But I always place it on a home systems as a backup to MS Office. The only time I've forced non-techy relatives to use it (because of licensing issues) they have argued with me and managed to run into bug after bug and in the end I get so fed up of being shouted and moaned at, that I bring out my dog eared copy of Microsoft Office XP and install that.
Although to give a few samples of the problems I've seen, my little sister copies images in to word before printing them most school kids do. When you reach about 20Mb's worth of images Writer crashes. My workplace makes use of excel spreadsheet as part of our process management (there are several hundred of them) they use VBA scripts and/or a lot of Excels functionality. Not a single one works in Open Office nor is there a way to do what we do in Calc. My Dad tried Calc for a full month, he has no knowledge of VBA and has built a lot of Excel Spreadsheets which function perfectly in Excel 2000 - 2010, in his month he found Calc wasn't performing operations, randomly deleted cells and crashed a lot. Since that month he went and purchased a copy of Office 2007 Standard and a VBA book because "Excel just works".
Your point about re-training costs is mute, the company I work for is going to roll out Office 2007 in 6 months, so 6 months ago they started a scheme giving every employee who wanted one a free copy of MS Office 2007. The cost of the licenses is minimal and they get to avoid training staff, to be honest I can't really see any re-training costs going from Office 2003 to Libre Office. Your arguement about formats is pure fud.
Open Office is not a replacement for Office, I would like it to be but it isn't.
It's not harder to read well written C++ code than Java, however it is easier to read badly written Java than medicore C++.
It's my one issue with C++ code, with Java our workplace has a development environment with Checkstyles, Code Formatters and analysis tools like PMD and find bugs. It makes even the new graduates code readable and fairly standard. I've never found anything like that for C\C++.
A company that deployed Phorm on its network without telling is users*, who before this data breech wern't even challenging the requests from ACS:Law and a company whose in house legal department were giving out user information unencrypted in violation of the data protection act.
Sounds a great company to show your support to, I'd be more inclined to support Talk Talk or Virgin since they actually fight to keep there customers privacy. BT and Sky are just back peddling so they don't look so bad in the media.
*European Commission has just brought legal charges against the UK government for not prosecuting BT over the privacy invasion that was Phorm.
Works fine in Word 2003, we use it in my workplace during document review/development. It's not slow, works quietly and displays changes made by different users in different colours. I'm a fan because when you make changes moving documents from version 1 to 2 instead of being forced to review an entire document you can check review the modified sections.
Considering how easy it is to use, to cause the issues outlined in the review we are dealing with some mighty incompetent users who have managed to do the impossible. The only issues its ever caused me is when I've accidentally deleted all the change markers.
You've never worked with ITAR then. I work for a major Aerospace company who are paranoid about ITAR most of us view it as a chore and the general aim is to limit the ITAR pollution for a project. It does make it a lot harder to develop a product. As far as I can tell best practice seems to involve treating it like UK Top Secret. Things which from other countries would be NATO Restricted suddenly have to be treated as Top Secret if they are from the USA. That's insane.
On top of that Americans never seem to understand the regulations, most small American companies seem to forget about the TAA and try to share things outside of the agreement so you have to keep constant vigilance for that, while others mark everything as ITAR including answers to questions like "when should we have our next teleconfrence? ".
I've been on 4 ITAR projects, in every project the thing that's taken up most of my time is dealing with the ITAR related issues and I'm fairly lowly developer.
Disclaimer - I'm not speaking for the company I work for, my words are my own
I read the BBC article on the spill, they hardly said that. Halliburton apparently installed sub standard concrete which should have failed inspection but was somehow passed. Transocean/BP made a number of procedural failures and and a pressure test showed the problem days before it happened and was missed by drilling crew and BP.
How does that translate to "everybody's doing it?".
Considering it was a rig owned by BP, operated by Transocean and installed by Haliburton, with parts made by dozens of other companies it would be pretty impressive if the cause was purely BP's fault.
I still think the US government lept on a bandwagon in order to install a US CEO, who amusingly was far more involved with the rig than the then CEO.
Giving up modding to correct this misconception. The company I work for has been writing software for the London underground. Because the trains are self driven they can put more trains on the line, this means smaller trains and reduced waiting times.
I have an Intel Atom N330 with a 256mb 9600 GT graphics card and 2GB's of ram. This machine is running from a 32GB SSD with Windows 7 x64.
