Sure. So does Brazil. Realistically, it's their people that have the disease, and their laws.
My point is that the drug companies are taking the wrong side of this, morally. I'm not saying that they are not entitled to do so. Heck, they could all stop selling the drugs to anyone and stand on top of the twin towers yelling "na na!" But, I would repect them even less then.
There's a lot of good information out there, but you have to look for it. American media is usually none to keen on pointing out where another government has been more vigillant in regards to human rights.
The costs for those drugs is about 0.0033 percent of each persons income in bazil.
The costs of what drugs? I recall a quote from the NPR story I was listening to on this topic that the average price of the "cocktail" was about US$150/week, which translated to local currency was about 2-3 times more than the salaries of the average employed victim (I know the magnitudes here are right, but honestly could have screwed up the specifcs, see NPR for details).
Brazil negotiated for a steep (but, not unreasonable, given the profit margins) discount if Brazil's health care bought the drugs. Of course, the drug companies wanted nothing to do with this. Why would they when they get top dollar from US charities?! Brazil was being used as a political pawn, and they're in the right, here.
Drug companies have been jerking around the third world for a LONG time now, and Brazil is not just an example: they will likely be the first pebble in a land-slide.
The tactic to date has been to provide these drugs at sky-high prices in those countries so that only the very rich can affort them. Then, a G8 nation sees that Hatians can't affort AIDS drugs, so there's a funraiser or foreign aid to pay for drugs for the locals.
This profiteering has been a major complaint of the entire third world to the UN and WTO for a long time (it's not just AIDS drugs). However, until now, no country felt that it was enough of an emergency to risk WTO/US/UN reprisals to stand up to these tactics. Brazil has offered to buy the drugs (not the people, the country), but at reasonable prices. The drug companies refused. Brazil has thus begun making their own.
This is not theft. This is not a case of someone trying to get a free ride. This is a case of human needs vs. corporate profits.
Allusion is made in the article to the future use of NVRAM for the journal. Now, I know how much a performance win this would be, but doesn't NetApp hold a patent on that?
Can someone with more patent-searching skills than myself verify? Thanks!
They don't say what game they tried, but it was a nintendo game....
Let's look at the trend in PC games. Games are going multi-player-over-the-Internet it a big way. The MMORPGs are moving along at a clip not seen since the explosion of "community-based Web sites".
So, when the game simulates a world, complete with thousands of other "real" people (players) to interact with, what would this study show? I have quite varied conversations in Everquest, and that's just the social aspect. There's also the math (yes math! in the form of statistics, simple arithmetic and algebra).
Then, there's the group dynamics. How do you organize people? Not a lesson most teenagers learn....
Now, we move to other styles of games. Myst, for example is pure puzzle-solving. Logic math and pretty pictures. I'd be concerned about any kid that played a video game to the exclusion of all else, but if it were Myst I suspect they'd come out of it with some improved logic skills.
Now on to hybrid games. Soul Reaver is a puzzle-solving/action game. Perhaps this kind of well-rounded game (I think Tomb Raider is in this catagory, but never played it) should be stressed for its ability to train many areas of the brain at once.
Now, to the future.... What happens when "video game" is an antiquated term? What happens when computers are used to simulate vast virtual environments with social activity, education and entertainment combined? What then? It's coming, and I think running around saying "it's stunting their growth" is not the most mature way that we can respond....
Let's evaluate what our kids do for the merits and flaws of each activity. Provide alternatives, not demands and never forget that you're trying to train them to be adults who can live thier own lives, not pets.
"it puts C++ to shame in terms of the cleanliness of its OO system"
No chance - think 'Type Safety'. Java relies heavily on casting which C++ manages to avoid
Then why did C++ need to invent four casting operators? I rarely if ever see C++ code that does not rely heavily on casting.
In many ways Java is more type-safe than C++, as it has stricter requirements on casting. However, C++ has the advantage of being essentially C with many additional features. The most successful C++ projects I've seen have used some inheritance, and otherwise basically programmed in C.
"C will continue to be the right language to choose"
I agree for System programs, but for applications the speed of development for C is way too slow and unreliable.
1. C is less unreliable, development-wise than C++. There are many reasons for this, but one example that comes up pretty fast in most C++ projects is suprise operator-overloading. Also, there's the "what do you mean, I passed an int and it got modified?!"
2. If you thing that development speed in C is slow, try programming in C++ and INCLUDING the Q/A and debugging time. A good C project with good developers vs. the same quality project and developers in C++ is about the same. The key is that the C code has less traps and much easier to read in the large (individual classes in C++ tend to be readable, but determining their interaction can be hell).
