I bet Ballmer lives in the most expensive van by the river.
Now on related news, people should go out and vote, but not for a president, that part we are isolated by the electoral college, if you live in a prodimnantly republican state, your vote for a president does not matter.
However, you should vote on state and local issues, this is where your vote counts.
Also, remember that up to 4 supreme court justices are expected to retire in the next 4 years, which gives the next president a lot of clout over legal issues handled by the supreme court for the next 10-15 years (depending on justices that will be assigned by the president). At this point the supreme court is split with 1 judge leaning them towards more liberal views. With republicans you can expect conservative right wing nominations that will challange civil liberties and keep science down in favor of religion. Democrats will leans towards liberal judges that will allow stem cell research, medicinal marijuana, and such. The choice is yours as to which direction you want the country to go, but if we fall behind in scientific research, another country can take the lead and that tends to have a domino effect that affects our economy.
If memory serves me right... this was done on a PvP server and was called Project M.
You could play a monster and would randomly spawn as one on some random map. You could kill other monsters and gain experience. You started as a low level monster (level 1-5) and some people actually got to level 12 I think. Since dying will just reset you back to another monster.
The problems were that you would have people playing monsters play like players do (which tends to be annoying). For example: you run up to someone kick and punch them, then run away and hide amoung your monster "friends". With some you got a bow and arrow and you could shoot people and run away. Essentially this is how players play but monsters comply and act dumb (you pull one from their friend and others look around and think, hey where did Bob go? Oh well, let's just stand around here. Oh wait where did Fred go? Hmm, ok I will just stand here and wait, nothing to see... and so forth, not very realistic).
So after a lot of people complained that players controlling monsters got them killed and generally annoyed them, the project was scrapped. This was a few years ago, my memory is a bit cloudy since I quit EQ a while ago.
That's what J2ME is all about, one platform for all those mobile devices. However it's still a hodge-podge of a toolkit, easy to develop, tricky to deploy and there is little guarantee that the JVM implemented for a specific mobile device is completely compliant. Not to mention that it's an interpreted language on an already somewhat slow mobile CPU (but this is the java problem, great if you have tons of spare cycles, not so good if you have to be efficient or rely on performance)...
However, if not constrained by J2ME, you have to now worry about all the different display types, input types, etc. Hell it's like programming for MSDOS and SVGA all over again. When will large corporations making these devices agree on anything?!
That is true. The difficulty of MI is that it takes a bit of discipline to get it done right. The one item that makes it potentially dangerous is common base classes (ones that are not labeled virtual).
Given the following scenario:
class Human {}; class BikeDriver : public Human {}; class CarDriver : public Human {}; class AllDriver : public CarDriver, public BikeDriver {};
If you do:
AllDriver *pAll = new AllDriver(); Human *pH = (Human *)pAll;
You get an ambiguity (and luckily one that is caught by most compilers), as to which Human class instance do you want to use one that CarDriver is based on or BikeDriver?
To fix this:
class Human {}; class BikeDriver : virtual public Human {}; class CarDriver : virtual public Human {}; class AllDriver : virtual public CarDriver, virtual public BikeDriver {};
Now that example will have just 1 instance of Human class.
This is the dreaded diamond inheritance that is often brought up when talking about multiple inheritance.
In Java you can have a kind-of multiple inheritance by allowing a class to extend from another class and to implement 1 or more interfaces (abstract class in C++). This is a nice feature and a lot easier to trust people with implementing. Multiple inheritance is just a generic version of this.
There are times where inheriting from multiple classes is very useful (especially when dealing with lots of base generic classes, many of which are abstract). You can always work around it but as it stands in C++ getting rid of it without a better replacement may be a bad idea.
Multiple inheritance is way complicated and most people that don't understand it, dismiss it as not useful. It's complicated enough to teach average programmers about inheritance and polymorphisms, when you add multiple inheritance along with virtual base classes, most people can't comprehend and misuse the design.
Your sampling of good developers may be limited to your dad, thus your opinion is apropriately biased.
