Go read up on the Xbox Live Arcade - it provides exactly what you're talking about - right now. And it's very succesful, with small publishers like Popcap writing small, fun, cheap games and selling a lot of copies. I hope Nintendo pull off something as good or even better, but let's not pretend they're offering something unique.
Compared to what?? I'm a 5 year veteran of server-side and client Java development, I recently built an app in C#/.NET mainly to see how it is. Some thought:
Visual Studio sucks. Really. I can only believe that everyone who loves it so much has never used a decent IDE before. Where's the refactoring? Where's the analysis? Where's the (working) real time error highlighting? Where's the customization (what if I don't want double-click to open the fricking GUI editor every time)? I could go on. Installing Resharper (from the same guys who do IntelliJ - a REALLY good IDE) improved things a lot, but it's still a mess.
C# as a language is, well, meh. It's alright. Doesn't do anything (important) that Java doesn't and screws up a few things quite royally. Structs are worse than useless, they're dangerous. Value and reference types are impossible to distinguish, again for no really good reason. I like the delegate stuff, event handling is neat, and the Property syntax is a bit neater than get/set. But where's the new cool stuff? Just not there..NET as a platform is very immature, which is to be expected - Java wasn't so great in the early days. The collections framework is really lacking - no Sets? That's just an example. Windows Forms is decent, no surprise there, it's really the platforms major selling point. Certainly for building Windows GUI apps Forms is a big step up from Swing.
So my overall experience has been pretty much what I expected - it's a Java wannabe that has some potential but needs some work. We'll see how things pan out.
Where on earth did you get all that from? Firstly, what are these "seemingly endless disasters" with the 360? They can't make them fast enough to satisfy demand, but what's new there with a console launch? Other than that and one game (DOA4) missing it's launch window - what's the problem? The japan issue really doesn't affect EA much, as Madden is hardly a big seller outside of the US.
This is the second time in a few months that EA management has specifically and publicly expressed their extreme displeasure with Microsoft and the 360.
Quote? Here's mine, from the CEO yesterday:
"We also had a successful launch on the Xbox 360 and expect that we will be the number one publisher on this platform in 2006"
Outside of some of the bigger sports titles, 360 projects are getting canceled at EA.
Really? Name one.
EA's management loved putting Microsoft in their place when they very publicly ignored the Xbox online service.
Now you're smoking. EA ignored XBL originally for sure, but the roar of disapproval from actual players was audible even in EA central. Guess what? Everything they do is now XBL enabled and has been for some time. Way to "stick it to the man". Please.
Errr....where on earth did you get that from? Geometry Wars was a 360 launch title - it was available on the Arcade from Nov 22 2005. It's one of the best selling (if not the best selling) titles on the Arcade.
The games cost money, nothing new there. Are they overpriced? Personally (with some exceptions) I think not, but if you do then you're free not to buy them.
As for your assertions that you can buy progress in the games (a) show me any example of this in any XBL game (b) explain why it's XBL taking us down this path when people have been buying MMORPG loot & characters on ebay for years.
Re:Uh, read then reply please.
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
But in most cases a difference in incoming type will force a difference in how you handle it, hence different methods. Sure, there will be commonality, and that's where your two overloaded methods do some prep work and then call a third common method to do the rest. Neat and elegant. When you _really_ don't care which of the permissiable types you've been give, well that's what inheritence was invented for. The other nice thing about using a supertype is that future maintainers can plugin new types you hadn't thought of and still use your method without an edit & recompile. Makes a lot more sense to me that adding yet another "|something" into the signature of every method.
I'm sorry but I did read your post and I don't see that solution as being the best of either world, never mind both.
Re:Dynamic typing
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Or you could just use overloading:
public foo doFoo(float) {..} public foo doFoo(int) {..}
or inheritence:
public foo doFoo(number) {..}
rather than dynamic typing:
public foo doFoo(your_guess_is_as_good_as_mine) {..}
I'm firmly in the static typing camp. Not only does it make things more reliable (due to compilers catching errors) it also prevents those errors in the first place by allowing IDEs to be smart and suggest appropriate parameters. Going back to dynamic typing also means going back to vi as the ultimate editor, and I really am not ready to give up my IntelliJ thanks.
Rather than all this expensive tech, why not just make it so the cars actually fit onto the road, maybe using some kind of raised rail to ensure they can't stray from the lane. Then, to avoid collisions, make all the cars go the same speed by actually connecting them together. You could even save energy by making the share one big engine at the front! You could even make it possible for people to move from one car to the next, maybe to get a drink from a special convenience car!
