And DAoC...? o_O Seriously. The level grind is much the same, and then you have to fight forever to grind through your necessary Realm Abilities...
Not really. The grind is much less than before and experienced players know a number of techniques to make it fairly efficient. Compared to any other game, daoc PvE is practically a joke now. Organized groups can probably achieve RvR-ready toons in a few weeks with only 2 to 3 hours invested per a night. On classic server people can grow level 50s in under 10 hours played pretty easily. Most of the time in getting a toon ready is actually spent collecting money or items needed. Existing players have an easy time with this because they can just dig from their pockets for the items they need.
I wouldn't consider PvP combat grinding either because you're actually playing against other people. You only need about Rank 6 or 7 to level the playing field. Sure a rank 12 will have almost double your points but not all of the rank 12s are quality players.
But I still don't like PvE and think they can really do away with it. There's still a lot of room for improvement in MMOs. But daoc right now is pretty lax. All of the hours I log in are spent in RvR not in PvE. I've PvE'ed for maybe 10 hours this entire year in that game.
I think you missed the parent's point. It's not the fact that he payed $600 for something more than a phone, it's that he payed $600 for a phone that is a phone. The phones the networks sell you are customized by the manufacturers to the network's specifications. This means loading their own software, disabling features, and doing everything possible to lock you out of the phone. It's much closer to one of those cable boxes you get for your TV where the company that is providing the service to you basically has it all locked up to do exactly what they want.
The other point is that because he didn't purchase the phone with a contract, he has negotiating power in his monthly rates. Most American's don't understand this concept because they're driven by the bottom-line price. So say he gets fed up with his cell service provider one month, well the next month he can ditch that provider and flip to another. If the provider still wants his sale, all he has to do is say "well, if you lower my price by $20 dollars, I'll reconsider..." This puts pressure on the service provider to maintain quality of service and/or maintain low rates. But by signing the contract, you are giving up your negotiating power and because you've essentially told them you're going to pay them for a couple of years, they feel no pressure to change their service quality or give you a better deal.
Key point to WoW's popularity: it appeals to EVERY play style in some form or fashion.
It doesn't appeal to me at all. Why should I have to go through so much PvE to be competitive? Why should I be forced into highly restricted zones or instances setup for PvP? The class assortment sucks. There's only "two" teams.
I'm a very different MMO player because I look for PvP opportunities. WoW is a PvE game with a sprinkle of PvP here and there that does not look like fun.
And for me, it's sad because the MMO model is based on having treadmills in one shape or form and treadmills are best implemented by PvE methods. Add new gear, new levels, new classes, new stuff players need to stay competitive. By doing so, the customers (yes customers, not players) have to keep buying the next expansion, and keep going back to PvE hours.
I had enough of that. There's no point in it for what I want to do. For some, that's everything they want. PvE is nice to them, and I believe it. Some people always want to be able to win. PvE gives those people a false sense of winning at something (though my honest opinion is you can never win at PvE because it is designed to be never-ending).
So perhaps I am of the minority of players that believe in better PvP experiences--things beyond ganking, zerging, and instances. And it does exist and it is quite addictive and more fun than any PvE experience can offer. But I am certain it doesn't exist in WoW.
Right now AMD and ATI to me look like two second place companies, and if they try to integrate closer they'll drag each other down.
I look at it this way: there are only three players, AMD, Intel, and nVidia. Beyond that you're not going to find a chipset, cpu, or gpu worth anything. The only company that (now) has sufficient expertise in all three areas is AMD. Intel has done a good job with centrino, but clearly has no interests and lacks knowledge in the GPU arena (they've only done the bare minimum with their integrated graphics). AMD now has the potential to succeed in providing an all-AMD platform, not just for desktops, but also for laptops. This opens up a new market segment to them that they've had trouble entering IF they can integrate the technologies between AMD and ATI fast enough. The big bonus is if they are successful in the laptop market segment, they no longer need to have be the performance king for CPUs or GPUs. Instead they can focus on being the efficiency king as nobody has bothered to fully tap that requirement. Intel has a pretty good start, but laptops are still only lasting hours on battery. I think they can still do better.
This will be a good move for AMD if they can manage to pull it off while Intel and nVidia lead in CPUs and GPUs. Let's hope they get through it somehow otherwise we'll be left with nVidia and Intel monopolies.
The investors and the market can make their own decisions regardless of how well thought out they are. Some investors will see this as a bad thing, some will not care, and some will see it as a good thing. That is what defines the market.
Now for my opinion: as a programmer with some new knowledge about accounting (I'm taking a class), my question to google is: why aren't you doing anything? Their trend has been consistently in the growth area yet their products and services don't seem to be growing as fast as they're growing their assets. Their strategies are also changing quite a bit: rather than attempting to compete, they are buying and lobbying. My only guess is that their biggest assets (people) are either not using their potential to improve products and implement insightful ideas, or have left the company.
My accouting instructor was commenting one day about a time when he was working for a software company as a financial expert. He said that the biggest assets a (software/intellectual property engineering) company has is its people. So one day a programmer left the company and he said, "our biggest asset was walking right out the door." I think that is starting to apply to Google.
