"Who cares about making Apple look bad. I'm concerned about the very real security implications of these actions. They're putting people at risk in order to get press and ignoring the established practices of the industry. "
Funny. I'm willing to bet if you replaced Apple with Microsoft you would have been modded down.
I've played many blizzard games and from what I have experienced, they aren't experts in innovation. What they are are experts in perfection of existing ideas for a majority of people. Every genre they have touched with successful games has already had someone else beat them to the idea first. The only difference is blizzard tends to get it right for the target market (most people) they want to capture.
I have heard nothing good about wow except that it has great PvE until level 60. After that, people have told me that it becomes the most glorified PvE treadmill ever. Many mmo players will say that prior to wow, mmorpgs already had treadmills in place. The only difference is blizzard managed to make a great game from 1-60, just long enough to sucker people into ignoring the treadmill at the end. Other mmos didn't hide this fact in the very beginning (the treadmill starts at level 1) so people get bored and give up. Was blizzard the first? I doubt it, I've seen EQ and the great efforts required to get anywhere in that game. The only problem was every mmo that tried to implement the treadmill did it poorly (too blatant, or too obvious up front for the newbie).
Sure, I'll give em that they do innovate in smaller areas of gameplay (interface, controls, slight game mechanics changes, etc...) but something totally new for a genre? No. Show me something like Spore or a Wii and I'll call blizzard innovative. That doesn't mean that they can't be successful or have good products, in fact, I think they make very good products. But I wouldn't call them innovative in terms of gaming innovation.
Sure, it is a metric but I still think it is a poor one because it does not account for the improvements in technology. A better metric would be the average broadband speed available to consumers. Compare that metric to other countries and you'll have much better data on how competitive and advanced the U.S. market is compared to other countries.
But we all know that that number is probably going to be much lower so of course the FCC and all of it's corporate buddies want to paint a different picture.
I take it you've never had to fix anything with regedit either then?
I believe the point of the post was that the operation was abstract and required extra knowledge, not that there are better/worse alternatives. The point is, you still have to learn/know something. The only way to avoid it is to make it work out of the box. Power users and people interested in stuff like that (geeks) may not care. But for everyone else it's like their car broke down in the middle of the road. They have no way of fixing it other than calling a mechanic or learning more about the car themselves--neither of which they are interested in except that it is the only way to get the car working again.
An article on Japan's women in engineering situation:
The Japanese government has taken up the gauntlet out of embarrassment, not chivalry. In 2004, women made up only 11.1% of the scientific workforce, the lowest proportion among the 30 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (Portugal has the highest rate, more than 40%; the U.S. f igure is 26%.)
So why is Portugal's percentage high and Japan and the US's percentages low? My opinion is that it is partially culture based. Just turn on the TV in the US and you'll see all of these commercials toward women advertising clothing, jewelry, and beauty products. In TV shows the scientists are almost always men. The engineers are almost always men. The geeks are almost always men.
If you want a neutral preference on gender in workforces, you're going to have to disassociate the cultural links between gender and professions. But that will never happen because the marketing departments will always choose the best role model for gender when they want to sell a product to a group of people.
Programs that may attempt to include bonuses for women to enter into male dominated fields don't work in my opinion. It's like saying you're entering a one sex dominated field and you probably won't feel as welcome just because you're surrounded by guys, but hey, to make up for it we'll offer you a scholarship of some sort. Every girl I talked to when I was in school I asked "why did you choose cs?" and the answer was never "because it's dominated by guys and I can get this cool scholarship." It was either the girl was actually interested in it, she had friends that were going into CS, or her parents influenced her decision. STRANGELY, those answers aren't all that much different from guy answers...
Want your kid to be more interested in sciences and engineering? Take away the doll and give her Legos. And don't turn on the TV to let her see all those commercials of "girl" toys either. It starts when they're kids, not when they're 18 and have already been influenced by so many outside inputs.
Oh, and English is a really hard language to learn. It's full of silly rules that make no sense. Even people who learn it at a young age and speak it their whole lives have trouble with it.
Isn't that every language? I'm not bilingual but I've spent (and still am spending) a good amount of time learning other languages (French, Japanese). Every language has funny rules that don't make sense but after spending all that time studying these other languages I've found funny rules in each of them that are unexplainable and are only solved by memorization.
For instance French is funny compared to English because every noun has a gender but no such thing exists in English. The gender gives the phrases no additional information but is so much a part of the language that you can't get by without memorizing the genders for all of the words.
Japanese is funny because they have different ways of counting things depending on the object's properties and I still have a hard time understanding the usefulness of Kanji.
