A month ago, I did something I hadn't done in years. I bought a new gaming console system. This is the first console system I've bought since my Colecovision. I have been, for the past twenty years or so, a die hard PC gamer. I turned my nose up at consoles.
For the last month, I've been having a blast. I picked up a few games, and all of them have been fun. I haven't touched a computer game in a month, other than nethack and zangband.
I'm now of the opinion that computer gaming is just a waste. Are there some good computer games? Yes. Do the very best computer games have better graphics than consoles, if you have good hardware? Yes. No console is beating out unreal tournament 2003 at 1600x1200 resolution. The console systems do have very nice graphics, though. More than good enough. And more importantly...
For the first time in 20 years I don't have to worry about whether my hardware is good enough to run the game I just bought.
PC gaming hardware is getting completely insane. $400 for a new 3d card? You can buy *two* console gaming systems for that! And a year from now, there will be a new $400 video card out, with endless articles about how it makes the $400 card you just bought last year look like garbage.
Who needs it? I'm enjoying gaming again more than I have for a long time. I don't have to run an OS I don't like by a company I don't like just to play some game that won't work under winex and doesn't have a Linux port. I don't have to mess around with installing anything. I don't have to sit in a stupid office chair at a desk. Just pop the game in, turn the console on, chill on the couch, and have fun.
I'm set til 2005 or 2006 when the new consoles com e out. Upgrading every 4 or 5 years to a new console, and then not having to sweat it again, is looking really nice.And the computer I currently have will be more than powerful enough to read web pages, send email, and write code on for a long, long time.
A "RDBMS" that does not support very basic RDBMS functionality is not a threat to any of the big RDBMS vendors. No company that cares about its data would be storing it on MySQL.
Scanning through these posts, I even saw one ridiculous person say something about being tired of all of this "database pretentiousness"... as if demanding that the application that is storing your *data* - one of the most important assets of your corporation - actually supports *basic* RDBMS functionality.
So, go right ahead. Acuse people who actually manage databases for a living of being "pretentious", and store your data in a database that doesn't even support foreign key constraints, or stored procedures. Write all your logic into your PHP code, since you can't actually write it into the database itself.
Then, when your database becomes a totally corrupted nightmare, because you can't even enforce basic standards of relational integrity in MySQL, maybe you'll think about all the "pretentious" people who actually knew what they were doing, and think that maybe you should have listened to them.
I really don't understand what's wrong with all of the people I see on here complaining about how rough their tech job is. It makes me wonder if any of them have actually had a non tech job in their life.
I'm a senior systems engineer at a very large, well known corporation, and I love it. I've been working in information systems for 8 years and I'm no where close to 'burning out'. Every day, I come to work and work solving interesting problems designing and implementing large scale internal applications that help the people I work with do their jobs better. Not only do I get to use the tools I want to use, and create useful tools that the people I work with enjoy using. I work with a lot of really intelligent people that are fun to work with, and while we all work hard we all enjoy what we do and enjoy working together.
I started out my "career" in life digging holes in the ground for a landscaping company. I worked a lot of other crappy jobs as well.. dish washer, prep cook, data entry... I hated them all. I got lucky and landed myself a position in technical support in 1994 and worked my way up into higher paying more skilled tech positions and I never looked back.
when I'm driving to work in the morning and I see a road crew laying asphalt on the highway in 100 degree weather, the LAST thing I'm thinking about is how hard I have it. I really think a lot of people responding to this article need some perspective.
Re:Yeah its always /.'s fault...
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The news story they posted isn't true. KDE 3.0 has NOT been released yet.The fact that there are some packages on their ftp site does not mean it is a release.
The KDE 3.0 release happens when the developers say that the release is official, and slashdot should respect that.
The KDE developers *are* being reponsible. They put the packages on the main ftp site so that the mirrors could mirror it. They were obviously going to wait until the mirrors had finished before announcing it.
This has nothing to do with violence and video games or any other half ass analogy you may try to make. This is clear cut and simple. Slashdot ran a false news story about an application that has not been released yet.