To me, Google is looking more like the new MS, but for advertising. Because of that, I believe the investors are right to treat them as a normal company in reference to their financials. I've long lost hope in Google because it no longer has its smart and creative appeal like its younger days.
Ill tell you why web developers do not adopt XHTML, its not because of reluctance to change, its because XHTML OFFERS NO BENEFITS TO HTML 4.
Incorrect. Web developers don't adopt it because they're not required to. XHTML offers one big benefit that many bad web developers, like yourself, fail to see. That is strict parsing and failures associated with parse errors. When you write a program, the compiler/interpreter expects you to write code that adheres to the syntax defined by the language. Failure to do so results in an error. There is exists no such thing for HTML4 markup, therefore you can gloss over several parser errors and never notice them. XHTML was out to fix that, but because the W3C has such a shitty track record with the other half of defining standards (which is testing, quality assurance, and certifcations), nobody bothers.
The parser should be anal. We've already developed and studied parser technology to the point where it is pretty standard or even automated to write a parser as long as you have a grammar. Having an anal parser is almost "free" testing--something many web developers need more training on.
Why would anyone in their right mind spend time updating from HTML 4 to XHTML 1.1 when there is no visible benefit and a LOT of pain.
It's only painful because you've been doing it wrong the entire time and you were allowed to get away with it.
HTML 5 FINALLY introduces features that web developers NEED. Things like native client side validation, canvas and menu elements. These are things that we have been crying out for years but W3C disappeared up their own self-validating a**es. If they had introduced these features into XHTML then I am sure it would have been adopted by browsers and developers alike.
No, you don't need those things. You think you do, but you don't. The internet was intended to spread information. Text and hyperlinks are a great way to get that across. But somewhere, someone(s) started playing with other types of content like images, animated images, built-in programmability (Javascript/ECMA script), and embedded programs and other types of media (flash, video, audio). Now we have bloated pages, pages that mess with your computer, and a complete mess called the world wide web.
I don't disagree that there are some benefits to having these things, but there's been an awful lot of hurt and pain caused by having them. Therefore, I believe it is much better to take a conservative approach to adopting standards that go beyond basic text. Once we've finally gotten that first step right, then maybe we'll get the others implemented better. But everyone's always quick to define the solution but never the problem that the solution is to solve. Because of that we end up with standards and solutions that have issues and are fairly limited in their lifespan or application.
To stop writing new standards and failure modes and focus on their QA efforts while existing browser projects catch up to the existing standards. As a developer and end-user of the results of both the standards and browers, there has been a piss-poor effort of ensuring and evaluating how well each browser satisfies a standard.
I've heard this a number of times before but I think it's a false sense of where the "hardness" is. If reading the code is hard, then that means that the code was not well written or not written for easy reading. So go back to writing code, and when you write it, make your only goal to make it easy to read. Suddenly you'll find writing code that is easy to read is very hard:).
Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software...
Emphasis on the last part mine. It is common for many companies to build highly integrated software even on top of proprietary software. Therefore when the proprietary vendor releases a new version (in this case MS), all of the custom in-house stuff breaks on the new version. Because of that many companies and organizations are slow to adopt the latest and greatest regardless of if it is open source or proprietary.
My guess is they have a lot of custom software that is based on the older versions, therefore the compatibility pack for microsoft-only software will not help them without adding another step to their processes.
I agree that sleep is worthless for servers but it's great for pc users. For example my parent's dell c521 desktop when sleeping takes only 2-3w at the plug and 'appears' to be off (all fans stopped). It only takes a second or two to get back to the desktop and applications are left as they were. I also agree that hardware vendors (especially graphics and chipset makers) need to focus more on low power solutions not only for laptops but also for desktop and server machines. The cpu vendors have been working on it already and intel has been pushing things like centrino and santa rosa for laptops, but I see no reason why these technologies can't also be applied to desktops and even servers which typically get left on all the time if not quite often.
Yes, Dell's website is basically the online equivalent of a car dealership except the products are computers instead of cars and they can't sit you in a room with free coffee and soda. The numbers change weekly or even daily; one week will have free shipping, then the next week will have "$300 off" but no free shipping and all of the base configurations are bumped a little in price. And then you go to a different website selling the same model but this time with a percentage off.
But even just by examining a few users, you will learn a lot. We went through this exercise in an HCI course I took. We were divided into groups of 4 students and we were required to observe 4 students (no in the class) while they used predetermined website they had never seen before (usually small online stores selling furniture). The total man-hours in the assignment would have been 1 hour pre-user * 4 * 4 observers = 16 hours. The operations were simple: find a bed and matching night stand, find 4 chairs and add them to the cart, etc.
With only 16 hours of work and 4 subjects it was immediately obvious that there were significant flaws and things that could easily be fixed. For example, there were many times where the user sat there and stared at the screen because they were trying to figure out how to do what they wanted to do.
I imagine with this GIMP project you could do two things: collect data about users of gimp (distributing the tool to anyone) and hand selecting users of the tool and examining the results on a case by case basis. That should provide a wealth of information.
Someday the tech pundits will learn that ease of use trumps features.
