but the sight of an orange "glow in the dark" MacOS logo keeps me up at night... there's nothing scarier than a bootup screen starring at you all night
i bought a game from them. i wonder if that's how they've become 'cash positive'.
who here bought something from them since the news of Chapter 11 came out? Do you think you helped them?
I though I helped them with my $30, but not anymore. Here's why:
They may have had their biggest revenue week after these news. They can't be pulling this as a publicity stunt every month. So we just prolonged the pain.
I guess I have to retract my claim in some way, shape, or form. Yes, VA was written in Smalltalk. However, the current version of Eclipse comes with Plug-In Development Environment, which is basically VA with some things changed around, and is written in Java. I was under the impression that it, in fact, was VisualAge. I apologize for the inaccuracies.
I don't know about CD-R or DVD (though I suspect most limitations consist of the lack of a hardware speaking interface in Java), but with the Office suite comment, you are refering to the lack of a fast windowing toolkit for Java.
Believe it or not, that's about to change. If you've ever seen IBM VisualAge environment, you should know that's written in Java. The window speed is just as fast as any office suite. I was surprised just how fast it was.
The people who wrote VA work for a company called OTI. The windowing kit they used was something proprietary and closed called JFace, but from what I understand, they are ready to release and open-source it to the public in the next few months, although the website is password protected right now.
Don't sell Java short. it's not system level programming, but it's hardly something to be dismissed as 'too slow'.
Hey people, how about everyone who can and who has ever played a Loki game without paying for it, go and buy one off their website? That's what I am doing. I think it will be worth it. Maybe this Slashdot post can generate a couple of tens of thousands of dollars for them, and they'll stay alive or at least afloat for a couple of more titles.
just my 2 cents
Linus Torvalds has decided to maintain the Linux kernel in a closed bombshell bunker, without releasing the source to anyone. We have started the project OpenLinus, which is trying to clone Linus from various Linus memorabilia in order to keep the GPL development going. Real Linus is fine with OpenLinus as long as the later does not impersonate the former.
"Their minds and bodies work together much better than those of most other people."
Ummm.... I don't want to burst your bubble, Jon, but our bodies would work better if we exercised regularly. My CS friends who do nothing but play games all day are
THE CLUMSIEST PEOPLE I HAVE EVER MET IN MY LIFE!!!
As for mind being more agile, the same has been said for decades about chess, team sports (as long as it is presented right), rock-climbing, reading books, etc. The truth is: any stimulating activity is helpful for young children. Naturally, games are stimulating.
While I usually disagree with just about anything that comes out of JonKatz's mouth (and there's a lot that comes out of JonKatz's mouth), I admit that this essay has a good point. And the point is,
Don't let the media hype define what you watch on tv. (I am talking to you, 13 year old 3l337 h4x0rz)
Don't let networks and websites be your only guide to what's going on in the world. (I am talking to you, college kids)
Don't think that you will watch a 60 minute special on high school violence and know how to prevent the next Columbine. (I am talking to you bad parents)
Don't think that you can post to slashdot and call yourself a geek-rights activist. (I am talking to you JonKatz)
P.S. enough with the GeekHype
I am worried that if I have to pay $5/month for EVERY site I visit while I waste 10 minutes at work, I will go broke.
I don't read kuro5hin regularly, so their "pay $5 or the kitty gets it" doesn't directly affect me. On the other hand, my bookmarks include about 15 daily timewasters (/. being the number one of them). If in six months, 5 of those 15 ask me for anywhere from 5 to 10 dollars, I will think twice before paying. That's 25 to 50 dollars a month just to keep me from doing work. The reason I (and everyone else's grandmother) read 15 websites a day is that no one website provides ALL the information I have grown to need. Paying $5 for the miniscule information each ONE website provides does not look like a reasonable micropayment.
Paying $0.49 of "pain-in-the-ass-micropayments" for a month of Penny-Arcade/Goats/Dilbert/(even UF though it has become bad IMHO) is not the problem for me, because I know I'll read each and every one of them and get a few laughs. The problem is paying $5 for each website (freshmeat/k5/rootprompt/slashdot/fuckedcompany) that fails to attract me for longer than 2 minutes a day.
just my two cents.
P.S. I am probably not going to visit k5 now. but they won't miss me.
