I dunno, I don't think "games for windows" has a whole lot to do with quality control.
Think what you like. But even simple things, like using Alt-Tab to leave a fullscreen game, work fine in GfW games and generally crash others.
I would expect at LEAST it to be equivalent to the xbox 360 live service, give me some tools for finding buddies, forming up parties, etc.
That's a valid complaint. (Pretty sure it has parties. But it doesn't have as many features as Xbox Live on an actual Xbox.)
But really, M$ has done very very little to help its status as a gaming platform other than to make DirectX.
WTF? Making DirectX is a billion times more than any other platform has ever done. That alone has done a fucking lot to help its status as a gaming platform.
I'm not saying there isn't more they could do, but that complaint is ridiculous. "Oh by putting massive effort into a compatible, state-of-the-art, gaming API that works on both the most popular home computer and the second-most popular console? They have done very little!" It's ridiculous on the face of it.
And the whole point of Games for Windows is to get Windows games on-par with console games, quality-wise. I can tell you, having play both, I always prefer to play the Xbox version because the Windows version is almost always a crashing piece of buggy shit.
Dawn of War 2 is a "Games for Windows" game. How is it dumbed-down? Give me one solid concrete practical example. (To start you off: it doesn't require a Xbox controller, that throw that one out the window.) Prove you're right using this title as an example.
I sometimes buy through Steam, but their sales aren't very good compared with, say, gogamer.com. Every so often, Steam'll have an amazing sale, but it's like once every six months at best.
It doesn't help that Steam frequently has pricing errors, and won't give you the sale price, and there's no way to report pricing errors in their retarded awful support system.
First, Microsoft fucked up the PC as a gaming platform. The lack of interest, investment, the Games for Windows fuck-up,
What is the "Games for Windows" fuck-up?
I think it's a great program, and games with the "Games For Windows" are (so far) universally higher-quality than those without. Quality control is one of those things the consoles have had going for them for ages, this program helps lift Windows games to the same level.
Putting a levy on the sale of blank CDs and DVDs, even for people who never intend to copy music/movies is about the most un-American thing I can think of. The fact that the levy doesn't even go to the artists that people are copying is just icing on the un-American cake.
If they passed that, I think it would be time for a Boston CD-R Party.
Dish Network used to offer a la carte back when they were new. They had to abandon that and go to bundles because their customer service costs went up the roof... people would switch channel sets every few days, and this was before the Internet was available, so every request had to be handled over the phone.
Verizon won't let me drop local phone service and keep DSL. Bastards.
From what I understand, they only do that in jurisdictions where they're legally required to. If you aren't in one of those areas, you're pretty much screwed. Sure, ATT and Qwest both have unbundled DSL, but where I live it's Verizon or bust.
Another ditto. I'm sick of hearing about rednecks in rural Arkansas bragging about their FIOS speeds when it's not offered in the tech utopia of Seattle. What the hell, Verizon? Do you determine where to install it using a dartboard?
It's almost pissed me off enough to give money to Comcast... almost...
If he's typing 90-110 (and he's not, seriously, what a liar) then there's pretty much nothing he can do to increase speed. If you've gone a significant amount of time without ever developing carpel tunnel, then you're probably ok with whatever you're doing. If you want to increase your speed, step 1 is determining your actual speed instead of making up a high number.
In history, there have been many times in many places where life has no value whatsoever. "Noble"men frequently tested the quality of their swords by killing peasants with them. Think of the millions killed by Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler-- that was just recently!
Look, the fact that you're alive in the 21st century at all? It's not a sad day, it's an awesome joyous day and better than any other time in history. Be happy that he lived in a society well-off enough to be able to diagnose cancer as an illness, instead of thinking the cause was a curse, or bad humors, or demonic possession.
The database maybe not, but those other customers on whose behalf your code is executing other queries that now run slower because you needlessly consume a big chunk of the DB's resourced surely will get offended.
Buying a new DB server is cheaper than fixing the code. Renting one (say, from Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) and keeping it offline until you're actually using it is cheaper still.
If your customers are complaining, it's (rightly) because you lack the ability to see the big picture here.
A mentality such as yours is frequently the reason why websites completely fail to scale up as traffic increases.
A website isn't a batch process.
