Anyone have any recommendations for a good JSP server? I've used Apache JServ for a while and it's horribly unstable, frequently locking up and requiring a kill -9. Tomcat seems nice, but I was unable to get it working over SSL even after many hours of tweaking config files. I've been planning on looking into Enhydra, which I've heard good things about.
Actually, it's much simpler. The site administrator decides for themselves. Certainly any site whose primary offering was pornography would prefer to be in the.xxx domain, because they will more easily reach their target audience that way.
Developers and gameplayers alike don't seem to recognize the huge difference that steady, high framerate makes for both the feel and playability of a game.
A game that runs 72fps most of the time but drops down below that, even if it's only a little, will not feel as solid or be as playable as one that holds a steady, say, 60fps.
PC games have always been the worst in this regard, partially because developers assume that better hardware is going to come out that will make their game run faster in the future, and partially because hardware is so unpredictable that getting it running smoothly on one machine doesn't necessarily mean that it will run smoothly on the next.
It's excellent that hardware manufacturers keep pushing the level of performance of their products, but it's not so that we can achieve 200fps with Quake 3. It's so that the game won't drop *below* its peak framerate, ever, even on a complex level with lots of enemies. (First person games have a special need for a high framerate because of the speed with which your viewing angle changes.)
Hmmmm, the first thing I thought of when I saw this thing was that bit in Stephenson's Crytonomicon where the main character was secretly snapping pics in a business meeting with his laptop.
Of course, by the looks of it, there's nothing secret about the camera on THIS thing. Ah well..
Reverse engineering allows capitalism to happen in the world of technology, where the "standard" (which is usually defined by whoever comes first) is all-powerful. It's not only just acceptable, it's absolutely necessary if we want the market to move forward.
I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that it might have been taken out of context. Nowhere does it say that "we" == Red Hat, or that they didn't say "We did start the open-source revolution as far as big business is concerned," or anything else.
Seems a little presumptuous to base an entire article on seven words. How about some context?
(Of course, that said, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Red Hat were getting a big head.)
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of U C Berkeley grad students was still at the core of BIND.
Interesting, I didn't expect them to admit to that sort of thing.
And it's not really that nslookup is going away, at least not the way that I think of it (a command line tool to quickly find an IP address) - they indicate that it was because nslookup currently is closely mapped to the BIND8 API which has been changed all around. I think they want something more abstract which will allow users to get the info they want without being closely tied to the underlying protocol. (Abstraction! Egad!)
Let's face it, the economy has moved to a global level. My company does business with people around the world every day as a matter of course. There's nothing special about it anymore.
By the same token, the people that work in the industry go where the work is. I work with Europeans who have moved to the US for jobs, Americans who previously have worked in Europe, Japan, and Australia, and so forth. I think the point is that it doesn't matter much any more - the global economy is more important that any one country's labor laws. Hopefully this move reflects that.
Well, this is it. MacOS is going the way of the Dodo, and that means...yes, the last of the "big" OSes (except for that one I won't mention) is a UNIX.
I have high hopes for these "UNIX under the hood" operating systems. I always thought Be had things right, and it looks like OS X is basically duplicating that scheme.
This seems like an all-to-appropriate metaphor for our planet's decaying interest in space exploration. Thirty years ago we were racing to put a man on the moon. Now we're racing to...um, watch our spacestation get eaten by mold because there isn't any such thing as an astronaut janitor.
Sheesh, I should hope that this trick isn't illegal. Otherwise one could argue that 20 years of IBM PC-combatible hegemony was all based on an illegal technology.
It's funny, because there's nothing revolutionary here. Combine flatscreen with touchscreen, wireless internet and a TV. And yet somehow we seem to be getting so much closer to the way that computers look in science fiction like Star Trek and Earth: Final Conflict. Dunno if there's any signifigance there, but I suspect in 20 years our TVs and computers (and other electronics) will all look and function pretty much just like this, and we'll look back at the huge clunky boxes that we used at the turn of the century with amusement.
I used XFCE for a little while just for the warm fuzzy nostalgia feeling it gave me. (I used CDE on the SparcStations at UCSD.) But...let's face it, it doesn't work all that well.