The money does come out of there and to the lower ranks of society... it's called an executives addiction to cocaine!
Re:All in it together
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The designers try to avoid multiple inheritance since they are aiming Java and C# to the bottom 85% of the programmers and multiple inheritance is too complex and way too many weak programmers do not understand how it works and create problems with its misuse. Give an unskilled worker a jackhammer and you can expect a call from your local utilities company. Just my observation...
Epidural should not be recommended for everyone, it's an invasive procedure that mucks with the spinal column (I almost laid out the anethesiologist who said, "oops, went too far, got some blood", he's messing with my wife not some lab speciment).
Another problem with epidurals is that the woman is numb and has a hard time feeling the child pass through, a a result tears occur due to "over-pushing" that take a few months to heal (no sex for a few months:( ), they can damage their lower back due to too much pushing, since they don't feel the pain an dthere is no pain-easeoff feedback.
Overall this is my theory: You just got an epidural: 1. Incur difficulty in pushing 2. Get your self on a ptosin drip and get some nasty irregular and unnatural contractions 3. Baby comes too fast and you get a lot of tearing or a caesarian section 4. Doctor is probably happy, insurance claims with caesarian section are less likely to stick in case of problems since it's considered an invasive surgery
We switched obgyns in the last week because the doctor we had was too gung-ho about induction and c-section. Using a mid-wife in a hospital was a far more rewarding of an experience.
Now back to the topic at hand: Check out one of the small X10 cams (or similar). Attach them to your PC and have them take snapshots every 3-10 seconds (depending on preference), run an FTP daemon (or web cam uploading program) bunch of those available to send those images to you web site (or if you ahve one running locally you are all set). Another thing is to get a cam program that lets you take time-lapse video, one frame every second or two, so you can quickly check on the baby sitter.
There are also privacy issues, I don't know if you need to tell your baby sitter about the fact they are being video taped, since you don't want any lawsuits. However telling the baby sitter that the house has web cams all over will probably make them think twice about shaking or ignoring the baby.
I just wish MMORPG designers and developers try to make their games interesting past the initial learning curve. The sad fact is that many become level grinds. Having played EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Dark Ages Of Camelot, Horizons, and City Of Heroes... I am just about ready to give up on the whole MMORPG arena. It's a level grind 80% of the time (if not more). But as long as these games are designed for everyone, they will suffer inbalances and have the level grind built in (some people actually like the mindless level grind, some people are mindless...)
Those are actually unrequested, you do request it, but the link then invokes JavaScript which does some other stuff and then tries to call window.open command which is an indirect call and it is blocked. You see if that was not blocked by Mozilla, then nothing is preventing some web site operator from calling window.open dozens of times when you only clicked it once. The block here is JavaScript based rather that a direct block of a popup which you can achieve via a TARGET element of the A tag.
I had a brother-in-law stay over and I let him use the computer to read email and browse, so he naturally used IE since he didn't know about Mozilla I have installed (IE is only in one place under Accessories|Communication, but he found it). Needless to say after he left I ran my weekly Spybot: Seek and Destroy and AVG anti-virus, only to find a few trojans, a virus and tons of tracking cookies in the IE folders. Needless to say I created a new folder called "Do Not Use" and put the blue E there, hoping no one uses it again.
By the way Mozilla Firefox has been working with my bank since version 0.6 (way to go Wells Fargo!) and I have not had any need to run IE with any other sites I visit. If it doesn't run in Mozilla, I don't want to visit the site, simple as that.
Most sites that do not seem to work with Mozilla are the ones using JavaScript to pop open unrequested windows to function. When MS released SP2 for XP it will block those, forcing many websites to redo their crappy code and make the web even more compatible with Mozilla... one can hope:)
I would disagree (with your disagreement) about the install, it's not difficult to install JVM per se, but to install it without clobbering the other applications that will not run in your version of the JVM has been a difficult road to travel. If all the companies using Java as a platform agreed not to stick their version as the default, add their JVM to global path and on and on; it may be bearable, but that is not the case. I can't tell you how many times I had an application written by Borland or Oracle (just to mention large vendors who should know better) start up and kill my eclipse debugger (process just vanished, ghost process left behind). At this point we use many Java based apps from major vendors and I can't run a lot of them at the same time, they require diffent JVMs and it seems different JVMs don't co-exist together very well (this is on Windows 2k and on Windows XP). This alos was enough to tarnish my faith in Java. I hate to keep track of which JVM which install uses so that I don't have to keep losing application (mostly they just vanish with no error message).
