It seems that they have so many of them now. Why can't all of the devo's just work on one? They could label it "Eclipse GUI plugin" or something. It seems to me that there's a lot of energy going into a lot of projects in parallel, when one of the projects getting done faster would be more desireable.
I've noticed that most games that come out have a ton of screen shots on the box, and almost all of them have a flip out front now. The publishing companies are typically to blame, demanding that a game is finished in a tiny amount of time. They see something that is flashy, and they will be impressed. The basic sale is showing the impressive graphics off, hoping that people buy based on that alone. As an example, you have Unreal 2, Doom clones, Quake clones, etc.
The games that pop out with new engines and stuff usually do not have the greatest design. Those typically come a generation later. I admit that I plunked down the money for Unreal 2. I justify it by saying that I am supporting future awesome engine development.:^P The game, however, was fairly boring.
I hope number 3 is "smooth gameplay, no bugs." I've got a relatively powerful system (Athlon XP 2400 / Radeon 8500), and Morrowind still is choppy at times. Neverwinter Nights wasn't stable until two months after I purchased the game, I began to call it "Nevergettoplay Nights." At least Unreal 2 wasn't choppy, although it did cause hangs every now and then.
Number 4 for "great games" should be extensibility. Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake 3, Half Life, NWN... Great games because I could change the models, levels, and sounds. I could create all new games, if I wanted to.
I'm not even out of college and I program in an enterprise environment. I'd venture to say that most guys popping out of school now are higher quality than the ones that came out of school three years ago. The employment situation is no longer a magnetic attractor of money hungry buffoons, so the only factor of those finishing school in CS/Programming is complete love of the system.
College guys spend ages coding up OSS projects, just so that they can build a name for themselves. That wierdo that makes comments on your favorite OSS mailing list, the one that has comments that jive with your own, he might just be 19 or 20 years old. He has to get known, otherwise he will have little hope of finding employment after school.
One thing about code is that it gets better with practice. These guys in school are practicing their asses off, because they know that they are looked down on as "noobs" to the industry.
I know that my code is crappy. I work hard to make it clean and keep it commented. The problem comes from trying to program in orginal ASP without a debugger.:-P It gets better over time, at least. In a couple years, I'll have a library of software to sell myself with. Until then, I'll stay where I work and whatnot.
My, my, my, that is acidic language. In order for more people to take you seriously, I strongly suggest you to take a chill-pill. The point that you make is valid, however, I am more willing to discount it on the basis that it's an overemotional argument.
I understand the strength of the command line in good OS's, including Windows, Linux, Unix, yada... In most corporate small business cases, I would certainly suggest windows. MSCE's come a dime a dozen nowadays, and if something gets f'd up, you can just blame them;-P
If you want to be heard and taken seriously, try to be as infomative as possible without looking like a zealot. )even if you say that you administer Linux boxen(
There's another option, one that is more suited to a consultant. That would be: "Take the money, write a kick-ass application that would scale on appropriate hardware, then tell the company that when they run into connection / speed / scaling prolems, they should throw in some extra hardware."
That way, you've still done work for them. You still have that project on your resume', and you've done what you could within inflexible constraints. If the company is frugal enough to hold off on increasing the budget, they're going to have to understand that the problems they have are a result of the hardware that they are running, and the choices that they have made.
Make them aware of other options, OSS or not, but don't reject a project just because they don't want what you want. That's bad salesmanship.
I do know that back in the day when I was using Linux...
It seems like you're making a comparison between something which came 5-6 years ago to something that came maybe 2 years ago. I'd say that there is a rather distinct technological difference there.
As for getting a new peice of software up and running... well, that's a training or a distro issue. Running Debian, RH, Suse, Gentoo nowadays usually involves a one-liner in the terminal, the software is pre-configured to work with the system that you're on.
Then you're talking about a database, which is not Linux. When I talk about a database server, I'm talking about the server OS that the database is sitting on, in our case it's Windows 2000. The issue at stake is not whether Informix is better than SQL Server or not. It's more than likely that the Governments are going to be running instances of Oracle or DB2 than they are of Informix.
