Switching topics but not the principle, take Iraq as an example: many think 3 years is too long to stabilize a country. Go search the NY Times archives from 1945 until about 1947 with the key words "Japan" and "violence" or "unrest".
I call bullshit. First off, 1945 to 1947 is 2 years, not 3. Second, Japan was a totally different situation. Japan was an aggresor country that attacked the united states and systematically had its capacity to fight destroyed over a period of 5 years beforehand. On the other hand we pre-emptively invaded Iraq and pretty much prevailed in the space of a month against the indigenous military. Finally, most telling, Japanese unrest was uniformly a reaction to being a conquered nation. Iraqi unrest stems to a greated extent from internal conflicts between the Sunnis, and Shi'ites. Comparing post-war Japan and current-day Iraq illustrates a flawed view of history, not a deep understanding of it.
Producers and studios are more intereasted in making one generic sure fire hit than in investing in small interesting movies. The very beauracracy that makes these huge movies and hypes them to no end in an effort to make money ends up turning them into crap.
Also, Bryan Singer was a total dick to leave the X-Men series to die a painful death and go direct a sub-par Superman movie. What an asshole.
I should get a PhD and a grant to study this crap.
Yes, nothing like thousands of dollars spent on an eduction so you can write a long winded dissertation stating the obvious. The negative impact of things like sports and smoking and drinking is largely glossed over because these things are institutionalized. Crush people on the gridiron and you're some sort of hero. Snipe people in a game and you're a violent crime waiting to happen. Drink miller and girls in bikinis will flock to you (or so the ads imply). Drop acid and you're destroying society.
State the obvious truth without a PhD and you're a crackpot.
We did count excessive physical contact in sports games, such as punching or otherwise attacking another player (e.g., after the football play was over).
This is a compelling statement. It implicitly states that violent sports aren't violence, in the eyes of the study. Tackling a football player inside a computer game isn't violent as long as its in the context of the game. Why is this? What are football, soccer, and rugby if not mock combat? Where do they get their free pass from being considered violent? If you look at the spectrum of mock combat activities, ranging from Chess to Football to PVP in World Of Warcraft, you have to admit that Football is the ONLY activity where someone is actually liable to be hurt in the normal course of the game. And yet computer games seem to be the target of all the ire.
Next time a politician starts taking pot shots at violence in 'games', join his campaign and try to expand it to include Chess and Football. See how it goes.
That's an excellent way to completely screw up your machine by disabling services that might be needed later for things like printing. If you shut down the spooler and then 3 weeks later need to print something you can spend a long time trying to figure out why printing doesn't work.
I see a lot of people replying that whoever is suggesting you do this is on crack, and that you shoudln't throw away working code so that you can go to Java. They might be right. They also might be on crack themselves. It all depends on what your software does and how much of it you're going to be able to throw away.
See, if the bulk of that 6 year old codebase is fine tuned code for simulating some physical process or something similarly domain specific, then throwing it away and converting it to another language would be insanity. But I'm betting its not. I'm betting the bulk of the codebase is the simple stuff that you have to build from the ground up in C++. You mentioned Hibernate, so there's probably ORM code somewhere in there, or DB code at least. You might have some amount of file IO code or event managing code or logging code or any of a hundred other tasks that people writing in C++ have to reinvent everytime they write an app.
This is one of the critical differences between C++ and Java. C++ doesn't have a giant common language runtime for doing network stuff and DB stuff and logging. It certainly doesn't have a vast array of open source third party libraries designed to do all the things you have to do for so many applications, like write logging and serialization API's.
So it comes down to how much code you need to port and how much code do you get to throw away. 'get' is the word here because every time you can junk a piece of functionality and use a mature open source third party library instead, that's more time you get to have to fix bugs in your domain specific code.