The worst part is that using 1.4.1_03 is not compatible with some apps using 1.4.1_02 (some major vendor even requires people to uninstall 1.4.1_03 and reinstall 1.4.1_02 or it would not run, but we needed 1.4.1_03 for another app... these are the dilemmas of the corporate contracts with vendors providing software that they only tested on bare machines with 1 JVM).
This is nothing of how slow they run and the gigantic footprint they have. 2GB is barely enough to run 2 or 3 apps before realizing that my HDD is thrashing. I work with Java and it has a lot of nice ideas, but overall I am not impressed with it.
It makes me sad to see this, but it also makes me hopeful that one day C/C++ will over-run Java and people will go back to learning how to write compact, efficient and clean code and all the new Java developers can either learn or go back to flipping burgers... I am jaded by all the bad developers I have encountered when dealing with Java... sorry I know there are a lot of great ones too.:(
And you are the reason that things run slow. Every problem has a specific solution, pushing RDBMS on everyone without regard to the problem is self-serving...oh wait you are making a small fortune on this, hence the vested interest into something you know.
I'd never use a database for anything more than storing data and doing simple fast queries to get it out. You are usually tied to one big database machine/cluster and it is the most expensive to scale. So more logic you put into the DB the more you will pay if you need to scale it (not to mention all the expensive DBA you will need to hire to manage the stored procedures, et al).
Fetch the data into business objects of some sort (or a local data store), work the data as you need then send it up to the presentation layer and you should have a nice architecture that can scale quite easily.
If you are doing reports, load data from DB into a map/map, process it, then generate XML data from the map/map and use XSLT to transform it to whatever output you like. Quite efficient and easily scaled.
0. Microsoft patches/fixes 1. Mozilla Firefox (and lots of extensions) 2. Spybot - Search & Destroy 3. AVG 4. MS Visual Studio NET 2003 5. cygwin 6. WinAmp 5.0 7. InfraView 8. DivX (codec only) 9. Open Office A. Eclipse and J2SE 1.4xxx B. TightVNC C. MySQL admin client D. Ultra Edit 32 E. Python F. PuTTY 10. Trillian
This is not an issue of morality or patriotism. It is am example of corporate greed. Hiring someone overseas instead of someone local may cost a bit more, but that local person pays taxes and buy the products and puts money back into our economy.
If the local person does not have a job, they are not going to be buy as much, thus reducing the seales figures for many companies. It is a vicious cycle, but I'll say it again, corporate executives for the most part cannot see further than their nose and only care about immediate savings, meeting quarterly goals and padding their wallets. They do not care about the long term and when the going gets tough, they retire.
Obviously you are not a programmer... One person would have done a way better job, but MS uses tons of resources, most of whom are clueless and thus you have the monstrocity they call Windows XP and in no way related to XP in this thread.
The 80s are coming back full force, it's expected that the games that helped shape the 80s and the whole game industry would make a small retro comeback. Hell I still boot up the old Atari 2600 so I can use a large orange box with a sword to kill a dragon that looks like a duck on crack...
This is no different than your crazy neighbor spending his life savings on restoring a Ford Edsel (and I swear that is a toilet seat not a grill)! People like nostalgia, remoinds them of times when things were simple and fun.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet Ballmer lives in the most expensive van by the river.
Now on related news, people should go out and vote, but not for a president, that part we are isolated by the electoral college, if you live in a prodimnantly republican state, your vote for a president does not matter.
However, you should vote on state and local issues, this is where your vote counts.
