WP7 doesn't do multitasking with third party apps (only Microsoft's own apps has this advantage, go figure...)
Yeah, same with Apple. Except Apple deceptively calls persistent state management "multitasking," while microsoft has decided not to use this misnomer.
It's funny when iPhone has support for encrypted Exchange connections in built-in software on both OS X (Mail) and iOS, and MS in neither Windows 7, nor Windows Phone 7.
Yes, it is funny that a 3 day old product doesn't have support for every possible feature. You'd be a fool to think that these things aren't coming soon.
xda-developers? One of the most active communities surrounding any mobile OS? They did tons of shit with WM6, creating custom ROMs and whatnot, and MS never got legally involved and let them have their fun.
Hey, it worked with the Zune, didn't it? Oh, wait...
What do you think Windows Phone 7 was before it was Windows Phone 7? It was Zune HD. So yeah, I'd say it worked out pretty well considering it has evolved into a fully functioning mobile operating system.
Umm, iPhone is still lacking multitasking and flash support and seems to be doing OK.
Oh, and before you contend the multitasking statement, WP7 implements "multitasking" the same way Apple does. Of course, Apple's definition of multitasking is actually a misnomer.
can someone tell me what WP7 does that makes it unique? What are its selling points? Because from what I've read, there are no unique aspects to it.
Let me start by saying I have used iPhones pretty extensively, iPhone 4 included and had owned a Nexus One since it launched up until I got my WP7 phone yesterday. I am extremely impressed. What is unique about it? I think it is an evolutionary step in the right direction in regards to user interaction and the general workflow of dealing with this relatively new form factor (that being touch-screen only). The tiles motif is extremely informative and looks surprisingly good considering how simple and basic it is. The tiles can animate and they seem to use this in a practical manner, not making things appear too busy on the home screen.
As far as UI responsiveness, it equals the iPhone and absolutely destroys Android, especially when it comes to the keyboard. Even with all the fancy auto text-correcting options turned on, there is no perceivable jitter. It is smooth as butter.
It takes from WebOS the concept of reconciling like-data into a universal hub. Personally, I really like this. The one thing I don't like about it, is the fact that every one of my facebook friends show up in my address book. I would like to see a feature to disable that aspect of it. Otherwise, it does a great job of integrating the social networking capabilities of various services into a single, cohesive interface that does the job extremely well.
The last thing I'll say, since I've only been using it a day and can't yet offer a comprehensive review, is that it inherits the Zune player, which is absolutely awesome. If you have a zune pass it is by far the best music service available on any portable device.
It's XBox all over again. They'll lose several billion on WP7 and write it off. WP8 will come out and after three years of shoving the platform down people's throats, they'll be a hard won 25% of the market. Don't get me wrong, I own an XBox 360 but how many years of mistakes did it take for them and how much did they lose on the original to come to that piece of market share?
You are clearly not very business savvy. Are you saying the Xbox was a bad idea because it wasn't instantly profitable? The only system *ever* to pull that off was the Wii, which was a rebranded GameCube. They went from total underdog with the original Xbox to market leader of next-gen consoles (I am NOT including Wii, because I don't consider it next gen and don't know anyone who actually plays theirs). So, to use an example of a highly successful Microsoft product to illustrate why they shouldn't do it all over again with a different product is a bit puzzling.
Why flush money down a losing venture until it starts to see a return? Because they can. And one of the many faults of capitalism is that those with a ton of money can do the stupidest shit and still come out okay.
Again, you don't understand big business. Sometimes you gotta lose money to make money. There are only two major players in the smartphone market and there is certainly room for a third. To say that this is a dumb move on Microsoft is absurd, especially considering how strong of a product they have launched.
Describing a mobile browser that weighs in at 17mb as "sleek" is like describing Kirstie Alley as sleek because she dropped a couple pounds and no longer needs a scooter to go grocery shopping.
I think it might be more appropriate to say that Firefox 4 got it's stomach stapled, and while it has dropped considerable weight, there is now a bunch of extra saggy skin everywhere.
It's always funny when you see future technologies that are doomed for failure. The projected keyboard has to be one of the most obviously useless features continually perpetuated as something that we will eventually have. I can only imagine how difficult and frustrating it would be to try and use one.
