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Comment: Re:Clarifications (Score 1) 279

by ardeez (#47344039) Attached to: Why Software Builds Fail

This is why continuous integration is such an important (and great!) thing.

The old mantra of 'works fine on my machine' - something I used to hear a lot in the days of WINNT 4,SP1,2,3,4,5,6, ADO 1, 1.5, 2, ... IE4.x MSVC runtime version x.xx (so lots of varieties) - really isn't what you want to hear when you're pushing out a release that's been only built on one particular developer's machine and then an email patch rushed out to you.

When you're at the customer site and they're all looking at you wondering,
  'General Exception 0xC00005'
'what does that mean' ??!
'It means I'm going to go back to the office and kill somebody'

Comment: Re:Step 1 (Score 1) 196

by ardeez (#47344005) Attached to: How Apple Can Take Its Headphones To the Next Level



So everybody criticising Beats for sound quality are probably wrong, so long as the sound is the type you like. Beats I think are quite bass heavy.

And everybody criticising Beats as a 'lifestyle' choice are probably right, although being a bit of an inverted snob in the process.

Sounds about right to me.

Comment: Rumour Seeded (Score 0) 70

So Tom's Hardware and Forbes have been seeded with this hopefully competitor killing announcement by

A trusted source with knowledge

But long gone are the days where an announcement by Microsoft (or a proxy) would kill a competitor's product before it even launches. Don't know why MS even bother these days, that old playbook really needs revised.


Submitted by Stunt Pope


Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:One word. (Score 1) 348

Price and a non intrusive and fair DRM system.

Sony obviously screwed this one up quite badly, and Microsoft are trying to use their
platform to build a walled garden around gamers. Increasingly - probably due to
more competition from mobile, these companies are squeezing their customers too hard.

If Valve can take a more liberal approach to protecting games from casual piracy
and manage still to allow games publishers to turn a profit then I could see their platform
attract both parties.

Good on them.

Comment: Re:Bullshit (Score 1) 375

by ardeez (#40806901) Attached to: John Romero's Doomy View On Android and Ouya

>He wasn't involved in Quake 3. He was fired after they released Quake 1.

and id hasn't released a decent single player first person shooter since.

Not saying that's due to Romero not being there, but Wolf, Doom, Doom II and Quake I were good games to play as a single player. I really don't feel as if id have bettered them since.

Quake II was not that bad, but everything since ...

Comment: Re:What kind of... (Score 1) 477

by ardeez (#39103863) Attached to: A Rant Against Splash Screens

>Launch background threads to do your resource loading

Which is a great idea, but it would make the job of figuring out how your
main menu on launch would look pretty complicated.

I guess it'd be pretty confusing for most users to have the File->Load menu item to be saying Please Wait while I load shit in the background... instead.

In short, it would complicate the programmer's job, and the user experience *a lot*

Comment: Re:Future (Score 1) 293

by ardeez (#38243756) Attached to: The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

Ha! We developers will never learn.

Come Sunday Dec 4th 292,277,026,596AD I bet you there'll still be some poor saps running around doing last minute testing whilst the managers on multi universe conference calls will all be saying :
'but we never thought the cobol code would be going for soo long! We just kept putting off the upgrades, and before you know it 2,922,770,245 centuries had passed and here we are!'
