Supported platforms: C# 1 (Windows), Java 3 (Windows, Linux, Solaris) (and that's just from Sun).
Actually thanks to the mono project C# is also supported under Linux. And I'm willing to bet it compiles under Solaris as well. Undoubtly Java runs on much more platforms (don't forget mobile devices), but let's be correct on this one.
ILM switching is another sign of the popularity Linux gains in the graphics market too. But what I found interesting was the way the changed happened.
I have a friend who has a friend who etc. works for ILM. They had planned this thing for a loooong time and they had assigned three (small) teams to this swithover project. One of the teams was to investigate the actual power of Linux in this domain and the offer of the marked. Techies. Second team was to look over the market see about savings, opportunities, investors, stuff like that. Financial $tuff The existence of the third team will probably never be acknowledged, but their task was to look into what their competitors who switched to Linux (see preview slashdot's announces of switchovers) were doing, how were they doing it, what impact on their revenues had, etc. I'd say spies. They've done a pretty good job.
Of course, this is highly fictional and has no relation to any living person or existing company ;).
Well, first of all we had (have) quite a lax policy on games. Do your job and do whatever you like. However, most of the time games we're allowed after hours only.
Here are three funny stories about getting caught playing.
At this company I used to work for, the boss had a harsh policy on games and it started by refusing to buy accelerated cards. So much for Q3A... Well, however, we eventually elude him and tricked him into buying some. Six hours a day games were then not so uncommon, especially since we had a multiple floor building, the management on the last floor:). But the boss had an ace up the sleeve. He used to scan the network for Q3 servers with that tool from GameSpy that is otherwise used to "lawfully" find servers:). He said nothing, but at the end of that month penalties poured in:))
Another funny story. We we're CTF-ing, all in the same room, a 4-4 game. I don't think a normal person could have resisted the shouts and yells that we're going on. On that particular day we thought our boss was out for the day, so we had an early start at around 4 pm. The truth was that he was out, but only to get out CEO from the airport. And most of us quickly exited the game when they entered our office when returning, except for this guy who keps on shouting : "Get the flag, get the f*ckin' flag!" with our boss and our CEO in the room. And when finally he saw we exited, he shouted, still not noticing the new commers, with his headphones still on his head: "Hey, whadda f*ck you exited now that I finally got the flag"... He turned blue two seconds later when he saw why we had exited.
At my latest company UT was the game of the day. And since our CTO played with us most of the time, we quite often broke the "games after hours" rule and played even in the middle of the day. On one of this occasions, out CTO joined the game with the nick of another casual player (thus we didn't noticed him), took the Sniper rifle and shot of on the guys in the head. Then the message flashed on the screen : "You're busted!"...
Well, however, I loved Q3 because you could do "bind ENTER quit" and it exited the game sooooo quickly. It saved me on more that a couple of boss-raides:)
I suggest the proper way would be to force the marketing fix bugs (they said the software was perfect and crap) while the programmers should be send to some exotic islands and punished to stay in luxury hotels and have lots of chicks and booze around...
I have a friend who while working for a Games magazine was assigned to review an upcoming game. The game was planned to be released no sooner than two months.
So she got a copy of the "close circuit game preview" CD and thought to give it a fair ride.
It took 3 days to install the game - it was so poorly written it only worked on a single test machine and it was UGLY and slow like hell.
So acting in consequence, my friend wrote the review and give it a 3 out of 10:). Suprise, surprise ! The editor was pissed and started to yell something along the lines of "yo' tryin' to ruin us or what ?!".
It turned out it was (guess still is) common practice to write good reviews in order to get early previews. You see, the magazine sells because it features early reviews, hence it has to get early game releases and has to write GOOD reviews in order for early stuff to keep coming and readers keep buying.
OTOH, the game companies obviously need to have good publicity so they use (among other stuff like PR and paid trips to nice resorts in order for editors to get a "preview" of the new stuff) this mechanism of early reviews.
Needless to say the game ended up as a complete failure, but all things considered who remembers the article that gave the game 8.8 out of 10 ?:)
Who said politics is the only whore ?
The BSA occasionally flexes their muscles in Romania too. Of course, they're mainly pushed by Microsoft as it is their biggest contributor.
Software piracy rate in Romania is a like 80% or so. So, naturally, their main target are students (i.e. "pirates") selling 5-10 disc copies and other companies nobody really ever heard of. Every once in a while they start raiding, give some fines and take some poor bastards and make them give tearful statements like: "I'm sorry I've used pirate software, I'll never do it again".
