From my experience from being a programmer at MP3.com from 1999 until its sale to CNET in 2003, the independant artist community is one of the biggest bunch of cheating assholes I have ever witnessed. Not all, but enough independant artists will utilize any number of underhanded ways to boost their exposure on a network. I see nothing in this system that prevents what artists did at MP3.com - user ratings are a joke, because many artists will do anything possible to whore themselves out among their community to get a higher rating. What you will end up seeing is that if this get popular enough, it will become fully corrupted by crappy music being highly rated , which will then turn off the average user, and become yet another circle jerk for talentless artists and basically a waste of time for legitimate ones.
When I was a student at University of California, San Diego I had to go to Kinkos to copy some material a fundraiser for Boy's Club my fraternity was putting on. I had to wait an hour while a team of medical students copied every page of all their textbooks and monoplized all the copiers. I asked them what they were doing and was told point blank that they had just bought those books and they were copying them with the intention of returning them the next day for a refund. I pointed them to a sign hung above the copiers that had a warning about duplicating copywrited material and they just shrugged.
I really need to get my work done so I talked to a Kinko's employee and asked him why he wasn't doing anything about the fact these medical students were blatantly disregarding not only Kinko policy but the law as well. His answer: We put that sign up but we don't really care if they do it. Shocked, I asked for his manager, explained the situation, and was given the exact same reply. Yea, the sign was up there, and the students knew they were doing something illegal in full site of people with the power to stop them, but as long as Kinkos was making money they didn't care.
My father is a well respected doctor in my hometown. He's on the board of the Foundation For Othrodonic Research, which is the premier organization for advances in orthodontics.
My father pays more in medical malpractice insurance than I made last year. He gets sued regularily by people who don't understand basic principals of taking care of their braces. For instance, one of his younger patients decided chowing down on ice cubes was a prudent thing to do. He promptly ripped off one of his braces, which then cut into his lip. His mother sued my father for malpractice.
Another case my father faced was when a teen didn't want his braces and manually removed them from his teeth. The smart lad stripped off most of the enamel on his teeth as well. My father was sued because the teen lied to his parents and only later in court was it proved my father wasn't at fault.
It's bogus cases like that drive up malpractice costs. These doctors aren't being greedy. They are trying to save their practices. It's almost no different than blacklisting spammers.
Ford isn't dead. In fact, he lives down the street from my parents. Granted, a lot of people in the Palm Springs area look dead, but that doesn't mean they are.
I bought a ReplayTV for my parents for Xmas. I hooked it up, dialed into their servers, and had seriously THE MOST HORRENDOUS TIME attempting to set it up. The setup found every available spot to die, the servers were continually down or unresponsive, and I had a hell of a time even getting a phone line that was active. So I bought my parents another gift, boxed up the Replay, and took it back home to return.
When I got home I decided to give it another chance, and hooked it up in my system. After an 3 hours I was able to finally complete the setup process (I had the same problems as at my parents house, but now I was playing Dark Age of Camelot so I had time to sit around pressing the 'attempt re-connection button'). After it was set up, it worked fine for about a week.
After a week, ReplayTV decided to change my local access numbers. Fine, whatever. Except they changed them to numbers that didn't work. None of them did for a week - I tried every night, and every local number. So I was stuck with a box that just sat there with no use other than to pause TV until they decided to get their act together. I called their tech support and all I got for a response was 'yea that is a problem'. Nice fucking response. My parents would of been livid if I had somehow managed to get it working at their house and left them with an inoperable piece of hardware and no support.
Eventually the local numbers started working, and presently it seems as if everything is running smoothly, but based on my past experience I can't recommend ReplayTV to anyone. Their service just plain sucked, and if I didn't have the patience of Job (or the lazyness, take your pick), I would of returned it.
I've been to the past 3 E3s and seen Warcraft 3 at each one. First time, it looked pretty badass. Losta units, full 3d. Second time, it looked ok. Less units, still 3d. 3d wasn't as big a deal anymore, since basically every development RTS was going 3d. Last E3, it looked pretty bad. Even less units, smaller maps, and the gameplay was pretty horrible. To picture the gameplay, take Warcraft 1, make it 3d and really pretty, and then reduce the amount of units on the screen to about 4, and throw in some super unit that destroys everything and never loses health.
Ensemble Studios' Age of Mythology looks about 50x better then War3. Empire Earth, created by Rick Goodman, lead producer of Age of Empires (tm)(c)(sm), looks better then War3 as well. By 2002, War3 will be old hat. Hell, its old hat now. I'm not holding my breath for it and I don't suggest you do either.