I've been a C++ developer a lot longer than I've been a Java developer, like by an order of magnitude, and while I still love C++, I wouldn't write an application in it unless I had a very good reason to. Some reasons were if it was a client app being distributed to a large homogenous Win32 userbase, where ensuring the VM was present or had the right version becomes more of a problem than its worth. If the VM footprint was larger than warranted by the application, like for instance if I'm writing a version of 'grep'. If I'm writing a 3D graphics intensive application like a game. Mostly this is all stuff on the client side. If I'm writing server side code, finding a reason not to write in Java becomes harder and harder. Maybe some would argue that PHP or Ruby On Rails is going to be better, but certainly not if you're dealing with a group of people with existing C++ knowledge.
You're biggest problem will be learning when NOT to write code. The temptation will be there to go ahead and write that XML parser, just because it so engrained. But you have to learn to use features in the language and the library.
I could go on quite a bit, but you get the idea. If you have any questions give me a ping, I'll be happy to answer them.
WinAmp uses less but makes finding the song I want is even harder.
Winamp's player has a jump to file dialog I can type in and find the subset of files containing the text I've entered (either in the filename or in the ID3 tags). Its media library has the same thing. What exactly do you mean by 'even harder'? Harder than what, having WinAmp read your mind?
Well, if this property holds true for the universe, and eventually our universe will expand a whole lot and lead to a new bang, exactly where in the known universe will this bang occur?
Everywhere. Imagine a balloon that keeps expanding and expanding without ever popping. A balloon is a better example than the earth, because its easier to ignore the third dimension with something hollow. There are 10 dots on it that represent all the matter in the universe. It starts with a surface area of 1. The matter density/temperature is now 10. This is the 'balloon big bang'. After a while it has a surface area of 2 and the matter density is 5. Later the surface area is 10 and the matter density is 1. The same amount of matter and the same amount of motion in that matter, but more space means the temperature has dropped.
At this point a new big bang happens. Looking at the baloon, we suddenly see 90 new dots appear evenly distributed. The matter density/temperature is now 10 again. The conditions of the big bang have been recreated, but in a much bigger space. From the point of view of the inhabitants of the balloon universe, the universe just became much hotter everywhere instantly. For us, it would be like someone with their hand on the CMB knob turned it up to 11.
I want to change my vote. After reading some stuff here and looking at their site some more it looks like they've taken an incredibly valuable web technology, and are driving it into the ground, trying to turn it into some quick and nasty ad revenue generator. I also can't imagine why a media player (or anything for that matter) should be sending out encrypted packets to someplace I don't have a keypair with.
It boggles my mind that Viewpoint would need to resort to spyware, which tends to put me on the side if 'they're being ignorant' as opposed to 'they're being evil'. Viewpoint had a liscenable product, that being effective geometry compression for 3D models. If you've got a good patent lock on that kind of technology, its hard to imagine not being able to turn it into a lot of money. On the other hand I look at their website now and search for the words geometry compression and find virtually nothing. Either they sold the tech or they don't know how to advertise it. Either one is incredibly stupid IMHO.
Are you high? That's like lauding the femenist ideals of 'Jugs' magazine. Star Trek doesn't have an intellectual appeal. It has a techno-fetishist appeal. With the exception of DS9, 90% of trek fare is insipid morality plays with earth-shattering messages like 'nuclear war is bad' and 'racism is wrong'.
If you actually watch Star Trek with a critical eye you begin to realize that there is no actual canon, or even characterization. Every female character is either a heavily emotion driven mother figure or a spunky warrior woman (tomboy), or if you go back to the old series, a secretary or a nurse. There are no hard and fast rules in the Star Trek world. The Federation has a prime directive, but its routinely violated by every captain we've seen. The captains always approach such situations as if something like this has never come up in the whole history of the Federation, as opposed to three times in the previous season, series or decade. Doesn't the federation have a fucking supreme court to set precedent?
Look, I used to love Trek, because it was the only thing going, and because I was 15 and didn't know any better. I also used to be really into G.I. Joe, but these are things we get over, you know. I don't know what leads you to believe that Trek is in ANY way intellectual. Idealistic maybe, but not intellectual. Tell me why you think it is and I'll describe in detail why you're wrong.