All languages have their uses (or they would not have been written). I just think that C is still the one language that fits almost all projects, and still has portability and interoperability features that blow everything else out of the water.
The word overtake is questionable here. Do we mean that more developers will be using it (that's what they mean), or that all that the tasks that those languages have previously been put to will be done in Java?
I think we can make a pretty good case that right around the same time, three toolkits came into existance, the Java widget set (SWING, I believe), Gtk+ and Qt. I notice that 99% of the apps on my Windows desktop are the old C++-based MFC widgets, and my Linux desktop is split between Qt and Gtk+. I never see a Java app unless it's the back-end technology for a Web site (but, more often that's PHP, Perl, Python or VB).
So, from whence comes this figure?
Well, most of it is based on the growth of Java as a wizzy buzz-language in the dot-com startup arena 1-2 years ago. Some of it is based on the fact that in the financial market, in-house apps are very often written in Java because it's something they can hire hordes of programmers to write, and it keeps them happy because their skill-sets are current. Remember, these are the folks that bought WAY into COBOL....
Java's a cool language, and I actually think it puts C++ to shame in terms of the cleanliness of its OO system, but it's just not useable for most of the large-scale development out there (can you imagine how much slower Mozilla or GCC would be if they were written in Java?)
C will continue to be the right language to choose, but C++ will continue to be chosen a large percentage of the time because people only think about the performance of critical sections not the maintainability or cleanliness of development.
Troll? No, just firm opinions that I have formed over the last 10 years watching first C++ and then Java become the darling languages of the "if it's OO it's good" programming set (not that the converse is true either....)
Please understand that this rant is the result of 10 years of watching the Internet come to terms with the lack of a HOSTS.TXT
Just out of curiousity. What is hosts.txt and why do you think it's needed?
HOSTS.TXT (yes, all caps) was the file that contained the list of all of the hosts on the Internet. Before DNS (and for a while after), there was HOSTS.TXT. You can probably find copies of it out there (for more info, you can see this old copy which I found via this article from the IETF mailing list).
What the heck ever made you think that I felt it was "needed"? It was, of course, needed in the pre-DNS Internet of the early 80s, but certainly has not been since, and would be a scary thing to try to maintain today;-)
I was talking about the thrashing that has occured as the Internet has scaled beyond all expectations, and then done so again; repeatedly.
As for your "HUH?", I don't know that I can help you there....
You're thinking of their 4GL. Every major database vendor has a 4GL ("fourth generation language", not my choice of terms). Most of them are really awful, but they have their place in certain business settings (right next to COBOL).
Progress the database was actually pretty nice, and had some features that are still not supported well in the rest of the commercial databases.
Six months ago, I thought about starting a software company because I saw a problem coming. The next wave of Internet growth will be in Web-based applications. I think we've all grown up and realized that discussion forums with free email are not commercially viable options, but applications that folks (or companies) will pay to use are. Many already exist, but for there to be a boom in this sort of Web application (not to be confused with the overused term "services"), we need a decent development framework (not page generation tools like PHP or web-server control tools like mod_perl, though their like need to play a part).
Right now, there are no options..Net is an attempt to develop one, and I think it's pretty bad, as it emphasises the same development models as Java, which are fundamentally cool for one developer but a disaster for a 10-year, 20-person development effort which is what any successful application springs from (if you're still mired in the belief that applications spring forth, fully formed from 6-month 1-to-3-person development, just take a look at any stable commercial software application with significant market share. What you start off with after that first six months has to be good, but what it BECOMES over the years must FIT your users and that's what makes or breaks software).
What we need is the ability to develop these applications in a scalable and modular way with the components of our choice. I was planning on using a mod_perl-based system as the core framework, but with a set of development tools for any language. Presumably when the Web application market matures, we'll find that language and platform interoperability is still key and C is still the only language that is, itself, language and platform neutral. But, that's only my guess.
What I know is that Microsoft is winning this race because it has no competition. Does that matter? Probably not. Open source efforts almost always get started late. The advantages of coming in after MS screws it up could be large.
I think that MS is missing one large item here (one they always ignore): the developer..Net is designed to satisfy the needs of an architecture and of your data, but not of the developer. UNIX has always been a better development environment than anything that Microsoft can put a GUI on, and scalable Web application infrastructures will not be any different.
