Microsoft has mostly been about making products barely clearing the bar
Conveniently choosing to ignore the work done by Anders Hejlsberg & Co with the.net framework
Conveniently choosing to ignore the groundbreaking research on language design and static code analysis done by the Spec# team
Conveniently choosing to ignore that the debugger in Visual Studio stands head and shoulders above the competition
Conveniently choosing to ignore how Microsoft has been able to establish itself as a major player in the game console world in surprisingly short time
The list continues, but who am I kidding, could anyone here be bothered...
When someone puts out a quality product against their track record, I don't knee-jerk into deriding it as bloated and unstable. If it's good, I can admit it's good.
Robert E. Peary was the first man to reach the North Pole, Roald Amundsen the first to reach the South Pole.
Both were without doubt great achievements, but none of them can be considered creations of something original.
I guess/hope most people would find the idea of Peary patenting the very process of reaching a pole rather silly - I however fail to see how that would be any different from many of the patents we see today...
Instead of wowing their audience with in-depth benchmarks they head right for what someone reading a review really wants, an opinion of the best bang for the buck.
Sorry Tom, but I have to disagree. What interests me is not your conclusions but your measurements leading up to it. I may have other preferences than you, what you consider barely acceptable performance may be more than I need, you may be able to accept more fan-noise than I, etc. If you provide me with the details, I'm perfectly capable of drawing my own conclusions.
Actually, Opera has never struck me as being particularly slim, quite the opposite in fact. That Opera produces a mobile version of their browser does not necessarily mean that the version they'll provide for the Wii won't be a resource hog; it could very well be that all the different versions share nothing but name and logo. In fact I consider that very likely, to gain portability you will usually have to sacrifice the elegant and effective solution.
But then again, does it really matter? If your hardware has plenty of resources, then don't waste time trying to minimize the footprint of your application.
no keyboard = restricted interface
Agreed, but I found your choise of words amusing, considering all the hype surrounding the 'new' controller.
Compared with the 360 and the PS3 the Wii might qualify as a "low-spec device", but doesn't it match a four-year-old-run-of-the-mill-office-PC pretty well?
Hmm, I'm a bit amazed, not only do you get away with calling the Wii a "low-spec device" and the new controller a "restricted interface", you also get modded insightful;-)
I wonder though how you're supposed to browse with the new controller, point and click?
In Windows 95, we gave programmatic access to the Start menu "Fast items" list - the items that appear at the top of the Start menu above the Programs list. This area was meant for the user to customize with their favorite links, but programs quickly saw the opportunity and spammed themselves into it every chance they got.
In IE, we gave programmatic access to the Favorites menu, and once again, programs spammed themselves into it.
Besides, I'm not at all convinced that Symantec has a technical reason for wanting to replace the Security Center.
Frankly, we'd like to see the Protection Center recognize installed non-Symantec applications--and keep advertising clearly marked as such.
It's with a sly sardonic grin I listen to Symantec lamenting:
Having been pretty happy with their antivirus for the last few generations I updated to NAV2006 end September when my subscription ran out. Buying, downloading and installing went pretty smooth, but after a restart Norton had, much to my surprise and oddly relevant for this thread, disabled the Windows Security Center and replaced it with their own Protection Center. I wasn't aware having asked for it in the first place. Whereas the default security center is rather discreet, the Norton version behaves like a piece of malware: It doesn't just put a small notification icon in the taskbar but grabs a huge chunk of the main pane and tries to grab your attention with big colorful dialogs. You can't uninstall it nor disable it. Nortons support pages won't prove helpful. I uninstalled NAV and did a reinstall, this time making sure that no checkboxes we're ticked - that didn't seem to bother it at all. Figuring out how to get rid of it took the most of an evening. It all brought back sad memories of a Real Player infestation, but having payed for the experience this time really made me feel like an idiot...
I understand why Symantec does this. In order for them to stay in business they need Johnny Consumer to think "Norton" instead of "anti-virus". But, it also makes perfect sense that MS wants to put an end to it. No, Symantec brought this one upon themselves.
we don't make cars that'll prevent the driver from deciding to drive up on the sidewalk and mow down pedestrians
...but if we had the technology, we would.
Anyway, if you had bothered to RTFA before getting all worked up you would have looked a lot smarter by now...
It is possible to run third-party security consoles in Vista, said Stephen Toulouse, a program manager in Microsoft's Security Technology Unit. However, people have to manually disable the Windows Security Center if they don't want to use it.
It might be possible that the decryption algorithm introduces some jitter [...]
