It'd be great if other companies who put out awesome games on the DC spend the time to port their games to the new generation of consoles for sale in the online stores. Nintendo has done a good job with making their back catalog available and while a lot of those games are nice for nostalgia, there's some games I really really want to play because I either didn't finish it or because it was just that good.
The games I can think of that come to mind immediately are:
* Crazy Taxi (pure goofy fun that would be fun with friends)
* Jet Set Radio (awesome soundtrack, cel shading graphics done right, just all around fun game that Tony Hawk and any snowboarding game hasn't been able to recapture)
* Shenmue (still looking for sailors after all these years...)
* SSX Tricky (I know, this is a PS2 game, but it'd be sweet to upgrade it for a PS3...it's the only SSX game that was simple and fun...I tried the wii version and it was just lacking that certain something from Tricky)
It's sad that I can get the original 2600 version of Adventure for an iPhone but can't play JSR unless I know someone who has both the game and a DC.
Maybe this isn't out the of realm of conceivability to others, but it was to me...Oracle is a software company (one that runs a lot on Sun hardware), and suddenly becoming a hardware company has got to be a daunting challenge, regardless of who you are or how smart you are.
The implications are staggering across the board. Maybe Oracle decides they don't want to the hardware, just Java and MySQL (...they got it, finally), but then all that Sun hardware and Solaris...? Or maybe they want to make Solaris/Sun hardware the best platform for Oracle products (already the case as far as I know), then what of support for all their other platforms.
Oracle likes to buy a lot of companies, but they've all been, more or less, niche players in specific markets to fill in the gaps of their own offerings. I can't imagine what "gap" buying Sun will fill, other than something will be certainly be filled.
These were depreciated in Exchange07, and I'm presuming that they're still depreciated, but not altogether gone (in 07 you had to install them manually).
There's still a lot (okay, well, some) that depends on MAPI and CDO being available in Exchange.
...whatever is at www.mysql.com. Look, I'm not trying to be flippant, but when I'm trying to sell the boss on FOSS solutions, I need to send him a link to a site that will give him the warm-fuzzies that demonstrates that a. the tech is solid (typically mention Wikipedia for that one) and b. it's not some fly-by-night operation that will suddenly up and disappear.
I'm not trying to put the other projects down, and I can appreciate why they exist, but this is the exact reason I'm always being laughed out of meetings where they decide to buy an Oracle license, or a Microsoft OS, those guys have the message down (i.e. marketing).
I'm trying to be the in-house cheerleader for what can be done in the free/open-source communities and mixed messages just don't fly to a boss who barely skims the executive summary of whatever glossy lands on his desk any given day.
Whereas I'm not too concerned about Red Hat Linux (especially since Oracle already has a version of it they brand as their own), my *real* concern is for JBoss, one of the best app servers out there.
If Oracle had not bought BEA, I'd think they'd buy up RH and replace oc4j/App server with JBoss, but since they *did* buy BEA, they now have WebLogic and JRockit; they'd probably just put JBoss out to pasture, which would leave a lot of folks who have deployed JBoss high-n-dry.
Yes, they wouldn't do it right away and yes, there's always the possibility of a fork, but it would make it that much harder of a sell to the boss who wanted to go with JBoss because it was a lot cheaper than what Oracle wanted for their app server.
...but am I the only one who thinks that they've been shifting the focus more to things that result in a good explosion, to the detriment of everything else?
I understand that the big boom Jamie wants makes for good TV, but the reason why I watch the show is because of their resourcefulness and inventiveness to try to prove/disprove any myth, regardless of whether it requires the assistance of Frank Doyle.
I just hope that it doesn't turn into the "All-Explosions!!!!!(tm) MythBusters" show.
...but when did Australia become the poster boy for blatant censorship and policies akin to fascism? I lived there for awhile back in the early 90s and it seemed like such a laid-back, friendly place where pretty much anything goes so long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
The irony of all this is I remember getting a "talking to" by a fellow in a bar who held up McCarthyism as one of America's saddest moments because it directly attacked free speech and free thought of individuals in the name of the "commie boogyman". With news like this coming out of Australia, I'm wondering if I'm going to see him again on TV in some show trial, being accused of thoughtcrime.
Actually, no, I won't, because unlike the McCarthy hearings, the ones in Australia would probably be censored.
I switched from doing everything in vi *to* Dreamweaver. I like having function lookup, automatic upload capability to the remote site, built in O'Reilly docs, etc.
That said, I'm working with Dreamweaver the same way I did with vi, all typing, no layout. In addition, as I do some ColdFusion work, having that grammar built in too helps a lot.