I've worked with the likes of Vignette, and I know that building applications there is a mistake. I've worked with low-level tools like mod_perl, and while I think that mod_perl is fundamentally the best technology for talking to a Web server, it's also very poor for developing applications. Why don't I have a debugger for building Web applications?
Ok, now that I've pissed everyone off or conviced you all I'm a loony, let me really jump off the deep end with a few assertions about the coming age of Web application development:
1. Using HTTP and (may all the little gods defend us) XML to shuttle data between application components is so fundamentally brain-dead, I'm suprised anyone's even taking it seriously. Let's just take a step back and remember that performance and complexity are the reasons that most people didn't like CORBA, and CORBA will soon be made to look light-weight by comparison.
2. You will soon begin to see the dawn of a scary phenomenon: shrink-wrapped, store-shelf Web applications.... Yep. Scary (and probably wrong, but that never stopped anyone).
3. Java is never going to die, but it's about to start entering the COBOL phase. Because it's a poor language? No, in fact it's a pretty cool language. No, Java will begin to atrophy because we've reached a point where the strongest advocates have begun to see projects get mired in the Java platform and its isolation from the rest of the world. The only people left touting Java will be the people who are saying "look at the giant, insulated, institutional system we built" or "look at the tiny self-contained widget frobnitzer" I built, and the next generation of developers are going to get wise to the common thread in those two statements.
Please understand that this rant is the result of 10 years of watching the Internet come to terms with the lack of a HOSTS.TXT. I'm not just jumping into this. I may be wrong in several places, but you should at least have considered these things before you jump of Microsoft's OR open source's band-wagons.
Because of MySQL's design, there's a silver lining here. The Gemini back-end (which, BTW is the guts of the Progress database (NOT PostgreSQL, which is a competing open source database), under a different name, and open sourced) is totally stand-alone in the sense that the MySQL folks just have to continue to support the table management API that they already had for things like Berkely DB and accept bugs from everyone including NuSphere.
Outside of that, they can stick their fingers in their ears and yell, "lalalalala, we can't here you!" all they like at NuSphere, and no harm comes of it. NuSphere for their part can stick their fingers in their ears too, because 99% of their effort goes into the Gemini back-end and their Apache/PHP/MySQL shrink-wrap bundle.
These two can feud all they like, and still work together seamlessly. This is the part of the open source benefit that most closed source types don't get yet. When they do, it's going to rock thier world!
Actually, it looks like Toronto has some of the most extensive lighting in eastern North America. Boston, NY and D.C. are much more constrained to a small area, where Toronto spans a very visible area with its brightest illumination.
Further north, most of Canada is like Maine. Even the well settled areas tend to have little light pollution compared with major cities.
Looking at the newest screenshots, there's one that shows lots of popups, and one of those popups is for selecting citizen types. The types allowed are:
Elvises
Scientists
Taxmen
Elvises?! This game has gotten... a little silly it seems;-)
I notice that there are chunks of the middle east and northern Africa that have been erased. Political lines are even gone. Is this a mistake, or are we protecting some valuable light pollution data, here?
Look, "Attack of the Clones" is cheesy, I admit, but a whole lot less chessy than "Star Wars" or "The Empire Stikes Back". We've just gotten used to those being the names of great movies.
People keep getting upset about the Star Wars films having Lucas fingerprints all over them, and for the life of me, I can't understand why! Star Wars is Star Wars, and it should not suprise you that there are things as painful as Ewoks, as predictable as light-sword fights, as broken science as ships meant for vacuum with hinged hatches. These are the hallmarks of the fun-but-essentially-fluff science-fiction-fantasy that Lucas creates. It's decent fantasy, but with high (and almost certainly accidental) camp value.
Go see the movie expecting a Lucas film, and I guarantee you will not be disappointed. Go expecting the next 2001, and you will be an unhappy camper.
Actually, since I've been playing EverQuest more and more, my desktop has been Windows 98 almost exclusively for the last few months (while I use Red Hat Linux at work and on my server).
Windows has never blue-screened on me (at least not since the last major update which was at least several months ago; can't remember before that...), but here's what I do that might make me unique:
1. I run Mozilla, not IE. Browser as core OS component... oops.
2. I do most of my work on Linux systems via SecureCRT. No office, no big, flashy Real Player, etc.
3. I don't run any services off of my Windows desktop. Any file-sharing, Web serving, etc is done from the Linux server.
So the 1/week crash myth seems to be a little far-fetched. This was CERTAINLY the case with 3.1 and 95, but 98 was fairly stable. NT 2000 is not too bad, but I use it rarely.
