Sorry Perl Gods, but it only counts as seven lines of code if there are seven COMMANDS. Combining multiple commands on one line doesn't count, because what's to stop higher level language writers from doing the same?
Still embarrassingly small though...think I'll port that bit of code to Java...
dM
Look, I lived through modems. Their time has come and gone. I haven't used one since 1995 and I'm not going back.
I've given up on them. They are not efficient for realtime communications at all, and there's no way to fake it. I remember suffering through the lag of Doom 2 on my 28.8 and that was in a direct client to client configuration -- no internet involved (with its lost packets, ping timeouts and multitasking). If you think game developers "aren't trying" to make games that'll run on your modem, you're forgetting something: modems are ancient devices that are worthless in transferring data! Hell, developers are already squeezing all the performance they can out of your crappy modem -- and beleive me, they've created miracles. Squeezing any more out of it opens huge holes for packet hackers and other cheaters...for example, the first revision of Jedi Knight (in which a hacked client can kill you just by telling the server that HIS screen saw you die).
You want a game you can play fairly over your little modem? It's not going to be an action packed, real time death thriller. It's not going to be a crazy point & click multi-user realm. It's going to be slow, laggy and probably incredibly boring to those of us who aren't tethered to old Bell Labs copper. It'll be something like tetrinet, or a text based MUD, or better still a Play by Mail game like VGA Planets (sorry, no GNU version for you linux losers, but there's a nice unsupported Java client kicking around). And even THESE games benefit from a real internet connection.
Game developers are already doing all they can so you don't get iced by LPBs. Maybe you should stop your useless complaining and see what you can do to get a faster connection. I've got a friend who started an ISP coop in the small town he lived in...got a T1 line and split the cost among his neighbours, who he linked together with standard cat 5 and a $100 hub. Turned out to be cheaper than dialup for all parties involved, and there's no draconian ToS agreement.
I realise I'm answering an ignorant troll, but I feel compelled to point out that Apple still sold more units last year than the linux community has sold ever. This is because Linux is a worthless desktop product with a markey consisting of 5% informed users and 95% ignorant trolls.
And let us not forget: Apple has always been the greatest proponent of proprietary hardware and software. Their philosophy of computation is that even if the entire third party market fails, even if every support company gave up, you could still use a mac without any trouble.
And for the record, Microsoft never bailed them out...Apple had grabbed a HUGE market chunk when MS handed them the check, and its stock was rising...that doesn't spell "bailed out" to me, it spells "please lend us some talented devs so we can make out mac software work!" Sure enough, three months later MS announced Office 98.
My software doesn't suck. It was made to be sold by professional coders at a place called "Microsoft," and not by open source hobbiest. Because of this fancy "software for money" model, the products are high quality and made to run on over 70% of the computers ever made. Certain other programs of mine were made by idealists from "IBM" and "Sun," and while they are more buggy and confusing, they are much better than similar programs from the "GNU" company.
Right now, there isn't much. Quicktime is NOT the best option, especially when you consider the overhead that the Sorenson codec requires and the fact that it is a VERY closed technology. It is also the largest and most prone to block noise.
Real Media isn't as expensive as it looks. First off, RM files don't need a server to stream! Unless you are using multiple bitrate streams (which are kind of nasty anyway), you can stream the files as just that, files on a web server. I use Apache, and they stream just fine off my demo site (http://epmf.dasmegabyte.org/circlemenu.html, it's sh_t and i know it). However, RM files are cheesy, they offer terrible picture quality at every bitrate and resolution and the audio is pretty bad too.