However, each language has their benefits and consistencies compared to one another. French has more consistent spellings compared to English (thanks Webster). For example anytime in French when you see 'eau' it is always pronounced the same way. English goes the wrong direction and overloads certain spellings with different sounds so when you see a word you've never seen before, you always have to 'guess' at how it is pronounced. Japanese has a pretty superior particle system (almost everything has a particle minus some funny rules...again) that makes certain aspects of it easy to learn.
There are some things that English does pretty well though. I think it does a decent job of accepting words from other languages and attempting to preserve the sound of the original word as long as the speaker is willing. In Japanese they take many words from other languages but because their system is based on the Kana system everything gets morphed quite a bit. For example "beer" is "bi-ru" because their kana system has no single 'r' sound. English also has fewer verb conjugations compared to something like French (I/you/they/we eat, he/she eats VS (I) Je mange, (you-casual) tu manges, (he/she) il/elle mange, (we) nous mangeons, (you-formal) vous mangez, (they-guys+girls/they-girls-only) ils/elles mangent).
Some people like removable storage because you can swap cards. I have -never- owned more than 1 memory card for a format, so again, I couldn't care less. Especially considering 8GB is fairly substantial.
I care. Apple is marketing this device as a "do it all" device yet I'm limited to the amount of space the thing comes with? I wouldn't bring up the issue except the fact that it will be storing pictures, music, and video. That's huge, especially the video part.
Honestly what I was thinking when I saw this announcement was that I wished Nintendo was the company that announced the "iphone" not Apple because Nintendo actually thinks about consumer wallets first and THEN tries to meet as many expectations with as possible within those cost constraints (see Wii). With Apple you know why they didn't include a memory card slot: they want you to buy the next bigger version and full price. Had they offered a memory card slot you could easily get by on the lower end version with the intention of expanding the memory via additional memory cards.
Oh yeah, as of right now I have 4 different SD cards of different sizes and I own 3 devices (pda, camera, and wii) other than computers that use them. So while you don't care people like me find it as a bonus and convenience (picture viewing on the wii) if the device supports media other devices are capable of utilizing.
The motivation behind wanting Mac OS X to "take up the whole fucking screen with this window" stems partly from being stuck in the Windows singletasking frame of mind
Incorrect.
When you have a terminal open and you start running commands, some command output doesn't care about the window size; a line is a line and until a new line is encountered or the end of the window is reached, the line won't wrap. It is equally annoying when the software 'thinks' it is smart enough to not wrap and just pisses you off even more by restricting itself but at the same time making it harder for you to read. The best example I can think of is Oracle's sqlplus tool which will try to fit a 100 character field in your window no matter what. Maybe newer versions are a little better, but either way, it's annoying.
So when I work in a ssh terminal, it isn't uncommon for me to want the window to take up the whole screen. Sure, it might not be all the time, but usually it occasionally happens.
Another example is webpages. Let's go to google's home page for instance and do a search for 'cards'. Great, search results on the left and ads on the right. Well if I resize my window to be really big this huge whitespace divider appears between the ads and the results. I like that. But google probably doesn't and google would rather have the software resize the window so that the ads are flush next to the results. My views don't agree with the software but I'm the user, I own the computer, I may have even created it, so let me do what I want.
And it isn't even that hard to do in windows: the maximize button is overrated, just double click the title bar. When the window is maximized, you can be certain (as long as your start menu is not on the top) that your window's title bar is at the top of the screen. So you fling your mouse up and double click.
So stop this BS on how things should be done. There are multiple ways to do something and each has their own advantage. There's no reason not to offer multiple options. There's nothing wrong with suggesting one method over others, but still making the others available. There is everything wrong with explicitly telling me there is only one way and just because the other ways aren't always what I want.
Nonetheless, there's nothing stopping you from making a single Mac OS X window take up the whole fucking screen. Just hide the dock, move your window into the top left corner, and resize it until it takes up the entire screen. It's just a pointless and silly task in the Mac GUI so there's no easy shortcut for it.
But that's exactly the argument. What's stopping Apple from providing this function? Bitterness to admit that microsoft sometimes does come up with useful functions? Both Gnome and Kde offer this function. But not OSX. It's exactly that attitude that pisses me off and is one major factor that makes me change my mind about buying Apple products.
I agree and I'm a little confused why he wouldn't have the necessary knowledge to understand in general how an emulator works. In my CS degree, compilers, OSes, programming languages, and computer architecture (hardware) were all required courses. Prior to taking those, we were required to take some basic introductory courses which went over some really basic concepts that would be used later.
