Sounds great, when can I get it? I live in a major US city, and it has been unavailable for a long time. Verizon keeps taunting me with FIOS offers in the mail, and then fails to actually deliver.
In over 20 years of employment, I've never programmed with any Microsoft language or framework (I've used Windows OS and Visual Studio, of course). At the moment, I've gotten 2 Java contracts in rapid succession, so I don't think that is going away any time soon.
Give me a fucking break. Had there been a "Texan on board with a pistol", there would have been 4 armed terrorists on each plane (and most likely, they would have exploited security flaws to ensure they had more and better guns than your hypothetical Texan Freedom Fighter)
The terrorists exploited a flaw in how we dealt with hijackers. It wasn't about a lack of guns at all.
This Java developer is using a Macbook Pro, and will continue to do so, as this announcement means little to me. I won't go into the details of why I prefer Macs, other than, I find the alternatives less useful to me.
My server development is done using the Sun/Oracle JDK, Eclipse, Tomcat and other open source frame works. My server apps run just fine with the Sun JVM, and the WAR/JAR executables can be copied to Linux or Windows Server, where they run just fine, with no problems.
I did once develop a GUI client app using the Apple tools, it wasn't so hot.
The only thing that will make me abandon Macs would be the unlikely move of restricting what apps can be installed, as on iOS devices.
As an experienced J2ME developer... The real pain was not "writing apps for individual handsets", it was dealing with all the undocumented bugs and "novel" interpretations of the J2ME spec. A game coded perfectly to the J2ME spec might run great on one family of handsets, and crash mysteriously on others, or even fail to launch.
Other major nightmares included: undocumented (and radically different) threading models, sound (which was not a part of the original J2ME spec), memory management and networking. And then you had to squeeze everything into a tiny JAR limit for the crappiest phones (64K when I started, later upped to 100K).
Did I mention that each phone (of which there were hundreds) was potentially different, and almost completely undocumented?
I will add too, as a former iPhone developer, that your provisioning profiles that let you run your own apps expire. They seem to have a duration or 1-2 months. I had a job interview a while back, so I put my apps onto my device, now I am getting warnings every day.
That said, developing for iPhone is a dream compared to J2ME and Brew.
The acetaminophen is not to poison a hard abuser; in fact, most doctors would prefer to prescribe the opiate-only preparations due to the toxicity of APAP at high dosages.
The political consequences of cutting NASA are trivial compared to cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicate or defense. In fairly short order every discretionary program is going to be cut to the bone in order to put off the day when the big entitlement programs have to be dealt with.
What is missing from this picture? How about the biggest budgetary sacred cow, defense spending? Plus the cost of 2 wars of occupation. End just one war and there will be more than enough money to fund NASA.
As a programmer who worked on J2ME cell phones for 4 years... Pretty much every phone I looked at allowed you to download apps to it from your own server, with no involvement of the carrier. Now if you were planning to SELL the app, you had to play ball with the carriers to get on their decks. You could, in theory, have built your own payment system and sold apps off your own pages (and, somehow marketed your apps independantly)
That said, J2ME programming was a nightmare, and dealing with carriers was infinately worse than any of the problems dealing with Apple. Their deal is actually quite sweet in comparison, and the tools are light years better.
Well I am a shy, anti-social geek. And my son has been diagnosed with mild Aspergers. I think my problems are a bit less severe, and he may grow out of the worst problems. When I was in school in the 70s, no one understood Apergers, so I was just labeled as a loner.
Heh, I remember that class. Instead of doing something normal, like writing a VAX assembler in C on our VAX minis running UNIX, the Professor From Hell insisted that we use a buggy Modula-2 compiler to write assembler/linkers which outputted 8086 machine code.
The class was divided into sets of 2 teams, compiler and linker. The linker teams wrote linker loaders which took the output from their assembler team, and outputted base64 text files, which would be transfered by sneaker net to PCs running DOS, at that point you were supposed to convert the base64 files to binary, and presto, they would run on the PCs.
I don't believe a single team in my class got their project to work. And now I think I know who you are too...
Where can one obtain the Wii development boxes? Best Buy? Frys? Oh that's right, Nintendo... you have to be a registered developer to get any dev hardware. Nintendo and Sony are hard to deal with, Microsoft, I have no idea, but they don't want hackers to have dev boxes either.