I rarely heard them picking on software companies - their main target are accounting and the such. I wish they'd pick more on software companies. Why ? Well, I worked for a number of small companies, 50 employees top, and the policy was : buy a copy of SoftwareX and everybody installs it. I don't think it's fair, but due to economic conditions in Romania everybody does it (would you expect somebody to pay $180 for a copy of MSWindows when the average income per month is $100-150 ?! same goes for companies).
I really think that if software companies would be raided, they'd switch to Open Source. One of the biggest "problems" with Open Source - support wouldn't be such an issues since pretty much everybody in a software company is a programmer:-).
Yes it can happen. At a previous company I worked for, BSA send some announcements (i.e. threats). As we had few licenses of W2K Server (and of course everybody had W2K Server installed), we kept the W2KS only on few computer (web-servers for ASP development) while most of us programmers installed Linux...
My point is that maybe BSA is, in a strange and twisted way, a temporary yet convenient ally of the free world. Probably until they realize bloatware is loosing terrain...
I've been up and down the path of trying to get open source to replace some costing apps. Sometimes I've succeeded, sometimes I failed.
I've noticed one thing though, in all this endeavor : the more "touchy" the system was, the greater the resistance to change to a better and more reliable open source alternative.
Than I started asking why ?
Let me point out some reasons behind this, which of course most of you already know:
Open source projects don't send out nice brochures telling how great the product is
Since there is almost no advertising (what ?! do you expect square headed managers to read slashdot ?! they barely can read !:), there's little info about what a product can and cannot do. Of course, you can always ask that geek down the hall that seems to know them all, but how much can you trust a guy without social life ?
We don't know if the new open source app will preserve/convert the data from the old app. I wanna be honest and say most of the time open source apps regard themselves as being the only apps out there (scratching someone's itch - ESR might say) and provide little feature to import existing data
But the number one reason behind not accepting open source replacement of sensitive software is the fact that there is no one to blame
The latest reason applies to both managers and sysadmins or whomever is in charge of getting things done. Pointing fingers is big business when things go wrong. Commercial app means that you have someone to call almost 24-7, someone to swear at and still be nice (you paid them a shitload of money to do so). If things break, sysadmins can always say: it was that creepy product's fault.
But that is one thing you cannot do to open source. First of all, you paid nothing. The creator lets you use the software because he's a nice guy. If the system crashes, the managers will point fingers at the sysadmin: you're the one going with this solution - you fix it!.
Now security is probably one of the most sensitive and touchy part of an organization. Yes open source security software works better, yes it provides you more options, no it won't send your secret data neither to NSA nor FBI, no it's not hard to setup up neither to maintain, and no, microsoft didn't invent it. But, sometimes it may screw things up. And when that happens, the first question on everybody's minds is: Whom do we point fingers at?
The ads only appear when using an Internet Explorer browser.
Yes, yes, yessssss ! Victory... V-I-C-T-O-R-Y !!.
I strongly urge the developers of these beautiful , amazing breath taking crap-ads to keep it that way: Internet Exploder ONLY !
Besides the fact that the US web site http://www.sharp-usa.com when viewed with K-Meleon displayed a page indicating to upgrade to Internet Explorer 4 or Netscape 4, I was quite unable to find a lot of info.
A few web searches took me through the UK web site (they have a pdf spec sheet) to the developer's web site (why didn't I think of it in the first place ?!).
Both the Linux spec and Java are interesting. It runs PersonalJava 1.2 with the Truffle AWT L&F. On the Linux part, it implements Embedix - the 2.4 kernel. I find very interesting it supports BusyBox + some additional commands.
"It provides minimal replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip, tar, etc. In addition, by using the network or a Compact Flash card, useful Linux tools can be used."
Also, I find very comforting that on the interface part we got Qt/Embedded which is quite cool.
To sum it up... I'm a developer looking for a PDA. $400 is pricey, but the Zaurus is not a gadget it's a real tool. I hope I'll find the funds to get one for Xmas:)
Let me state that all of you are absolutely wrong.
Doing a quick search on Microsoft's web site for "giant computor" yielded no result. Hence, in the light of the axiom: "Nothing exists 'till Microsoft invents it" I'm forced to draw the conclusion that there is no such thing as giant computor.
Damn y'all geeks for a second you almost fooled me in believing all those blinking computer lights I've seen in the movies are for real.
Adding Kazaa to the list of progs that got hit bye RIAA makes me think all this happens because there is somebody to get hit.