I watched all of season 1 of Alias in one sitting because I thought it was brilliant. I watched season 2 and began to realize there was never any payoff. Now I just tease my wife for watching Lost because Abrams doesn't know how to tell a fucking story. He just knows how to tease you with unresolved questions and jerk you along without ever giving a decent payoff. Everytime he's painted into a corner he tries to do something shocking and seemingly revealing, but all it does is make things more confusing.
Star Trek is over. They had their chance to keep up with the times in terms of writing (Battlestar Galatica makes it clear it doesn't matter what the technology is, as long as the characters are solid and the storylines are good and relevant. No one wants to watch a show about cooperation and peace and happiness and the federation when that's clearly not the direction we're heading. A show about the nearly total destruction of mankind somehow just seems more apropos.
Hell, Paramount probably only asked Abrams after asking Moore and being told to go fuck themselves.
Firefly. My personal favorite of recent fare. The SFX are a notch below Battlestar Galactica, but the writing makes up for it.
Ok, you do know that the FX company for Firefly is the exact same company that does Galactica right? I mean you didn't notice the similarities, like all the shots being done as if they were being shot with a handheld cam by some guy floating in space? If firefly had continued, then its FX shots would most likely look exactly on par with the current Galactica stuff.
I have to disagree. I work at a media hosting company and while I don't know the exact specs for their connection to the net at large, I know that for sites pretty much up and down the west coast I regularly get 2 megabytes per second. That's 20Mb, which for those keeping score is twice as fast as the first commercially widespread ethernet adaptors. The fedora core 5 DVD torrent transferred in less than 15 minutes.
My home cable modem regularly exceeds 8Mb and based on the things I do with my time and connectivity, visiting my in-laws with their 1.5Mb DSL connection is like taking a nice swim in molasses.
The real justification for that war is far too complex for the average person, never mind a 5-second sound bite.
Supposing that the people in charge know better than us and can be allowed to lie to justify a war that is really being fought for different reasons is tyranny.
Just because you think the supposed real reason for the war is valid doesn't mean it it, even if you think most other people don't have the capacity to understand. Hell, that attitude is part of the problem.
You know, I assumed the war wasn't about WMD's too. I figured the administration had an ulterior motive. I think that's ascribing far too much talent to the administration. Even if you give them credit for having a shadowy master plan, you still have to admit the possiblity that they're fucking it up.
the Guild of Heterosexual Males? The Guild of White Men From America?
That's a specious argument. Heterosexual males, and white men from america aren't likely to need to go somewhere special to find acceptance and escape harrasment. Most guild are likely to be upwards of 90% heterosexual white males already. Just because they haven't made it explicit in their recruiting doesn't mean someone openly gay wouldn't be made to feel unwelcome either.
Gross generalizations about a particular group are hurtful and can be considered discriminatory.
Then are gross generalizations about gross generalizations hurtful as well? I was drawing a comparison between straight people and gay people. If you're actually trying to argue that straight people as opposed to gay people are ostracized, abused or marginalized for being straight instead of gay anywhere in the world, you're insane. If you're saying my statement isn't valid on the basis that its a generalization and not because its not true, you're just tedious.
1. ban the guild for promoting hate speech
2. GLBT friendly doesn't mean you have to be gay (or lesbian etc). It means you have to be opposed to gay-bashing. No one bashes straight people. Straight people aren't persecuted in society.
If you don't want to stand out in a crowd, don't call attention to yourself. There should never have been a guild in WoW that was allowed to recruit based on sexual preference. It is only a target for harassment.
You're an ass. The guild was promoted as being GLBT friendly. The idea is that you don't have to be gay, you just have to think that being gay isn't inherently wrong, and maybe that using words like 'fag' as an epithet you hurl at people who ninja your loot might be a tad insensitive, or even outright wrong.
And on what basis, pray tell, should guilds be allowed to recruit? If you strip out all possible real world ties, then all that's left is style of play and level of dedication to the gameworld. That's hardly healthy. I'm in the one of the Penny Arcade guilds because I like Penny Arcade. If PA suddenly gains a state GLBT friendly policy, does that make my guild suddenly in violation? Where do you draw the line? As far as I'm concerned, the line should be drawn at hate speech or offensive language. But since many consider 'fag' to be both of those and Blizzard clearly allows it, they're not even drawing that line.
