This would mean that a vast majority of the PSP's game library would be unplayable since most of the games for the psp are on UMDs.
I've seen news stories of Dave Perry making claims that Sony's going in that direction, but, it would be horribly stupid.
And yet PSN continues to re-release the best-selling PSP games as digital downloads. Yesterday they released Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters as a downloadable PSP game.
I'm looking for Sony to co-release PSP games as downloadable (PSN) and UMD. If they can do that (starting soon!) then it won't be such a big deal if the next-gen PSP drops UMD support.
not in the, "WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU IN MY BAG?!" benchmark. Otherwise, pretty true. The only problem is that the cost of stamping a UMD is still marginally cheaper than shipping out spare memory cards and online sales have the problem of, "oh shit, my memory card/hard drive/etc just ate itself, what now?" factor. WiiWare, XBLA and PSN have proven that online sales can work on consoles, there are still other hurdles to jump through.
Sony has already leaked (announced?) that the next PSP will not use UMD, and will only support mem-stick games.
I'm a big fan of this decision. I have a PSP 1001, and can't remember the last time I actually bought a UMD for it. Pretty much all the games I have now are download-only. I buy them on PSN (using my PS3) then move them to the PSP. It's not that hard.
Solaris is open. If you don't like the CDDL license, too bad for you. The fact that it doesn't meet the requirements of an aging anti-commerce hippie doesn't make it less open. Hearing "change the license" is automatically a flag that some Linux fanboy is determined to paint the world in HIS colour, and EVERYONE ELSE must comply.
I prefer that Solaris be totally opened. I understand that not all of Solaris source code is currently available. From Wikipedia:
Sun has released most of the Solaris source code under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 1.1. The CDDL was approved as an open source license by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in January 2005. Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary.
This is a free software license. It has a copyleft with a scope that's similar to the one in the Mozilla Public License, which makes it incompatible with the GNU GPL. This means a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.
Years after Oracle's purchase of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel, these companies are still running pretty much like they had before the acquisition. Given their track record with letting the original company operate the way it had been, I'm betting Oracle will do nothing with Sun.
What needs to happen is for Oracle to split Sun apart, remove the business lines that aren't working (workstations, thin clients, huge servers,..) and put the focus on the parts that are working (Solaris, Niagra next-gen chip technology, low-end to mid-range servers,..). I'd also love to see Oracle release Solaris as a totally open-source kernel (under something like the GNU GPL, or a similarly F/OSS license) and let it compete with Linux. And I want Oracle to continue funding Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice (which are all owned by Sun.) I think MySQL would make a handy low-end competitor to MS-SQL, for example.
But I'm not holding my breath for Oracle to do the right thing.
At our shop, "Front end web developer" is too specific. (Unfortunately, we are often stuck with vague descriptions.)
Our folks who do this role are either called web designer or the old-school webmaster.
That said, I don't know of anyone who just does this. Our "plain" html web sites are going away, replaced by sites managed by a central CMS. Even us managers are expected to be able to write web pages, using the CMS. Our "web designers" now do a lot of what used to be "human factors engineering" but on the web. They often create mock-ups of what a web application might look like and how you might interact with it. That mock-up later gets turned into a UI design (often by the same person) with a well-defined xhtml, so that the developer can just code a web app that creates content according to the document structure.
In college, I got a job as a summer intern at a small R&D company, writing code to run reports against the company proprietary database (row counts, histograms,... simple stuff, but they hadn't written such a thing.)
It was a small privately-owned company, and they really didn't have a spot for me to work near any of the full-time developers. So they put me in the computer room (they called it a "data center" but I couldn't call it that today.) I wrote code on a folding table where the monitor too up most of the space. The keyboard kind of hung off the front of the table by about half an inch - it was that close. I developed RSI from that.
At least I didn't have a problem with glare, because there were no lights near me. So I worked in semi-darkness, with the monitor brightness turned down so it wasn't too bad.
>> The Million Dollar question will be whether the fact that XP upgrades to Windows 7 requires a clean install will prove to be Microsoft's undoing.
> The Million Dollar answer is "no". Because when you upgrade a corporate desktop, you don't upgrade in place. You create an image and you reimage your desktops en masse.
Whereupon:
1. You discover all the hidden defects in your backup system. Users start to line up outside your office asking where their data is/went. Extra anguish is demonstrated by [...]
Wow, does your organization really operate this way? Over here, we purchase standardized desktops and laptops. "Developers" get one type of laptop, "managers" and "Project managers" get a different tier of laptop.. some older users whose systems haven't come up for replacement may still run the "powerhouse" desktop we used to issue. When our desktop support folks upgraded the OS on my laptop, they simply (arranged a time, then) took away my old laptop, and immediately replaced it with a "new" laptop (of the same class) with the upgraded OS.
They give me 2-5 days for "uh oh" discovery ("hey, I guess I had this file on my old laptop..") then securely erase my old hard drive, and re-image it to give to someone else.
Since we have a standardized platform, it's fairly straightforward for the desktop support group to test new versions of the software or operating system (say, Windows 7) to make sure all the devices work. With a standardized platform - even taking system replacement every 3-4 years - there are only so many configs you can have. I'm not saying testing takes a day - it may take months - but it's not that hard to figure out if everyone has pretty much the same system.
Most corporate shops run in a similar way. I doubt any of them will "upgrade in place". They'll just issue a new image to users running Windows 7, if and when they choose to upgrade to Win7.