Re:How Incredibly Discourteous
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What good would that do? Someone would find the files on a mirror, and instantly we'd get a slashdot story about the kde3 release with a link to the ftp site, and it would get slammed again.
I think it is much easier and simpler for slashdot to not run false stories. In fact, the kde developers have NOT announced the release of KDE 3.0, and therefore, KDE 3.0 *has* *not* *been* *released*.
How Incredibly Discourteous
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The KDE developers have not announced the release of KDE 3.0 yet because the mirrors have not gotten KDE 3.0 yet. Since they have not announced the release, do you think there might be a *reason* they have not announced it?
The editors at slashdot *know* the effect it has on a web site or ftp site when a story runs about that site. They *know* that the kde ftp site will get hammered because of this story. The *know* that the KDE developers obviously aren't ready yet BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOT ANNOUNCED THE RELEASE.
Yet, you announce the story anyway, before the actual release. Now, the ftp site will be slammed *before* the mirrors get a copy, which insures that things will be a huge mess for quiet some time.
This is the most incredibly discourteous and unprofessional behavior I've seen on a web site. Show some freaking respect towards the open source developers who create code (and give you something to write about on this site) and DO NOT ANNOUNCE A RELEASE BEFORE THE RELEASE.
Your lack of caring about the impact of your actions on this site really disgusts me.
Okay... since Xfree 4.2.0 according to the article hasn't reached all the mirrors yet.. what was the point of posting the release on slashdot, thereby slashdoting the xfree site, and making it more difficult for the mirrors to get their copies?
Couldn't you have waited a day until the mirrors were caught up?
A business to business ecommerce firm that I worked for recently went out of business. I was a Perl programmer there. The only one. The rest of the coders were java coders. Good java coders, too. Our company released the first complete implementation of Sun's JDO specification while I worked there, among other things.
I was working again within two weeks of being laid off as a systems programmer in a very large well known corporation. Most of the java people I knew are still looking for jobs.
I ate lunch with a recruiter friend of mine last week and mentioned to him that I knew some good java programmers who were looking for work. He groaned and said "please, no more java programmers. There's a huge supply of them right now, they are all losing their jobs, and nobody wants them anymore now that the dot coms are mostly dead. If you know any Unix / C / Perl people though, let me know. I always need them and good ones aren't easy to find".
Java hasn't "won" anything. Java has had a lot of money in advertising spent to convince pointy haired bosses that it is the wave of the future. There was briefly a huge demand for Java coders as the dot coms hit their boomtime. Business to business e-commerce was the "wave of the future" and Java was the language of that future.
Now even the large successful business to business companies that already had clients are struggling. The small ones are all dead or dying. There is a huge oversupply of Java coders who learned Java from a Learn Java In 21 Days book to take advantage of the boomtime, and the good Java programmers are getting lost in the flood. The word "Java" leaves a bad taste in many people's mouths, as it is now associated with the failure that was the web economy.
The tech market will slowly pick back up. Java will find a permanent niche and be used for a good time to come. However, its not all the rage anymore. Its just another language, useful for some things, not so useful for others.
Get over yourself buddy. The Java coder as king of the world, sucking down his $5.00 starbucks coffee at the foozball table in the office recroom days are over.
Somehow, I doubt that the 15 year olds "know the inner workings of the net better than anyone else".
Some crazy people night think that the people who actually designed the protocols that are used on the "net" *might* know the "inner workings" a little better than 15 year olds.
I'll preface this by saying that I'm a @home customer, and I'm bummed out that I can't run a web server anymore.
I think that this is a perfectly reasonable response from @home. I work at a large ISP and I've seen how rapidly this code red garbage spreds. The little editorial comment that they can "simply block infected machines" is, quite frankly, garbage. Code Red 2 spreads faster than anyone could possibly keep up with blocking one machine at a time.
Code Red 2 is tearing up bandwidth at these cable companies. Its noticeably slowing down my speeds on my home internet connection. Something needs to be done in a hurry, and blocking port 80 is a fast solution that works.
Instead of blaming the broadband providers, why don't you blame the real culprit in this situation: Windows. Get angry at Microsoft; if it weren't for their lousy code and lousy security this problem would not have been possible in the first place.