For lightweight window managers there are plenty of other alternatives. AfterStep 1.0 is still one of my favorites (the later ones aren't so hot). Window Maker is excellent, and I did enjoy Black Box for a while (although it suffered from AfterStep disease a little bit).
Linux, Free Software, and Open Source, are about *software*.
Apple is about hardware.
Where is the conflict?
...
Yes, they do make software, but they've proven quite thoroughly that it is not at all core to their business, since they are abandoning MacOS and switching to a highly modified BSD.
That's correct; and by the same token, Japanese is actually #2. Over the years I've had contact with lots of Japanese and even picked up a little of it. Everywhere from arcade games in the early eighties, fighting games in the 90's, and recently comments in the Sega code for the Dreamcast SDK.
As far as the internet is concerned, the majority of it is hosted in the United States (and in fact, most of that is probably in California). The people making the web pages speak English; their customers speak (mostly) English, and their employers expect them to write in English. Hence, it dominates.
I suppose it's not terribly fair, but there you go.
The game industry has been in a slump for most of the last decade. I think it is finally starting to recover with the console market, although people still insist on rushing out to buy hyped-up games like Perfect Dark, Goldeneye, or Resident Evil, despite the fact that they plainly suck.
Here's a game which is as fun as anything that ever came out in the 80's: Rayman 2. The Dreamcast version, especially, is gorgeous. The gameplay is fun and unique and never gets stale. The cinematics are amusing enough that you don't constantly skip them. Most importantly, it runs at full (60fps) framerate, something most developers seem to think is not important...
Another good one that I played at E3 is Jet Set Radio (supposeldy the name will be changed to Jet Grind Radio for the US). Very unique gameplay, and art that gets away from the horrible polygonal look that games have suffered from ever since the industry became obessed with 3D.
As a game developer who is frustrated with the commercial industry, I've greatly enjoyed working on my mud. It allows me to get back to basics: creating a game that's actually fun and immersive, and not worrying about the next milestone or what the marketing guys want.
In fact, I'll take this fine opportunity to pimp it. The webpage:
Yes, the keyboard and mouse are already around. I don't know when they will be in (or if they are already) in stores, but I've used one on my set5 (Dreamcast dev box) for the last few months.
I believe a prototype ethernet adapter has been in some developer's hands for a while now also, although you have to jump through quite a few hoops to get it to work. As I recall, you can't just hook it into an existing LAN - you have to set up a box running a tunnel connection (PPP) as its gateway. Linux or FreeBSD are recommended for this task.
I'm a bit confused about Carmack's apparent show of support for the x-box. It seems to me that the x-box is just another attempt by Microsoft to lock people into their (usually pretty bad) APIs, so that they won't go and do nasty things like port their games to Dreamcast or Be or anything else.
Does the x-box claim to support OpenGL, or is Quake going to become a DirectX-only game now?
This is a very nice piece of software - much nicer than the hoarde of ICQ clients for Linux (or for that matter, the official ICQ client for Windows). I was thrilled to see that it uses GTK - nothing bugs me quite as much as companies that insist on using some obscure widget set, making their application look dated the day it is released.
I applaud Yahoo for their release, and I also ask: why don't all the free ICQ clients for Linux work as simply, and as nicely, as the Yahoo messenger?
Excuse my rant, but having had to work with and around this piece of software for far too long in my business, allow me to vent my feelings on the subject.:)
3D Studio MAX is a horrible piece of software. I consider it indirectly responsible for the horrible 3D art to be found in (most) modern video games. The interface makes it nearly impossible to create anything resembling good art, and even if you could, the models it produces are trash. It's common to see hundreds of double polygons, points that are nearly on top of other but not quite, textures that are loaded but never used... and don't get me started on the bugs. Some have been there since 1.0 (even in such simple actions as rotating a model with the mouse!) and game programmers around the world (myself included) have had to write hundreds or maybe thousands of plug-ins to try to fix its quirks, bugs, and other general failures. (Don't believe me? Try this!)
Yes, it's slowly getting better, thanks to the millions of dollars the game industry has thrown at it. It's still almost unusable, but most game artists now don't know any better because they've never used anything else.
