Can you please explain why? I wrote a plugin for Gnome-Do last summer and found the code refreshingly simple and easy to grok. I'm a hard core C/Perl/Java coder, and I really like some of the features of C#, such as the in-line properties for accessors/mutators. The dbus hooks into Mono are first-class citizens, and MUCH easier to use than their C counterparts. Apart from the "omg a Microsoft engineer designed it" knee-jerk reaction, what is the complaint with Mono?
The Gnome version of that is Gnome Do, which started as a project to port Quicksilver to Linux. Quicksilver was purchased by Apple and put into OSX 10.3 several years ago. I use Gnome, and I no longer have any sort of task bar or "start menu"; they are pointless wastes of screen real estate. If I want to chat with my buddy Mike, I just hit meta-space, and then type "ch", which auto-completes to "Chat", then I hit tab and type "mi" which auto-completes to Mike. Gnome-Do will then launch Pidgin and open a chat window for Mike. If I want to listen to Rhapsody In Blue, I hit meta-space, and type "rha", it auto-completes the song name, I hit enter and then Rhythmbox starts playing Gershwin. It really is an amazing riff on all the quick launchers. It's much better than Spotlight (Apple's version of Quicksilver); I wrote a plugin for Gnome-Do last summer -- it's all written in C#/Mono and very accessible for coders of any level.
According to the latest PC Gamer podcast, the PC version also has many more enemies, and is therefore a lot more difficult than the console versions. I'm playing on "normal" difficulty on PC, and have died too many times to remember (level 9). I can play through Mass Effect without ever dying once on Hard. The quick-bar at the bottom of the screen (1920x1080) is already full of spells, potions, elixers, etc.. My brother has the 360 version, I'm intrigued to go find out how different they really are, and how he could possibly play it without a mouse. The game feels like the old Baldur's Gate games; even though it's using a variant of the Mass Effect engine, it uses it very differently. Great game.
The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is incredible. I go there every time I visit Portland. I put it ahead of any technology museums in the surrounding states, including my native California.
Amazon dosn't pay sales tax on items you buy from them in thier home state unless it is a state where they have a nexus.
Wow, I must have missed where "nexus" was defined in the Constitution. Don't get me wrong, I believe all sales taxes should be abolished in favor or progressive income taxes -- but to make such distinctions is asinine. Why should Amazon's board be able to decide which state is and is not a "nexus", and then deign to follow those laws that they choose? Amazon uses Idaho for gift certificate sales because it is one of the few states that allow the proceeds to return to the company when the expiration date passes. They are picking and choosing the local laws that they want to follow; but then they cry and take their toys home when others play the same game.
Amazon should charge sales tax on those states that pass these laws. The fight is between the citizens of those states and their publicly elected governments, not between Amazon and the government.
This has everything to do with the commerce clause. The states are flirting with the fringes of it, and Amazon is playing it for their benefit. If you really don't think it is, then go ahead and try to buy a big-ticket item (such as a car) from a neighboring state and then bring it home and register it...
Buggy-whip manufacturers were no doubt quite upset with the proliferation of the horseless carriage. I suppose they should have lobbied for laws to make them illegal.
This is hardly a case of luddism. We're talking about a community that is using a tried-and-true sales tax in order to fund the common coffers. The sales tax can be the key component of the so-called "flat tax", which is lauded by conservatives everywhere as the solution to all our budget problems. I have moral issues with sales taxes at all because they seem to be regressive in nature (particularly when on food and shelter) -- but to allow Amazon to pay no taxes while Joe Shopowner has to pony up... well, it smacks of a government-created market disparity. Add to that the inefficiencies of shipping products a-la-carte instead of in bulk, you begin to uncover something rotten and inefficient.
They have no profit motive and clearly no personal integrity or desire to serve motives.
Yes, clearly, all politicians lack personal integrity -- and if they had a profit motive they would be full of integrity. </sarcasm>
At every turn, government at all levels seek more and more money rather than taking a hard look at where they are spending it.
Wait, I thought they had no profit motive...
Perhaps North Carolina is upset because local business are closing due to the tax disparity? Amazon sneaks in as an interstate institution, and they know that if residents have to pay tax in addition to shipping, their customers will be more likely to patronize local business. The same places that provide property tax and pay for things like schools. I doubt this has anything to do with "campaign donors and higher pay", which sounds like knee-jerk AM radio conservatism.
Seriously? You're going to swallow the $99 argument? Try taking a look at the TCO of the iPhone. The FCC is even looking into this anti-competitive bundling crap. IPhone manufacturing costs put it just below $200, and yet AT&T will only sell you one for $600 w/o a contract.
What this has to do with the PS3 is left as an exercise to the reader.
Amen. I wish more developers would take the time to understand this point. Without an analog to Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Flash (vector animator/tweening) -- no other technology will succeed. HTML5 is a great _engine_, but that's all it is until we have the tooling to make it actually useful.
Yes, it would be nice to be able to look left and right during a racing game without having to use a button. I think Natal will be great for things like that, but it will not replace the controller.
A store and system that does little beyond locking you in to paying retail prices for new games for the rest of all time is going to be a hard thing to sell to people that know they can do better.
That's the fundamental problem. Sony executives have had a long history of exploiting the PlayStation brand with "synergy" for the rest of the company. The PS3 and the PSP are prime examples of mostly-useless crap that they have shoved into them in order to "leverage" other Sony properties (UMD, Blueray, Memorystick, etc.). The executives are freaking out over the iPhone because they see their market crumbling, and so what do they do? Do they copy the Apple model? Hell no. Instead, they've removed the UMB albatross and replaced it with what is effectively a used-game killing technology that still charges full price. They are going to "trickle" titles into the store (Nintendo is also guilty of this with the DSi and WiiWare) instead of immediately placing every title at our fingertips.
They just don't get it. I love my PSP 3000; it's an excellent SNES/Genesis/NES emulator. It does an OK job at N64 and some MAME titles. I'd gladly buy these gems if they are extremely cheap -- after all, once my PSP (or DSi) dies, all of them disappear into a black hole. Paying full price and waiting weeks and weeks for a 10-year-old title to be "released" is just stupid. Paying anything over $20 for new titles which are DRM-ladden and tied to a physical player --- well, that's just unacceptable. Steam allows me to move from machine to machine; the software follows my account.
Wake up Sony and Nintendo. You're going to be irrelevant soon.
Not to mention that Nintendo's DS has been broken for much longer, and has and even bigger piracy "problem". If jailbroken units are the cause of PSP's demise, then you must explain why the DS has not suffered the same fate. Sony just can't come to grips with the fact the PSP's UMD drive was a shitty solution to a problem that didn't exist. It sapped battery power. It was slow. The "cross company synergy" didn't come to fruition. It was a bold move, but ultimately a bad one.
The reason why Java has garbage collection has nothing to do with programmer convenience; it is needed in order to make Java's security model work. Without garbage collection, a thread could allocate a chunk of memory and then free it, while hanging on to the pointer -- and then periodically take a look at what shows up in the memory area where the previously freed block used to be.
Ridiculous. The only way to allocate dynamic memory from the Java language is by creating objects; there is no way to "hang on to a pointer" because there are no pointers. If you're talking about the JVM itself, then that all depends on the implementation of the VM -- but even still, there is no idea of a pointer unless you're in JNI, in which case you're bypasing the security model anyway...
Any Java process running in the same VM would be at risk. This kind of deliberate use of "dangling pointers" is easy to prevent if using garbage collectors, very difficult to prevent otherwise.
How is thread 2 going to get a reference to an object that is "no longer being used" by thread 1? Again, there are no pointers.. and this has nothing to do with garbage collection.
Protecting processes running in the same VM from each other may not seem terribly useful now, but Java was originally designed to be used in embedded controllers, where the JVM would *be* the operating system, and where processes had to be protected from each other without the help of a hardware memory management unit.
Oh wow. +5 insightful for THAT?
There are no processes in the JVM. A JVM can create new processes, but it those processes do not run in the same VM.
FWIW, I also beg to differ about the difficulty of manual memory management. In C++ it is usually very easy, as long as you're consistent about doing deallocations in destructors. I once had to write a 40,000+ line C++ program, with lots of dynamic memory management going on; once development was complete, I ran a complete test suite under Purify, and found 5, yes, five, memory leaks. Considering that most leaks are the result of mis-handled object ownership, which is an issue that garbage collection does not eliminate in general, you should be careful about your design, *and* use memory analyzers like OptimizeIt, even when developing in a GC environment.
You probably didn't use multiple 3rd-party libraries then. Each one will potentially use a different model. Particularly insidious libraries have you free memory inside structs before freeing the struct (object) itself. Java has no ambiguity in this regard. You don't have to worry about how to "free" object Foo from some factory in Mary's handy library -- it Just Works.
Garbage collection is all about programmer convenience. The tradeoff is that it causes issues for performance testing -- but there are many, many tools to help with that, and they are much easier to implement than memory leak detectors (particularly in event-driven systems with near-infinite states).
Good riddance to C++. It's great for games and (maybe) operating systems, but keep it the hell away from the datacenter.
There is no difference in this regard when one compares Scientology to Mormonism, though. While latter-day saints are able to participate in Sunday services and basic salvation (baptism, confirmation, priesthood) -- they are NOT able to participate in the higher ordinances of the church without taking out their endowments at the temple. Guess what one of the qualifications for attending temple is.
Being a full tithe payer!
So, it's not so different from Scientology, and yet it has the status of a religion. I don't understand why France tries to "protect" people from one group but not the other. It seems a slippery slope to discern which organizations are "real" religions and which ones are "fake". I would posit that the task is futile, because, by definition, religions cannot be disproven with reason; they are entirely based on faith and personal experience.
I attacked your whiny bitch argument from a free-market perspective, not from hierarchy of needs stand. It doesn't matter if a consumer is "forced" to buy it, that is beside the point. Free markets work when there is choice, whether its for food or cell phones. The current American system is fucked up; in order to buy your preferred phone (market choice), one must also add a bunch of contract and infrastructure commitments for an arbitrary length of time which may or may not continue a reasonable level of service (not a market choice). The reverse is also true; some excellent carriers may not "support" a phone that satisfies the consumer's needs. It's like having your television picked out by your content service, and then being bitch slapped with an industry-wide two-year contract and told to sit down and shut up when it doesn't work very well twelve months in.
Fortunately, neither your nor my opinions matter. The legal system will deal with it in a fair, non whiny-bitch-hyperbolic manner.
What if you want to cancel the service a year later, after the network clogs up due to hordes of iPhone users? The answer is a lawsuit, and bringing one does not a whiny bitch make. I've noticed that these 2 and 3-year contracts are now seeping into cable and satellite service. It's despicable, anti-competitive, free-market destroying corporatism at its finest. They only get away with it because their insular oligarchies make them de-facto mopolies.
Bring on the lawsuits, I say. This crap has to end at some point -- or we'll eventually be signing 5-year contracts for grocery store loyalty.
He's simply pointing out that it's an eerie coincidence that Microsoft is suing TomTom for linux code, and that this company is suing a Linux shop for O/R mapping at the same time. This patent troll could have filed suit against any number of companies, including Apple, Sun or Oracle -- all of which sell JavaEE middle tiers and make far more money on them. Why did they pick RedHat? It smells fishy.
"It's out there and it's happening," Dunn said. "It's felonies, potentially federal felonies, and kids are clueless. They think that because the person is across the room and you're sending it across the room that it isn't a big deal. It's not the case."
These kids could end up on the sex-offender registry, which would further deflate its usefulness and also deny a whole host of opportunities from these kids. What they did amounts to "show me yours, I'll show you mine" in my opinion -- but our culture is so wrapped up in sex offender mania that we're conflating rapists with innocent behavior.
When we bought our house close to the University of Utah, we looked on the state's sex offender registry and were alarmed by all the incidents around. After drilling down to specific cases, however, it turns out that most of them were of the drunken-college-student variety. Now, when I hear that someone is a "sex offender", I'm not certain if they are a violent rapist, or if they took a dare to run down the block naked.
Slashdot Mirror
Countdown to Dan Kaminsky abusing it.... 5.... 4.... 3....
So, before we had government, every surviving adult was "grown up" and held no magical world views? That would be a sight to see!
Can you please explain why? I wrote a plugin for Gnome-Do last summer and found the code refreshingly simple and easy to grok. I'm a hard core C/Perl/Java coder, and I really like some of the features of C#, such as the in-line properties for accessors/mutators. The dbus hooks into Mono are first-class citizens, and MUCH easier to use than their C counterparts. Apart from the "omg a Microsoft engineer designed it" knee-jerk reaction, what is the complaint with Mono?
The Gnome version of that is Gnome Do, which started as a project to port Quicksilver to Linux. Quicksilver was purchased by Apple and put into OSX 10.3 several years ago. I use Gnome, and I no longer have any sort of task bar or "start menu"; they are pointless wastes of screen real estate. If I want to chat with my buddy Mike, I just hit meta-space, and then type "ch", which auto-completes to "Chat", then I hit tab and type "mi" which auto-completes to Mike. Gnome-Do will then launch Pidgin and open a chat window for Mike. If I want to listen to Rhapsody In Blue, I hit meta-space, and type "rha", it auto-completes the song name, I hit enter and then Rhythmbox starts playing Gershwin. It really is an amazing riff on all the quick launchers. It's much better than Spotlight (Apple's version of Quicksilver); I wrote a plugin for Gnome-Do last summer -- it's all written in C#/Mono and very accessible for coders of any level.
According to the latest PC Gamer podcast, the PC version also has many more enemies, and is therefore a lot more difficult than the console versions. I'm playing on "normal" difficulty on PC, and have died too many times to remember (level 9). I can play through Mass Effect without ever dying once on Hard. The quick-bar at the bottom of the screen (1920x1080) is already full of spells, potions, elixers, etc.. My brother has the 360 version, I'm intrigued to go find out how different they really are, and how he could possibly play it without a mouse. The game feels like the old Baldur's Gate games; even though it's using a variant of the Mass Effect engine, it uses it very differently. Great game.
But the irony is delicious. Disney has always fought for infinite copyright, and now it will come back to bite them in the ass.
Seems to be fine at the moment. Is this the first anti-slashdot-effect?
The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is incredible. I go there every time I visit Portland. I put it ahead of any technology museums in the surrounding states, including my native California.
Wouldn't that be a legitimate use of the keyboard? Would Microsoft pay $2000 for it?
gentle.. gentle.. gentle..
asdf... mmmm....
Harder! Firmer!
THERE!
HARDER! NOW! THE TILDE! THE TILDE! CARROT! YES!
Amazon dosn't pay sales tax on items you buy from them in thier home state unless it is a state where they have a nexus.
Wow, I must have missed where "nexus" was defined in the Constitution. Don't get me wrong, I believe all sales taxes should be abolished in favor or progressive income taxes -- but to make such distinctions is asinine. Why should Amazon's board be able to decide which state is and is not a "nexus", and then deign to follow those laws that they choose? Amazon uses Idaho for gift certificate sales because it is one of the few states that allow the proceeds to return to the company when the expiration date passes. They are picking and choosing the local laws that they want to follow; but then they cry and take their toys home when others play the same game.
Amazon should charge sales tax on those states that pass these laws. The fight is between the citizens of those states and their publicly elected governments, not between Amazon and the government.
This has everything to do with the commerce clause. The states are flirting with the fringes of it, and Amazon is playing it for their benefit. If you really don't think it is, then go ahead and try to buy a big-ticket item (such as a car) from a neighboring state and then bring it home and register it...
Buggy-whip manufacturers were no doubt quite upset with the proliferation of the horseless carriage. I suppose they should have lobbied for laws to make them illegal.
This is hardly a case of luddism. We're talking about a community that is using a tried-and-true sales tax in order to fund the common coffers. The sales tax can be the key component of the so-called "flat tax", which is lauded by conservatives everywhere as the solution to all our budget problems. I have moral issues with sales taxes at all because they seem to be regressive in nature (particularly when on food and shelter) -- but to allow Amazon to pay no taxes while Joe Shopowner has to pony up... well, it smacks of a government-created market disparity. Add to that the inefficiencies of shipping products a-la-carte instead of in bulk, you begin to uncover something rotten and inefficient.
They have no profit motive and clearly no personal integrity or desire to serve motives.
Yes, clearly, all politicians lack personal integrity -- and if they had a profit motive they would be full of integrity. </sarcasm>
At every turn, government at all levels seek more and more money rather than taking a hard look at where they are spending it.
Wait, I thought they had no profit motive...
Perhaps North Carolina is upset because local business are closing due to the tax disparity? Amazon sneaks in as an interstate institution, and they know that if residents have to pay tax in addition to shipping, their customers will be more likely to patronize local business. The same places that provide property tax and pay for things like schools. I doubt this has anything to do with "campaign donors and higher pay", which sounds like knee-jerk AM radio conservatism.
What this has to do with the PS3 is left as an exercise to the reader.
Amen. I wish more developers would take the time to understand this point. Without an analog to Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Flash (vector animator/tweening) -- no other technology will succeed. HTML5 is a great _engine_, but that's all it is until we have the tooling to make it actually useful.
Yes, it would be nice to be able to look left and right during a racing game without having to use a button. I think Natal will be great for things like that, but it will not replace the controller.
Oh no! Microsoft Bob will come back?!?!
A store and system that does little beyond locking you in to paying retail prices for new games for the rest of all time is going to be a hard thing to sell to people that know they can do better.
That's the fundamental problem. Sony executives have had a long history of exploiting the PlayStation brand with "synergy" for the rest of the company. The PS3 and the PSP are prime examples of mostly-useless crap that they have shoved into them in order to "leverage" other Sony properties (UMD, Blueray, Memorystick, etc.). The executives are freaking out over the iPhone because they see their market crumbling, and so what do they do? Do they copy the Apple model? Hell no. Instead, they've removed the UMB albatross and replaced it with what is effectively a used-game killing technology that still charges full price. They are going to "trickle" titles into the store (Nintendo is also guilty of this with the DSi and WiiWare) instead of immediately placing every title at our fingertips.
They just don't get it. I love my PSP 3000; it's an excellent SNES/Genesis/NES emulator. It does an OK job at N64 and some MAME titles. I'd gladly buy these gems if they are extremely cheap -- after all, once my PSP (or DSi) dies, all of them disappear into a black hole. Paying full price and waiting weeks and weeks for a 10-year-old title to be "released" is just stupid. Paying anything over $20 for new titles which are DRM-ladden and tied to a physical player --- well, that's just unacceptable. Steam allows me to move from machine to machine; the software follows my account.
Wake up Sony and Nintendo. You're going to be irrelevant soon.
Not to mention that Nintendo's DS has been broken for much longer, and has and even bigger piracy "problem". If jailbroken units are the cause of PSP's demise, then you must explain why the DS has not suffered the same fate. Sony just can't come to grips with the fact the PSP's UMD drive was a shitty solution to a problem that didn't exist. It sapped battery power. It was slow. The "cross company synergy" didn't come to fruition. It was a bold move, but ultimately a bad one.
The reason why Java has garbage collection has nothing to do with programmer convenience; it is needed in order to make Java's security model work. Without garbage collection, a thread could allocate a chunk of memory and then free it, while hanging on to the pointer -- and then periodically take a look at what shows up in the memory area where the previously freed block used to be.
Ridiculous. The only way to allocate dynamic memory from the Java language is by creating objects; there is no way to "hang on to a pointer" because there are no pointers. If you're talking about the JVM itself, then that all depends on the implementation of the VM -- but even still, there is no idea of a pointer unless you're in JNI, in which case you're bypasing the security model anyway...
Any Java process running in the same VM would be at risk. This kind of deliberate use of "dangling pointers" is easy to prevent if using garbage collectors, very difficult to prevent otherwise.
How is thread 2 going to get a reference to an object that is "no longer being used" by thread 1? Again, there are no pointers.. and this has nothing to do with garbage collection.
Protecting processes running in the same VM from each other may not seem terribly useful now, but Java was originally designed to be used in embedded controllers, where the JVM would *be* the operating system, and where processes had to be protected from each other without the help of a hardware memory management unit.
Oh wow. +5 insightful for THAT? There are no processes in the JVM. A JVM can create new processes, but it those processes do not run in the same VM.
