I once read this interesting Daily WTF/Worse Than Failure article about Netscape and how AOL's marketing team was screwing with it. For the life of me, I can't find the article. But one of the things they did was realize that pop-up blocking was one of the new cool things for browsers to have. But the marketing team stepped in and said, "Hold on just a second. We can't have the browser blocking OUR pop-ups." So they added rule to block all pop-ups except those that came from the netscape web page.
The netscape homepage happened to have a pop-up on it and of course, this is the default home page of the browser. When you initially ran netscape, first thing you saw was a pop-up and the page behind it claiming, "New Feature: pop-up blocker".
I thought of an even better idea. You call in your order to starbucks and they BRING the coffee TO YOU. Kinda like a pizz...uh, I mean kinda like something nobody has ever done or thought of before.
I buy pizza this way all the time and have been doing so for a while. I order it and pay online. I walk in, give my name and get my order. I don't wait in line.
I have this idea where you order the pizza online and they bring it right to your door. Patent pending!
Once Square and others start to really get going with PS3 (that is, once Japanese developers stop concentrating so much on the PS2, haha) it will pick up strength quickly.
This is what I've been thinking. But then, you gotta think from the perspective of the people trying to make money off of the games they develop. They're thinking, "Why would I release this game exclusively on the PS3 when it has a fraction of the population as the 360 or the Wii?" They're thinking, "If I'm making this game exclusive so I don't spend energy/resources on porting, it makes sense to put it on the more popular system". The PS3 is not the pony to bet on.
Meh, sometimes "polish" can take a backseat to more titles and more content, depending on the kind of game it is. Something like a Final Fantasy or Elder Scrolls game, I'm cool with having it take as long as it "needs to." Games like a Gears sequel using the same engine, or a racing game, and for that matter a Smash game, I just want something "new" to play soon enough. And 7 years later is just not "soon enough" for me.
So... quantity over quality then? I guess we're just two different types of gamers. I am a huge Sim fan. I bought SimSociety but then I read the reviews for it. They weren't flattering. I returned the game unopened and purchased Call of Duty 4 instead. Enjoy the next Madden.
But not all delays are admirable in this sense. They can be due to poor resource management, they can be due to not enough work being spent on the game earlier on, etc. Unless Smash Bros Brawl, when released, turns out to match Oblivion or FFXII in scope and polish, the wait time by fans will hardly be justified.
Admirable has nothing to do with it. Other games have nothing to do with it. Game X will be less polished if it's released early; period. It may not be as good as Oblivion or FFXII, but it'll be better than it would have been if it was released early. That's the point, and that's why I feel a game's delay should inspire hope more than disappointment (duke nukem forever excluded).
1) Smash Bros Brawl being delayed until next year. Mr. Iwata personally told me that he was hoping to make this game a release title for the "Revolution" (this was in 2005). We're now more than a year overdue, and for something like Smash that really doesn't imply 6.5 solid years of development time. They were simply slow to start on it.
I'd rather have a great game late than a shitty game early. Every game you mentioned after this point could have been better if it was delayed longer. Delays are a good thing. They translate to, "We would rather make this game better than release it in its crappy state."
Sorry if that's not inflammatory enough. I could try harder. I must say, though, this is good news and I'm glad the IE 8 team is working on this. Better late than never.
For some values of "late". I mean, IE8 could come out years from now. By the time IE8 comes out it could be behind in the standards discussed in this article. It could even come out and support less than the article claims. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't MS often break the promises it makes?
Microsoft: The next version of IE will be even more standards compliant than Opera! EU: Oh well... Considering that, I guess it would be pretty ironic and hypocritical to punish you for a lack of standards. Microsoft: Excellent...
Microsoft: The next version of IE will be even more standards compliant than Opera!
So what's the point?!! If people can still write crap code, they will.
This isn't for them, this is for the serious web developers that currently have to bend over backwards to get their website to render correct on IE and non-IE browsers.
All the existing sites you mentioned, could use OpenSocial if they wanted to.
But why would they want to? Why would Facebook want you to use MySpace apps? I think Facebook would prefer its users to be oblivious to the existence of myspace. Why would Facebook want to make the difference between myspace and itself negligible? It wouldn't. Otherwise, who would care about which social network you use? How is that attitude beneficial to a Social Network that's already one of the big players?