If you want to talk about websites, we can talk about websites. Obviously, my opinion on websites is different than my opinion on batch processes. But to blithely come in here and say "you're wrong, because what you said about batch processes doesn't apply to websites!" that's just insulting to me and all your readers.
So... what are we talking about? Batch processes? Websites?
Would you prefer Congress look into this, or steroid use in baseball? Believe me, this is *good* as far as Congressional investigations go-- they're usually unbelievably petty.
That's the kind of thinking that leads to batch jobs taking an hour, that should be done in 5 minutes or less.
And...?
You say that as if it's a problem. But look at it this way: 1) Before it was a batch job, it took actual human beings days of effort to do what's done in one hour now. 2) If it *is* business critical, then you can spend the additional time required to optimize it. If it's not, then you saved a lot of time and money.
I swear to God most programmers posting in this thread are completely incapable of looking at the big picture. The database doesn't get offended if you ask it the same thing over and over.
If you can't write your own code to accomplish the "two or three critical things" in less code and time than it takes you to rewrite the entire framework from scratch, you suck as a programmer. I was going to type a lot more there, but that's the essential point.
Besides, what the hell framework are you using that this is even an issue?
Except if you were using the programming library's time/date functions, your code would have been fixed auto-magically when the US time zones changed a couple years ago. It would properly handle edge-case time zone bugs, like the ones that recently afflicted the Zune and PS3 without you doing anything at all.
Most code that re-implements standard library code is buggy, from my experience. Sure maybe you saved an hour writing it as opposed to learning how to do things properly, but that doesn't help three years down the road when your company loses millions of dollars because a critical system is down on February 29th.
Do you work in software development? Most of your tedious diatribe leads me to believe that the answer to that question is 'no'. Spend a few years working as a programmer and software designer and then come back to this subject when you know more; because right now, judging by what you have said, you don't know enough about programming or software design to even have an opinion.
Seriously? You replied to a complaint about elitism with that insanely-elitist screed?
The classic, "your opinion doesn't matter because you don't have the same amount of experience as me" elitist bullshit?
Did your brain explode from the irony of that? Jesus Christ, man, was this some kind of ill-conceived joke are are you really that dense?
More time is spent trying to figure out how to use and work around limitations of existing libraries and tools and less about designing such tools from scratch.
If you truly believe that, I can't imagine how buggy your code is.
I'm not saying they were. In fact, I really have no clue what you're replying to. For example, you bring up standards, but the ACID test isn't one.
What I'm saying is that the ACID test doesn't necessarily test anything that Microsoft is interested in testing. Or anything required to make a quality web browser. That's all I'm saying.
When I looked into it back when it was new (and my memory might be fuzzy here, bear with me), I remember it being primarily about how browsers handled rare edge cases and errors, more intended to test error-handling than whether or not the page was rendered how its creator wanted it to be rendered.
Maybe the study should have been, "why are people working with Wikipedia completely unable to communicate in English to other people?" Shit, at the very least, why not tell us what your constantly-used GA and FA acronyms actually *mean*.
You missed the parent's point completely. If the test is useless, or mostly-useless (which I personally believe ACID is), then who gives a shit what score IE gets? And, more importantly, why should the IE team waste their precious time caring about it?
Since there's no good reference implementation, and since the W3C is fucking awful at writing standards, frankly I don't blame the IE team for anything that's happened. My only gripe is that they stopped development for so long, but then again-- why would they have bothered to developer it since their major competitor, Netscape, gave up? So even that I have trouble criticizing them for.
Microsoft are masters of pragmatic code. The W3C is nothing but pie-in-the-sky good intentions that don't actually get day-to-day business done. (Proof: pick a successful website, any random website, check to see if it validates. It doesn't.) While the W3C was dinking around with some moronic plan to make HTML XML compatible, for several years and for God-knows what reason, Microsoft was creating real useful code.
Look, I have no problem with people writing perfectly compliant websites, or perfectly compliant browsers, but peopel on Slashdot act as if your perfect renderer is Jesus. It's not even a tenth as important as this forum thinks it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, I don't think "games for windows" has a whole lot to do with quality control.
Think what you like. But even simple things, like using Alt-Tab to leave a fullscreen game, work fine in GfW games and generally crash others.
I would expect at LEAST it to be equivalent to the xbox 360 live service, give me some tools for finding buddies, forming up parties, etc.
