A couple important things that the above post doesn't seem to get:
PvP may be a niche market, but if that niche is only 10% - well, I think I'd call a million subscriptions a success.
WAR is oriented towards RvR (realm vs. realm). RvR is different in some aspects than a number of common impressions about PvP. In particular:
the pvp aspect is voluntary (you choose to go into the area) - no getting ganked when you want to relax
you are detached from your enemy and have de facto allies (each realm is one side, your allies can't hurt you and are likely working towards killing your enemies) - side bonus, enemies can't talk trash to you
RvR is implicitly cooperative - see above.
Just because RvR is a primary feature in this game does not mean there is not a wealth of PvE content. As others in this thread have said, public quests are a wonderful new feature to encourage cooperative play. There is also raid content, dungeons, etc.
RvR is just as social as casual pve - perhaps more so because you are more likely to be working on a coordinated objective, unless you are in a coordinated raid (not necessarily casual)... or a public quest!
Open parties (an easy way for a casual player to join a group looking for new members) are a huge social mechanic for casual players to meet and play with people.
There are a large number of people who say that they hate pvp because their impression of pvp is running around on a low level character getting killed by higher level min-maxed characters when all they want to do is kill their first fluffy bunny. WAR has an alternative rule set for that style of play, but the core rule set intentionally prevents it.
You would think the slashdot crowd would be refreshed by a company doing a public disclosure of changes like this.
Seriously though, this is not a huge deal (unless you had your heart set on one of those classes at release). There are still 20 classes with a large amount of variety and a good mix of standard mmo and new-ish mechanics. That's a large number more than many MMO's. see: http://www.warhammeronline.com/armiesofWAR/index.php
As for the cities, yes it's a definite loss, but two strong cities will serve that facet of end-game content well to start. (Yes it's only one of many possible facets.)
Yes, I've been in beta since the beginning, and yes the game is much more polished than people are expecting. I really can't comment beyond that with the NDA, but feel free to browse the public info: http://www.warhammeronline.com/index.php
The number of the door that Monty picks does not affect your outcome unless choose to let it. However, it is conditioned on your first choice. That's the extra information that you are missing.
We must remember that Mythic's case against Microsoft constitutes a claim of ownership over these themes.
Try again. It represents a trademark of a particular word within a particular context. For a trademark to hold any validity it must be defended against dilution. Mythic's claim is that the use of Mythica in the context that Microsoft is using it is confusingly similar to the Mythic trademark.
Originality of content and the theme / basis of the content is not what's being questioned in the lawsuit. What's being questioned is the name.
I completely agree with your post; however, being able to learn a new language, or in some cases a slight different (ie moving from Java: a non-oop) paradigm, doesn't necessarily mean that people will want to switch languages.
If you know how to solve a problem in OO Java, you are not going to use C to do it if you have the choice.
We know the reality is that people don't use the best language for the job most of the time, they just use the one they are most familiar with.
Blocking file sharing is difficult. You effectively have to put a bandwidth cap on the dorms, or block entire ranges of ports. Also, I'm not sure what good emailing does to solve the problem in general, but overloading the campus mail server at most places is not that hard, and causes a _huge_ headache for everyone when it happens.
Absolutely nothing but choose a secure effective cryptographic scheme for important data and transactions. If you think that by imposing legal limitations on the use of cryptography that you will stop terrorists or other unauthorized users from encrypting their data then I would have to urge you to seriously consider your view. The algorithm chosen for AES is not the only secure encryption algorithm out there and it is somewhat trivial to implement a number of highly secure cyphers. Legislation against cryptography generally only means that law-abiding citizens must use insecure methods of protecting themselves.
Of course the issue isn't really programmers, it's the management dictating what the programmers have to do. Most of the time the programming that being done is being done by techies who have to get all the new bells and whistles out the door as quickly as possible. To do it as a computer scientist or a computer engineer means that the program is going to take a whole lot more time to develop, because you are going to worry about things like design optimality and well correctness instead of hacking out a good-enough close-enough solution.