I don't know the costs, I do know that my former employer was reluctant to purchase more than 2 PSP dev boxes, and we had a limited supply of Wii boxes. I can get an iPod Touch at Costco for $249. At this point, anyone can become a registered iPhone developer.
XBox SDK may be free, but the dev boxes are not. And I purposely refuse to know anything about Microsoft development, your point?
You already live in that world if you own a console.
A console isn't an always-on, portable, Wifi-enabled general purpose computing device, and I suspect very few people expect it to be such.
The iPhone is "expected" to be a phone; iPod Touch is "expected" to be a portable media player. Consoles are "expected" to be gaming devices. They are all general purpose computers which have been constrained in functionality for marketing purposes. Modern consoles have networking capabilities, and there are portable gaming devices (PSP, Nintendo DS).
You are projecting your desires onto a product, and those desires do not match Apples marketing plans.
Would you buy a Wii, knowing that you can't play PS3 games on it?
Would you buy a Macbook Pro, knowing that you could (for the sake of argument) only install software from the App Store on it?
Ponder those differences for a while.
Actually I bought my iPod touch before there was an App store. This is true of most owners of iPhone / iPod Touch. Your argument is meaningless. You know the deal going in when you buy an iPhone. If you don't like it, get something else.
If Apple were to retroactively restrict my ability to install apps on my Macbook, then yes I would be pissed.
Every week I come across this sort of ranting on various mailing lists. I have worked as a J2ME developer for over 4 years, and I have dipped my toes into the console world as well. Currently I work on iPhone, and it is a dream. I don't like the paranoia and bullshit, but the cellphone / console world is basically just as bad.
Please don't rant about "police state" mentality or make silly analogies. You already live in that world if you own a console. Don't rant about anti-trust lawsuits, the console makers have been doing it for decades, it is totally legal.
You cannot even get dev tools for consoles such as PSP or Wii. The companies won't even talk to you. It doesn't matter how many stores carry PS3 games, you won't ever have a chance to make one without the backing of the right company.
In the J2ME world, most of the sales are on carrier sell decks. To get on those decks, you have to get the attention of corporate behemoths such as AT&T or Sprint. Cell phone development companies hire people whose entire job it to manage "carrier relations". That 70/30 split people complain about is better than any deal you will get from a carrier, assuming they even deign to talk to you.
J2ME - dev tools are free, but you have to deal with literally hundreds of different devices, all with their own unique undocumented bugs, not to mention radically different implementations of the J2ME spec. The only plus is that you can theoretically set up your own e-commerce system and bypass the carrier decks. Last I checked, some carriers were requiring apps to be digitally signed, and limited the APIs you could access.
BREW - The apps have DRM in them; I believe you have to go through a propriety system developed by Qualcom to sell anything
Symbian - none of the 4 companies I've worked for have ever given a shit about this platform, so don't even mention it.
Android - Maybe it will be great, at this point it is vapor ware
Consoles - you need an expensive and difficult to obtain developer box. Every piece of documentation is under NDA. The companies have total control over which games get approved for sale, and the experience of getting final approval is time consuming and stressful.
I wasn't an "Apple fanboi" until about 3 months ago, when I went all in with a Macbook pro (in fact, I once vowed to never use Macs again after bad experiences developing on them in the mid 90s).
In C, the programmer can realize that sin(45) is a constant and inline the value by hand. While it would be nice for the compiler to figure this out, I don't see it as a big gain. I'm sure languages like Haskell can evaluate chains of statements and function calls and determine that ultimately the result is a constant. This might be cool, however I have yet to write a significant program where this would be the case.
My vague understanding of functional languages, is that I/O functions have side effects, hence their historical problems in dealing with I/O. Writing programs with highly constrained I/O is of little interest to real world programmers (outside of a few niche fields).
And bang paths usually were not hard to use. From my vague memories of that time, all you really had to do was figure out how to get to a main node like ucbvax, that would then connect to whatever route your recipient was using. I never looked at any kind of network map.
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
IMO, Consider Phlebas is the weakest of the Culture novels (unless one counts Bridge or Inversions). Start with Excession, Player of Games, or Look to Windward.
