Smoking is a little different in France and on the Continent than in the USA. It's possible that certain European smokers, going to a foreign country like the USA for the first time, would be ignorant of the written and unwritten rules of "smoker's etiquette" here in the U.S.A., where an adult can't light up within twenty yards of a kid without drawing down the passive-aggressive wrath of the nearest PTA mother.
I can't imagine a situation where I wouldn't add Boost to a project, especially considering that large portions of it have been included in C++0x, and that the library has been for years a kind "standard outside the standard" or a de facto standard.
Installing/building it the 1st time can be a little messy (the same to be expected from any large library) but it pays off in the long run... Boost has all the stuff you wanted the standard library to have.
The number of users who want to run OS X, Ubuntu or *nix as opposed to Windows is a rounding error, for good reason. Buying a non-Windows PC is simply a mistake unless you're an uber-technical type.
What's really fun is watching your typical Apple fanboy's face go pale, then red, then pale again as he reads this post and tries so very hard to understand why the world is throwing these numbers at him which prove how small-time Apple is in any area except the one. : )
The profit potential on the desktop and the pure web has always outstripped what iPhone apps are capable of. If it's a labor of love or if you just love Apple, by all means, develop for the iPhone. If profits are your goal, the iPhone is a severely limiting choice, for freelancers especially.
"Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users...."
Uh huh. Riiiiiight. It wasn't that you posted the change, saw the stampede of people looking for ways to "remove the background image", and decided to pull it. Surely not that. We all know how tough it is to get those "explanatory links" to show up. The <a> element is serious stuff. Non-trivial.
Because the Firefox add-on ecosystem is a complete mess. Try building an add-on if you've swallowed the Firefox koolaid. (Still miles and miles better than IE, but the Firefox add-on registration/update mechanism is one of the worst in the biz.)
Wow. Do people actually still use Windows Update? Like, on "auto" mode? I'm terrified of that thing. TERRIFIED. I take pains to make sure it's turned off and set to the "don't fucking bug me EVER or I'll kill you" setting. If I absolutely need an update, I'll fetch it myself, very carefully turning Windows Update on, allowing it to run, then squashing it like a cockroach under my heel.
It's not a weird assumption, it's a completely relevant assumption.
Currently, if you want to build iPhone software using anything other than the approved Apple stack, jail-breaking is required by fiat. You have no option. It means the iPhone market isn't truly competitive; the "best" development environments and practices aren't allowed to bubble to the top; instead we're constrained to the Apple backwater (and it IS a backwater; trust me when I say Apple should be so lucky to have something like Haskell or Flash or .NET running on their shitty hardware).
Btw, an MP3 is a data file, not a piece of software. Not an App.
True, but a mixed-mode system may be possible: polygons in conjunction with point clouds. You'd essentially "spray" your points across polygonal faces, like a sort of spackle or paper mache. With the points so anchored, animation/physics might be easier.
Oh, please. If Spolsky doesn't want to continue blogging, I think the world will survive. For a couple years now all Joel has offered to the software community is: "here, read this, listen to my Stackoverflow podcast while I whore out Fog Creek."
The few times he actually decides to really talk software, it's pretty good, and his VC stuff is pretty good, but there's nothing he contributes that the world can't get from a dozen other guys.
And frankly, he comes across as kind of an a-hole in his podcasts. Atwood is a much nicer guy.
I agree. As a rule, if a site contains those pesky double-underlined links that display "contextually relevant" advertising on HOVER, I won't read the article.
That said, nobody really gives NBC much credence these days. Another big media outfit on its way out -- for exactly this sort of stupid behavior with regard to coverage. And Bob Costas, hate to say it, has never been "genuine". He's the biggest schmooze in the business. Always has been.
Still, sad to see the once-great China, who gave us paper, movable type, gunpowder, the compass, and too many other world-changing inventions to name here, devolving into a dystopian nation of bean-counting surveillance monkeys. A great society (and I am not implying that America and the West are "great" in this sense) does not police private communications between adults in order to detect the use of lewd or subversive words...period. Such behavior is symptomatic of a system of government that is rotten to its core.
I doubt you can extrapolate from your experiences on a single MMORPG to the industry as a whole. Grind may well be intentional in your case, or in WoW; but in (many) other MMORPGs, the designers put a lot of work into reducing grind. Grind is always a double-edged sword, and rather than focus on grinding for grinding's sake, I recommend you focus on creating a compelling gaming experience first; worry about metastructure when you've managed to do that.