That's odd. When the company I worked for went under, they laid off everyone, including the "real programmers".
This "only idiots are getting laid off" attitude that I see here all the time is complete bull. Many companies are going completely under right now. When they do, everyone gets the axe, including all the programmers. I know plenty of excellent programmers currently looking for work.
The programmers where I worked were responsible for creating the first 100% complete implementation of Sun's JDO specification. They were excellent programmers, and they all lost their jobs, just like many people in the area.
Before everyone runs their mouths about how evil George Lucas is, and how special effects and star wars have nothing to do with medical equipment (whoops, too late) maybe you should do a little research and get some actual facts.
Industrial Light and Magic has been involved in the medical business before. They helped to pioneer the technique of generating 3d imagery from medical scans. I believe that ILM spun off a company that worked solely on computer imagery in the medical field, although I can't recall the name of the company at the moment.
I really wish that the Slashdot crowd would stop having total knee jerk reactions to anyone who tries to protect their trademarks when most of the people mouthing off the loudest seem the least informed as to what they are discussing.
You don't remember any real scifi movies before Dune? Dune set "new ground" in science fiction movies?
How old are you? Seriously?
You want ground breaking science fiction movies... how about The Day The Earth Stood Still? How about Fantastic Voyage? How about 2001?
Blade Runner? Blade Runner was also an adaptation of a book (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and a much more successfully done one than Dune.
Dune didn't pioneer any new realm in the movie industry. Special effects? Grand sets? A well respected science fiction novel brought to the big screen? Sorry, all been done before.
Saying that the movie was ruined in editing is a lame excuse. Editing is a very vital part of the movie making process. If the final movie that you have after the editing is done is horrible, then you have made a horrible movie, and it doesn't matter what you have left on the cutting room floor.
I am really stunned that you could claim that someone who read the Dune book would think that the horrible David Lynch abortion of an adaptation of the book was in any way shape or form one of the "best movies ever made".
The movie was, simply put, terrible. It was terrible on multiple levels.
On one level, it was a horrible adaptation of the book. It was in fact one of the worst book to screen translations that I have ever seen in my life, except for perhaps the horrible butchering of the story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" by Philip K Dick which was made into the absolutely horrible "Total Recall"
Putting aside the book to movie aspect, the movie was just horrible in and of itself. Kyle MacLachlan was terrible. The excessive narration was cheesy and distracting. The Harkonnens were just campy and bufoonish instead of being menacing in any way at all. The pacing was terrible, the first half drags and the last half jumps through major events barely even touching them.
I read the sourceforge pages on "CSS" and I can find no compelling reason to switch to this language for scripting over any of the excellent scripting languages that already exist. It does not have any unique compelling features that I can see, other than "it looks like C".
There are already so many scripting languages available that a new one needs to offer some compelling feature. I'm running down the list of "CSS" features..
C syntax: Not really a feature. If you are a C programmer I suppose having something familiar is a bonus however.
Sophisticated error handling by exceptions - Perl, Python, and Ruby already have this.
High performance database libraries - Perl already has the very sophisticated DBI database interface. Python is at version 2.0 of its database API specification. A DBI interface is currently in development for Ruby.
Automate regular tasks or build application benchmarks with the outstanding windows control library: Perl, Python, and Ruby already have good windows integration.
Develop libraries to meet your special requirements using your favorite C/C++ compiler: Perl, Python, and Ruby can all be extended via C and/or C++
Develop libraries to meet your special requirements using your favorite C/C++ compiler: Ruby is embeddable in C applications. Python is embeddable in C and Java applications. Perl is weak in this area, but I believe Perl 6.0 is supposed to be easily embeddable.
Write CGI programs for your web server: You can write CGI in numerous scripting languages already. In addition, mod_perl allows you to directly access Apache's module API to write extensions to Apache itself. Then of course there is PHP although I do not consider PHP a general purpose language. Pike / Roxen is a viable contendor in this area as well.
A major feature that I see missing in "CSS" is OOP. Python and Ruby, two of the newer generation scripting languages, have very powerful OO features. Ruby is object pure... everything in the language is an object that is extendable down to basic types like strings and integers (similiar to smalltalk).