Mature OSS projects generally are modularized well, because parallel development is greatly hampered otherwise. Closed projects tend to be much dirtier in this respect.
Whilst I agree with most of what you say, this is a real stretch. You seem to imply that whilst OSS projects are developed by a large number of developers, closed source ones are typically one or two man shows (otherwise, how could they not need the same ease of parallel development?). This is, in my experience, generally false. I have worked on closed source projects with over 100 active, full time developers, and that's not particularly unusual. There are few OSS projects of that size, and the majority (judging by what I see on sourceforge) are basically solo efforts. With the obvious exceptions of the (very) big projects like Apache, JBoss, etc much of the OSS code I've reviewed and used has been very much in the "super developer" model with little thought given to reuse and modularity, never mind parallel development.
Your post would make PERFECT sense, if only the guild in question was not allowing hetrosexuals to join. However, as was pretty clear to me from the summary (no I did not RTFA) they simply were GLBT _friendly_ - not exclusive. In other words, a place for people to go to escape the usual bigoted crap thrown around during online play. I'm hetro but if I played WoW and saw such a guild I'd probably join myself, those "OMFG!!!SO GHEY!!!" losers get very tiring.
If you want to go and form a "hetrosexual friendly" guild of your own go for it, you will be one of _many_.
XP DOES have it - check out "runas". It doesn't always work perfectly (as some apps/commands don't like it) but the intent is there. Seems like Vista will have a properly integrated version with better support. I fail to see how this is a bad thing.
As a VP for a tech-heavy Fortune 100 company who currently has Visual Studio 2003 _and_ IntelliJ IDEA (never mind Slashdot) open on my desktop, I can quite categorically state you're full of it. Sure I spend plenty of time in meetings and on the phone, and yes I am here to provide guidance and direction (which you could call vision if you want), but I also build apps. Sorry to disappoint you...
Not everyone's a GW fan. I have it, and it's mildly entertaining, but for whatever reason I just suck at it. Which gives it a pretty short attention span. PGR3 on the other hand....
Still think it's insignificant? Compared to how much energy those people use for things other than not watching TV, yes I do. Any number can be multiplied up enough times to make it seem big, but to get an impression of whether it really is or not requires context.
For some context here, according to this page, in 2004 the total US electricity demand was 692,908MW (693GW). So your figure (which I suspect is high, but this is all wild ass speculation!) is 0.19% of the total.
Personally, I'm more concerned about the other 99.81%:)
Sure, I was able to work out it was 9W using the DC math, but my vague memory of physics (and the manual of my power meter) tells me that it's different for AC. In other words it tells me it's using 9VA but 0W - I couldn't tell you the difference.
Anyway, let's say it is 9W. That's 1 sixth of a lightbulb. It would take almost 5 days to use 1 kWh of electricity, or cost $7.50 to power it for a year. So no, I don't see what the problem is. Rather than switching the TV off, I'll just leave a light off for 10 minutes a day - will save the same amount of power.
Before you tag me as some crazy SUV driving energy comsuming monster - you're wrong. I do care about environmental issues and power consumption. But I also have a sense of scale. I know how much energy I use with things like A/C, cooking, driving and heating. The amount used by the TV pales into complete insignificance next to those. I'm all for making changes, but there's no point trying to make myself feel good that I'm "making a difference" by switching off the TV. Switching the A/C off when I go out, driving a more fuel efficient car, using public transport where possible - all of these make a FAR bigger difference than that.
Most games are around 15-25 hours, even being generous you're looking at $2 an hour. When I buy a CD for (on average) $12-$15 I'm going to listen to it at least 10-20 times - if it's good, a lot more. At 74 mins (yes, almost all the CDs I buy are full) that's closer to $0.50 per hours. So gaming is 4 times more expensive than listening to music, which is fine, I like to do both, but it's hardly comparable "value".
I really don't understand the problem here. I just measured my TV with a power meter. Powered up, it takes 93W @120V. In standby it drops to 0W. Of course it's not really 0, but my meter can't measure it. I do see 0.07A, so I guess there's a trickle there, but I'm not overly concerned.
I think you'd be surprised. All the logitech wireless keyboards I've used recently (even the cheapy $30 ones) have encrypted communications. That, coupled with a range of only a few feet, make me feel pretty secure.
In reality what would happen is that each song would be $5 (for the ones you could buy, new songs no being purchasable for about a year or so). So you'd be feeding a lot less music into those nice boxes, the market share for shich would be smaller because online sales would ever remain a tiny niche.