"Then imagine the server didn't work... you purchase would be rendered useless. This includes if the server is only partial in disorder, like in the case of throwing your items away. No matter what entertainment product you use, you really would feel annoyed if it missed a part."
I don't have to imagine; I play Anarchy Online. Annoying doesn't begin to describe the first month. .agrippa.
The potential risk to lose a patent infringement case and end up paying HUGE amount of settlement money far outweighs the potential risk of winning said case. Therefore if you believe your company has a 70 percent or less chance of winning, you usually settle. That's because you have a 30 percent or greater chance of losing and having to shell out, take a hit on your quaterly numbers, take the bad press, take the stigma, and answer to your shareholders.
However if you're smart, like most of the companies Rambus sued, you put a nice little "pending the patent challenge being upheld in court" clause that puts you back on the bargining table if things don't pan out for Rambus. That way you cover your ass in case the patent is upheld (cause you already settled), and you root for the company willing to take them on.
I dont understand this article at all. It starts off as an explanation of how computers are already pretty powerful for today's applications. Then he talks about how though Doom said it would run on a 386, he was forced to upgrade. Then, applying stellar logic, he proceeds to use the minimum system requirements listed on software boxes as a basis for his first point, simply bypassing his second assertion that there exists software that lists much lower requirements then it needs. He has two completely different, paradoxical arguments in his article.
He also demonstrates an acute lack of knowledge about his subject. So the Unreal box says "200mhz". Has he ever tried it? Sure it runs. However it's like watching a slideshow. The same is true for a lot of the software he listed. Just because something runs doesn't mean it runs well. Of the things that ran well, like Diablo II and Baulders Gate II, those are based on the previous engines, which ran fine with his current setup, and hence are not a good basis for comparison.
Essentially, what he is trying to say is that what it generally considered now as an older computer (mhz at or under 350 pretty much) can still run current software with the same hardware. Fine. Thanks for validating that. But, taking from his own Doom-upgrade theory, the current software will not run all that well on older machines and demand an upgrade (perhaps not to the latest stuff, but still an upgrade). Therefore, by his own logic, he has no reason to upgrade yet he does.
Perhaps downloading all that porn caused the logic section of his brain to malfunction.
1) Napster doesn't have 50 million users. It's the same thing as the ICQ/AIM or MSN or Yahoo or just about anyone on the web's numbers. Multiple accounts, forgotten accounts, abandoned accounts all take their toll on the real number. Sure, Napster has a lot of users, but no where near 50 million. I myself have 4 from testing the Napster module for perl. I forget the actual numbers, but ICQ has something like only 5-6 million real users for the tens of millions of accounts.
2) Charging people for what they previously got for free on the internet won't work. It's been proven time and time again. Napster might be able to make this model work to some extent, but not in the sheer quantity needed to even approach payment on their settlement. At $9, they need a little under 2 million monthly subscriptions. At $5, they need a little under 4 million subscriptions. Those are big numbers for an internet subscription service.
3) There are free Napster alternatives. 'Nuff said.
4) Quality of content. If you're going to pay, you expect your download not to time out or mrHaX0r01 to not cut you off in the middle of the download because he's rebooting his machine. We put up with these inconviences now because it's free. If my phone company started disconnecting my calls in the middle of conversations I wouldn't be too happy. There is a level of service expected when you pay for something, and I don't believe they have that level of service to attain the subscriptions necessary.
Enjoy your Napster while you can. This settlement offer shows that Napster knows it lost and knows its royally screwed. There is very little chance that Napster can raise over $200 million a year profit to pay for this, and the record companies know that.
Really, how involved can this game be? The typical DBZ episode breakdown:
3 minutes of recapping the last episode
4 minutes flying around
8 minutes powering up
4 minutes of those 8 spent talking about how the person powering up is achieving a new level of power previously not believed to be attained
1 minute of the bald short dude saying "I know I can't beat XXX but I must try"
30 seconds of fighting
5 minutes standing around staring each other down
1 minute of telling the other fighter how their efforts are futile
2 minutes of the announcer speculating on what is going to happen next
1 minute of the characters thinking what the announcer speculated on
2 minutes of the announcer speculating on what is going to happen in the next episode (again)
The rest of the time is commercials/credits.
So in a typical 30 minute map you would have 30 seconds of playing the same fighting animation over and over against a striped background. Sounds like fun!