Windows does get better, which you have to be aware of, if you're going to rationally explain to others why the should use something else.
Of course, if EverQuest ran under Linux, I would forget I had a Windows partition....
Ahem... Responding to trolls is usually something I don't fall for, but:
GCC 2.96 is an unofficial version of the gcc 3.0 development code that Red Hat released because of their substantial ability to support the code (being as they employ a significant number of the world's gcc hackers) and their customers' demands for better standards support in C++. GCC 2.96 was unstable initially only in a few small areas, and they were fixed way back in 7.0 updates. I've never ever had a problem with 7.1.
If you want to hate Red Hat, I suppose its compiler is as good a place as any to start a rant, but it's not a broken or unstable compiler. In fact, it's a much better compiler than gcc 2.95 in some pretty dramatic areas (standards compliance, non-x86 support, etc).
I think you need to re-evaluate what you mean by "unstable" and "gcc", since gcc 2.96 did start life as an honest-to-goodness development snapshot of gcc, and was brought to you by the very same folks that gave you egcs.
Reality check, folks; the following are not science fiction:
The West Wing -- Two angles were mentioned. On the alternate-universe angle, it's not. It's just fiction. There's no substantial, "what if" premise related to a historical event (what if the president were a human being who could think for himself doesn't quite count). On the science angle, there's science in the show (good science), but very little speculation. Speculation is a key to science fiction, and the dividing line between Law and Order (which had a whole lot of science) and Viper (a bad show, but clearly science fiction for its speculation).
Buffy, Angel, et al. -- Nope. These shows are fantasy pure and simple. The line gets muddy (is The Lathe of Heaven science fiction or fantasy?), but vampires and their respective hunters don't even get a smudge on their wardrobes
I will say that, as an SF snob, I find the fawning over Lexx to be distasteful, but I'm pleased with the recent Farscape for actually getting the plot moving again. Best SF on TV is still B5 re-runs and the Iron Chef (which is clearly about the mandroid who plays Chairman Kaga;-)
The idea is that *all* technology is asymtotic. Yes, computer *speed* is a simple (non-asymtotic, so far) progression. AI seems to have gone no-where (except where we redefine the term), but the IMPACT on our culture and our world has been on a curve, the function of which is only starting to become evident. Think about what a man from 1800 would say about our world (it would probably involve lots of screaming). Now think about how someone from 1900 would feel (not a WHOLE lot different, but the acceptance of, if not comfort with electricity is there at least). Now, think about someone from 1950 (you actually HAVE little radios that you can talk to people through? you can travel to Japan HOW fast? old people get replacement WHATS?)
Technology in genetics, networking, materials science and electrical engineering is progressing at a frightening rate. Soon, we'll be able to construct useful, microscopic machines; implanted computers; and who knows what else.
So, this idea is introduced in book 2 (or 3, depending on how you count) of "Across Realtime", a Novel(s) of his (it was origianlly 2 short novels and a novella, I think).
The idea is that technology progression is asymtotic, and will eventually reach the point where one day of technological progress is equal to all that of human history, and then, well... there's the next day. He doesn't cover exactly what it is, because by definition, we don't know yet. But, it's catastrophic in the novel. A good read (actually the first part which basically just introduces the "Bauble" is a good read alone).
He sort of refined the idea into something maintainable in Fire Upon the Deep by introducing the concept of the Slow Zone which acts as a kind of buffer for technology. If things in the Beyond get too hairy, the Slow Zone always remains unaffected, and civilization can crawl back up out of the "backwaters" (e.g. our area of the galaxy).
He's a good author, and I love his take on things like cryptography, culture (A Deepness in the Sky), religion, USENET (Fire Upon the Deep), Virtual Reality and cr/hacker culture (True Names).
Every time I get a game, there's a short list of graphics devices supported on the box. I always hear about the development of this or that game, in terms of specific card features.
Heck, I even remember Carmack talking on Slashdot about things like "Nvidia's OpenGL extensions" and other features of specific cards that he was having to take advantage of.
Yeah, the new wiz-bang game will probably be able to limp-along on whatever you've got, but likely will only be optimized for a few special cards.
The video-card industry has gotten really awful. I hope that someone pulls it back in line and we get back on a standards track where card manufacturers contribute to the standards efforts and then work hard to make the standard interface efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
- UPDATE 'foo', map {
... } grep { ... } sort SELECT 'bar', ...