No, not really. The rate at which the ecryption algorithm is able to feed you data will vary, but for several reasons. Picking a few from the top of my head: You'll have to wait for the harddisk to get to the data, other devices sharing the PCI bus will delay getting these data to system memory, as the encryption runs your CPU will be fed partly from the cache (fast) or from system memory (slow), and task switching will give you varying amounts of CPU time. "Jitter" caused by the "varying amount of time to decrypt a chunk of data" won't add anything of importance at this point, and data still has to travel trough a decoder module, through the dense traffic on the PCI bus on it's way to the sound card, etc.
Because of all this, the audio stream will be buffered and resync'ed on your sound card removing any "jitter" introduced along the way.
The word "jitter" is too often used to legitimize a theory completely out of touch with reality, some kind of catch-all "argument" to end any insightful discussion of digital audio.
That's a great idea: getting the first post, putting "BOOOOOOOOOH!" in the title, and getting everyone to reply to it. Just lean back and watch the thread go:
The new iTunes will download cover art for all the songs in your library, no matter where you got them from, as long as you have an iTunes account.
Not wanting to spoil the fun, but think twice before you replace artwork grabbed from Amazon, buy.com, or similar places. The artwork iTunes 7 fetches in this way isn't the full resolution artwork that you'll get if you buy from the store, but instead artwork of considerably lower quality, definitely no better than what you could already pull down from Amazon.
The true high resolution artwork embedded in tracks bought in the music store can be extracted using AtomicParsley (among others). If someone feels like hosting a site for original artwork I'll gladly upload the few hundred covers I've got.
A sad story indeed, Norton seems to adopt the methods used by malware companies.
Having been pretty happy with their antivirus for the last few generations I updated to nav2006 last week when my subscription ran out without second thought.
Buying, downloading and installing went pretty smooth, but after a restart Norton had disabled the Windows Security Center and replaced it with their own Protection Center (??!!) I wasn't aware having asked for it in the first place. It didn't provide anything new. It didn't just put a small notification icon in right part of the taskbar but grabbed a huge chunk of the main pane. Where the default security center warnings were discreet, norton really wants to grab your attention with big colorful dialogs. You couldn't disable it. Nortons support pages didn't prove helpful. I uninstalled NAV and reinstalled, this time making sure that no checkboxes we're ticked - that didn't seem to bother it at all...
It took the most of an evening, but you can get rid of it: run services.msc, disable the "Norton Protection Center" service, and reenable the default one.
It all brought back sad memories of Real Player back when it peaked, but having payed for the experience this time really made me feel like an idiot...
Norton allows you to run the full version for 15 days, so do yourself a favor and find out if you're willing to put up with it, before throwing money at it.
Sadly I know what all Microsoft needs to do is wave a few tired old franchises in the consumers' face (Halo, DOA, Halo, Project Gotham Racing, Halo, Halo, Halo... Did I mention Halo?) and no one will never notice Nintendo.
...who never seem to lack inspiration, the fresh ideas just keep on flowing from these guys. Amazing stuff really, just check out the 2005 releases:
* Mario Party Advance (Game Boy Advance)
* Dr. Mario & Puzzle League (Game Boy Advance)
* Mario Superstar Baseball (GameCube)
* Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix (GameCube)
* Super Mario 64 DS (Nintendo DS) - Australia and Europe Release -
* Super Princess Peach (Nintendo DS) - October 20 -
* Mario Party 7 (GameCube) - November 7 -
* Mario Kart DS (Nintendo DS) - November 14 -
* Mario Tennis: Power Tour (Game Boy Advance) - September 13 -
* Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (Nintendo DS) - November 28 -
* Super Mario Strikers (GameCube) - November 18 -
* Mario Kart Arcade GP (Arcade) -international release-
* Dr. Mario & Puzzle League (Game Boy Advance)
* NBA Street V3 (GameCube) Nintendo All Stars Team
* SSX On Tour (GameCube) Mario is a playable snowboarder
* Yoshi Touch and Go (Nintendo DS)
I've worked with Visual Studio. So go on, tell me how to see every 4th and 5th element of a 1000 element array in the debugger, without having to type in each index individually
Well, to pick the obvious one first (sorry, it'll get better below): if you're looking for every n-th byte because your array in fact holds a sequence of struct's then you've probably got the struct defined somewhere in your project and typecasting your array in the watch window will do the trick (the array should probably have been an array of structs to begin with, but anyway...)