.agrippa.
Reality Check - You're Not As Good As You Think
on
Too Old To Code?
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· Score: 3
Sorry to say this, but in reality probably aren't as good at programming as you think you are. I took high school programming and I thought I was pretty badass, I could out-code nearly everyone. Then I went to college and found out I had a lot to learn about coding. I also had 3 programming jobs in college; each time I went into a job I thought I was badass and ended up seeing just how far I had to go. When I dropped out of college to work for a local startup, again I thought I was pretty badass. Well guess what, history repeated itself and I have been learning at a breakneck speed. I'm having a great time learning from guys who have been coding for 20, 30 years. I was never a "bad" coder, I just wasn't as good as I thought I was. Unless you're another John Carmack I think you'll learn you aren't as badass as you think you are, either. However, surround yourself with people better than you and you eventually will become great. .agrippa.
Will you stop using ORDER BY and GROUP BY statements? Your ORDER BY statment in selectComments is most likely slowing down this site by an order of magnitude. MySQL doesn't do well with ORDER BY and GROUP BY! You really should look into returning your information and having perl do the sorting. Perl was built for sorting. Perl likes sorting. Perl is your sorting friend. If you wish I can submit a fix, I wrote a slashdot-type messageboard over the past few weeks that borrowed from your design (it's functional and it's proven:-) but -god help me- not the horrendous sql or code.
I play a female character in Unreal Tournament for a few reasons. First of all, I look pretty damn fine when I die. Second, when someone kills me, I can say "ahh gotta pick on the girls, eh?". Thirdly, when I kill someone, it's "damn, you got smoked - by a girl". It's all about getting in their heads:-) .agrippa.
In UT, there are still plenty of 2d sprites. The most obvious is the sniper scope. I know quite a lot of people who have played UT with 3d glasses and they all say that using the sniper rifle with 3d glasses sucks because it tries to overlay a 2d sprite on a 3d world so though you think you have targetted someone, when you actually fire, the shot is miles away from the actual target. It is so annoying that those whom I knew gave up on the glasses in UT. .agrippa.
Least you forget, this was a "year-long" study, hence the hardware used is going to be at least one year old. Since they probably did not pick bleeding-edge hardware a year ago either, it's safe to assume they used at least the prior year's hardware. So at the conclusion of the study, the hardware would be at best, two years old. Just speculation but it makes sense. .agrippa.
Hey guys, mysql chokes big time on ORDER BY and GROUP BY statements. Sure they might be fine in other databases but mysql has a really hard time with them and it will lead to performance degredation. You should look into different ways to structure your SQL. Multiple selects, for instance, is much faster than one select with an ORDER BY and/or GROUP BY. Mysql flies on selects. Just a word of advice. Thanks for publishing the source, too:-) .agrippa.
My old roommate and one of my best friends works for Anderson as well. His last job, incidentally, was teaching a class on ecommerce. When he told me this I asked him if he'd ever set up a web server before (No). A database (No). Written CGI? (No). Of course I knew all these answers would be no because I basically taught him everything he knows about computers by living with him for 4 years. Why in the world are you teaching a class on ecommerce, I asked. Because I'm the most qualified in Anderson's mind, he replied. Now that's scary. BTW his next question was how do I set up an Oracle-driven ecommerce site on a Sun and I laughed so hard I nearly wet my pants. Happy Secular Days Off .agrippa.
Good point about a Perl interpreter in Mozilla. I never really understood what the big deal about Java was anyway, to me it's all hype. Supposedly you can write once, run anywhere, but in reality you really can't do much more than a universal Hello World program, if that. For maximum portability I usually use Perl anyway. Sure there are some qwirks going from Unix -> Windows in Perl, but for the most part it's much more portable than Java for the small to medium sized applications I need. But that's just me, I would expect a Java advocate to disagree.:-) .agrippa.
provides very little that you can't get in a basic data structures class. I finished the entire book at a swim meet one day because there really wasn't anything that revolutionary behind it. Aside from pseudo-hashes, which look pretty nifty, I don't see much value in investing in this book if you already know data structures/sorting algorithms. I suppose if you didn't have a basis in those it would be a wise investment but even then most of the concepts are fairly simple and fairly intuative. My advice would be to buy an office copy and keep it around as a reference for your programmers if they have a brain freeze, but don't bother with a personal copy..agrippa.