This is the heart of the power of Perl, and if the interface is built right, it could be a huge boon to database work.Of course, done wrong it could be slow, difficult to maintain and immediately obsolete.
Sure. So does Brazil. Realistically, it's their people that have the disease, and their laws.
My point is that the drug companies are taking the wrong side of this, morally. I'm not saying that they are not entitled to do so. Heck, they could all stop selling the drugs to anyone and stand on top of the twin towers yelling "na na!" But, I would repect them even less then.
- This article goes into the production of the drugs
- and this article goes into the US dropping the case on the previous moves by Brazil
There's a lot of good information out there, but you have to look for it. American media is usually none to keen on pointing out where another government has been more vigillant in regards to human rights.The costs for those drugs is about 0.0033 percent of each persons income in bazil.
The costs of what drugs? I recall a quote from the NPR story I was listening to on this topic that the average price of the "cocktail" was about US$150/week, which translated to local currency was about 2-3 times more than the salaries of the average employed victim (I know the magnitudes here are right, but honestly could have screwed up the specifcs, see NPR for details).
Brazil negotiated for a steep (but, not unreasonable, given the profit margins) discount if Brazil's health care bought the drugs. Of course, the drug companies wanted nothing to do with this. Why would they when they get top dollar from US charities?! Brazil was being used as a political pawn, and they're in the right, here.
I'd just like to point out the history here.
Drug companies have been jerking around the third world for a LONG time now, and Brazil is not just an example: they will likely be the first pebble in a land-slide.
The tactic to date has been to provide these drugs at sky-high prices in those countries so that only the very rich can affort them. Then, a G8 nation sees that Hatians can't affort AIDS drugs, so there's a funraiser or foreign aid to pay for drugs for the locals.
This profiteering has been a major complaint of the entire third world to the UN and WTO for a long time (it's not just AIDS drugs). However, until now, no country felt that it was enough of an emergency to risk WTO/US/UN reprisals to stand up to these tactics. Brazil has offered to buy the drugs (not the people, the country), but at reasonable prices. The drug companies refused. Brazil has thus begun making their own.
This is not theft. This is not a case of someone trying to get a free ride. This is a case of human needs vs. corporate profits.
Allusion is made in the article to the future use of NVRAM for the journal. Now, I know how much a performance win this would be, but doesn't NetApp hold a patent on that?
Can someone with more patent-searching skills than myself verify? Thanks!
Also, it will be functionally better than pay-per-view movies (which don't give you the ability to pause, rewind, etc.)
You don't have a TiVo, do you?
They don't say what game they tried, but it was a nintendo game....
Let's look at the trend in PC games. Games are going multi-player-over-the-Internet it a big way. The MMORPGs are moving along at a clip not seen since the explosion of "community-based Web sites".
So, when the game simulates a world, complete with thousands of other "real" people (players) to interact with, what would this study show? I have quite varied conversations in Everquest, and that's just the social aspect. There's also the math (yes math! in the form of statistics, simple arithmetic and algebra).
Then, there's the group dynamics. How do you organize people? Not a lesson most teenagers learn....
Now, we move to other styles of games. Myst, for example is pure puzzle-solving. Logic math and pretty pictures. I'd be concerned about any kid that played a video game to the exclusion of all else, but if it were Myst I suspect they'd come out of it with some improved logic skills.
Now on to hybrid games. Soul Reaver is a puzzle-solving/action game. Perhaps this kind of well-rounded game (I think Tomb Raider is in this catagory, but never played it) should be stressed for its ability to train many areas of the brain at once.
Now, to the future.... What happens when "video game" is an antiquated term? What happens when computers are used to simulate vast virtual environments with social activity, education and entertainment combined? What then? It's coming, and I think running around saying "it's stunting their growth" is not the most mature way that we can respond....
Let's evaluate what our kids do for the merits and flaws of each activity. Provide alternatives, not demands and never forget that you're trying to train them to be adults who can live thier own lives, not pets.
"it puts C++ to shame in terms of the cleanliness of its OO system"
No chance - think 'Type Safety'. Java relies heavily on casting which C++ manages to avoid
Then why did C++ need to invent four casting operators? I rarely if ever see C++ code that does not rely heavily on casting.
In many ways Java is more type-safe than C++, as it has stricter requirements on casting. However, C++ has the advantage of being essentially C with many additional features. The most successful C++ projects I've seen have used some inheritance, and otherwise basically programmed in C.
"C will continue to be the right language to choose"
I agree for System programs, but for applications the speed of development for C is way too slow and unreliable.