Why? I really don't understand this argument. Why would Apple licensing FairPlay to (for example) Sonos affect prices on iTMS? Sure if they licensed it to other media services (like Rhapsody) I could see it having an effect (although I personally think it would push prices down, not up - competition tends to do that) but licensing to other hardware manufacturers would have no effect whatsoever, other than to potentially diminish iPod sales, and that's what they're worried about.
Apple has enough leverage to keep online music sales resonably priced and therefore interesting. Licensing the format would simply mean no power to any online music store and a music industry that decided what you could and could not do.
Walmart sell a lot of CDs, but they're not the only seller. Are you suggesting that it Walmart became the only place you could buy CDs that the price would drop? That seems highly unlikely. History and basic economics show us that when a certain commodity is availabile from more than one source the average price will drop. Look at the WMA based services (Yahoo, Rhapsody, Walmart, etc) - last time I looked they all offered better value (i.e. lower costs) than iTMS. Why? Competition. Currently, for a lot of people (iPod owners), they only have one source for legal downloads. That's never a good thing.
You seem to think my comment was negative, or in some way attacking Apple. It wasn't. I was simply pointing out that as a company in business they exist for one reason and one reason only - to make money. Anything and everything they do is towards that goal. That holds for Apple, Microsoft, Glaxo, Nestle, Google and everyone else.
I'm equally tired of people who believe (and preach) that their personal company de'jour is somehow acting alturistically and in the best interests of society at large - they're not.
Of course there's a reason to license FairPlay - actually quite a few.
Firstly there's allowing your customers to play the music they purchase from you on the device of their choice, whether a competitor to one of your own or one in a market you don't support - for example a network media player (e.g. Squeezebox or Sonos) or a car-based player (e.g. Phatbox). Secondly there's bringing new customers to your music store by attracting those who, for whatever reason, don't choose to buy your players (say goodbye to Rhapsody, Napster, et al). I'm sure there are more I can't think of right now (income from licensing fees? Could be quite substantial in itself).
However, of course, these are not good reasons (well, not good for Apple's accountants) because as we all know iTMS (and therefore FairPlay) exists for one reason and one reason alone - to sell iPods. Anything which dilutes the iTMS/iPod coupling is bad for Apple, hence they will never license FairPlay. Don't kid yourself that Apple are keeping FairPlay locked up for your benefit, they're a corporation just like any other - their only driver is the bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
Go read up on the Xbox Live Arcade - it provides exactly what you're talking about - right now. And it's very succesful, with small publishers like Popcap writing small, fun, cheap games and selling a lot of copies. I hope Nintendo pull off something as good or even better, but let's not pretend they're offering something unique.
The results aren't being manually modified. What's being modified is the index contents, from which the results are automatically generated.
Compared to what?? I'm a 5 year veteran of server-side and client Java development, I recently built an app in C#/.NET mainly to see how it is. Some thought:
.NET as a platform is very immature, which is to be expected - Java wasn't so great in the early days. The collections framework is really lacking - no Sets? That's just an example. Windows Forms is decent, no surprise there, it's really the platforms major selling point. Certainly for building Windows GUI apps Forms is a big step up from Swing.
Visual Studio sucks. Really. I can only believe that everyone who loves it so much has never used a decent IDE before. Where's the refactoring? Where's the analysis? Where's the (working) real time error highlighting? Where's the customization (what if I don't want double-click to open the fricking GUI editor every time)? I could go on. Installing Resharper (from the same guys who do IntelliJ - a REALLY good IDE) improved things a lot, but it's still a mess.
C# as a language is, well, meh. It's alright. Doesn't do anything (important) that Java doesn't and screws up a few things quite royally. Structs are worse than useless, they're dangerous. Value and reference types are impossible to distinguish, again for no really good reason. I like the delegate stuff, event handling is neat, and the Property syntax is a bit neater than get/set. But where's the new cool stuff? Just not there.
So my overall experience has been pretty much what I expected - it's a Java wannabe that has some potential but needs some work. We'll see how things pan out.
Where on earth did you get all that from? Firstly, what are these "seemingly endless disasters" with the 360? They can't make them fast enough to satisfy demand, but what's new there with a console launch? Other than that and one game (DOA4) missing it's launch window - what's the problem? The japan issue really doesn't affect EA much, as Madden is hardly a big seller outside of the US.
This is the second time in a few months that EA management has specifically and publicly expressed their extreme displeasure with Microsoft and the 360.
Quote? Here's mine, from the CEO yesterday:
"We also had a successful launch on the Xbox 360 and expect that we will be the number one publisher on this platform in 2006"
Outside of some of the bigger sports titles, 360 projects are getting canceled at EA.