Can we *PLEASE* have a game where people don't slow the zones down with their endless conversations? I'm trying to power level. Oh, and ban the anime furries too...
I went to college about 27 years ago. The favorite language of the staff was Pascal, a language with no pointers, which was interpreted (using some kind of "P-code" virtual machine). Even though all the computers were running UNIX, there was a strong anti-C bias. This was UC Santa Cruz, btw, not some wimpy junior college.
The only reason I know anything about C / C++ and pointers is because I chose to learn C in my spare time. The program there emphasized theory, not practical programming courses.
I can't tell you if the modern curriculum is watered-down compared to 27 years ago. What I can say is that I would take a Java programmer over a Pascal programmer any day. Even though I am an old-school C programmer, Java is now my language of choice.
When I was in high school, I didn't work hard. I got good grades overall, but some areas were weaker than others (writing for example). Praising me for "working hard" to get that A in math or chemistry would have backfired, because I knew I wasn't working hard, those were just classes that were easy for me.
I used to ace vocabulary tests in my SAT prep class. I would literally scan over the latest list of words before the class, then finish the test before all the other students, and always get 95%+ scores. (And that vocabulary knowledge didn't vanish, I've retained it, probably because I was also an avid reader)
I know I am not a genius, but I am also pretty freaking smart, in certain areas. I don't know why, whether it is genetic or learned.
I know I could have performed better in school, if someone had figured out the right way to motivate me. This topic is especially relevant for me, now that I am a parent. I want to know the answer, but simply changing the style of praise isn't going to cut it.
now take California's "normal" driving conditions of sitting on the freeway STOPPED for hours. An Ultra low is making it's small amount of emissions sitting there... A PZ is making NOTHING.
As a resident of the SF Bay Area, I can tell you that it is definately not normal to sit on the freeway stopped for hours. Sure traffic is bad, but not that bad. There is usually an accident somewhere slowing things down, and you can get stuck unmoving for a while, but it is not "hours".
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds great, when can I get it? I live in a major US city, and it has been unavailable for a long time. Verizon keeps taunting me with FIOS offers in the mail, and then fails to actually deliver.
In over 20 years of employment, I've never programmed with any Microsoft language or framework (I've used Windows OS and Visual Studio, of course). At the moment, I've gotten 2 Java contracts in rapid succession, so I don't think that is going away any time soon.
Give me a fucking break. Had there been a "Texan on board with a pistol", there would have been 4 armed terrorists on each plane (and most likely, they would have exploited security flaws to ensure they had more and better guns than your hypothetical Texan Freedom Fighter)
The terrorists exploited a flaw in how we dealt with hijackers. It wasn't about a lack of guns at all.
This Java developer is using a Macbook Pro, and will continue to do so, as this announcement means little to me. I won't go into the details of why I prefer Macs, other than, I find the alternatives less useful to me.
My server development is done using the Sun/Oracle JDK, Eclipse, Tomcat and other open source frame works. My server apps run just fine with the Sun JVM, and the WAR/JAR executables can be copied to Linux or Windows Server, where they run just fine, with no problems.
I did once develop a GUI client app using the Apple tools, it wasn't so hot.
The only thing that will make me abandon Macs would be the unlikely move of restricting what apps can be installed, as on iOS devices.
As an experienced J2ME developer... The real pain was not "writing apps for individual handsets", it was dealing with all the undocumented bugs and "novel" interpretations of the J2ME spec. A game coded perfectly to the J2ME spec might run great on one family of handsets, and crash mysteriously on others, or even fail to launch.
Other major nightmares included: undocumented (and radically different) threading models, sound (which was not a part of the original J2ME spec), memory management and networking. And then you had to squeeze everything into a tiny JAR limit for the crappiest phones (64K when I started, later upped to 100K).
Did I mention that each phone (of which there were hundreds) was potentially different, and almost completely undocumented?
I will add too, as a former iPhone developer, that your provisioning profiles that let you run your own apps expire. They seem to have a duration or 1-2 months. I had a job interview a while back, so I put my apps onto my device, now I am getting warnings every day.
That said, developing for iPhone is a dream compared to J2ME and Brew.