No, well targeted and implemented requirements and marketing makes a good product. Take a look at the Wii: the target consumer was anyone and the target problem was providing entertainment. Why did it run kill all competition with xbox and ps3? Because the product was designed almost perfectly for it's task and sold at a correct price point for these consumers. To top it all off, even the company as a stakeholder benefits because each unit sold returns a profit rather than a loss. But it would have gone no where if it they didn't put in the effort they did to market the product with shows, commercials, and magazine/internet media.
Apple does a good job with marketing and they do a fairly good job with requirements. But what they fail at is meeting pricing requirements. It wasn't until later revisions of their ipods and other hardware that they were able to sell a product to other consumers that couldn't afford their current offerings. The reason why everyone has ipod now is because Apple made cheaper versions of the thing, not because of the interface alone. The interface is only one piece of the pie. If you want to consistently succeed, you need to: make the entire pie better than all your competitors, make it so that you competitors can't access a portion of the pie (think telephone/cable companies, patents), or make it so that your customers can't use any other pies other than your own (monopolies).
but for those who smoke, the concept is somewhat akin to taking caffeine tablets instead of enjoying (or sharing ) that great cup of coffee. To the extent it works, life becomes a little bit less enjoyable. And less social.
First off I think coffee tastes like crap. Even the "good stuff." The reason why it tastes good is because of caffeine, sugar, creamer or milk. Caffeine (like nicotine) has addictive properties, though not nearly as addictive as nicotine is. Large amounts of caffeine and sugar will also knock you out and put you into an extreme low where you'll just nap without knowing it. The thing is, you drink coffee because it keeps you awake temporarily. The next thing you know you're drinking it like water and because you've been drinking it so long suddenly there exists a range of coffees where one tastes better than the other.
Second of all, I think you underestimate nicotine and the form it gets into you from smoking. I don't smoke myself, but I did take a biology class on drugs and the brain with a professor who had smoked in the past. Nicotine is highly addictive. I forget the exact amount but a small amount of pure nicotine (somewhere in the milligrams) will kill you. Secondly the form of intake by cigarettes (lungs) is way different compared to patches and pills. When you have a patch or pill, the nicotine enters your system by however the patch or pill was designed. But like most drugs, people have varying levels of sensitivity to the drug. What the cigarette allows is for the user to determine that level of satisfaction because you control how much you breathe in and how frequently.
Now for the social aspect. I have a coworker who smokes and drinks coffee. I sometimes go out with him on his smoke breaks or coffee breaks though I don't really like the smoke breaks because I sometimes get the smell of the second hand crap. I'll be honest, the social aspect is bogus. You can walk out there an have any kind of conversation with a glass of water--there's nothing tying you to a cigarette except nicotine. And I've talked to my coworker numerous times about his attempts to quit. He's always said he would be ok for a few weeks but on the right day and right time, he'll find himself craving a cigarette regardless of all logic in his head.
Every smoker chose to smoke at some point. But what keeps them smoking even though they know it's bad? It's not social, you can be social anytime you want. It's nicotine and how everyone's brain is wired. Social, drinking, coffee, breaks are just a delusional excuse to justify smoking when it's really the pleasure center of your brain influencing your decision. You can do this with any drug that has addictive properties or even anything that affects the pleasure center of your brain. The problem is that certain things don't have really bad effects (mainly caffeine and to some degree eating) while others will kill you or make you much more susceptible to diseases.
george orwell is bullshit. the future of cameras everywhere is that they can be used AGAINST big government
1984 wasn't just about cameras, it was about the government getting too powerful and eventually controlling every aspect of citizen's lives--cameras and technology were just the mediums used to establish that power in the 1984 setting. But you don't even need good technology to do it. Just lookup the DPRK.
I don't think he wants to abolish use of the mouse, rather he is suggesting that the mouse is overused for functions that can be done significantly faster with a different input device (keyboard). Example: in photoshop there is a toolbar with icons/buttons you can click on with the mouse, but it also has keyboard shortcuts for each of those buttons. However, many interfaces ignore the fact that the keyboard exists and only rely on the mouse.
Also, with your example (tabbing 20 times or so), this is not an example of a failure to use the keyboard as an input device, but rather a failure on the user interface designer's ability to create a usable interface with the keyboard. Rather than tabbing 20 times, the interface should have a field select mode where it displays shortcut keys to each field. Therefore, if 'esc' happened to be the key to put the interface into form select mode, to get to the 20th form field, you would do something like: [esc] [20] [enter]. If that is somewhat like VI, that's because that's what I intended. The only issue VI has is poor feedback and does not protect the user from error (trying to type while in command mode). These issues were mostly because the interface then was purely text. Now we can do better: we can overlay a feedback window showing the user exactly what they're doing with every key press and we can design the mode to require a 'final' key button press (like enter) to confirm the command. We can also implement 'unlimited undo' to revert back to a previous state.
So I still think our interfaces (today) are quite poor because they only exploit one extreme vs the other (keyboard vs mouse). Interfaces need to get better by exploiting features of both devices and implementing a smart interface that understands how to accept alternate forms of input styles than a single solution. Give me the keyboard efficiency of a text editor, the visual response of something close to a video game, and the ease of learning with a mouse--that would be the next generation interface.