When running the Divx Converter the machine is fine, I'll often browse the web and have divx player/windows media player running and won't suffer any sow down.
I allowed iTunes 9 on it and the experience wasn't pretty the background processes put a 0.5 second lag on the machine and iTunes took a full minute to load and then play a song. The only way to fix things was to reformat.
iTunes doesn't do that much more than Windows Media Player or Nokia Ovi Player and those applications run without using most of my limited processing power.
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I agree about copy protection on game saves. I own assassins creed 2 the save games are copy protected and I have to ask why?
With call of duty if you move a save from one account to another you lose the ability to earn trophies. Since game companies can invoke measures like this to stop people skipping things why do we need copy protection on save games?
Last year myself and my Dad both got Uncharted 2 for Christmas, we took it in turns playing the game on one machine. When we finished I took my save home and replayed the game. This year both of us want Assassins Creed 2 : Brotherhood. I won't play it until I get home because there is no point playing for all that time and then having to go back to the beginning.
I don't want pirated games, I care nothing for the "Other OS" feature. Giving me the ability to move all my saves onto a USB stick should be top priority. That an firing the Sony Executive who thought copy protecting game saves was a good idea.
Readers generally dislike book adaptations because Hollywood tends to trample over the book's storyline and do whatever they want.
Harry Potter, LOTR, and Twilight appear to be good adaptations. Just as Spiderman and Watchmen were good adaptations.
Sure there can be cuts and changes, but in those films the directors made changes so they story would work on the screen and they either have the writer enforcing the plot or a director that really cares about the subject.
Hollywood's failure with game conversions is like Star Trek 13, or Thunderbirds. Rather than learn the universe, the rules, care about the characters, etc.. (basically take the time to know what it is that is so loved about the book/game) they will do their own thing. Heck in Thunderbirds they changed the order of age of the brothers. In Star Trek they basically tell us the last 20 year of TV shows didn't happen.
Chill man, I got your point there's no need to shout.
I see mobile applications differently.
I have a Nokia 5800 and it browses the web pretty well however I've noticed a lot of websites simply aren't designed for mobile access (Domino's and the redesigned BBC News site come to mind). There is nothing stopping Domino's from scrubbing their web content and proving me a simplified view for my phone. The UK News Application in the Ovi store does this pretty well.
The idea isn't to move the web into mobile applications but to stop phone users from loading unnecessary images/javascript. When I browse on my phone I've noticed images/flash can be 99% of the page size, when I'm ordering Pizza I don't want to have to download several 0.5-2Mb images.
I agree companies like Apple are probably hoping for websites accessible through specific applications. But I think companies are trying to use applications for accessability (see Tesco's, Facebook, Pizza Hut, Windows Live Messenger, Wikipedia applications).
I'd say that's too high, my friends are huge fans of CoD and so I have played all of the call of duty's and it doesn't look like the game designer is playing the game because of the the massive problems for the game on the PS3.
My biggest issue has to do with player profiles, on modern warfare 2 importing them from anouther PS3 meant you lost the ability to earn trophies. On Black Ops you can't have multiple profiles, it simply spawns an identical version of the main account. Me and my friends like to get together and play games this aspect of CoD games sucks horribly even resistance 2 did better.
Every iteration of CoD has this problem, and Black Ops has just added the need to sit through 10 loading screens to do anything and everytime you go back to the main menu you have to run the system calibration tests. Let not forget most offline co-op games are now limited to two people for no reason. The only good thing about that game is Zombies.
I thought the Nano along with the iPhone 4 showed an Apple running out of steam.
The new nano has a small screen and I'm sure has made a lot of people go wow! But has completely lost the point of the old nano. It requires more button presses to use and forces the user to look at the screen. Most people seem to use nano's in places like the gym or the car. Adding a touch screen is a disadvantage in those locations. They would have been better off keeping the old nano form factor and increasing the storage.
Likewise the new iPhone 4 seems more what would happen if HTC designed an iPhone. The typical flare for styling present in apple devices doesn't seem to exist in that phone. It's all retinal display, megapixels, video calling, etc.. Which would be fine but the new iPhone isn't that impressive when you compare the specifications with other phones.
Then again I dislike apple products for a host of reasons. But do wonder if I'm right when some of my friends who are fan boys/girls show dislike for the iPad and Nano.