Also, remember that up to 4 supreme court justices are expected to retire in the next 4 years, which gives the next president a lot of clout over legal issues handled by the supreme court for the next 10-15 years (depending on justices that will be assigned by the president). At this point the supreme court is split with 1 judge leaning them towards more liberal views. With republicans you can expect conservative right wing nominations that will challange civil liberties and keep science down in favor of religion. Democrats will leans towards liberal judges that will allow stem cell research, medicinal marijuana, and such. The choice is yours as to which direction you want the country to go, but if we fall behind in scientific research, another country can take the lead and that tends to have a domino effect that affects our economy.
Think and vote.
If memory serves me right... this was done on a PvP server and was called Project M.
You could play a monster and would randomly spawn as one on some random map. You could kill other monsters and gain experience. You started as a low level monster (level 1-5) and some people actually got to level 12 I think. Since dying will just reset you back to another monster.
The problems were that you would have people playing monsters play like players do (which tends to be annoying). For example: you run up to someone kick and punch them, then run away and hide amoung your monster "friends". With some you got a bow and arrow and you could shoot people and run away. Essentially this is how players play but monsters comply and act dumb (you pull one from their friend and others look around and think, hey where did Bob go? Oh well, let's just stand around here. Oh wait where did Fred go? Hmm, ok I will just stand here and wait, nothing to see... and so forth, not very realistic).
So after a lot of people complained that players controlling monsters got them killed and generally annoyed them, the project was scrapped. This was a few years ago, my memory is a bit cloudy since I quit EQ a while ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_Defense
Of course he is from Kashyyk, but he lives on Endor, does that make any sense? Of course not, therefore this expansion must be awesome!
This is the expansion where you get the quest to prove that Chewbakka is really from Endor.
If it wasn't for this equation, your cell phone wouldn't work.
I know a lot of people whose cell phones work and they don't know this equation...
That's what J2ME is all about, one platform for all those mobile devices. However it's still a hodge-podge of a toolkit, easy to develop, tricky to deploy and there is little guarantee that the JVM implemented for a specific mobile device is completely compliant. Not to mention that it's an interpreted language on an already somewhat slow mobile CPU (but this is the java problem, great if you have tons of spare cycles, not so good if you have to be efficient or rely on performance)...
However, if not constrained by J2ME, you have to now worry about all the different display types, input types, etc. Hell it's like programming for MSDOS and SVGA all over again. When will large corporations making these devices agree on anything?!
That is true. The difficulty of MI is that it takes a bit of discipline to get it done right. The one item that makes it potentially dangerous is common base classes (ones that are not labeled virtual).
Given the following scenario:
class Human {};
class BikeDriver : public Human {};
class CarDriver : public Human {};
class AllDriver : public CarDriver, public BikeDriver {};
If you do:
AllDriver *pAll = new AllDriver();
Human *pH = (Human *)pAll;
You get an ambiguity (and luckily one that is caught by most compilers), as to which Human class instance do you want to use one that CarDriver is based on or BikeDriver?
To fix this:
class Human {};
class BikeDriver : virtual public Human {};
class CarDriver : virtual public Human {};
class AllDriver : virtual public CarDriver, virtual public BikeDriver {};
Now that example will have just 1 instance of Human class.
This is the dreaded diamond inheritance that is often brought up when talking about multiple inheritance.
In Java you can have a kind-of multiple inheritance by allowing a class to extend from another class and to implement 1 or more interfaces (abstract class in C++). This is a nice feature and a lot easier to trust people with implementing. Multiple inheritance is just a generic version of this.
There are times where inheriting from multiple classes is very useful (especially when dealing with lots of base generic classes, many of which are abstract). You can always work around it but as it stands in C++ getting rid of it without a better replacement may be a bad idea.
Multiple inheritance is way complicated and most people that don't understand it, dismiss it as not useful. It's complicated enough to teach average programmers about inheritance and polymorphisms, when you add multiple inheritance along with virtual base classes, most people can't comprehend and misuse the design.
Your sampling of good developers may be limited to your dad, thus your opinion is apropriately biased.