Slashdot Mirror
From my experience from being a programmer at MP3.com from 1999 until its sale to CNET in 2003, the independant artist community is one of the biggest bunch of cheating assholes I have ever witnessed. Not all, but enough independant artists will utilize any number of underhanded ways to boost their exposure on a network. I see nothing in this system that prevents what artists did at MP3.com - user ratings are a joke, because many artists will do anything possible to whore themselves out among their community to get a higher rating. What you will end up seeing is that if this get popular enough, it will become fully corrupted by crappy music being highly rated , which will then turn off the average user, and become yet another circle jerk for talentless artists and basically a waste of time for legitimate ones.
.agrippa.
Why do they have to go to Mexico?
.agrippa.
When I was a student at University of California, San Diego I had to go to Kinkos to copy some material a fundraiser for Boy's Club my fraternity was putting on. I had to wait an hour while a team of medical students copied every page of all their textbooks and monoplized all the copiers. I asked them what they were doing and was told point blank that they had just bought those books and they were copying them with the intention of returning them the next day for a refund. I pointed them to a sign hung above the copiers that had a warning about duplicating copywrited material and they just shrugged.
I really need to get my work done so I talked to a Kinko's employee and asked him why he wasn't doing anything about the fact these medical students were blatantly disregarding not only Kinko policy but the law as well. His answer: We put that sign up but we don't really care if they do it. Shocked, I asked for his manager, explained the situation, and was given the exact same reply. Yea, the sign was up there, and the students knew they were doing something illegal in full site of people with the power to stop them, but as long as Kinkos was making money they didn't care.
My father is a well respected doctor in my hometown. He's on the board of the Foundation For Othrodonic Research, which is the premier organization for advances in orthodontics.
.agrippa.
My father pays more in medical malpractice insurance than I made last year. He gets sued regularily by people who don't understand basic principals of taking care of their braces. For instance, one of his younger patients decided chowing down on ice cubes was a prudent thing to do. He promptly ripped off one of his braces, which then cut into his lip. His mother sued my father for malpractice.
Another case my father faced was when a teen didn't want his braces and manually removed them from his teeth. The smart lad stripped off most of the enamel on his teeth as well. My father was sued because the teen lied to his parents and only later in court was it proved my father wasn't at fault.
It's bogus cases like that drive up malpractice costs. These doctors aren't being greedy. They are trying to save their practices. It's almost no different than blacklisting spammers.
Ford isn't dead. In fact, he lives down the street from my parents. Granted, a lot of people in the Palm Springs area look dead, but that doesn't mean they are.
.agrippa.
I bought a ReplayTV for my parents for Xmas. I hooked it up, dialed into their servers, and had seriously THE MOST HORRENDOUS TIME attempting to set it up. The setup found every available spot to die, the servers were continually down or unresponsive, and I had a hell of a time even getting a phone line that was active. So I bought my parents another gift, boxed up the Replay, and took it back home to return.
When I got home I decided to give it another chance, and hooked it up in my system. After an 3 hours I was able to finally complete the setup process (I had the same problems as at my parents house, but now I was playing Dark Age of Camelot so I had time to sit around pressing the 'attempt re-connection button'). After it was set up, it worked fine for about a week.
After a week, ReplayTV decided to change my local access numbers. Fine, whatever. Except they changed them to numbers that didn't work. None of them did for a week - I tried every night, and every local number. So I was stuck with a box that just sat there with no use other than to pause TV until they decided to get their act together. I called their tech support and all I got for a response was 'yea that is a problem'. Nice fucking response. My parents would of been livid if I had somehow managed to get it working at their house and left them with an inoperable piece of hardware and no support.
Eventually the local numbers started working, and presently it seems as if everything is running smoothly, but based on my past experience I can't recommend ReplayTV to anyone. Their service just plain sucked, and if I didn't have the patience of Job (or the lazyness, take your pick), I would of returned it.
.agrippa.
I've been to the past 3 E3s and seen Warcraft 3 at each one. First time, it looked pretty badass. Losta units, full 3d. Second time, it looked ok. Less units, still 3d. 3d wasn't as big a deal anymore, since basically every development RTS was going 3d. Last E3, it looked pretty bad. Even less units, smaller maps, and the gameplay was pretty horrible. To picture the gameplay, take Warcraft 1, make it 3d and really pretty, and then reduce the amount of units on the screen to about 4, and throw in some super unit that destroys everything and never loses health.
