Right on. I think PC gaming hit its peak, while console gaming is on the rise. Console hardware has come to the point where online, 3d gaming is breaking the cost/performance barrier compared to the PC. SOCOM for PS2, perfect example.
Even after all these years with fast GPU's and CPU's, PC gaming is still painful. You gotta have your drivers just right, you gotta have supported hardware, or even stable hardware for that matter. If I calculated the amount of time I've wasted on getting my damned video driver just right to play 3d games without lockups, I would certainly justify the cost of a $200 console with a $40-$50 game. While it's sometimes fun and a learning experience tinkering with my PC to get it up for gaming, it can be tiring doing it again and again.
I'm not sure if Linux gaming will ever get there, or if it does you'll need a Linus type person behind the gaming API that can "sell" game developers on the interface.
All the blood, sweat and tears put into your programming masterpiece will be undone by your bonehead boss who hires some schmuck who looked good on paper. All the diagrams and CASE tools won't save you from your team members (or even yourself after a few years, many beers, and grey hairs).
You can either stay in the trenches and live with this inevitable truth or move up the food chain and pray that you know how to hire like-minded developers.
Ah, I remember the school days. It seemed so simple then. Who would have thought that the programming field would be so torn with politics, moron team members, and pointy haired bosses. It's never going to get easy, but that's a good thing.
Before you go all holier-than-thou with academia, I would suggest to you that with out the finanical support of the biotech firms much of that research would not be funded or possible. Lets not forget that those biotech students often have the desire to graduate and take home a paycheck. You can't have one without the other.
You need to foster that learning environment and you need the application of the technology to keep the cycle going.
What needs to happen is a balance to keep everyone on track and honest, having that patent keeps the control with the idea maker. I can see where it would be in the best interest of the professor to patent his ideas, lest you have biotech firms run with his idea, make billions, and never return the favor back to the university with grants, scholarships, etc.
Don't think though that the university system can be solely creditted with all the great achievements. In order to have the luxury of time devoted entirely to research, somebody has the pay the bills, buy the equipment, pay the profs, fund the grants.
Yes the various browsers and versions render HTML differently, making us developers do bad things, but how can you expect the web to be 100% standards compliant? And by whose standards? the W3C? Microsoft? AOL? the United States government? IBM?
How do you create a medium of information that is accessible to people of all languages, disabilities, cultures through any sort of digital device? Who decides how to implement it?
It's a world wide web dumbass (Zeldman), and it's a wonder it works at all. Like any sort of large scale human project, sacrifices must be made to get the thing in action. I would venture to say that the state of the web is pretty good today, but as always, is under construction.
As for CS students who spend their time and effort on projects that might not ever make it--I've heard of this guy that wrote some stuff back when he was in school, and it seems to be quite popular now. Think his name was Linus.
Heh, bootable cdrom would be the quickest way to go! There's certainly plenty of spare pc's sitting around in most large offices. Much more discrete as well. Plus, when their techies find it, more than likely they won't have a clue how to view the contents.
Don't forget to wear your gloves though, fingerprints show up very nicely on cd's.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I thought going digital tv is not the same as high definition tv. Seems like everyone is confusing HDTV with DTV and assuming we're going to pay $2000 for our next TV. Digital TV refers to the method of broadcast right? Requiring a different receiver vs. analog. HDTV is basically increasing the resolution, requiring a slug of different equipment in the box that allows display of that format. I've understood that you will be able to purchase a digital receiver and plug that into your old analog box, whereas HDTV will require a whole new box.
Tab completion is in Windows XP, no registry hacks needed. FYI, Microsoft may have declared DOS dead, but the command line thrives in XP. There are a slug of new command line tools in XP that make working with Windows a little less painful.
Um, correct me if I'm wrong but if you are developing client side java for an in-house system, this matters not. You just distribute your JVM in the usual manner.
If you are developing for the internet, why not use the OBJECT tag and automatically download the required JVM from sun?
Check out http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/guide/plugin/dev eloper_guide/using_tags.html on how to do that.
9/11 reference in AOTC? Look at how a people will submit to a leader in times of crisis. If you consider the plot of how Palpatine was granted emergency powers in reaction to the separatist movement to assemble an army of the republic. This significant turn of events has echoes throughout our history as well. Remember when Bush wanted some similar emergency powers after 9/11? Military tribunals? All for the love of the empire--er, republic--er, nation.