And linux programmers are just as bad. Yeah, the kernel is tightly optimized and well-designed under its basic design principle, but most of the application layer that runs on top of that kernel are hacked contrivances. There are a lot of really good coders out there, there aren't as many good designers, and a lot of projects don't have decent designers jump on until it's well past the design point.
Well, one reason is that social security numbers are not completely unique... They are supposed to be, but it is not unheard of for the same number to be issued twice. Also, this sort of use was very much not the original purpose of the social security number and a number of, often disregarded, laws make using it for such illegal.
A national id card must have a photo id and be very
The more important issue though is why we do not need a national id card -- Why it is not worth giving up all sense of anonymity in your daily life -- Why the government, and large corporations, should not be tracking every movement of every person. Yes, it would make police matters much easier... but at what violation to your civil liberties.
Really, it seems as if half the people here are looking at one small aspect of a national identity card -- privacy on the internet. And a lot of these examples would likely never become part of any benefit that may be gained from a national id card. If it were passed, there is no way that you would decide the granularity of the information in the database, and you may be able to give it out selectively, but there would be a number of people/companies/organizations that would be able to check this information at any time... for the good of humanity of course.
As well as you are forgetting the chilling effect on personal freedom in the real flesh and blood world... not the one where you get your e-mail, or the one where you communicate with dead trees... no the one where you could be denied access to making a purchase at WalMart because you cannot show your national id card, and how can they track you otherwise. The one where you could be randomly stopped on the street and forced to justify that you are a citizen of this country by any police officer who has had a bad day. The one where using a fake name, a pen name, an improper nickname or alias would have criminal penalties in all circumstances. Personally I tend to think road blocks are a violation of civil liberties, how will you feel when they set up a sidewalk block in downtown, so they can scan your id badge?
The reason that other languages do not work as well as java in the applet context, is that in order for an applet to be able to be used freely on the web, it must provide cross platform support. Also, it must have some type of security sandbox or no intelligent user is ever going to let it execute. Java provides both of these without any extra complicated programming hacks. As well as having already established itself as a comptent de facto standard.
The reason that applets have never really made it big is essentially two fold. The first is the shitty virtual machine that most browsers have. IE runs a semi 1.0--1.1 compliant browser and there have been significant changes since then (Swing anybody?). The other reason, and perhaps more important is that there are only a few instances where applets are really needed. If all you are doing is displaying semi-dynamic (aka database driven) content, which is all the pretty much every page on the web does, just use some sort of php/jsp/cgi type solution and your fine, it's faster, and easier in general. If you need a little bit of client side dynamics, you can throw in a little dhtml/javascript and have your form validation and pretty scrolling text or whatever. The real use for applets come when you need a much more interactive sort of web application, where the display needs to be updated constantly, or you need to do a lot of dynamically generated graphics or very complex data processing. These types of apps appear much more frequently on intranets than they do on the web in general, and provide a much richer interactive experience.
Let's hit these points quickly and in order, but it'll take a little introduction. J2EE (servlets, EJB, JSP, etc.) is designed to be a full-fledged application development platform for delivering any type of content to any type of content viewer (ie web-browser). The basic J2EE paradigm contains three layers:
A backend database/information system.
A middle enterprise/business logic layer.
A frontend/presentation layer.
Web content is one example of that third layer. The real advantage of using a J2EE system though is the middle layer. This way you can have a web page to view information and an application that you gives you a much more flexible means of presenting and altering that data, and not have to write anything more than the frontend to the data.
Anyway, as to your points:
mod_perl or mod_php It functions very similarly to either of these except that you're coding is in Java with the inherit advantages (strongly-typed, large api, etc.)
cgi requires forking an external process, tomcat throws up a new thread inside of a virtual machine process that is already running which is much less overhead than the cgi fork. also it is faster to develop inside java as well as being safer in general (no memory leaks, better object-oriented design etc.)
Besides having all of the disadvantages of cgi, gcj is not a perfect rendition of java. Last I checked it was still missing a number of key pieces including good multi-threading and reflection.
