It is THAT strange. I'd never go drinking with my co-workers, because they are not the kind of people I like to have as friends (doesn't mean they aren't nice people, just not the people I hang around with).
And as far as I've heard friendship of co-workers outside the work is very rare in the company I work. I only know of two people who go climbing some times.
I've made the experience that IT people generally lack social skills. Some more, some less, but I don't know a IT professional who's a 'party animal'. But maybe I just know the wrong people:-)
I don't agree with this, because AFAIK is the population of the EU countries together comparable to the population of the US. And not all EU states are that far in e-government.
I agree with the problem of the bigger bureaucracy, but that's a general problem of the US, IMHO.
And like in the EU, certain states of the US could in fact try to establish e-government sites, couldn't they ? So the problem must be elsewhere.
Whether video games are considered art or not depends on the individual definition of art, IMHO.
My understanding of art is that someone creates something that has a superior quality than other objects of that kind. So, for example, if I draw a picture it's not art because of the lacking quality;-) There are easily a billion people who can do better than me. But if Dali draws a picture it's art because he is very good at drawing pictures, and you easily recognize it. There are only a few people who can do better than Dali, and that makes his pictures art.
Same for video games: some outstanding games can be considered art, some poorly done advertising games not.
For example, I consider the Monkey Island series as art because of their beautiful graphics, their well-done jokes and because it's generally of a very high quality level.
Then there some games around the Neverending Story movie (if someone remembers), and they were about the greatest sh*t I've ever seen;-)
Beside the overall-quality of a game, normally good artists are behind games to create the backgrounds, the characters, movies and music. And there's a reason we call them artists;-)
As you mentioned on your FAQ page, the Wesley Crusher character from TNG was target of some not very complementary jokes. But are there any Wesley Crusher jokes that you liked ?
I think the reason for the stagnating window manager development is that you don't want to reinvent the wheel over and over again: for every need there is a fitting window manager out there already. You can choose between a dozen or more, AFAIK. So why should any one want to write Yet Another Window-Manager ? Well, besides the fact that it's fun to write one on your own;-)
Sokoban ! This neat little game is very simple learn, avaible in a wide variety of implementation (most for free) and it indocrtinates abstract thinking...
I think GUI-based development tools are very good for beginners and if the tool is good even for pro's, but commmand line is more flexible. How many of you started with Borland's Turbo * series ? I've used Turbo Basic, Turbo Assembler and Turbo Pascal in my youth (which is not that far away:-), and they were very simple to use which made them so successful. At the same time, they were very powerful, especially because of those great debugger support combined with a good online reference.
Now, since I left the Microsoft world three years ago I don't know about todays Borland tools, or Microsoft's Visual tools. But I'd bet these tools are good, because of the programmers use them. Command line tools are found mostly in the UNIX world, maybe because there is no good command shell in Windows;-)
But if you understand more things 'behind the scenes' and start building larger projects with several dozen to hundred files, one sometimes needs more flexibility than a GUI tool can offer. I personally prefer a KDE Konsole with three to five terminals plus Midnight Commander. It makes working very fast, at least for me it's faster than KDevelop or Sniff+ or any other GUI tool that I tried. For me, the main problem with GUI dev tools is simply the lack of good Makefile support. I've found no GUI tools yet, which makes it easy to write a system which uses plug-ins which in turn use 3rd party libraries... plus the necessary directory structure to keep the source maintainable. Maybe there are, but one needs time to learn how to use a specific GUI tool, and I'm too lazy for that;-)
I'm developing open-source software because I enjoy programming. That's it. And it is fun to work with other enthusiasts, unlike office programming where most developers don't even know how to format a disc (at least in the company I work, it amazes me how little all those programmers know). The reason to publish the source is simply that it increases the chance of being known as a programmer, it enhances my "fame", if you'd like to call it this way. Others are able to correct my errors and mistakes, so I also learn WHAT errors and mistakes I make. It's no use writing some closed-source app as a hobby that is full of bugs, design flaws and release it as Shareware or whatever, 'cause noone would use it. If it's open-source, it gets corrected and grows faster, thus gets more useful.
Marc Haisenko
The 3Dsia Project (http://www.3dsia.org)
Well, it's kinda sad to say this, because Gericom makes nice notebooks, IMHO, and I have a Webboy. It sure _is_ a good notebook, but Gericom gives a shit on Linux users (I'm bugging them for half a year now). The problem is the display, which can only be used via VESA Framebuffer which is a inflexible and slow (!) solution. Gericom often uses the SiS900 chipset which has good Linux support by SiS directly, but the XFRee86 SiS900 driver has problems with TFT displays (at least in Gericom notebooks... it seems as noone ever got it running under Linux). The sound makes some strange noise very few minutes, with the mouse "jumping" around while it automagically presses some buttons. Very annoying, as this can accidentially close windows or do other things you don't like (it prevents long working periods).