After those core courses, I understood how a computer conceptually works at the hardware level, though I don't have the EE skills or knowledge to begin designing a circuit board. I can make my own digital logic circuits and design my own processor at a theoretical level. Later it was my decision if I wanted to a take a class to be able to really design real hardware using something like VHDL. At the very least, I would be able to design and make my own programming language and compiler. OSes are a whole different story as they are huge, but I at least understand the bootloader, DMA, and how interrupts are handled.
If it wasn't for that, he's right, I would have no clue where to start in order to write an emulator. But seeing as how I had to come up with a working compiler, though a simple one in school, I know what kind of effort would be required to write an emulator. In fact, they taught me the fundamentals to develop and understand the basics of any system whether it be the processor, the OS, or the programming language/compiler. That way if I really wanted to get into the details, starting and learning wouldn't be so bad.
So my advice would be to go back to school and make sure you take those core courses and not just take them to pass, but to understand and apply the knowledge you learn. If you already know how to learn, then maybe you can get by without school, though I don't recommend it because you'll have fewer ways to confirm that you understand what you learned. The other benefit is that when you want to learn, you find that you will ask more questions to further your knowledge and the nice thing about school (hopefully) is that the expert is right in front of you. The catch is, it's more of a 'bottom up' process where you learn the basic building blocks first and determine how they fit into the big picture rather than simply starting at the top (I have an emulator, what do I need to build it?) and work your way down.
You forgot one more thing about theaters: all of those ads you get to sit through if you show up early. It's really stupid too because they turn up the sound so you have to talk louder to the person next to you while you wait. And they wonder why people hate theaters.
The interesting thing is that Nintendo's system is SO different, it isn't straight ports that will work. Last generation, game companies could switch their target system around without much re-jiggering, but Nintendo's system requires a completely different approach because it is so unique.
How is it so different? The DEFAULT input device is very different, but the actual hardware of the system is actually very simple and more compatible with previous consoles. In fact, you can plug in your gamecube controllers into the Wii and insert a gamecube disc and it should work. You should also check out some Wii development videos where they show the dev simply swinging around the Wii remote to record the action; it makes it look like programming the Wii with the Wii remote really easy. On the other hand, we have PS3 which uses a completely different cell architecture and their dev kit is apparently quite costly as well.
I think Nintendo is getting it right this time: innovate on the input devices (Wii remote) while the underlying system remains simple. The Sony is keeping the input device mostly the same while the underlying system gets more complex. With additional input devices, Nintendo can turn the Wii into the same basic gamepad paradigm.
I used to hibernate my desktop machine at work because the IT department forgot to disable it. I thought it was great, I had the benefits of turning off the computer as well as saving the state of my desktop. Add to the fact that the boot time was much faster than a cold boot and I thought it was a huge benefit.
Later they disabled hibernation and now I can only shutdown or lock the machine. Well, so much for saving electricity. Now I leave it on most of the time. They probably have good reasons (startup scripts and such) but if there was functionality in hibernate to meet their needs I think hibernation could easily save the world lots of money especially when these windows boxes seem to gradually startup slower for some reason. It takes me a good 5 minutes to startup at work, and I can't do a single thing about it except go through the hassle of asking for a new machine. At home of course it's a totally different story.
World of Warcraft has a horrible PVP system because Blizzard never approached Realm vs Realm in a way that made you want to help out your side because it was fun. Add in instanced PVP and the randomness that makes world PVP will always be dead.
Warhammer on the other hand seems to get this somewhat. The only problem I see is that they are asking me to invest what probably amounts to 3-5 games worth of money into their game over a year. Why will this epic combat still be epic down the line when I'm fighting the same people over the same land I've been looking at for a year. Why cant the scenarios take place on the larger battlefield. Instanced Combat is such a cop out.
Other games like Shadowbane and Daoc (also owned and developed by EA Mythic) have already been done in this style. I still play Daoc to this day and you have a point, it does more or less work out if you throw enough rules at it. Other games like Shadowbane failed miserably because there were no rules. When there are no rules, and you give players a choice to choose a side, eventually one side wins and becomes a massive zerg. The remaining players are always outnumbered and can never put up a fight against the overwhelming numbers.
The only reason daoc survives is because of a set number of teams, certain tools and group setups that make zerg "busting" possible, and the community's own recognition of the problem. Now, it's no longer small groups whining about zergs or the underpopulated realm whining about being outnumbered (though it still happens to a certain degree). The players have learned to deal with the problem and construct their own communities to keep the game fun and somewhat balanced. For this reason, there exists different types of RvR in daoc: solo, small group, 8v8, and zerg. You're free to participate in all of them and EA/Mythic doesn't even put any rules to say that they exist. The player community has more or less developed these rules. While there's still nothing stopping a full group from killing solos or a zerg killing a small group, there's still a good portion of people willing to respect other fights. Only the solo players suffer because they're pretty much getting hunted by everyone and anyone and a majority of the targets are bigger fish (groups) trying to kill solos.