I do find it quite telling that no digital artists outside the game industry use 3DSMax. For some reason, game creators are incredibly susceptible to hype, which is the only way that 3DSMax was able to gain its current market position. (In fact, I see very many parallels in 3DSMax's climb to market dominance with that of Microsoft and Windows.) No, in the movie industry, no one uses 3DS - instead they use superior tools like Lightwave, Maya, or SoftImage.
Only last thing: portability. I'm sure that 3DSMax will never make it to any other platform, as it is a supremely Windowsish piece of software. Maya, Lightwave, and Softimage, on the other hand, began life on other platforms, and continue to run there.
I happen to know one of the programmers at TrustCommerce. Despite the somewhat boring-looking public website, they have a kick-ass payment gateway. They have geographically seperated servers with automatic fail-over so they have 100% uptime. Their API is very clean (unlike CyberCash) and they offer clients for perl, java, C, and most of the Windows gobblygook (COM objects, Active X, etc). I've also heard their support is exceptional...a 24hr hotline and well-written documentation.
Of course, *I* think the best part is that they run exclusively (well, not counting their own in-house code) on free software. All their servers run Red Hat, and they use Apache for both of their websites and (I believe) Postgres as their database.
(Usual disclaimer is attached: I'm not a customer, I've just seen how they do business and am impressed. More importantly, they run on the kind of powerhouse servers that geeks like me have dreams about...)
Probably Interactive Light's creditors. I wouldn't bother, though: they, like most game publishers, are a bunch of pricks that would never do anything that they didn't stand to profit immensely from.
Needless to say this is my personal view, not the position of any company that I have worked for.:)
As it so happens, I was a developer for one of the "flagship" games for the OAA. Allow me to dispel any myths for you: it was a horrible attempt by Intel to create a market for their upcoming high-end processor, codenamed Katmai. (We all now know it as the Pentium III.) Basically, they were concerned by the fact that most people didn't seem to care very much about new processors, because their computer was fast enough anyways, and it was becoming common knowledge that a faster hard drive and more RAM was a better investment.
It didn't work. My game (Savage Quest) was originally slated to use a Katmai 500, but ended up going down to a PII-450 (you read it right, a P2) for the production machines. In the meantime they shifted to other ridiculous strategies, like telling you that you need a faster processor in order to browse the web effectively.
Most of the games that came out for OAA really sucked. I consider Savage Quest to be an exception, although it is not without its flaws. They were mostly ugly, low-framerate, boring, and completely trite compared to the other coin-op games around them at the time. I played most of them at various arcade convetions that I attended during the development of Savage Quest; except for one (some space-racer called "XCF" or something) I never saw a single one in a real arcade.
I wouldn't mention this, but this is slashdot, so I suppose I shall. I developed the game entirely on a Slackware Linux box. I wrote drivers for the arcade hardware (coindroppers, joysticks etc) and we used dual Voodoo boards for display. I still have the game and it runs beautifully on your average Athalon+Voodoo system, but unfortunately the company that owns the rights (Interactive Light) just went out of business a month or so ago, so I'm afraid that no Linux port is on the way to store shelves, or ever will be. A shame, it's (in my not-so-humble opinion) a darn fun game.
I've been using FreeBSD for many years, almost as long as Linux. I have a mix of BSD, Linux, IRIX, and Solaris boxes at my house. Three years ago, FreeBSD seemed slightly snappier on lower-end hardware than Linux, and both were certainly faster than the legacy UNIXes I was used to. However, Linux still seemed to be slightly quicker on the high-end hardware of the time, especially since it had basic SMP support.
Things have changed since then. Blame it on all the money pouring into Linux, or all the kernel hackers Red Hat employs. I'm not sure what happened, but somewhere in there Linux got WAY faster than anything else, including FreeBSD. Today my current FreeBSD install seems absolutely sluggish compared to the latest implementations of Linux. (And I have FreeBSD running on faster hardware!) Granted, the difference is probably only in the range of 20%, but this difference is most definitely notable. And of course, as these benchmarks show, Linux scales quite nicely up to the super high-end. The filesystem, in particular, is blazingly fast on Linux as compared to anything else (including BSD).