But if you want a cheap and fast Windows notebook I can recommend Gericom, with Linux it's a real pain:-(
It saddens me, too, that IBM/Lotus are not going to support Linux. I'm mailing Lotus for over a year now, in a four-month-rhythm. I've also talked to some folks of Lotus at the CeBIT. And I always get the same answer: noone wants to use Notes on Linux.
And this is simply a lie, as this forum demonstrates. There are a lot of people running Notes with WINE or VMWare, and sure it works with WINE, but there are some drawbacks (e.g. I'm for some reason not able to filter my mail under Linux, but it works fine under Windoze).
I think I keep mailing them until they give up finally making a Linux version of Notes:-)
But it's not a standard ! There's no official paper backing it. By standard I mean that several companies/organizations use the same system. I'm a client of company A, you of company B and we both are able to pay the online-comic C.
The main problem IMHO is the missing (micro) payment standard. I wouldn't be willing to give out my credit card numbers just for a dollar or even a few cents. Besides, I don't have a credit card and I don't like to have one (they just make trouble because you USE them;-)
If there would be a payment system where I could transfer money onto an online deposit and then transfer money from the deposit to someone on the net, things would be completely different !
The often-discussed micro-payment for online comics for instance, I'd sure pay 10cents or whatever for an episode of a good online comic.
Boy, the answer to the question "Is code expressive ?" is the International Obfuscated C Contest (http://www.ioccc.org). Here you can see expressive code in all its' beauty.
Besides that, you can express even simple operations in various ways. So, for example, increasing an integer i can be written in these ways (C, of course):
i++;
++i;
i = i + 1;
i = 1 + i;
being the most obvious methods. There are infinite more ways, they just cost more clock cycles:-)=) But just choosing which of the above four ways to go is a form of expression.
Same goes for anything not as trivial as an increment. It simply starts by choosing the programming language. Whether you prefer Modula-2, Pascal or C is up to you, there's AFAIK nothing you can do with one of them that can't be done with anotherone of these three, it's just that another language might provide ways for doing things more elegant.
(You can write AI in C, yet most scientists prefer to write them in Lisp because it's more elegant, easier to do; yet you can do it in both languages)
And let's not forget that we all talk about programming languages !:-)
Naah, why criple such a nice DVD-Player ? I've recently bought a laptop with a DVD-Player and was _so_ disappointed by it, because I was used to the good quality of the PS2 DVD-Player... what's more interesting to me is playing my own Tuxracer levels on the PS2:-)=) And maybe CivCTP, HoMM3 and SimCity3000:-)=)
This sound too much like 'it's not the gun which kills but the person who uses it'. America has a very sick relationship to guns, and calling it a tool is just perverse ! According to www.dumblaws.com some counties REQUIRE every family to have at least one gun. This is only possible in America, while in the rest of the world you need special training and licenses to buy a gun. Lucky me living in Europe, I'm just waiting for the cyberpunk come true:-) Happy slaughtering, America
I congrat the people of the LINE project for this success because this technological interesting, but that's it... it's interesting. Okay, it may be nice replacing the ugly Windows GUI with GNOME or KDE, but how many Windows users will do that ?
But I think that doesn't matter... it's one of these 'just because I can' issues:-)
As a german I find Wolfenstein very amusing, especially 'cause I'm politically more on the left-wing, but I wonder how long it will take here in Germany until this game is forbidden:-)=)
It is illegal in Germany to possess a copy of Wolfenstein3D, because of all the Nazis in it and because you kill people:-)
And BTW: I've seen the screenshots on 3dactionplanet, and I have to say that the first do impress me much more than the rest because their really realistic
I see many of you saying "we already have Linux, why BSD ?"...
Well, I think you're wasting your time on this discussion because it's like the Holy War between GNOME and KDE: take what you like, but please don't say that the other is shit, because that's not true.
I think it's good to see BSD spreading as well because in the end everyone gains from this: programs are written in the OpenSource manner, and it does not (really) matter if a program is developed on Linux or BSD, in the end it's UNIX, and _that's_ the point...