If you've got something more fancy in mind, then Visual Studio supports macros http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b4c73967. aspx. For some reason the MSDN pages mostly discuss using macros for text editing, but they'll interface nicely with the debugger and the samples that were dumped on your harddrive by the VS installer should be enough to get you started (take a closer look at the VSDebugger macro).
VB macros may not be as simple as just adding printf statements, but *_they do not alter the flow of your program_*. Besides, not all environments provide a threadsafe prinf method. Don't misunderstand me, I agree that the printf statement does come in handy sometimes (Java including the toString method in java.lang.Object is a really nice touch). If you didn't have a threadsafe prinf it would make sense to write one yourself...but the debugger gives you one for free.
Is there such a thing as an embedded platform that cannot generate any sort of output at all?
Of course it'll have to produce output in some way or another. If it didn't then why bother about the quality of its software;-) But, that doesn't imply that it has a channel for you to dump your debug information on. I've been writing software for GSM SIMs the last eight years (geez, how time flies); we just don't have a channel to dump output on, the handset controls the IO pin. Or take Grishnakh's reply to my original post: I've tracked down bugs in embedded software using a single LED....imagine having to find a bug in any reasonably sized project by carefully counting 'heartbeats' instead of just firing up your simulator.
[...] the way I get a program working is first toss it at the compiler and fix all the syntax errors and such that it finds. [...] Next, I run it in the debugger, to catch the runtime errors. Once those are fixed, I get down to the business of finding and fixing the real errors
We're probably not that far apart then - guess I'd better call off the fight. Yes, the debugger is just a tool. A great tool though, that may save you from hours/days/weeks of tedious bugtracking. What puzzles me is when someone claims that we'd be better off without the debugger. That strikes me as just as silly as a carpenter claiming he'll do just as fine without the hammer...
Not wanting to pick a fight, but let me guess: you've never had to track down a bug in a multithreaded application, where your debug code changes the timing and removes your race condition?
Let me guess, you've never had to track down a bug in embedded sofware, with no such thing as "printf"?
For a totally arbitrary example, how could you tell the debugger you want to see every 4th and 5th element of an array?
Let me guess, you've never worked with Visual Studio, Eclipse, Delphi, or any other modern win32 toolset?
I don't think kernel development should be "easy". I do not condone single-stepping through code to find the bug. I do not think that extra visibility into the system is necessarily a good thing.
Following the same absurd line of reasoning, I guess Linus considers syntax highlighting, code navigation, and auto-completion workings of the evil?
The amount of time you'll spend tracking down someone elses error ("=" instead of "==" anyone?) I'd much rather spend refactoring and trying to improve the general design of the code. But, each to his own...
And I who though Richard Stallman was the religious freak...
Re:A new set of problems
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 1
What do you think field radios, powered goggles, comm units run off?
Slashdot Mirror
Conveniently choosing to ignore the groundbreaking research on language design and static code analysis done by the Spec# team
Conveniently choosing to ignore that the debugger in Visual Studio stands head and shoulders above the competition
Conveniently choosing to ignore how Microsoft has been able to establish itself as a major player in the game console world in surprisingly short time
The list continues, but who am I kidding, could anyone here be bothered...
...and we can all start reposting the cheap witty comments: 8500 pages! Boy, that's one large .doc
...someone should come up with a new logo for the system. It probably means something to someone but I don't think it's being effectively conveyed.
I guess this is what it's all about. Once you know it, it seems obvious, but if you don't...
your exceptionally obtuse analogy
What analogy? - I questioned the assertion that >>what, exactly, is creating something original, if not being "the first one to get there"<<
Robert E. Peary was the first man to reach the North Pole, Roald Amundsen the first to reach the South Pole.
Both were without doubt great achievements, but none of them can be considered creations of something original.
I guess/hope most people would find the idea of Peary patenting the very process of reaching a pole rather silly - I however fail to see how that would be any different from many of the patents we see today...
Sorry Tom, but I have to disagree. What interests me is not your conclusions but your measurements leading up to it. I may have other preferences than you, what you consider barely acceptable performance may be more than I need, you may be able to accept more fan-noise than I, etc. If you provide me with the details, I'm perfectly capable of drawing my own conclusions.
...and now you're calling firefox bloated ;-)
Actually, Opera has never struck me as being particularly slim, quite the opposite in fact. That Opera produces a mobile version of their browser does not necessarily mean that the version they'll provide for the Wii won't be a resource hog; it could very well be that all the different versions share nothing but name and logo. In fact I consider that very likely, to gain portability you will usually have to sacrifice the elegant and effective solution.