There's always going to be issues to list out with Windows, such as:
GUI's for a server OS: This is completely unnecessary, hogs memory and CPU, and introduces more complexity to that which is supposed to be simple.
The inclusion of unnecessary services and software on the server: Once again, the database / web / application server do not need a web browser, they do not need an e-mail client, a calculator, notepad, etc. They should only have the libraries that allow a programmer to communicate with the servers that actually are supposed to do the work, especially CDO. This is the big bad library that most of those Outlook worms use anyway. The e-mail server should be the one to handle message generation.
Excessive device drivers: The MS solution to the problem of installing on every system is to waste space by copying every driver to known devices to the hard disk. This includes twain/scanner drivers, ATI/Nvidia/Matrox/Diamond/S3 display adapters, sixteen different mice, etc. A server machine should have a serial port, a NIC or two, EGA/VGA out, PS/2 for a keyboard. Your server's interface ought to be a command line, which does not require a mouse.
I grow tired of bitching about the OS though. MS (and MS croonies) seem to love the facets of bloat. A server should not have a GUI, imagine if you lost a machine because of a bug in the graphical subsystem. You'd love to just have terminal to work with after that. Unnecessary software = unnecessary complexity = increased probability of failure.
The PHB starts to get suspicious when your hands give a sudden movement every time that he comes by. And then there's the one time that he sneaked up on you, and witnessed you zoning out for five minutes before saying anything.
In my IT experience with MS, and experience throughout school with UNIX flavors, I'd say that more time is wasted on Windows. Windows Servers are bad in particular.
I've had our Database server up and die, killing your "4 hours of productivity." Every time I log in, I wait for Windows to automount every network drive that is mapped, which takes about 20 seconds. Every time I need to reboot because an installation program has updated the registry, I've needed to reboot.
Now, I'm a developer. If you compare just common desktop users, you'll find that Linux is either slightly faster than Windows. The UI for Windows is/has been cloned to the point of mootness. The MS point of "Time & Training" is completely bogus, as well as being nebulous. There really is no way that MS can back up the claim of time saved, since they have done a full year comparison of users, chosen at random from a very very large userbase.
The support contract that Munich signed with Suse undoubtedly includes upgrades to the system. Since it's the support service that Suse sells, the actual OS is insignificant (it's free, after all). Any and all upgrades will be provided under the support contract at the cost of the media it's on, if that.
If MS were willing to hand out licenses of Windows 2003 Server to everyone who has Windows 2000 Servers and Windows NT Servers, then you'd have a leg to stand on. Unfortunately, everyone must pay for the upgrade. If the payment is discounted, you are still paying something. Compare this to Linux, where all that is in place is a support contract. The OS upgrades are a giveaway.
Very much like my company. We have over 150 branches, all requiring office software. We decided to go with the latest StarOffice, primarily because it's easier to blame Sun than it is to blame a nebulous group of hackers.
The MS Office licensing outlook appeared to be around $300,000 for us. We spent $60,000 on StarOffice. OpenOffice would have been even cheaper, but PHB's can be pretty stupid sometimes.;-)
It isn't so marginal, you're just being arbitrary for the sake of being arbitrary.
OpenOffice consumes massive amounts of RAM anyways. I've got the "start center" enabled, since it makes things very quick, but looking at the task manager, you see that it eats 60 MB of memory, 50 MB of paging memory.
Conversely, Word starts up without a "Start Center" at about the same speed, and takes 18 MB or RAM, 13 MB of paging memory. Excel starts quickly, and uses 6 MB of RAM and 2 MB of paging memory.
OpenOffice is a piggy. I use it primarily because I admire the principle behind it, and not because it is a superior software package. It's functionally equivalent, I'd say, but it sure does gobble the RAM.
That game developers are mostly clueless about women. This is probably because they are primarily guys, and most them there don't get too much contact with women. Yeah, they may date, and even some are married, but they still have not had the time to actually make some observations of the nature of the woman.
The stereotypes are bullshit, for the most part. Women are going to think that games like "Barbie style magnet" and "Dofoo's tea party" are going to be degrading. Women aren't all about pink.