AOTC has a fantastic way of presenting a story that is not black and white, which is an excellent parallel to our own world. Can you see the ties? Trade federation, are they good, bad, greedy, or just pawns? Separatists, are they doing the right thing by getting out of the galactic government, or also pawns? Anakin, yes he is bound to a honorable organization, but took a personal vendetta against unsuspecting savages, is that bad or is he justified? It's so easy to love the orginal three Star Wars films because you knew who to cheer for, but it gets a lot more complex this time around.
And as for AOTC being the loser because of box office numbers: I truly, deeply, think Katz is a hypocrite.
Aren't these the guys that own Blizzard, both of whom are taking bnetd to court? Screw em in that case. Paying legal fees, with every $0.99 in the bucket.
Stop and think about this proposal. Now you know why the IRS tax code is such an abyss of rules and regulations.
If the country was all pay-per-use, many of the programs we have today would never be in place. Sometimes you need to support a program with the excess you get from others. However, some programs never get any buy-in from the voters unless they are supported by their own tax.
So what you have is a mess of people who feel we should have a flat tax on income, sales, etc. and those who prefer to fund only programs they like. I think this is unavoidable in America.
Perhaps NASA is at a critical point where it needs the support of a specialized tax or it will cease to be productive. Hell, if the Navy can squeeze in recruiting ads with movie previews, why not?
The best part of April Fool's day on slashdot is listening to all you clowns that fell for the joke and are whining about how stupid the jokes are and enough already.
C'mon folks, April Fool's on slashdot is a tradition. So what if they made you think twice today...
Thank you for the background. It's sort of the analogy of Photoshop PSD format to JPEG. Having worked on only the backend of web development, I was unaware of how Quicktime related to all other video formats.
However, most Joe Webusers out there think Quicktime is a pain in the arse because they have to download a pesky plugin in order to get the dang movie to play.
WTF? Am I the only one that appreciates all of the Star Trek series? Face it, no matter how much makeup or CGI you do or how cheesy the acting gets, Star Trek will only be as good as your suspension of disbelief. It's sci-fi, that's science fiction. You need to let your imagination go for a while and have some fun. So what if the continuity isn't perfect or the story seems stale, it's tv entertainment and if you can't enjoy that, then don't bitch about it. I do believe each Star Trek series has kept to Gene's spirit well, and I imagine the next one will also. If the next story doesn't progress with new technology, so be it, the ST story was never just about technology. -------
That kind of thing can't really happen with windows, yeah you can get back orifice but norton antivirus takes care of that.
If you believe that one antivirus utility will solve all your security problems, go right ahead and keep running that windows box. Any system connected to a public network is vunerable if not properly tweaked and monitored. Just because it has a simplified GUI doesn't mean there aren't any exploits out there. You need to surf some hacking sites, you'll be suprised what's available to crack your windows machine.
if he hears that he has to check some web page and subscribe to mailing lists to keep on top of latest exploits that will root his box, it's a good reason to stay with windows.
That's about as good system administration as sticking your head in the ground and hoping nothing happens. If you're not willing to put forth some effort in preventive maintenance, you're going to end up with a lot of work in the future, whether you run NT or Linux/Unix.
I work for a relatively small insurance company who has done some work with mySQL. We have a web site from which our field agents run reports written in Perl. Typically the database will have around 150,000+ records
It is fast. Very fast. mySQL does exactly what I need it to do, spit back data quickly for those agents on dialup internet connections.
In the 384 days (and counting) that we've had mySQL up and running, there has never been a corruption or crash. So yes, it is a stable and reliable database.
The important thing is that it works for us. If you are selling stuff online, maybe you should look at something else, say PostgreSQL.
Cool, maybe I'll get to boot Caldera DOS under Win98 now. I believe part of the problem that Caldera had with Win95 was that MS purposely made it impossible to use another bootloader to start win.com... -------
and know it was/is a huge problem for many companies. I do agree that the media hyped it up a little too much, but that doesn't mean there was no problem at all. I have have seen and rewritten COBOL code that would have failed after 12/31/99.
In defense of the mainframers, you need to get a perspective. There weren't many people with coding skills, and development standards had yet to be refined. I doubt there were any "software engineers" in the 60's, but plenty of people doing stuff with the big iron that was unheard of. I would also suggest that the people who coded using 2 digit years assumed that their code would be obsolete and rewritten before the century turnover. I've seen a lot of code that was originally written to be a quick and dirty fix still in production 5-10 years later.