What a freaking fluff Job. Windows 7, the most widely supported desktop operating systems behind Windows XP, "squeeks" in a victory by two points in the "Driver and Compatibility" rating. Yes, this guy is trying to convince himself that desktop linux, the platform with notoriously bad support for desktop drivers and very little support for games, came close!
private int _numCars;
public void setNumCars(int numCars){
_numCars = numCars;
}
public int getNumCars(){
return _numCars;
}
is SO much simpler than this:
public int NumCars {get;set;}
I could point out several other ways that Java is "simpler," but your point is well taken, old man.
Yeah, they should precede everything with a recursive acronym that sounds really awkward when actually saying it out loud. That would be a much better naming scheme.
I use both by choice all the time. The.NET platform is leaps and bounds ahead of the Java platform in nearly every way.
Oh, that's right, Java is licensed under the GPL, so it's inherently better. I forgot, ideology trumps technical merit. Now, in typical slashdot fashion, mod parent Insightful and me Troll. Thanks, and have a good day.
I was pointing out that the little guys with very little resources don't seem to have any problem at all so somebody is full of shit somewhere.
The one who is full of shit here is you. There is an enlightening blog post by the creator of Braid (Jonathan Blow) where he reaches out to the Linux community asking how to overcome some of the deficiencies of xorg and various sound libraries. Here are some of the highlights in the comments from a small developer with very little resources:
I would say the biggest problems, development-tools wise, are the lack of a reasonable debugger, the slowness of gcc, the lack of the Visual C++ “IntelliSense” kinds of features, and edit+continue, and the extreme disappointment that is OpenGL 3.0. At this point Direct3D is a far, far superior environment for programming and debugging. And that is pretty lame, because when it started out it was horrible and sucky and OpenGL was obviously superior; but GL just lost ground, year after year, until we get where we are today.
However, the development tools are just not very good, and it turns out to be too big a sacrifice. As I was telling someone in a conversation the other week, it was hard enough (and very expensive) to make Braid on Windows, where the tools were a lot better. Braid could easily have failed and never been completed. If I had had to develop Braid on Linux, where it is so much harder to build software, it probably would have failed. You wouldn’t have gotten to play the game, ever.
So, that is too big a price to pay. I was willing to suffer some friction, to have to patch the source of whatever tools I was using in order to get them to do what I wanted. But the friction is just too great; the development tools are just too poor. I can’t take that much of a hit, because I would never get anything done.
What is it that you find good about the tools? It appears to me that they are about 12 years behind what I can use on Windows.
But this is exactly my point — I don’t want *more* functionality. I want *less* functionality, but that works better and allows me to do what I need at a high level of quality.
One of the big problems with Linux these days is that people are writing all kinds of random crap code when there aren’t even dependable foundations that apps can use.
SDL is not an appropriate API for a high-quality game that cares a lot about game feel; it’s better as an API for mini games or whatever. Which is fine. There’s a place in the world for that, but it’s not what I want for my game.
I could keep going, there is plenty more, but I'll just link you to the original post so you can check it out for yourself: http://braid-game.com/news/?p=364
tl;dr; Linux is a horrible platform to develop games for.
Good luck getting your (purely) C# game onto the PS3, it's not possible.
I don't know how familiar you are with game development, but nobody is using C# for serious game development.
However, if you choose microsoft only technologies, you have essentially removed your ability to create a multi-platform game.
Do you know why this doesn't matter? Because Windows has a vast majority of the market share. It helps that MS is also extremely developer friendly, and directX has surpassed openGL in just about every way.
You wouldn't ship your windows game without the required external libraries, right?
It goes far beyond just that. Across distros, the environments are different, directory structures are different, window managers and their conventions are different. Being able to neatly package up a game and have a reliable installer becomes a huge pain in the ass.
Having to field support calls, most of which would amount to you telling the person to get a supported video card and proprietary driver, along with trying to explain the process of installing it for their particular distro, would cost far more than any revenue that would be brought in by porting to linux in the first place.
You've already made them POSIX and OpenGL, you're 85% of the way there.
More like 10%.
This is the problem with Linux: What company in their right mind would port to the platform that is both hardest to develop for and has the smallest user base? xorg, driver issues, distro inconsistencies all make porting games to linux an absolute nightmare. A lot of fundamental changes need to be made to desktop linux before it will really be taken seriously by anyone but Id. John Carmack even came out and said that Rage wouldn't be commercially supported on Linux, and that they'd provide an executable and let people fend for themselves as far as actually getting it to run.
