For me the first XCOM is probably the best game ever. It completely absorbed me for several months. It really gets into your mind, and I remember that I use to be in class in highschool thinking on ways to optimize the research path, new considerations on where to build a base, etc.
The settings were just great, the rural areas, fighting in the greys in barns or even worst, in cities with civilians that were minding their business. The game really had a strong personality. The first times you played you could pretty much scream during the battles, as one of the "greys" turned around a corner, shoot one of your soldiers, and turned around.
I still remember my mother opening the door to my room at 3 am during a weeknight, while I was really tense and concentrated on a city mission looking for the last ethereal that was mind controlling my troops... I think I woke up the whole neighborhood with the way I screamed...
And of course, after playing it for several hours at night there was NO way I would open the door... even to go to the bathroom I had to turn on all the lights in the house.
I still have it installed on an old 486 laptop I have and play it once in a while. I also got the Win95 version when it came out, but it runs way too fast on my P3 500 desktop.
It is funny the impact this game had. I still have several stories written by fans of the game back in the day. There were also tons of hacks to get more money, fiddle with your soldier's stats, etc. You can check a couple of nice sites here and here, or just do a quick search on google. There's also an interesting story about the phenomenon here
For all of you who didn't had the chance to play this great game, it is a combination of resouce management/strategy stage where you build bases, purchase equipment, recruit troops, etc. to build up earth defenses for an alien invasion. When you spot an UFO, you have to shoot it down and then engage the aliens in turn-based tactical combat. The trick is that depending on how you performed on those missions, you would get new technologies to research and the country you fought on increase/decrease your budget.
You also grew fond of your troops, since they stayed with you through out the game, and as they gained experience became pretty good fighters. I almost cried several times when they killed (or worst, mind controlled) one of them.
It's a shame that the other X-Com games didn't really live up to the original. The second one just didn't have the same personality, it was basically the same game, with weaker aliens, and under the sea. And don't get me started on the third one...
Any way, if you have a chance, try to get it, it might still be on a baragain bin somewhere.
This is what I think everytime I hear the "one good song on a CD" argument. I do use file sharing networks from time to time, but I also buy all new releases by my favorite artists on CD. That's the only way to get to know an artist, listen to their full albums.
I really like artist like Massive Attack or Radiohead - they put out GREAT albums, that grow on you and are more than worth what you pay for them. These two artists' style fit my particular taste in music, but I'm sure there are very talented musicians putting out great albums on every music genre out there - sometimes you may have to look for them, though.
In the company I work with, they don't pay us overtime, but they make sure we're not bitter about working extra hours.
First of all, we usually work 9 hours a day. And we don't mind, because the work environment is nice enough to work that we gladly stay the extra hour to get the job done (at least most of the time).
Then there comes that moment where the deadline is near and we have to really work overtime. For example, in the last project I was in, we had to work for 3 weeks for about 65-70 h/week. On the second Saturday we came in, the department manager (yes, she is nice enough to stay with us on those long hours, making sure that we're well feed and giving us moral support - and we appreciate that, even though she doesn't help that much on the tecnical side) sat down with us and made us a nice offer - once the project was done, we'll get 2 days off (one or two developers at a time), plus 1 extra vacation day. This is the second time they've done this, and they really mean it. We all got long weekends after all the hard work.
I think this kind of policy benefits both the employee and the employer. It benefits us because we avoid burnout, and get some recognition for the extra time we put in. Most of us took a Friday and a Monday off, and took off to the beach (we are based in Costa Rica, currently in the middle of summer). And it benefits the employer because he knows he can count on us for those times when an extra effort is needed, and keeps the employees with a nice morale.
Yes, I have become very poli-functional in the last couple of years. In the company I used to work at, until about 6 months ago, I was a project manager, but also assumed the role of router/firewall admin, Solaris/Linux admin, programmer, some sort of IT helpdesk, etc. I usually worked way more that 8 hours a day with all those responsabilities.
However, I didn't complain (well, probably a couple of times...). I really loved what I did, and loved the feeling of being highly productive and helpful.