That's a valid complaint. (Pretty sure it has parties. But it doesn't have as many features as Xbox Live on an actual Xbox.)
But really, M$ has done very very little to help its status as a gaming platform other than to make DirectX.
WTF? Making DirectX is a billion times more than any other platform has ever done. That alone has done a fucking lot to help its status as a gaming platform.
I'm not saying there isn't more they could do, but that complaint is ridiculous. "Oh by putting massive effort into a compatible, state-of-the-art, gaming API that works on both the most popular home computer and the second-most popular console? They have done very little!" It's ridiculous on the face of it.
And the whole point of Games for Windows is to get Windows games on-par with console games, quality-wise. I can tell you, having play both, I always prefer to play the Xbox version because the Windows version is almost always a crashing piece of buggy shit.
Ok I'm calling you on this bullshit.
Dawn of War 2 is a "Games for Windows" game. How is it dumbed-down? Give me one solid concrete practical example. (To start you off: it doesn't require a Xbox controller, that throw that one out the window.) Prove you're right using this title as an example.
Each browser provided their own copy and link URLs. So if, for example, Mozilla's is sub-standard, they only have themselves to blame.
I sometimes buy through Steam, but their sales aren't very good compared with, say, gogamer.com. Every so often, Steam'll have an amazing sale, but it's like once every six months at best.
It doesn't help that Steam frequently has pricing errors, and won't give you the sale price, and there's no way to report pricing errors in their retarded awful support system.
First, Microsoft fucked up the PC as a gaming platform. The lack of interest, investment, the Games for Windows fuck-up,
What is the "Games for Windows" fuck-up?
I think it's a great program, and games with the "Games For Windows" are (so far) universally higher-quality than those without. Quality control is one of those things the consoles have had going for them for ages, this program helps lift Windows games to the same level.
Putting a levy on the sale of blank CDs and DVDs, even for people who never intend to copy music/movies is about the most un-American thing I can think of. The fact that the levy doesn't even go to the artists that people are copying is just icing on the un-American cake.
If they passed that, I think it would be time for a Boston CD-R Party.
That could be the case. My story came from a Dish Network customer support agent, so obviously it could be really biased.
Dish Network used to offer a la carte back when they were new. They had to abandon that and go to bundles because their customer service costs went up the roof... people would switch channel sets every few days, and this was before the Internet was available, so every request had to be handled over the phone.
Verizon won't let me drop local phone service and keep DSL. Bastards.
From what I understand, they only do that in jurisdictions where they're legally required to. If you aren't in one of those areas, you're pretty much screwed. Sure, ATT and Qwest both have unbundled DSL, but where I live it's Verizon or bust.
Another ditto. I'm sick of hearing about rednecks in rural Arkansas bragging about their FIOS speeds when it's not offered in the tech utopia of Seattle. What the hell, Verizon? Do you determine where to install it using a dartboard?
It's almost pissed me off enough to give money to Comcast... almost...
If he's typing 90-110 (and he's not, seriously, what a liar) then there's pretty much nothing he can do to increase speed. If you've gone a significant amount of time without ever developing carpel tunnel, then you're probably ok with whatever you're doing. If you want to increase your speed, step 1 is determining your actual speed instead of making up a high number.
Could be worse.
In history, there have been many times in many places where life has no value whatsoever. "Noble"men frequently tested the quality of their swords by killing peasants with them. Think of the millions killed by Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler-- that was just recently!
Look, the fact that you're alive in the 21st century at all? It's not a sad day, it's an awesome joyous day and better than any other time in history. Be happy that he lived in a society well-off enough to be able to diagnose cancer as an illness, instead of thinking the cause was a curse, or bad humors, or demonic possession.
The database maybe not, but those other customers on whose behalf your code is executing other queries that now run slower because you needlessly consume a big chunk of the DB's resourced surely will get offended.
Buying a new DB server is cheaper than fixing the code. Renting one (say, from Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) and keeping it offline until you're actually using it is cheaper still.
If your customers are complaining, it's (rightly) because you lack the ability to see the big picture here.
A mentality such as yours is frequently the reason why websites completely fail to scale up as traffic increases.
A website isn't a batch process.
If you want to talk about websites, we can talk about websites. Obviously, my opinion on websites is different than my opinion on batch processes. But to blithely come in here and say "you're wrong, because what you said about batch processes doesn't apply to websites!" that's just insulting to me and all your readers.