You must be in the US, in the UK wondering into my town centre I can put my hands on it in a O2 store and a Carphone Warehouse.
For an idea of it works try the N8, the interfaces are very similar however the N900 is quicker and the interface is better (think the best parts of Andriod added in). I had a quick look online and the video found here gives a pretty good impression of how it works.
The only downside is it is a heavy phone. For comparison I have a Nokia 5800 the N900 is slightly larger and noticeably heavier.
Why? BP is half American, the rig was run by Americans, the safety mechanism was turned off by Americans, the rig was built by Americans. They followed American standards, yes BP should have properly overseen matters but American Government could not stop falsey referring to BP as British Petrolium so people wouldn't think any Americans were to blame.
How did the exCEO of BP talk himself out of a job? What I saw was a bunch of politicians chase down a British CEO because it would look good with the voters. They didn't perform an inquiry but instead created a stage so they could attack him.
The cynic in me also wonders if forcing out a British CEO for the American who was in charge of the spill area, was done to protect Oil interests (like Iraq). Especially since BP owned up to the spill and have already compensated people while Exxon haven't paid a dime.
I also wonder if Americans realise how much bad will they gained from British public in doing such a thing. Personally I thought Obama's handling showed he was worse than Bush.
I don't know if a creator/god exists but the idea that it would give us higher reasoning skills and then punish us for using them scares the hell out of me.
Most parenting books would argue such behaviour is damaging for a child. Why is it suddenly ok for a creator\god?
True, but in my limited experience people who write inefficient Java code, would write inefficient C++ code and people who write bad code will write bad code in any language, there are more bad Java programmers than C++ because its easier to learn (pointers).
The most common problem I've seen with inefficient Java code is iterating through arrays and lists. That problem wouldn't go away just by using C++.
Java has things like Checkstyle, PMD, Findbugs, etc.. which are free and can be integrated into your IDE. These tools provide management metrics and force proper practices making it easier to do it right. I'd love to know of some C++ equivalents.
Java isn't that much slower than C++ these days, if you do it right Java/C++ performance is so close as to not matter.
It's also more maintainable, has better frameworks and you don't have lots of beginner/intermediate level programmers introducing memory holes left, right and center.
Saying all that I work for a company which has invested millions into Java applications. Considering how Oracle has been acting the tech leads are pushing to moving us back to C++.
Except I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft ran Coverity as part of their build process. I am surprised Google don't.
Where I work any project which is updated has a coverity run performed on it overnight. While Coverity isn't perfect and it can be confused it is a good bit of software.
I agree, I maintain all my family's computers. Some of those people are terrifying with computers.
When doing this sort of thing your doing it as a favour to them. Setup the PC so it is secure and leave basic instructions. If they can't follow them or ignore the work you've done let them pay someone to fix it. Then they start to appreciate what your doing for them, or they become happy paying someone to fix their screw ups.
You forgot Rule 34 of the internet, if you can imagine it there is porn of it
You realise that's complete non-sense right? I did Computer Engineering (think Electrical Engineering degree with a software programming module instead of digital filter module, and a software project management module instead of microwave electronics pt 2).
I choose my degree because I was uncertain if I wanted to be electrical or software, in the end I choose software because I'm good at it. Spending hours on a software problem wasn't as tedious as spending hours on a Electronics problem. Most of my friends did Electonic and Electrical Degrees and moved into robotics, antenna design, etc.. They hated software programming with a passion, I'm probably the most technology geeky one of the bunch.
People do what makes them happy, people enjoy what they are good at.
Open Office twice as fast? Are you going to try and tell me Firefox is the fastest browser as well?
My personal issue with Open Office is that it is slow to intially load and looks like something from the windows 95 era. But I always place it on a home systems as a backup to MS Office. The only time I've forced non-techy relatives to use it (because of licensing issues) they have argued with me and managed to run into bug after bug and in the end I get so fed up of being shouted and moaned at, that I bring out my dog eared copy of Microsoft Office XP and install that.