For strict streaming, Windows Media 8 is by far your best choice, and if you're just a hard anti-microsoft guy (no reason to be in this case, they have the best product), I guess it's not an option. But WM8 has some amazingly high video quality at low bitrates, approaching the level of some of the demo Mpeg-4 stuff coming out from research labs (BTW, the MS codec is NOT Mpeg-4, and neither is "divX;-)", they're simply slight implimentations of the huge mpeg-4 spec. Mpeg-4 doesn't really have an interchange format yet, and saying these Mpeg-4 video layers are "Mpeg-4" is like calling the windshield of a '67 beetle "the entire chassis of every car ever made") Wm8's only real shortcomings are: right now the encoder is windows onyl command line, sometimes files are worthless once encoded and the audio at low bitrates sounds like Yanni in a tin can.
But quality isn't what's important...if you're streaming data for a business, you can't be streaming it in a format your users might now have. In this instance, you'll have to think of the following points:
Every windows machine has some version of Windows Media Player; however, not all of them have WM8 installed. WM 6.4 doesn't work well with WM8 files, sometimes the video doen't play at all (!)
If you use DivX, your users will have to download a "grey market" app that won't automatically install. It's a moderately difficult task.
Quicktime is free, cross platform and readily available, but MANY pc users won't have it. Furthurmore, many others will only have old versions which won't work at all.
Real Player is freaking everywhere. But Real Player is notorious for spamming and annoying its user base, and the video quality is, well, sh_tty.
MPEG is great...but MPEg-1 is big, MPEG-2 costly, and MPEG-4 intangible. Still, for users willing to wait for the download, it's worth it.
Whatever you eventually decide to use, please do the world a favour and offer MULTIPLE BITRATES. Nothing is worse than sitting through a ten minute download of a 128 kbit stream on a 28.8, except being forced to sit through a low res 450kbit stream on an OC line!
I am not a very nice person, and usually list my name as eat@poo.net, yourservice@isapackoflies.org or asdf@ghjkl.cz. I also try to mess up surveys whenever possible, by clicking buttons in a mathematical order and so forth. When I have to put my real name (for online shoppes and so forth) I always spell it differently, and keep a list of the misspellings so I can tell who sells my name where. For the occasional spammer I have to give a real address to (for confirmation or whatever), i use my dasmegabytespam@hotmail.com address. It's always filled with a few thousand pieces of unwanted mail, and it's nice to know it's all choking up some behemouth SQL server somewhere.
Why do I do this? Habit mostly. But it's nice to know there's always one alternative to having marketeers knowing everything about me: lie like a lazy dog.
On the internet I buy products based on reviews anyway.
You know, THX stuff is very very expensive. Adding THX to a receiver adds about $200-300 to its price, for what is known as "reference quality" components. If Lucasfilm is okaying entire THX-ready computer systems for under $2000, they are GUARANTEED to be lower quality than other THX certified components. Besides, I've seen the "top of the line Dolby Digital" setups from Dell, and they're utter crap, even compared to a sub $400 integrated DD/DVD solution from Kenwood. What this cert. means is not good news of high quality tech for pc theatre enthusiasts (which is a bit like saying "hyundai accent driving enthusiasts"), but bad news for real videophiles: Lucasfilm's THX rating is now officially nothing more than a brand name. It means nothing. And the extra money I *could* have spent on a nice McIntosh MC500 power amp but instead laid into various THX certified speakers and components is now an even worse mistake than I worried it might be.
Last summer I worked for a small company called WebWay. We were a great little web design and internet company of about 25 people, and whether we knew it or not, we had an excellent communications model. You see, being a small company, everybody had their hand in everybody else's work -- us coders helped the IT guys manage our machines and taught them our web secrets and the designers used the receptionist's eye for what looked nice before producing a product. My boss was also a coder, and he was the smartest in the bunch. I HAD to talk to him, because I knew next to nothing of how to program for the web at the time and he did. Because of this peer communications model, he always knew what I was up to and I always knew a little about what he thought of my work...something I don't see today, with my manager who, while a great guy and very down to earth, hasn't touched a line of code in a long while and isn't expected to.