From my perspective using "CSS" instead of one of the next generation scripting languages (Python and Ruby) is a giant step backwards. In addition, the old mainstay Perl is a very mature language with an unparalleled library of available modules for it. What is the incentive for using "CSS" other than the novelty of having a C like syntax?
Slashdot Mirror
A month ago, I did something I hadn't done in years. I bought a new gaming console system. This is the first console system I've bought since my Colecovision. I have been, for the past twenty years or so, a die hard PC gamer. I turned my nose up at consoles.
For the last month, I've been having a blast. I picked up a few games, and all of them have been fun. I haven't touched a computer game in a month, other than nethack and zangband.
I'm now of the opinion that computer gaming is just a waste. Are there some good computer games? Yes. Do the very best computer games have better graphics than consoles, if you have good hardware? Yes. No console is beating out unreal tournament 2003 at 1600x1200 resolution. The console systems do have very nice graphics, though. More than good enough. And more importantly...
For the first time in 20 years I don't have to worry about whether my hardware is good enough to run the game I just bought.
PC gaming hardware is getting completely insane. $400 for a new 3d card? You can buy *two* console gaming systems for that! And a year from now, there will be a new $400 video card out, with endless articles about how it makes the $400 card you just bought last year look like garbage.
Who needs it? I'm enjoying gaming again more than I have for a long time. I don't have to run an OS I don't like by a company I don't like just to play some game that won't work under winex and doesn't have a Linux port. I don't have to mess around with installing anything. I don't have to sit in a stupid office chair at a desk. Just pop the game in, turn the console on, chill on the couch, and have fun.
I'm set til 2005 or 2006 when the new consoles com e out. Upgrading every 4 or 5 years to a new console, and then not having to sweat it again, is looking really nice.And the computer I currently have will be more than powerful enough to read web pages, send email, and write code on for a long, long time.
A "RDBMS" that does not support very basic RDBMS functionality is not a threat to any of the big RDBMS vendors. No company that cares about its data would be storing it on MySQL.
Scanning through these posts, I even saw one ridiculous person say something about being tired of all of this "database pretentiousness"... as if demanding that the application that is storing your *data* - one of the most important assets of your corporation - actually supports *basic* RDBMS functionality.
So, go right ahead. Acuse people who actually manage databases for a living of being "pretentious", and store your data in a database that doesn't even support foreign key constraints, or stored procedures. Write all your logic into your PHP code, since you can't actually write it into the database itself.
Then, when your database becomes a totally corrupted nightmare, because you can't even enforce basic standards of relational integrity in MySQL, maybe you'll think about all the "pretentious" people who actually knew what they were doing, and think that maybe you should have listened to them.
I really don't understand what's wrong with all of the people I see on here complaining about how rough their tech job is. It makes me wonder if any of them have actually had a non tech job in their life.
I'm a senior systems engineer at a very large, well known corporation, and I love it. I've been working in information systems for 8 years and I'm no where close to 'burning out'. Every day, I come to work and work solving interesting problems designing and implementing large scale internal applications that help the people I work with do their jobs better. Not only do I get to use the tools I want to use, and create useful tools that the people I work with enjoy using. I work with a lot of really intelligent people that are fun to work with, and while we all work hard we all enjoy what we do and enjoy working together.
I started out my "career" in life digging holes in the ground for a landscaping company. I worked a lot of other crappy jobs as well.. dish washer, prep cook, data entry... I hated them all. I got lucky and landed myself a position in technical support in 1994 and worked my way up into higher paying more skilled tech positions and I never looked back.
when I'm driving to work in the morning and I see a road crew laying asphalt on the highway in 100 degree weather, the LAST thing I'm thinking about is how hard I have it. I really think a lot of people responding to this article need some perspective.
The news story they posted isn't true. KDE 3.0 has NOT been released yet.The fact that there are some packages on their ftp site does not mean it is a release.
The KDE 3.0 release happens when the developers say that the release is official, and slashdot should respect that.