I don't see albums going away. This should only make the "album" more worthy. In the past you could just throw together a bunch of songs, and maybe one or two of them were actually worth something. As a consumer this model sucked: you felt 2 songs were worth the money yet if you wanted them, you had to pay up the entire cost of the album.
Now they can't do that anymore. If they want to sell an album, every song on the album better be worth it. The people who will benefit now are the listeners/consumers and the musicians that actually have song writing proficiency. The people who will lose out on this model are the one-hit wonders. In my opinion, that simple change will improve the quality of music by quite a bit as it's no longer easy to get away with selling crap.
When Vista first boots, it asks you to create a user account (and optionally password). What it's not clear about, is that this first account is actually the admin account. If you put a password on the admin account and create a regular user account and login with the regular user account, every UAC prompt will require the admin password before continuing. The admin account name/icon will already be selected/shown in the uac prompt and all you have to do is start typing the password. Most people initially think that the first account is actually the user account and therefore have admin privileges but still get the UAC 'cancel/allow' buttons.
When setup and used in the admin/regular user manner, it's very similar to a *nix environment. The regular user account can't delete/overwrite other important areas like the system directory and applications folders and anytime they try they either get an access denied message or a uac prompt requiring the admin account password. So as long as they're not doing something fishy (like install software or mess with the system areas) they never see it.
Don't assume that only people that know something about linux are hitting the ubuntu pages. There are a lot of people that end up looking at the machines anyway but don't know a thing about ubuntu. This is natural just as anyone in a store will happen to walk by some gadget they don't understand and will wonder if they need one of those gadgets because someone else is there fiddling with it.
And dell is right to suggest windows to users that have no clue what they're doing. If a linux geek is willing to help a friend out with a few linux issues, great. But people who happen to buy ubuntu might be lost in the dark when something goes wrong or something doesn't go quite right. Most people's reactions when they have a problem isn't "read the fine manual," it's more like call up the manufacturer and talk to a human being.
2. A good software developer writes applications that are meant to be run as binaries. Sorry web folks, you're not software developers. At the very best, you are WEB application developers. At worst, you're still coding static HTML pages and trying to get that six figure job. Yes, web developers are necessary. Yes, web developers are quite talented. But web developers are rarely well versed in C or C++. However, many web developers have a leg up on software developers in the visual department though. Not always, but more often than not.
3. Everything I said about the web developers above? It all applies in reverse to the software developers. As always, there are some exceptions, but they are rare. Software developers should typically not try to write web applications. At best, you'll wind up re-inventing something some other web developer has already done that's ten times better. At worst, you'll wind up with some ugly monstrosity of a web page that isn't user friendly and while the backend might be super efficient, it won't actually do a lot. Stick to software development, it's a different creature altogether. If you are dead set on becoming a web developer, then try REALLY hard NOT to bring much of what you know about UI design (which tends to be little) to the web app side. Remember that the web is primarily a visual medium, including the text. It has to look at least as good as it works.
So what happens when you have a binary (compiled from C) that accepts CGI and outputs HTML? What about languages that run in VMs like Java?
I think you have your terms mixed up. Software developers, refers to anyone that develops software. It doesn't matter if the language or medium it runs on is compiled/interpreted/VM. It is all software. Web developer would refer to a software developer that specializes in web applications. Similarly a C developer would refer to a software developer that specializes in utilizing the C language.
Also I can make your binary look like interpreted code by putting it into an emulator. Now your "native binary" is running in "software." Your comments are borderline flame bait and you should feel ashamed of your education if those generalizations are what you've come down to. It has been proven over and over again that implementation details are the smallest portion of the pie, the big meat is in requirements, design, and testing work. Beyond that the platform in which the solution runs (like binary, web, VM, etc.) is irrelevant.
Funny, my Linux boxen don't collect any information at all and still they run nice and stable and get their updates as needed.
I bet the server you download updates from collects information, particularly your IP address and time stamp.
But the article tries its best to spin it so that the information that does get sent is somehow your personal information but never completely claims that. It only claims that information is getting sent, but what type of information, the article doesn't know.
Since it's a Microsoft negative article and Slashdot, I'm guessing most people will simply gloss over that fact because it is MS. Meanwhile, if you replace MS with Google you're more likely to have sane comments. Of all companies, I'd say Google is the worst in terms of harvesting user information. A lot of their technology and services thrive on knowing more about you.
But the big companies aren't the easy targets. The easy targets are non-tech companies that require knowing customer sensitive information. Think online stores, banks, and even schools. For example, with my Dell Vista machine, at no point have I even entered my credit card number or even worse, my social security number. All they have is my product key and maybe a name. However, with an online store you can purchase with a credit card. Now that store's database or log files (if they're stupid) will have your credit card number and all information (name, phone number, address, email). Schools can also be just as bad if not worse. There was a UCLA incident a while back where the servers were compromised and students that attended the school may have had sensitive information (SSNs) leaked.
So Microsoft has my IP address and knows that I'm running on a dell motherboard. And here's another one, I drive a silver honda civic. But all that's meaningless as a simple transaction at an online store or bank is levels beyond that to the point where my identity can even be stolen if the poor little online store's servers are compromised. There's a wealth of information being logged on the internet but I'm not convinced that Microsoft has anything near critical about me. Google probably does, online stores definitely do, and with banks and schools I'm basically trusting them with my identity on a daily basis.