Yes, gcj is improving and for most web pages you don't need reflection or multi-threading... but that just brings back the same old issue... use the right tool for the right job. If you want a small fast page that does a few database queries, use mod_php. If you want a full featured web/internet/intranet application with good security, application managed transaction support, complicated business logic that connects to a large scale database management server and other such, use J2EE.
::sigh:: One of the biggest issues with Java, as has been stated in many different ways already are poor coding choices when using it. ie. if you are doing a lot of string manipulation you use StringBuffer instead of String. Just like you don't store your booleans in double precision in C. One of the biggest advanatges to Java is it's API. One of the worst disadvantages to Java are people who don't bother to understand the class they are using.
I just graduated with a B.S.C.S. and a B.S. Mathematics, and have spent a good deal of time considering this issue. I also have Sun certifications in Java and use it daily in my job.
In the CS program, Java was used as the primary language from freshman year on. This approach was a good thing (tm) in my mind. Having a single consistent language across all classes allows students to focus on learning the material that is taught in the class and exploring those concepts in their programs, as opposed to fiddling with obscure problems from languages they are not familiar with. Also, it allows the students to develop and the teachers to test on whatever system they are most comfortable with because of the platform independent nature of the language.
These advantages make the actual act of programming much more transparent to the student, so that they focus on the science part of computer science. While some programs have different views, the one I attended, and my personal opinion as well, dictate that the objective of a Computer Science education is to teach you the theory behind the construction of a program to solve problems efficiently, as well as expose you to prior work by individuals in these areas. In this respect, a computer science degree is much more like a math degree than an electrical engineering degree. Those who are interested in writing device drivers and other low level programming or in understanding the internal workings of a computer from cache coherency and pipelining to defining machine instructions should seek a computer engineering degree. At most universities, these are separate programs, and should remain so.
No, Java does not allow you access to these low level mechanisms, but if you learn how to program well in an abstract language like Java, then you are learning techniques that are applicable in all languages. They just might take a little more time to implement in assembly. One of the pros for the buisness world, and one of the cons for teachers is that Java has such a large API associated with it. This API allows for rapid development, as the programmer does not have to "reinvent the wheel" often. On the flipside students end up using data structures and methods they do not understand. However, if a program is well-designed, then the students will be forced to understand these abstract data types and implement them themselves before they ever have reason to use them. After that they will then have the API's particular implementation to use as a standard for the rest of their career.
I don't believe that educational institutions have any obligation to provide job skills to their students. Their goal should be to give them the a broad base of knowledge and the ability to adapt those skills to any situation. Choosing a consistent, platform independent, powerful, and adaptable language such as Java provides a good mechanism for presenting this information and for learning these skills.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a large number of people who say that they hate pvp because their impression of pvp is running around on a low level character getting killed by higher level min-maxed characters when all they want to do is kill their first fluffy bunny. WAR has an alternative rule set for that style of play, but the core rule set intentionally prevents it.
Everybody Panic!
You would think the slashdot crowd would be refreshed by a company doing a public disclosure of changes like this.
Seriously though, this is not a huge deal (unless you had your heart set on one of those classes at release). There are still 20 classes with a large amount of variety and a good mix of standard mmo and new-ish mechanics. That's a large number more than many MMO's. see: http://www.warhammeronline.com/armiesofWAR/index.php
As for the cities, yes it's a definite loss, but two strong cities will serve that facet of end-game content well to start. (Yes it's only one of many possible facets.)
Yes, I've been in beta since the beginning, and yes the game is much more polished than people are expecting. I really can't comment beyond that with the NDA, but feel free to browse the public info: http://www.warhammeronline.com/index.php
-ACupOfCoffee
The number of the door that Monty picks does not affect your outcome unless choose to let it. However, it is conditioned on your first choice. That's the extra information that you are missing.
A lot of this has already been done, although the site hasn't updated since google changed their API's: www.gcensus.com.
Will you continue you your team lead system from DAoC in WAR?
Try again. It represents a trademark of a particular word within a particular context.
For a trademark to hold any validity it must be defended against dilution. Mythic's claim is that the use of Mythica in the context that Microsoft is using it is confusingly similar to the Mythic trademark.