Anytime I hear about WoW I hear about how it's PvE is great and its PvP is terrible. But the daoc community has given up on PvE and focuses on RvR. The only time we whine about PvE is when EA/Mythic comes even close to introducing a new grind or make the grind harder. We only touch PvE as necessary and most players spend most of their time in RvR.
I seriously don't understand people who will wait in line or pay above the retail price for what will most likely be the most problem/bug prone verson of the unit.
It's funny. I like to watch anime and every other futuristic/space based one always features these new civilizations that are rebuilt yet there is 'old technology' sitting around that nobody understands. But when the old tech does work, it's usually better than the existing civilization's tech.
Sound familiar? Probably because it is. Many historians and even scientists study old technology and for a good reason. The issue here is we don't want to forget what we happened and why it happened that way so that we don't continuously make the same mistakes in the future. Even on a small scale level of weeks, a business managing a group of people could get much better insight if access to the historical data was available to generate charts and trends.
The problem isn't stupid and I don't think it is that hard. Life has managed to come up with a pretty good solution of persistence and that is to make copies of itself faster than the rate at which it decays. Why can't we do the same with data? We don't have to make the data live forever, we only have to make it live for as long as humans exist.
Take a kid in a developed country, give him a laptop, and more often than not, I will guarantee that the first thing he will become interested in is a game. This was true of myself, and the only reason I started to use the computer to learn, was because of my luck in taking a class that got me started on making web pages. I will agree that having the computer gave me the possibility to experiment and do other things, but it was only one of several factors that were necessary. I seriously doubt giving children laptops will help the situation. Maybe a few kids out of a hundred will be lucky enough to start on the right path, but even then, what use is their knowledge in a country that cannot support it?
People don't understand what the real problem is. Even if you give a country food, technology, and education, it does not necessarily mean that that country will immediately join the ranks of all of the developed nations. Look at any country that has these things and I guarantee you will find a large portion of the population attempting to immigrate, legally or illegally, into a developed nation. Why? Jobs and money.
Why put writely, jotspot etc out of business by copying them? It seems much less evil to at least pay off the startups who showed the initiative to come up with something new.
I have a copy of windows xp and had my hardware configuration change several times until my free activations ran out. When it did run out, I happened to be reinstalling pretty late around 12 midnight. At first I was pretty annoyed because I couldn't do everything automatically, but I decided to give the support phone number a try even though it was late at night. I wasn't expecting to get service but they picked up and asked for all of my windows xp codes and such. After that they asked why I was reinstalling and I just said because I changed the motherboard and I needed to reinstall to get it working again. Then they gave me a code to enter into the activation utility and I was done.
I think that this policy of limiting the number of reactivations isn't to prevent the buyer of the software from reinstalling the software on his own machines, but to prevent the buyer from freely installing the software on friends' machines. If you're forced to take 5-10 minutes out of your way to install it by calling microsoft, I'm pretty sure you probably won't be willing to do that for each of your 100 "friends".
Everyone here keeps thinking about using the flash memory as a regular "swap" style cache that it written and read many times. But I don't think that's how flash should be used. Flash memory should be used to read chunks of data often yet write to that data rarely. This applies in some applications, for example, loading program executables. You rarely overwrite the data for a program's binary yet you read from it often. If you cache all of the program executables along with their config files (which also should be written to rarely), I'm sure you could see much faster performance or power savings because the only time you would need to spin up the hard drive is when you want to save new data (assuming your flash memory has enough storage to store most of the user's programs).
My understanding on the new "ribbon" is the bar changes to show you commands that are applicable in that context. So when you are in a table for example and you select a row, the ribbon would show you the options that apply to "row" manipulations. The thought process behind the ribbon is to allow you to have fast access to all operations without going through dialogs burried in menus.
The current WinXP and office versions offer no such thing as they still use menus and dialogs. What you're talking about is how the start menu and other program menu's learn to 'hide' options from you. I agree that that is backwards, but that is not how the ribbon works.
I'm a gentoo user and I agree. I upgraded my compiler, kernel, and all of my packages a while back and the worst part of it all was that I was afraid that something in the process of the upgrades was going to break the system especially if I didn't do things right. I got through it cautiously with a few gotchas but nothing I couldn't fix myself.
Prior to that, I had problems building an mplayer version that was marked stable with certain use flags. There were also issues where I would emerge a package that was marked stable then a few weeks later it would be hard masked and attempt to unmerge itself and install some other version which failed.
Now I simply don't emerge until I'm ready to deal with the maintenance headaches because I'm afraid something or another is going to break. But I know at some point, something in my system needs to be changed or I'm going to want to install package X which depends on new version of package Y which needs compiler version Z.
