I loved the things that were hard but allowed me to create value to other players.
I loved being able to craft tools, and then learn how to market them face to face by traveling from one hospital to the next telling the docs how better crafting tools would help them craft more effective medicines.
From there I moved to harvesting top quality materials and creating large quantities of powerups. I came up with a naming schema which allowed the customer to immediately see and select the powerups they wanted, and placed large quantities right next to a premium weapons vendor. Unit for unit, those were some of the easiest credits I made in the game.
At that point, there were practically no Master Chefs in the game, because food was so bugged and people hadn't really taken the time to see how food buffs could help them. I rolled ten million meatballs over the course of a month, and became a Master Chef. Investing in the best harvesters took some time, getting the best resources took a while, and the changing bugs in the food system and the changing food charts kept me amused for quite a while, first pushing out Tattoine Sunburns, then Fishak, then other drinks. The lessons I learned about customer interaction in that game would have cost me plenty of moolah had I made those mistakes on my employer's dime.
The best thing about Tempest was the incredible, diverse community. Fun times. I wish Haley was still alive and we'd have the Intergalactic Outfitters still running.
SWG showed me that co-operative interactive electronic entertainment can teach kids, and why not adults too, the value of building something, creating things which help others, while still letting people blow off steam through combat. I've been toying with the idea of starting a business to create an low-latency open-ended simulation platform useful for MMOG developers, just to get the costs down enough that electronic entertainment wouldn't have to always be about violence, simply because that's all the budget allows.
Java apps have a fraction of the operating costs of PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby apps. That's good for people who look at how operating budgets get spent, because they can then produce more bang for the buck.
Except that Trac does something completely different from Sourceforge EE. I'm currently evaluating options for setting up a common "intra-Sourceforge" to cut academic application development costs, and SFEE is currently on the top of the list while Trac isn't on the list at all. Too bad that the sales people at SF don't seem to want our money at all, they don't seem to be very good at answering email.
I'm of the opinion, though, that open sourcing SFEE would quadruple their sales pipeline permanently, and they could push higher-margin products through that pipeline.
If payment in the sciences is reason to distrust the findings...
Payment for following the process has always been OK for the process, but payment for producing predefined results, which is what these PR firms are paid to do, has always been considered unethical.
I'm looking for something here that's either science or rationalism, and I'm finding neither.
Rational people can disagree based on different knowledge of facts and a different appreciation of the context.
Science is (among other things) a loose process aimed at finding truths. It is necessarily loose, as strict definitions a priori have historically hindered achieving the aim of finding truths.
These PR firms are hired to exploit this looseness and the circumstances arising from a relatively homogenous atmosphere of sincere participation to the scientific process, so as to delay and make impotent the effects of honest scientific discovery to public policy.
This is exactly what the tobacco companies, for example, achieved: enough delay to pull in additional billions in profit.
Ruby on Rails - the Bush administration of web frameworks.
This is what they do. They spam their marketing materials on one forum after another, glossing over finer points like the lack of Unicode and threading support, along with quite a number of tools professionals need in their development, and then use their meat or sock puppet accounts to downmod messages they don't want to reach their target marketing audience.
With Perl, or Python, or C/C++, or virtually everything else besides Java (and.net), all you need is the language. You don't need a gargantuan mandatory library, just a tiny standard library, or sometimes none at all. Java has nice no-nonsense semantics, but it is unfortunately bogged down by a monstrosity of a runtime.
I'm sorry, I thought that it was obvious that modern business software development solutions solve a superset of business problems compared to the early professional solutions such as Prolog/Pascal/C/C++ and later hobbyist solutions such as Python, and that it's pretty useless to try to turn the clock backwards.
I wish all these Java libraries worked like the way CPAN does.
Do you mean you wish Java libraries worked like CPAN, in the way Maven and its automatic library repository works or in the way the JPackage repository works?
Better languages than the PHP disaster? Perl, Python, Ruby. They work _very_ well.
Of these languages, only Perl has working multithreading support. Python and Ruby both have hugely granular global interpreter locking, which makes multithreading impractical.
What works well for a hobbyist doesn't necessary work well when professional adult programmers need to accomplish something reliably day in and day out.
The Python interpreter is not fully thread safe. In order to support multi-threaded Python programs, there's a global lock that must be held by the current thread before it can safely access Python objects. Without the lock, even the simplest operations could cause problems in a multi-threaded program: for example, when two threads simultaneously increment the reference count of the same object, the reference count could end up being incremented only once instead of twice.
It's wonderful if you don't try to use its advertised library collection (instead of having to write all of your integration libraries yourself, and then debug and maintain them) which must have been coded up by total rank amateurs, and as long as you don't need to do anything as advanced as, say, create multithreaded programs so you can share expensive model state resources instead of hitting a database for everything.
Slashdot Mirror
You will neither refer to a trustworthy source nor put your name behind your words?
If he wants to pursue a libel case against you, I'm good for a $50 donation.
mkavanagh2, if you're going to be his accuser, please state your full name.
I loved the things that were hard but allowed me to create value to other players.
I loved being able to craft tools, and then learn how to market them face to face by traveling from one hospital to the next telling the docs how better crafting tools would help them craft more effective medicines.
From there I moved to harvesting top quality materials and creating large quantities of powerups. I came up with a naming schema which allowed the customer to immediately see and select the powerups they wanted, and placed large quantities right next to a premium weapons vendor. Unit for unit, those were some of the easiest credits I made in the game.