I think it would be very interesting for Oracle to buy Sun. Here's why:
I'd love to see Oracle create a "black box" database system - you get an install DVD (sold for either SPARC or Intel) and boot your system hardware with it. At install, you indicate what products you want to install, maybe give some license codes, and the DVD automatically installs a database system for you. Want to set up a database that participates in a RAC cluster? There'd be an install option for that. Want to connect to some JBOD or SAN? There'd be an option for that, too. The/etc/system file is pre-tuned, but you get options to provide further tuning (even post-install).
Behind the scenes, the Oracle installer would lay down a hardened, minimal install of [Open]Solaris, and all your storage would be on ZFS. You don't do any "UNIX sysadmin" on this machine because to an administrator, it's just a black box. Think network appliance, or Google-in-a-box.
Sure, you might get an SSH prompt so system DBAs could manually apply patches or do any of the post-install tuning (mentioned above.) But in general, the system downloads patches (operating system, Oracle database, other Oracle software,..) automatically. You should have an option to have them installed automatically (except for any patches that would require a restart/reboot) or choose to have patches downloaded so you can install them "manually" during scheduled down-time.
A system like this might be very interesting. I had assumed Oracle was going to do something like this a few years ago after they announced their "unbreakable Linux", but nothing really came of it.
GamePolitics asked a First Amendment rights expert for his opinion on the matter, and the National Coalition Against Censorship spoke out against the bill, urging Governor Jon Huntsman to strike it down. Fortunately, it appears he took their advice (or that of many lobbying retailers), as the bill has now been vetoed. Huntsman said, "The industries most affected by this new requirement indicated that rather than risk being held liable under this bill, they would likely choose to no longer issue age appropriate labels on goods and services."
(emphasis mine)
I'm optimistic that we'll see a lot more stories in the coming year like this one, of governors vetoing similar game-sale restrictions - or of state legislatures not passing these bills at all.
But it's not just because of First Amendment issues. Apparently, that hasn't been a problem for the legislatures passing the bills in the first place. I think the downturn in the economy will wind up helping the game industry here.
This governor clearly got the message: "the economy is in recession, and this bill would make it less likely that your state would have sales in a certain industry." And he wisely decided to veto the bill, so that game retailers in his state (WalMart, Target, EB/GameStop,..) would continue to sell games. No doubt someone also showed him the sales numbers for the top games and how many of them would be affected by this bill (rated M). And so, had a bill like this already been on the books, those sales would not have happened in his state. I can't see any governor wanting to sign a bill that prevents money entering his state's economy, not at a time like this.
Money drives a lot of things, and the economy clearly drives decisions at the government level.
Does anyone have an example of really good AI in action games (or any non-RPG, non-RTS games)?
I really liked the AI in the Thief 1 & 2 games (never played Thief 3.) Very believable, added a certain dimension to the game.
Guards would sort of tool around the place, doing their rounds. If you hadn't been discovered, they were not very attentive (you might believe they were just bored with the routine.) If they heard you make a noise, they entered a higher level of alertness, became more suspicious. Their posture would change as they snooped around, looking for what caused the noise. You had to be really well-hidden for them not to find you. If you made any more noise, they went towards that. Make a lot of noise, or show yourself, and they entered full-alert and came charging. You were pretty much screwed if you found yourself trapped in a semi-dark corner on marble tile when guards were around.
If a suspicious guard didn't find anything, then he would (after a long while) go back to the lower alert level, and just go about his day. But I don't remember that guards, once they actually saw you, ever went back to just doing a normal, unaware patrol.
(Did suspicious guards "infect" nearby guards, causing them to become suspicious for a certain time? Maybe someone here will remember.)
Guards alsowent into higher alert automatically if they came across an unconscious body. So you always had to be careful about stashing the body(ies) when you coshed someone.
It would have been much better if guards responded to torches going out, or moss suddenly appearing in a room, or an arrow sticking out of a post, or a door left open. Even a simple acknowledgment "hmm, I thought that torch was lit before... must have gone out" would have been more realistic.
But generally, I thought the AI in Thief was pretty well done.
Does anyone have an example of really good AI in action games (or any non-RPG, non-RTS games)?
The AI in the first Half-Life was pretty good, I thought. Especially for the era. There were AI creatures that, once they saw you, would run to the rest of their group so they could attack in greater numbers. IIRC, other AI would behave a certain way (i.e. aggressive) until their health dropped too low, then would act in another way (i.e. defensive, even retreating.) It was very believable with the non-human creatures (the sonic dog-things) and not too bad with the enemy soldiers. I think the soldiers had certain logic, where if they had a reasonably good shot at you, they took it - otherwise, they'd reposition to get a better angle. Net effect: in certain areas, you'd have two soldiers laying down "covering fire" while two others ran around the corner to flank you. I was surprised by that the first few times it happened; very decent AI.
I'm re-playing Killzone 2 right now. The first play-through, I thought the AI wasn't too bad. The second time through, I realized that the AI had a different behavior when you were more than a certain distance away vs. closer. So on my second time through the game, I ran up to a lot of Helghast and used the knife on them (there's a trophy for that, anyway.) If you can get close enough without taking too much damage, it's easy because the AI takes about half a second to switch to the other "mode", during which time it has stopped shooting. That's the opportunity to strike. (Yes, this kind of kills re-play value.)
Oh don't get me wrong - I had some great life experiences from my dad, like learning how to hunt and fish, how to fix things, how to build a new wall for a house, etc... In fact, it was my dad that got me into computers and taught me BASIC on the Commodore 64.
It's the raising of the children from ages 0-8 that has me a bit worried; for example, my dads idea of a punishment was to strap me into the front seat of the car, take off the car door, and drive on the highway at 60mph. While I realize that might've been fun for a teenage, at 8 years old with an angry adult driving the car, I was terrified... and that was for forgetting to return a rental at Blockbuster. I can't remember what my punishment was for not doing a school project, but I don't think it was good.