The way I see it, Blizzard isn't really discriminating against anyone.
Blizzard has already been discriminating against people by failing to enforce their anti-sexual harrasment policy. As long as someone if free to hurl 'fag' or 'gay' as an insult in game, then Blizzard is fostering a hostile environment for GLBT players. And FTA, the person was recruiting for a GLBT friendly guild. That means it wasn't exclusionary except of course that you couldn't be hostile to GLBT people. You didn't have to be Gay to join the guild. You just had to think that using 'fag' as an epithet was wrong. Besides, Night Elves are very clear already gay.
When you run a game server the server and map are *your* property, not Valve's.
The physical server is your property. Not the map, if its a Valve created map. Even if its a custom map thats the same as a Valve map with custom ad textures. That map belongs to Valve. It's licensed for your use and it doesn't belong to you any more than an episode of 'Friends' is yours because you own the TV that received it.
its like saying you can't buy a movie poster, take it home, and modify it to have an add and then get sued because your friends saw it.
No, is more like if I make an 'Indiana Jones and The Temptation of the Meatball Sub' poster, put it up in my local gaming cafe, and get money from the Subway next door becasue I'm driving business there. I fully expect to get sued by Lucasfilm.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, Bryan Singer was a total dick to leave the X-Men series to die a painful death and go direct a sub-par Superman movie. What an asshole.
State the obvious truth without a PhD and you're a crackpot.
Next time a politician starts taking pot shots at violence in 'games', join his campaign and try to expand it to include Chess and Football. See how it goes.
That's an excellent way to completely screw up your machine by disabling services that might be needed later for things like printing. If you shut down the spooler and then 3 weeks later need to print something you can spend a long time trying to figure out why printing doesn't work.
See, if the bulk of that 6 year old codebase is fine tuned code for simulating some physical process or something similarly domain specific, then throwing it away and converting it to another language would be insanity. But I'm betting its not. I'm betting the bulk of the codebase is the simple stuff that you have to build from the ground up in C++. You mentioned Hibernate, so there's probably ORM code somewhere in there, or DB code at least. You might have some amount of file IO code or event managing code or logging code or any of a hundred other tasks that people writing in C++ have to reinvent everytime they write an app.
This is one of the critical differences between C++ and Java. C++ doesn't have a giant common language runtime for doing network stuff and DB stuff and logging. It certainly doesn't have a vast array of open source third party libraries designed to do all the things you have to do for so many applications, like write logging and serialization API's.
So it comes down to how much code you need to port and how much code do you get to throw away. 'get' is the word here because every time you can junk a piece of functionality and use a mature open source third party library instead, that's more time you get to have to fix bugs in your domain specific code. I've been a C++ developer a lot longer than I've been a Java developer, like by an order of magnitude, and while I still love C++, I wouldn't write an application in it unless I had a very good reason to. Some reasons were if it was a client app being distributed to a large homogenous Win32 userbase, where ensuring the VM was present or had the right version becomes more of a problem than its worth. If the VM footprint was larger than warranted by the application, like for instance if I'm writing a version of 'grep'. If I'm writing a 3D graphics intensive application like a game. Mostly this is all stuff on the client side. If I'm writing server side code, finding a reason not to write in Java becomes harder and harder. Maybe some would argue that PHP or Ruby On Rails is going to be better, but certainly not if you're dealing with a group of people with existing C++ knowledge.
You're biggest problem will be learning when NOT to write code. The temptation will be there to go ahead and write that XML parser, just because it so engrained. But you have to learn to use features in the language and the library.
I could go on quite a bit, but you get the idea. If you have any questions give me a ping, I'll be happy to answer them.
At this point a new big bang happens. Looking at the baloon, we suddenly see 90 new dots appear evenly distributed. The matter density/temperature is now 10 again. The conditions of the big bang have been recreated, but in a much bigger space. From the point of view of the inhabitants of the balloon universe, the universe just became much hotter everywhere instantly. For us, it would be like someone with their hand on the CMB knob turned it up to 11.