Yes, yes, we get it. You're salty because Microsoft developed a technology that is quickly becoming recognized as being superior to much of what Linux has to offer. Well, there is Mono, which is, as we now know, more Open than Java. I realize your whole world has just been turned upside down, but that's no reason to lash out.
I think the reason for this is that a lot of web programming isn't overly complex and the brevity of a dynamic language is an advantage in these cases because you can't code something up pretty quickly. Anyone writing any sort of really complex web app in a dynamically typed language is just asking for trouble.
Checked arithmetic (on overflow, they throw an exception)
Support for tail calls (for Lisp, F# and other functional languages)
Value types, these are structs that are not wrapped in an object
VM-level support for generics
Platform-invoke allows developers to call native code without having to write any glue in C++ using JNI, it can all be done in the managed language.
The Common Language Specification: a spec that set the rules for interoperability across programming languages (for example: the rules for public identifier casing, handling of int vs uint and so on).
Delegates allow user to keep a reference to a method or an instance method and invoke it. The VM also can turn any delegate invocation into an asynchronous invocation, so you can turn any method into an async method, like this: mySortFunc.BeginInvoke (array)
Support for dynamic code generation through the Reflection.Emit API.
A database file format allows for efficient reading of the metadata from assemblies. It does not require decompression and the database format is suitable for lazy loading.
Attributes were special objects that could annotate most elements in the virtual machine, you could annotate classes, methods, parameters, local variables, and at runtime the VM or the runtime could do interesting things with it.
Unsafe code (pointers) to support C++, Cobol and Fortran compilers running on the CLI.
Native support for talking to COM-based APIs. Although mostly Windows-specific, its used to talk to Mozilla, VirtualBox and OpenOffice APIs in Linux.
Covariance and contravariance introduced with.NET 4 make even more generic cases a pleasure to use.
64-bit arrays (although part of the spec, only Mono implements this).
So, are you saying that having the actual names and locations is of actual value? What "justice" is going to be brought. None. These are casualties of war and having actual numbers and locations changes very little, except now more innocents are in danger, will be less willing to act as informants in the future, and the war will drag on even longer. Do the ends justify the means? Absolutely not. Julian Assange deserves what the families of the people he has outed will ultimately endure.
First of all, I never once said "Think of the troops." It would be more accurately paraphrased as "Think of the innocent civilians you have outed."
Secondly, someone with an opinion that doesn't subscribe to your conspiracy theory is not a troll, although it is a convenient straw man when confronted with reason and logic.
Slashdot Mirror
WP7 doesn't do multitasking with third party apps (only Microsoft's own apps has this advantage, go figure...)
Yeah, same with Apple. Except Apple deceptively calls persistent state management "multitasking," while microsoft has decided not to use this misnomer.
It's funny when iPhone has support for encrypted Exchange connections in built-in software on both OS X (Mail) and iOS, and MS in neither Windows 7, nor Windows Phone 7.
Yes, it is funny that a 3 day old product doesn't have support for every possible feature. You'd be a fool to think that these things aren't coming soon.
What dedicated user base?
xda-developers? One of the most active communities surrounding any mobile OS? They did tons of shit with WM6, creating custom ROMs and whatnot, and MS never got legally involved and let them have their fun.
Hey, it worked with the Zune, didn't it? Oh, wait...
What do you think Windows Phone 7 was before it was Windows Phone 7? It was Zune HD. So yeah, I'd say it worked out pretty well considering it has evolved into a fully functioning mobile operating system.
Umm, iPhone is still lacking multitasking and flash support and seems to be doing OK.
Oh, and before you contend the multitasking statement, WP7 implements "multitasking" the same way Apple does. Of course, Apple's definition of multitasking is actually a misnomer.
can someone tell me what WP7 does that makes it unique? What are its selling points? Because from what I've read, there are no unique aspects to it.
Let me start by saying I have used iPhones pretty extensively, iPhone 4 included and had owned a Nexus One since it launched up until I got my WP7 phone yesterday. I am extremely impressed. What is unique about it? I think it is an evolutionary step in the right direction in regards to user interaction and the general workflow of dealing with this relatively new form factor (that being touch-screen only). The tiles motif is extremely informative and looks surprisingly good considering how simple and basic it is. The tiles can animate and they seem to use this in a practical manner, not making things appear too busy on the home screen.