Although to give a few samples of the problems I've seen, my little sister copies images in to word before printing them most school kids do. When you reach about 20Mb's worth of images Writer crashes. My workplace makes use of excel spreadsheet as part of our process management (there are several hundred of them) they use VBA scripts and/or a lot of Excels functionality. Not a single one works in Open Office nor is there a way to do what we do in Calc. My Dad tried Calc for a full month, he has no knowledge of VBA and has built a lot of Excel Spreadsheets which function perfectly in Excel 2000 - 2010, in his month he found Calc wasn't performing operations, randomly deleted cells and crashed a lot. Since that month he went and purchased a copy of Office 2007 Standard and a VBA book because "Excel just works".
Your point about re-training costs is mute, the company I work for is going to roll out Office 2007 in 6 months, so 6 months ago they started a scheme giving every employee who wanted one a free copy of MS Office 2007. The cost of the licenses is minimal and they get to avoid training staff, to be honest I can't really see any re-training costs going from Office 2003 to Libre Office. Your arguement about formats is pure fud.
Open Office is not a replacement for Office, I would like it to be but it isn't.
It's not harder to read well written C++ code than Java, however it is easier to read badly written Java than medicore C++.
It's my one issue with C++ code, with Java our workplace has a development environment with Checkstyles, Code Formatters and analysis tools like PMD and find bugs. It makes even the new graduates code readable and fairly standard. I've never found anything like that for C\C++.
A company that deployed Phorm on its network without telling is users*, who before this data breech wern't even challenging the requests from ACS:Law and a company whose in house legal department were giving out user information unencrypted in violation of the data protection act.
Sounds a great company to show your support to, I'd be more inclined to support Talk Talk or Virgin since they actually fight to keep there customers privacy. BT and Sky are just back peddling so they don't look so bad in the media.
*European Commission has just brought legal charges against the UK government for not prosecuting BT over the privacy invasion that was Phorm.
Works fine in Word 2003, we use it in my workplace during document review/development. It's not slow, works quietly and displays changes made by different users in different colours. I'm a fan because when you make changes moving documents from version 1 to 2 instead of being forced to review an entire document you can check review the modified sections.
Considering how easy it is to use, to cause the issues outlined in the review we are dealing with some mighty incompetent users who have managed to do the impossible. The only issues its ever caused me is when I've accidentally deleted all the change markers.
You've never worked with ITAR then. I work for a major Aerospace company who are paranoid about ITAR most of us view it as a chore and the general aim is to limit the ITAR pollution for a project. It does make it a lot harder to develop a product. As far as I can tell best practice seems to involve treating it like UK Top Secret. Things which from other countries would be NATO Restricted suddenly have to be treated as Top Secret if they are from the USA. That's insane.
On top of that Americans never seem to understand the regulations, most small American companies seem to forget about the TAA and try to share things outside of the agreement so you have to keep constant vigilance for that, while others mark everything as ITAR including answers to questions like "when should we have our next teleconfrence? ".
I've been on 4 ITAR projects, in every project the thing that's taken up most of my time is dealing with the ITAR related issues and I'm fairly lowly developer.
Disclaimer - I'm not speaking for the company I work for, my words are my own
I read the BBC article on the spill, they hardly said that. Halliburton apparently installed sub standard concrete which should have failed inspection but was somehow passed. Transocean/BP made a number of procedural failures and and a pressure test showed the problem days before it happened and was missed by drilling crew and BP.
How does that translate to "everybody's doing it?".
Considering it was a rig owned by BP, operated by Transocean and installed by Haliburton, with parts made by dozens of other companies it would be pretty impressive if the cause was purely BP's fault.
I still think the US government lept on a bandwagon in order to install a US CEO, who amusingly was far more involved with the rig than the then CEO.
Giving up modding to correct this misconception. The company I work for has been writing software for the London underground. Because the trains are self driven they can put more trains on the line, this means smaller trains and reduced waiting times.
It's actually running on the Picadilly line.
Any Symbian phone would cover that, personally I'd suggest the Nokia x6.
I have an Intel Atom N330 with a 256mb 9600 GT graphics card and 2GB's of ram. This machine is running from a 32GB SSD with Windows 7 x64.
When running the Divx Converter the machine is fine, I'll often browse the web and have divx player/windows media player running and won't suffer any sow down.
I allowed iTunes 9 on it and the experience wasn't pretty the background processes put a 0.5 second lag on the machine and iTunes took a full minute to load and then play a song. The only way to fix things was to reformat.
iTunes doesn't do that much more than Windows Media Player or Nokia Ovi Player and those applications run without using most of my limited processing power.