Recently there were very few files shared on Napster because of their name filtering. People just left. Gnutella has been steadily growing though. I definitely say Gnutella is the future. I doubt Napster will be able to attract all those people back if they introduce a paid service. Gnutella has a pretty good chance of staying alive, and staying free.
The link about the Bayh-Dole Act actually doesn't say anything about patenting by businesses. It says that "the university is expected to give licensing" not patents.
i happen to work in corporate research at a big computer company, and while i am still in school, it is certainly NOT true that corporations can ][w]easily patent university research in exchange for funding.
academic research/work belongs to the students and the university, no matter who pays for it. at some universities student rights come first, at others vice versa. But a third party always comes last.
When I worked on a project at school (Cornell) which was supposed to be used by my current employer, they first had to modify our work agreement and run it by their lawyers twice or thrice, before finally seeing that the university copyrights were preserved. the project was funded by both university and corporate sides, btw.
in short, it depends on the university whether the fruits of academic labor will be given up for a few million funding. that much I know. but you can count on both interested parties will try to tear a larger piece of ownership for themselves, so the article, IMHO, is just taking a singular case where Berkeley decided to waste its own funding and forfeit a few of their own patents.
If they are trying to steal market from Oracle (small businesses and such), they will need their database to be transactional. Thus it's not MySQL in its current incarnation. And from what I remember in DB course, not accounting for transactions in the early stages of design, makes a hell of a time rewriting the product later.
Postgres, while transactional, lacks the performance. I have not tested it myself, but I seem to remember a bunch of benchmark articles a while back which seemed to point to this. (CORRECT ME, DON'T FLAME ME, IF I AM WRONG). It kinda makes sense for MySQL to be faster if it doesn't support LOCK.
"There are people who believe that commercial software should not exist at all--that there should be no jobs or taxes around commercial software at all. The GPL was created with that goal in mind."
We must admit, we have all been strategically using Linux to rid the world of Commercial Computer Jobs, in our hopes to start a world-wide holocaust against computer-inclined people, and welcome back the age of computer monopo^H^H^H^H^H^Hcivility.
but, wait! in our struggle against computer programmers, we have become THEM!!!! oh, no! our plan is ruined!
"The ecosystem where you have free software and commercial software--and customers always get to decide which they use--that's a very important and healthy ecosystem... [The GPL] breaks that cycle--that is, it makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that work. So what you saw with TCP/IP or Sendmail or the browser could never happen. We believe there should be free software and commercial software; there should be a rich ecosystem that works around that."
Do any of you understand this? I am not someone who knows GPL by heart, so i can't comment on it very well, but to me the statement looks unparsable. Kind of a it-depends-what-you-mean-by-'is' argument.
My point though is that he is only attacking the GPL here. Needless to say there are a lot of other licenses compatible with the definition of Open Source. Half of them are made by commercial entities, like Mozilla, IBM, CNRI, Sun, and Intel. Gates is careful not to quickly criticize those.
It seems that commercial products can perfectly coexist in the realm of 'free', or rather 'open' licenses. (Not free as in 'FSF free software'. Free as in 'free speech'). Just look at Apache and IBM's Websphere (built on top of that) is now a half a billion dollar business for IBM. I am sure there are more examples of this.
While it is hard to judge your own programming prowess, it is easy to say which language helped you better understand programming basics and particulars. I am no different. I don't consider myself an extraordinary programmer, but I concern myself with design and elegance more often than not, because now I find myself in the midst of big projects a lot more often. My take on this is that Java is ugly, but it is fine. If you know (or a teacher tells you) what features of a language are useful and elegant and which are not, you will become a good programmer. And Java has enough good features to fill an AP CS course.
1. Java is not that slow. In the Tibetian philosophy sense of the word, comparing your running time against an ideal program that does the same thing in Assembly/Linux/C/etc, we are all slow! But I have seen examples where a good Java compiler would do incredible things like String interning to a naive diff engine and the running time would be twenty times faster than the same naive program in Python or C++. GUI's are slow in Java, but that is not the language's fault, but rather the whole AWT/Swing hierarchy.
*Note: C++ would likely to be much slower too if it was compiled into bytecode.