The games that appeal to the majority of women will involve the nuturing of characters, repetitive tasks, and a strong sentimental feel. I've lived my whole life around women, and if there is one thing that I've noticed about them is that they like to care for things. They like to plant things, encourage growth in things, and basically do all of those motherly type things. Then comes the knack that women have to endure the most boring things on earth, seemingly making it look enjoyable.
Look at the jobs that women have in factories, they are going to be the kind that either involve:
Managing a group
Fine motor skills.
Lots of repetitive tasks.
If you can make a game that involves all of these things, you will have made a game that women enjoy.
This is why you find a huge number of women playing games like "The Sims," where all of the daily tasks become repetitive, and the player is allowed near complete control over the character. "The Sims" appeals to the core feminine side without making it distasteful or insulting. It is quite the game for the ladies.
There is a provision in the DoD funding specifically for black ops. Senate knows that there *is* money going into them, although they all know that there is no way that they will know what the money is spent on. For all we know, TIA has been a thriving force since 1980.
All money for government goes through the house, regardless of what people may think. The military / CIA / NSA need to request funds from congress in order to do their operations. These funds end up looking like "Monkey Wrench" and "Toilet Seat," because these are good non-descriptive words that act as substitutes.
The wording of the bill is interesting, however, since it doesn't specify what can get the money, rather is specifies what cannot get the money. This way, congress can limit what the intelligence department can do with the money, without them actually knowing what they really are doing.
George, this is your brain. (holds up head of lettuce. Pulls peice off and presents it to George.) This is the part of your brain that is intelligent. The rest of it here is completely dedicated to sex. When you don't have sex, the rest of this head of lettuce gets "turned on."
George then learned Portugese so that he could screw the maid. Soon after, he became a complete imbecile once again.
This is the Seinfeld theory. The only individual that worked in complete opposition to it was E. Schroedinger, who always did his best work when he was getting laid regularly.
My *other* name (not Slime-dogg) is "Molybedenum." I was a chemistry addict in high school, but all "Molybdenum" names were taken everywhere. Mine sounds better, and has a nicer connotation.
If I need more character names than that, I replace the "l" with an "x," and get a nice Magic card reference in there too.
dd: sounds like 'th' - Myrddin is like "Merthin", not "Merlin."
ll: sounds like 'hl'
ch: sounds like 'k' as in "back," not "knife."
w: sounds like "oo" as in "swoon," when it appears that it is being used as a vowel. "mwneridd" sounds like "moonerith." Something like "Gwenhyvvar" sounds like "Guinevere."
y: takes the place of an 'i,' typically.;-)
I probably missed some, but those are the most common Celtic combinations.
Eh. People would just start killing other people with slingshots, kitchen knives, big rocks, whatever. Anything can be used as a weapon. When will the anti-gun people realize that it's just as easy for someone to throw a rock at someone's head as it is to shoot them. Of course, it's more likely that you'll miss (maybe). If someone wants to kill someone else, they're gonna do it.
There are plenty of strangulations and stabbings in addition to shootings. Banning guns is not the solution. It's not even close.
The kids that have gone on killing sprees, or tried to, or whatever, have not necessarily been poor. Instead, it seems that they have been social outcasts. There has to be a reason for someone to hate society enough to want to start killing people, and this reason is not violent video games. It seems that violent video games have become the scapegoat for something that most people do not want to admit: social pressure.
No cop is going to want to admit that his high school cheerleader daughter makes fun of people because it's cool to do so. No rich man wants to admit that his son hangs a gang known as "the football team," and randomly goes around beating kids up, for fun. These kids that have gone on killing rampages have had one thing in common, to tell the truth... they were all in some sort of social disgrace. People didn't like them.
Why don't we get to the root of the problem here, and teach our kids never to hate? The Suicide Machines state it in one of their more recent songs:
Because our state of mind needs to be corrected, so tech your kids never to hate... -Stand Up
The song refers more to racism and people's rights, but the words can be applied to anyone. The kid is different, they might be fat, skinny, pimply, bow-legged, smelly, whatever; these are all reasons for other kids to point at them and laugh.