I do have a better paying job right now, and, even though I'm supposed to be more focused with a single responsability as project leader, I am already doing other things - do tests to evaluate potential employees, support sales, coordinate the internal soccer championship and weekend trips with the rest of the staff ("integration activities"), work on an internal magazine, etc.
I just love the feeling of knowing I did a great job during the day and helped a lot of people. Also you become essential, so you feel you'll always have a job during these difficult times.
We've worked with UNIXSmith, and they do an excelent job securing both UNIX and NT/2k servers, and with security audits. I don't know if they could handle an agency like the one you're talking about, but for an ecommerce site or a medium-sized company like us, they have proven that they are up to the task.
They also have their own line of server appliances, like the Airlock Firewall, and can monitor your servers 24/7 as well.
Overall, I think they do a very good job. I thought someone here might be interested in checking them out.
Disclaimer: I don't work for them, I'm just a happy user of their services.
At work we normally use Visual SourceSafe, which, at least in my eyes, has a lot of problems and is definitely not suited for distributed programming.
Recently, however, Ive been using Perforce quite a bit, for a project in which we have three geographically distributed teams (Costa Rica, Utah and California). It is really nice, especially compared to VSS. It is completly multiplatform, very stable, has a nice interface (both winP4 and the command line client), manages branches and merges really well, etc.
The only downside I see is that access times are a bit on the slow side, but then again, all of them are here in Costa Rica;)
We also used CVS a little bit before switching to P4, and it worked well, but I think P4 is a more polished product, specially since not only developers where checking in and out stuff.
Evaluated several IDEs, decided for JB4
on
Java IDEs?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I work at a consulting company, and about 1 year ago I was in charge of evaluating several IDEs in order to standarize the development environment. Before that, there were people using vim, emacs, Editplus (my favorite - I still keep it around) and whatever-editor-you-can-think-of. I considered the following IDEs during the evaluation:
Forte for Java
Netbeans
JBuilder
Visual Age
Kawa
Most of the applications we build are web-based J2EE applications. The requirements for the IDEs were:
Code completition (obviously)
Ability to remotely debug JSPs and servlets running in Tomcat, JRun, Weblogic, and iPlanet web server.
Ability to remotely debug EJBs in Weblogic, and iPlanet app server.
Facilitate the creation and deployment of EJBs and Javabeans components, including the xml deployment descriptors and the creation of.war and.jar files.
Extensibility. (we like to build our own tools)
HTML attribute completition on the JSP pages (like Homesite does).
To a lesser extent, the performance of the IDE.
Some others I can't remember right now...
In the end my recommendation was to purchase several licenses for JBuilder 4 Enterprise for the EJB programmers and to have the rest of the team use JBuilder 4 Foundation. The main reasons were:
very nice and easy to use OpenTools API (we already have about 50 or more tools that greatly simplify our work)
some very nice EJB features and wizards, like automatic deployment descriptors, automatic creation of the archive files, etc.
Deploys to Weblogic 5.1 (what we used at the time)
Allows us to debug JSPs and servlets in Tomcat, Weblogic, JRun and iPlanetWS (with some work).
Allows us to debug EJBs in WebLogic.
Integrates with Visual SourceSafe through some readily available opentools
The only ugly part was the price, but the Enterprise Edition, along with our own inhouse OpenTools, boosted our productivity quite a bit, so we could say that it more than paid for itself. It also doesn't support HTML, but since then we also bought Macromedia's Ultradev, and the graphics designers take care of most of that part.
Right now I'm looking at the latest version of JBuilder 5 Enterprise Studio, which also contains Rational Rose. It might be in our upgrade path in the future for the JB4 Enterprise users, but there doesn't seem to be any replacement for JBuilder 4 Foundation, since the JB5 Personal Edition has a more restrictive license.
As a side note, recently I've been using the latest version of NetBeans (3.2.1) quite bit in my house and it seems pretty nice. It handles remote debugging quite well, and it does understand HTML.
I think he should have considered Netscape 6.1.