I call BS on this comment.
If you were learning BASIC on the C64, that means you were born in the very early 1970's. When you were 8 years old, it would have been around 1980. Blockbuster Video was started 1985, in Texas.
You'd have to change the animal so much that it wouldn't seem recognizable. The old formula has become such a cliche that there's absolutely nothing you can reuse from it. Reset button at the end of the episode, lame. Space anomalies, lame. Gritty scifi future with lots of angst, made lame by overexposure on Galactica. Aliens who look exactly like us save for bumpy foreheads? I could buy it when I was younger but it's just ridiculous these days. (I'll probably be in the minority on this one.) Time-travel plots, squishy techno-babble science plots, holodeck plots, everything that makes Trek Trek is what's been killing it. It's like asking "Can we make a healthy Big Mac?" Yeah, and by the time you're done removing everything that's bad about that burger, you're left with nothing but lettuce and sesame seeds.
As a fan, what I'd like to see is the Star Trek experience from another point of view. Don't keep giving us the "good guys", the Federation, with their Prime Directive.
Give us a series based on, say, the Klingons (TNG era.. please skip the whole "TOS to TNG" evolution thing - TOS Klingons looked that way because of budget, that's it.) A story similar to Star Trek: Klingon would make a great pilot for a Klingon-based series - a young Klingon goes through the Rite of Ascension to become a true Warrior, joins a ship. Let the series experience the Star Trek universe through the lens of a young Klingon - not some goody Federation captain, which we've now seen more times than we need.
As he experiences the universe as a Klingon warrior, so do we. Let a mentor show him the true path of a Klingon warrior. Show the audience the code of honor from the Klingons. Throw in some Klingon language (swearing in Klingon!)
In this series, there's no Prime Directive. Very little diplomacy, no helping other cultures to better themselves. And it should go without saying: no journey of self-discovery, except for the central character as he learns what it means to be a true Klingon warrior.
Yes, under GNOME. But to the vast number of people who might try Linux, they don't want to about "GNOME" or "KDE". To them, it's all "Linux". So in my blog, I try to take that tone- if you're a Windows user, look at all the crap that's broken in Windows that's not broken under Linux.
It's always interesting when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time. You'll see some tech writer blog about this every few months; sometimes they are a bit boring, but I always learn something from watching a Linux newbie try things out for the first time.
At work, it's the other way with me. I've been using Linux at work since 2000 (I'm a staff person at a university) but my boss recently made his preferences clear: I should run Windows, just like everyone else. So I did what anyone would do in this situation - I blogged about it. I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to write about making a return to Windows:
It hasn't been pretty. In short, I find a lot of stuff in Windows to be just plain broken. Nothing is the same, even among different "first tier" applications (that means apps from Microsoft.)
My next post will be about the stupid dialog boxes in Windows. I find them lacking compared to what I expect from Linux.
I've enjoyed buying games at the PlayStation Network store. So far, I've purchased Flower, Magic Ball, Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty, Super Rub-a-Dub, and others for my PlayStation 3. I've also bought No Gravity, SOCOM, and a few other games for PSP, also directly from PSN. That, and the occasional movie rental.
Downloading games is great for some games. You'll note that none of these games were fairly small - maybe topping at around 1GB for 'Quest for Booty'. That's where the true value comes in for downloadable games, when they aren't too big.
The PlayStation3 uses Blu-Ray for its media-based games. The guys at Insomniac Games said they pretty much filled the Blu-Ray for both Ratchet & Clank Future, and Resistance 2. I just got Killzone 2, and I'm willing to bet they did the same. A dual-layer Blu-Ray disc is 50GB. I'm not sure I want to download 50GB for a video game. Yeah, I know hard drives are getting bigger - but that's a lot of stuff to download before I can play my game, and if I start downloading now, I'm still not gonna be able to play it tonight. Compare that to my running out to Target (5 minutes from my house) and picking up a physical PS3 game.
Downloading that much content will also cause problems if my cable company implements a monthly bandwidth limit.
I think we'll see certain game publishers leaning more to downloadable games from places like PSN or XBL. That just makes sense for a lot of games. But for the AAA titles out there like Killzone, Battlefield, Ratchet & Clank, EA Sports, etc. you'll still see them on physical media, even 5 years from now.
Windows 95, 98, XP, etc., all the non-server ones, didn't need a shell. I grew up using Windows and never once needed something like that. Arguably, it would be nice on the server side, I guess... but Windows did appear to try to get AWAY from the command line.
MS-DOS had a half-decent command-line environment - don't knock it. For those of us that grew up with DOS, it was great, and moving to an all-GUI "Windows" environment was a painful shift.
Why on earth would someone do this trade in when you could make at least ten more dollars just listing it on their own marketplace?
I'm a gamer, but I also have a life. Kind of bits to have to post something on eBay or some other marketplace just to get rid of a game. Remember, you also have to ship the game, deal with money transfer, etc. May not be much to you, but I probably work more than 40hrs a week, and my free time is important to me. It's very convenient for me to just bring in any games I've stopped playing, and use them for trade when I buy a new game. For example, I recently went through my PSP/PS2/PS3 games, decided I wasn't playing some of them, brought them in for trade. Got enough in trade that a new game was basically pocket change.
Took all of 10 minutes to drive to the nearest GameStop to make this happen.
Sure, I could have gotten more by selling them on eBay or something. My brother reminds me of this all the time. But bringing them in for trade (or now, to Amazon) is way more immediate.
"I am working with a non-profit that will eventually host a massive online self-help archive and community (using FTP and HTTP services). We are expecting 1,000+ unique visitors / day. [...]"
