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User: AKAImBatman

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  1. Re:The more I learn about JavaScript... on GWT in Action · · Score: 1

    Have you ever seen C libs embedded in Rhino, maybe built with gcj?

    I'm not really sure what you're asking here, so I'll just give a generic answer. Rhino compiles scripts to Java classes based on Rhino's hashtable-like data-model classes. Java classes can be passed to Rhino either by extending/implementing the data-model classes, or by using the Livescript-like Javascript APIs.

    Native libraries are incompatible with Java save for when they are mapped to a class through JNI. So if you want to link in a library, make a JNI wrapper. Before you do that, though, make sure there isn't a Java library that already does what you want. There are very few things above the level of a system driver that Java does not have a cross-platform library for.
  2. Re:The more I learn about JavaScript... on GWT in Action · · Score: 1

    Do you think that the new Java 7 Kernel will actually make javascript faster to execute?

    I suppose it depends on whether the price of orange juice directly affects the outcome of soccer games played in the Miami Orange Bowl.
  3. Re:The more I learn about JavaScript... on GWT in Action · · Score: 1

    Sorry, that should read "Spidermonkey has its bytecode own interpreter." Which is slow. Very slow.

  4. Re:The more I learn about JavaScript... on GWT in Action · · Score: 1

    That said, there is a JavaScript interpreter written in Java called Rhino. But if you were looking for speed, I would certainly look at a C implementation (like spidermonkey or NJS) first.

    That's just goofy. Spidermonkey is quite a bit slower than Rhino. They both contain runtime compilers, but Spidermonkey has its own interpreter. Rhino compiles down to Java bytecode which is then JITed by the JVM. If you want performance, use Rhino!
  5. Re:The more I learn about JavaScript... on GWT in Action · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The problem with JavaScript is that it's horribly slow to execute.

    Depends on your engine. I've put some thought into the same sort of server-side Javascript engine as you have. Someone else mentioned the Netscape Enterprise Server. That was... not so great. I was thinking more along the lines of building on top of a Java Servlet Engine. The Mozilla Rhino Javascript Engine actually compiles the JS down to Java byte code. That wouldn't be all that special, except that the JVM then JITs that to native code. Which means that Javascript doesn't have to be slow. ;)

    I figure you could create a JSHttpServlet object and map a file of your own extension (it can be *.js if you want it to be) to that servlet. The servlet then creates a JS environment that maps HttpRequest and HttpResponse as global variables. You can even map HttpSession and a PrintWriter output stream if you want. (That gets pretty close to JSP territory. ;-)) Load the script at init() time, and execute it when called.
  6. Re:ummm.... right.... on The N-Gage Will Rise Again · · Score: 1

    As far as J2ME phones are concerned, improving the controls is left up nearly entirely to Sun.

    Nonsense. The MIDP 2.0 APIs have sufficient controls for most games. The limitations are almost always in the hardware and/or bugs in the JVM implementation. For example, many phones will not report more than a single key press to the application. This makes it impossible to write a game that requires diagonals and/or direction + fire. To add insult to injury, many phones fail to report "game" keys to the application. (It's tons of fun trying to start an app on Motorola phones when the app can't read the left button. :-/) Combined with outright cramped controls with little effort put into making them better, cell phones are a travesty when it comes to gaming. Even the simplest game is hard to play on the vast majority of phones.

    That's not to say that there aren't exceptions like the Nokia 68xx phones, but all those hardware features tend to be negated by the fact that Nokia's JVM has bugs big enough to drive a Mack truck through.

    There are a lot of companies that would disagree with that statement.

    Let 'em. Until they can show actual evidence, I won't believe that phone/game system combinations are viable in the market today. The current market for phone games has been a self-perpetuating market based on the idea that if you market known brands of games, you can sell them even if they're poor. Basically, the consumer has no other choice for content, so he'll gladly pay for the Pacman, Sim City, Tetris, Metal Slug, whatever carrot dangled in front of him. Who cares if he's actually going to play the game or not, as long as he buys it?

    Of course, this sort of short-sighted thinking creates problems in the long run. Consumers start to catch on and all this new content gets de-emphasized when they select their next handset. Consumers end up with an even worse phone for playing games, and the cycle repeats.
  7. Re:In other news... on July NPDs Show PS3 Didn't Pull Ahead of 360 · · Score: 1

    It's a juxtaposition between what the market is doing economically (where the PS3 DOES actually fit exactly as one would expect it) and what Sony is doing to ignore the realities of the market.

    The reality is that a large amount of disposable cash combined with a steady (though not quite as fast as predicted) adoption of cutting edge, home entertainment technology does position the PS3 "perfectly" in the market. But not in the way that Sony is trying to position it. Sony acts as if every teenager working at McDonald's should work triple overtime* just to purchase a PS3. Which is just plain wrong thinking. They have a product, they have a market, now all they need to do is charge for that product.

    * I don't know about kids these day, but when I was a teen, $600 was what I made per month working full time during the summer.