Kids nowadays are brought to be proud and arrogant of who they are. The best defense they have is to appear untouchable, usually striking out verbally at anything that is different or threatening. I know, I've done it before. I was wrong too. I remember that there was this really overweight kid that we used to pick on, he always sat in the front seat of the bus. We could never be cool with him, he was an easy target. He ended up going to a school for the behaviorally challenged. I think that he only got placed there because he was emulating what all of the kids were intimating, he became a monster so the monster couldn't touch him.
Some of the greatest minds of history were outcasts. There are a pile of artists and songwriters out there that express the hopelessness that they face in society. It's interesting that they are the ones that could have cracked if they weren't stronger. It's interesting that they are the ones that everyone recognizes now, and the ones that had their pinnacle in high school are now firemen or work in a factory.
If the kids learn to be accepting, truly accepting of everyone, then we probably wouldn't have that much of a problem. Instances like this are brought upon over time by social pressure, not by genetic psychosis, and definitely not be video games.
I'm impressed with the progress of Mono. They have gotten the C# compiler to the point where they can compile the compiler without relying on the MS.NET C# compiler. The runtime is functional, and contains everything that you can find in the.NET runtime.
The difference is in the libraries that flesh out the rest of the.NET framework, most notably the windows.forms class. Most of the library DLL's can be run from Mono just as well as.NET. The certain classes that do have a reliance on the windows API (windows.forms and other closed classes) are being re-implemented on top of GTK / GTK+.
All it takes is patience. Mono will be identical to.Net, eventually. I hope no one goes around saying that the libraries are required for the runtime, because they truly are not.
BTW, ASP.NET is a humongous step up for anyone who was an ASP developer. Sometimes it is way too difficult to convince company heads to go with a solution that doesn't cost money. They typically ask about support, and then ask why other companies still use MS products. I'm one of the only guys in my company's IT department that has experience with UNIX, everyone else was weaned from the typewriter onto Windows. Shit, even one of the programmers here barely knows how to type, prefers the point and click interface of Delphi, and brags about how much easier that is than.NET.
For anyone caught in the MS environment, using MS SQL Server, along with IIS....NET is more than ideal. Everything has been made much simpler, especially the part where I can develop something in C#, and let someone else who is afraid of braces use that class in VB.NET. The integration of ADO.NET and SQL Server, the improved handling of ASP.NET stuff by IIS, and the ease of creating something useful and reusable makes.Net great on Windows.
Looking upon Unix, I start to think that.Net might just be a good place to start to tie things together there too.
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It seems that they have so many of them now. Why can't all of the devo's just work on one? They could label it "Eclipse GUI plugin" or something. It seems to me that there's a lot of energy going into a lot of projects in parallel, when one of the projects getting done faster would be more desireable.
I've noticed that most games that come out have a ton of screen shots on the box, and almost all of them have a flip out front now. The publishing companies are typically to blame, demanding that a game is finished in a tiny amount of time. They see something that is flashy, and they will be impressed. The basic sale is showing the impressive graphics off, hoping that people buy based on that alone. As an example, you have Unreal 2, Doom clones, Quake clones, etc.
The games that pop out with new engines and stuff usually do not have the greatest design. Those typically come a generation later. I admit that I plunked down the money for Unreal 2. I justify it by saying that I am supporting future awesome engine development. :^P The game, however, was fairly boring.
I hope number 3 is "smooth gameplay, no bugs." I've got a relatively powerful system (Athlon XP 2400 / Radeon 8500), and Morrowind still is choppy at times. Neverwinter Nights wasn't stable until two months after I purchased the game, I began to call it "Nevergettoplay Nights." At least Unreal 2 wasn't choppy, although it did cause hangs every now and then.
Number 4 for "great games" should be extensibility. Doom, Wolfenstein, Quake 3, Half Life, NWN... Great games because I could change the models, levels, and sounds. I could create all new games, if I wanted to.
I'm not even out of college and I program in an enterprise environment. I'd venture to say that most guys popping out of school now are higher quality than the ones that came out of school three years ago. The employment situation is no longer a magnetic attractor of money hungry buffoons, so the only factor of those finishing school in CS/Programming is complete love of the system.
College guys spend ages coding up OSS projects, just so that they can build a name for themselves. That wierdo that makes comments on your favorite OSS mailing list, the one that has comments that jive with your own, he might just be 19 or 20 years old. He has to get known, otherwise he will have little hope of finding employment after school.