But then again, does it really matter? If your hardware has plenty of resources, then don't waste time trying to minimize the footprint of your application.
no keyboard = restricted interface
Agreed, but I found your choise of words amusing, considering all the hype surrounding the 'new' controller.
Compared with the 360 and the PS3 the Wii might qualify as a "low-spec device", but doesn't it match a four-year-old-run-of-the-mill-office-PC pretty well?
Hmm, I'm a bit amazed, not only do you get away with calling the Wii a "low-spec device" and the new controller a "restricted interface", you also get modded insightful ;-)
I wonder though how you're supposed to browse with the new controller, point and click?
An old post of Raymond Chen springs to mind: Why is there no programmatic access to the Start menu pin list?
Besides, I'm not at all convinced that Symantec has a technical reason for wanting to replace the Security Center.
I guess I just not willing to put as much faith in Norton as you are. I'm siding with Raymond Chen on this one: Why is there no programmatic access to the Start menu pin list?
It's with a sly sardonic grin I listen to Symantec lamenting:
Having been pretty happy with their antivirus for the last few generations I updated to NAV2006 end September when my subscription ran out. Buying, downloading and installing went pretty smooth, but after a restart Norton had, much to my surprise and oddly relevant for this thread, disabled the Windows Security Center and replaced it with their own Protection Center. I wasn't aware having asked for it in the first place. Whereas the default security center is rather discreet, the Norton version behaves like a piece of malware: It doesn't just put a small notification icon in the taskbar but grabs a huge chunk of the main pane and tries to grab your attention with big colorful dialogs. You can't uninstall it nor disable it. Nortons support pages won't prove helpful. I uninstalled NAV and did a reinstall, this time making sure that no checkboxes we're ticked - that didn't seem to bother it at all. Figuring out how to get rid of it took the most of an evening. It all brought back sad memories of a Real Player infestation, but having payed for the experience this time really made me feel like an idiot...
I understand why Symantec does this. In order for them to stay in business they need Johnny Consumer to think "Norton" instead of "anti-virus". But, it also makes perfect sense that MS wants to put an end to it. No, Symantec brought this one upon themselves.
Besides, are you really sure that Symantec's desire to replace the SC is for technical reasons?
Anyway, if you had bothered to RTFA before getting all worked up you would have looked a lot smarter by now...
...and North Elbonia
It might be possible that the decryption algorithm introduces some jitter [...]
No, not really. The rate at which the ecryption algorithm is able to feed you data will vary, but for several reasons. Picking a few from the top of my head: You'll have to wait for the harddisk to get to the data, other devices sharing the PCI bus will delay getting these data to system memory, as the encryption runs your CPU will be fed partly from the cache (fast) or from system memory (slow), and task switching will give you varying amounts of CPU time. "Jitter" caused by the "varying amount of time to decrypt a chunk of data" won't add anything of importance at this point, and data still has to travel trough a decoder module, through the dense traffic on the PCI bus on it's way to the sound card, etc.
Because of all this, the audio stream will be buffered and resync'ed on your sound card removing any "jitter" introduced along the way.
The word "jitter" is too often used to legitimize a theory completely out of touch with reality, some kind of catch-all "argument" to end any insightful discussion of digital audio.
A subtle joke perhaps?
That's a great idea: getting the first post, putting "BOOOOOOOOOH!" in the title, and getting everyone to reply to it. Just lean back and watch the thread go:
:)
BOOOOOOOOOH!
BOOOOOOOOOH!
BOOOOOOOOOH!
BOOOOOOOOOH!
Oh boy, pulling that stunt, you are the man, I'm not worthy...
Not wanting to spoil the fun, but think twice before you replace artwork grabbed from Amazon, buy.com, or similar places. The artwork iTunes 7 fetches in this way isn't the full resolution artwork that you'll get if you buy from the store, but instead artwork of considerably lower quality, definitely no better than what you could already pull down from Amazon.
The true high resolution artwork embedded in tracks bought in the music store can be extracted using AtomicParsley (among others). If someone feels like hosting a site for original artwork I'll gladly upload the few hundred covers I've got.
I thought the same but no, if you run a checksum on your files before and after the import you'll see that they are left untouched.
Unless we, the children of slashdot, united.
If only we could lay to rest the Unix/Windows/MacOS bickering, we could rule the universe...
A sad story indeed, Norton seems to adopt the methods used by malware companies.
Having been pretty happy with their antivirus for the last few generations I updated to nav2006 last week when my subscription ran out without second thought.