The acetaminophen is not to poison a hard abuser; in fact, most doctors would prefer to prescribe the opiate-only preparations due to the toxicity of APAP at high dosages.
Tell that to Rush Limbaugh.
The political consequences of cutting NASA are trivial compared to cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicate or defense. In fairly short order every discretionary program is going to be cut to the bone in order to put off the day when the big entitlement programs have to be dealt with.
What is missing from this picture? How about the biggest budgetary sacred cow, defense spending? Plus the cost of 2 wars of occupation. End just one war and there will be more than enough money to fund NASA.
As a programmer who worked on J2ME cell phones for 4 years... Pretty much every phone I looked at allowed you to download apps to it from your own server, with no involvement of the carrier. Now if you were planning to SELL the app, you had to play ball with the carriers to get on their decks. You could, in theory, have built your own payment system and sold apps off your own pages (and, somehow marketed your apps independantly)
That said, J2ME programming was a nightmare, and dealing with carriers was infinately worse than any of the problems dealing with Apple. Their deal is actually quite sweet in comparison, and the tools are light years better.
Well I am a shy, anti-social geek. And my son has been diagnosed with mild Aspergers. I think my problems are a bit less severe, and he may grow out of the worst problems. When I was in school in the 70s, no one understood Apergers, so I was just labeled as a loner.
No, the old meters didn't "work fine". 1/5 of them are broken and eat your quarters, or they get jammed.
Well, in a previous job as a facebook app developer, I was using Facebook and Skype all day.
Windows devs are a dime a dozen and therefore cheap to hire.
I'm looking for the guy who is supplying the dimes...
Heh, I remember that class. Instead of doing something normal, like writing a VAX assembler in C on our VAX minis running UNIX, the Professor From Hell insisted that we use a buggy Modula-2 compiler to write assembler/linkers which outputted 8086 machine code.
The class was divided into sets of 2 teams, compiler and linker. The linker teams wrote linker loaders which took the output from their assembler team, and outputted base64 text files, which would be transfered by sneaker net to PCs running DOS, at that point you were supposed to convert the base64 files to binary, and presto, they would run on the PCs.
I don't believe a single team in my class got their project to work. And now I think I know who you are too...
Where can one obtain the Wii development boxes? Best Buy? Frys? Oh that's right, Nintendo... you have to be a registered developer to get any dev hardware. Nintendo and Sony are hard to deal with, Microsoft, I have no idea, but they don't want hackers to have dev boxes either.
I don't know the costs, I do know that my former employer was reluctant to purchase more than 2 PSP dev boxes, and we had a limited supply of Wii boxes. I can get an iPod Touch at Costco for $249. At this point, anyone can become a registered iPhone developer.
XBox SDK may be free, but the dev boxes are not. And I purposely refuse to know anything about Microsoft development, your point?
A console isn't an always-on, portable, Wifi-enabled general purpose computing device, and I suspect very few people expect it to be such.
The iPhone is "expected" to be a phone; iPod Touch is "expected" to be a portable media player. Consoles are "expected" to be gaming devices. They are all general purpose computers which have been constrained in functionality for marketing purposes. Modern consoles have networking capabilities, and there are portable gaming devices (PSP, Nintendo DS).
You are projecting your desires onto a product, and those desires do not match Apples marketing plans.
Would you buy a Wii, knowing that you can't play PS3 games on it?
Would you buy a Macbook Pro, knowing that you could (for the sake of argument) only install software from the App Store on it?
Ponder those differences for a while.
Actually I bought my iPod touch before there was an App store. This is true of most owners of iPhone / iPod Touch. Your argument is meaningless. You know the deal going in when you buy an iPhone. If you don't like it, get something else.
If Apple were to retroactively restrict my ability to install apps on my Macbook, then yes I would be pissed.
Every week I come across this sort of ranting on various mailing lists. I have worked as a J2ME developer for over 4 years, and I have dipped my toes into the console world as well. Currently I work on iPhone, and it is a dream. I don't like the paranoia and bullshit, but the cellphone / console world is basically just as bad.
Please don't rant about "police state" mentality or make silly analogies. You already live in that world if you own a console. Don't rant about anti-trust lawsuits, the console makers have been doing it for decades, it is totally legal.