Ah, and BTW: congrats to the NetBSD folks:-)
Yes, I do think so, too. He did show the situation and really kindly asked them to not use his brand. To me this is OK although SSH is normally used for the service/protocol instead of Tatu's product, just because he didn't say "If you don't rename I'll have to force you" or something. We don't see polite mails regarding unauthorized trademark use very often, do we ? So let's all try not to give a reason for beeing impolite
I myself am a young (21 yr.) programmer working for a B2B company and luckily don't have these problems. I started programming when I was 8 yrs. old and several people here, especially developers, know that... I'm far from being a programming guru but have experience and knowledge about things others do not have in my office (e.g. I'm the only one using a Linux desktop, which made me famous in my office;-), and I guess that's why people do accept me here as a 'normal' developer.
So if you like to be fully accepted I guess you have to show the others that you have knowledge/experience, perhaps knowledge/experience others do not have (no one in my office knows a thing about Cap'n Crunch, for example:-)=)
But for me it's more important to have a good job with nice workmates. You can't have all of them on your side, there will always be workmates that don't like you and vice versa. If the majority of your workmates don't accept you and you have a problem with that change your employer, because a bad working environment will make you ill, mentally and physically...
As a programmer for an open-source project and for a B2B company I can't tell you how important cross-platform programming is ! And I've gotta tell ya, beeing cross-platform with C/C++ is hard, and the advantage of Java is that it's platform-independent from the ground up.
A Java app may not integrate into a desktop as well as a good written cross-platform C++ app but you always have to consider the pros and cons when choosing a programming language, and no programming language is even near to be perfect/all-purpose... that's why there are so many of them:-)
This is the coolest anti-hacker-story I've ever hard of... congratulations to the people at DirecTV that implemented this counter-attack. Normally I wouldn't react this way, but this counter-attack shows that some very clever employee at DirecTV was even smarter than most of the hackers, and has humor as well:-) Of course most of those people who lost their cards are not sharing my thoughts, but hey, they did in fact steal a service and this is the bill...;-)
Hi folks,
I'm from the 3Dsia staff, and happily noticed this story, so I'm trying to gain some new project members:-) If you're interested in helping us, subscribe to our mailinglists and get your questions answered (see here.
We are currently in a redesign phase, means we will start with a complete code rewrite soon. So if you're into OpenGL programming, 3D modelling and the kind you should have a look:-)
Thnx and c'ya,
Marc
Marc Haisenko
The 3Dsia Project
alias StonedBones
alias DarkDust
axl@cu-muc.de
Slashdot Mirror
It is THAT strange. I'd never go drinking with my co-workers, because they are not the kind of people I like to have as friends (doesn't mean they aren't nice people, just not the people I hang around with).
:-)
And as far as I've heard friendship of co-workers outside the work is very rare in the company I work. I only know of two people who go climbing some times.
I've made the experience that IT people generally lack social skills. Some more, some less, but I don't know a IT professional who's a 'party animal'. But maybe I just know the wrong people
Excuse me, but privacy laws in europe are stronger than in the US. Ask Microsoft or any other big american companies about that.
I don't agree with this, because AFAIK is the population of the EU countries together comparable to the population of the US. And not all EU states are that far in e-government.
I agree with the problem of the bigger bureaucracy, but that's a general problem of the US, IMHO.
And like in the EU, certain states of the US could in fact try to establish e-government sites, couldn't they ? So the problem must be elsewhere.
Whether video games are considered art or not depends on the individual definition of art, IMHO. My understanding of art is that someone creates something that has a superior quality than other objects of that kind. So, for example, if I draw a picture it's not art because of the lacking quality ;-) There are easily a billion people who can do better than me. But if Dali draws a picture it's art because he is very good at drawing pictures, and you easily recognize it. There are only a few people who can do better than Dali, and that makes his pictures art.
Same for video games: some outstanding games can be considered art, some poorly done advertising games not.
For example, I consider the Monkey Island series as art because of their beautiful graphics, their well-done jokes and because it's generally of a very high quality level.
Then there some games around the Neverending Story movie (if someone remembers), and they were about the greatest sh*t I've ever seen ;-)
Beside the overall-quality of a game, normally good artists are behind games to create the backgrounds, the characters, movies and music. And there's a reason we call them artists ;-)
As you mentioned on your FAQ page, the Wesley Crusher character from TNG was target of some not very complementary jokes. But are there any Wesley Crusher jokes that you liked ?
I think the reason for the stagnating window manager development is that you don't want to reinvent the wheel over and over again: for every need there is a fitting window manager out there already. You can choose between a dozen or more, AFAIK. So why should any one want to write Yet Another Window-Manager ? Well, besides the fact that it's fun to write one on your own ;-)
Sokoban ! This neat little game is very simple learn, avaible in a wide variety of implementation (most for free) and it indocrtinates abstract thinking...