Others have pointed this out to you, but 1,000 visitors is not much load at all. I work at a large university, and during registration first day of classes, we have 500 unique users (what you call "visitors") in each hour. On the first day of classes, we may get 1,000 unique users per hour as students look up their class schedules, and sign in to the registration system to drop that stupid class they were just in. We run a load balancer at the network level, so that traffic is balanced immediately at the switch, rather than at a host level before being sent to a back-end web host.
But doing the same in your case will be very expensive. If you work at a non-profit, you probably don't have this in your budget.
If you're just doing simple http and ftp (that is, not running a web application with a database back-end.. or an application that keeps "state" on the server, requiring users to always go back to the same server server they first visited) then you might consider the simplest solution of all: DNS round-robin. Simply put, you enter the IP addresses for two web servers (or ftp servers) for a single www entry in DNS. At the expense of hitting your DNS more frequently, you could set the TTL to 1 hour for the round-robin so that if server #1 went down, you could push an update to DNS so "www" just points to server #2, and users are only inconvenienced for about an hour.
But your best solution is probably just to outsource this, especially if you're only doing simple http and ftp. A good web hosting company already has this infrastructure available to you. No need to re-invent the wheel for just 1,000 users.
Also, are you saying programs in X don't have a different look and feel from each other? Like Gnome and KDE applications?
Sure, GNOME and KDE apps look different - but under Fedora, where GNOME was installed by default, all my apps were GNOME. So Firefox, Openoffice, Terminal, the text editor,... all looked identical.
Yet under Windows, apps all look different - they use different themes - even "first-party" apps from Microsoft. Office looks different from IE or Firefox, different from Media Player (our phone system emails me my voicemails as WAV files),... it's all different. Nothing feels the same.
Another example is keyboard handling. When I used Fedora, every application handled, say, ctrl-backspace the same - it backspaced over the last word. But under Windows, this is different depending on which app you're in. For some apps, ctrl-backspace works "correctly" and backs up over the last word. Other apps insert a ctrl-backspace character. Other apps just back up one character. Another app just skips back to the start of the line, deleting nothing. And one other app doesn't recognize ctrl-backspace at all (does nothing.) Again, behavior differs even in first-party (Microsoft) apps.
So I'd say that Linux (certainly, Fedora... the one I used) is waaaaaaaaay more consistent than Windows.
Is the hardware MORE plug-and-play than in Linux?
I haven't used any weird hardware, but I do find it interesting that Windows didn't recognize the laptop's mini-dock until after it was rebooted. Yet I know (from using it under Linux) that the mini-dock just presents the optical drive as a USB optical drive, and reproduces ports for audio, USB, video, etc. And Linux recognized it right away, even the first time, without having to reboot.
In that instance, Windows was definitely LESS plug-and-play than Linux.
I've been a Linux user since 1993, when I was a student at university. Until 1998, I ran Linux as my primary OS, but kept a Windows partition on my home system to run some games. And since 2002 I've been fortunate enough to run Linux full-time at work. It has been a great experience so far.
I didn't
have any issues exchanging documents with others at work, and
certainly my previous bosses didn't mind. But times change, I suppose.
I've been asked to move back to Windows, at least for work. The difference between Windows (XP) and Linux (Fedora 9) has been shocking, to say the least. Since you often see blogs or tech articles (like the parent post) when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time, I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to blog about my first experience running Windows in over 6 or 7 years:
The short list of things I have run into in my first week of running Windows:
hardware support is definitely not plug-and-play (had troubles
getting a simple laptop mini-dock to get recognized, same with the
external display.)
programs look and act differently from each other (no common themes,
inconsistent behavior, etc.)
MS Office (2007) makes it hard for me to write the documents I need to create for work.
Font rendering is poor.
I haven't written yet about program look-and-feel; I'll do that soon.
But I have noticed that MS Office acts differently from Notepad, from
Media Player, and from the Windows local file browser.
Also,
ctrl-backspace is implemented differently just about everywhere - in
some cases, it backspaces to the start of the word or field (what I
expect) and elsewhere it only backspaces once, and in other cases it
inserts a ctrl-backspace character!
they didn't contribute GNOME. In fact, one might say they so far as to try to steal it, passing it off as the "Sun Java Desktop", when it wasn't Sun's and isn't Java based.
True, Sun didn't contribute GNOME, but they did a very nice usability study that GNOME found very useful, and helped move GNOME forward a great deal.
I for one hope that Sun not only survives, but prospers. Sun has greatly contributed over the years to the development community, particularly FOSS developers.
Sun has certainly contributed many highly-visible projects that we just take for granted these days: NFS, OpenOffice, Java, GNOME, etc. And ZFS is very powerful, but hasn't really made it to other places yet. However, it just seems Sun doesn't know what to do with it, or how to market it.
A few years back, I got to visit Sun for an executive briefing. We met with a lot of higher-ups at Sun (including Scott McNealy.) I repeated to whoever would listen that Sun needed to get their act together: Figure out an (easily-understood) strategy for Sun and FOSS, and move with it. Separate the hardware and software marketing; and at the same time, let me choose systems "menu-style" just like buying a Dell. Simplify your product lines and marketing. Release a consumer-based UNIX distro for commodity PC systems that has the polish of Linux (the apps are there - Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. - so for 99% of the population that's the "compatibility" they need.)
Yes, Sun has done some of these things, but not in a coherent way, and certainly not in a simple way. Things are just too hard to go through Sun.
Sun needs to get organized if they want to remain competitive.
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This would mean that a vast majority of the PSP's game library would be unplayable since most of the games for the psp are on UMDs. I've seen news stories of Dave Perry making claims that Sony's going in that direction, but, it would be horribly stupid.