I'd be much more interested in a system where I'm either not afraid to install an experimental or bleeding edge package (even if it's marked stable) as long as I'm given the option to roll back to my previously working configuration. Even better yet, insert another package marker 'stable-mature' meaning the package has been available for some duration of time (say 3 months or more) and has not had any build issues reported during that period.
The whole fixing things part is great and fun when you have plenty of time. But for other things I just want it to work, and I want to be 99% sure that it's going to work even though it's 6-month old technology. I noticed the only time I'm really interested in an upgrade is when either the new version provides functionality that I need or am interested in using or the new version includes a bug fix that I find important. Otherwise it seems like more headache and experimentation than what it's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
"Who cares about making Apple look bad. I'm concerned about the very real security implications of these actions. They're putting people at risk in order to get press and ignoring the established practices of the industry. "
Funny. I'm willing to bet if you replaced Apple with Microsoft you would have been modded down.
I've played many blizzard games and from what I have experienced, they aren't experts in innovation. What they are are experts in perfection of existing ideas for a majority of people. Every genre they have touched with successful games has already had someone else beat them to the idea first. The only difference is blizzard tends to get it right for the target market (most people) they want to capture.
I have heard nothing good about wow except that it has great PvE until level 60. After that, people have told me that it becomes the most glorified PvE treadmill ever. Many mmo players will say that prior to wow, mmorpgs already had treadmills in place. The only difference is blizzard managed to make a great game from 1-60, just long enough to sucker people into ignoring the treadmill at the end. Other mmos didn't hide this fact in the very beginning (the treadmill starts at level 1) so people get bored and give up. Was blizzard the first? I doubt it, I've seen EQ and the great efforts required to get anywhere in that game. The only problem was every mmo that tried to implement the treadmill did it poorly (too blatant, or too obvious up front for the newbie).
Sure, I'll give em that they do innovate in smaller areas of gameplay (interface, controls, slight game mechanics changes, etc...) but something totally new for a genre? No. Show me something like Spore or a Wii and I'll call blizzard innovative. That doesn't mean that they can't be successful or have good products, in fact, I think they make very good products. But I wouldn't call them innovative in terms of gaming innovation.
Sure, it is a metric but I still think it is a poor one because it does not account for the improvements in technology. A better metric would be the average broadband speed available to consumers. Compare that metric to other countries and you'll have much better data on how competitive and advanced the U.S. market is compared to other countries.
But we all know that that number is probably going to be much lower so of course the FCC and all of it's corporate buddies want to paint a different picture.
I believe the point of the post was that the operation was abstract and required extra knowledge, not that there are better/worse alternatives. The point is, you still have to learn/know something. The only way to avoid it is to make it work out of the box. Power users and people interested in stuff like that (geeks) may not care. But for everyone else it's like their car broke down in the middle of the road. They have no way of fixing it other than calling a mechanic or learning more about the car themselves--neither of which they are interested in except that it is the only way to get the car working again.
So why is Portugal's percentage high and Japan and the US's percentages low? My opinion is that it is partially culture based. Just turn on the TV in the US and you'll see all of these commercials toward women advertising clothing, jewelry, and beauty products. In TV shows the scientists are almost always men. The engineers are almost always men. The geeks are almost always men.
If you want a neutral preference on gender in workforces, you're going to have to disassociate the cultural links between gender and professions. But that will never happen because the marketing departments will always choose the best role model for gender when they want to sell a product to a group of people.
Programs that may attempt to include bonuses for women to enter into male dominated fields don't work in my opinion. It's like saying you're entering a one sex dominated field and you probably won't feel as welcome just because you're surrounded by guys, but hey, to make up for it we'll offer you a scholarship of some sort. Every girl I talked to when I was in school I asked "why did you choose cs?" and the answer was never "because it's dominated by guys and I can get this cool scholarship." It was either the girl was actually interested in it, she had friends that were going into CS, or her parents influenced her decision. STRANGELY, those answers aren't all that much different from guy answers...
Want your kid to be more interested in sciences and engineering? Take away the doll and give her Legos. And don't turn on the TV to let her see all those commercials of "girl" toys either. It starts when they're kids, not when they're 18 and have already been influenced by so many outside inputs.
Isn't that every language? I'm not bilingual but I've spent (and still am spending) a good amount of time learning other languages (French, Japanese). Every language has funny rules that don't make sense but after spending all that time studying these other languages I've found funny rules in each of them that are unexplainable and are only solved by memorization.
For instance French is funny compared to English because every noun has a gender but no such thing exists in English. The gender gives the phrases no additional information but is so much a part of the language that you can't get by without memorizing the genders for all of the words.