I think GUI-based development tools are very good for beginners and if the tool is good even for pro's, but commmand line is more flexible. How many of you started with Borland's Turbo * series ? I've used Turbo Basic, Turbo Assembler and Turbo Pascal in my youth (which is not that far away :-), and they were very simple to use which made them so successful. At the same time, they were very powerful, especially because of those great debugger support combined with a good online reference.
;-)
;-)
Now, since I left the Microsoft world three years ago I don't know about todays Borland tools, or Microsoft's Visual tools. But I'd bet these tools are good, because of the programmers use them. Command line tools are found mostly in the UNIX world, maybe because there is no good command shell in Windows
But if you understand more things 'behind the scenes' and start building larger projects with several dozen to hundred files, one sometimes needs more flexibility than a GUI tool can offer. I personally prefer a KDE Konsole with three to five terminals plus Midnight Commander. It makes working very fast, at least for me it's faster than KDevelop or Sniff+ or any other GUI tool that I tried. For me, the main problem with GUI dev tools is simply the lack of good Makefile support. I've found no GUI tools yet, which makes it easy to write a system which uses plug-ins which in turn use 3rd party libraries... plus the necessary directory structure to keep the source maintainable. Maybe there are, but one needs time to learn how to use a specific GUI tool, and I'm too lazy for that
I'm developing open-source software because I enjoy programming. That's it. And it is fun to work with other enthusiasts, unlike office programming where most developers don't even know how to format a disc (at least in the company I work, it amazes me how little all those programmers know). The reason to publish the source is simply that it increases the chance of being known as a programmer, it enhances my "fame", if you'd like to call it this way. Others are able to correct my errors and mistakes, so I also learn WHAT errors and mistakes I make. It's no use writing some closed-source app as a hobby that is full of bugs, design flaws and release it as Shareware or whatever, 'cause noone would use it. If it's open-source, it gets corrected and grows faster, thus gets more useful. Marc Haisenko The 3Dsia Project (http://www.3dsia.org)
Well, it's kinda sad to say this, because Gericom makes nice notebooks, IMHO, and I have a Webboy. It sure _is_ a good notebook, but Gericom gives a shit on Linux users (I'm bugging them for half a year now). The problem is the display, which can only be used via VESA Framebuffer which is a inflexible and slow (!) solution. Gericom often uses the SiS900 chipset which has good Linux support by SiS directly, but the XFRee86 SiS900 driver has problems with TFT displays (at least in Gericom notebooks... it seems as noone ever got it running under Linux). The sound makes some strange noise very few minutes, with the mouse "jumping" around while it automagically presses some buttons. Very annoying, as this can accidentially close windows or do other things you don't like (it prevents long working periods). :-(
But if you want a cheap and fast Windows notebook I can recommend Gericom, with Linux it's a real pain
It saddens me, too, that IBM/Lotus are not going to support Linux. I'm mailing Lotus for over a year now, in a four-month-rhythm. I've also talked to some folks of Lotus at the CeBIT. And I always get the same answer: noone wants to use Notes on Linux. And this is simply a lie, as this forum demonstrates. There are a lot of people running Notes with WINE or VMWare, and sure it works with WINE, but there are some drawbacks (e.g. I'm for some reason not able to filter my mail under Linux, but it works fine under Windoze). I think I keep mailing them until they give up finally making a Linux version of Notes :-)
But it's not a standard ! There's no official paper backing it. By standard I mean that several companies/organizations use the same system. I'm a client of company A, you of company B and we both are able to pay the online-comic C.
The main problem IMHO is the missing (micro) payment standard. I wouldn't be willing to give out my credit card numbers just for a dollar or even a few cents. Besides, I don't have a credit card and I don't like to have one (they just make trouble because you USE them ;-)
If there would be a payment system where I could transfer money onto an online deposit and then transfer money from the deposit to someone on the net, things would be completely different !
The often-discussed micro-payment for online comics for instance, I'd sure pay 10cents or whatever for an episode of a good online comic.
Boy, the answer to the question "Is code expressive ?" is the International Obfuscated C Contest (http://www.ioccc.org). Here you can see expressive code in all its' beauty.
:-)=) But just choosing which of the above four ways to go is a form of expression.
:-)
Besides that, you can express even simple operations in various ways. So, for example, increasing an integer i can be written in these ways (C, of course):
i++;
++i;
i = i + 1;
i = 1 + i;
being the most obvious methods. There are infinite more ways, they just cost more clock cycles
Same goes for anything not as trivial as an increment. It simply starts by choosing the programming language. Whether you prefer Modula-2, Pascal or C is up to you, there's AFAIK nothing you can do with one of them that can't be done with anotherone of these three, it's just that another language might provide ways for doing things more elegant. (You can write AI in C, yet most scientists prefer to write them in Lisp because it's more elegant, easier to do; yet you can do it in both languages)
And let's not forget that we all talk about programming languages !