Sadly, I think a lot of small companies have very cohesive communications models and work very efficiently because of it...however, greed belies expansion. The second you move in a manager whose job is management, you kill the process -- at least, with self-managing tasks like deadline programming. The moral: stay small, and stay productive. Get big, and you'll pay more for less, including the outrageous salary of your "managers."
I hate to tell you this bub...
on
CS vs CIS
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· Score: 1
But I graduated with a MA in English Literature and a BA in Rhetorical Theory and *I* get the same jobs you do. It's because the computer industry realized long ago that experience is much more important than anything written on a diploma.
However, just starting out, you have to think about WHY you're going in to the computer field. Computers in business are not what they were ten years ago; it's not all about the optimizations and smug coding you learn in CS. CIS is the field of dirty, actual use computing -- the sort of thing most readers of this site could figure out given twenty minutes and a Usenet group. It's my opinion that the skills learned in CIS are useless three years after you learned them; after all, we're not networking now the way we did in 1997, and then we weren't networking the way we did in 1994. The skills you learn in CS you will always need -- the ability to learn an algorithm or new high level (read: not scripted) language, the ability to comprehend object oriented design (most of my managers are CIS grads and can't ken this to save their lives, it's why i'm constantly in Rational Rose) and the flexibility to do pretty much anything given enough time and the right tools.
If you're going into computers just to make quick money as a sysadmin, I suggest you go directly into CIS. You'll probably never use these skills programming websites and networking PCs. However, if you want to do any real programming (e.g. machine language optimizations, robotics, wireless programming, or making scads of money writing drivers for Microsoft), you'll want that CS MS.
..in that it's idealistic, and totally meaningless beyond that. The "tech slump" means that suddenly open source is going to rule the world and everybody's going to be happy and nobody will ever make the mistake of trying to make money off the internet again?
Please. I remember the "brave, young internet" before the VCs stepped in and gave us cheap bandwidth, thick pipes and massive technology bases: it sucked. It was mostly personal web pages on hobbie with the occasional boring rant and a lot of porn. Nowhere in sight were the massively useful coding help pages, community sites or information pages that have risen because of, and partially in spite of, this "massive captial investment." If it weren't for red hat's drive for proftiability, you wouldn't be using LINUX right now; and if you think they're just going to go back to being a small company again just because you think the tech slump should mean the death of the internet culture, you've got a rude awakening.
Now, I agree that there are going to be massive changes in the way things are done. Kitsch can't drive a page anymore, you're definitely going to see a lot more useful content. But because of this, you're going to see a lot more pay-for-play, and whether this is going to fly with the internet user is unknown. It certainly wouldn't fly with the paranoids that stalk many of these open source forums, wailing cleverly about the badness of closed standards. But this is what will happen: the internet will gradually become useful, one way or another, and touchy-feely open source won't be the catalyst: money will. Not the same quick buck IPO money that came about a year ago, but money's money in my book. Microsoft will grow, possibly as a provider of open source solutions (like its amazing XML parser, nicely designed web browser which was the first to support all the HTML 4.0 and ECMAScript directives and Oracle killing DB built on ANSI SQL). If being a monopoly means making great products, if VC means a few dead dumb ideas and a lot of great ones, and if open source means whining softly about how you'd prefer to hum in the shower than sing in a musical hall, I think I'll take the businesses,
"computers are totally predictable..."
*Sigh*, so are most PEOPLE, most single cells and many other complex systems. The trick is looking for what to predict. Computers are "predictable" only so much as we control the situation. Try running your machine without a fan for awhile, or institute some bit error (like a magnetic picture of your girlfriend on your case, something I did for a while in a futile juvenile attempt to goad my 386-40 into sentience). Suddenly, things become less predictable. The predictability of a cornered animal's actions are similarly predictable, so long as we control the situation. Granted, this is a silly sort of argument -- after all, there's no call for a "free range" computer. I'm just saying that perhaps the predictability of a computer and therefore its ability to truly "innovate" without outside stimulus is a fairly pardigmatic concept -- as is creativity in humans. Look at any three websites and tell me that each of them is a seperate entity with no similarity, that they aren't adapted to a paradigm with radom minor deviances according to a further paradigm of acceptable deviance, and I'll call you a liar. Sure, computers can't create, but neither can most humans...there's no reason why a computer, properly programmed and template driven, can't emulate the "art" of most advertising executives, web site designers, popular music authors, &tc.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry Perl Gods, but it only counts as seven lines of code if there are seven COMMANDS. Combining multiple commands on one line doesn't count, because what's to stop higher level language writers from doing the same?