  8. Re:ummm.... right.... on The N-Gage Will Rise Again · · Score: 4, Informative

    They *did* fix that problem, you know? The N-Gage QD added an actual card slot, did away with side-talkin', smoothed out the look, and dropped the price substantially. (I've heard of several people who managed to be at the right place at the right time to get their N-Gages for almost nothing.)

    The real problem is that the concept was ill-advised to begin with. There's no real evidence to suggest that consumers want their gaming devices combined with their cell phones. Even worse, the portable gaming market has a high percentage of younger adults and children who are even less interested in getting an overpriced phone for gaming. To top things off, the N-Gage was graphically underpowered from day #1. It wasn't quite as bad as the Game.com (pronounced "Game Comm"), but games like Tomb Raider pushed its 3D capabilities to the limit. Nokia also failed to follow up with a more powerful device after the introduction of the Nintendo DS.

    As if things weren't bad enough, Nokia never knew how to market the thing. They kept trying to sell it as a phone rather than a game system. (On the few rare occasions that they even promoted it.) In result, the market ignored them.

    Nokia should really just stop with the N-Gage and look at improving the controls on regular phones instead. Cell phone gaming is absolutely horrendous at the moment, yet no one in the market seems to be doing anything to fix it. Go figure.

  9. Re:Refactoring on State of the OpenJDK Project and Java 7 · · Score: 1

    To be perfectly honest, that looks like ECMAScript (commonly known as Javascript), except worse. The key to Java's success is that it got out of the syntactic sugar rat race and pushed all the functionality into the API. Need new features? Write them as APIs. While I'm sorry to say that Sun has started to give in to pressure in that area, the language is still nowhere near as poor as I see on that Scala page.

    I hate to say it, but Scala would be a very poor language for large projects. The syntax makes the code difficult to read, with idiosyncrasies galore. It fails the KISS test and will not be taken seriously.

  10. Re:In other news... on July NPDs Show PS3 Didn't Pull Ahead of 360 · · Score: 1

    I wish I had a nickel for every time someone told me I'm wrong, then repeat the exact same thing I just said. I'd be a very wealthy man. =)

    Try reading the post you're responding to. I rarely make such trite statements as "Nintendo GOOOOD! Sony BAAAAAD!"* As a result, you may be forced to pay attention to if you wish to comprehend the point I am making.

    * Napster BAAAAAD! Beer GOOOOOD!

  11. In other news... on July NPDs Show PS3 Didn't Pull Ahead of 360 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    VGCharts is predicting that the Wii has already outsold the Xbox 360. If their numbers are on target (which they have been shown to be accurate in the past), then the market is officially settling in to a Wii > XBox 360 > PS3 console situation.

    What's interesting about this situation is that it fits perfectly with the way the market normally works. On one end of the spectrum, you have a cheaper product that aims to make less money per unit, but make it up in volume. On the other end of the spectrum, you have a product that's more expensive and aims to make more money per unit even if the volume is lower.

    The only thing messed up about this situation is that the high end of the spectrum isn't aiming to make money. They're losing money on each console in the grandest attempt at the razor blade model ever seen. Even on each game unit, the price of development is so high that it has to be cutting into the available royalties.

    The bright side is that the cost of the PS3 components *will* go down very quickly. Cutting-edge parts always drop in price the fastest. If Sony keeps their price high enough to start making a small profit (or at least break even!) on each console, they'll have an opportunity to comfortably maintain the high end of the spectrum, and perhaps even grow that market in the future.

  12. Re:Bittorrent is not a p2p file sharing program. on Judge — "Making Available" Is Stealing Music · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, it will. The judgement is directly against people sharing files with an obvious intent to infringe on copyright. How that compares to the legality of a download acceleration service (BitTorrent) is beyond me. Even the BitTorrent search engine doesn't make the files directly available. It simply links to torrent files that describe the network for downloading the file. They also (as I understand) yank illegal torrents from the search on request. So I don't really see the parallel that the submitter is trying to make.

    copyright infringers get sued != BitTorrent is an illegal technology

  13. Re-read that on Another Sony Rootkit? · · Score: 1

    the USB stick installs a driver that is hiding a directory under "c:\windows\". So, when enumerating files and subdirectories in the Windows directory, the directory and files inside it are not visible through Windows API.


    Hidden files do not require a driver, nor are they 100% invisible to the Windows API. :-/
  14. Re:Sony on Another Sony Rootkit? · · Score: 1

    Fair enough. Just as long as you're aware that when the media says "rootkit", they really mean "malicious kernel driver". :-)

  15. Re:Sony on Another Sony Rootkit? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Your definition is the original definition, but it's not how it's currently used. By your definition, the BMG CDs were not rootkits either. These days "rootkit" is used on Windows systems to refer to software which modifies the kernel space for nefarious purposes.

  16. Re:Sony on Another Sony Rootkit? · · Score: 3, Informative

    According to TFA (which could be wrong, I suppose) this isn't a malformed directory. It's one that's being explicitly hidden from listings by a rootkit. The files are still there, but they're completely invisible to any and all tools. If you uninstall the rootkit, suddenly they'd pop back into visibility.

  17. Re:Sony on Another Sony Rootkit? · · Score: 2, Informative

    is my computer more vulnerable?