The KDE developers *are* being reponsible. They put the packages on the main ftp site so that the mirrors could mirror it. They were obviously going to wait until the mirrors had finished before announcing it.
This has nothing to do with violence and video games or any other half ass analogy you may try to make. This is clear cut and simple. Slashdot ran a false news story about an application that has not been released yet.
What good would that do? Someone would find the files on a mirror, and instantly we'd get a slashdot story about the kde3 release with a link to the ftp site, and it would get slammed again.
I think it is much easier and simpler for slashdot to not run false stories. In fact, the kde developers have NOT announced the release of KDE 3.0, and therefore, KDE 3.0 *has* *not* *been* *released*.
The KDE developers have not announced the release of KDE 3.0 yet because the mirrors have not gotten KDE 3.0 yet. Since they have not announced the release, do you think there might be a *reason* they have not announced it?
The editors at slashdot *know* the effect it has on a web site or ftp site when a story runs about that site. They *know* that the kde ftp site will get hammered because of this story. The *know* that the KDE developers obviously aren't ready yet BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOT ANNOUNCED THE RELEASE.
Yet, you announce the story anyway, before the actual release. Now, the ftp site will be slammed *before* the mirrors get a copy, which insures that things will be a huge mess for quiet some time.
This is the most incredibly discourteous and unprofessional behavior I've seen on a web site. Show some freaking respect towards the open source developers who create code (and give you something to write about on this site) and DO NOT ANNOUNCE A RELEASE BEFORE THE RELEASE.
Your lack of caring about the impact of your actions on this site really disgusts me.
Okay... since Xfree 4.2.0 according to the article hasn't reached all the mirrors yet.. what was the point of posting the release on slashdot, thereby slashdoting the xfree site, and making it more difficult for the mirrors to get their copies?
Couldn't you have waited a day until the mirrors were caught up?
I was working again within two weeks of being laid off as a systems programmer in a very large well known corporation. Most of the java people I knew are still looking for jobs.
I ate lunch with a recruiter friend of mine last week and mentioned to him that I knew some good java programmers who were looking for work. He groaned and said "please, no more java programmers. There's a huge supply of them right now, they are all losing their jobs, and nobody wants them anymore now that the dot coms are mostly dead. If you know any Unix / C / Perl people though, let me know. I always need them and good ones aren't easy to find".
Java hasn't "won" anything. Java has had a lot of money in advertising spent to convince pointy haired bosses that it is the wave of the future. There was briefly a huge demand for Java coders as the dot coms hit their boomtime. Business to business e-commerce was the "wave of the future" and Java was the language of that future.
Now even the large successful business to business companies that already had clients are struggling. The small ones are all dead or dying. There is a huge oversupply of Java coders who learned Java from a Learn Java In 21 Days book to take advantage of the boomtime, and the good Java programmers are getting lost in the flood. The word "Java" leaves a bad taste in many people's mouths, as it is now associated with the failure that was the web economy.
The tech market will slowly pick back up. Java will find a permanent niche and be used for a good time to come. However, its not all the rage anymore. Its just another language, useful for some things, not so useful for others.
Get over yourself buddy. The Java coder as king of the world, sucking down his $5.00 starbucks coffee at the foozball table in the office recroom days are over.
Some crazy people night think that the people who actually designed the protocols that are used on the "net" *might* know the "inner workings" a little better than 15 year olds.
I think that this is a perfectly reasonable response from @home. I work at a large ISP and I've seen how rapidly this code red garbage spreds. The little editorial comment that they can "simply block infected machines" is, quite frankly, garbage. Code Red 2 spreads faster than anyone could possibly keep up with blocking one machine at a time.
Code Red 2 is tearing up bandwidth at these cable companies. Its noticeably slowing down my speeds on my home internet connection. Something needs to be done in a hurry, and blocking port 80 is a fast solution that works.
Instead of blaming the broadband providers, why don't you blame the real culprit in this situation: Windows. Get angry at Microsoft; if it weren't for their lousy code and lousy security this problem would not have been possible in the first place.