Not to sound like a grumpy old man (actually I'm 26), but there was a time when disk space/memory/cpu time were critical resources. You had to know exactly how big your data files were and often had to pre-allocate space for them. You put your program and data on a cardboard punchcard and hoped to hell you didn't have to recompile anything! Run times were more like hours than seconds! If you think windows takes forever to boot, try waiting 45 minutes for the system to IPL.
So Mr. Katz, nothing major happened on this New Years day, but not with out a hell of an effort. I'd like to see how many people got stuck with Y2K conversions, upgrades, and overtime. I'd like to see how many IT managers were freaking out because the code they wrote in their younger days was going to fail in 2000. If you're wondering if the money spent on this fiasco was worth it, you'll know it when your bank statement shows up this month or your health insurance pays for your last doctor's visit.
Has it occurred to anybody that the real reason the theaters are going off on the carding issue is not about the theater company's morals but sales? Theater related businesses, video rental stores included, are under a lot of pressure with the recent events (no need to tell you again) by the whole of the American public & media.
They're scared that if they don't do something, anything, they'll look like they're ok with violence and other socially undesirable activity.
They're afraid to lose business, why do you think most theaters refuse to play NC-17? It's all about brand image & marketing BS. "We're a family theater", etc.
They're scared that if they just sit back, they'll get regulated. Government regulations cost businesses a lot of time and money. They know if this happens, they'll have to raise ticket prices again, and that'll probably tick off more people than the under 17 crowd.
At least if they do this now, they might look good for the media so there will be less chance that voting citizens will cry for laws to fix this mess.
Unfortunately for the theaters, they are the movie industry point of contact with the public, they can't afford to make the experience a bad one for the ticket buyers. At the same time, however, they can't afford to look like they've contributed to all the ills of society, hence the carding issue.
I'm not defending the theaters actions, just trying to understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
SDF: Space Defense Fortress
Don't you watch Robotech?
sheesh.
--
hecubas
Right on. I think PC gaming hit its peak, while console gaming is on the rise. Console hardware has come to the point where online, 3d gaming is breaking the cost/performance barrier compared to the PC. SOCOM for PS2, perfect example.
Even after all these years with fast GPU's and CPU's, PC gaming is still painful. You gotta have your drivers just right, you gotta have supported hardware, or even stable hardware for that matter. If I calculated the amount of time I've wasted on getting my damned video driver just right to play 3d games without lockups, I would certainly justify the cost of a $200 console with a $40-$50 game. While it's sometimes fun and a learning experience tinkering with my PC to get it up for gaming, it can be tiring doing it again and again.
I'm not sure if Linux gaming will ever get there, or if it does you'll need a Linus type person behind the gaming API that can "sell" game developers on the interface.
--
hecubas
All the blood, sweat and tears put into your programming masterpiece will be undone by your bonehead boss who hires some schmuck who looked good on paper. All the diagrams and CASE tools won't save you from your team members (or even yourself after a few years, many beers, and grey hairs).
You can either stay in the trenches and live with this inevitable truth or move up the food chain and pray that you know how to hire like-minded developers.
Ah, I remember the school days. It seemed so simple then. Who would have thought that the programming field would be so torn with politics, moron team members, and pointy haired bosses. It's never going to get easy, but that's a good thing.
*ahem*
Before you go all holier-than-thou with academia, I would suggest to you that with out the finanical support of the biotech firms much of that research would not be funded or possible. Lets not forget that those biotech students often have the desire to graduate and take home a paycheck. You can't have one without the other.
You need to foster that learning environment and you need the application of the technology to keep the cycle going.
What needs to happen is a balance to keep everyone on track and honest, having that patent keeps the control with the idea maker. I can see where it would be in the best interest of the professor to patent his ideas, lest you have biotech firms run with his idea, make billions, and never return the favor back to the university with grants, scholarships, etc.
Don't think though that the university system can be solely creditted with all the great achievements. In order to have the luxury of time devoted entirely to research, somebody has the pay the bills, buy the equipment, pay the profs, fund the grants.
Yes the various browsers and versions render HTML differently, making us developers do bad things, but how can you expect the web to be 100% standards compliant? And by whose standards? the W3C? Microsoft? AOL? the United States government? IBM?