And yet PSN continues to re-release the best-selling PSP games as digital downloads. Yesterday they released Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters as a downloadable PSP game.
I'm looking for Sony to co-release PSP games as downloadable (PSN) and UMD. If they can do that (starting soon!) then it won't be such a big deal if the next-gen PSP drops UMD support.
not in the, "WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU IN MY BAG?!" benchmark. Otherwise, pretty true. The only problem is that the cost of stamping a UMD is still marginally cheaper than shipping out spare memory cards and online sales have the problem of, "oh shit, my memory card/hard drive/etc just ate itself, what now?" factor. WiiWare, XBLA and PSN have proven that online sales can work on consoles, there are still other hurdles to jump through.
Sony has already leaked (announced?) that the next PSP will not use UMD, and will only support mem-stick games.
I'm a big fan of this decision. I have a PSP 1001, and can't remember the last time I actually bought a UMD for it. Pretty much all the games I have now are download-only. I buy them on PSN (using my PS3) then move them to the PSP. It's not that hard.
Solaris is open. If you don't like the CDDL license, too bad for you. The fact that it doesn't meet the requirements of an aging anti-commerce hippie doesn't make it less open. Hearing "change the license" is automatically a flag that some Linux fanboy is determined to paint the world in HIS colour, and EVERYONE ELSE must comply.
I prefer that Solaris be totally opened. I understand that not all of Solaris source code is currently available. From Wikipedia:
Sun has released most of the Solaris source code under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 1.1. The CDDL was approved as an open source license by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in January 2005. Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary.
Emphasis mine.
However, the Free Software Foundation states that the CDDL is free, but not compatible with the GNU GPL (meaning code cannot be shared between them, unless they were already dual-licensed):
This is a free software license. It has a copyleft with a scope that's similar to the one in the Mozilla Public License, which makes it incompatible with the GNU GPL. This means a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason.
And yes, I know there is a controversy about GPL and CDDL.
Years after Oracle's purchase of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel, these companies are still running pretty much like they had before the acquisition. Given their track record with letting the original company operate the way it had been, I'm betting Oracle will do nothing with Sun.
What needs to happen is for Oracle to split Sun apart, remove the business lines that aren't working (workstations, thin clients, huge servers, ..) and put the focus on the parts that are working (Solaris, Niagra next-gen chip technology, low-end to mid-range servers, ..). I'd also love to see Oracle release Solaris as a totally open-source kernel (under something like the GNU GPL, or a similarly F/OSS license) and let it compete with Linux. And I want Oracle to continue funding Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice (which are all owned by Sun.) I think MySQL would make a handy low-end competitor to MS-SQL, for example.
But I'm not holding my breath for Oracle to do the right thing.
At our shop, "Front end web developer" is too specific. (Unfortunately, we are often stuck with vague descriptions.)
Our folks who do this role are either called web designer or the old-school webmaster.
That said, I don't know of anyone who just does this. Our "plain" html web sites are going away, replaced by sites managed by a central CMS. Even us managers are expected to be able to write web pages, using the CMS. Our "web designers" now do a lot of what used to be "human factors engineering" but on the web. They often create mock-ups of what a web application might look like and how you might interact with it. That mock-up later gets turned into a UI design (often by the same person) with a well-defined xhtml, so that the developer can just code a web app that creates content according to the document structure.
In college, I got a job as a summer intern at a small R&D company, writing code to run reports against the company proprietary database (row counts, histograms, ... simple stuff, but they hadn't written such a thing.)
It was a small privately-owned company, and they really didn't have a spot for me to work near any of the full-time developers. So they put me in the computer room (they called it a "data center" but I couldn't call it that today.) I wrote code on a folding table where the monitor too up most of the space. The keyboard kind of hung off the front of the table by about half an inch - it was that close. I developed RSI from that.
At least I didn't have a problem with glare, because there were no lights near me. So I worked in semi-darkness, with the monitor brightness turned down so it wasn't too bad.
I worked there for about 6 weeks.
>> The Million Dollar question will be whether the fact that XP upgrades to Windows 7 requires a clean install will prove to be Microsoft's undoing.
> The Million Dollar answer is "no". Because when you upgrade a corporate desktop, you don't upgrade in place. You create an image and you reimage your desktops en masse.
Whereupon: 1. You discover all the hidden defects in your backup system. Users start to line up outside your office asking where their data is/went. Extra anguish is demonstrated by [...]
Wow, does your organization really operate this way? Over here, we purchase standardized desktops and laptops. "Developers" get one type of laptop, "managers" and "Project managers" get a different tier of laptop .. some older users whose systems haven't come up for replacement may still run the "powerhouse" desktop we used to issue. When our desktop support folks upgraded the OS on my laptop, they simply (arranged a time, then) took away my old laptop, and immediately replaced it with a "new" laptop (of the same class) with the upgraded OS.
They give me 2-5 days for "uh oh" discovery ("hey, I guess I had this file on my old laptop..") then securely erase my old hard drive, and re-image it to give to someone else.
Since we have a standardized platform, it's fairly straightforward for the desktop support group to test new versions of the software or operating system (say, Windows 7) to make sure all the devices work. With a standardized platform - even taking system replacement every 3-4 years - there are only so many configs you can have. I'm not saying testing takes a day - it may take months - but it's not that hard to figure out if everyone has pretty much the same system.
Most corporate shops run in a similar way. I doubt any of them will "upgrade in place". They'll just issue a new image to users running Windows 7, if and when they choose to upgrade to Win7.