Buying, downloading and installing went pretty smooth, but after a restart Norton had disabled the Windows Security Center and replaced it with their own Protection Center (??!!) I wasn't aware having asked for it in the first place. It didn't provide anything new. It didn't just put a small notification icon in right part of the taskbar but grabbed a huge chunk of the main pane. Where the default security center warnings were discreet, norton really wants to grab your attention with big colorful dialogs. You couldn't disable it. Nortons support pages didn't prove helpful. I uninstalled NAV and reinstalled, this time making sure that no checkboxes we're ticked - that didn't seem to bother it at all...
It took the most of an evening, but you can get rid of it: run services.msc, disable the "Norton Protection Center" service, and reenable the default one.
It all brought back sad memories of Real Player back when it peaked, but having payed for the experience this time really made me feel like an idiot...
Norton allows you to run the full version for 15 days, so do yourself a favor and find out if you're willing to put up with it, before throwing money at it.
* Mario Party Advance (Game Boy Advance)
* Dr. Mario & Puzzle League (Game Boy Advance)
* Mario Superstar Baseball (GameCube)
* Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix (GameCube)
* Super Mario 64 DS (Nintendo DS) - Australia and Europe Release -
* Super Princess Peach (Nintendo DS) - October 20 -
* Mario Party 7 (GameCube) - November 7 -
* Mario Kart DS (Nintendo DS) - November 14 -
* Mario Tennis: Power Tour (Game Boy Advance) - September 13 -
* Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time (Nintendo DS) - November 28 -
* Super Mario Strikers (GameCube) - November 18 -
* Mario Kart Arcade GP (Arcade) -international release-
* Dr. Mario & Puzzle League (Game Boy Advance)
* NBA Street V3 (GameCube) Nintendo All Stars Team
* SSX On Tour (GameCube) Mario is a playable snowboarder
* Yoshi Touch and Go (Nintendo DS)
Well, to pick the obvious one first (sorry, it'll get better below): if you're looking for every n-th byte because your array in fact holds a sequence of struct's then you've probably got the struct defined somewhere in your project and typecasting your array in the watch window will do the trick (the array should probably have been an array of structs to begin with, but anyway...)
If you've got something more fancy in mind, then Visual Studio supports macros http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b4c73967. aspx. For some reason the MSDN pages mostly discuss using macros for text editing, but they'll interface nicely with the debugger and the samples that were dumped on your harddrive by the VS installer should be enough to get you started (take a closer look at the VSDebugger macro).
VB macros may not be as simple as just adding printf statements, but *_they do not alter the flow of your program_*. Besides, not all environments provide a threadsafe prinf method. Don't misunderstand me, I agree that the printf statement does come in handy sometimes (Java including the toString method in java.lang.Object is a really nice touch). If you didn't have a threadsafe prinf it would make sense to write one yourself ...but the debugger gives you one for free.
Of course it'll have to produce output in some way or another. If it didn't then why bother about the quality of its software ;-) But, that doesn't imply that it has a channel for you to dump your debug information on. I've been writing software for GSM SIMs the last eight years (geez, how time flies); we just don't have a channel to dump output on, the handset controls the IO pin. Or take Grishnakh's reply to my original post: I've tracked down bugs in embedded software using a single LED. ...imagine having to find a bug in any reasonably sized project by carefully counting 'heartbeats' instead of just firing up your simulator.
We're probably not that far apart then - guess I'd better call off the fight. Yes, the debugger is just a tool. A great tool though, that may save you from hours/days/weeks of tedious bugtracking. What puzzles me is when someone claims that we'd be better off without the debugger. That strikes me as just as silly as a carpenter claiming he'll do just as fine without the hammer...
Not wanting to pick a fight, but let me guess: you've never had to track down a bug in a multithreaded application, where your debug code changes the timing and removes your race condition?
Let me guess, you've never had to track down a bug in embedded sofware, with no such thing as "printf"?
For a totally arbitrary example, how could you tell the debugger you want to see every 4th and 5th element of an array?
Let me guess, you've never worked with Visual Studio, Eclipse, Delphi, or any other modern win32 toolset?
Following the same absurd line of reasoning, I guess Linus considers syntax highlighting, code navigation, and auto-completion workings of the evil?
The amount of time you'll spend tracking down someone elses error ("=" instead of "==" anyone?) I'd much rather spend refactoring and trying to improve the general design of the code. But, each to his own...
And I who though Richard Stallman was the religious freak...
What do you think field radios, powered goggles, comm units run off?
A very very very long power cord?