I think there IS a way to avoid this happening again, unless till the government bans any kind of file sharing through law.:(
What if we take an open-source distributed file-sharing client and just keep renaming it every time they come against it. Since it's free, it doesn't cost a thing to rename it, while it'll cost RIAA a ton of money in lawyer fees.
I was wondering myself about socialization and ostracization.
I don't live in US, but nonetheless I'm working in an IT company. I've recently been to US working for a small company, still IT, so I'd like to make some comments including both experiences.
Socialization in my home country is mostly about getting together with friends. Friends are people a) I made a long time ago b) I made recently. The A) category comprises people I know from school or from college - people I've long been friends with.
B) is about people I met recently, through my new job or through other friends (friend of a friend).
A) are the friends I struggle to keep connected to, since we have a long array of memories between us.
We usually go out on events, not on a regular basis. Events such as bowling, camping, etc.
People I've recently met - B) - are conjunctural friends, though over the time some of them went into the A) category.
Since the topic is about getting together with your workmates, let me state this doesn't happen a lot. Going out usually means beer. Back in US we had this weekly event where we played basketball (Thursday) and poker (every each other Saturday). Other than this, lunch and stuff you didn't wanna do alone anyway.
Now looking back, I tend to blame most of the desocialization on instant messaging. Before each of my friends had a working place, we kinda missed each other a lot and we tried to get together as much as possible. ICQ made it possible to talk to each other pretty much every single day, so that "I haven't seen you in a while" went off...
I also noticed that spanning over a couple of years, going out and getting together seem to be constant events in my life (const as in weekly or whatever). The events stay - the people taking part in seem to change.
the phenomenon is generally not noticeable to average Internet users because most netizens only use a tiny portion of the Net. "Most people access five or ten web sites," Labovitz says.
Oh...(SHOCKED!) so does it mean out there are other sites besides slashdot...
Cool... do you need any special software to browse them ? I use K-Meleon. There's a green icon on my desktop - I double click it and it takes me to slashdot.org, where I read the coolest stuff and then I click the tiny X button ontop when I finished.
Heard about a proggie, though: Internet Exploder that would supposedly take you places where you wanted to go that thay - I always thought it's some travel/tourism/ticket booking application or stuff like that....
Gone researching how to get to the others 4 or 9 web sites...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually thanks to the mono project C# is also supported under Linux. And I'm willing to bet it compiles under Solaris as well. Undoubtly Java runs on much more platforms (don't forget mobile devices), but let's be correct on this one.
Well, I guess you win on this one since the open source community and Icaza's boys are not really a "Vendor" ;)
I don't get one thing...
If 9% think what they do it's illegal, why don't they simply stop?!
Have you done your part in emailing the two companies and trying to say your thoughts hoping you would steer them to reason ?
If not do it so.
If you did, then switch to your anonymous email account and send them some nice hate mail as well...
I have a friend who has a friend who etc. works for ILM. They had planned this thing for a loooong time and they had assigned three (small) teams to this swithover project.
;) .
One of the teams was to investigate the actual power of Linux in this domain and the offer of the marked. Techies .
Second team was to look over the market see about savings, opportunities, investors, stuff like that. Financial $tuff
The existence of the third team will probably never be acknowledged, but their task was to look into what their competitors who switched to Linux (see preview slashdot's announces of switchovers) were doing, how were they doing it, what impact on their revenues had, etc. I'd say spies. They've done a pretty good job.
Of course, this is highly fictional and has no relation to any living person or existing company
Well, first of all we had (have) quite a lax policy on games. Do your job and do whatever you like. However, most of the time games we're allowed after hours only.
:). But the boss had an ace up the sleeve. He used to scan the network for Q3 servers with that tool from GameSpy that is otherwise used to "lawfully" find servers :). He said nothing, but at the end of that month penalties poured in :))
:)
Here are three funny stories about getting caught playing.
At this company I used to work for, the boss had a harsh policy on games and it started by refusing to buy accelerated cards. So much for Q3A... Well, however, we eventually elude him and tricked him into buying some. Six hours a day games were then not so uncommon, especially since we had a multiple floor building, the management on the last floor
Another funny story. We we're CTF-ing, all in the same room, a 4-4 game. I don't think a normal person could have resisted the shouts and yells that we're going on. On that particular day we thought our boss was out for the day, so we had an early start at around 4 pm. The truth was that he was out, but only to get out CEO from the airport. And most of us quickly exited the game when they entered our office when returning, except for this guy who keps on shouting : "Get the flag, get the f*ckin' flag!" with our boss and our CEO in the room. And when finally he saw we exited, he shouted, still not noticing the new commers, with his headphones still on his head: "Hey, whadda f*ck you exited now that I finally got the flag"... He turned blue two seconds later when he saw why we had exited.