One thing about code is that it gets better with practice. These guys in school are practicing their asses off, because they know that they are looked down on as "noobs" to the industry.
I know that my code is crappy. I work hard to make it clean and keep it commented. The problem comes from trying to program in orginal ASP without a debugger. :-P It gets better over time, at least. In a couple years, I'll have a library of software to sell myself with. Until then, I'll stay where I work and whatnot.
MS makes command line Wizards now?
My, my, my, that is acidic language. In order for more people to take you seriously, I strongly suggest you to take a chill-pill. The point that you make is valid, however, I am more willing to discount it on the basis that it's an overemotional argument.
I understand the strength of the command line in good OS's, including Windows, Linux, Unix, yada... In most corporate small business cases, I would certainly suggest windows. MSCE's come a dime a dozen nowadays, and if something gets f'd up, you can just blame them ;-P
If you want to be heard and taken seriously, try to be as infomative as possible without looking like a zealot. )even if you say that you administer Linux boxen(
or pass on the job and look for another client.
There's another option, one that is more suited to a consultant. That would be: "Take the money, write a kick-ass application that would scale on appropriate hardware, then tell the company that when they run into connection / speed / scaling prolems, they should throw in some extra hardware."
That way, you've still done work for them. You still have that project on your resume', and you've done what you could within inflexible constraints. If the company is frugal enough to hold off on increasing the budget, they're going to have to understand that the problems they have are a result of the hardware that they are running, and the choices that they have made.
Make them aware of other options, OSS or not, but don't reject a project just because they don't want what you want. That's bad salesmanship.
Way cool... Click on the humongo map link at the lat/lon site, and report back how much memory it eats.
Right now, I've got Firebird using 40 MB of RAM, 805 MB of swap.
It reads like it would be illegal to post any copyrighted information to any publicly accessible network. This bill, folks, will make the WWW illegal.
Then again, if senators are passing e-mail back and forth on a mailing list, they will be in violation of this bill, and be called felons.
I do know that back in the day when I was using Linux...
It seems like you're making a comparison between something which came 5-6 years ago to something that came maybe 2 years ago. I'd say that there is a rather distinct technological difference there.
As for getting a new peice of software up and running... well, that's a training or a distro issue. Running Debian, RH, Suse, Gentoo nowadays usually involves a one-liner in the terminal, the software is pre-configured to work with the system that you're on.
Then you're talking about a database, which is not Linux. When I talk about a database server, I'm talking about the server OS that the database is sitting on, in our case it's Windows 2000. The issue at stake is not whether Informix is better than SQL Server or not. It's more than likely that the Governments are going to be running instances of Oracle or DB2 than they are of Informix.
There's always going to be issues to list out with Windows, such as:
I grow tired of bitching about the OS though. MS (and MS croonies) seem to love the facets of bloat. A server should not have a GUI, imagine if you lost a machine because of a bug in the graphical subsystem. You'd love to just have terminal to work with after that. Unnecessary software = unnecessary complexity = increased probability of failure.
The PHB starts to get suspicious when your hands give a sudden movement every time that he comes by. And then there's the one time that he sneaked up on you, and witnessed you zoning out for five minutes before saying anything.
Of course, you attribute it to "Break-Time."
That's a really really big IF.
In my IT experience with MS, and experience throughout school with UNIX flavors, I'd say that more time is wasted on Windows. Windows Servers are bad in particular.
I've had our Database server up and die, killing your "4 hours of productivity." Every time I log in, I wait for Windows to automount every network drive that is mapped, which takes about 20 seconds. Every time I need to reboot because an installation program has updated the registry, I've needed to reboot.
Now, I'm a developer. If you compare just common desktop users, you'll find that Linux is either slightly faster than Windows. The UI for Windows is/has been cloned to the point of mootness. The MS point of "Time & Training" is completely bogus, as well as being nebulous. There really is no way that MS can back up the claim of time saved, since they have done a full year comparison of users, chosen at random from a very very large userbase.
Watch those savings go down the tubes when the MS lawyers come by and say, "So, can you prove you have installed only MS Word on X thousand machines?"