The problem is that Intel will not implement anything AMD comes up with unless AMD can convince enough software companies to switch their products to the AMD developed standards. For example way back, they created 3dnow! instructions and had minimal success even though there were some obvious performance benefits. Intel never implemented 3dnow and instead went with SSE. It's pretty obvious who won that battle. Now AMD did have a win with AMD64/x86-64, but progress there has been slow and Intel still doesn't want to admit defeat by relabeling the supported instructions as EMT64. If AMD wants to truly win the instructions standards battle, they would have to focus more effort on gaining market share and software partnerships first.
Another thing to note is that while they do typically lag behind one version of SSE, they did implement a number of improvements to SSE instruction performance in barcelona. Hopefully these improvements will shorten the gap on SSE heavy benchmarks (optimized encoding software, games).
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. The grind is much less than before and experienced players know a number of techniques to make it fairly efficient. Compared to any other game, daoc PvE is practically a joke now. Organized groups can probably achieve RvR-ready toons in a few weeks with only 2 to 3 hours invested per a night. On classic server people can grow level 50s in under 10 hours played pretty easily. Most of the time in getting a toon ready is actually spent collecting money or items needed. Existing players have an easy time with this because they can just dig from their pockets for the items they need.
I wouldn't consider PvP combat grinding either because you're actually playing against other people. You only need about Rank 6 or 7 to level the playing field. Sure a rank 12 will have almost double your points but not all of the rank 12s are quality players.
But I still don't like PvE and think they can really do away with it. There's still a lot of room for improvement in MMOs. But daoc right now is pretty lax. All of the hours I log in are spent in RvR not in PvE. I've PvE'ed for maybe 10 hours this entire year in that game.
I think you missed the parent's point. It's not the fact that he payed $600 for something more than a phone, it's that he payed $600 for a phone that is a phone. The phones the networks sell you are customized by the manufacturers to the network's specifications. This means loading their own software, disabling features, and doing everything possible to lock you out of the phone. It's much closer to one of those cable boxes you get for your TV where the company that is providing the service to you basically has it all locked up to do exactly what they want.
The other point is that because he didn't purchase the phone with a contract, he has negotiating power in his monthly rates. Most American's don't understand this concept because they're driven by the bottom-line price. So say he gets fed up with his cell service provider one month, well the next month he can ditch that provider and flip to another. If the provider still wants his sale, all he has to do is say "well, if you lower my price by $20 dollars, I'll reconsider..." This puts pressure on the service provider to maintain quality of service and/or maintain low rates. But by signing the contract, you are giving up your negotiating power and because you've essentially told them you're going to pay them for a couple of years, they feel no pressure to change their service quality or give you a better deal.
It doesn't appeal to me at all. Why should I have to go through so much PvE to be competitive? Why should I be forced into highly restricted zones or instances setup for PvP? The class assortment sucks. There's only "two" teams.
I'm a very different MMO player because I look for PvP opportunities. WoW is a PvE game with a sprinkle of PvP here and there that does not look like fun.
And for me, it's sad because the MMO model is based on having treadmills in one shape or form and treadmills are best implemented by PvE methods. Add new gear, new levels, new classes, new stuff players need to stay competitive. By doing so, the customers (yes customers, not players) have to keep buying the next expansion, and keep going back to PvE hours.
I had enough of that. There's no point in it for what I want to do. For some, that's everything they want. PvE is nice to them, and I believe it. Some people always want to be able to win. PvE gives those people a false sense of winning at something (though my honest opinion is you can never win at PvE because it is designed to be never-ending).
So perhaps I am of the minority of players that believe in better PvP experiences--things beyond ganking, zerging, and instances. And it does exist and it is quite addictive and more fun than any PvE experience can offer. But I am certain it doesn't exist in WoW.
I look at it this way: there are only three players, AMD, Intel, and nVidia. Beyond that you're not going to find a chipset, cpu, or gpu worth anything. The only company that (now) has sufficient expertise in all three areas is AMD. Intel has done a good job with centrino, but clearly has no interests and lacks knowledge in the GPU arena (they've only done the bare minimum with their integrated graphics). AMD now has the potential to succeed in providing an all-AMD platform, not just for desktops, but also for laptops. This opens up a new market segment to them that they've had trouble entering IF they can integrate the technologies between AMD and ATI fast enough. The big bonus is if they are successful in the laptop market segment, they no longer need to have be the performance king for CPUs or GPUs. Instead they can focus on being the efficiency king as nobody has bothered to fully tap that requirement. Intel has a pretty good start, but laptops are still only lasting hours on battery. I think they can still do better.
This will be a good move for AMD if they can manage to pull it off while Intel and nVidia lead in CPUs and GPUs. Let's hope they get through it somehow otherwise we'll be left with nVidia and Intel monopolies.
The investors and the market can make their own decisions regardless of how well thought out they are. Some investors will see this as a bad thing, some will not care, and some will see it as a good thing. That is what defines the market.