At my latest company UT was the game of the day. And since our CTO played with us most of the time, we quite often broke the "games after hours" rule and played even in the middle of the day. On one of this occasions, out CTO joined the game with the nick of another casual player (thus we didn't noticed him), took the Sniper rifle and shot of on the guys in the head. Then the message flashed on the screen : "You're busted!"...
Well, however, I loved Q3 because you could do "bind ENTER quit" and it exited the game sooooo quickly. It saved me on more that a couple of boss-raides
I suggest the proper way would be to force the marketing fix bugs (they said the software was perfect and crap) while the programmers should be send to some exotic islands and punished to stay in luxury hotels and have lots of chicks and booze around...
Or maybe I'm just frustrated...
I have a friend who while working for a Games magazine was assigned to review an upcoming game. The game was planned to be released no sooner than two months. :). :)
So she got a copy of the "close circuit game preview" CD and thought to give it a fair ride.
It took 3 days to install the game - it was so poorly written it only worked on a single test machine and it was UGLY and slow like hell.
So acting in consequence, my friend wrote the review and give it a 3 out of 10
Suprise, surprise ! The editor was pissed and started to yell something along the lines of "yo' tryin' to ruin us or what ?!".
It turned out it was (guess still is) common practice to write good reviews in order to get early previews. You see, the magazine sells because it features early reviews, hence it has to get early game releases and has to write GOOD reviews in order for early stuff to keep coming and readers keep buying.
OTOH, the game companies obviously need to have good publicity so they use (among other stuff like PR and paid trips to nice resorts in order for editors to get a "preview" of the new stuff) this mechanism of early reviews.
Needless to say the game ended up as a complete failure, but all things considered who remembers the article that gave the game 8.8 out of 10 ?
Who said politics is the only whore ?
The BSA occasionally flexes their muscles in Romania too. Of course, they're mainly pushed by Microsoft as it is their biggest contributor. :-).
Software piracy rate in Romania is a like 80% or so. So, naturally, their main target are students (i.e. "pirates") selling 5-10 disc copies and other companies nobody really ever heard of.
Every once in a while they start raiding, give some fines and take some poor bastards and make them give tearful statements like: "I'm sorry I've used pirate software, I'll never do it again".
I rarely heard them picking on software companies - their main target are accounting and the such.
I wish they'd pick more on software companies. Why ? Well, I worked for a number of small companies, 50 employees top, and the policy was : buy a copy of SoftwareX and everybody installs it. I don't think it's fair, but due to economic conditions in Romania everybody does it (would you expect somebody to pay $180 for a copy of MSWindows when the average income per month is $100-150 ?! same goes for companies).
I really think that if software companies would be raided, they'd switch to Open Source. One of the biggest "problems" with Open Source - support wouldn't be such an issues since pretty much everybody in a software company is a programmer
Yes it can happen. At a previous company I worked for, BSA send some announcements (i.e. threats). As we had few licenses of W2K Server (and of course everybody had W2K Server installed), we kept the W2KS only on few computer (web-servers for ASP development) while most of us programmers installed Linux...
My point is that maybe BSA is, in a strange and twisted way, a temporary yet convenient ally of the free world. Probably until they realize bloatware is loosing terrain...
I've noticed one thing though, in all this endeavor : the more "touchy" the system was, the greater the resistance to change to a better and more reliable open source alternative.
Than I started asking why ?
Let me point out some reasons behind this, which of course most of you already know:
- Open source projects don't send out nice brochures telling how great the product is
- Since there is almost no advertising (what ?! do you expect square headed managers to read slashdot ?! they barely can read !
:), there's little info about what a product can and cannot do. Of course, you can always ask that geek down the hall that seems to know them all, but how much can you trust a guy without social life ?
- We don't know if the new open source app will preserve/convert the data from the old app. I wanna be honest and say most of the time open source apps regard themselves as being the only apps out there (scratching someone's itch - ESR might say) and provide little feature to import existing data
- But the number one reason behind not accepting open source replacement of sensitive software is the fact that there is no one to blame
The latest reason applies to both managers and sysadmins or whomever is in charge of getting things done.Pointing fingers is big business when things go wrong. Commercial app means that you have someone to call almost 24-7, someone to swear at and still be nice (you paid them a shitload of money to do so). If things break, sysadmins can always say: it was that creepy product's fault.