That's odd. When the company I worked for went under, they laid off everyone, including the "real programmers". This "only idiots are getting laid off" attitude that I see here all the time is complete bull. Many companies are going completely under right now. When they do, everyone gets the axe, including all the programmers. I know plenty of excellent programmers currently looking for work. The programmers where I worked were responsible for creating the first 100% complete implementation of Sun's JDO specification. They were excellent programmers, and they all lost their jobs, just like many people in the area.
Before everyone runs their mouths about how evil George Lucas is, and how special effects and star wars have nothing to do with medical equipment (whoops, too late) maybe you should do a little research and get some actual facts. Industrial Light and Magic has been involved in the medical business before. They helped to pioneer the technique of generating 3d imagery from medical scans. I believe that ILM spun off a company that worked solely on computer imagery in the medical field, although I can't recall the name of the company at the moment. I really wish that the Slashdot crowd would stop having total knee jerk reactions to anyone who tries to protect their trademarks when most of the people mouthing off the loudest seem the least informed as to what they are discussing.
You don't remember any real scifi movies before Dune? Dune set "new ground" in science fiction movies? How old are you? Seriously? You want ground breaking science fiction movies... how about The Day The Earth Stood Still? How about Fantastic Voyage? How about 2001? Blade Runner? Blade Runner was also an adaptation of a book (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and a much more successfully done one than Dune. Dune didn't pioneer any new realm in the movie industry. Special effects? Grand sets? A well respected science fiction novel brought to the big screen? Sorry, all been done before. Saying that the movie was ruined in editing is a lame excuse. Editing is a very vital part of the movie making process. If the final movie that you have after the editing is done is horrible, then you have made a horrible movie, and it doesn't matter what you have left on the cutting room floor.
I am really stunned that you could claim that someone who read the Dune book would think that the horrible David Lynch abortion of an adaptation of the book was in any way shape or form one of the "best movies ever made". The movie was, simply put, terrible. It was terrible on multiple levels. On one level, it was a horrible adaptation of the book. It was in fact one of the worst book to screen translations that I have ever seen in my life, except for perhaps the horrible butchering of the story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" by Philip K Dick which was made into the absolutely horrible "Total Recall" Putting aside the book to movie aspect, the movie was just horrible in and of itself. Kyle MacLachlan was terrible. The excessive narration was cheesy and distracting. The Harkonnens were just campy and bufoonish instead of being menacing in any way at all. The pacing was terrible, the first half drags and the last half jumps through major events barely even touching them.
There are already so many scripting languages available that a new one needs to offer some compelling feature. I'm running down the list of "CSS" features..
C syntax: Not really a feature. If you are a C programmer I suppose having something familiar is a bonus however.
Sophisticated error handling by exceptions - Perl, Python, and Ruby already have this.
High performance database libraries - Perl already has the very sophisticated DBI database interface. Python is at version 2.0 of its database API specification. A DBI interface is currently in development for Ruby.
Automate regular tasks or build application benchmarks with the outstanding windows control library: Perl, Python, and Ruby already have good windows integration.
Develop libraries to meet your special requirements using your favorite C/C++ compiler: Perl, Python, and Ruby can all be extended via C and/or C++
Develop libraries to meet your special requirements using your favorite C/C++ compiler: Ruby is embeddable in C applications. Python is embeddable in C and Java applications. Perl is weak in this area, but I believe Perl 6.0 is supposed to be easily embeddable.
Write CGI programs for your web server: You can write CGI in numerous scripting languages already. In addition, mod_perl allows you to directly access Apache's module API to write extensions to Apache itself. Then of course there is PHP although I do not consider PHP a general purpose language. Pike / Roxen is a viable contendor in this area as well.
A major feature that I see missing in "CSS" is OOP. Python and Ruby, two of the newer generation scripting languages, have very powerful OO features. Ruby is object pure... everything in the language is an object that is extendable down to basic types like strings and integers (similiar to smalltalk).
From my perspective using "CSS" instead of one of the next generation scripting languages (Python and Ruby) is a giant step backwards. In addition, the old mainstay Perl is a very mature language with an unparalleled library of available modules for it. What is the incentive for using "CSS" other than the novelty of having a C like syntax?
By the way, the name "CSS" was a HORRIBLE choice.