Now for my opinion: as a programmer with some new knowledge about accounting (I'm taking a class), my question to google is: why aren't you doing anything? Their trend has been consistently in the growth area yet their products and services don't seem to be growing as fast as they're growing their assets. Their strategies are also changing quite a bit: rather than attempting to compete, they are buying and lobbying. My only guess is that their biggest assets (people) are either not using their potential to improve products and implement insightful ideas, or have left the company.
My accouting instructor was commenting one day about a time when he was working for a software company as a financial expert. He said that the biggest assets a (software/intellectual property engineering) company has is its people. So one day a programmer left the company and he said, "our biggest asset was walking right out the door." I think that is starting to apply to Google.
To me, Google is looking more like the new MS, but for advertising. Because of that, I believe the investors are right to treat them as a normal company in reference to their financials. I've long lost hope in Google because it no longer has its smart and creative appeal like its younger days.
Incorrect. Web developers don't adopt it because they're not required to. XHTML offers one big benefit that many bad web developers, like yourself, fail to see. That is strict parsing and failures associated with parse errors. When you write a program, the compiler/interpreter expects you to write code that adheres to the syntax defined by the language. Failure to do so results in an error. There is exists no such thing for HTML4 markup, therefore you can gloss over several parser errors and never notice them. XHTML was out to fix that, but because the W3C has such a shitty track record with the other half of defining standards (which is testing, quality assurance, and certifcations), nobody bothers.
The parser should be anal. We've already developed and studied parser technology to the point where it is pretty standard or even automated to write a parser as long as you have a grammar. Having an anal parser is almost "free" testing--something many web developers need more training on.
It's only painful because you've been doing it wrong the entire time and you were allowed to get away with it.
No, you don't need those things. You think you do, but you don't. The internet was intended to spread information. Text and hyperlinks are a great way to get that across. But somewhere, someone(s) started playing with other types of content like images, animated images, built-in programmability (Javascript/ECMA script), and embedded programs and other types of media (flash, video, audio). Now we have bloated pages, pages that mess with your computer, and a complete mess called the world wide web.
I don't disagree that there are some benefits to having these things, but there's been an awful lot of hurt and pain caused by having them. Therefore, I believe it is much better to take a conservative approach to adopting standards that go beyond basic text. Once we've finally gotten that first step right, then maybe we'll get the others implemented better. But everyone's always quick to define the solution but never the problem that the solution is to solve. Because of that we end up with standards and solutions that have issues and are fairly limited in their lifespan or application.
To stop writing new standards and failure modes and focus on their QA efforts while existing browser projects catch up to the existing standards. As a developer and end-user of the results of both the standards and browers, there has been a piss-poor effort of ensuring and evaluating how well each browser satisfies a standard.
I've heard this a number of times before but I think it's a false sense of where the "hardness" is. If reading the code is hard, then that means that the code was not well written or not written for easy reading. So go back to writing code, and when you write it, make your only goal to make it easy to read. Suddenly you'll find writing code that is easy to read is very hard :).
Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software...
Emphasis on the last part mine. It is common for many companies to build highly integrated software even on top of proprietary software. Therefore when the proprietary vendor releases a new version (in this case MS), all of the custom in-house stuff breaks on the new version. Because of that many companies and organizations are slow to adopt the latest and greatest regardless of if it is open source or proprietary.
My guess is they have a lot of custom software that is based on the older versions, therefore the compatibility pack for microsoft-only software will not help them without adding another step to their processes.
Don't forget about:
World of Cash Flows, Ever-depreciation, and Trauma Credits: Second Adjustments.
I agree that sleep is worthless for servers but it's great for pc users. For example my parent's dell c521 desktop when sleeping takes only 2-3w at the plug and 'appears' to be off (all fans stopped). It only takes a second or two to get back to the desktop and applications are left as they were. I also agree that hardware vendors (especially graphics and chipset makers) need to focus more on low power solutions not only for laptops but also for desktop and server machines. The cpu vendors have been working on it already and intel has been pushing things like centrino and santa rosa for laptops, but I see no reason why these technologies can't also be applied to desktops and even servers which typically get left on all the time if not quite often.
Yes, Dell's website is basically the online equivalent of a car dealership except the products are computers instead of cars and they can't sit you in a room with free coffee and soda. The numbers change weekly or even daily; one week will have free shipping, then the next week will have "$300 off" but no free shipping and all of the base configurations are bumped a little in price. And then you go to a different website selling the same model but this time with a percentage off.
Anything is better than nothing.
But even just by examining a few users, you will learn a lot. We went through this exercise in an HCI course I took. We were divided into groups of 4 students and we were required to observe 4 students (no in the class) while they used predetermined website they had never seen before (usually small online stores selling furniture). The total man-hours in the assignment would have been 1 hour pre-user * 4 * 4 observers = 16 hours. The operations were simple: find a bed and matching night stand, find 4 chairs and add them to the cart, etc.
With only 16 hours of work and 4 subjects it was immediately obvious that there were significant flaws and things that could easily be fixed. For example, there were many times where the user sat there and stared at the screen because they were trying to figure out how to do what they wanted to do.