Don't get me wrong: I love FreeBSD and I bow down in humble hommage to its authors. They have done an amazing job and given the world one of the best OS's it has ever seen. But the truth of the matter is Linux is 'better' by most standards, and the gap continues to widen due to the hype and the money behind it.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone have any recommendations for a good JSP server? I've used Apache JServ for a while and it's horribly unstable, frequently locking up and requiring a kill -9. Tomcat seems nice, but I was unable to get it working over SSL even after many hours of tweaking config files. I've been planning on looking into Enhydra, which I've heard good things about.
Any others I should be considering?
Actually, it's much simpler. The site administrator decides for themselves. Certainly any site whose primary offering was pornography would prefer to be in the .xxx domain, because they will more easily reach their target audience that way.
Developers and gameplayers alike don't seem to recognize the huge difference that steady, high framerate makes for both the feel and playability of a game.
A game that runs 72fps most of the time but drops down below that, even if it's only a little, will not feel as solid or be as playable as one that holds a steady, say, 60fps.
PC games have always been the worst in this regard, partially because developers assume that better hardware is going to come out that will make their game run faster in the future, and partially because hardware is so unpredictable that getting it running smoothly on one machine doesn't necessarily mean that it will run smoothly on the next.
It's excellent that hardware manufacturers keep pushing the level of performance of their products, but it's not so that we can achieve 200fps with Quake 3. It's so that the game won't drop *below* its peak framerate, ever, even on a complex level with lots of enemies. (First person games have a special need for a high framerate because of the speed with which your viewing angle changes.)
Haven't you ever read Dirk Gently? Remember the bit about the sofa in the stairwell...
Hmmmm, the first thing I thought of when I saw this thing was that bit in Stephenson's Crytonomicon where the main character was secretly snapping pics in a business meeting with his laptop.
Of course, by the looks of it, there's nothing secret about the camera on THIS thing. Ah well..
Reverse engineering allows capitalism to happen in the world of technology, where the "standard" (which is usually defined by whoever comes first) is all-powerful. It's not only just acceptable, it's absolutely necessary if we want the market to move forward.
They only quoted seven words from Tiemann:
"We did start the open-source revolution"
I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that it might have been taken out of context. Nowhere does it say that "we" == Red Hat, or that they didn't say "We did start the open-source revolution as far as big business is concerned," or anything else.
Seems a little presumptuous to base an entire article on seven words. How about some context?
(Of course, that said, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Red Hat were getting a big head.)
The basic sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by a bunch of U C Berkeley grad students was still at the core of BIND.
Interesting, I didn't expect them to admit to that sort of thing.
And it's not really that nslookup is going away, at least not the way that I think of it (a command line tool to quickly find an IP address) - they indicate that it was because nslookup currently is closely mapped to the BIND8 API which has been changed all around. I think they want something more abstract which will allow users to get the info they want without being closely tied to the underlying protocol. (Abstraction! Egad!)
All in all, it sounds like good news.
Let's face it, the economy has moved to a global level. My company does business with people around the world every day as a matter of course. There's nothing special about it anymore.
By the same token, the people that work in the industry go where the work is. I work with Europeans who have moved to the US for jobs, Americans who previously have worked in Europe, Japan, and Australia, and so forth. I think the point is that it doesn't matter much any more - the global economy is more important that any one country's labor laws. Hopefully this move reflects that.
Well, this is it. MacOS is going the way of the Dodo, and that means...yes, the last of the "big" OSes (except for that one I won't mention) is a UNIX.
I have high hopes for these "UNIX under the hood" operating systems. I always thought Be had things right, and it looks like OS X is basically duplicating that scheme.
This seems like an all-to-appropriate metaphor for our planet's decaying interest in space exploration. Thirty years ago we were racing to put a man on the moon. Now we're racing to...um, watch our spacestation get eaten by mold because there isn't any such thing as an astronaut janitor.
*sigh*
Sheesh, I should hope that this trick isn't illegal. Otherwise one could argue that 20 years of IBM PC-combatible hegemony was all based on an illegal technology.