Originality of content and the theme / basis of the content is not what's being questioned in the lawsuit. What's being questioned is the name.
I completely agree with your post; however, being able to learn a new language, or in some cases a slight different (ie moving from Java: a non-oop) paradigm, doesn't necessarily mean that people will want to switch languages.
If you know how to solve a problem in OO Java, you are not going to use C to do it if you have the choice.
We know the reality is that people don't use the best language for the job most of the time, they just use the one they are most familiar with.
Blocking file sharing is difficult. You effectively have to put a bandwidth cap on the dorms, or block entire ranges of ports. Also, I'm not sure what good emailing does to solve the problem in general, but overloading the campus mail server at most places is not that hard, and causes a _huge_ headache for everyone when it happens.
Final Fantasy: The Finale of course
Absolutely nothing but choose a secure effective cryptographic scheme for important data and transactions. If you think that by imposing legal limitations on the use of cryptography that you will stop terrorists or other unauthorized users from encrypting their data then I would have to urge you to seriously consider your view. The algorithm chosen for AES is not the only secure encryption algorithm out there and it is somewhat trivial to implement a number of highly secure cyphers. Legislation against cryptography generally only means that law-abiding citizens must use insecure methods of protecting themselves.
That idea doesn't work... the chance that it's miscomputed twice in a row is still way too high...
Of course the issue isn't really programmers, it's the management dictating what the programmers have to do. Most of the time the programming that being done is being done by techies who have to get all the new bells and whistles out the door as quickly as possible. To do it as a computer scientist or a computer engineer means that the program is going to take a whole lot more time to develop, because you are going to worry about things like design optimality and well correctness instead of hacking out a good-enough close-enough solution.
And linux programmers are just as bad. Yeah, the kernel is tightly optimized and well-designed under its basic design principle, but most of the application layer that runs on top of that kernel are hacked contrivances. There are a lot of really good coders out there, there aren't as many good designers, and a lot of projects don't have decent designers jump on until it's well past the design point.
Well, one reason is that social security numbers are not completely unique... They are supposed to be, but it is not unheard of for the same number to be issued twice. Also, this sort of use was very much not the original purpose of the social security number and a number of, often disregarded, laws make using it for such illegal.
A national id card must have a photo id and be very
The more important issue though is why we do not need a national id card -- Why it is not worth giving up all sense of anonymity in your daily life -- Why the government, and large corporations, should not be tracking every movement of every person. Yes, it would make police matters much easier... but at what violation to your civil liberties.
Really, it seems as if half the people here are looking at one small aspect of a national identity card -- privacy on the internet. And a lot of these examples would likely never become part of any benefit that may be gained from a national id card. If it were passed, there is no way that you would decide the granularity of the information in the database, and you may be able to give it out selectively, but there would be a number of people/companies/organizations that would be able to check this information at any time... for the good of humanity of course.
As well as you are forgetting the chilling effect on personal freedom in the real flesh and blood world... not the one where you get your e-mail, or the one where you communicate with dead trees... no the one where you could be denied access to making a purchase at WalMart because you cannot show your national id card, and how can they track you otherwise. The one where you could be randomly stopped on the street and forced to justify that you are a citizen of this country by any police officer who has had a bad day. The one where using a fake name, a pen name, an improper nickname or alias would have criminal penalties in all circumstances. Personally I tend to think road blocks are a violation of civil liberties, how will you feel when they set up a sidewalk block in downtown, so they can scan your id badge?
The reason that other languages do not work as well as java in the applet context, is that in order for an applet to be able to be used freely on the web, it must provide cross platform support. Also, it must have some type of security sandbox or no intelligent user is ever going to let it execute. Java provides both of these without any extra complicated programming hacks. As well as having already established itself as a comptent de facto standard.