Still embarrassingly small though...think I'll port that bit of code to Java... dM
Look, I lived through modems. Their time has come and gone. I haven't used one since 1995 and I'm not going back.
I've given up on them. They are not efficient for realtime communications at all, and there's no way to fake it. I remember suffering through the lag of Doom 2 on my 28.8 and that was in a direct client to client configuration -- no internet involved (with its lost packets, ping timeouts and multitasking). If you think game developers "aren't trying" to make games that'll run on your modem, you're forgetting something: modems are ancient devices that are worthless in transferring data! Hell, developers are already squeezing all the performance they can out of your crappy modem -- and beleive me, they've created miracles. Squeezing any more out of it opens huge holes for packet hackers and other cheaters...for example, the first revision of Jedi Knight (in which a hacked client can kill you just by telling the server that HIS screen saw you die).
You want a game you can play fairly over your little modem? It's not going to be an action packed, real time death thriller. It's not going to be a crazy point & click multi-user realm. It's going to be slow, laggy and probably incredibly boring to those of us who aren't tethered to old Bell Labs copper. It'll be something like tetrinet, or a text based MUD, or better still a Play by Mail game like VGA Planets (sorry, no GNU version for you linux losers, but there's a nice unsupported Java client kicking around). And even THESE games benefit from a real internet connection.
Game developers are already doing all they can so you don't get iced by LPBs. Maybe you should stop your useless complaining and see what you can do to get a faster connection. I've got a friend who started an ISP coop in the small town he lived in...got a T1 line and split the cost among his neighbours, who he linked together with standard cat 5 and a $100 hub. Turned out to be cheaper than dialup for all parties involved, and there's no draconian ToS agreement.
I realise I'm answering an ignorant troll, but I feel compelled to point out that Apple still sold more units last year than the linux community has sold ever. This is because Linux is a worthless desktop product with a markey consisting of 5% informed users and 95% ignorant trolls.
And let us not forget: Apple has always been the greatest proponent of proprietary hardware and software. Their philosophy of computation is that even if the entire third party market fails, even if every support company gave up, you could still use a mac without any trouble.
And for the record, Microsoft never bailed them out...Apple had grabbed a HUGE market chunk when MS handed them the check, and its stock was rising...that doesn't spell "bailed out" to me, it spells "please lend us some talented devs so we can make out mac software work!" Sure enough, three months later MS announced Office 98.
My software doesn't suck. It was made to be sold by professional coders at a place called "Microsoft," and not by open source hobbiest. Because of this fancy "software for money" model, the products are high quality and made to run on over 70% of the computers ever made. Certain other programs of mine were made by idealists from "IBM" and "Sun," and while they are more buggy and confusing, they are much better than similar programs from the "GNU" company.
Real Media isn't as expensive as it looks. First off, RM files don't need a server to stream! Unless you are using multiple bitrate streams (which are kind of nasty anyway), you can stream the files as just that, files on a web server. I use Apache, and they stream just fine off my demo site (http://epmf.dasmegabyte.org/circlemenu.html, it's sh_t and i know it). However, RM files are cheesy, they offer terrible picture quality at every bitrate and resolution and the audio is pretty bad too.