Naah, why criple such a nice DVD-Player ? I've recently bought a laptop with a DVD-Player and was _so_ disappointed by it, because I was used to the good quality of the PS2 DVD-Player... what's more interesting to me is playing my own Tuxracer levels on the PS2 :-)=) And maybe CivCTP, HoMM3 and SimCity3000 :-)=)
This sound too much like 'it's not the gun which kills but the person who uses it'. America has a very sick relationship to guns, and calling it a tool is just perverse ! According to www.dumblaws.com some counties REQUIRE every family to have at least one gun. This is only possible in America, while in the rest of the world you need special training and licenses to buy a gun. Lucky me living in Europe, I'm just waiting for the cyberpunk come true :-) Happy slaughtering, America
I congrat the people of the LINE project for this success because this technological interesting, but that's it... it's interesting. Okay, it may be nice replacing the ugly Windows GUI with GNOME or KDE, but how many Windows users will do that ? But I think that doesn't matter... it's one of these 'just because I can' issues :-)
As a german I find Wolfenstein very amusing, especially 'cause I'm politically more on the left-wing, but I wonder how long it will take here in Germany until this game is forbidden :-)=)
It is illegal in Germany to possess a copy of Wolfenstein3D, because of all the Nazis in it and because you kill people :-)
And BTW: I've seen the screenshots on 3dactionplanet, and I have to say that the first do impress me much more than the rest because their really realistic
I see many of you saying "we already have Linux, why BSD ?"... Well, I think you're wasting your time on this discussion because it's like the Holy War between GNOME and KDE: take what you like, but please don't say that the other is shit, because that's not true. I think it's good to see BSD spreading as well because in the end everyone gains from this: programs are written in the OpenSource manner, and it does not (really) matter if a program is developed on Linux or BSD, in the end it's UNIX, and _that's_ the point... Ah, and BTW: congrats to the NetBSD folks :-)
Yes, I do think so, too. He did show the situation and really kindly asked them to not use his brand. To me this is OK although SSH is normally used for the service/protocol instead of Tatu's product, just because he didn't say "If you don't rename I'll have to force you" or something. We don't see polite mails regarding unauthorized trademark use very often, do we ? So let's all try not to give a reason for beeing impolite
I myself am a young (21 yr.) programmer working for a B2B company and luckily don't have these problems. I started programming when I was 8 yrs. old and several people here, especially developers, know that ... I'm far from being a programming guru but have experience and knowledge about things others do not have in my office (e.g. I'm the only one using a Linux desktop, which made me famous in my office ;-), and I guess that's why people do accept me here as a 'normal' developer.
So if you like to be fully accepted I guess you have to show the others that you have knowledge/experience, perhaps knowledge/experience others do not have (no one in my office knows a thing about Cap'n Crunch, for example :-)=)
But for me it's more important to have a good job with nice workmates. You can't have all of them on your side, there will always be workmates that don't like you and vice versa. If the majority of your workmates don't accept you and you have a problem with that change your employer, because a bad working environment will make you ill, mentally and physically...
As a programmer for an open-source project and for a B2B company I can't tell you how important cross-platform programming is ! And I've gotta tell ya, beeing cross-platform with C/C++ is hard, and the advantage of Java is that it's platform-independent from the ground up. A Java app may not integrate into a desktop as well as a good written cross-platform C++ app but you always have to consider the pros and cons when choosing a programming language, and no programming language is even near to be perfect/all-purpose... that's why there are so many of them :-)
This is the coolest anti-hacker-story I've ever hard of... congratulations to the people at DirecTV that implemented this counter-attack. Normally I wouldn't react this way, but this counter-attack shows that some very clever employee at DirecTV was even smarter than most of the hackers, and has humor as well :-) Of course most of those people who lost their cards are not sharing my thoughts, but hey, they did in fact steal a service and this is the bill... ;-)
Hi folks, I'm from the 3Dsia staff, and happily noticed this story, so I'm trying to gain some new project members :-) If you're interested in helping us, subscribe to our mailinglists and get your questions answered (see here.
We are currently in a redesign phase, means we will start with a complete code rewrite soon. So if you're into OpenGL programming, 3D modelling and the kind you should have a look :-)
Thnx and c'ya,
Marc
Marc Haisenko
The 3Dsia Project
alias StonedBones
alias DarkDust
axl@cu-muc.de