I imagine with this GIMP project you could do two things: collect data about users of gimp (distributing the tool to anyone) and hand selecting users of the tool and examining the results on a case by case basis. That should provide a wealth of information.
No, well targeted and implemented requirements and marketing makes a good product. Take a look at the Wii: the target consumer was anyone and the target problem was providing entertainment. Why did it run kill all competition with xbox and ps3? Because the product was designed almost perfectly for it's task and sold at a correct price point for these consumers. To top it all off, even the company as a stakeholder benefits because each unit sold returns a profit rather than a loss. But it would have gone no where if it they didn't put in the effort they did to market the product with shows, commercials, and magazine/internet media.
Apple does a good job with marketing and they do a fairly good job with requirements. But what they fail at is meeting pricing requirements. It wasn't until later revisions of their ipods and other hardware that they were able to sell a product to other consumers that couldn't afford their current offerings. The reason why everyone has ipod now is because Apple made cheaper versions of the thing, not because of the interface alone. The interface is only one piece of the pie. If you want to consistently succeed, you need to: make the entire pie better than all your competitors, make it so that you competitors can't access a portion of the pie (think telephone/cable companies, patents), or make it so that your customers can't use any other pies other than your own (monopolies).
First off I think coffee tastes like crap. Even the "good stuff." The reason why it tastes good is because of caffeine, sugar, creamer or milk. Caffeine (like nicotine) has addictive properties, though not nearly as addictive as nicotine is. Large amounts of caffeine and sugar will also knock you out and put you into an extreme low where you'll just nap without knowing it. The thing is, you drink coffee because it keeps you awake temporarily. The next thing you know you're drinking it like water and because you've been drinking it so long suddenly there exists a range of coffees where one tastes better than the other.
Second of all, I think you underestimate nicotine and the form it gets into you from smoking. I don't smoke myself, but I did take a biology class on drugs and the brain with a professor who had smoked in the past. Nicotine is highly addictive. I forget the exact amount but a small amount of pure nicotine (somewhere in the milligrams) will kill you. Secondly the form of intake by cigarettes (lungs) is way different compared to patches and pills. When you have a patch or pill, the nicotine enters your system by however the patch or pill was designed. But like most drugs, people have varying levels of sensitivity to the drug. What the cigarette allows is for the user to determine that level of satisfaction because you control how much you breathe in and how frequently.
Now for the social aspect. I have a coworker who smokes and drinks coffee. I sometimes go out with him on his smoke breaks or coffee breaks though I don't really like the smoke breaks because I sometimes get the smell of the second hand crap. I'll be honest, the social aspect is bogus. You can walk out there an have any kind of conversation with a glass of water--there's nothing tying you to a cigarette except nicotine. And I've talked to my coworker numerous times about his attempts to quit. He's always said he would be ok for a few weeks but on the right day and right time, he'll find himself craving a cigarette regardless of all logic in his head.
Every smoker chose to smoke at some point. But what keeps them smoking even though they know it's bad? It's not social, you can be social anytime you want. It's nicotine and how everyone's brain is wired. Social, drinking, coffee, breaks are just a delusional excuse to justify smoking when it's really the pleasure center of your brain influencing your decision. You can do this with any drug that has addictive properties or even anything that affects the pleasure center of your brain. The problem is that certain things don't have really bad effects (mainly caffeine and to some degree eating) while others will kill you or make you much more susceptible to diseases.
And what if you don't have an ex-girlfriend?
1984 wasn't just about cameras, it was about the government getting too powerful and eventually controlling every aspect of citizen's lives--cameras and technology were just the mediums used to establish that power in the 1984 setting. But you don't even need good technology to do it. Just lookup the DPRK.
I don't think he wants to abolish use of the mouse, rather he is suggesting that the mouse is overused for functions that can be done significantly faster with a different input device (keyboard). Example: in photoshop there is a toolbar with icons/buttons you can click on with the mouse, but it also has keyboard shortcuts for each of those buttons. However, many interfaces ignore the fact that the keyboard exists and only rely on the mouse.
Also, with your example (tabbing 20 times or so), this is not an example of a failure to use the keyboard as an input device, but rather a failure on the user interface designer's ability to create a usable interface with the keyboard. Rather than tabbing 20 times, the interface should have a field select mode where it displays shortcut keys to each field. Therefore, if 'esc' happened to be the key to put the interface into form select mode, to get to the 20th form field, you would do something like: [esc] [20] [enter]. If that is somewhat like VI, that's because that's what I intended. The only issue VI has is poor feedback and does not protect the user from error (trying to type while in command mode). These issues were mostly because the interface then was purely text. Now we can do better: we can overlay a feedback window showing the user exactly what they're doing with every key press and we can design the mode to require a 'final' key button press (like enter) to confirm the command. We can also implement 'unlimited undo' to revert back to a previous state.
So I still think our interfaces (today) are quite poor because they only exploit one extreme vs the other (keyboard vs mouse). Interfaces need to get better by exploiting features of both devices and implementing a smart interface that understands how to accept alternate forms of input styles than a single solution. Give me the keyboard efficiency of a text editor, the visual response of something close to a video game, and the ease of learning with a mouse--that would be the next generation interface.