Really? Name one.
EA's management loved putting Microsoft in their place when they very publicly ignored the Xbox online service.
Now you're smoking. EA ignored XBL originally for sure, but the roar of disapproval from actual players was audible even in EA central. Guess what? Everything they do is now XBL enabled and has been for some time. Way to "stick it to the man". Please.
Errr....where on earth did you get that from? Geometry Wars was a 360 launch title - it was available on the Arcade from Nov 22 2005. It's one of the best selling (if not the best selling) titles on the Arcade.
The games cost money, nothing new there. Are they overpriced? Personally (with some exceptions) I think not, but if you do then you're free not to buy them.
As for your assertions that you can buy progress in the games (a) show me any example of this in any XBL game (b) explain why it's XBL taking us down this path when people have been buying MMORPG loot & characters on ebay for years.
But in most cases a difference in incoming type will force a difference in how you handle it, hence different methods. Sure, there will be commonality, and that's where your two overloaded methods do some prep work and then call a third common method to do the rest. Neat and elegant. When you _really_ don't care which of the permissiable types you've been give, well that's what inheritence was invented for. The other nice thing about using a supertype is that future maintainers can plugin new types you hadn't thought of and still use your method without an edit & recompile. Makes a lot more sense to me that adding yet another "|something" into the signature of every method.
I'm sorry but I did read your post and I don't see that solution as being the best of either world, never mind both.
Heh. Exactly what I was thinking. What's the point of a car you don't drive?
Here's an idea:
Rather than all this expensive tech, why not just make it so the cars actually fit onto the road, maybe using some kind of raised rail to ensure they can't stray from the lane. Then, to avoid collisions, make all the cars go the same speed by actually connecting them together. You could even save energy by making the share one big engine at the front! You could even make it possible for people to move from one car to the next, maybe to get a drink from a special convenience car!
Wow. I think I'll call it the "Train".
Mature OSS projects generally are modularized well, because parallel development is greatly hampered otherwise. Closed projects tend to be much dirtier in this respect.
Whilst I agree with most of what you say, this is a real stretch. You seem to imply that whilst OSS projects are developed by a large number of developers, closed source ones are typically one or two man shows (otherwise, how could they not need the same ease of parallel development?). This is, in my experience, generally false. I have worked on closed source projects with over 100 active, full time developers, and that's not particularly unusual. There are few OSS projects of that size, and the majority (judging by what I see on sourceforge) are basically solo efforts. With the obvious exceptions of the (very) big projects like Apache, JBoss, etc much of the OSS code I've reviewed and used has been very much in the "super developer" model with little thought given to reuse and modularity, never mind parallel development.
Your post would make PERFECT sense, if only the guild in question was not allowing hetrosexuals to join. However, as was pretty clear to me from the summary (no I did not RTFA) they simply were GLBT _friendly_ - not exclusive. In other words, a place for people to go to escape the usual bigoted crap thrown around during online play. I'm hetro but if I played WoW and saw such a guild I'd probably join myself, those "OMFG!!!SO GHEY!!!" losers get very tiring.
If you want to go and form a "hetrosexual friendly" guild of your own go for it, you will be one of _many_.
XP DOES have it - check out "runas". It doesn't always work perfectly (as some apps/commands don't like it) but the intent is there. Seems like Vista will have a properly integrated version with better support. I fail to see how this is a bad thing.
As a VP for a tech-heavy Fortune 100 company who currently has Visual Studio 2003 _and_ IntelliJ IDEA (never mind Slashdot) open on my desktop, I can quite categorically state you're full of it. Sure I spend plenty of time in meetings and on the phone, and yes I am here to provide guidance and direction (which you could call vision if you want), but I also build apps. Sorry to disappoint you...
I've had two in two days...that must really rile you
Wow. You're bragging about getting FP. That says it all about your maturity and intellect.
Not everyone's a GW fan. I have it, and it's mildly entertaining, but for whatever reason I just suck at it. Which gives it a pretty short attention span. PGR3 on the other hand....
Still think it's insignificant?
:)
Compared to how much energy those people use for things other than not watching TV, yes I do. Any number can be multiplied up enough times to make it seem big, but to get an impression of whether it really is or not requires context.
For some context here, according to this page, in 2004 the total US electricity demand was 692,908MW (693GW). So your figure (which I suspect is high, but this is all wild ass speculation!) is 0.19% of the total.