At that point, there were practically no Master Chefs in the game, because food was so bugged and people hadn't really taken the time to see how food buffs could help them. I rolled ten million meatballs over the course of a month, and became a Master Chef. Investing in the best harvesters took some time, getting the best resources took a while, and the changing bugs in the food system and the changing food charts kept me amused for quite a while, first pushing out Tattoine Sunburns, then Fishak, then other drinks. The lessons I learned about customer interaction in that game would have cost me plenty of moolah had I made those mistakes on my employer's dime.
The best thing about Tempest was the incredible, diverse community. Fun times. I wish Haley was still alive and we'd have the Intergalactic Outfitters still running.
SWG showed me that co-operative interactive electronic entertainment can teach kids, and why not adults too, the value of building something, creating things which help others, while still letting people blow off steam through combat. I've been toying with the idea of starting a business to create an low-latency open-ended simulation platform useful for MMOG developers, just to get the costs down enough that electronic entertainment wouldn't have to always be about violence, simply because that's all the budget allows.
This is as ridiculous as saying that we won't be able to go buy milk from stores if we have laws against extortion.
Because it is the Kwisatz Serverrack.
And here I stand, with no +1 Funny to grant.
You forgot the (mis)management of Star Wars Galaxies.
Java apps have a fraction of the operating costs of PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby apps. That's good for people who look at how operating budgets get spent, because they can then produce more bang for the buck.
Except that Trac does something completely different from Sourceforge EE. I'm currently evaluating options for setting up a common "intra-Sourceforge" to cut academic application development costs, and SFEE is currently on the top of the list while Trac isn't on the list at all. Too bad that the sales people at SF don't seem to want our money at all, they don't seem to be very good at answering email.
I'm of the opinion, though, that open sourcing SFEE would quadruple their sales pipeline permanently, and they could push higher-margin products through that pipeline.
If payment in the sciences is reason to distrust the findings...
Payment for following the process has always been OK for the process, but payment for producing predefined results, which is what these PR firms are paid to do, has always been considered unethical.
I'm looking for something here that's either science or rationalism, and I'm finding neither.
Rational people can disagree based on different knowledge of facts and a different appreciation of the context.
Science is (among other things) a loose process aimed at finding truths. It is necessarily loose, as strict definitions a priori have historically hindered achieving the aim of finding truths.
These PR firms are hired to exploit this looseness and the circumstances arising from a relatively homogenous atmosphere of sincere participation to the scientific process, so as to delay and make impotent the effects of honest scientific discovery to public policy.
This is exactly what the tobacco companies, for example, achieved: enough delay to pull in additional billions in profit.
Project Semplice brings people with Visual Basic skills to Java the cost-effective way.
Check out this Flash demo for Java Studio Creator 2.1.
Ruby on Rails - the Bush administration of web frameworks.
This is what they do. They spam their marketing materials on one forum after another, glossing over finer points like the lack of Unicode and threading support, along with quite a number of tools professionals need in their development, and then use their meat or sock puppet accounts to downmod messages they don't want to reach their target marketing audience.
What's the Secret Sauce in Ruby on Rails?
Clueless newbies and disruptive marketing.
With Perl, or Python, or C/C++, or virtually everything else besides Java (and .net), all you need is the language. You don't need a gargantuan mandatory library, just a tiny standard library, or sometimes none at all. Java has nice no-nonsense semantics, but it is unfortunately bogged down by a monstrosity of a runtime.
I'm sorry, I thought that it was obvious that modern business software development solutions solve a superset of business problems compared to the early professional solutions such as Prolog/Pascal/C/C++ and later hobbyist solutions such as Python, and that it's pretty useless to try to turn the clock backwards.
I wish all these Java libraries worked like the way CPAN does.
Do you mean you wish Java libraries worked like CPAN, in the way Maven and its automatic library repository works or in the way the JPackage repository works?
why, oh, why java croaks on OutOfMemoryException when we have more than 8G of ram most of which is not being used
Because you are rank amateurs who are unable to read documents or use profiling tools such as jconsole or YourKit?
Better languages than the PHP disaster? Perl, Python, Ruby. They work _very_ well.
Of these languages, only Perl has working multithreading support. Python and Ruby both have hugely granular global interpreter locking, which makes multithreading impractical.
What works well for a hobbyist doesn't necessary work well when professional adult programmers need to accomplish something reliably day in and day out.
"No", who would run PHP on Java anyway? Why? Why would open-sourcing it help?
Hellooooo, Caucho Quercus already implements PHP in Java.
So you used this implementation?
The Python interpreter is not fully thread safe. In order to support multi-threaded Python programs, there's a global lock that must be held by the current thread before it can safely access Python objects. Without the lock, even the simplest operations could cause problems in a multi-threaded program: for example, when two threads simultaneously increment the reference count of the same object, the reference count could end up being incremented only once instead of twice.
I absolutely agree that having conformant java specifications is a great thing, and is perhaps the single most important reason for Java's success.
They have already open sourced J2EE (without the J2SE portion) in the form of Glassfish.
How did you get around python's Global Interpreter Lock to create multithreaded Python programs?
It's wonderful if you don't try to use its advertised library collection (instead of having to write all of your integration libraries yourself, and then debug and maintain them) which must have been coded up by total rank amateurs, and as long as you don't need to do anything as advanced as, say, create multithreaded programs so you can share expensive model state resources instead of hitting a database for everything.
The next guy in your job is just going to love you for using Plone, for the platform's great documentation and wonderful stability.
I wonder what it's like to make so much money you can give a dedicated customer a high handed heave-ho.
You should ask Sony Online Entertainment, they're currently living with the results.