Nintendo also has an incredible track record of not being able to foster healthy relations with third party developers, and being outright hostile to indie developers (see: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/03/21/fils-aime-nintendo-not-...). The Wii, outside from the first party titles, was pretty much a wasteland at least compared to the offerings of Microsoft and Sony. This I think has led to the Wii having a fairly low attach rate and, at least anecdotally, the number of consoles that were bought for Wii Sports and have been gathering dust ever since.
I would love to do this, however it is against my employment agreement to develop and sell games on the side. As cool as this would be, I really would like to keep my day job. :(
It's not just that you can't fly into busy airspace, it's that you can't fly into airspace where you need to talk to an air traffic controller for VFR flight (class B-D).
If you live in or near a big city chances are that the airports out of which you will want to fly will be close to airspace into which you cannot fly. It a hassle if you have to drive out to the boonies in order to start your flying trip or if you have to take the long way around a large block of busy airspace.
I put together a Linux computer this week based on an Atom D510 (dual core, hyperthreaded). It came to $250 with a 500gb HD, 2gb RAM, case and DVD drive, though I could have saved $30 by omitting the opitical drive and installing from a memory stick. It has the added benefit of being passively cooled -- it is almost silent, the only noise being what is emitted by the harddrive. It's even quieter than my Macbook Pro.
I think whenever the topic of premature optimization comes up most people forget the whole Knuth/Hoare quote:
> We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Everyone seems to latch on the second part, but the first part, and the context, are very important. At the time the quote was first coined they were considering "premature optimization" to be the use of "inc eax" instead of "add eax, 1". The key, I think, is the bit about small efficiencies -- we shouldn't worry that "inc eax" uses two bytes less than "add eax, 1" from the outset, but cache thrashing should definitely be a concern.
Optimization is something that should always be in a programmers mind, especially when programming embedded machines. If you're not at a point where you are optimizing the code you are working with then you should be writing it in a way that it can be optimized down the road.
I would think that anyone who uses "premature optimization is the root of all evil" as a retort is fair game for being challenged on how they would actually optimize their code when they have the chance :)
(disclaimer: I write code for video games, my world view may not be the same as yours, though I still believe this applies globally.)
I always see streams brought up as a critique of C++, at least compared to how it is handled by C, and I agree that they are terrible. However, everyone else also agrees that they are terrible, and as an added bonus the C IO functions are still available.
C++ brings a lot of heavy-weight machinery to the table but the best part is that you don't have to use it. If you just want to write C but desire templates to reduce the amount of writing you need to do then so be it, write C-with-templates!
My big beef with the language is mostly due to the legacy crud it is saddled with in the C preprocessor. Many of the build time issues I find myself suffering with are because of people, for example, including Windows.h a) in the first place and b) not defining WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN. Junior (and senior, for that matter!) developers seldom know how to properly structure their code so that their iteration times don't plummet.
I'd say very good. The value of a spy is in the information distributed not not getting caught. The other problem is the vast majority of the performance data we have is from agents, who were caught, so it's difficult to compare and contrast agents who were caught vs. those that aren't. We also don't yet know what information they passed.
What kind of job would you be looking to get back into in that week? Would you go back to what you were doing or would you go to anyone with a help wanted sign in the window? I ask because I have been looking to move out of my job and into something similar (video game library/embedded C++ development) for months now and there are few, if any, opportunities available.
If I could get my old job back (or similar) within that time frame I would quit tomorrow.