Personally, Shenmue is the example I go back to when someone brings up abrupt endings, "coulda been great", "if only they'd given it a chance", etc. etc. I played the original on the Dreamcast, bought the import of Shenmue 2 and went through that whole boot cd thing, then bought it again for the XBox. And there we are, at the end of 2, staring at that wall, wondering where they could possibly go from there.
Turns out, nowhere.
This is a game that, like a lot of games and shows other people have mentioned, had a (I guess) small but devoted following; I really enjoyed the game(s) and really thought we were getting into a "true" tv-like series, only with a Virtua Fighter engine. And it was just dropped. Nobody has even *hinted* that anything new will ever come out, nor has Yu Suzuki or anyone at Sega even bothered to, at the very least, throw up a web page to tell how it was all supposed to come out.
Sadly, I think this is also a case where fan-fiction wouldn't help; it was supposed to be this whole story that Suzuki supposedly wrote and would have (theoretically) been spread out over a lot of "episodes".
Oh well, now I'm depressed...maybe I'll watch some Babylon 5 to cheer myself up.
Good backup strategies are critical to any operation, regardless of platform. I've seen similar things happen with MSSQL server databases as well as Oracle running on the most powerful Sun box you can get (circa 2001).
One database backup strategy I've seen used rather successfully is doing a straight SQL dump every night and then copying the sql file over to somewhere else; even if the database became hopelessly corrupted there's still a way to re-import everything.
Of course, this is in *addition* to mirroring, tape backups, etc.
I have a lot of hardware that would have been relegated to scrap if it hadn't been for NetBSD. Hmm...can I still do anything useful with that Mac SE/30? Sure, I'll run a small mail server for internal use so I can learn how Postfix and Sendmail work. And the multitude of bots trying to hack my Internet-facing machine wouldn't know what to do with a Vax-based NetBSD machine even if they got in.
That said, of course these machines are outrageously slow by today's standards; the Vax alone has been relegated to the basement 'cause it's so freaking loud. But hey, I happened to have the hardware, and since of course it runs NetBSD, it's a learning experience if nothing else.
As long as Apple makes products that work for me, I'll keep buyin' em, no matter who they trot out to talk about it.
Why did Jobs wear the black turtleneck when doing the keynotes? Style? Hardly. He blended better into the background. That way whatever he was holding would show up better.
If you're a company selling products, it's all about the products. To me, Apple products do everything I need and more; this is why I'm a fan of the company.
A lot of other folks have said you need to keep innovating, which I agree with, but I would also say you need to take your products in totally new directions...bundling, but in a good way, comes to mind. I don't know what your product is, but can you work with another product and come up with something completely new and game changing? Can you find a new and totally off-the-wall use for your product or build something completely different around it?
No one can afford to rest on their laurels and assume it's *done*; Once you stop, you're effectively out of the race.
Red makes a big splash here in the tech world, but I'm curious to know how their cameras stack up against anything from Arri or Panavision; they're theoretically the "big dogs" when it comes to filming motion pictures. Do they see an upstart like Red as a threat? Do they have similar products? Yes, Googling is my friend and I could find out models, prices, etc., but what I'm really trying to get at is whether or not these companies are feeling in any way threatened by this announcement, and whether filmmakers see Red's cameras as a way of making blockbuster-quality movies cheaper, better quality, etc.
More precisely, why would anyone continue to shoot film in this day and age? Especially since programs like Avid and Final Cut are likely going to be the tools to edit the movie, regardless of origin. Seems a pure-digital workflow would be the way to go.
I'm working on a project that uses a lot of soil moisture probes to determine where in the field the irrigation system isn't reaching. The idea is that the farmer can bring up the data on his/her phone while in the field and right next to the equipment. I'm not so up on the hardware, but apparently it's a lot of probes using wifi to a consolidation unit that, for some reason, doesn't have anything other than a serial port.
So for us it's actually a C library that is invoked by Java as a native method, which in turn is called by a servlet running on Tomcat. All in all, it's a really easy project.
...and the "easiest" solution is to go the web route. You can determine, based on the browser identifier, what is connecting to your web server and adjust the CSS accordingly. In our app, for example, I use a CSS library from Google Code to make the app look like an iPhone app when I detect it's an iPhone. I use a different CSS file when it's anything Blackberry.
Your server, therefore, is what should be the controller. I'm assuming you want to connect somehow to things like the air conditioning, lights, etc. The web server can invoke a CGI program, as an example, which talks to whatever serial lines are necessary to control said equipment.