Japanese is funny because they have different ways of counting things depending on the object's properties and I still have a hard time understanding the usefulness of Kanji.
However, each language has their benefits and consistencies compared to one another. French has more consistent spellings compared to English (thanks Webster). For example anytime in French when you see 'eau' it is always pronounced the same way. English goes the wrong direction and overloads certain spellings with different sounds so when you see a word you've never seen before, you always have to 'guess' at how it is pronounced. Japanese has a pretty superior particle system (almost everything has a particle minus some funny rules...again) that makes certain aspects of it easy to learn.
There are some things that English does pretty well though. I think it does a decent job of accepting words from other languages and attempting to preserve the sound of the original word as long as the speaker is willing. In Japanese they take many words from other languages but because their system is based on the Kana system everything gets morphed quite a bit. For example "beer" is "bi-ru" because their kana system has no single 'r' sound. English also has fewer verb conjugations compared to something like French (I/you/they/we eat, he/she eats VS (I) Je mange, (you-casual) tu manges, (he/she) il/elle mange, (we) nous mangeons, (you-formal) vous mangez, (they-guys+girls/they-girls-only) ils/elles mangent).
I care. Apple is marketing this device as a "do it all" device yet I'm limited to the amount of space the thing comes with? I wouldn't bring up the issue except the fact that it will be storing pictures, music, and video. That's huge, especially the video part.
Honestly what I was thinking when I saw this announcement was that I wished Nintendo was the company that announced the "iphone" not Apple because Nintendo actually thinks about consumer wallets first and THEN tries to meet as many expectations with as possible within those cost constraints (see Wii). With Apple you know why they didn't include a memory card slot: they want you to buy the next bigger version and full price. Had they offered a memory card slot you could easily get by on the lower end version with the intention of expanding the memory via additional memory cards.
Oh yeah, as of right now I have 4 different SD cards of different sizes and I own 3 devices (pda, camera, and wii) other than computers that use them. So while you don't care people like me find it as a bonus and convenience (picture viewing on the wii) if the device supports media other devices are capable of utilizing.
Software is probably the only industry where you can get paid to fix your mistakes.
Incorrect.
When you have a terminal open and you start running commands, some command output doesn't care about the window size; a line is a line and until a new line is encountered or the end of the window is reached, the line won't wrap. It is equally annoying when the software 'thinks' it is smart enough to not wrap and just pisses you off even more by restricting itself but at the same time making it harder for you to read. The best example I can think of is Oracle's sqlplus tool which will try to fit a 100 character field in your window no matter what. Maybe newer versions are a little better, but either way, it's annoying.
So when I work in a ssh terminal, it isn't uncommon for me to want the window to take up the whole screen. Sure, it might not be all the time, but usually it occasionally happens.
Another example is webpages. Let's go to google's home page for instance and do a search for 'cards'. Great, search results on the left and ads on the right. Well if I resize my window to be really big this huge whitespace divider appears between the ads and the results. I like that. But google probably doesn't and google would rather have the software resize the window so that the ads are flush next to the results. My views don't agree with the software but I'm the user, I own the computer, I may have even created it, so let me do what I want.
And it isn't even that hard to do in windows: the maximize button is overrated, just double click the title bar. When the window is maximized, you can be certain (as long as your start menu is not on the top) that your window's title bar is at the top of the screen. So you fling your mouse up and double click.
So stop this BS on how things should be done. There are multiple ways to do something and each has their own advantage. There's no reason not to offer multiple options. There's nothing wrong with suggesting one method over others, but still making the others available. There is everything wrong with explicitly telling me there is only one way and just because the other ways aren't always what I want.
But that's exactly the argument. What's stopping Apple from providing this function? Bitterness to admit that microsoft sometimes does come up with useful functions? Both Gnome and Kde offer this function. But not OSX. It's exactly that attitude that pisses me off and is one major factor that makes me change my mind about buying Apple products.
I agree and I'm a little confused why he wouldn't have the necessary knowledge to understand in general how an emulator works. In my CS degree, compilers, OSes, programming languages, and computer architecture (hardware) were all required courses. Prior to taking those, we were required to take some basic introductory courses which went over some really basic concepts that would be used later.
After those core courses, I understood how a computer conceptually works at the hardware level, though I don't have the EE skills or knowledge to begin designing a circuit board. I can make my own digital logic circuits and design my own processor at a theoretical level. Later it was my decision if I wanted to a take a class to be able to really design real hardware using something like VHDL. At the very least, I would be able to design and make my own programming language and compiler. OSes are a whole different story as they are huge, but I at least understand the bootloader, DMA, and how interrupts are handled.
