Let's go.........RANDOM!

[MrBunsy]

The only thing stopping WP7 from being great is the fact that phone salesmen get more commission for their iPhone and Android sales.

And that developing for it is even more of a pain than the hoops you have to jump through for Apple's iPhone?

[shinygerbil]

The only thing stopping WP7 from being great is the fact that phone salesmen get more commission for their iPhone and Android sales.

And that developing for it is even more of a pain than the hoops you have to jump through for Apple's iPhone?

Is it? I've no idea. Last time I checked you needed a Mac to program for iPhone, which is a hell of a hoop for me to jump through :p WP7 seems pretty simple to program for, to be honest. Anyone who's ever worked with XNA should be right at home too.

[Feud]

You're not allowed to hate WP7 until you've given it a decent try, just like everybody else

That's a heck of a hoop to jump through.

[bert_the_turtle]

I think the new Xbox UI looks great, but is definitely less usable - though the tradeoff is not a bad one in my opinion. Given that there is still really very little to actually *do* on an Xbox besides games and a paltry selection of "apps" I can live with some oversized typography and big rectangular icons. And anyway, loser that I am, I actually use the voice control

List of issues I have with the new Xbox UI:
- voice control, since you mention it, is limited. It only gets you so far and then you have to switch over to another input method and that's pretty much the worst thing controls can do.
- Kinect hand gesture controls are slow and sluggish, the hover-to-select method was ugly from the start, kinect takes ages to boot up and start working so whatever it is you want to do, you already did it with the controller when kinect finally is ready to take your commands. Swipes just don't work for me.
- It is not clear enough which element of the UI is currently selected when you work with a controller, the highlights are far too subtle for such huge UI elements.
- What's the best bit of the phone UI? right, that you can configure it. Can't do it on the XBox. If I don't want my games come after videos, well, sucks for me!
- IT IS SHOVING THINGS INTO MY FACE I DON'T WANT. And even if I did want them, I'd first have to pay. All the big tiles in the main interface are rotating ads for content. Right now, of the small tiles, excluding the system settings and social ones, three are external ads (blocked here, but the space still says 'ad'), 4 are marketplaces (don't mind them, they need to be somewhere), 2 are "Inside XBox" links (tolerable form of ads) 7 are ads for marketplace content, and a whooping 6 are dedicated to letting you use what you have already bought (reduce that to 3 for me since I don't and won't have any videos, music or apps on there), and they're scattered all about. They should all be on the start screen.
- The one good way to launch stored games, the Quick Launch, sorts the list weirdly.
I guess I don't mind so much the idea of adapting a phone interface to a console (highlights aside, it works reasonably well with a controller), but the execution, and that they switched it from being about playing games you own to selling you music and videos.

[Cooper42]

Windows 8's metro feature of actually using the desktop as more than a space to dump icons and the odd file you temporarily need is a good thing. It is pretty absurd that to launch apps or get to infomration we are stuck with a little menu in a corner of icons on a bar. That this has become the ubiquitous UI system across Linux flavours, OSX and windows despite it being really poor use of screen space is just weird. Tacky widgets in recent windows are not the answer. Metro is a step in the right way.

But doing it solely with respect to touch screen is just idiotic. Creating a decent use of desktop space for desktop computers with keyboards and mice would be welcome. Shame they don't care enough to try.

[bert_the_turtle]

Dunno about you, but I spend most of the time using applications, not launching them. My screen space is therefore mostly used up by various application windows. Where Metro could shine is switching between applications and views or using them concurrently. Use an editor fullscreen, press one button to split the screen in the middle, bring up browser in other half, copy information you want, close/hide browser, editor goes back to fullscreen. I essentially already use a four tile layout when coding, but it's cumbersome.

[Feud]

So, Lewis Meriwether was pretty stinking cool. Reading a book on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, seriously incredible.

[shinygerbil]

Literally everything I know about Lewis and Clark comes from Gary Larson cartoons.

[Feud]

Like the one where Clark is ticked that Lewis stepped on the back of his shoe, making it come off? Haha, Far Side was great.

Their job was to go 7,000 miles, over unknown country, expecting to be out of contact with known civilization for at least 18 months to two years. On their way they were expected to document any plants, animals, peoples, or geographic features they encountered. Basically: they knew where the Mississippi river was, and they had a reasonably good idea of where the Pacific ocean was, but in between was a blank spot on the map. So, they set out to go from point A to point B and back again without getting killed somehow, while writing science and anthropology textbooks along the way.