Personally, I'm more concerned about the other 99.81%
Sure, I was able to work out it was 9W using the DC math, but my vague memory of physics (and the manual of my power meter) tells me that it's different for AC. In other words it tells me it's using 9VA but 0W - I couldn't tell you the difference.
Anyway, let's say it is 9W. That's 1 sixth of a lightbulb. It would take almost 5 days to use 1 kWh of electricity, or cost $7.50 to power it for a year. So no, I don't see what the problem is. Rather than switching the TV off, I'll just leave a light off for 10 minutes a day - will save the same amount of power.
Before you tag me as some crazy SUV driving energy comsuming monster - you're wrong. I do care about environmental issues and power consumption. But I also have a sense of scale. I know how much energy I use with things like A/C, cooking, driving and heating. The amount used by the TV pales into complete insignificance next to those. I'm all for making changes, but there's no point trying to make myself feel good that I'm "making a difference" by switching off the TV. Switching the A/C off when I go out, driving a more fuel efficient car, using public transport where possible - all of these make a FAR bigger difference than that.
Most games are around 15-25 hours, even being generous you're looking at $2 an hour. When I buy a CD for (on average) $12-$15 I'm going to listen to it at least 10-20 times - if it's good, a lot more. At 74 mins (yes, almost all the CDs I buy are full) that's closer to $0.50 per hours. So gaming is 4 times more expensive than listening to music, which is fine, I like to do both, but it's hardly comparable "value".
I really don't understand the problem here. I just measured my TV with a power meter. Powered up, it takes 93W @120V. In standby it drops to 0W. Of course it's not really 0, but my meter can't measure it. I do see 0.07A, so I guess there's a trickle there, but I'm not overly concerned.
I think you'd be surprised. All the logitech wireless keyboards I've used recently (even the cheapy $30 ones) have encrypted communications. That, coupled with a range of only a few feet, make me feel pretty secure.
Because, of course, the manufacturers would never think of that and, I dunno, maybe, encrypt the traffic? Sheesh.
In reality what would happen is that each song would be $5 (for the ones you could buy, new songs no being purchasable for about a year or so). So you'd be feeding a lot less music into those nice boxes, the market share for shich would be smaller because online sales would ever remain a tiny niche.
Why? I really don't understand this argument. Why would Apple licensing FairPlay to (for example) Sonos affect prices on iTMS? Sure if they licensed it to other media services (like Rhapsody) I could see it having an effect (although I personally think it would push prices down, not up - competition tends to do that) but licensing to other hardware manufacturers would have no effect whatsoever, other than to potentially diminish iPod sales, and that's what they're worried about.
Apple has enough leverage to keep online music sales resonably priced and therefore interesting. Licensing the format would simply mean no power to any online music store and a music industry that decided what you could and could not do.
Walmart sell a lot of CDs, but they're not the only seller. Are you suggesting that it Walmart became the only place you could buy CDs that the price would drop? That seems highly unlikely. History and basic economics show us that when a certain commodity is availabile from more than one source the average price will drop. Look at the WMA based services (Yahoo, Rhapsody, Walmart, etc) - last time I looked they all offered better value (i.e. lower costs) than iTMS. Why? Competition. Currently, for a lot of people (iPod owners), they only have one source for legal downloads. That's never a good thing.
You seem to think my comment was negative, or in some way attacking Apple. It wasn't. I was simply pointing out that as a company in business they exist for one reason and one reason only - to make money. Anything and everything they do is towards that goal. That holds for Apple, Microsoft, Glaxo, Nestle, Google and everyone else.
I'm equally tired of people who believe (and preach) that their personal company de'jour is somehow acting alturistically and in the best interests of society at large - they're not.
There is no reason whatsoever to license FairPlay
Of course there's a reason to license FairPlay - actually quite a few.
Firstly there's allowing your customers to play the music they purchase from you on the device of their choice, whether a competitor to one of your own or one in a market you don't support - for example a network media player (e.g. Squeezebox or Sonos) or a car-based player (e.g. Phatbox). Secondly there's bringing new customers to your music store by attracting those who, for whatever reason, don't choose to buy your players (say goodbye to Rhapsody, Napster, et al). I'm sure there are more I can't think of right now (income from licensing fees? Could be quite substantial in itself).
However, of course, these are not good reasons (well, not good for Apple's accountants) because as we all know iTMS (and therefore FairPlay) exists for one reason and one reason alone - to sell iPods. Anything which dilutes the iTMS/iPod coupling is bad for Apple, hence they will never license FairPlay. Don't kid yourself that Apple are keeping FairPlay locked up for your benefit, they're a corporation just like any other - their only driver is the bottom line.