I think what's going to happen is 1) nobody will use OpenSocial except the up-and-comers or 2) the big players will "use" it but constantly add/remove features to it that makes it more useful for them and breaks compatibility. And regardless, the second google comes out with version 2.0, there's going to be some sites that upgrade and some that don't (or upgrade slower). Those that want their OpenSocial apps to work on as many sites as possible will need to code to the lowest common denominator. It'll be just like writing CSS for browsers.
Yes, IE is part of the core UI. MS has used that as an excuse to leave IE the way it is. But really, all they have to do is remove the shortcuts to it and make the ability to visit websites from Window widgets a configuration you have to turn on by hand. By default, if I type "http://example.com" into a Window widget it could pop up an error saying, "Error: IE not installed *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*. Click here to install IE." When the user "Installs IE" from that link, all it really does is is toggle that default setting and puts a shortcut of IE on the desktop/start menu. I think that would be sufficient.
It would be like Ford putting Ford stereos in their cars, which they do, and that hasn't stopped all these other stereo manufacturers (such as Sirius and XM) entering the market.
I think your analogy is flawed too. It would be more apt if the ford radios were the most popular radios, they decoded radio signals in a non-standard way and all the standard radio signals came in with tons of static. Now put yourself in the perspective of the person who makes the devices that generate the radio signals. Now your analogy fits.
No court in a million years would honor a C&D sent to a news site covering a news story in good faith. This is what Fair Use is all about, regardless of which Intellectual Property we're talking about.
Speaking of which, aren't the shirts themselves safe from the courts too? I would think this falls under "parody".
If I feel a few lines of code are confusing I think of how I would comment it. I then use this comment to come up with a name of a method instead. If something can sufficiently be explained in a method name, the method name is preferred. Comments have their evil side. If you have a lot of comments on some code and you refactor the code, it's likely that the comments are not completely accurate anymore. Now, if you want everything to be synced, you have to modify code AND comments. If you don't keep your code synced with your comments, your comments are not only worthless but harmful. I've seen comments like this:
int i = i + 3;//add 2 to i
When you see something like this, all other comments have instantly been discredited and useless. Maybe you're thinking, "The same thing can happen with method names". And you're absolutely correct. But, it's much less effort to rename a method name, especially with refactoring tools built into IDEs.
The transitions in Lord of the Rings from "ice" to "fire" to "water" to "forest" areas actually seem to make sense, but only because they take place over 36 hours of video
Is that the Director's Director cut version where each film has 9 hours of extra content?
Even if Google is unsuccessful, it will scare the pants off of the other cell phone companies until Google actually fails. The result of that will force them to come up with some innovation to compete and that will benefit the consumer. Even if this turns out to not be a win for Google, it'll be a win for us.
I read about something similar to this in the latest issue of skeptic magazine. When you scan through old research with the intent of finding correlations not related to the original hypothesis it's called data mining and it's a classic no-no of scientific research. It's similar to having a medical study without a control group or using a biased sample of the population as test subjects.
Why did I have to hear about this for the first time on Slashdot? I'm constantly watching discovery channel, comedy central and adult swim. You'd think these networks would be the perfect place to put a commercial for this show, yet I've never seen one.
Meyers: I did a little research and I discovered a startling thing...
There was violence in the past, long before cartoons were invented. Kent: I see. Fascinating. Meyers: Yeah, and know something, Karl? The Crusades, for instance.
Tremendous violence, many people killed, the darned thing went
on for thirty years. Kent: And this was before cartoons were invented? Meyers: That's right, Kent.
Not yet, but eventually I'm sure the latest and greatest games will only come out for Vista, the newest Office files can only be read by a version that works on Vista and you will only get security/os upgrades for Vista, etc. They can make an amazing library for.NET that every developer would want to use that will only work for Vista. They can pay tons of companies to make the next version of their application Vista only.
Basically, I don't think MS is going to make people want to switch to Vista by making Vista great, they'll make people switch by making XP inconvenient/unsafe to use.
Slashdot Mirror
The netscape homepage happened to have a pop-up on it and of course, this is the default home page of the browser. When you initially ran netscape, first thing you saw was a pop-up and the page behind it claiming, "New Feature: pop-up blocker".