1. C is less unreliable, development-wise than C++. There are many reasons for this, but one example that comes up pretty fast in most C++ projects is suprise operator-overloading. Also, there's the "what do you mean, I passed an int and it got modified?!"
2. If you thing that development speed in C is slow, try programming in C++ and INCLUDING the Q/A and debugging time. A good C project with good developers vs. the same quality project and developers in C++ is about the same. The key is that the C code has less traps and much easier to read in the large (individual classes in C++ tend to be readable, but determining their interaction can be hell).
All languages have their uses (or they would not have been written). I just think that C is still the one language that fits almost all projects, and still has portability and interoperability features that blow everything else out of the water.
The word overtake is questionable here. Do we mean that more developers will be using it (that's what they mean), or that all that the tasks that those languages have previously been put to will be done in Java?
I think we can make a pretty good case that right around the same time, three toolkits came into existance, the Java widget set (SWING, I believe), Gtk+ and Qt. I notice that 99% of the apps on my Windows desktop are the old C++-based MFC widgets, and my Linux desktop is split between Qt and Gtk+. I never see a Java app unless it's the back-end technology for a Web site (but, more often that's PHP, Perl, Python or VB).
So, from whence comes this figure?
Well, most of it is based on the growth of Java as a wizzy buzz-language in the dot-com startup arena 1-2 years ago. Some of it is based on the fact that in the financial market, in-house apps are very often written in Java because it's something they can hire hordes of programmers to write, and it keeps them happy because their skill-sets are current. Remember, these are the folks that bought WAY into COBOL....
Java's a cool language, and I actually think it puts C++ to shame in terms of the cleanliness of its OO system, but it's just not useable for most of the large-scale development out there (can you imagine how much slower Mozilla or GCC would be if they were written in Java?)
C will continue to be the right language to choose, but C++ will continue to be chosen a large percentage of the time because people only think about the performance of critical sections not the maintainability or cleanliness of development.
Troll? No, just firm opinions that I have formed over the last 10 years watching first C++ and then Java become the darling languages of the "if it's OO it's good" programming set (not that the converse is true either....)
HOSTS.TXT (yes, all caps) was the file that contained the list of all of the hosts on the Internet. Before DNS (and for a while after), there was HOSTS.TXT. You can probably find copies of it out there (for more info, you can see this old copy which I found via this article from the IETF mailing list).
What the heck ever made you think that I felt it was "needed"? It was, of course, needed in the pre-DNS Internet of the early 80s, but certainly has not been since, and would be a scary thing to try to maintain today ;-)
I was talking about the thrashing that has occured as the Internet has scaled beyond all expectations, and then done so again; repeatedly.
As for your "HUH?", I don't know that I can help you there....
You're thinking of their 4GL. Every major database vendor has a 4GL ("fourth generation language", not my choice of terms). Most of them are really awful, but they have their place in certain business settings (right next to COBOL).
Progress the database was actually pretty nice, and had some features that are still not supported well in the rest of the commercial databases.
Six months ago, I thought about starting a software company because I saw a problem coming. The next wave of Internet growth will be in Web-based applications. I think we've all grown up and realized that discussion forums with free email are not commercially viable options, but applications that folks (or companies) will pay to use are. Many already exist, but for there to be a boom in this sort of Web application (not to be confused with the overused term "services"), we need a decent development framework (not page generation tools like PHP or web-server control tools like mod_perl, though their like need to play a part).
.Net is an attempt to develop one, and I think it's pretty bad, as it emphasises the same development models as Java, which are fundamentally cool for one developer but a disaster for a 10-year, 20-person development effort which is what any successful application springs from (if you're still mired in the belief that applications spring forth, fully formed from 6-month 1-to-3-person development, just take a look at any stable commercial software application with significant market share. What you start off with after that first six months has to be good, but what it BECOMES over the years must FIT your users and that's what makes or breaks software).
.Net is designed to satisfy the needs of an architecture and of your data, but not of the developer. UNIX has always been a better development environment than anything that Microsoft can put a GUI on, and scalable Web application infrastructures will not be any different.
Right now, there are no options.
What we need is the ability to develop these applications in a scalable and modular way with the components of our choice. I was planning on using a mod_perl-based system as the core framework, but with a set of development tools for any language. Presumably when the Web application market matures, we'll find that language and platform interoperability is still key and C is still the only language that is, itself, language and platform neutral. But, that's only my guess.
What I know is that Microsoft is winning this race because it has no competition. Does that matter? Probably not. Open source efforts almost always get started late. The advantages of coming in after MS screws it up could be large.