The money does come out of there and to the lower ranks of society... it's called an executives addiction to cocaine!
The designers try to avoid multiple inheritance since they are aiming Java and C# to the bottom 85% of the programmers and multiple inheritance is too complex and way too many weak programmers do not understand how it works and create problems with its misuse. Give an unskilled worker a jackhammer and you can expect a call from your local utilities company. Just my observation...
Epidural should not be recommended for everyone, it's an invasive procedure that mucks with the spinal column (I almost laid out the anethesiologist who said, "oops, went too far, got some blood", he's messing with my wife not some lab speciment).
:( ), they can damage their lower back due to too much pushing, since they don't feel the pain an dthere is no pain-easeoff feedback.
Another problem with epidurals is that the woman is numb and has a hard time feeling the child pass through, a a result tears occur due to "over-pushing" that take a few months to heal (no sex for a few months
Overall this is my theory:
You just got an epidural:
1. Incur difficulty in pushing
2. Get your self on a ptosin drip and get some nasty irregular and unnatural contractions
3. Baby comes too fast and you get a lot of tearing or a caesarian section
4. Doctor is probably happy, insurance claims with caesarian section are less likely to stick in case of problems since it's considered an invasive surgery
We switched obgyns in the last week because the doctor we had was too gung-ho about induction and c-section. Using a mid-wife in a hospital was a far more rewarding of an experience.
Now back to the topic at hand:
Check out one of the small X10 cams (or similar). Attach them to your PC and have them take snapshots every 3-10 seconds (depending on preference), run an FTP daemon (or web cam uploading program) bunch of those available to send those images to you web site (or if you ahve one running locally you are all set). Another thing is to get a cam program that lets you take time-lapse video, one frame every second or two, so you can quickly check on the baby sitter.
There are also privacy issues, I don't know if you need to tell your baby sitter about the fact they are being video taped, since you don't want any lawsuits. However telling the baby sitter that the house has web cams all over will probably make them think twice about shaking or ignoring the baby.
The big father is watching!
I just wish MMORPG designers and developers try to make their games interesting past the initial learning curve. The sad fact is that many become level grinds. Having played EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Dark Ages Of Camelot, Horizons, and City Of Heroes... I am just about ready to give up on the whole MMORPG arena. It's a level grind 80% of the time (if not more). But as long as these games are designed for everyone, they will suffer inbalances and have the level grind built in (some people actually like the mindless level grind, some people are mindless...)
Control-S saves.
Those are actually unrequested, you do request it, but the link then invokes JavaScript which does some other stuff and then tries to call window.open command which is an indirect call and it is blocked. You see if that was not blocked by Mozilla, then nothing is preventing some web site operator from calling window.open dozens of times when you only clicked it once. The block here is JavaScript based rather that a direct block of a popup which you can achieve via a TARGET element of the A tag.
I had a brother-in-law stay over and I let him use the computer to read email and browse, so he naturally used IE since he didn't know about Mozilla I have installed (IE is only in one place under Accessories|Communication, but he found it). Needless to say after he left I ran my weekly Spybot: Seek and Destroy and AVG anti-virus, only to find a few trojans, a virus and tons of tracking cookies in the IE folders. Needless to say I created a new folder called "Do Not Use" and put the blue E there, hoping no one uses it again.
:)
By the way Mozilla Firefox has been working with my bank since version 0.6 (way to go Wells Fargo!) and I have not had any need to run IE with any other sites I visit. If it doesn't run in Mozilla, I don't want to visit the site, simple as that.
Most sites that do not seem to work with Mozilla are the ones using JavaScript to pop open unrequested windows to function. When MS released SP2 for XP it will block those, forcing many websites to redo their crappy code and make the web even more compatible with Mozilla... one can hope
I would disagree (with your disagreement) about the install, it's not difficult to install JVM per se, but to install it without clobbering the other applications that will not run in your version of the JVM has been a difficult road to travel. If all the companies using Java as a platform agreed not to stick their version as the default, add their JVM to global path and on and on; it may be bearable, but that is not the case. I can't tell you how many times I had an application written by Borland or Oracle (just to mention large vendors who should know better) start up and kill my eclipse debugger (process just vanished, ghost process left behind). At this point we use many Java based apps from major vendors and I can't run a lot of them at the same time, they require diffent JVMs and it seems different JVMs don't co-exist together very well (this is on Windows 2k and on Windows XP). This alos was enough to tarnish my faith in Java. I hate to keep track of which JVM which install uses so that I don't have to keep losing application (mostly they just vanish with no error message).