It's funny, because there's nothing revolutionary here. Combine flatscreen with touchscreen, wireless internet and a TV. And yet somehow we seem to be getting so much closer to the way that computers look in science fiction like Star Trek and Earth: Final Conflict. Dunno if there's any signifigance there, but I suspect in 20 years our TVs and computers (and other electronics) will all look and function pretty much just like this, and we'll look back at the huge clunky boxes that we used at the turn of the century with amusement.
I used XFCE for a little while just for the warm fuzzy nostalgia feeling it gave me. (I used CDE on the SparcStations at UCSD.) But...let's face it, it doesn't work all that well.
For lightweight window managers there are plenty of other alternatives. AfterStep 1.0 is still one of my favorites (the later ones aren't so hot). Window Maker is excellent, and I did enjoy Black Box for a while (although it suffered from AfterStep disease a little bit).
Linux, Free Software, and Open Source, are about *software*.
Apple is about hardware.
Where is the conflict?
...
Yes, they do make software, but they've proven quite thoroughly that it is not at all core to their business, since they are abandoning MacOS and switching to a highly modified BSD.
That's correct; and by the same token, Japanese is actually #2. Over the years I've had contact with lots of Japanese and even picked up a little of it. Everywhere from arcade games in the early eighties, fighting games in the 90's, and recently comments in the Sega code for the Dreamcast SDK.
As far as the internet is concerned, the majority of it is hosted in the United States (and in fact, most of that is probably in California). The people making the web pages speak English; their customers speak (mostly) English, and their employers expect them to write in English. Hence, it dominates.
I suppose it's not terribly fair, but there you go.
The game industry has been in a slump for most of the last decade. I think it is finally starting to recover with the console market, although people still insist on rushing out to buy hyped-up games like Perfect Dark, Goldeneye, or Resident Evil, despite the fact that they plainly suck.
Here's a game which is as fun as anything that ever came out in the 80's: Rayman 2. The Dreamcast version, especially, is gorgeous. The gameplay is fun and unique and never gets stale. The cinematics are amusing enough that you don't constantly skip them. Most importantly, it runs at full (60fps) framerate, something most developers seem to think is not important...
Another good one that I played at E3 is Jet Set Radio (supposeldy the name will be changed to Jet Grind Radio for the US). Very unique gameplay, and art that gets away from the horrible polygonal look that games have suffered from ever since the industry became obessed with 3D.
In fact, I'll take this fine opportunity to pimp it. The webpage:
Blood Dusk
or connect directly:
mud.dusk.org 7000
Yes, the keyboard and mouse are already around. I don't know when they will be in (or if they are already) in stores, but I've used one on my set5 (Dreamcast dev box) for the last few months.
I believe a prototype ethernet adapter has been in some developer's hands for a while now also, although you have to jump through quite a few hoops to get it to work. As I recall, you can't just hook it into an existing LAN - you have to set up a box running a tunnel connection (PPP) as its gateway. Linux or FreeBSD are recommended for this task.
I'm a bit confused about Carmack's apparent show of support for the x-box. It seems to me that the x-box is just another attempt by Microsoft to lock people into their (usually pretty bad) APIs, so that they won't go and do nasty things like port their games to Dreamcast or Be or anything else.
Does the x-box claim to support OpenGL, or is Quake going to become a DirectX-only game now?
This is a very nice piece of software - much nicer than the hoarde of ICQ clients for Linux (or for that matter, the official ICQ client for Windows). I was thrilled to see that it uses GTK - nothing bugs me quite as much as companies that insist on using some obscure widget set, making their application look dated the day it is released.
I applaud Yahoo for their release, and I also ask: why don't all the free ICQ clients for Linux work as simply, and as nicely, as the Yahoo messenger?
3D Studio MAX is a horrible piece of software. I consider it indirectly responsible for the horrible 3D art to be found in (most) modern video games. The interface makes it nearly impossible to create anything resembling good art, and even if you could, the models it produces are trash. It's common to see hundreds of double polygons, points that are nearly on top of other but not quite, textures that are loaded but never used... and don't get me started on the bugs. Some have been there since 1.0 (even in such simple actions as rotating a model with the mouse!) and game programmers around the world (myself included) have had to write hundreds or maybe thousands of plug-ins to try to fix its quirks, bugs, and other general failures. (Don't believe me? Try this!)