Even better, you don't need to buy the actual hardware; get XCode and you get an iPhone simulator. Likewise, RIM has a simulator for every freaking model of every phone they've ever released (as well as for the different carriers).
Total cost to you should be zip for development purposes.
Back in 1990 I had absolutely no idea what "multitasking" and "multi-user" meant when it came to a single machine; I was raised on C64s, Apple ][s, etc., which were basically single-tasking. A friend at college showed me MUDs (specifically AberMUD) and all of a sudden it was like playing Zork and Adventure all over again, but in real time! With real people! All over the world!
As if my mind weren't already completely blown by the idea of a real-time Zork-like game, I realized that all of this was happening on a single machine, somewhere in Sweden. I asked how this was possible, and therein lies the beginning of my discovery of how computers worked in general, culminating in being a developer today.
It seemed absolutely magic to me then, and in reality, is still magic now. Man...I can still see it all now, sitting in front of that VT102 on the tiled, raised floor, thinking I had been let in on the hidden secret of the world, which was the early 1990s-era Internet.
Laugh if you will, but a light bulb with an IP address would be a good idea for an environment which has thousands and thousands of them. Any industrial plant, stadium, etc., would probably benefit from being able to generate a report based on pinging each bulb to see which responded and which didn't, and to change the ones that didn't.
One place I think this could really be useful is an airport...think of all those lights everywhere, scattered about the runways and taxiways.
Before Brain was doing the HowStuffWorks podcast, he wrote what I consider to be the best book of how the low-level stuff in Windows works: Win32 System Services. I learned everything about threads in there.
That said, it's specifically for C/C++ and never mentions Java or C#, so the examples probably won't help. What I really liked was how he explained the Dining Philosophers problem, how mutexes, semaphores, etc., work, and even though he talks a lot about specific API calls, I really learned how Windows was working under the hood and helped my code considerably.
I'd suggest at least reading the threads section in the store and see if it helps getting the gist of it.
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It'd be great if other companies who put out awesome games on the DC spend the time to port their games to the new generation of consoles for sale in the online stores. Nintendo has done a good job with making their back catalog available and while a lot of those games are nice for nostalgia, there's some games I really really want to play because I either didn't finish it or because it was just that good.
The games I can think of that come to mind immediately are:
* Crazy Taxi (pure goofy fun that would be fun with friends)
* Jet Set Radio (awesome soundtrack, cel shading graphics done right, just all around fun game that Tony Hawk and any snowboarding game hasn't been able to recapture)
* Shenmue (still looking for sailors after all these years...)
* SSX Tricky (I know, this is a PS2 game, but it'd be sweet to upgrade it for a PS3...it's the only SSX game that was simple and fun...I tried the wii version and it was just lacking that certain something from Tricky)
It's sad that I can get the original 2600 version of Adventure for an iPhone but can't play JSR unless I know someone who has both the game and a DC.
Maybe this isn't out the of realm of conceivability to others, but it was to me...Oracle is a software company (one that runs a lot on Sun hardware), and suddenly becoming a hardware company has got to be a daunting challenge, regardless of who you are or how smart you are.
The implications are staggering across the board. Maybe Oracle decides they don't want to the hardware, just Java and MySQL (...they got it, finally), but then all that Sun hardware and Solaris...? Or maybe they want to make Solaris/Sun hardware the best platform for Oracle products (already the case as far as I know), then what of support for all their other platforms.
Oracle likes to buy a lot of companies, but they've all been, more or less, niche players in specific markets to fill in the gaps of their own offerings. I can't imagine what "gap" buying Sun will fill, other than something will be certainly be filled.
These were depreciated in Exchange07, and I'm presuming that they're still depreciated, but not altogether gone (in 07 you had to install them manually).
There's still a lot (okay, well, some) that depends on MAPI and CDO being available in Exchange.
...whatever is at www.mysql.com. Look, I'm not trying to be flippant, but when I'm trying to sell the boss on FOSS solutions, I need to send him a link to a site that will give him the warm-fuzzies that demonstrates that a. the tech is solid (typically mention Wikipedia for that one) and b. it's not some fly-by-night operation that will suddenly up and disappear.
I'm not trying to put the other projects down, and I can appreciate why they exist, but this is the exact reason I'm always being laughed out of meetings where they decide to buy an Oracle license, or a Microsoft OS, those guys have the message down (i.e. marketing).
I'm trying to be the in-house cheerleader for what can be done in the free/open-source communities and mixed messages just don't fly to a boss who barely skims the executive summary of whatever glossy lands on his desk any given day.