For strict streaming, Windows Media 8 is by far your best choice, and if you're just a hard anti-microsoft guy (no reason to be in this case, they have the best product), I guess it's not an option. But WM8 has some amazingly high video quality at low bitrates, approaching the level of some of the demo Mpeg-4 stuff coming out from research labs (BTW, the MS codec is NOT Mpeg-4, and neither is "divX
But quality isn't what's important...if you're streaming data for a business, you can't be streaming it in a format your users might now have. In this instance, you'll have to think of the following points:
Every windows machine has some version of Windows Media Player; however, not all of them have WM8 installed. WM 6.4 doesn't work well with WM8 files, sometimes the video doen't play at all (!)
If you use DivX, your users will have to download a "grey market" app that won't automatically install. It's a moderately difficult task.
Quicktime is free, cross platform and readily available, but MANY pc users won't have it. Furthurmore, many others will only have old versions which won't work at all.
Real Player is freaking everywhere. But Real Player is notorious for spamming and annoying its user base, and the video quality is, well, sh_tty.
MPEG is great...but MPEg-1 is big, MPEG-2 costly, and MPEG-4 intangible. Still, for users willing to wait for the download, it's worth it.
Whatever you eventually decide to use, please do the world a favour and offer MULTIPLE BITRATES. Nothing is worse than sitting through a ten minute download of a 128 kbit stream on a 28.8, except being forced to sit through a low res 450kbit stream on an OC line!
I am not a very nice person, and usually list my name as eat@poo.net, yourservice@isapackoflies.org or asdf@ghjkl.cz. I also try to mess up surveys whenever possible, by clicking buttons in a mathematical order and so forth. When I have to put my real name (for online shoppes and so forth) I always spell it differently, and keep a list of the misspellings so I can tell who sells my name where. For the occasional spammer I have to give a real address to (for confirmation or whatever), i use my dasmegabytespam@hotmail.com address. It's always filled with a few thousand pieces of unwanted mail, and it's nice to know it's all choking up some behemouth SQL server somewhere.
Why do I do this? Habit mostly. But it's nice to know there's always one alternative to having marketeers knowing everything about me: lie like a lazy dog.
On the internet I buy products based on reviews anyway.
You know, THX stuff is very very expensive. Adding THX to a receiver adds about $200-300 to its price, for what is known as "reference quality" components. If Lucasfilm is okaying entire THX-ready computer systems for under $2000, they are GUARANTEED to be lower quality than other THX certified components. Besides, I've seen the "top of the line Dolby Digital" setups from Dell, and they're utter crap, even compared to a sub $400 integrated DD/DVD solution from Kenwood. What this cert. means is not good news of high quality tech for pc theatre enthusiasts (which is a bit like saying "hyundai accent driving enthusiasts"), but bad news for real videophiles: Lucasfilm's THX rating is now officially nothing more than a brand name. It means nothing. And the extra money I *could* have spent on a nice McIntosh MC500 power amp but instead laid into various THX certified speakers and components is now an even worse mistake than I worried it might be.
Last summer I worked for a small company called WebWay. We were a great little web design and internet company of about 25 people, and whether we knew it or not, we had an excellent communications model. You see, being a small company, everybody had their hand in everybody else's work -- us coders helped the IT guys manage our machines and taught them our web secrets and the designers used the receptionist's eye for what looked nice before producing a product. My boss was also a coder, and he was the smartest in the bunch. I HAD to talk to him, because I knew next to nothing of how to program for the web at the time and he did. Because of this peer communications model, he always knew what I was up to and I always knew a little about what he thought of my work...something I don't see today, with my manager who, while a great guy and very down to earth, hasn't touched a line of code in a long while and isn't expected to.
Sadly, I think a lot of small companies have very cohesive communications models and work very efficiently because of it...however, greed belies expansion. The second you move in a manager whose job is management, you kill the process -- at least, with self-managing tasks like deadline programming. The moral: stay small, and stay productive. Get big, and you'll pay more for less, including the outrageous salary of your "managers."
But I graduated with a MA in English Literature and a BA in Rhetorical Theory and *I* get the same jobs you do. It's because the computer industry realized long ago that experience is much more important than anything written on a diploma.