I've been using it almost exclusively in both Linux and Windows since it came out. It looks like the people at AOL/Netscape finally got it 'kinda' right. It haven't crashed yet, the interface is very responsive and it doesn't take forever to load, as was the case with versions 6.0 and 6.01.
Plus, the UI is cool:-)
If only I could fix those horrible fonts in Mandrake 8.0.....
Slashdot Mirror
For me the first XCOM is probably the best game ever. It completely absorbed me for several months. It really gets into your mind, and I remember that I use to be in class in highschool thinking on ways to optimize the research path, new considerations on where to build a base, etc.
The settings were just great, the rural areas, fighting in the greys in barns or even worst, in cities with civilians that were minding their business. The game really had a strong personality. The first times you played you could pretty much scream during the battles, as one of the "greys" turned around a corner, shoot one of your soldiers, and turned around.
I still remember my mother opening the door to my room at 3 am during a weeknight, while I was really tense and concentrated on a city mission looking for the last ethereal that was mind controlling my troops ... I think I woke up the whole neighborhood with the way I screamed ... ... even to go to the bathroom I had to turn on all the lights in the house.
And of course, after playing it for several hours at night there was NO way I would open the door
I still have it installed on an old 486 laptop I have and play it once in a while. I also got the Win95 version when it came out, but it runs way too fast on my P3 500 desktop.
It is funny the impact this game had. I still have several stories written by fans of the game back in the day. There were also tons of hacks to get more money, fiddle with your soldier's stats, etc. You can check a couple of nice sites here and here, or just do a quick search on google. There's also an interesting story about the phenomenon here
For all of you who didn't had the chance to play this great game, it is a combination of resouce management/strategy stage where you build bases, purchase equipment, recruit troops, etc. to build up earth defenses for an alien invasion. When you spot an UFO, you have to shoot it down and then engage the aliens in turn-based tactical combat. The trick is that depending on how you performed on those missions, you would get new technologies to research and the country you fought on increase/decrease your budget.
You also grew fond of your troops, since they stayed with you through out the game, and as they gained experience became pretty good fighters. I almost cried several times when they killed (or worst, mind controlled) one of them.
It's a shame that the other X-Com games didn't really live up to the original. The second one just didn't have the same personality, it was basically the same game, with weaker aliens, and under the sea. And don't get me started on the third one...
Any way, if you have a chance, try to get it, it might still be on a baragain bin somewhere.
This is what I think everytime I hear the "one good song on a CD" argument. I do use file sharing networks from time to time, but I also buy all new releases by my favorite artists on CD. That's the only way to get to know an artist, listen to their full albums.
I really like artist like Massive Attack or Radiohead - they put out GREAT albums, that grow on you and are more than worth what you pay for them. These two artists' style fit my particular taste in music, but I'm sure there are very talented musicians putting out great albums on every music genre out there - sometimes you may have to look for them, though.
In the company I work with, they don't pay us overtime, but they make sure we're not bitter about working extra hours.
First of all, we usually work 9 hours a day. And we don't mind, because the work environment is nice enough to work that we gladly stay the extra hour to get the job done (at least most of the time).
Then there comes that moment where the deadline is near and we have to really work overtime. For example, in the last project I was in, we had to work for 3 weeks for about 65-70 h/week. On the second Saturday we came in, the department manager (yes, she is nice enough to stay with us on those long hours, making sure that we're well feed and giving us moral support - and we appreciate that, even though she doesn't help that much on the tecnical side) sat down with us and made us a nice offer - once the project was done, we'll get 2 days off (one or two developers at a time), plus 1 extra vacation day. This is the second time they've done this, and they really mean it. We all got long weekends after all the hard work.
I think this kind of policy benefits both the employee and the employer. It benefits us because we avoid burnout, and get some recognition for the extra time we put in. Most of us took a Friday and a Monday off, and took off to the beach (we are based in Costa Rica, currently in the middle of summer). And it benefits the employer because he knows he can count on us for those times when an extra effort is needed, and keeps the employees with a nice morale.