So... what are we talking about? Batch processes? Websites?
Would you prefer Congress look into this, or steroid use in baseball? Believe me, this is *good* as far as Congressional investigations go-- they're usually unbelievably petty.
That's the kind of thinking that leads to batch jobs taking an hour, that should be done in 5 minutes or less.
And...?
You say that as if it's a problem. But look at it this way:
1) Before it was a batch job, it took actual human beings days of effort to do what's done in one hour now.
2) If it *is* business critical, then you can spend the additional time required to optimize it. If it's not, then you saved a lot of time and money.
I swear to God most programmers posting in this thread are completely incapable of looking at the big picture. The database doesn't get offended if you ask it the same thing over and over.
Ok, let's put this in reality-land.
If you can't write your own code to accomplish the "two or three critical things" in less code and time than it takes you to rewrite the entire framework from scratch, you suck as a programmer. I was going to type a lot more there, but that's the essential point.
Besides, what the hell framework are you using that this is even an issue?
Except if you were using the programming library's time/date functions, your code would have been fixed auto-magically when the US time zones changed a couple years ago. It would properly handle edge-case time zone bugs, like the ones that recently afflicted the Zune and PS3 without you doing anything at all.
Most code that re-implements standard library code is buggy, from my experience. Sure maybe you saved an hour writing it as opposed to learning how to do things properly, but that doesn't help three years down the road when your company loses millions of dollars because a critical system is down on February 29th.
Do you work in software development? Most of your tedious diatribe leads me to believe that the answer to that question is 'no'. Spend a few years working as a programmer and software designer and then come back to this subject when you know more; because right now, judging by what you have said, you don't know enough about programming or software design to even have an opinion.
Seriously? You replied to a complaint about elitism with that insanely-elitist screed?
The classic, "your opinion doesn't matter because you don't have the same amount of experience as me" elitist bullshit?
Did your brain explode from the irony of that? Jesus Christ, man, was this some kind of ill-conceived joke are are you really that dense?
More time is spent trying to figure out how to use and work around limitations of existing libraries and tools and less about designing such tools from scratch.
If you truly believe that, I can't imagine how buggy your code is.
Out of curiosity, what do you have against IE8?
I haven't had to jump through any hoops for it, but on the other hand I'm working mostly in Javascript and DOM, and less in layout/CSS-type stuffs.
Assuming you're talking about HTML5 in IE9, isn't that (almost) common knowledge right now? You act as if it's some huge secret.
I'm not saying they were. In fact, I really have no clue what you're replying to. For example, you bring up standards, but the ACID test isn't one.
What I'm saying is that the ACID test doesn't necessarily test anything that Microsoft is interested in testing. Or anything required to make a quality web browser. That's all I'm saying.
When I looked into it back when it was new (and my memory might be fuzzy here, bear with me), I remember it being primarily about how browsers handled rare edge cases and errors, more intended to test error-handling than whether or not the page was rendered how its creator wanted it to be rendered.
What the holy shit are you talking about?
Maybe the study should have been, "why are people working with Wikipedia completely unable to communicate in English to other people?" Shit, at the very least, why not tell us what your constantly-used GA and FA acronyms actually *mean*.
Anybody care to translate that into English?
You missed the parent's point completely. If the test is useless, or mostly-useless (which I personally believe ACID is), then who gives a shit what score IE gets? And, more importantly, why should the IE team waste their precious time caring about it?
Since there's no good reference implementation, and since the W3C is fucking awful at writing standards, frankly I don't blame the IE team for anything that's happened. My only gripe is that they stopped development for so long, but then again-- why would they have bothered to developer it since their major competitor, Netscape, gave up? So even that I have trouble criticizing them for.
Microsoft are masters of pragmatic code. The W3C is nothing but pie-in-the-sky good intentions that don't actually get day-to-day business done. (Proof: pick a successful website, any random website, check to see if it validates. It doesn't.) While the W3C was dinking around with some moronic plan to make HTML XML compatible, for several years and for God-knows what reason, Microsoft was creating real useful code.
Look, I have no problem with people writing perfectly compliant websites, or perfectly compliant browsers, but peopel on Slashdot act as if your perfect renderer is Jesus. It's not even a tenth as important as this forum thinks it is.