You cannot even get dev tools for consoles such as PSP or Wii. The companies won't even talk to you. It doesn't matter how many stores carry PS3 games, you won't ever have a chance to make one without the backing of the right company.
In the J2ME world, most of the sales are on carrier sell decks. To get on those decks, you have to get the attention of corporate behemoths such as AT&T or Sprint. Cell phone development companies hire people whose entire job it to manage "carrier relations". That 70/30 split people complain about is better than any deal you will get from a carrier, assuming they even deign to talk to you.
J2ME - dev tools are free, but you have to deal with literally hundreds of different devices, all with their own unique undocumented bugs, not to mention radically different implementations of the J2ME spec. The only plus is that you can theoretically set up your own e-commerce system and bypass the carrier decks. Last I checked, some carriers were requiring apps to be digitally signed, and limited the APIs you could access.
BREW - The apps have DRM in them; I believe you have to go through a propriety system developed by Qualcom to sell anything
Symbian - none of the 4 companies I've worked for have ever given a shit about this platform, so don't even mention it.
Android - Maybe it will be great, at this point it is vapor ware
Consoles - you need an expensive and difficult to obtain developer box. Every piece of documentation is under NDA. The companies have total control over which games get approved for sale, and the experience of getting final approval is time consuming and stressful.
I wasn't an "Apple fanboi" until about 3 months ago, when I went all in with a Macbook pro (in fact, I once vowed to never use Macs again after bad experiences developing on them in the mid 90s).
In C, the programmer can realize that sin(45) is a constant and inline the value by hand. While it would be nice for the compiler to figure this out, I don't see it as a big gain. I'm sure languages like Haskell can evaluate chains of statements and function calls and determine that ultimately the result is a constant. This might be cool, however I have yet to write a significant program where this would be the case.
My vague understanding of functional languages, is that I/O functions have side effects, hence their historical problems in dealing with I/O. Writing programs with highly constrained I/O is of little interest to real world programmers (outside of a few niche fields).
I live in Silicon Valley, and I would say that the home, internet and insurance prices you list are cheap, food and gas more expensive....
We are freaking out, because gas is now $4.50 per gallon...
And bang paths usually were not hard to use. From my vague memories of that time, all you really had to do was figure out how to get to a main node like ucbvax, that would then connect to whatever route your recipient was using. I never looked at any kind of network map.
IMO, Consider Phlebas is the weakest of the Culture novels (unless one counts Bridge or Inversions). Start with Excession, Player of Games, or Look to Windward.
Can we *PLEASE* have a game where people don't slow the zones down with their endless conversations? I'm trying to power level. Oh, and ban the anime furries too...
I went to college about 27 years ago. The favorite language of the staff was Pascal, a language with no pointers, which was interpreted (using some kind of "P-code" virtual machine). Even though all the computers were running UNIX, there was a strong anti-C bias. This was UC Santa Cruz, btw, not some wimpy junior college.
The only reason I know anything about C / C++ and pointers is because I chose to learn C in my spare time. The program there emphasized theory, not practical programming courses.
I can't tell you if the modern curriculum is watered-down compared to 27 years ago. What I can say is that I would take a Java programmer over a Pascal programmer any day. Even though I am an old-school C programmer, Java is now my language of choice.
When I was in high school, I didn't work hard. I got good grades overall, but some areas were weaker than others (writing for example). Praising me for "working hard" to get that A in math or chemistry would have backfired, because I knew I wasn't working hard, those were just classes that were easy for me.
I used to ace vocabulary tests in my SAT prep class. I would literally scan over the latest list of words before the class, then finish the test before all the other students, and always get 95%+ scores. (And that vocabulary knowledge didn't vanish, I've retained it, probably because I was also an avid reader)
I know I am not a genius, but I am also pretty freaking smart, in certain areas. I don't know why, whether it is genetic or learned.
I know I could have performed better in school, if someone had figured out the right way to motivate me. This topic is especially relevant for me, now that I am a parent. I want to know the answer, but simply changing the style of praise isn't going to cut it.
As a resident of the SF Bay Area, I can tell you that it is definately not normal to sit on the freeway stopped for hours. Sure traffic is bad, but not that bad. There is usually an accident somewhere slowing things down, and you can get stuck unmoving for a while, but it is not "hours".