I think that MS is missing one large item here (one they always ignore): the developer.
I've worked with the likes of Vignette, and I know that building applications there is a mistake. I've worked with low-level tools like mod_perl, and while I think that mod_perl is fundamentally the best technology for talking to a Web server, it's also very poor for developing applications. Why don't I have a debugger for building Web applications?
Ok, now that I've pissed everyone off or conviced you all I'm a loony, let me really jump off the deep end with a few assertions about the coming age of Web application development:
1. Using HTTP and (may all the little gods defend us) XML to shuttle data between application components is so fundamentally brain-dead, I'm suprised anyone's even taking it seriously. Let's just take a step back and remember that performance and complexity are the reasons that most people didn't like CORBA, and CORBA will soon be made to look light-weight by comparison.
2. You will soon begin to see the dawn of a scary phenomenon: shrink-wrapped, store-shelf Web applications.... Yep. Scary (and probably wrong, but that never stopped anyone).
3. Java is never going to die, but it's about to start entering the COBOL phase. Because it's a poor language? No, in fact it's a pretty cool language. No, Java will begin to atrophy because we've reached a point where the strongest advocates have begun to see projects get mired in the Java platform and its isolation from the rest of the world. The only people left touting Java will be the people who are saying "look at the giant, insulated, institutional system we built" or "look at the tiny self-contained widget frobnitzer" I built, and the next generation of developers are going to get wise to the common thread in those two statements.
Please understand that this rant is the result of 10 years of watching the Internet come to terms with the lack of a HOSTS.TXT. I'm not just jumping into this. I may be wrong in several places, but you should at least have considered these things before you jump of Microsoft's OR open source's band-wagons.
Because of MySQL's design, there's a silver lining here. The Gemini back-end (which, BTW is the guts of the Progress database (NOT PostgreSQL, which is a competing open source database), under a different name, and open sourced) is totally stand-alone in the sense that the MySQL folks just have to continue to support the table management API that they already had for things like Berkely DB and accept bugs from everyone including NuSphere.
Outside of that, they can stick their fingers in their ears and yell, "lalalalala, we can't here you!" all they like at NuSphere, and no harm comes of it. NuSphere for their part can stick their fingers in their ears too, because 99% of their effort goes into the Gemini back-end and their Apache/PHP/MySQL shrink-wrap bundle.
These two can feud all they like, and still work together seamlessly. This is the part of the open source benefit that most closed source types don't get yet. When they do, it's going to rock thier world!
Actually, it looks like Toronto has some of the most extensive lighting in eastern North America. Boston, NY and D.C. are much more constrained to a small area, where Toronto spans a very visible area with its brightest illumination.
Further north, most of Canada is like Maine. Even the well settled areas tend to have little light pollution compared with major cities.
- Elvises
- Scientists
- Taxmen
Elvises?! This game has gotten... a little silly it seemsI notice that there are chunks of the middle east and northern Africa that have been erased. Political lines are even gone. Is this a mistake, or are we protecting some valuable light pollution data, here?
Odd.
Look, "Attack of the Clones" is cheesy, I admit, but a whole lot less chessy than "Star Wars" or "The Empire Stikes Back". We've just gotten used to those being the names of great movies.
People keep getting upset about the Star Wars films having Lucas fingerprints all over them, and for the life of me, I can't understand why! Star Wars is Star Wars, and it should not suprise you that there are things as painful as Ewoks, as predictable as light-sword fights, as broken science as ships meant for vacuum with hinged hatches. These are the hallmarks of the fun-but-essentially-fluff science-fiction-fantasy that Lucas creates. It's decent fantasy, but with high (and almost certainly accidental) camp value.
Go see the movie expecting a Lucas film, and I guarantee you will not be disappointed. Go expecting the next 2001, and you will be an unhappy camper.
Actually, since I've been playing EverQuest more and more, my desktop has been Windows 98 almost exclusively for the last few months (while I use Red Hat Linux at work and on my server).
Windows has never blue-screened on me (at least not since the last major update which was at least several months ago; can't remember before that...), but here's what I do that might make me unique:
1. I run Mozilla, not IE. Browser as core OS component... oops.
2. I do most of my work on Linux systems via SecureCRT. No office, no big, flashy Real Player, etc.
3. I don't run any services off of my Windows desktop. Any file-sharing, Web serving, etc is done from the Linux server.
So the 1/week crash myth seems to be a little far-fetched. This was CERTAINLY the case with 3.1 and 95, but 98 was fairly stable. NT 2000 is not too bad, but I use it rarely.