As far as UI responsiveness, it equals the iPhone and absolutely destroys Android, especially when it comes to the keyboard. Even with all the fancy auto text-correcting options turned on, there is no perceivable jitter. It is smooth as butter.
It takes from WebOS the concept of reconciling like-data into a universal hub. Personally, I really like this. The one thing I don't like about it, is the fact that every one of my facebook friends show up in my address book. I would like to see a feature to disable that aspect of it. Otherwise, it does a great job of integrating the social networking capabilities of various services into a single, cohesive interface that does the job extremely well.
The last thing I'll say, since I've only been using it a day and can't yet offer a comprehensive review, is that it inherits the Zune player, which is absolutely awesome. If you have a zune pass it is by far the best music service available on any portable device.
It's XBox all over again. They'll lose several billion on WP7 and write it off. WP8 will come out and after three years of shoving the platform down people's throats, they'll be a hard won 25% of the market. Don't get me wrong, I own an XBox 360 but how many years of mistakes did it take for them and how much did they lose on the original to come to that piece of market share?
You are clearly not very business savvy. Are you saying the Xbox was a bad idea because it wasn't instantly profitable? The only system *ever* to pull that off was the Wii, which was a rebranded GameCube. They went from total underdog with the original Xbox to market leader of next-gen consoles (I am NOT including Wii, because I don't consider it next gen and don't know anyone who actually plays theirs). So, to use an example of a highly successful Microsoft product to illustrate why they shouldn't do it all over again with a different product is a bit puzzling.
Why flush money down a losing venture until it starts to see a return? Because they can. And one of the many faults of capitalism is that those with a ton of money can do the stupidest shit and still come out okay.
Again, you don't understand big business. Sometimes you gotta lose money to make money. There are only two major players in the smartphone market and there is certainly room for a third. To say that this is a dumb move on Microsoft is absurd, especially considering how strong of a product they have launched.
Describing a mobile browser that weighs in at 17mb as "sleek" is like describing Kirstie Alley as sleek because she dropped a couple pounds and no longer needs a scooter to go grocery shopping.
I think it might be more appropriate to say that Firefox 4 got it's stomach stapled, and while it has dropped considerable weight, there is now a bunch of extra saggy skin everywhere.
It's always funny when you see future technologies that are doomed for failure. The projected keyboard has to be one of the most obviously useless features continually perpetuated as something that we will eventually have. I can only imagine how difficult and frustrating it would be to try and use one.
What a freaking fluff Job. Windows 7, the most widely supported desktop operating systems behind Windows XP, "squeeks" in a victory by two points in the "Driver and Compatibility" rating. Yes, this guy is trying to convince himself that desktop linux, the platform with notoriously bad support for desktop drivers and very little support for games, came close!
Desktop Linux -- The Next Duke Nuke'em Forever.
Yes, because THIS:
private int _numCars;
public void setNumCars(int numCars){
_numCars = numCars;
}
public int getNumCars(){
return _numCars;
}
is SO much simpler than this:
public int NumCars {get;set;}
I could point out several other ways that Java is "simpler," but your point is well taken, old man.
Gnuthing...
PS - My gnuts itch.
Yeah, they should precede everything with a recursive acronym that sounds really awkward when actually saying it out loud. That would be a much better naming scheme.
I use both by choice all the time. The .NET platform is leaps and bounds ahead of the Java platform in nearly every way.
Oh, that's right, Java is licensed under the GPL, so it's inherently better. I forgot, ideology trumps technical merit. Now, in typical slashdot fashion, mod parent Insightful and me Troll. Thanks, and have a good day.
Is this one of those soft "pledges" that's not worth the paper it's written on, or is this something legally binding?
Yeah, you know, kinda like Java and the GPL?
Perhaps you should just stop watching fiction.
I was pointing out that the little guys with very little resources don't seem to have any problem at all so somebody is full of shit somewhere.
The one who is full of shit here is you. There is an enlightening blog post by the creator of Braid (Jonathan Blow) where he reaches out to the Linux community asking how to overcome some of the deficiencies of xorg and various sound libraries. Here are some of the highlights in the comments from a small developer with very little resources:
I would say the biggest problems, development-tools wise, are the lack of a reasonable debugger, the slowness of gcc, the lack of the Visual C++ “IntelliSense” kinds of features, and edit+continue, and the extreme disappointment that is OpenGL 3.0. At this point Direct3D is a far, far superior environment for programming and debugging. And that is pretty lame, because when it started out it was horrible and sucky and OpenGL was obviously superior; but GL just lost ground, year after year, until we get where we are today.