The reason that applets have never really made it big is essentially two fold. The first is the shitty virtual machine that most browsers have. IE runs a semi 1.0--1.1 compliant browser and there have been significant changes since then (Swing anybody?). The other reason, and perhaps more important is that there are only a few instances where applets are really needed. If all you are doing is displaying semi-dynamic (aka database driven) content, which is all the pretty much every page on the web does, just use some sort of php/jsp/cgi type solution and your fine, it's faster, and easier in general. If you need a little bit of client side dynamics, you can throw in a little dhtml/javascript and have your form validation and pretty scrolling text or whatever. The real use for applets come when you need a much more interactive sort of web application, where the display needs to be updated constantly, or you need to do a lot of dynamically generated graphics or very complex data processing. These types of apps appear much more frequently on intranets than they do on the web in general, and provide a much richer interactive experience.
- A backend database/information system.
- A middle enterprise/business logic layer.
- A frontend/presentation layer.
Web content is one example of that third layer. The real advantage of using a J2EE system though is the middle layer. This way you can have a web page to view information and an application that you gives you a much more flexible means of presenting and altering that data, and not have to write anything more than the frontend to the data.Anyway, as to your points:
- mod_perl or mod_php It functions very similarly to either of these except that you're coding is in Java with the inherit advantages (strongly-typed, large api, etc.)
- cgi requires forking an external process, tomcat throws up a new thread inside of a virtual machine process that is already running which is much less overhead than the cgi fork. also it is faster to develop inside java as well as being safer in general (no memory leaks, better object-oriented design etc.)
- Besides having all of the disadvantages of cgi, gcj is not a perfect rendition of java. Last I checked it was still missing a number of key pieces including good multi-threading and reflection.
Yes, gcj is improving and for most web pages you don't need reflection or multi-threading... but that just brings back the same old issue... use the right tool for the right job. If you want a small fast page that does a few database queries, use mod_php. If you want a full featured web/internet/intranet application with good security, application managed transaction support, complicated business logic that connects to a large scale database management server and other such, use J2EE.::sigh:: One of the biggest issues with Java, as has been stated in many different ways already are poor coding choices when using it. ie. if you are doing a lot of string manipulation you use StringBuffer instead of String. Just like you don't store your booleans in double precision in C. One of the biggest advanatges to Java is it's API. One of the worst disadvantages to Java are people who don't bother to understand the class they are using.
I just graduated with a B.S.C.S. and a B.S. Mathematics, and have spent a good deal of time considering this issue. I also have Sun certifications in Java and use it daily in my job.
In the CS program, Java was used as the primary language from freshman year on. This approach was a good thing (tm) in my mind. Having a single consistent language across all classes allows students to focus on learning the material that is taught in the class and exploring those concepts in their programs, as opposed to fiddling with obscure problems from languages they are not familiar with. Also, it allows the students to develop and the teachers to test on whatever system they are most comfortable with because of the platform independent nature of the language.
These advantages make the actual act of programming much more transparent to the student, so that they focus on the science part of computer science. While some programs have different views, the one I attended, and my personal opinion as well, dictate that the objective of a Computer Science education is to teach you the theory behind the construction of a program to solve problems efficiently, as well as expose you to prior work by individuals in these areas. In this respect, a computer science degree is much more like a math degree than an electrical engineering degree. Those who are interested in writing device drivers and other low level programming or in understanding the internal workings of a computer from cache coherency and pipelining to defining machine instructions should seek a computer engineering degree. At most universities, these are separate programs, and should remain so.
No, Java does not allow you access to these low level mechanisms, but if you learn how to program well in an abstract language like Java, then you are learning techniques that are applicable in all languages. They just might take a little more time to implement in assembly. One of the pros for the buisness world, and one of the cons for teachers is that Java has such a large API associated with it. This API allows for rapid development, as the programmer does not have to "reinvent the wheel" often. On the flipside students end up using data structures and methods they do not understand. However, if a program is well-designed, then the students will be forced to understand these abstract data types and implement them themselves before they ever have reason to use them. After that they will then have the API's particular implementation to use as a standard for the rest of their career.
I don't believe that educational institutions have any obligation to provide job skills to their students. Their goal should be to give them the a broad base of knowledge and the ability to adapt those skills to any situation. Choosing a consistent, platform independent, powerful, and adaptable language such as Java provides a good mechanism for presenting this information and for learning these skills.