I think it would be very interesting for Oracle to buy Sun. Here's why:
I'd love to see Oracle create a "black box" database system - you get an install DVD (sold for either SPARC or Intel) and boot your system hardware with it. At install, you indicate what products you want to install, maybe give some license codes, and the DVD automatically installs a database system for you. Want to set up a database that participates in a RAC cluster? There'd be an install option for that. Want to connect to some JBOD or SAN? There'd be an option for that, too. The /etc/system file is pre-tuned, but you get options to provide further tuning (even post-install).
Behind the scenes, the Oracle installer would lay down a hardened, minimal install of [Open]Solaris, and all your storage would be on ZFS. You don't do any "UNIX sysadmin" on this machine because to an administrator, it's just a black box. Think network appliance, or Google-in-a-box.
Sure, you might get an SSH prompt so system DBAs could manually apply patches or do any of the post-install tuning (mentioned above.) But in general, the system downloads patches (operating system, Oracle database, other Oracle software, ..) automatically. You should have an option to have them installed automatically (except for any patches that would require a restart/reboot) or choose to have patches downloaded so you can install them "manually" during scheduled down-time.
A system like this might be very interesting. I had assumed Oracle was going to do something like this a few years ago after they announced their "unbreakable Linux", but nothing really came of it.
I predict Frack, Frell and Frag are coming soon...
What a load of felgercarb!
If you watched the original series, you can smile with me. :-)
Did you just wake up from a 20 year sleep?
Even 8 years would have been enough to not recognize things today.
GamePolitics asked a First Amendment rights expert for his opinion on the matter, and the National Coalition Against Censorship spoke out against the bill, urging Governor Jon Huntsman to strike it down. Fortunately, it appears he took their advice (or that of many lobbying retailers), as the bill has now been vetoed. Huntsman said, "The industries most affected by this new requirement indicated that rather than risk being held liable under this bill, they would likely choose to no longer issue age appropriate labels on goods and services."
(emphasis mine)
I'm optimistic that we'll see a lot more stories in the coming year like this one, of governors vetoing similar game-sale restrictions - or of state legislatures not passing these bills at all.
But it's not just because of First Amendment issues. Apparently, that hasn't been a problem for the legislatures passing the bills in the first place. I think the downturn in the economy will wind up helping the game industry here.
This governor clearly got the message: "the economy is in recession, and this bill would make it less likely that your state would have sales in a certain industry." And he wisely decided to veto the bill, so that game retailers in his state (WalMart, Target, EB/GameStop, ..) would continue to sell games. No doubt someone also showed him the sales numbers for the top games and how many of them would be affected by this bill (rated M). And so, had a bill like this already been on the books, those sales would not have happened in his state. I can't see any governor wanting to sign a bill that prevents money entering his state's economy, not at a time like this.
Money drives a lot of things, and the economy clearly drives decisions at the government level.
Does anyone have an example of really good AI in action games (or any non-RPG, non-RTS games)?
I really liked the AI in the Thief 1 & 2 games (never played Thief 3.) Very believable, added a certain dimension to the game.
Guards would sort of tool around the place, doing their rounds. If you hadn't been discovered, they were not very attentive (you might believe they were just bored with the routine.) If they heard you make a noise, they entered a higher level of alertness, became more suspicious. Their posture would change as they snooped around, looking for what caused the noise. You had to be really well-hidden for them not to find you. If you made any more noise, they went towards that. Make a lot of noise, or show yourself, and they entered full-alert and came charging. You were pretty much screwed if you found yourself trapped in a semi-dark corner on marble tile when guards were around.
If a suspicious guard didn't find anything, then he would (after a long while) go back to the lower alert level, and just go about his day. But I don't remember that guards, once they actually saw you, ever went back to just doing a normal, unaware patrol.
(Did suspicious guards "infect" nearby guards, causing them to become suspicious for a certain time? Maybe someone here will remember.)
Guards alsowent into higher alert automatically if they came across an unconscious body. So you always had to be careful about stashing the body(ies) when you coshed someone.
It would have been much better if guards responded to torches going out, or moss suddenly appearing in a room, or an arrow sticking out of a post, or a door left open. Even a simple acknowledgment "hmm, I thought that torch was lit before... must have gone out" would have been more realistic.
But generally, I thought the AI in Thief was pretty well done.
Does anyone have an example of really good AI in action games (or any non-RPG, non-RTS games)?
The AI in the first Half-Life was pretty good, I thought. Especially for the era. There were AI creatures that, once they saw you, would run to the rest of their group so they could attack in greater numbers. IIRC, other AI would behave a certain way (i.e. aggressive) until their health dropped too low, then would act in another way (i.e. defensive, even retreating.) It was very believable with the non-human creatures (the sonic dog-things) and not too bad with the enemy soldiers. I think the soldiers had certain logic, where if they had a reasonably good shot at you, they took it - otherwise, they'd reposition to get a better angle. Net effect: in certain areas, you'd have two soldiers laying down "covering fire" while two others ran around the corner to flank you. I was surprised by that the first few times it happened; very decent AI.
I'm re-playing Killzone 2 right now. The first play-through, I thought the AI wasn't too bad. The second time through, I realized that the AI had a different behavior when you were more than a certain distance away vs. closer. So on my second time through the game, I ran up to a lot of Helghast and used the knife on them (there's a trophy for that, anyway.) If you can get close enough without taking too much damage, it's easy because the AI takes about half a second to switch to the other "mode", during which time it has stopped shooting. That's the opportunity to strike. (Yes, this kind of kills re-play value.)