[Xocrates]

I think I saw a Time Squad episode about them >.>

[Xocrates]

Statistics can be rather interesting.

I've been looking at the full (though not yet final) results for one of the courses I took this semester, and at the bottom of the table the teacher added a few stats of the overall results, including the global approval rate: 59%

This wouldn't be a bad value, except for the fact that it only takes into account people who completed the evaluation. Given that the course has 3 evaluation components, two of which you require a positive grade, it means there is a lot of people that having flunked to one of those won't even try for the other, meaning that those 59% don't take into account all of those. In effect, that number is based on 157 people out of 292. Meaning that the ratio between those who signed up and those who were approved is actually around 30% (or about 40% if you only count the ones that even tried) and this is after they artificially inflated the results of one of the tests.

Now, you may be thinking that I'm saying all this because the course is actually stupid hard and they're trying to hide it.
Actually, I'm not. Well, not specifically.

The course in question is the first programming course in a Software Engineering degree, and while it's true I had learned to code before, and I disagree with the way several components of the evaluation were handled, this was actually not that hard a course. In fact the teachers proved to be surprisingly lenient on a lot of stuff.

As such I'm left to wonder if the jump between high-school and college is really so big that people just fall off the one course they were supposed to be really trying to get a good understanding of, and/or if people actually care so little about the degree they choose.

[MrBunsy]

The only thing stopping WP7 from being great is the fact that phone salesmen get more commission for their iPhone and Android sales.

And that developing for it is even more of a pain than the hoops you have to jump through for Apple's iPhone?

Is it? I've no idea. Last time I checked you needed a Mac to program for iPhone, which is a hell of a hoop for me to jump through :p WP7 seems pretty simple to program for, to be honest. Anyone who's ever worked with XNA should be right at home too.

Last time I checked (don't think it's changed though) you have to pay MS money to do most things and you get barely any access to stuff on the phone, unlike android which is free to dev/emulate and where you get access to most features of the phone.

[GreenRock]

As a Computer Science major I can tell you from experience that there's ridiculous amounts of people who sign up for it simply because "they're good with computers", i.e. they know how MS Word works and/or like to game. Programming isn't technically that hard, but it is relatively abstract and if you purely joined in for the 'clicky-clicky stuff' it's vastly different from what you were expecting. If you're not good at exact sciences the odds are definitely stacked against you when try your luck on something abstract and rooted in maths like object-oriented programming. From my year, about 30% dropped out within the first six months. Currently in my third year, less than half of the original group remains. Some have moved to other majors, some to professional colleges (i.e. a level lower than university).

This 'clickity-click' deal.

I became interested in computer science because of video games. Because of the 'clickity-click stuff'. People obviously took the course because they were interested in computers, not because they think they were good at it. I suppose it's arguable; whether or not one should invest time in something they're: a) good at. b) interested in. BUT, their interest obviously got themselves into that class, and their knowledge on the material obviously got them out. My interest grew, and that lead me to actually learn the material. Of course, I knew nothing about abstraction or programming when I wanted to develop games. I was just a silly boy back then.

Mind you, coding games is cool and all, but that's not the only reason I'm learning how to program. What pisses me off are all the modern warfare fanatics who were sitting in my computer science II class, regretting such.

I truly feel sorry for the people who dropped that class because they obviously don't know what to do. Maybe if they had explored their interest earlier, they could've gotten a handle on a language. It's too late in college, when there's money involved.

EDIT: An apology for all the "obviously"'s and the this'. I'm becoming quite fond of repetition and italicizing to mirror my actual voice.
In other news, MIT application successfully submitted

[ynbniar]

Computer Science dropout here (1989).

Problem was there was no structured approach to teaching programming skills at High School back then, and it was a time where you could "hit the metal" and program hardware directly (Amiga)...I was a 68000 assembly bedroom programmer!

Structured, reliable, high level code was a nightmare for me.

[Xocrates]

Question:

I'm starting to consider getting a new laptop, however there are two requisites I kind of wanted: A USB entry in the back (to plug in a mouse) and a fairly high resolution (for reference, my four year old laptop had a 1680x1050 resolution), is there any mid-high range that fits this descrition that does not cost upwards of 2000€ and is about the size of a desktop?

Because otherwise, I start to suspect I would be better served getting a second desktop and nicking my mother's laptop (or otherwise just get a cheap one) for when I do need the mobility.