How do you create a medium of information that is accessible to people of all languages, disabilities, cultures through any sort of digital device? Who decides how to implement it?
It's a world wide web dumbass (Zeldman), and it's a wonder it works at all. Like any sort of large scale human project, sacrifices must be made to get the thing in action. I would venture to say that the state of the web is pretty good today, but as always, is under construction.
As for CS students who spend their time and effort on projects that might not ever make it--I've heard of this guy that wrote some stuff back when he was in school, and it seems to be quite popular now. Think his name was Linus.
Never stop questioning the status quo.
--
hecubas
Heh, bootable cdrom would be the quickest way to go! There's certainly plenty of spare pc's sitting around in most large offices. Much more discrete as well. Plus, when their techies find it, more than likely they won't have a clue how to view the contents.
Don't forget to wear your gloves though, fingerprints show up very nicely on cd's.
--
hecubas
Correct me if I'm wrong, I thought going digital tv is not the same as high definition tv. Seems like everyone is confusing HDTV with DTV and assuming we're going to pay $2000 for our next TV. Digital TV refers to the method of broadcast right? Requiring a different receiver vs. analog. HDTV is basically increasing the resolution, requiring a slug of different equipment in the box that allows display of that format. I've understood that you will be able to purchase a digital receiver and plug that into your old analog box, whereas HDTV will require a whole new box.
Am I wrong here?
Tab completion is in Windows XP, no registry hacks needed. FYI, Microsoft may have declared DOS dead, but the command line thrives in XP. There are a slug of new command line tools in XP that make working with Windows a little less painful.
--
hecubas
Um, correct me if I'm wrong but if you are developing client side java for an in-house system, this matters not. You just distribute your JVM in the usual manner.
v eloper_guide/using_tags.html on how to do that.
If you are developing for the internet, why not use the OBJECT tag and automatically download the required JVM from sun?
Check out http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/guide/plugin/de
--
hecubas
9/11 reference in AOTC? Look at how a people will submit to a leader in times of crisis. If you consider the plot of how Palpatine was granted emergency powers in reaction to the separatist movement to assemble an army of the republic. This significant turn of events has echoes throughout our history as well. Remember when Bush wanted some similar emergency powers after 9/11? Military tribunals? All for the love of the empire--er, republic--er, nation.
AOTC has a fantastic way of presenting a story that is not black and white, which is an excellent parallel to our own world. Can you see the ties? Trade federation, are they good, bad, greedy, or just pawns? Separatists, are they doing the right thing by getting out of the galactic government, or also pawns? Anakin, yes he is bound to a honorable organization, but took a personal vendetta against unsuspecting savages, is that bad or is he justified? It's so easy to love the orginal three Star Wars films because you knew who to cheer for, but it gets a lot more complex this time around.
And as for AOTC being the loser because of box office numbers: I truly, deeply, think Katz is a hypocrite.
--
hecubas
Aren't these the guys that own Blizzard, both of whom are taking bnetd to court? Screw em in that case. Paying legal fees, with every $0.99 in the bucket.
And that's how the Ewoks beat the Empire on Endor!
Go Ewoks!!
Um, switched networks anyone? Great, now I can see all the images that my system is pulling in off the web.
Whee!
If the country was all pay-per-use, many of the programs we have today would never be in place. Sometimes you need to support a program with the excess you get from others. However, some programs never get any buy-in from the voters unless they are supported by their own tax.
So what you have is a mess of people who feel we should have a flat tax on income, sales, etc. and those who prefer to fund only programs they like. I think this is unavoidable in America.
Perhaps NASA is at a critical point where it needs the support of a specialized tax or it will cease to be productive. Hell, if the Navy can squeeze in recruiting ads with movie previews, why not?
The best part of April Fool's day on slashdot is listening to all you clowns that fell for the joke and are whining about how stupid the jokes are and enough already.
C'mon folks, April Fool's on slashdot is a tradition. So what if they made you think twice today...
hecubas
However, most Joe Webusers out there think Quicktime is a pain in the arse because they have to download a pesky plugin in order to get the dang movie to play.