2. Unless your assembly language supports types, there will soon come a point where your students will need to leave the warm womb of MIX/MIPS/RISC/x86. And I *AM* talking about extensible types here. Something with inheritance, interfaces, generic types (to be incorporated into Java from GJ), etc. All that C++ had to offer when it came out was Classes, and everybody jumped on it, because finally you could write better libraries and API's with method access control, even though it looked like a garbage truck was dumped on the clean sanctity of C.
*Note: the whole idea behind object oriented design is that you can extend the functionality of your program without changing existing code, but by extending the object type to cover more functions. That sounds like bloat, but that's when good design practices come in.
3. Java syntax could use a lot of work... Well, no argument here. There are a bunch of C things I'd like added to Java. Type synonyms is one. I know a lot of people will disagree with me here, but I'd like to see typedef's. But that's life. In good CS departments profs teach functional languages like Lisp, ML, Eifel, with great success. Some amazing programmers virtually speak great designs in ML. But eventually they have to leave their functional heritage in favor of Java and C++. Most of the time it is simply the political pressures of the workplace.
All in all, Java is not the best language to start out with, but considering that you always have to learn something else and move on, it is by far above average. It prepares you for the brave new object-oriented world out there. And once you realize all the brain-damages of Java and learn to sidestep them, you will be more aware of the same in other languages. I must mention though that I am in favor of Java *ONLY* with the condition that it will lead toward other languages in the curriculum.
*Note: I really, really want some feedback to my comment. However, I am going to say right now, that I will ignore any rants with the "Java ruined my life" flavor. If you honestly believe that learning Java first made you a bad programmer for life, you should get a friendly hacker slap some sense into you. Giving him/her (I wish there were more female hackers) your latest piece of code and asking for critical feedback should be the first thing you do when you wake up tomorrow.
At first I really thought that the lawsuit against Napster, Inc was an ethical issue, as many artists felt that their work was stolen.
But this just proves that the lawsuit was just to manipulate Napster into becoming a money collector for the music distributors. Not that there was any doubt that record companies lack any ethic, but staging this whole lawsuit for the sole purpose of getting a slice of Napster's equity is worse than anything they have ever done.
at least it is not called c-colon-backslash. that would be one for the ages. just imagine the headlines "Microsoft kills its new language in just three characters!!!"
actually, Princess Mononoke is a '95 film. You could actually see it in the US around '97, with subtitles and/or bad dubbing. The graphics in the movie are just about '95 level.
The movie was re-released for american audience in '99 when it was professionaly dubbed. Of course the characters in the film are awesome, but the translation basically ruined it for me. Ineloquent dialog was the most annoying thing.
well, i guess that's the price you pay for not learning Japanese. 8)
Not to get into a flame war, but I viewed Titan AE as a Hollywood try at Anime. Even japanese animation is hardly original all the time. But its strengths are different, as is the case with Titan AE.
Anime is a ultimately a cheap and cool way to portray superhuman characters without having to forego on dramatic plots. There are problems with that as any good Anime film has half a dozen of films with the same plot of ten percent the quality, but we [americans] have the same problem with actual movies, books, websites, even tv programs. in my experience, you have to read ten bad books to find one worth remembering. Good books are even rarer.
So don't judge Titan AE on a scale you would judge SW:TPM. it's at best unrealistic.
so, does this mean I^Hanyone can play Unreal naked? I mean I^Heverybody already does, but these new skins are going to give a whole new meaning to the pelvic thrust taunts. 8)
You may have already won! All you need to do is to be in the first 1,000 of 335,000 to turn off your Napster, and you will be qualified for the semifinals in a raffle to win a signed Metallica CD, together with a trip to the capital of the United States where you will appear in front of a government commitee on the issues of copyrighted music piracy.
But hurry! You must respond promptly in order to qualify, or your entry will be viewed as inadmissible evidence in the criminal case of music copyrightrights infringement.
Sincerely, RIAA Legal Team representing the interests of Metallica.
Slashdot Mirror
until the 10 million digit mersenne prime is found, if one exists.
very interesting... but hey, this should pump a few more clients into SETI@home, rc5, and the rest of the bunch.
but the sight of an orange "glow in the dark" MacOS logo keeps me up at night... there's nothing scarier than a bootup screen starring at you all night
i bought a game from them. i wonder if that's how they've become 'cash positive'.
who here bought something from them since the news of Chapter 11 came out? Do you think you helped them?