Everyone is saying it's 30 days but I think it's 5. "Source": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting
I thought of an even better idea. You call in your order to starbucks and they BRING the coffee TO YOU. Kinda like a pizz...uh, I mean kinda like something nobody has ever done or thought of before.
For some values of "late". I mean, IE8 could come out years from now. By the time IE8 comes out it could be behind in the standards discussed in this article. It could even come out and support less than the article claims. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't MS often break the promises it makes?
How very insightful. I hope people mod you up.
Microsoft: The next version of IE will be even more standards compliant than Opera!
EU: Oh well... Considering that, I guess it would be pretty ironic and hypocritical to punish you for a lack of standards.
Microsoft: Excellent...
Microsoft: The next version of IE will be even more standards compliant than Opera!
This isn't for them, this is for the serious web developers that currently have to bend over backwards to get their website to render correct on IE and non-IE browsers.
But why would they want to? Why would Facebook want you to use MySpace apps? I think Facebook would prefer its users to be oblivious to the existence of myspace. Why would Facebook want to make the difference between myspace and itself negligible? It wouldn't. Otherwise, who would care about which social network you use? How is that attitude beneficial to a Social Network that's already one of the big players?
I think what's going to happen is 1) nobody will use OpenSocial except the up-and-comers or 2) the big players will "use" it but constantly add/remove features to it that makes it more useful for them and breaks compatibility. And regardless, the second google comes out with version 2.0, there's going to be some sites that upgrade and some that don't (or upgrade slower). Those that want their OpenSocial apps to work on as many sites as possible will need to code to the lowest common denominator. It'll be just like writing CSS for browsers.
"It's not enabled by default, and my advice is to never enable it. Ever."
Yes, IE is part of the core UI. MS has used that as an excuse to leave IE the way it is. But really, all they have to do is remove the shortcuts to it and make the ability to visit websites from Window widgets a configuration you have to turn on by hand. By default, if I type "http://example.com" into a Window widget it could pop up an error saying, "Error: IE not installed *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*. Click here to install IE." When the user "Installs IE" from that link, all it really does is is toggle that default setting and puts a shortcut of IE on the desktop/start menu. I think that would be sufficient.
I think your analogy is flawed too. It would be more apt if the ford radios were the most popular radios, they decoded radio signals in a non-standard way and all the standard radio signals came in with tons of static. Now put yourself in the perspective of the person who makes the devices that generate the radio signals. Now your analogy fits.
Speaking of which, aren't the shirts themselves safe from the courts too? I would think this falls under "parody".
int i = i + 3; //add 2 to i
When you see something like this, all other comments have instantly been discredited and useless. Maybe you're thinking, "The same thing can happen with method names". And you're absolutely correct. But, it's much less effort to rename a method name, especially with refactoring tools built into IDEs.
Is that the Director's Director cut version where each film has 9 hours of extra content?
He may be talking about the shuffle. The shuffle doesn't let you resync with another computer.
Even if Google is unsuccessful, it will scare the pants off of the other cell phone companies until Google actually fails. The result of that will force them to come up with some innovation to compete and that will benefit the consumer. Even if this turns out to not be a win for Google, it'll be a win for us.
I read about something similar to this in the latest issue of skeptic magazine. When you scan through old research with the intent of finding correlations not related to the original hypothesis it's called data mining and it's a classic no-no of scientific research. It's similar to having a medical study without a control group or using a biased sample of the population as test subjects.
Why did I have to hear about this for the first time on Slashdot? I'm constantly watching discovery channel, comedy central and adult swim. You'd think these networks would be the perfect place to put a commercial for this show, yet I've never seen one.
Meyers: I did a little research and I discovered a startling thing...
There was violence in the past, long before cartoons were invented.
Kent: I see. Fascinating.
Meyers: Yeah, and know something, Karl? The Crusades, for instance.
Tremendous violence, many people killed, the darned thing went
on for thirty years.
Kent: And this was before cartoons were invented?
Meyers: That's right, Kent.
Not yet, but eventually I'm sure the latest and greatest games will only come out for Vista, the newest Office files can only be read by a version that works on Vista and you will only get security/os upgrades for Vista, etc. They can make an amazing library for .NET that every developer would want to use that will only work for Vista. They can pay tons of companies to make the next version of their application Vista only.
Basically, I don't think MS is going to make people want to switch to Vista by making Vista great, they'll make people switch by making XP inconvenient/unsafe to use.