However, the development tools are just not very good, and it turns out to be too big a sacrifice. As I was telling someone in a conversation the other week, it was hard enough (and very expensive) to make Braid on Windows, where the tools were a lot better. Braid could easily have failed and never been completed. If I had had to develop Braid on Linux, where it is so much harder to build software, it probably would have failed. You wouldn’t have gotten to play the game, ever.
So, that is too big a price to pay. I was willing to suffer some friction, to have to patch the source of whatever tools I was using in order to get them to do what I wanted. But the friction is just too great; the development tools are just too poor. I can’t take that much of a hit, because I would never get anything done.
What is it that you find good about the tools? It appears to me that they are about 12 years behind what I can use on Windows.
But this is exactly my point — I don’t want *more* functionality. I want *less* functionality, but that works better and allows me to do what I need at a high level of quality.
One of the big problems with Linux these days is that people are writing all kinds of random crap code when there aren’t even dependable foundations that apps can use.
SDL is not an appropriate API for a high-quality game that cares a lot about game feel; it’s better as an API for mini games or whatever. Which is fine. There’s a place in the world for that, but it’s not what I want for my game.
I could keep going, there is plenty more, but I'll just link you to the original post so you can check it out for yourself: http://braid-game.com/news/?p=364
tl;dr; Linux is a horrible platform to develop games for.
Good luck getting your (purely) C# game onto the PS3, it's not possible.
I don't know how familiar you are with game development, but nobody is using C# for serious game development.
However, if you choose microsoft only technologies, you have essentially removed your ability to create a multi-platform game.
Do you know why this doesn't matter? Because Windows has a vast majority of the market share. It helps that MS is also extremely developer friendly, and directX has surpassed openGL in just about every way.
You wouldn't ship your windows game without the required external libraries, right?
It goes far beyond just that. Across distros, the environments are different, directory structures are different, window managers and their conventions are different. Being able to neatly package up a game and have a reliable installer becomes a huge pain in the ass.
Having to field support calls, most of which would amount to you telling the person to get a supported video card and proprietary driver, along with trying to explain the process of installing it for their particular distro, would cost far more than any revenue that would be brought in by porting to linux in the first place.
You've already made them POSIX and OpenGL, you're 85% of the way there.
More like 10%.
This is the problem with Linux: What company in their right mind would port to the platform that is both hardest to develop for and has the smallest user base? xorg, driver issues, distro inconsistencies all make porting games to linux an absolute nightmare. A lot of fundamental changes need to be made to desktop linux before it will really be taken seriously by anyone but Id. John Carmack even came out and said that Rage wouldn't be commercially supported on Linux, and that they'd provide an executable and let people fend for themselves as far as actually getting it to run.
What I should have said was "FOSS approved alternative." And nobody is going to try and write a kernel in C#, so this example is largely pointless.
Typical GNU astroturfer, you are. That's why you get all of RMS' toejam.
Yes, yes, we get it. You're salty because Microsoft developed a technology that is quickly becoming recognized as being superior to much of what Linux has to offer. Well, there is Mono, which is, as we now know, more Open than Java. I realize your whole world has just been turned upside down, but that's no reason to lash out.
I think the reason for this is that a lot of web programming isn't overly complex and the brevity of a dynamic language is an advantage in these cases because you can't code something up pretty quickly. Anyone writing any sort of really complex web app in a dynamically typed language is just asking for trouble.
I noticed lots of people take pictures of mirrors, too.
So, are you saying that having the actual names and locations is of actual value? What "justice" is going to be brought. None. These are casualties of war and having actual numbers and locations changes very little, except now more innocents are in danger, will be less willing to act as informants in the future, and the war will drag on even longer. Do the ends justify the means? Absolutely not. Julian Assange deserves what the families of the people he has outed will ultimately endure.
First of all, I never once said "Think of the troops." It would be more accurately paraphrased as "Think of the innocent civilians you have outed."
Secondly, someone with an opinion that doesn't subscribe to your conspiracy theory is not a troll, although it is a convenient straw man when confronted with reason and logic.