I though I helped them with my $30, but not anymore. Here's why:
They may have had their biggest revenue week after these news. They can't be pulling this as a publicity stunt every month. So we just prolonged the pain.
Any thoughts?
I guess I have to retract my claim in some way, shape, or form. Yes, VA was written in Smalltalk. However, the current version of Eclipse comes with Plug-In Development Environment, which is basically VA with some things changed around, and is written in Java. I was under the impression that it, in fact, was VisualAge. I apologize for the inaccuracies.
Thanks for keeping me honest. 8)
I don't know about CD-R or DVD (though I suspect most limitations consist of the lack of a hardware speaking interface in Java), but with the Office suite comment, you are refering to the lack of a fast windowing toolkit for Java.
Believe it or not, that's about to change. If you've ever seen IBM VisualAge environment, you should know that's written in Java. The window speed is just as fast as any office suite. I was surprised just how fast it was.
The people who wrote VA work for a company called OTI. The windowing kit they used was something proprietary and closed called JFace, but from what I understand, they are ready to release and open-source it to the public in the next few months, although the website is password protected right now.
Don't sell Java short. it's not system level programming, but it's hardly something to be dismissed as 'too slow'.
Hey people, how about everyone who can and who has ever played a Loki game without paying for it, go and buy one off their website? That's what I am doing. I think it will be worth it. Maybe this Slashdot post can generate a couple of tens of thousands of dollars for them, and they'll stay alive or at least afloat for a couple of more titles. just my 2 cents
Linus Torvalds has decided to maintain the Linux kernel in a closed bombshell bunker, without releasing the source to anyone. We have started the project OpenLinus, which is trying to clone Linus from various Linus memorabilia in order to keep the GPL development going. Real Linus is fine with OpenLinus as long as the later does not impersonate the former.
"Their minds and bodies work together much better than those of most other people."
Ummm.... I don't want to burst your bubble, Jon, but our bodies would work better if we exercised regularly. My CS friends who do nothing but play games all day are
THE CLUMSIEST PEOPLE I HAVE EVER MET IN MY LIFE!!!
As for mind being more agile, the same has been said for decades about chess, team sports (as long as it is presented right), rock-climbing, reading books, etc. The truth is: any stimulating activity is helpful for young children. Naturally, games are stimulating.
While I usually disagree with just about anything that comes out of JonKatz's mouth (and there's a lot that comes out of JonKatz's mouth), I admit that this essay has a good point. And the point is, Don't let the media hype define what you watch on tv. (I am talking to you, 13 year old 3l337 h4x0rz) Don't let networks and websites be your only guide to what's going on in the world. (I am talking to you, college kids) Don't think that you will watch a 60 minute special on high school violence and know how to prevent the next Columbine. (I am talking to you bad parents) Don't think that you can post to slashdot and call yourself a geek-rights activist. (I am talking to you JonKatz) P.S. enough with the GeekHype
I am worried that if I have to pay $5/month for EVERY site I visit while I waste 10 minutes at work, I will go broke.
I don't read kuro5hin regularly, so their "pay $5 or the kitty gets it" doesn't directly affect me. On the other hand, my bookmarks include about 15 daily timewasters (/. being the number one of them). If in six months, 5 of those 15 ask me for anywhere from 5 to 10 dollars, I will think twice before paying. That's 25 to 50 dollars a month just to keep me from doing work. The reason I (and everyone else's grandmother) read 15 websites a day is that no one website provides ALL the information I have grown to need. Paying $5 for the miniscule information each ONE website provides does not look like a reasonable micropayment.
Paying $0.49 of "pain-in-the-ass-micropayments" for a month of Penny-Arcade/Goats/Dilbert/(even UF though it has become bad IMHO) is not the problem for me, because I know I'll read each and every one of them and get a few laughs. The problem is paying $5 for each website (freshmeat/k5/rootprompt/slashdot/fuckedcompany) that fails to attract me for longer than 2 minutes a day.
just my two cents.
P.S. I am probably not going to visit k5 now. but they won't miss me.