:(
The worst part is that using 1.4.1_03 is not compatible with some apps using 1.4.1_02 (some major vendor even requires people to uninstall 1.4.1_03 and reinstall 1.4.1_02 or it would not run, but we needed 1.4.1_03 for another app... these are the dilemmas of the corporate contracts with vendors providing software that they only tested on bare machines with 1 JVM).
This is nothing of how slow they run and the gigantic footprint they have. 2GB is barely enough to run 2 or 3 apps before realizing that my HDD is thrashing. I work with Java and it has a lot of nice ideas, but overall I am not impressed with it.
It makes me sad to see this, but it also makes me hopeful that one day C/C++ will over-run Java and people will go back to learning how to write compact, efficient and clean code and all the new Java developers can either learn or go back to flipping burgers... I am jaded by all the bad developers I have encountered when dealing with Java... sorry I know there are a lot of great ones too.
And you are the reason that things run slow. Every problem has a specific solution, pushing RDBMS on everyone without regard to the problem is self-serving...oh wait you are making a small fortune on this, hence the vested interest into something you know.
I'd never use a database for anything more than storing data and doing simple fast queries to get it out. You are usually tied to one big database machine/cluster and it is the most expensive to scale. So more logic you put into the DB the more you will pay if you need to scale it (not to mention all the expensive DBA you will need to hire to manage the stored procedures, et al).
Fetch the data into business objects of some sort (or a local data store), work the data as you need then send it up to the presentation layer and you should have a nice architecture that can scale quite easily.
If you are doing reports, load data from DB into a map/map, process it, then generate XML data from the map/map and use XSLT to transform it to whatever output you like. Quite efficient and easily scaled.
If only they would stop pushing DVD+R down everyone's throat, it's the least compatible format and the only one HP offers with their machines.
0. Microsoft patches/fixes
1. Mozilla Firefox (and lots of extensions)
2. Spybot - Search & Destroy
3. AVG
4. MS Visual Studio NET 2003
5. cygwin
6. WinAmp 5.0
7. InfraView
8. DivX (codec only)
9. Open Office
A. Eclipse and J2SE 1.4xxx
B. TightVNC
C. MySQL admin client
D. Ultra Edit 32
E. Python
F. PuTTY
10. Trillian
This is not an issue of morality or patriotism. It is am example of corporate greed. Hiring someone overseas instead of someone local may cost a bit more, but that local person pays taxes and buy the products and puts money back into our economy.
If the local person does not have a job, they are not going to be buy as much, thus reducing the seales figures for many companies. It is a vicious cycle, but I'll say it again, corporate executives for the most part cannot see further than their nose and only care about immediate savings, meeting quarterly goals and padding their wallets. They do not care about the long term and when the going gets tough, they retire.
Obviously you are not a programmer... One person would have done a way better job, but MS uses tons of resources, most of whom are clueless and thus you have the monstrocity they call Windows XP and in no way related to XP in this thread.
How about a standard issue greedy corporate executive? Dime a dozen... they'll **** Bill Gates **** for stock options.
I always thought that arrow was really a sword, but the box is holding it backwards (it's all about the imagination you know). :)
The 80s are coming back full force, it's expected that the games that helped shape the 80s and the whole game industry would make a small retro comeback. Hell I still boot up the old Atari 2600 so I can use a large orange box with a sword to kill a dragon that looks like a duck on crack...
This is no different than your crazy neighbor spending his life savings on restoring a Ford Edsel (and I swear that is a toilet seat not a grill)! People like nostalgia, remoinds them of times when things were simple and fun.