I want to change my vote. After reading some stuff here and looking at their site some more it looks like they've taken an incredibly valuable web technology, and are driving it into the ground, trying to turn it into some quick and nasty ad revenue generator. I also can't imagine why a media player (or anything for that matter) should be sending out encrypted packets to someplace I don't have a keypair with.
It boggles my mind that Viewpoint would need to resort to spyware, which tends to put me on the side if 'they're being ignorant' as opposed to 'they're being evil'. Viewpoint had a liscenable product, that being effective geometry compression for 3D models. If you've got a good patent lock on that kind of technology, its hard to imagine not being able to turn it into a lot of money. On the other hand I look at their website now and search for the words geometry compression and find virtually nothing. Either they sold the tech or they don't know how to advertise it. Either one is incredibly stupid IMHO.
ever have one of those days where you wish you could just rate the article 'troll'.
Are you high? That's like lauding the femenist ideals of 'Jugs' magazine. Star Trek doesn't have an intellectual appeal. It has a techno-fetishist appeal. With the exception of DS9, 90% of trek fare is insipid morality plays with earth-shattering messages like 'nuclear war is bad' and 'racism is wrong'.
If you actually watch Star Trek with a critical eye you begin to realize that there is no actual canon, or even characterization. Every female character is either a heavily emotion driven mother figure or a spunky warrior woman (tomboy), or if you go back to the old series, a secretary or a nurse. There are no hard and fast rules in the Star Trek world. The Federation has a prime directive, but its routinely violated by every captain we've seen. The captains always approach such situations as if something like this has never come up in the whole history of the Federation, as opposed to three times in the previous season, series or decade. Doesn't the federation have a fucking supreme court to set precedent?
Look, I used to love Trek, because it was the only thing going, and because I was 15 and didn't know any better. I also used to be really into G.I. Joe, but these are things we get over, you know. I don't know what leads you to believe that Trek is in ANY way intellectual. Idealistic maybe, but not intellectual. Tell me why you think it is and I'll describe in detail why you're wrong.
Star Trek is over. They had their chance to keep up with the times in terms of writing (Battlestar Galatica makes it clear it doesn't matter what the technology is, as long as the characters are solid and the storylines are good and relevant. No one wants to watch a show about cooperation and peace and happiness and the federation when that's clearly not the direction we're heading. A show about the nearly total destruction of mankind somehow just seems more apropos.
Hell, Paramount probably only asked Abrams after asking Moore and being told to go fuck themselves.
Ok, you do know that the FX company for Firefly is the exact same company that does Galactica right? I mean you didn't notice the similarities, like all the shots being done as if they were being shot with a handheld cam by some guy floating in space? If firefly had continued, then its FX shots would most likely look exactly on par with the current Galactica stuff.
even if DS9 was a ripoff of B5, that doesn't detract from the fact that DS9 was better executed.
My home cable modem regularly exceeds 8Mb and based on the things I do with my time and connectivity, visiting my in-laws with their 1.5Mb DSL connection is like taking a nice swim in molasses.
Just because you think the supposed real reason for the war is valid doesn't mean it it, even if you think most other people don't have the capacity to understand. Hell, that attitude is part of the problem.
You know, I assumed the war wasn't about WMD's too. I figured the administration had an ulterior motive. I think that's ascribing far too much talent to the administration. Even if you give them credit for having a shadowy master plan, you still have to admit the possiblity that they're fucking it up.
1. ban the guild for promoting hate speech 2. GLBT friendly doesn't mean you have to be gay (or lesbian etc). It means you have to be opposed to gay-bashing. No one bashes straight people. Straight people aren't persecuted in society.
And on what basis, pray tell, should guilds be allowed to recruit? If you strip out all possible real world ties, then all that's left is style of play and level of dedication to the gameworld. That's hardly healthy. I'm in the one of the Penny Arcade guilds because I like Penny Arcade. If PA suddenly gains a state GLBT friendly policy, does that make my guild suddenly in violation? Where do you draw the line? As far as I'm concerned, the line should be drawn at hate speech or offensive language. But since many consider 'fag' to be both of those and Blizzard clearly allows it, they're not even drawing that line.