Recently there were very few files shared on Napster because of their name filtering. People just left. Gnutella has been steadily growing though. I definitely say Gnutella is the future. I doubt Napster will be able to attract all those people back if they introduce a paid service. Gnutella has a pretty good chance of staying alive, and staying free.
just my 2 cents
The link about the Bayh-Dole Act actually doesn't say anything about patenting by businesses. It says that "the university is expected to give licensing" not patents.
i happen to work in corporate research at a big computer company, and while i am still in school, it is certainly NOT true that corporations can ][w]easily patent university research in exchange for funding.
academic research/work belongs to the students and the university, no matter who pays for it. at some universities student rights come first, at others vice versa. But a third party always comes last.
When I worked on a project at school (Cornell) which was supposed to be used by my current employer, they first had to modify our work agreement and run it by their lawyers twice or thrice, before finally seeing that the university copyrights were preserved. the project was funded by both university and corporate sides, btw.
in short, it depends on the university whether the fruits of academic labor will be given up for a few million funding. that much I know. but you can count on both interested parties will try to tear a larger piece of ownership for themselves, so the article, IMHO, is just taking a singular case where Berkeley decided to waste its own funding and forfeit a few of their own patents.
If they are trying to steal market from Oracle (small businesses and such), they will need their database to be transactional. Thus it's not MySQL in its current incarnation. And from what I remember in DB course, not accounting for transactions in the early stages of design, makes a hell of a time rewriting the product later.
Postgres, while transactional, lacks the performance. I have not tested it myself, but I seem to remember a bunch of benchmark articles a while back which seemed to point to this. (CORRECT ME, DON'T FLAME ME, IF I AM WRONG). It kinda makes sense for MySQL to be faster if it doesn't support LOCK.
Free round of install images on me!
it's a nice bonus for the AWESOME job they did on RH7.1
"There are people who believe that commercial software should not exist at all--that there should be no jobs or taxes around commercial software at all. The GPL was created with that goal in mind."
We must admit, we have all been strategically using Linux to rid the world of Commercial Computer Jobs, in our hopes to start a world-wide holocaust against computer-inclined people, and welcome back the age of computer monopo^H^H^H^H^H^Hcivility.
but, wait! in our struggle against computer programmers, we have become THEM!!!! oh, no! our plan is ruined!
"The ecosystem where you have free software and commercial software--and customers always get to decide which they use--that's a very important and healthy ecosystem... [The GPL] breaks that cycle--that is, it makes it impossible for a commercial company to use any of that work or build on any of that work. So what you saw with TCP/IP or Sendmail or the browser could never happen. We believe there should be free software and commercial software; there should be a rich ecosystem that works around that."
Do any of you understand this? I am not someone who knows GPL by heart, so i can't comment on it very well, but to me the statement looks unparsable. Kind of a it-depends-what-you-mean-by-'is' argument.
My point though is that he is only attacking the GPL here. Needless to say there are a lot of other licenses compatible with the definition of Open Source. Half of them are made by commercial entities, like Mozilla, IBM, CNRI, Sun, and Intel. Gates is careful not to quickly criticize those.
It seems that commercial products can perfectly coexist in the realm of 'free', or rather 'open' licenses. (Not free as in 'FSF free software'. Free as in 'free speech'). Just look at Apache and IBM's Websphere (built on top of that) is now a half a billion dollar business for IBM. I am sure there are more examples of this.
While it is hard to judge your own programming prowess, it is easy to say which language helped you better understand programming basics and particulars. I am no different. I don't consider myself an extraordinary programmer, but I concern myself with design and elegance more often than not, because now I find myself in the midst of big projects a lot more often. My take on this is that Java is ugly, but it is fine. If you know (or a teacher tells you) what features of a language are useful and elegant and which are not, you will become a good programmer. And Java has enough good features to fill an AP CS course.
1. Java is not that slow. In the Tibetian philosophy sense of the word, comparing your running time against an ideal program that does the same thing in Assembly/Linux/C/etc, we are all slow! But I have seen examples where a good Java compiler would do incredible things like String interning to a naive diff engine and the running time would be twenty times faster than the same naive program in Python or C++. GUI's are slow in Java, but that is not the language's fault, but rather the whole AWT/Swing hierarchy.