In a civilized country, the burden of proof would lie on Microsoft to prove that the company was running Word on X + Y thousand machines.
The support contract that Munich signed with Suse undoubtedly includes upgrades to the system. Since it's the support service that Suse sells, the actual OS is insignificant (it's free, after all). Any and all upgrades will be provided under the support contract at the cost of the media it's on, if that.
If MS were willing to hand out licenses of Windows 2003 Server to everyone who has Windows 2000 Servers and Windows NT Servers, then you'd have a leg to stand on. Unfortunately, everyone must pay for the upgrade. If the payment is discounted, you are still paying something. Compare this to Linux, where all that is in place is a support contract. The OS upgrades are a giveaway.
Very much like my company. We have over 150 branches, all requiring office software. We decided to go with the latest StarOffice, primarily because it's easier to blame Sun than it is to blame a nebulous group of hackers.
The MS Office licensing outlook appeared to be around $300,000 for us. We spent $60,000 on StarOffice. OpenOffice would have been even cheaper, but PHB's can be pretty stupid sometimes. ;-)
It isn't so marginal, you're just being arbitrary for the sake of being arbitrary.
OpenOffice consumes massive amounts of RAM anyways. I've got the "start center" enabled, since it makes things very quick, but looking at the task manager, you see that it eats 60 MB of memory, 50 MB of paging memory.
Conversely, Word starts up without a "Start Center" at about the same speed, and takes 18 MB or RAM, 13 MB of paging memory. Excel starts quickly, and uses 6 MB of RAM and 2 MB of paging memory.
OpenOffice is a piggy. I use it primarily because I admire the principle behind it, and not because it is a superior software package. It's functionally equivalent, I'd say, but it sure does gobble the RAM.
I thought that you had to first be an "intellectual" before you could have "intellectual property."
That game developers are mostly clueless about women. This is probably because they are primarily guys, and most them there don't get too much contact with women. Yeah, they may date, and even some are married, but they still have not had the time to actually make some observations of the nature of the woman.
The stereotypes are bullshit, for the most part. Women are going to think that games like "Barbie style magnet" and "Dofoo's tea party" are going to be degrading. Women aren't all about pink.
The games that appeal to the majority of women will involve the nuturing of characters, repetitive tasks, and a strong sentimental feel. I've lived my whole life around women, and if there is one thing that I've noticed about them is that they like to care for things. They like to plant things, encourage growth in things, and basically do all of those motherly type things. Then comes the knack that women have to endure the most boring things on earth, seemingly making it look enjoyable.
Look at the jobs that women have in factories, they are going to be the kind that either involve:
- Managing a group
- Fine motor skills.
- Lots of repetitive tasks.
If you can make a game that involves all of these things, you will have made a game that women enjoy.This is why you find a huge number of women playing games like "The Sims," where all of the daily tasks become repetitive, and the player is allowed near complete control over the character. "The Sims" appeals to the core feminine side without making it distasteful or insulting. It is quite the game for the ladies.
There is a provision in the DoD funding specifically for black ops. Senate knows that there *is* money going into them, although they all know that there is no way that they will know what the money is spent on. For all we know, TIA has been a thriving force since 1980.
All money for government goes through the house, regardless of what people may think. The military / CIA / NSA need to request funds from congress in order to do their operations. These funds end up looking like "Monkey Wrench" and "Toilet Seat," because these are good non-descriptive words that act as substitutes.
The wording of the bill is interesting, however, since it doesn't specify what can get the money, rather is specifies what cannot get the money. This way, congress can limit what the intelligence department can do with the money, without them actually knowing what they really are doing.
George, this is your brain. (holds up head of lettuce. Pulls peice off and presents it to George.) This is the part of your brain that is intelligent. The rest of it here is completely dedicated to sex. When you don't have sex, the rest of this head of lettuce gets "turned on."
George then learned Portugese so that he could screw the maid. Soon after, he became a complete imbecile once again.
This is the Seinfeld theory. The only individual that worked in complete opposition to it was E. Schroedinger, who always did his best work when he was getting laid regularly.
My *other* name (not Slime-dogg) is "Molybedenum." I was a chemistry addict in high school, but all "Molybdenum" names were taken everywhere. Mine sounds better, and has a nicer connotation.