Yes, I have become very poli-functional in the last couple of years. In the company I used to work at, until about 6 months ago, I was a project manager, but also assumed the role of router/firewall admin, Solaris/Linux admin, programmer, some sort of IT helpdesk, etc. I usually worked way more that 8 hours a day with all those responsabilities.
However, I didn't complain (well, probably a couple of times...). I really loved what I did, and loved the feeling of being highly productive and helpful.
I do have a better paying job right now, and, even though I'm supposed to be more focused with a single responsability as project leader, I am already doing other things - do tests to evaluate potential employees, support sales, coordinate the internal soccer championship and weekend trips with the rest of the staff ("integration activities"), work on an internal magazine, etc.
I just love the feeling of knowing I did a great job during the day and helped a lot of people. Also you become essential, so you feel you'll always have a job during these difficult times.
You're right. I normally use:
Juan Perez
21 Jumpstreet
Somecity, FL 33102
We've worked with UNIXSmith, and they do an excelent job securing both UNIX and NT/2k servers, and with security audits. I don't know if they could handle an agency like the one you're talking about, but for an ecommerce site or a medium-sized company like us, they have proven that they are up to the task.
They also have their own line of server appliances, like the Airlock Firewall, and can monitor your servers 24/7 as well.
Overall, I think they do a very good job. I thought someone here might be interested in checking them out.
Disclaimer: I don't work for them, I'm just a happy user of their services.
Actually, I had thought of several Stars Wars/Dune connections before reading this:
There were others, but I don't remember them now.
Then again, I'm a big time Dune fan, so I may be biased.
At work we normally use Visual SourceSafe, which, at least in my eyes, has a lot of problems and is definitely not suited for distributed programming.
Recently, however, Ive been using Perforce quite a bit, for a project in which we have three geographically distributed teams (Costa Rica, Utah and California). It is really nice, especially compared to VSS. It is completly multiplatform, very stable, has a nice interface (both winP4 and the command line client), manages branches and merges really well, etc. The only downside I see is that access times are a bit on the slow side, but then again, all of them are here in Costa Rica ;)
We also used CVS a little bit before switching to P4, and it worked well, but I think P4 is a more polished product, specially since not only developers where checking in and out stuff.
I work at a consulting company, and about 1 year ago I was in charge of evaluating several IDEs in order to standarize the development environment. Before that, there were people using vim, emacs, Editplus (my favorite - I still keep it around) and whatever-editor-you-can-think-of. I considered the following IDEs during the evaluation:
- Forte for Java
- Netbeans
- JBuilder
- Visual Age
- Kawa
Most of the applications we build are web-based J2EE applications. The requirements for the IDEs were:In the end my recommendation was to purchase several licenses for JBuilder 4 Enterprise for the EJB programmers and to have the rest of the team use JBuilder 4 Foundation. The main reasons were:
The only ugly part was the price, but the Enterprise Edition, along with our own inhouse OpenTools, boosted our productivity quite a bit, so we could say that it more than paid for itself. It also doesn't support HTML, but since then we also bought Macromedia's Ultradev, and the graphics designers take care of most of that part.
Right now I'm looking at the latest version of JBuilder 5 Enterprise Studio, which also contains Rational Rose. It might be in our upgrade path in the future for the JB4 Enterprise users, but there doesn't seem to be any replacement for JBuilder 4 Foundation, since the JB5 Personal Edition has a more restrictive license.
As a side note, recently I've been using the latest version of NetBeans (3.2.1) quite bit in my house and it seems pretty nice. It handles remote debugging quite well, and it does understand HTML.
------
Me
I think he should have considered Netscape 6.1. :-)
I've been using it almost exclusively in both Linux and Windows since it came out. It looks like the people at AOL/Netscape finally got it 'kinda' right. It haven't crashed yet, the interface is very responsive and it doesn't take forever to load, as was the case with versions 6.0 and 6.01.
Plus, the UI is cool
If only I could fix those horrible fonts in Mandrake 8.0.....
Seems that Ben Franklin was right:
"But in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes"