The single player missions in a game like Doom III will not be...
1. Start level 2. Wait until player arrives at end...sort of affairs. I'm sure Doom III will be full of scripted events, and will rely on certain things happening at certain times in response to actions. Adding a co-op player means re-thinking all that stuff, and multiplies the possibilities to be considered.
As you say, co-op presents no special technical difficulties. It's just a matter of editing presentation and scripting - but that's a large affair in what, I'm sure, will be a large, complex game.
If you're going to call me out for using "retarded", you should also call me out for using "idiot" - it's the same deal, and used to mean the same thing. In 30 years, few people will remember that the word "retarded" ever had anything to do with Down's Syndrome - "retarded" lost the fight to mean that a long time ago (and thus they've moved on to new words). Euphimisms like this are necessarily shortlived. Give it up.
But if you can't, you definitely shouldn't use the word "dumb" - unless you're speaking German.
If Real wants its product to be accessible, they should make it so you don't have to play "Hunt the Free Version Link" on their website for 4 hours to get their software. Idiots.
As to WMP, I think the ability to play a video or sound has gotten to be something people expect of an OS. Macs can sure as hell play video out of the box - to me it would be unfair to say MS couldn't do this. Let software compete on merit - not on the basis of goofy artificial restrictions to protect software that very few people want.
Years ago, we went through the same dance with the browser - and that dance looks retarded now. Imagine if Windows today shipped without a browser? How would most people go about getting one? It would be a crippled OS. As years go by, and PC's do more media work, WMP will look the same way.
1. Make a handheld that plays GameCube games. 2. Make a handheld that supports reasonable 3d games and wireless gaming. 3. Make a portable system that plays GameCube games and DVD's. 4. Make a portable system with two screens (increasing cost/size), don't say why, don't release any information while PSP eats your mindshare lunch, don't give any re-assurance about specs/capabilities, and have vague, horrifying rumors that it plays movies in some wacky, proprietary format
Please, Nintendo, don't kill your fanboys like this. Have some mercy. Or shame. Or something.
My dream advice? Co-brand the next X-Box with MS (call it XCube) - it's new architecture should make it easy to make it GameCube backwards compatible. Then make a handheld that's GameCube compatible. You can sell the great new software for the XCube, while also making money on GameCube/PortaGameCube/Also-Playable-on-XCube games.
think that in your rush to argue with a +5 Insightful comment
Slashdot ratings are meaningless. If you derive any satisfaction from having a +5 rated comment that is really, really sad. And, if you're wondering, my Karma dick is undoubtedly bigger than yours.:)
Did the Pentagon fail to protect the country or not?
My argument was that this was irrelevant. Let me be clear: I am not interested in talking about your absurd conspiracy theories or whether Bush was elected. As a hint for future reference, pretty much nobody is. I brought up Bush being elected as a joke - it's irrelevant to the point of cliche. I wasn't trying to argue it either way - it is completely irrelevant.
I never said anybody needed a base on the moon, I merely gave reasons for why it might be militaristically important, especially in the current political context
Actually, I think we should have a moonbase. My post was to give arguments as to why it didn't make sense as a military resource - arguments you ignored. Instead, you brought in 9/11, which is (at the risk of repeating myself) irrelevant - despite your vigorous metaphor mixing attempt.
I have nothing interesting to say about your absurd conspiracy theory - it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
To me, that's a failure to keep your hill safe from moles.
"Hill", in this case, is not a generic metaphor for territory or power. It has a specific meaning relating to military capability.
Perhaps I need to be clearer about how irrelevant this is: the possibility of terrorists killing lots of civilians via low resource infiltration doesn't mean we need a hill on the moon to hit targets in Syria.
I suppose next you'll remind me that Bush wasn't really elected ON THE HILL.
I think there's a lot of value to the prestige of having a moonbase. In the current atmosphere, having military capabilities there would have positives and negatives in terms of prestige.
I'm not sure how potent it would be as a deterrent. Terrorists aren't blind to practicality, and moon-missiles just don't have a lot of advantages. A much less costly option, and much more effective (both practically, and as deterrents) would be legions of super-Predator drones.
Esp. when we can create a nuclear explosion without the nasty radioactive fallout
The most potent fallout of a nuclear weapon now would be political. Current technology could produce fairly clean "battlefield nukes" - it's just not politically feasible regardless of practicality or science. And honestly, they wouldn't serve a significant field role in currently-imaginable conflicts.
Overall, I really like the moonbase plan. Having a peaceful, positive "national goal" can be a powerful force for good - and I think that's about what Bush wants out of the whole effort.
Well, wasn't 9/11 supposed to be an example of just how poor the US is controlling its hill? Isn't that the point?
If we define "top of the hill" as "the ability to know if terrorists are controlling your planes intent on smashing them into buildings" - then yes, the US has trouble controlling the top of the hill.
If we define "top of the hill" as "the ability to target and hit things all over the battlefield" like any normal person would, then your post reads like the nonsense it is.
And if anyone is claiming the US no longer has "top of the hill" in this sense, they're retarded. The US's problems are with controlling the "alleys", the "bunkers", and in very few cases the "beaches" - but "hill" has been well covered since about 1989 (when there was still two hills).
The moon may have been a military resource in the 60's, but it's hardly one now.
Soldier 1: "We're taking fire from that alley!" Soldier 2: "Quick, deploy the moon missiles!"
It's hard to argue that the US has any problems controlling the top of the hill these days. ICBM's still work. US planes have operated pretty much undeterred for a long time. And MAD, on the other hand, is less viable than ever as a strategy (given enemy psychology).
The moon has tons of resources for constructing weapons, especially new kinds of nuclear weapons
That's silly. Constructing weapons would be a ludicrously costly, stupid thing to do on the moon. New kind of nuclear weapons? The old kinds work perfectly well, thank you - they are perfectly capable of supplying any kind of abomination the military might demand of them, even if they must be dropped out of a plane rather than launched from the moon.
The US military needs more precise ways to blow small things up that they can't see - not bigger ways to blow big things up that they can see from the moon.
CoD may have some adult themes, but they're handled reasonably. Heck, stuff "goes boom" in Mario Kart. People dying is not the issue.
It's like saying "Saving Private Ryan" and "House of 1000 Corpses" are the same kind of movie because they both get gory. The first is a movie adults enjoy (like they would CoD, Halo, or Age of Empires), the second is an "adult-themed" movie.
The only real line-blurring games I've seen are Leisure-Suit Larry and GTA, and to a lesser extent survival horror or Eternal Darkness. In these cases, "adult-themes" end up working two ways - attracting adolescents (and the adolescent-at-heart), and turning some adults off (though certainly not all).
Mario Party 5 and Mario Kart Double Dash are amazingly fun, family games. I recently switched from PS2 to GameCube because my girlfriend loves Mario Kart and she thinks Manhunt is disgusting (it really is, too). They've got a really wide variety and they focus less on adult-themed games.
I've noticed that the adults that I talk to - professional people, parents, etc - uniformly prefer fun games with mild presentation: ranging from Mario Kart to Project Gotham to Super Monkey Ball to Halo. Nobody is crazy for Postal or Manhunt or Xtreme Beach Volleyball. "Adult" themed games, like "adult" movies, would be more aptly named "adolescent".
Adults, typically, have grown out of their desire to see nothing but boobs and blood. Adults don't think "ooh, I can't enjoy this because the graphics are cartoony and that's baby stuff".
When people complain about Nintendo making kids games, they should at least get the criticism right: Nintendo doesn't fail adults, it fails wide-eyed 15 year old boys.
This lock requires electricity and an electrical control. If you're going to require electricity, why not use a smart-card-esque key? You get all the benefits of this - plus a whole bunch more control/flexibility and likely less overall cost.
Most locks are picked by tweaking a series of levers in the lock or bypassing some sort of electronic control system.
There will be an electronic control system here, just like any other electronic system. The actual physical lock is still going to be actuated by electricity.
I suppose the system may be less prone to vandalism than an electrical system - but either is vulnerable to the old "fill lock with cement" trick, which is really pretty easy.
Perhaps there's something here I'm missing - but the article doesn't hint at what that might be.
Lately I've been playing Enemy Territory mostly, and only on PunkBusted servers. For a while, wallhacks were fairly common in ET (when you're spectating someone, detecting wallhackery is fairly easy) - but I haven't noticed a cheater for a long time now.
PB seems to work as advertised, and has never given me any problems. If it's letting some cheats through, it's not enough that it would affect my enjoyment of the game. If someone cares more about the outcome (or their performance), I suppose they may want a more foolproof tool - but PB is good enough for me.
Nintendo will hook up with "the beast" for a co-branded console - the XCube. It will be backwards compatible with the GameCube (it has a closely architecture), it will have easily the best first party support (bringing Nintendo brands and MS dollars), and a flabbergasting amount of power (better, proven architecture from IBM/ATI - more money to make it fly).
I suppose it depends on conditions in the job market.
Except this isn't just a niggle, its a major land grab attempt by the employer, and is illegal in many countries and states
Illegality be damned - it happens.
It really depends on the employer. At a larger firm, staying legal is usually a big deal and you could consult the company hr ethics patrol or whatever. At many smaller companies, it's just "how it is" and you can either "work 5 illegal minutes every day and remain employed" or "spend the next couple years trying to squeeze water from a rock while spending money you don't have on a lawyer who won't work on this crap."
Every job has plusses and minuses. In some job markets, you have to accept more minuses than plusses while you wait for something better. And sometimes you accept working 5 illegal minutes in order to keep a job that's really quite good. You don't strain at gnats if it means swallowing the camel (unemployment).
If this guy can do better, great. If he can't, he should be careful about managing how he appears to the company. Tread lightly, and keep an eye on the job ads.
..and I can go to the CEO (of a fairly large company) with an issue I want addressed. But that is after a long time of demonstrating that I'm competent. If I was a new employee, and the only reason he recognized me is because I was the guy who fiddled with his NDA, I wouldn't get a great reception for my change requests.
Contrary to popular belief, there are jobs out there.
Sometimes, in some places, for some people. I know plenty of quality people right now that are un- (or severly under-) employed. I know people that put up with fairly deep crap (eg. constant overtime, irrational demands) to continue getting a paycheck/year of experience.
Any job has a certain level of crap associated with it. There've been many times I've asked myself "Is this really the hill I want to die (get fired) on?" Looking back, I'm glad for all the times I've compromised. Issues are almost always less serious than they appear at the time, and are very seldom worth really sticking your neck out for - unless you're fairly sure you can get something better/as-good somewhere else.
Many bosses don't want boat-rockers. Someone who niggles about contracts may be the same guy who pulls out labor laws every time the boss wants 5 minutes of overtime - or the same guy who is constantly pushing his own way of doing this, that or the other.
Especially at the beginning of a job, many employers want some reassurance that the new guy is going to "submit", fit in, and concentrate on company work.
Depending on market conditions (and they don't sound good for this guy), I'd keep all of this very low-key. No lawyers, and no big confrontations - unless he doesn't need the job.
In this article it's worth mentioning as a means to contrast the whole grid idea with existing RPC designs
I guess. But it's confusing an implementation with an architecture. I suppose somebody might have asked "Couldn't we implement this sort of architecture using CORBA?" - but that train of thought seems out of place in the article.
To fit with the article, it seems like it would have made more sense to compare "Grid computing vs. regular RPC" rather than "Our protocols for grid computing vs. one protocol for RPC".
It's like an article comparing S-ATA and Ethernet (and bringing up DHCP as a real great feature). While you could legitimately write this article, it wouldn't be the most helpful.
The author seems to have intuited their similarity by looking over their respective buzzword lists. All-in-all, the article seemed only vaguely in touch with reality. And it was targetted much more at management than technical folk, the kind of people who would ask "Should I be pushing my guys to use P2P or CORBA for the new CRM system?"
I'm fairly sure I'm stupider now than when I started reading.
A lot of porn companies apparently put samples on the file sharing networks as ads. Some apparently even include popups of their sites embedded in wmv's.
Because Java is the best and C# is wrong and if this really is a performance difference then performance doesn't matter today but it probably isn't really a performance difference and what matters is clean syntax and open portability VM I bytecode everybody knows bean he needs to read blah, grouty, blah.
It seems many Slashdot readers not only fail to read the articles or others' comments, but can't even be bothered to read the whole little summary blurb before commenting.
Half the comments on this story are pretty much just template responses to anything that would compare Java and C# - and a good portion of the rest don't seem to have grasped what is stated in the summary.
My theory: posters realize that after the first 50 comments, they'll pretty much be talking to a black hole - so they comment earlier than their comprehension might dictate.
I agree, and I didn't mean to suggest that software patents are benign. While I do think that a company like IBM registers patents primarily as defense, they certainly have grave potential ramifications.
I think the solution here is very short patents on software/business methods (about 3 years), and shorter patents on traditional inventions as well.
It no longer needs to take a long time to get a reasonable competitive advantage from an invention - law should reflect that.
Lots of software companies have lots of patents. Sometimes they're silly, but it sets up sort of a Mutually Assured Destruction. Microsoft isn't going to try to bludgeon IBM with a patent suit, because they know IBM has just as many silly patents to bludgeon them back with.
It's because of this setup that we normally only see big IP cases come from companies that don't actually produce anything (and thus have little to fear from a counter-attack) - like SCO.
Slashdot Mirror
The single player missions in a game like Doom III will not be...
...sort of affairs. I'm sure Doom III will be full of scripted events, and will rely on certain things happening at certain times in response to actions. Adding a co-op player means re-thinking all that stuff, and multiplies the possibilities to be considered.
1. Start level
2. Wait until player arrives at end
As you say, co-op presents no special technical difficulties. It's just a matter of editing presentation and scripting - but that's a large affair in what, I'm sure, will be a large, complex game.
If you're going to call me out for using "retarded", you should also call me out for using "idiot" - it's the same deal, and used to mean the same thing. In 30 years, few people will remember that the word "retarded" ever had anything to do with Down's Syndrome - "retarded" lost the fight to mean that a long time ago (and thus they've moved on to new words). Euphimisms like this are necessarily shortlived. Give it up.
But if you can't, you definitely shouldn't use the word "dumb" - unless you're speaking German.
If Real wants its product to be accessible, they should make it so you don't have to play "Hunt the Free Version Link" on their website for 4 hours to get their software. Idiots.
As to WMP, I think the ability to play a video or sound has gotten to be something people expect of an OS. Macs can sure as hell play video out of the box - to me it would be unfair to say MS couldn't do this. Let software compete on merit - not on the basis of goofy artificial restrictions to protect software that very few people want.
Years ago, we went through the same dance with the browser - and that dance looks retarded now. Imagine if Windows today shipped without a browser? How would most people go about getting one? It would be a crippled OS. As years go by, and PC's do more media work, WMP will look the same way.
Here's some hypothetical plans:
1. Make a handheld that plays GameCube games.
2. Make a handheld that supports reasonable 3d games and wireless gaming.
3. Make a portable system that plays GameCube games and DVD's.
4. Make a portable system with two screens (increasing cost/size), don't say why, don't release any information while PSP eats your mindshare lunch, don't give any re-assurance about specs/capabilities, and have vague, horrifying rumors that it plays movies in some wacky, proprietary format
Please, Nintendo, don't kill your fanboys like this. Have some mercy. Or shame. Or something.
My dream advice? Co-brand the next X-Box with MS (call it XCube) - it's new architecture should make it easy to make it GameCube backwards compatible. Then make a handheld that's GameCube compatible. You can sell the great new software for the XCube, while also making money on GameCube/PortaGameCube/Also-Playable-on-XCube games.
think that in your rush to argue with a +5 Insightful comment
:)
Slashdot ratings are meaningless. If you derive any satisfaction from having a +5 rated comment that is really, really sad. And, if you're wondering, my Karma dick is undoubtedly bigger than yours.
Did the Pentagon fail to protect the country or not?
My argument was that this was irrelevant. Let me be clear: I am not interested in talking about your absurd conspiracy theories or whether Bush was elected. As a hint for future reference, pretty much nobody is. I brought up Bush being elected as a joke - it's irrelevant to the point of cliche. I wasn't trying to argue it either way - it is completely irrelevant.
I never said anybody needed a base on the moon, I merely gave reasons for why it might be militaristically important, especially in the current political context
Actually, I think we should have a moonbase. My post was to give arguments as to why it didn't make sense as a military resource - arguments you ignored. Instead, you brought in 9/11, which is (at the risk of repeating myself) irrelevant - despite your vigorous metaphor mixing attempt.
I have nothing interesting to say about your absurd conspiracy theory - it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
To me, that's a failure to keep your hill safe from moles.
"Hill", in this case, is not a generic metaphor for territory or power. It has a specific meaning relating to military capability.
Perhaps I need to be clearer about how irrelevant this is: the possibility of terrorists killing lots of civilians via low resource infiltration doesn't mean we need a hill on the moon to hit targets in Syria.
I suppose next you'll remind me that Bush wasn't really elected ON THE HILL.
I think there's a lot of value to the prestige of having a moonbase. In the current atmosphere, having military capabilities there would have positives and negatives in terms of prestige.
I'm not sure how potent it would be as a deterrent. Terrorists aren't blind to practicality, and moon-missiles just don't have a lot of advantages. A much less costly option, and much more effective (both practically, and as deterrents) would be legions of super-Predator drones.
Esp. when we can create a nuclear explosion without the nasty radioactive fallout
The most potent fallout of a nuclear weapon now would be political. Current technology could produce fairly clean "battlefield nukes" - it's just not politically feasible regardless of practicality or science. And honestly, they wouldn't serve a significant field role in currently-imaginable conflicts.
Overall, I really like the moonbase plan. Having a peaceful, positive "national goal" can be a powerful force for good - and I think that's about what Bush wants out of the whole effort.
Well, wasn't 9/11 supposed to be an example of just how poor the US is controlling its hill? Isn't that the point?
If we define "top of the hill" as "the ability to know if terrorists are controlling your planes intent on smashing them into buildings" - then yes, the US has trouble controlling the top of the hill.
If we define "top of the hill" as "the ability to target and hit things all over the battlefield" like any normal person would, then your post reads like the nonsense it is.
And if anyone is claiming the US no longer has "top of the hill" in this sense, they're retarded. The US's problems are with controlling the "alleys", the "bunkers", and in very few cases the "beaches" - but "hill" has been well covered since about 1989 (when there was still two hills).
Keep it straight, man.
The moon may have been a military resource in the 60's, but it's hardly one now.
Soldier 1: "We're taking fire from that alley!"
Soldier 2: "Quick, deploy the moon missiles!"
It's hard to argue that the US has any problems controlling the top of the hill these days. ICBM's still work. US planes have operated pretty much undeterred for a long time. And MAD, on the other hand, is less viable than ever as a strategy (given enemy psychology).
The moon has tons of resources for constructing weapons, especially new kinds of nuclear weapons
That's silly. Constructing weapons would be a ludicrously costly, stupid thing to do on the moon. New kind of nuclear weapons? The old kinds work perfectly well, thank you - they are perfectly capable of supplying any kind of abomination the military might demand of them, even if they must be dropped out of a plane rather than launched from the moon.
The US military needs more precise ways to blow small things up that they can't see - not bigger ways to blow big things up that they can see from the moon.
CoD may have some adult themes, but they're handled reasonably. Heck, stuff "goes boom" in Mario Kart. People dying is not the issue.
It's like saying "Saving Private Ryan" and "House of 1000 Corpses" are the same kind of movie because they both get gory. The first is a movie adults enjoy (like they would CoD, Halo, or Age of Empires), the second is an "adult-themed" movie.
The only real line-blurring games I've seen are Leisure-Suit Larry and GTA, and to a lesser extent survival horror or Eternal Darkness. In these cases, "adult-themes" end up working two ways - attracting adolescents (and the adolescent-at-heart), and turning some adults off (though certainly not all).
Mario Party 5 and Mario Kart Double Dash are amazingly fun, family games. I recently switched from PS2 to GameCube because my girlfriend loves Mario Kart and she thinks Manhunt is disgusting
(it really is, too). They've got a really wide variety and they focus less on adult-themed games.
I've noticed that the adults that I talk to - professional people, parents, etc - uniformly prefer fun games with mild presentation: ranging from Mario Kart to Project Gotham to Super Monkey Ball to Halo. Nobody is crazy for Postal or Manhunt or Xtreme Beach Volleyball. "Adult" themed games, like "adult" movies, would be more aptly named "adolescent".
Adults, typically, have grown out of their desire to see nothing but boobs and blood. Adults don't think "ooh, I can't enjoy this because the graphics are cartoony and that's baby stuff".
When people complain about Nintendo making kids games, they should at least get the criticism right: Nintendo doesn't fail adults, it fails wide-eyed 15 year old boys.
This lock requires electricity and an electrical control. If you're going to require electricity, why not use a smart-card-esque key? You get all the benefits of this - plus a whole bunch more control/flexibility and likely less overall cost.
Most locks are picked by tweaking a series of levers in the lock or bypassing some sort of electronic control system.
There will be an electronic control system here, just like any other electronic system. The actual physical lock is still going to be actuated by electricity.
I suppose the system may be less prone to vandalism than an electrical system - but either is vulnerable to the old "fill lock with cement" trick, which is really pretty easy.
Perhaps there's something here I'm missing - but the article doesn't hint at what that might be.
Windows Scripting Host should provide all the functionality you need. It's fairly easy to use, even if the target program has a complicated UI.
I've done this sort of batch convert with it before without much hassle.
Lately I've been playing Enemy Territory mostly, and only on PunkBusted servers. For a while, wallhacks were fairly common in ET (when you're spectating someone, detecting wallhackery is fairly easy) - but I haven't noticed a cheater for a long time now.
PB seems to work as advertised, and has never given me any problems. If it's letting some cheats through, it's not enough that it would affect my enjoyment of the game. If someone cares more about the outcome (or their performance), I suppose they may want a more foolproof tool - but PB is good enough for me.
Nintendo will hook up with "the beast" for a co-branded console - the XCube. It will be backwards compatible with the GameCube (it has a closely architecture), it will have easily the best first party support (bringing Nintendo brands and MS dollars), and a flabbergasting amount of power (better, proven architecture from IBM/ATI - more money to make it fly).
I suppose it depends on conditions in the job market.
Except this isn't just a niggle, its a major land grab attempt by the employer, and is illegal in many countries and states
Illegality be damned - it happens.
It really depends on the employer. At a larger firm, staying legal is usually a big deal and you could consult the company hr ethics patrol or whatever. At many smaller companies, it's just "how it is" and you can either "work 5 illegal minutes every day and remain employed" or "spend the next couple years trying to squeeze water from a rock while spending money you don't have on a lawyer who won't work on this crap."
Every job has plusses and minuses. In some job markets, you have to accept more minuses than plusses while you wait for something better. And sometimes you accept working 5 illegal minutes in order to keep a job that's really quite good. You don't strain at gnats if it means swallowing the camel (unemployment).
If this guy can do better, great. If he can't, he should be careful about managing how he appears to the company. Tread lightly, and keep an eye on the job ads.
..and I can go to the CEO (of a fairly large company) with an issue I want addressed. But that is after a long time of demonstrating that I'm competent. If I was a new employee, and the only reason he recognized me is because I was the guy who fiddled with his NDA, I wouldn't get a great reception for my change requests.
Contrary to popular belief, there are jobs out there.
Sometimes, in some places, for some people. I know plenty of quality people right now that are un- (or severly under-) employed. I know people that put up with fairly deep crap (eg. constant overtime, irrational demands) to continue getting a paycheck/year of experience.
Any job has a certain level of crap associated with it. There've been many times I've asked myself "Is this really the hill I want to die (get fired) on?" Looking back, I'm glad for all the times I've compromised. Issues are almost always less serious than they appear at the time, and are very seldom worth really sticking your neck out for - unless you're fairly sure you can get something better/as-good somewhere else.
Many bosses don't want boat-rockers. Someone who niggles about contracts may be the same guy who pulls out labor laws every time the boss wants 5 minutes of overtime - or the same guy who is constantly pushing his own way of doing this, that or the other.
Especially at the beginning of a job, many employers want some reassurance that the new guy is going to "submit", fit in, and concentrate on company work.
Depending on market conditions (and they don't sound good for this guy), I'd keep all of this very low-key. No lawyers, and no big confrontations - unless he doesn't need the job.
In this article it's worth mentioning as a means to contrast the whole grid idea with existing RPC designs
I guess. But it's confusing an implementation with an architecture. I suppose somebody might have asked "Couldn't we implement this sort of architecture using CORBA?" - but that train of thought seems out of place in the article.
To fit with the article, it seems like it would have made more sense to compare "Grid computing vs. regular RPC" rather than "Our protocols for grid computing vs. one protocol for RPC".
It's like an article comparing S-ATA and Ethernet (and bringing up DHCP as a real great feature). While you could legitimately write this article, it wouldn't be the most helpful.
The author seems to have intuited their similarity by looking over their respective buzzword lists. All-in-all, the article seemed only vaguely in touch with reality. And it was targetted much more at management than technical folk, the kind of people who would ask "Should I be pushing my guys to use P2P or CORBA for the new CRM system?"
I'm fairly sure I'm stupider now than when I started reading.
A lot of porn companies apparently put samples on the file sharing networks as ads. Some apparently even include popups of their sites embedded in wmv's.
Windows Forms in .NET aren't coupled with any particular language. I'm guessing that wasn't the answer you were looking for, though.
Because Java is the best and C# is wrong and if this really is a performance difference then performance doesn't matter today but it probably isn't really a performance difference and what matters is clean syntax and open portability VM I bytecode everybody knows bean he needs to read blah, grouty, blah.
It seems many Slashdot readers not only fail to read the articles or others' comments, but can't even be bothered to read the whole little summary blurb before commenting.
Half the comments on this story are pretty much just template responses to anything that would compare Java and C# - and a good portion of the rest don't seem to have grasped what is stated in the summary.
My theory: posters realize that after the first 50 comments, they'll pretty much be talking to a black hole - so they comment earlier than their comprehension might dictate.
I agree, and I didn't mean to suggest that software patents are benign. While I do think that a company like IBM registers patents primarily as defense, they certainly have grave potential ramifications.
I think the solution here is very short patents on software/business methods (about 3 years), and shorter patents on traditional inventions as well.
It no longer needs to take a long time to get a reasonable competitive advantage from an invention - law should reflect that.
Lots of software companies have lots of patents. Sometimes they're silly, but it sets up sort of a Mutually Assured Destruction. Microsoft isn't going to try to bludgeon IBM with a patent suit, because they know IBM has just as many silly patents to bludgeon them back with.
It's because of this setup that we normally only see big IP cases come from companies that don't actually produce anything (and thus have little to fear from a counter-attack) - like SCO.