Whereas I'm not too concerned about Red Hat Linux (especially since Oracle already has a version of it they brand as their own), my *real* concern is for JBoss, one of the best app servers out there.
If Oracle had not bought BEA, I'd think they'd buy up RH and replace oc4j/App server with JBoss, but since they *did* buy BEA, they now have WebLogic and JRockit; they'd probably just put JBoss out to pasture, which would leave a lot of folks who have deployed JBoss high-n-dry.
Yes, they wouldn't do it right away and yes, there's always the possibility of a fork, but it would make it that much harder of a sell to the boss who wanted to go with JBoss because it was a lot cheaper than what Oracle wanted for their app server.
...but am I the only one who thinks that they've been shifting the focus more to things that result in a good explosion, to the detriment of everything else?
I understand that the big boom Jamie wants makes for good TV, but the reason why I watch the show is because of their resourcefulness and inventiveness to try to prove/disprove any myth, regardless of whether it requires the assistance of Frank Doyle.
I just hope that it doesn't turn into the "All-Explosions!!!!!(tm) MythBusters" show.
...our new bluetooth headset overlords!
Oh, also our cut-copy-paste overlords!
...but when did Australia become the poster boy for blatant censorship and policies akin to fascism? I lived there for awhile back in the early 90s and it seemed like such a laid-back, friendly place where pretty much anything goes so long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
The irony of all this is I remember getting a "talking to" by a fellow in a bar who held up McCarthyism as one of America's saddest moments because it directly attacked free speech and free thought of individuals in the name of the "commie boogyman". With news like this coming out of Australia, I'm wondering if I'm going to see him again on TV in some show trial, being accused of thoughtcrime.
Actually, no, I won't, because unlike the McCarthy hearings, the ones in Australia would probably be censored.
I switched from doing everything in vi *to* Dreamweaver. I like having function lookup, automatic upload capability to the remote site, built in O'Reilly docs, etc.
That said, I'm working with Dreamweaver the same way I did with vi, all typing, no layout. In addition, as I do some ColdFusion work, having that grammar built in too helps a lot.
Personally, Shenmue is the example I go back to when someone brings up abrupt endings, "coulda been great", "if only they'd given it a chance", etc. etc. I played the original on the Dreamcast, bought the import of Shenmue 2 and went through that whole boot cd thing, then bought it again for the XBox. And there we are, at the end of 2, staring at that wall, wondering where they could possibly go from there.
Turns out, nowhere.
This is a game that, like a lot of games and shows other people have mentioned, had a (I guess) small but devoted following; I really enjoyed the game(s) and really thought we were getting into a "true" tv-like series, only with a Virtua Fighter engine. And it was just dropped. Nobody has even *hinted* that anything new will ever come out, nor has Yu Suzuki or anyone at Sega even bothered to, at the very least, throw up a web page to tell how it was all supposed to come out.
Sadly, I think this is also a case where fan-fiction wouldn't help; it was supposed to be this whole story that Suzuki supposedly wrote and would have (theoretically) been spread out over a lot of "episodes".
Oh well, now I'm depressed...maybe I'll watch some Babylon 5 to cheer myself up.
Oh wait... dammit!!
Good backup strategies are critical to any operation, regardless of platform. I've seen similar things happen with MSSQL server databases as well as Oracle running on the most powerful Sun box you can get (circa 2001).
One database backup strategy I've seen used rather successfully is doing a straight SQL dump every night and then copying the sql file over to somewhere else; even if the database became hopelessly corrupted there's still a way to re-import everything.
Of course, this is in *addition* to mirroring, tape backups, etc.
Should schools have to offer vegetarian heating?
You want to heat your school by burning vegetarians? You people are sick! Sick I tell you! Sick!
Next you'll be telling me that soylent green is people. Yeah, sure, like the government would let that happen.
I have a lot of hardware that would have been relegated to scrap if it hadn't been for NetBSD. Hmm...can I still do anything useful with that Mac SE/30? Sure, I'll run a small mail server for internal use so I can learn how Postfix and Sendmail work. And the multitude of bots trying to hack my Internet-facing machine wouldn't know what to do with a Vax-based NetBSD machine even if they got in.
That said, of course these machines are outrageously slow by today's standards; the Vax alone has been relegated to the basement 'cause it's so freaking loud. But hey, I happened to have the hardware, and since of course it runs NetBSD, it's a learning experience if nothing else.
"Having" Bush as ex-president is quite a pleasing thing.