Ensemble Studios' Age of Mythology looks about 50x better then War3. Empire Earth, created by Rick Goodman, lead producer of Age of Empires (tm)(c)(sm), looks better then War3 as well. By 2002, War3 will be old hat. Hell, its old hat now. I'm not holding my breath for it and I don't suggest you do either.
.agrippa.
"Then imagine the server didn't work... you purchase would be rendered useless. This includes if the server is only partial in disorder, like in the case of throwing your items away. No matter what entertainment product you use, you really would feel annoyed if it missed a part."
.agrippa.
I don't have to imagine; I play Anarchy Online. Annoying doesn't begin to describe the first month.
The potential risk to lose a patent infringement case and end up paying HUGE amount of settlement money far outweighs the potential risk of winning said case. Therefore if you believe your company has a 70 percent or less chance of winning, you usually settle. That's because you have a 30 percent or greater chance of losing and having to shell out, take a hit on your quaterly numbers, take the bad press, take the stigma, and answer to your shareholders.
.agrippa.
However if you're smart, like most of the companies Rambus sued, you put a nice little "pending the patent challenge being upheld in court" clause that puts you back on the bargining table if things don't pan out for Rambus. That way you cover your ass in case the patent is upheld (cause you already settled), and you root for the company willing to take them on.
I dont understand this article at all. It starts off as an explanation of how computers are already pretty powerful for today's applications. Then he talks about how though Doom said it would run on a 386, he was forced to upgrade. Then, applying stellar logic, he proceeds to use the minimum system requirements listed on software boxes as a basis for his first point, simply bypassing his second assertion that there exists software that lists much lower requirements then it needs. He has two completely different, paradoxical arguments in his article.
.agrippa.
He also demonstrates an acute lack of knowledge about his subject. So the Unreal box says "200mhz". Has he ever tried it? Sure it runs. However it's like watching a slideshow. The same is true for a lot of the software he listed. Just because something runs doesn't mean it runs well. Of the things that ran well, like Diablo II and Baulders Gate II, those are based on the previous engines, which ran fine with his current setup, and hence are not a good basis for comparison.
Essentially, what he is trying to say is that what it generally considered now as an older computer (mhz at or under 350 pretty much) can still run current software with the same hardware. Fine. Thanks for validating that. But, taking from his own Doom-upgrade theory, the current software will not run all that well on older machines and demand an upgrade (perhaps not to the latest stuff, but still an upgrade). Therefore, by his own logic, he has no reason to upgrade yet he does.
Perhaps downloading all that porn caused the logic section of his brain to malfunction.
1) Napster doesn't have 50 million users. It's the same thing as the ICQ/AIM or MSN or Yahoo or just about anyone on the web's numbers. Multiple accounts, forgotten accounts, abandoned accounts all take their toll on the real number. Sure, Napster has a lot of users, but no where near 50 million. I myself have 4 from testing the Napster module for perl. I forget the actual numbers, but ICQ has something like only 5-6 million real users for the tens of millions of accounts.
.agrippa.
2) Charging people for what they previously got for free on the internet won't work. It's been proven time and time again. Napster might be able to make this model work to some extent, but not in the sheer quantity needed to even approach payment on their settlement. At $9, they need a little under 2 million monthly subscriptions. At $5, they need a little under 4 million subscriptions. Those are big numbers for an internet subscription service.
3) There are free Napster alternatives. 'Nuff said.
4) Quality of content. If you're going to pay, you expect your download not to time out or mrHaX0r01 to not cut you off in the middle of the download because he's rebooting his machine. We put up with these inconviences now because it's free. If my phone company started disconnecting my calls in the middle of conversations I wouldn't be too happy. There is a level of service expected when you pay for something, and I don't believe they have that level of service to attain the subscriptions necessary.
Enjoy your Napster while you can. This settlement offer shows that Napster knows it lost and knows its royally screwed. There is very little chance that Napster can raise over $200 million a year profit to pay for this, and the record companies know that.
Really, how involved can this game be? The typical DBZ episode breakdown:
.agrippa.
3 minutes of recapping the last episode
4 minutes flying around
8 minutes powering up
4 minutes of those 8 spent talking about how the person powering up is achieving a new level of power previously not believed to be attained
1 minute of the bald short dude saying "I know I can't beat XXX but I must try"
30 seconds of fighting
5 minutes standing around staring each other down
1 minute of telling the other fighter how their efforts are futile
2 minutes of the announcer speculating on what is going to happen next
1 minute of the characters thinking what the announcer speculated on
2 minutes of the announcer speculating on what is going to happen in the next episode (again)
The rest of the time is commercials/credits.