Windows does get better, which you have to be aware of, if you're going to rationally explain to others why the should use something else.
Of course, if EverQuest ran under Linux, I would forget I had a Windows partition....
Ahem... Responding to trolls is usually something I don't fall for, but:
GCC 2.96 is an unofficial version of the gcc 3.0 development code that Red Hat released because of their substantial ability to support the code (being as they employ a significant number of the world's gcc hackers) and their customers' demands for better standards support in C++. GCC 2.96 was unstable initially only in a few small areas, and they were fixed way back in 7.0 updates. I've never ever had a problem with 7.1.
If you want to hate Red Hat, I suppose its compiler is as good a place as any to start a rant, but it's not a broken or unstable compiler. In fact, it's a much better compiler than gcc 2.95 in some pretty dramatic areas (standards compliance, non-x86 support, etc).
I think you need to re-evaluate what you mean by "unstable" and "gcc", since gcc 2.96 did start life as an honest-to-goodness development snapshot of gcc, and was brought to you by the very same folks that gave you egcs.
- The West Wing -- Two angles were mentioned. On the alternate-universe angle, it's not. It's just fiction. There's no substantial, "what if" premise related to a historical event (what if the president were a human being who could think for himself doesn't quite count). On the science angle, there's science in the show (good science), but very little speculation. Speculation is a key to science fiction, and the dividing line between Law and Order (which had a whole lot of science) and Viper (a bad show, but clearly science fiction for its speculation).
- Buffy, Angel, et al. -- Nope. These shows are fantasy pure and simple. The line gets muddy (is The Lathe of Heaven science fiction or fantasy?), but vampires and their respective hunters don't even get a smudge on their wardrobes
I will say that, as an SF snob, I find the fawning over Lexx to be distasteful, but I'm pleased with the recent Farscape for actually getting the plot moving again. Best SF on TV is still B5 re-runs and the Iron Chef (which is clearly about the mandroid who plays Chairman KagaOne might even go so far as to say... HeLa cool!
Er, sorry it just slipped out!
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Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
The idea is that *all* technology is asymtotic. Yes, computer *speed* is a simple (non-asymtotic, so far) progression. AI seems to have gone no-where (except where we redefine the term), but the IMPACT on our culture and our world has been on a curve, the function of which is only starting to become evident. Think about what a man from 1800 would say about our world (it would probably involve lots of screaming). Now think about how someone from 1900 would feel (not a WHOLE lot different, but the acceptance of, if not comfort with electricity is there at least). Now, think about someone from 1950 (you actually HAVE little radios that you can talk to people through? you can travel to Japan HOW fast? old people get replacement WHATS?)
Technology in genetics, networking, materials science and electrical engineering is progressing at a frightening rate. Soon, we'll be able to construct useful, microscopic machines; implanted computers; and who knows what else.
The world becomes stranger faster, every year.
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Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
So, this idea is introduced in book 2 (or 3, depending on how you count) of "Across Realtime", a Novel(s) of his (it was origianlly 2 short novels and a novella, I think).
The idea is that technology progression is asymtotic, and will eventually reach the point where one day of technological progress is equal to all that of human history, and then, well... there's the next day. He doesn't cover exactly what it is, because by definition, we don't know yet. But, it's catastrophic in the novel. A good read (actually the first part which basically just introduces the "Bauble" is a good read alone).
He sort of refined the idea into something maintainable in Fire Upon the Deep by introducing the concept of the Slow Zone which acts as a kind of buffer for technology. If things in the Beyond get too hairy, the Slow Zone always remains unaffected, and civilization can crawl back up out of the "backwaters" (e.g. our area of the galaxy).
He's a good author, and I love his take on things like cryptography, culture (A Deepness in the Sky), religion, USENET (Fire Upon the Deep), Virtual Reality and cr/hacker culture (True Names).
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Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com)
Every time I get a game, there's a short list of graphics devices supported on the box. I always hear about the development of this or that game, in terms of specific card features.
Heck, I even remember Carmack talking on Slashdot about things like "Nvidia's OpenGL extensions" and other features of specific cards that he was having to take advantage of.
Yeah, the new wiz-bang game will probably be able to limp-along on whatever you've got, but likely will only be optimized for a few special cards.
The video-card industry has gotten really awful. I hope that someone pulls it back in line and we get back on a standards track where card manufacturers contribute to the standards efforts and then work hard to make the standard interface efficient.