If I need more character names than that, I replace the "l" with an "x," and get a nice Magic card reference in there too.
Here's a short guide:
I probably missed some, but those are the most common Celtic combinations.
Eh. People would just start killing other people with slingshots, kitchen knives, big rocks, whatever. Anything can be used as a weapon. When will the anti-gun people realize that it's just as easy for someone to throw a rock at someone's head as it is to shoot them. Of course, it's more likely that you'll miss (maybe). If someone wants to kill someone else, they're gonna do it.
There are plenty of strangulations and stabbings in addition to shootings. Banning guns is not the solution. It's not even close.
Heh, no... the latest war was started by Daikatana.
I think differently.
The kids that have gone on killing sprees, or tried to, or whatever, have not necessarily been poor. Instead, it seems that they have been social outcasts. There has to be a reason for someone to hate society enough to want to start killing people, and this reason is not violent video games. It seems that violent video games have become the scapegoat for something that most people do not want to admit: social pressure.
No cop is going to want to admit that his high school cheerleader daughter makes fun of people because it's cool to do so. No rich man wants to admit that his son hangs a gang known as "the football team," and randomly goes around beating kids up, for fun. These kids that have gone on killing rampages have had one thing in common, to tell the truth... they were all in some sort of social disgrace. People didn't like them.
Why don't we get to the root of the problem here, and teach our kids never to hate? The Suicide Machines state it in one of their more recent songs:
The song refers more to racism and people's rights, but the words can be applied to anyone. The kid is different, they might be fat, skinny, pimply, bow-legged, smelly, whatever; these are all reasons for other kids to point at them and laugh.Kids nowadays are brought to be proud and arrogant of who they are. The best defense they have is to appear untouchable, usually striking out verbally at anything that is different or threatening. I know, I've done it before. I was wrong too. I remember that there was this really overweight kid that we used to pick on, he always sat in the front seat of the bus. We could never be cool with him, he was an easy target. He ended up going to a school for the behaviorally challenged. I think that he only got placed there because he was emulating what all of the kids were intimating, he became a monster so the monster couldn't touch him.
Some of the greatest minds of history were outcasts. There are a pile of artists and songwriters out there that express the hopelessness that they face in society. It's interesting that they are the ones that could have cracked if they weren't stronger. It's interesting that they are the ones that everyone recognizes now, and the ones that had their pinnacle in high school are now firemen or work in a factory.
If the kids learn to be accepting, truly accepting of everyone, then we probably wouldn't have that much of a problem. Instances like this are brought upon over time by social pressure, not by genetic psychosis, and definitely not be video games.
I'm impressed with the progress of Mono. They have gotten the C# compiler to the point where they can compile the compiler without relying on the MS.NET C# compiler. The runtime is functional, and contains everything that you can find in the .NET runtime.
The difference is in the libraries that flesh out the rest of the .NET framework, most notably the windows.forms class. Most of the library DLL's can be run from Mono just as well as .NET. The certain classes that do have a reliance on the windows API (windows.forms and other closed classes) are being re-implemented on top of GTK / GTK+.
All it takes is patience. Mono will be identical to .Net, eventually. I hope no one goes around saying that the libraries are required for the runtime, because they truly are not.
BTW, ASP.NET is a humongous step up for anyone who was an ASP developer. Sometimes it is way too difficult to convince company heads to go with a solution that doesn't cost money. They typically ask about support, and then ask why other companies still use MS products. I'm one of the only guys in my company's IT department that has experience with UNIX, everyone else was weaned from the typewriter onto Windows. Shit, even one of the programmers here barely knows how to type, prefers the point and click interface of Delphi, and brags about how much easier that is than .NET.
For anyone caught in the MS environment, using MS SQL Server, along with IIS... .NET is more than ideal. Everything has been made much simpler, especially the part where I can develop something in C#, and let someone else who is afraid of braces use that class in VB.NET. The integration of ADO.NET and SQL Server, the improved handling of ASP.NET stuff by IIS, and the ease of creating something useful and reusable makes .Net great on Windows.
Looking upon Unix, I start to think that .Net might just be a good place to start to tie things together there too.