So in a typical 30 minute map you would have 30 seconds of playing the same fighting animation over and over against a striped background. Sounds like fun!
Sorry to say this, but in reality probably aren't as good at programming as you think you are. I took high school programming and I thought I was pretty badass, I could out-code nearly everyone. Then I went to college and found out I had a lot to learn about coding. I also had 3 programming jobs in college; each time I went into a job I thought I was badass and ended up seeing just how far I had to go. When I dropped out of college to work for a local startup, again I thought I was pretty badass. Well guess what, history repeated itself and I have been learning at a breakneck speed. I'm having a great time learning from guys who have been coding for 20, 30 years. I was never a "bad" coder, I just wasn't as good as I thought I was. Unless you're another John Carmack I think you'll learn you aren't as badass as you think you are, either. However, surround yourself with people better than you and you eventually will become great.
.agrippa.
Will you stop using ORDER BY and GROUP BY statements? Your ORDER BY statment in selectComments is most likely slowing down this site by an order of magnitude. MySQL doesn't do well with ORDER BY and GROUP BY! You really should look into returning your information and having perl do the sorting. Perl was built for sorting. Perl likes sorting. Perl is your sorting friend. If you wish I can submit a fix, I wrote a slashdot-type messageboard over the past few weeks that borrowed from your design (it's functional and it's proven :-) but -god help me- not the horrendous sql or code.
.agrippa.
I play a female character in Unreal Tournament for a few reasons. First of all, I look pretty damn fine when I die. Second, when someone kills me, I can say "ahh gotta pick on the girls, eh?". Thirdly, when I kill someone, it's "damn, you got smoked - by a girl". It's all about getting in their heads :-)
.agrippa.
In UT, there are still plenty of 2d sprites. The most obvious is the sniper scope. I know quite a lot of people who have played UT with 3d glasses and they all say that using the sniper rifle with 3d glasses sucks because it tries to overlay a 2d sprite on a 3d world so though you think you have targetted someone, when you actually fire, the shot is miles away from the actual target. It is so annoying that those whom I knew gave up on the glasses in UT.
.agrippa.
Least you forget, this was a "year-long" study, hence the hardware used is going to be at least one year old. Since they probably did not pick bleeding-edge hardware a year ago either, it's safe to assume they used at least the prior year's hardware. So at the conclusion of the study, the hardware would be at best, two years old. Just speculation but it makes sense.
.agrippa.
Hey guys, mysql chokes big time on ORDER BY and GROUP BY statements. Sure they might be fine in other databases but mysql has a really hard time with them and it will lead to performance degredation. You should look into different ways to structure your SQL. Multiple selects, for instance, is much faster than one select with an ORDER BY and/or GROUP BY. Mysql flies on selects. Just a word of advice. Thanks for publishing the source, too :-)
.agrippa.
My old roommate and one of my best friends works for Anderson as well. His last job, incidentally, was teaching a class on ecommerce. When he told me this I asked him if he'd ever set up a web server before (No). A database (No). Written CGI? (No). Of course I knew all these answers would be no because I basically taught him everything he knows about computers by living with him for 4 years. Why in the world are you teaching a class on ecommerce, I asked. Because I'm the most qualified in Anderson's mind, he replied. Now that's scary. BTW his next question was how do I set up an Oracle-driven ecommerce site on a Sun and I laughed so hard I nearly wet my pants.
.agrippa.
Happy Secular Days Off
Good point about a Perl interpreter in Mozilla. I never really understood what the big deal about Java was anyway, to me it's all hype. Supposedly you can write once, run anywhere, but in reality you really can't do much more than a universal Hello World program, if that. For maximum portability I usually use Perl anyway. Sure there are some qwirks going from Unix -> Windows in Perl, but for the most part it's much more portable than Java for the small to medium sized applications I need. But that's just me, I would expect a Java advocate to disagree. :-)
.agrippa.
provides very little that you can't get in a basic data structures class. I finished the entire book at a swim meet one day because there really wasn't anything that revolutionary behind it. Aside from pseudo-hashes, which look pretty nifty, I don't see much value in investing in this book if you already know data structures/sorting algorithms. I suppose if you didn't have a basis in those it would be a wise investment but even then most of the concepts are fairly simple and fairly intuative. My advice would be to buy an office copy and keep it around as a reference for your programmers if they have a brain freeze, but don't bother with a personal copy. .agrippa.