Oh don't get me wrong - I had some great life experiences from my dad, like learning how to hunt and fish, how to fix things, how to build a new wall for a house, etc... In fact, it was my dad that got me into computers and taught me BASIC on the Commodore 64. It's the raising of the children from ages 0-8 that has me a bit worried; for example, my dads idea of a punishment was to strap me into the front seat of the car, take off the car door, and drive on the highway at 60mph. While I realize that might've been fun for a teenage, at 8 years old with an angry adult driving the car, I was terrified ... and that was for forgetting to return a rental at Blockbuster. I can't remember what my punishment was for not doing a school project, but I don't think it was good.
I call BS on this comment.
If you were learning BASIC on the C64, that means you were born in the very early 1970's. When you were 8 years old, it would have been around 1980. Blockbuster Video was started 1985, in Texas.
You'd have to change the animal so much that it wouldn't seem recognizable. The old formula has become such a cliche that there's absolutely nothing you can reuse from it. Reset button at the end of the episode, lame. Space anomalies, lame. Gritty scifi future with lots of angst, made lame by overexposure on Galactica. Aliens who look exactly like us save for bumpy foreheads? I could buy it when I was younger but it's just ridiculous these days. (I'll probably be in the minority on this one.) Time-travel plots, squishy techno-babble science plots, holodeck plots, everything that makes Trek Trek is what's been killing it. It's like asking "Can we make a healthy Big Mac?" Yeah, and by the time you're done removing everything that's bad about that burger, you're left with nothing but lettuce and sesame seeds.
As a fan, what I'd like to see is the Star Trek experience from another point of view. Don't keep giving us the "good guys", the Federation, with their Prime Directive.
Give us a series based on, say, the Klingons (TNG era .. please skip the whole "TOS to TNG" evolution thing - TOS Klingons looked that way because of budget, that's it.) A story similar to Star Trek: Klingon would make a great pilot for a Klingon-based series - a young Klingon goes through the Rite of Ascension to become a true Warrior, joins a ship. Let the series experience the Star Trek universe through the lens of a young Klingon - not some goody Federation captain, which we've now seen more times than we need.
As he experiences the universe as a Klingon warrior, so do we. Let a mentor show him the true path of a Klingon warrior. Show the audience the code of honor from the Klingons. Throw in some Klingon language (swearing in Klingon!)
In this series, there's no Prime Directive. Very little diplomacy, no helping other cultures to better themselves. And it should go without saying: no journey of self-discovery, except for the central character as he learns what it means to be a true Klingon warrior.
Hey, I'd watch that every week!
Yes, under GNOME. But to the vast number of people who might try Linux, they don't want to about "GNOME" or "KDE". To them, it's all "Linux". So in my blog, I try to take that tone- if you're a Windows user, look at all the crap that's broken in Windows that's not broken under Linux.
It's always interesting when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time. You'll see some tech writer blog about this every few months; sometimes they are a bit boring, but I always learn something from watching a Linux newbie try things out for the first time.
At work, it's the other way with me. I've been using Linux at work since 2000 (I'm a staff person at a university) but my boss recently made his preferences clear: I should run Windows, just like everyone else. So I did what anyone would do in this situation - I blogged about it. I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to write about making a return to Windows:
Linux in Exile
It hasn't been pretty. In short, I find a lot of stuff in Windows to be just plain broken. Nothing is the same, even among different "first tier" applications (that means apps from Microsoft.)
My next post will be about the stupid dialog boxes in Windows. I find them lacking compared to what I expect from Linux.
I've enjoyed buying games at the PlayStation Network store. So far, I've purchased Flower, Magic Ball, Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty, Super Rub-a-Dub, and others for my PlayStation 3. I've also bought No Gravity, SOCOM, and a few other games for PSP, also directly from PSN. That, and the occasional movie rental.
Downloading games is great for some games. You'll note that none of these games were fairly small - maybe topping at around 1GB for 'Quest for Booty'. That's where the true value comes in for downloadable games, when they aren't too big.
The PlayStation3 uses Blu-Ray for its media-based games. The guys at Insomniac Games said they pretty much filled the Blu-Ray for both Ratchet & Clank Future, and Resistance 2. I just got Killzone 2, and I'm willing to bet they did the same. A dual-layer Blu-Ray disc is 50GB. I'm not sure I want to download 50GB for a video game. Yeah, I know hard drives are getting bigger - but that's a lot of stuff to download before I can play my game, and if I start downloading now, I'm still not gonna be able to play it tonight. Compare that to my running out to Target (5 minutes from my house) and picking up a physical PS3 game.
Downloading that much content will also cause problems if my cable company implements a monthly bandwidth limit.
I think we'll see certain game publishers leaning more to downloadable games from places like PSN or XBL. That just makes sense for a lot of games. But for the AAA titles out there like Killzone, Battlefield, Ratchet & Clank, EA Sports, etc. you'll still see them on physical media, even 5 years from now.
Windows 95, 98, XP, etc., all the non-server ones, didn't need a shell. I grew up using Windows and never once needed something like that. Arguably, it would be nice on the server side, I guess... but Windows did appear to try to get AWAY from the command line.
MS-DOS had a half-decent command-line environment - don't knock it. For those of us that grew up with DOS, it was great, and moving to an all-GUI "Windows" environment was a painful shift.
I say MS-DOS had a half-decent CLI, but DOS is much better now. You're welcome, btw. :-)
Why on earth would someone do this trade in when you could make at least ten more dollars just listing it on their own marketplace?
I'm a gamer, but I also have a life. Kind of bits to have to post something on eBay or some other marketplace just to get rid of a game. Remember, you also have to ship the game, deal with money transfer, etc. May not be much to you, but I probably work more than 40hrs a week, and my free time is important to me. It's very convenient for me to just bring in any games I've stopped playing, and use them for trade when I buy a new game. For example, I recently went through my PSP/PS2/PS3 games, decided I wasn't playing some of them, brought them in for trade. Got enough in trade that a new game was basically pocket change.