Yes, it's slowly getting better, thanks to the millions of dollars the game industry has thrown at it. It's still almost unusable, but most game artists now don't know any better because they've never used anything else.
I do find it quite telling that no digital artists outside the game industry use 3DSMax. For some reason, game creators are incredibly susceptible to hype, which is the only way that 3DSMax was able to gain its current market position. (In fact, I see very many parallels in 3DSMax's climb to market dominance with that of Microsoft and Windows.) No, in the movie industry, no one uses 3DS - instead they use superior tools like Lightwave, Maya, or SoftImage.
Only last thing: portability. I'm sure that 3DSMax will never make it to any other platform, as it is a supremely Windowsish piece of software. Maya, Lightwave, and Softimage, on the other hand, began life on other platforms, and continue to run there.
I happen to know one of the programmers at TrustCommerce. Despite the somewhat boring-looking public website, they have a kick-ass payment gateway. They have geographically seperated servers with automatic fail-over so they have 100% uptime. Their API is very clean (unlike CyberCash) and they offer clients for perl, java, C, and most of the Windows gobblygook (COM objects, Active X, etc). I've also heard their support is exceptional...a 24hr hotline and well-written documentation.
Of course, *I* think the best part is that they run exclusively (well, not counting their own in-house code) on free software. All their servers run Red Hat, and they use Apache for both of their websites and (I believe) Postgres as their database.
You can probably drop a line to customerservice@trustcommerce.com if you want a quote.
(Usual disclaimer is attached: I'm not a customer, I've just seen how they do business and am impressed. More importantly, they run on the kind of powerhouse servers that geeks like me have dreams about...)
Probably Interactive Light's creditors. I wouldn't bother, though: they, like most game publishers, are a bunch of pricks that would never do anything that they didn't stand to profit immensely from.
:)
Needless to say this is my personal view, not the position of any company that I have worked for.
It didn't work. My game (Savage Quest) was originally slated to use a Katmai 500, but ended up going down to a PII-450 (you read it right, a P2) for the production machines. In the meantime they shifted to other ridiculous strategies, like telling you that you need a faster processor in order to browse the web effectively.
Most of the games that came out for OAA really sucked. I consider Savage Quest to be an exception, although it is not without its flaws. They were mostly ugly, low-framerate, boring, and completely trite compared to the other coin-op games around them at the time. I played most of them at various arcade convetions that I attended during the development of Savage Quest; except for one (some space-racer called "XCF" or something) I never saw a single one in a real arcade.
I wouldn't mention this, but this is slashdot, so I suppose I shall. I developed the game entirely on a Slackware Linux box. I wrote drivers for the arcade hardware (coindroppers, joysticks etc) and we used dual Voodoo boards for display. I still have the game and it runs beautifully on your average Athalon+Voodoo system, but unfortunately the company that owns the rights (Interactive Light) just went out of business a month or so ago, so I'm afraid that no Linux port is on the way to store shelves, or ever will be. A shame, it's (in my not-so-humble opinion) a darn fun game.
I've been using FreeBSD for many years, almost as long as Linux. I have a mix of BSD, Linux, IRIX, and Solaris boxes at my house. Three years ago, FreeBSD seemed slightly snappier on lower-end hardware than Linux, and both were certainly faster than the legacy UNIXes I was used to.
However, Linux still seemed to be slightly quicker on the high-end hardware of the time, especially since it had basic SMP support.
Things have changed since then. Blame it on all the money pouring into Linux, or all the kernel hackers Red Hat employs. I'm not sure what happened, but somewhere in there Linux got WAY faster than anything else, including FreeBSD. Today my current FreeBSD install seems absolutely sluggish compared to the latest implementations of Linux. (And I have FreeBSD running on faster hardware!) Granted, the difference is probably only in the range of 20%, but this difference is most definitely notable. And of course, as these benchmarks show, Linux scales quite nicely up to the super high-end. The filesystem, in particular, is blazingly fast on Linux as compared to anything else (including BSD).
Don't get me wrong: I love FreeBSD and I bow down in humble hommage to its authors. They have done an amazing job and given the world one of the best OS's it has ever seen. But the truth of the matter is Linux is 'better' by most standards, and the gap continues to widen due to the hype and the money behind it.