I don't see albums going away. This should only make the "album" more worthy. In the past you could just throw together a bunch of songs, and maybe one or two of them were actually worth something. As a consumer this model sucked: you felt 2 songs were worth the money yet if you wanted them, you had to pay up the entire cost of the album.
Now they can't do that anymore. If they want to sell an album, every song on the album better be worth it. The people who will benefit now are the listeners/consumers and the musicians that actually have song writing proficiency. The people who will lose out on this model are the one-hit wonders. In my opinion, that simple change will improve the quality of music by quite a bit as it's no longer easy to get away with selling crap.
Vista is pretty close if setup correctly.
When Vista first boots, it asks you to create a user account (and optionally password). What it's not clear about, is that this first account is actually the admin account. If you put a password on the admin account and create a regular user account and login with the regular user account, every UAC prompt will require the admin password before continuing. The admin account name/icon will already be selected/shown in the uac prompt and all you have to do is start typing the password. Most people initially think that the first account is actually the user account and therefore have admin privileges but still get the UAC 'cancel/allow' buttons.
When setup and used in the admin/regular user manner, it's very similar to a *nix environment. The regular user account can't delete/overwrite other important areas like the system directory and applications folders and anytime they try they either get an access denied message or a uac prompt requiring the admin account password. So as long as they're not doing something fishy (like install software or mess with the system areas) they never see it.
Don't assume that only people that know something about linux are hitting the ubuntu pages. There are a lot of people that end up looking at the machines anyway but don't know a thing about ubuntu. This is natural just as anyone in a store will happen to walk by some gadget they don't understand and will wonder if they need one of those gadgets because someone else is there fiddling with it.
And dell is right to suggest windows to users that have no clue what they're doing. If a linux geek is willing to help a friend out with a few linux issues, great. But people who happen to buy ubuntu might be lost in the dark when something goes wrong or something doesn't go quite right. Most people's reactions when they have a problem isn't "read the fine manual," it's more like call up the manufacturer and talk to a human being.
So what happens when you have a binary (compiled from C) that accepts CGI and outputs HTML? What about languages that run in VMs like Java?
I think you have your terms mixed up. Software developers, refers to anyone that develops software. It doesn't matter if the language or medium it runs on is compiled/interpreted/VM. It is all software. Web developer would refer to a software developer that specializes in web applications. Similarly a C developer would refer to a software developer that specializes in utilizing the C language.
Also I can make your binary look like interpreted code by putting it into an emulator. Now your "native binary" is running in "software." Your comments are borderline flame bait and you should feel ashamed of your education if those generalizations are what you've come down to. It has been proven over and over again that implementation details are the smallest portion of the pie, the big meat is in requirements, design, and testing work. Beyond that the platform in which the solution runs (like binary, web, VM, etc.) is irrelevant.
I bet the server you download updates from collects information, particularly your IP address and time stamp.
But the article tries its best to spin it so that the information that does get sent is somehow your personal information but never completely claims that. It only claims that information is getting sent, but what type of information, the article doesn't know.
Since it's a Microsoft negative article and Slashdot, I'm guessing most people will simply gloss over that fact because it is MS. Meanwhile, if you replace MS with Google you're more likely to have sane comments. Of all companies, I'd say Google is the worst in terms of harvesting user information. A lot of their technology and services thrive on knowing more about you.
But the big companies aren't the easy targets. The easy targets are non-tech companies that require knowing customer sensitive information. Think online stores, banks, and even schools. For example, with my Dell Vista machine, at no point have I even entered my credit card number or even worse, my social security number. All they have is my product key and maybe a name. However, with an online store you can purchase with a credit card. Now that store's database or log files (if they're stupid) will have your credit card number and all information (name, phone number, address, email). Schools can also be just as bad if not worse. There was a UCLA incident a while back where the servers were compromised and students that attended the school may have had sensitive information (SSNs) leaked.
So Microsoft has my IP address and knows that I'm running on a dell motherboard. And here's another one, I drive a silver honda civic. But all that's meaningless as a simple transaction at an online store or bank is levels beyond that to the point where my identity can even be stolen if the poor little online store's servers are compromised. There's a wealth of information being logged on the internet but I'm not convinced that Microsoft has anything near critical about me. Google probably does, online stores definitely do, and with banks and schools I'm basically trusting them with my identity on a daily basis.
The problem is that Intel will not implement anything AMD comes up with unless AMD can convince enough software companies to switch their products to the AMD developed standards. For example way back, they created 3dnow! instructions and had minimal success even though there were some obvious performance benefits. Intel never implemented 3dnow and instead went with SSE. It's pretty obvious who won that battle. Now AMD did have a win with AMD64/x86-64, but progress there has been slow and Intel still doesn't want to admit defeat by relabeling the supported instructions as EMT64. If AMD wants to truly win the instructions standards battle, they would have to focus more effort on gaining market share and software partnerships first.
Another thing to note is that while they do typically lag behind one version of SSE, they did implement a number of improvements to SSE instruction performance in barcelona. Hopefully these improvements will shorten the gap on SSE heavy benchmarks (optimized encoding software, games).
They're all camping out in front of the apple/cingular stores.