WTF? Am I the only one that appreciates all of the Star Trek series? Face it, no matter how much makeup or CGI you do or how cheesy the acting gets, Star Trek will only be as good as your suspension of disbelief. It's sci-fi, that's science fiction. You need to let your imagination go for a while and have some fun. So what if the continuity isn't perfect or the story seems stale, it's tv entertainment and if you can't enjoy that, then don't bitch about it. I do believe each Star Trek series has kept to Gene's spirit well, and I imagine the next one will also. If the next story doesn't progress with new technology, so be it, the ST story was never just about technology.
-------
That kind of thing can't really happen with windows, yeah you can get back orifice but norton antivirus takes care of that.
If you believe that one antivirus utility will solve all your security problems, go right ahead and keep running that windows box. Any system connected to a public network is vunerable if not properly tweaked and monitored. Just because it has a simplified GUI doesn't mean there aren't any exploits out there. You need to surf some hacking sites, you'll be suprised what's available to crack your windows machine.
if he hears that he has to check some web page and subscribe to mailing lists to keep on top of latest exploits that will root his box, it's a good reason to stay with windows.
That's about as good system administration as sticking your head in the ground and hoping nothing happens. If you're not willing to put forth some effort in preventive maintenance, you're going to end up with a lot of work in the future, whether you run NT or Linux/Unix.
-------
I work for a relatively small insurance company who has done some work with mySQL. We have a web site from which our field agents run reports written in Perl. Typically the database will have around 150,000+ records
It is fast. Very fast. mySQL does exactly what I need it to do, spit back data quickly for those agents on dialup internet connections.
In the 384 days (and counting) that we've had mySQL up and running, there has never been a corruption or crash. So yes, it is a stable and reliable database.
The important thing is that it works for us. If you are selling stuff online, maybe you should look at something else, say PostgreSQL.
-------
Cool, maybe I'll get to boot Caldera DOS under Win98 now. I believe part of the problem that Caldera had with Win95 was that MS purposely made it impossible to use another bootloader to start win.com...
-------
Slashdot needs a Slashbox for the fat-time serial!
on topic part:
I've been waiting years for Episode I, so a couple more won't kill me to wait for it on DVD or whatever the media de jour is.
-------
Maybe there should be a Slashdot feature column just for Haiku...
-------
In defense of the mainframers, you need to get a perspective. There weren't many people with coding skills, and development standards had yet to be refined. I doubt there were any "software engineers" in the 60's, but plenty of people doing stuff with the big iron that was unheard of. I would also suggest that the people who coded using 2 digit years assumed that their code would be obsolete and rewritten before the century turnover. I've seen a lot of code that was originally written to be a quick and dirty fix still in production 5-10 years later.
Not to sound like a grumpy old man (actually I'm 26), but there was a time when disk space/memory/cpu time were critical resources. You had to know exactly how big your data files were and often had to pre-allocate space for them. You put your program and data on a cardboard punchcard and hoped to hell you didn't have to recompile anything! Run times were more like hours than seconds! If you think windows takes forever to boot, try waiting 45 minutes for the system to IPL.
So Mr. Katz, nothing major happened on this New Years day, but not with out a hell of an effort. I'd like to see how many people got stuck with Y2K conversions, upgrades, and overtime. I'd like to see how many IT managers were freaking out because the code they wrote in their younger days was going to fail in 2000. If you're wondering if the money spent on this fiasco was worth it, you'll know it when your bank statement shows up this month or your health insurance pays for your last doctor's visit.
-------
Has it occurred to anybody that the real reason the theaters are going off on the carding issue is not about the theater company's morals but sales? Theater related businesses, video rental stores included, are under a lot of pressure with the recent events (no need to tell you again) by the whole of the American public & media.
They're scared that if they don't do something, anything, they'll look like they're ok with violence and other socially undesirable activity.
They're afraid to lose business, why do you think most theaters refuse to play NC-17? It's all about brand image & marketing BS. "We're a family theater", etc.
They're scared that if they just sit back, they'll get regulated. Government regulations cost businesses a lot of time and money. They know if this happens, they'll have to raise ticket prices again, and that'll probably tick off more people than the under 17 crowd.
At least if they do this now, they might look good for the media so there will be less chance that voting citizens will cry for laws to fix this mess.
Unfortunately for the theaters, they are the movie industry point of contact with the public, they can't afford to make the experience a bad one for the ticket buyers. At the same time, however, they can't afford to look like they've contributed to all the ills of society, hence the carding issue.
I'm not defending the theaters actions, just trying to understand it.