    Generally, yes. A virus could check for the existence of one of these rootkits, and abuse its hidden locations to hide itself. Which means that a virus can hide from even rootkit detectors in the shadow of "legitimate" software.
  18. Re:Sony on Another Sony Rootkit? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, it is a rootkit. It's modifying the kernel space to hide directories from the user. There are better ways of doing such a thing, but a rootkit has the advantage of keeping the files hidden from common methods of hidden-file detection. Something like a virus or trojan would tend to use a kit like this to make sure that it couldn't be found by antivirus software. Such kits also tend to mask the presence of their processes, just to make sure that they REALLY can't be detected.

  19. Re:Dragging their feet on RIAA Short on Funds? Fails to Pay Attorney Fees · · Score: 4, Funny

    Is there any penalty for failing to pay?

    Other than having assets seized by the Sheriff and auctioned off to settle the debt? No, none.
  20. Re:How are they different from groupthink? on See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia · · Score: 1
    Interesting.

    But your counter assertion that peer review is enough, using science as an example of an institution that works through peer review, is wrong IMO. So maybe that's why I didn't see the sarcasm: because it's a bad analogy.

    A fair enough argument, but ultimately flawed. Science DOES work on peer review. The framework in place (i.e. the Scientific Method) doesn't automatically provide a method of preventing abuse. Someone has to hold you to that method. That's where peer review comes in. Everything in science is either peer reviewed or ignored. (Though sometimes it shouldn't be ignored, but science does tend to eventually correct that mistake.)

    Similarly, Wikipedia has its own framework. Rather than reviewing against the logical deductions involved in observe, hypothesize, and experiment, it defers its topics to those with more authority. All statements have to be verifiable against a source that is authoritative on the topic. The result is a self-correcting system that removes most forms of abuse within a reasonable period of time. People *caring* about topics actually helps them improve. Even if the resulting article is sterile, it's usually still informative. :)
  21. Actually... on Yahoo Edges out Google in Customer Satisfaction · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is where Google's simplicity is apparently hurting it in the long-term, as new users just aren't seeing Google's new offerings--such as increased storage options, additions to Google Maps, and tweaks to Google Image Search--right in front of their faces like they do with other sites.

    It's not their simplicity that's hurting them, it's that they've failed to follow through on their success. The search engine was an amazing tool, and GMail was absolutely wonderful. But after that they had quite a few missteps. Maps was initially less useful than, say, MapQuest due to poor directions. This was eventually improved upon, but now Google is fighting the first-impression syndrome. Similarly, Google Video failed to appeal to most users. Google eventually gave up and bought their competitor: YouTube. Which sent the message that Google Video was as much of a failure as everyone thought it was.

    Then you've got increasing complaints about their AdSense and AdWords services. Various webmasters complaining that they were kicked out of the program for no discernible reason. AdWords advertisers who say that they're getting charged for links they didn't get. Etc.

    It all adds up to an age old problem: It's hard to maintain the top position. All the eyeballs are focused on you, and if you don't deliver you're going to get heavily criticized for it.
  22. Re:How are they different from groupthink? on See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    Were you being sarcastic?

    I'm currently hosting a discussion over in my Journal about what an interesting experience this proved to be.

    Tell me, did you read the post I was replying to? If so, did you notice that I quoted the parent nearly word for word from his first few sentences, save for replacing terms about Wikipedia with Science? With that in mind, can you elaborate on why you think I might not be using sarcasm to make a point?

    Also, did you consider reading the posts that responded to me before replying yourself? If so, were they unclear when the subject of "posters missing the point" was brought up?

    I'm very curious to know how so many people were able to completely miss the purpose of my post. Even after it was spelled out in the replies. Even the mods continued to mod my post down and the silly replies up; and they have to scroll through the replies before moderating!

    A very interesting situation, indeed. And perhaps a cautionary tale about not quoting parent posts.

    Thank you in advance for your assistance. :-)
  23. Re:How are they different from groupthink? on See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    pparently "insightful" knee-jerking... sigh.

    If it makes you feel any better, you're not the only one. There are still more people replying with the same reaction (despite all the posts yelling WAKE UP!) and my post is sitting at -1 Troll.

    On the downside, I weep for what Slashdot has become. :-(

    Still, the difference between the wiki editor community and the scientific community is that the scientific community is made up of actual experts (at least in a vastly larger proportion) with verifiable credentials.

    Quite true. However, Wikipedia does have its own framework of checks and balances. Specifically, everything has to be verifiable against an authoritative source. Just as experiments have to be peer reviewed to check that the scientific method was followed precisely, Wikipedia articles are peer reviewed to make sure that information can be backed up by solid sources.

    Neither methodology is perfect, but they do compare in that they are self-correcting. :-)
  24. Re:How are they different from groupthink? on See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    The only thing retarded is the fact that you got mod points for that. Please re-read the post in CONTEXT and note the fact that I was throwing the parent's words back at him. Then we'll discuss the "retarded" nature of my post. :-/

  25. Re:How are they different from groupthink? on See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    Thank you for being the only person to be paying any attention. The responses I got from others are actually quite shocking in their inability to read the post in context.