If it wasn't for that, he's right, I would have no clue where to start in order to write an emulator. But seeing as how I had to come up with a working compiler, though a simple one in school, I know what kind of effort would be required to write an emulator. In fact, they taught me the fundamentals to develop and understand the basics of any system whether it be the processor, the OS, or the programming language/compiler. That way if I really wanted to get into the details, starting and learning wouldn't be so bad.
So my advice would be to go back to school and make sure you take those core courses and not just take them to pass, but to understand and apply the knowledge you learn. If you already know how to learn, then maybe you can get by without school, though I don't recommend it because you'll have fewer ways to confirm that you understand what you learned. The other benefit is that when you want to learn, you find that you will ask more questions to further your knowledge and the nice thing about school (hopefully) is that the expert is right in front of you. The catch is, it's more of a 'bottom up' process where you learn the basic building blocks first and determine how they fit into the big picture rather than simply starting at the top (I have an emulator, what do I need to build it?) and work your way down.
You forgot one more thing about theaters: all of those ads you get to sit through if you show up early. It's really stupid too because they turn up the sound so you have to talk louder to the person next to you while you wait. And they wonder why people hate theaters.
(I'm (sorry))
You don't (happen to (program (lisp))) do you?
How is it so different? The DEFAULT input device is very different, but the actual hardware of the system is actually very simple and more compatible with previous consoles. In fact, you can plug in your gamecube controllers into the Wii and insert a gamecube disc and it should work. You should also check out some Wii development videos where they show the dev simply swinging around the Wii remote to record the action; it makes it look like programming the Wii with the Wii remote really easy. On the other hand, we have PS3 which uses a completely different cell architecture and their dev kit is apparently quite costly as well.
I think Nintendo is getting it right this time: innovate on the input devices (Wii remote) while the underlying system remains simple. The Sony is keeping the input device mostly the same while the underlying system gets more complex. With additional input devices, Nintendo can turn the Wii into the same basic gamepad paradigm.
I used to hibernate my desktop machine at work because the IT department forgot to disable it. I thought it was great, I had the benefits of turning off the computer as well as saving the state of my desktop. Add to the fact that the boot time was much faster than a cold boot and I thought it was a huge benefit.
Later they disabled hibernation and now I can only shutdown or lock the machine. Well, so much for saving electricity. Now I leave it on most of the time. They probably have good reasons (startup scripts and such) but if there was functionality in hibernate to meet their needs I think hibernation could easily save the world lots of money especially when these windows boxes seem to gradually startup slower for some reason. It takes me a good 5 minutes to startup at work, and I can't do a single thing about it except go through the hassle of asking for a new machine. At home of course it's a totally different story.
Other games like Shadowbane and Daoc (also owned and developed by EA Mythic) have already been done in this style. I still play Daoc to this day and you have a point, it does more or less work out if you throw enough rules at it. Other games like Shadowbane failed miserably because there were no rules. When there are no rules, and you give players a choice to choose a side, eventually one side wins and becomes a massive zerg. The remaining players are always outnumbered and can never put up a fight against the overwhelming numbers.
The only reason daoc survives is because of a set number of teams, certain tools and group setups that make zerg "busting" possible, and the community's own recognition of the problem. Now, it's no longer small groups whining about zergs or the underpopulated realm whining about being outnumbered (though it still happens to a certain degree). The players have learned to deal with the problem and construct their own communities to keep the game fun and somewhat balanced. For this reason, there exists different types of RvR in daoc: solo, small group, 8v8, and zerg. You're free to participate in all of them and EA/Mythic doesn't even put any rules to say that they exist. The player community has more or less developed these rules. While there's still nothing stopping a full group from killing solos or a zerg killing a small group, there's still a good portion of people willing to respect other fights. Only the solo players suffer because they're pretty much getting hunted by everyone and anyone and a majority of the targets are bigger fish (groups) trying to kill solos.
Anytime I hear about WoW I hear about how it's PvE is great and its PvP is terrible. But the daoc community has given up on PvE and focuses on RvR. The only time we whine about PvE is when EA/Mythic comes even close to introducing a new grind or make the grind harder. We only touch PvE as necessary and most players spend most of their time in RvR.
It's funny. I like to watch anime and every other futuristic/space based one always features these new civilizations that are rebuilt yet there is 'old technology' sitting around that nobody understands. But when the old tech does work, it's usually better than the existing civilization's tech.
Sound familiar? Probably because it is. Many historians and even scientists study old technology and for a good reason. The issue here is we don't want to forget what we happened and why it happened that way so that we don't continuously make the same mistakes in the future. Even on a small scale level of weeks, a business managing a group of people could get much better insight if access to the historical data was available to generate charts and trends.