However, just starting out, you have to think about WHY you're going in to the computer field. Computers in business are not what they were ten years ago; it's not all about the optimizations and smug coding you learn in CS. CIS is the field of dirty, actual use computing -- the sort of thing most readers of this site could figure out given twenty minutes and a Usenet group. It's my opinion that the skills learned in CIS are useless three years after you learned them; after all, we're not networking now the way we did in 1997, and then we weren't networking the way we did in 1994. The skills you learn in CS you will always need -- the ability to learn an algorithm or new high level (read: not scripted) language, the ability to comprehend object oriented design (most of my managers are CIS grads and can't ken this to save their lives, it's why i'm constantly in Rational Rose) and the flexibility to do pretty much anything given enough time and the right tools.
If you're going into computers just to make quick money as a sysadmin, I suggest you go directly into CIS. You'll probably never use these skills programming websites and networking PCs. However, if you want to do any real programming (e.g. machine language optimizations, robotics, wireless programming, or making scads of money writing drivers for Microsoft), you'll want that CS MS.
..in that it's idealistic, and totally meaningless beyond that. The "tech slump" means that suddenly open source is going to rule the world and everybody's going to be happy and nobody will ever make the mistake of trying to make money off the internet again?
Please. I remember the "brave, young internet" before the VCs stepped in and gave us cheap bandwidth, thick pipes and massive technology bases: it sucked. It was mostly personal web pages on hobbie with the occasional boring rant and a lot of porn. Nowhere in sight were the massively useful coding help pages, community sites or information pages that have risen because of, and partially in spite of, this "massive captial investment." If it weren't for red hat's drive for proftiability, you wouldn't be using LINUX right now; and if you think they're just going to go back to being a small company again just because you think the tech slump should mean the death of the internet culture, you've got a rude awakening.
Now, I agree that there are going to be massive changes in the way things are done. Kitsch can't drive a page anymore, you're definitely going to see a lot more useful content. But because of this, you're going to see a lot more pay-for-play, and whether this is going to fly with the internet user is unknown. It certainly wouldn't fly with the paranoids that stalk many of these open source forums, wailing cleverly about the badness of closed standards. But this is what will happen: the internet will gradually become useful, one way or another, and touchy-feely open source won't be the catalyst: money will. Not the same quick buck IPO money that came about a year ago, but money's money in my book. Microsoft will grow, possibly as a provider of open source solutions (like its amazing XML parser, nicely designed web browser which was the first to support all the HTML 4.0 and ECMAScript directives and Oracle killing DB built on ANSI SQL). If being a monopoly means making great products, if VC means a few dead dumb ideas and a lot of great ones, and if open source means whining softly about how you'd prefer to hum in the shower than sing in a musical hall, I think I'll take the businesses,
"computers are totally predictable..."
*Sigh*, so are most PEOPLE, most single cells and many other complex systems. The trick is looking for what to predict. Computers are "predictable" only so much as we control the situation. Try running your machine without a fan for awhile, or institute some bit error (like a magnetic picture of your girlfriend on your case, something I did for a while in a futile juvenile attempt to goad my 386-40 into sentience). Suddenly, things become less predictable. The predictability of a cornered animal's actions are similarly predictable, so long as we control the situation. Granted, this is a silly sort of argument -- after all, there's no call for a "free range" computer. I'm just saying that perhaps the predictability of a computer and therefore its ability to truly "innovate" without outside stimulus is a fairly pardigmatic concept -- as is creativity in humans. Look at any three websites and tell me that each of them is a seperate entity with no similarity, that they aren't adapted to a paradigm with radom minor deviances according to a further paradigm of acceptable deviance, and I'll call you a liar. Sure, computers can't create, but neither can most humans...there's no reason why a computer, properly programmed and template driven, can't emulate the "art" of most advertising executives, web site designers, popular music authors, &tc.
Java is the way...