Took all of 10 minutes to drive to the nearest GameStop to make this happen.
Sure, I could have gotten more by selling them on eBay or something. My brother reminds me of this all the time. But bringing them in for trade (or now, to Amazon) is way more immediate.
"I am working with a non-profit that will eventually host a massive online self-help archive and community (using FTP and HTTP services). We are expecting 1,000+ unique visitors / day. [...]"
Others have pointed this out to you, but 1,000 visitors is not much load at all. I work at a large university, and during registration first day of classes, we have 500 unique users (what you call "visitors") in each hour. On the first day of classes, we may get 1,000 unique users per hour as students look up their class schedules, and sign in to the registration system to drop that stupid class they were just in. We run a load balancer at the network level, so that traffic is balanced immediately at the switch, rather than at a host level before being sent to a back-end web host.
But doing the same in your case will be very expensive. If you work at a non-profit, you probably don't have this in your budget.
If you're just doing simple http and ftp (that is, not running a web application with a database back-end .. or an application that keeps "state" on the server, requiring users to always go back to the same server server they first visited) then you might consider the simplest solution of all: DNS round-robin. Simply put, you enter the IP addresses for two web servers (or ftp servers) for a single www entry in DNS. At the expense of hitting your DNS more frequently, you could set the TTL to 1 hour for the round-robin so that if server #1 went down, you could push an update to DNS so "www" just points to server #2, and users are only inconvenienced for about an hour.
But your best solution is probably just to outsource this, especially if you're only doing simple http and ftp. A good web hosting company already has this infrastructure available to you. No need to re-invent the wheel for just 1,000 users.
Also, are you saying programs in X don't have a different look and feel from each other? Like Gnome and KDE applications?
Sure, GNOME and KDE apps look different - but under Fedora, where GNOME was installed by default, all my apps were GNOME. So Firefox, Openoffice, Terminal, the text editor, ... all looked identical.
Yet under Windows, apps all look different - they use different themes - even "first-party" apps from Microsoft. Office looks different from IE or Firefox, different from Media Player (our phone system emails me my voicemails as WAV files), ... it's all different. Nothing feels the same.
Another example is keyboard handling. When I used Fedora, every application handled, say, ctrl-backspace the same - it backspaced over the last word. But under Windows, this is different depending on which app you're in. For some apps, ctrl-backspace works "correctly" and backs up over the last word. Other apps insert a ctrl-backspace character. Other apps just back up one character. Another app just skips back to the start of the line, deleting nothing. And one other app doesn't recognize ctrl-backspace at all (does nothing.) Again, behavior differs even in first-party (Microsoft) apps.
So I'd say that Linux (certainly, Fedora ... the one I used) is waaaaaaaaay more consistent than Windows.
Is the hardware MORE plug-and-play than in Linux?
I haven't used any weird hardware, but I do find it interesting that Windows didn't recognize the laptop's mini-dock until after it was rebooted. Yet I know (from using it under Linux) that the mini-dock just presents the optical drive as a USB optical drive, and reproduces ports for audio, USB, video, etc. And Linux recognized it right away, even the first time, without having to reboot.
In that instance, Windows was definitely LESS plug-and-play than Linux.
I've been a Linux user since 1993, when I was a student at university. Until 1998, I ran Linux as my primary OS, but kept a Windows partition on my home system to run some games. And since 2002 I've been fortunate enough to run Linux full-time at work. It has been a great experience so far. I didn't have any issues exchanging documents with others at work, and certainly my previous bosses didn't mind. But times change, I suppose.
I've been asked to move back to Windows, at least for work. The difference between Windows (XP) and Linux (Fedora 9) has been shocking, to say the least. Since you often see blogs or tech articles (like the parent post) when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time, I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to blog about my first experience running Windows in over 6 or 7 years:
Linux in Exile
The short list of things I have run into in my first week of running Windows:
I haven't written yet about program look-and-feel; I'll do that soon. But I have noticed that MS Office acts differently from Notepad, from Media Player, and from the Windows local file browser.
Also, ctrl-backspace is implemented differently just about everywhere - in some cases, it backspaces to the start of the word or field (what I expect) and elsewhere it only backspaces once, and in other cases it inserts a ctrl-backspace character!
they didn't contribute GNOME. In fact, one might say they so far as to try to steal it, passing it off as the "Sun Java Desktop", when it wasn't Sun's and isn't Java based.
True, Sun didn't contribute GNOME, but they did a very nice usability study that GNOME found very useful, and helped move GNOME forward a great deal.
I for one hope that Sun not only survives, but prospers. Sun has greatly contributed over the years to the development community, particularly FOSS developers.
Sun has certainly contributed many highly-visible projects that we just take for granted these days: NFS, OpenOffice, Java, GNOME, etc. And ZFS is very powerful, but hasn't really made it to other places yet. However, it just seems Sun doesn't know what to do with it, or how to market it.
A few years back, I got to visit Sun for an executive briefing. We met with a lot of higher-ups at Sun (including Scott McNealy.) I repeated to whoever would listen that Sun needed to get their act together: Figure out an (easily-understood) strategy for Sun and FOSS, and move with it. Separate the hardware and software marketing; and at the same time, let me choose systems "menu-style" just like buying a Dell. Simplify your product lines and marketing. Release a consumer-based UNIX distro for commodity PC systems that has the polish of Linux (the apps are there - Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. - so for 99% of the population that's the "compatibility" they need.)
Yes, Sun has done some of these things, but not in a coherent way, and certainly not in a simple way. Things are just too hard to go through Sun.
Sun needs to get organized if they want to remain competitive.