The problem isn't stupid and I don't think it is that hard. Life has managed to come up with a pretty good solution of persistence and that is to make copies of itself faster than the rate at which it decays. Why can't we do the same with data? We don't have to make the data live forever, we only have to make it live for as long as humans exist.
Take a kid in a developed country, give him a laptop, and more often than not, I will guarantee that the first thing he will become interested in is a game. This was true of myself, and the only reason I started to use the computer to learn, was because of my luck in taking a class that got me started on making web pages. I will agree that having the computer gave me the possibility to experiment and do other things, but it was only one of several factors that were necessary. I seriously doubt giving children laptops will help the situation. Maybe a few kids out of a hundred will be lucky enough to start on the right path, but even then, what use is their knowledge in a country that cannot support it?
People don't understand what the real problem is. Even if you give a country food, technology, and education, it does not necessarily mean that that country will immediately join the ranks of all of the developed nations. Look at any country that has these things and I guarantee you will find a large portion of the population attempting to immigrate, legally or illegally, into a developed nation. Why? Jobs and money.
Probably because in the past, Google's offering was less popular than a competitor's offering. Even though Google has a lot of smart people, Google still made the decision to buy its competitor.
If you can't beat them, buy them!
I have a copy of windows xp and had my hardware configuration change several times until my free activations ran out. When it did run out, I happened to be reinstalling pretty late around 12 midnight. At first I was pretty annoyed because I couldn't do everything automatically, but I decided to give the support phone number a try even though it was late at night. I wasn't expecting to get service but they picked up and asked for all of my windows xp codes and such. After that they asked why I was reinstalling and I just said because I changed the motherboard and I needed to reinstall to get it working again. Then they gave me a code to enter into the activation utility and I was done.
I think that this policy of limiting the number of reactivations isn't to prevent the buyer of the software from reinstalling the software on his own machines, but to prevent the buyer from freely installing the software on friends' machines. If you're forced to take 5-10 minutes out of your way to install it by calling microsoft, I'm pretty sure you probably won't be willing to do that for each of your 100 "friends".
"Don't think about what the company can do for you, think about what YOU can do for the company."
-Office Space
Everyone here keeps thinking about using the flash memory as a regular "swap" style cache that it written and read many times. But I don't think that's how flash should be used. Flash memory should be used to read chunks of data often yet write to that data rarely. This applies in some applications, for example, loading program executables. You rarely overwrite the data for a program's binary yet you read from it often. If you cache all of the program executables along with their config files (which also should be written to rarely), I'm sure you could see much faster performance or power savings because the only time you would need to spin up the hard drive is when you want to save new data (assuming your flash memory has enough storage to store most of the user's programs).
My understanding on the new "ribbon" is the bar changes to show you commands that are applicable in that context. So when you are in a table for example and you select a row, the ribbon would show you the options that apply to "row" manipulations. The thought process behind the ribbon is to allow you to have fast access to all operations without going through dialogs burried in menus.
The current WinXP and office versions offer no such thing as they still use menus and dialogs. What you're talking about is how the start menu and other program menu's learn to 'hide' options from you. I agree that that is backwards, but that is not how the ribbon works.
How about Tokyo?
http://www.urbanplanet.org/forums/lofiversion/inde x.php/t4574.html
I'm a gentoo user and I agree. I upgraded my compiler, kernel, and all of my packages a while back and the worst part of it all was that I was afraid that something in the process of the upgrades was going to break the system especially if I didn't do things right. I got through it cautiously with a few gotchas but nothing I couldn't fix myself.
Prior to that, I had problems building an mplayer version that was marked stable with certain use flags. There were also issues where I would emerge a package that was marked stable then a few weeks later it would be hard masked and attempt to unmerge itself and install some other version which failed.
Now I simply don't emerge until I'm ready to deal with the maintenance headaches because I'm afraid something or another is going to break. But I know at some point, something in my system needs to be changed or I'm going to want to install package X which depends on new version of package Y which needs compiler version Z.
I'd be much more interested in a system where I'm either not afraid to install an experimental or bleeding edge package (even if it's marked stable) as long as I'm given the option to roll back to my previously working configuration. Even better yet, insert another package marker 'stable-mature' meaning the package has been available for some duration of time (say 3 months or more) and has not had any build issues reported during that period.
The whole fixing things part is great and fun when you have plenty of time. But for other things I just want it to work, and I want to be 99% sure that it's going to work even though it's 6-month old technology. I noticed the only time I'm really interested in an upgrade is when either the new version provides functionality that I need or am interested in using or the new version includes a bug fix that I find important. Otherwise it seems like more headache and experimentation than what it's worth.