As long as Apple makes products that work for me, I'll keep buyin' em, no matter who they trot out to talk about it.
Why did Jobs wear the black turtleneck when doing the keynotes? Style? Hardly. He blended better into the background. That way whatever he was holding would show up better.
If you're a company selling products, it's all about the products. To me, Apple products do everything I need and more; this is why I'm a fan of the company.
...it's not a hallucination if they really are out to get you.
Mirroring, RAID, grid, whatever. At some point, you want your data safe and secure on something not physically attached to any power source.
A lot of other folks have said you need to keep innovating, which I agree with, but I would also say you need to take your products in totally new directions...bundling, but in a good way, comes to mind. I don't know what your product is, but can you work with another product and come up with something completely new and game changing? Can you find a new and totally off-the-wall use for your product or build something completely different around it?
No one can afford to rest on their laurels and assume it's *done*; Once you stop, you're effectively out of the race.
Red makes a big splash here in the tech world, but I'm curious to know how their cameras stack up against anything from Arri or Panavision; they're theoretically the "big dogs" when it comes to filming motion pictures. Do they see an upstart like Red as a threat? Do they have similar products? Yes, Googling is my friend and I could find out models, prices, etc., but what I'm really trying to get at is whether or not these companies are feeling in any way threatened by this announcement, and whether filmmakers see Red's cameras as a way of making blockbuster-quality movies cheaper, better quality, etc.
More precisely, why would anyone continue to shoot film in this day and age? Especially since programs like Avid and Final Cut are likely going to be the tools to edit the movie, regardless of origin. Seems a pure-digital workflow would be the way to go.
I'm working on a project that uses a lot of soil moisture probes to determine where in the field the irrigation system isn't reaching. The idea is that the farmer can bring up the data on his/her phone while in the field and right next to the equipment. I'm not so up on the hardware, but apparently it's a lot of probes using wifi to a consolidation unit that, for some reason, doesn't have anything other than a serial port.
So for us it's actually a C library that is invoked by Java as a native method, which in turn is called by a servlet running on Tomcat. All in all, it's a really easy project.
...and the "easiest" solution is to go the web route. You can determine, based on the browser identifier, what is connecting to your web server and adjust the CSS accordingly. In our app, for example, I use a CSS library from Google Code to make the app look like an iPhone app when I detect it's an iPhone. I use a different CSS file when it's anything Blackberry.
Your server, therefore, is what should be the controller. I'm assuming you want to connect somehow to things like the air conditioning, lights, etc. The web server can invoke a CGI program, as an example, which talks to whatever serial lines are necessary to control said equipment.
Even better, you don't need to buy the actual hardware; get XCode and you get an iPhone simulator. Likewise, RIM has a simulator for every freaking model of every phone they've ever released (as well as for the different carriers).
Total cost to you should be zip for development purposes.
Back in 1990 I had absolutely no idea what "multitasking" and "multi-user" meant when it came to a single machine; I was raised on C64s, Apple ][s, etc., which were basically single-tasking. A friend at college showed me MUDs (specifically AberMUD) and all of a sudden it was like playing Zork and Adventure all over again, but in real time! With real people! All over the world!
As if my mind weren't already completely blown by the idea of a real-time Zork-like game, I realized that all of this was happening on a single machine, somewhere in Sweden. I asked how this was possible, and therein lies the beginning of my discovery of how computers worked in general, culminating in being a developer today.
It seemed absolutely magic to me then, and in reality, is still magic now. Man...I can still see it all now, sitting in front of that VT102 on the tiled, raised floor, thinking I had been let in on the hidden secret of the world, which was the early 1990s-era Internet.
Good times, good times.
Laugh if you will, but a light bulb with an IP address would be a good idea for an environment which has thousands and thousands of them. Any industrial plant, stadium, etc., would probably benefit from being able to generate a report based on pinging each bulb to see which responded and which didn't, and to change the ones that didn't.
One place I think this could really be useful is an airport...think of all those lights everywhere, scattered about the runways and taxiways.
The Windows version uses OLE.
Before Brain was doing the HowStuffWorks podcast, he wrote what I consider to be the best book of how the low-level stuff in Windows works: Win32 System Services. I learned everything about threads in there.
That said, it's specifically for C/C++ and never mentions Java or C#, so the examples probably won't help. What I really liked was how he explained the Dining Philosophers problem, how mutexes, semaphores, etc., work, and even though he talks a lot about specific API calls, I really learned how Windows was working under the hood and helped my code considerably.
I'd suggest at least reading the threads section in the store and see if it helps getting the gist of it.