*Note: C++ would likely to be much slower too if it was compiled into bytecode.
2. Unless your assembly language supports types, there will soon come a point where your students will need to leave the warm womb of MIX/MIPS/RISC/x86. And I *AM* talking about extensible types here. Something with inheritance, interfaces, generic types (to be incorporated into Java from GJ), etc. All that C++ had to offer when it came out was Classes, and everybody jumped on it, because finally you could write better libraries and API's with method access control, even though it looked like a garbage truck was dumped on the clean sanctity of C.
*Note: the whole idea behind object oriented design is that you can extend the functionality of your program without changing existing code, but by extending the object type to cover more functions. That sounds like bloat, but that's when good design practices come in.
3. Java syntax could use a lot of work... Well, no argument here. There are a bunch of C things I'd like added to Java. Type synonyms is one. I know a lot of people will disagree with me here, but I'd like to see typedef's. But that's life. In good CS departments profs teach functional languages like Lisp, ML, Eifel, with great success. Some amazing programmers virtually speak great designs in ML. But eventually they have to leave their functional heritage in favor of Java and C++. Most of the time it is simply the political pressures of the workplace.
All in all, Java is not the best language to start out with, but considering that you always have to learn something else and move on, it is by far above average. It prepares you for the brave new object-oriented world out there. And once you realize all the brain-damages of Java and learn to sidestep them, you will be more aware of the same in other languages. I must mention though that I am in favor of Java *ONLY* with the condition that it will lead toward other languages in the curriculum.
*Note: I really, really want some feedback to my comment. However, I am going to say right now, that I will ignore any rants with the "Java ruined my life" flavor. If you honestly believe that learning Java first made you a bad programmer for life, you should get a friendly hacker slap some sense into you. Giving him/her (I wish there were more female hackers) your latest piece of code and asking for critical feedback should be the first thing you do when you wake up tomorrow.
Cheers,
Mike
At first I really thought that the lawsuit against Napster, Inc was an ethical issue, as many artists felt that their work was stolen.
But this just proves that the lawsuit was just to manipulate Napster into becoming a money collector for the music distributors. Not that there was any doubt that record companies lack any ethic, but staging this whole lawsuit for the sole purpose of getting a slice of Napster's equity is worse than anything they have ever done.
Just my personal feeling...
at least it is not called c-colon-backslash. that would be one for the ages. just imagine the headlines "Microsoft kills its new language in just three characters!!!"
actually, Princess Mononoke is a '95 film. You could actually see it in the US around '97, with subtitles and/or bad dubbing. The graphics in the movie are just about '95 level.
The movie was re-released for american audience in '99 when it was professionaly dubbed. Of course the characters in the film are awesome, but the translation basically ruined it for me. Ineloquent dialog was the most annoying thing.
well, i guess that's the price you pay for not learning Japanese. 8)
Not to get into a flame war, but I viewed Titan AE as a Hollywood try at Anime. Even japanese animation is hardly original all the time. But its strengths are different, as is the case with Titan AE.
Anime is a ultimately a cheap and cool way to portray superhuman characters without having to forego on dramatic plots. There are problems with that as any good Anime film has half a dozen of films with the same plot of ten percent the quality, but we [americans] have the same problem with actual movies, books, websites, even tv programs. in my experience, you have to read ten bad books to find one worth remembering. Good books are even rarer.
So don't judge Titan AE on a scale you would judge SW:TPM. it's at best unrealistic.
so, does this mean I^Hanyone can play Unreal naked? I mean I^Heverybody already does, but these new skins are going to give a whole new meaning to the pelvic thrust taunts. 8)
Dear Napster user!
You may have already won! All you need to do is to be in the first 1,000 of 335,000 to turn off your Napster, and you will be qualified for the semifinals in a raffle to win a signed Metallica CD, together with a trip to the capital of the United States where you will appear in front of a government commitee on the issues of copyrighted music piracy.
But hurry! You must respond promptly in order to qualify, or your entry will be viewed as inadmissible evidence in the criminal case of music copyrightrights infringement.
Sincerely,
RIAA Legal Team
representing the interests of Metallica.
for a little while i was excited that there might be another star wars or matrix movie, until i actually read that it's about Ender's Game. 8)
seriously though, what did people think of the five chapters on the website?