FWIW, I also beg to differ about the difficulty of manual memory management. In C++ it is usually very easy, as long as you're consistent about doing deallocations in destructors. I once had to write a 40,000+ line C++ program, with lots of dynamic memory management going on; once development was complete, I ran a complete test suite under Purify, and found 5, yes, five, memory leaks. Considering that most leaks are the result of mis-handled object ownership, which is an issue that garbage collection does not eliminate in general, you should be careful about your design, *and* use memory analyzers like OptimizeIt, even when developing in a GC environment.
You probably didn't use multiple 3rd-party libraries then. Each one will potentially use a different model. Particularly insidious libraries have you free memory inside structs before freeing the struct (object) itself. Java has no ambiguity in this regard. You don't have to worry about how to "free" object Foo from some factory in Mary's handy library -- it Just Works.
Garbage collection is all about programmer convenience. The tradeoff is that it causes issues for performance testing -- but there are many, many tools to help with that, and they are much easier to implement than memory leak detectors (particularly in event-driven systems with near-infinite states).
Good riddance to C++. It's great for games and (maybe) operating systems, but keep it the hell away from the datacenter.
There is no difference in this regard when one compares Scientology to Mormonism, though. While latter-day saints are able to participate in Sunday services and basic salvation (baptism, confirmation, priesthood) -- they are NOT able to participate in the higher ordinances of the church without taking out their endowments at the temple. Guess what one of the qualifications for attending temple is.
Being a full tithe payer!
So, it's not so different from Scientology, and yet it has the status of a religion. I don't understand why France tries to "protect" people from one group but not the other. It seems a slippery slope to discern which organizations are "real" religions and which ones are "fake". I would posit that the task is futile, because, by definition, religions cannot be disproven with reason; they are entirely based on faith and personal experience.
I attacked your whiny bitch argument from a free-market perspective, not from hierarchy of needs stand. It doesn't matter if a consumer is "forced" to buy it, that is beside the point. Free markets work when there is choice, whether its for food or cell phones. The current American system is fucked up; in order to buy your preferred phone (market choice), one must also add a bunch of contract and infrastructure commitments for an arbitrary length of time which may or may not continue a reasonable level of service (not a market choice). The reverse is also true; some excellent carriers may not "support" a phone that satisfies the consumer's needs. It's like having your television picked out by your content service, and then being bitch slapped with an industry-wide two-year contract and told to sit down and shut up when it doesn't work very well twelve months in.
Fortunately, neither your nor my opinions matter. The legal system will deal with it in a fair, non whiny-bitch-hyperbolic manner.
What if you want to cancel the service a year later, after the network clogs up due to hordes of iPhone users? The answer is a lawsuit, and bringing one does not a whiny bitch make. I've noticed that these 2 and 3-year contracts are now seeping into cable and satellite service. It's despicable, anti-competitive, free-market destroying corporatism at its finest. They only get away with it because their insular oligarchies make them de-facto mopolies.
Bring on the lawsuits, I say. This crap has to end at some point -- or we'll eventually be signing 5-year contracts for grocery store loyalty.
He's simply pointing out that it's an eerie coincidence that Microsoft is suing TomTom for linux code, and that this company is suing a Linux shop for O/R mapping at the same time. This patent troll could have filed suit against any number of companies, including Apple, Sun or Oracle -- all of which sell JavaEE middle tiers and make far more money on them. Why did they pick RedHat? It smells fishy.
That was a miniseries called Charlie Jade. Not the best acting, and they fucked the story up a bit -- but I still enjoyed it.
Charges coming in Davis County over nude photos
"It's out there and it's happening," Dunn said. "It's felonies, potentially federal felonies, and kids are clueless. They think that because the person is across the room and you're sending it across the room that it isn't a big deal. It's not the case."
These kids could end up on the sex-offender registry, which would further deflate its usefulness and also deny a whole host of opportunities from these kids. What they did amounts to "show me yours, I'll show you mine" in my opinion -- but our culture is so wrapped up in sex offender mania that we're conflating rapists with innocent behavior.
When we bought our house close to the University of Utah, we looked on the state's sex offender registry and were alarmed by all the incidents around. After drilling down to specific cases, however, it turns out that most of them were of the drunken-college-student variety. Now, when I hear that someone is a "sex offender", I'm not certain if they are a violent rapist, or if they took a dare to run down the block naked.