But that is one thing you cannot do to open source. First of all, you paid nothing. The creator lets you use the software because he's a nice guy. If the system crashes, the managers will point fingers at the sysadmin: you're the one going with this solution - you fix it!.
Now security is probably one of the most sensitive and touchy part of an organization. Yes open source security software works better, yes it provides you more options, no it won't send your secret data neither to NSA nor FBI, no it's not hard to setup up neither to maintain, and no, microsoft didn't invent it. But, sometimes it may screw things up. And when that happens, the first question on everybody's minds is:
Whom do we point fingers at?
Quote:
The ads only appear when using an Internet Explorer browser.
Yes, yes, yessssss ! Victory... V-I-C-T-O-R-Y !!.
I strongly urge the developers of these beautiful , amazing breath taking crap-ads to keep it that way: Internet Exploder ONLY !
K-Meleon user
Besides the fact that the US web site http://www.sharp-usa.com when viewed with K-Meleon displayed a page indicating to upgrade to Internet Explorer 4 or Netscape 4, I was quite unable to find a lot of info.
:)
A few web searches took me through the UK web site (they have a pdf spec sheet) to the developer's web site (why didn't I think of it in the first place ?!).
Both the Linux spec and Java are interesting. It runs PersonalJava 1.2 with the Truffle AWT L&F. On the Linux part, it implements Embedix - the 2.4 kernel. I find very interesting it supports BusyBox + some additional commands.
"It provides minimal replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip, tar, etc. In addition, by using the network or a Compact Flash card, useful Linux tools can be used."
Also, I find very comforting that on the interface part we got Qt/Embedded which is quite cool.
To sum it up... I'm a developer looking for a PDA. $400 is pricey, but the Zaurus is not a gadget it's a real tool. I hope I'll find the funds to get one for Xmas
philipx
Let me state that all of you are absolutely wrong.
Doing a quick search on Microsoft's web site for "giant computor" yielded no result.
Hence, in the light of the axiom: "Nothing exists 'till Microsoft invents it" I'm forced to draw the conclusion that there is no such thing as giant computor.
Damn y'all geeks for a second you almost fooled me in believing all those blinking computer lights I've seen in the movies are for real.
Adding Kazaa to the list of progs that got hit bye RIAA makes me think all this happens because there is somebody to get hit.
:(
I think there IS a way to avoid this happening again, unless till the government bans any kind of file sharing through law.
What if we take an open-source distributed file-sharing client and just keep renaming it every time they come against it. Since it's free, it doesn't cost a thing to rename it, while it'll cost RIAA a ton of money in lawyer fees.
Isn't that feasable ?
I checked the sys requirements and I thought I'm going to die laughing.
It's embedded yet it needs a CD-ROM or DVD and a Microsoft compatible mouse. How the hell am I going to stash a DVD in my watch ?!?
philip
I was wondering myself about socialization and ostracization.
I don't live in US, but nonetheless I'm working in an IT company. I've recently been to US working for a small company, still IT, so I'd like to make some comments including both experiences.
Socialization in my home country is mostly about getting together with friends. Friends are people a) I made a long time ago b) I made recently. The A) category comprises people I know from school or from college - people I've long been friends with. B) is about people I met recently, through my new job or through other friends (friend of a friend).
A) are the friends I struggle to keep connected to, since we have a long array of memories between us. We usually go out on events, not on a regular basis. Events such as bowling, camping, etc.
People I've recently met - B) - are conjunctural friends, though over the time some of them went into the A) category.
Since the topic is about getting together with your workmates, let me state this doesn't happen a lot. Going out usually means beer. Back in US we had this weekly event where we played basketball (Thursday) and poker (every each other Saturday). Other than this, lunch and stuff you didn't wanna do alone anyway.
Now looking back, I tend to blame most of the desocialization on instant messaging. Before each of my friends had a working place, we kinda missed each other a lot and we tried to get together as much as possible. ICQ made it possible to talk to each other pretty much every single day, so that "I haven't seen you in a while" went off...
I also noticed that spanning over a couple of years, going out and getting together seem to be constant events in my life (const as in weekly or whatever). The events stay - the people taking part in seem to change.
the phenomenon is generally not noticeable to average Internet users because most netizens only use a tiny portion of the Net. "Most people access five or ten web sites," Labovitz says.
Oh...(SHOCKED!) so does it mean out there are other sites besides slashdot...
Cool... do you need any special software to browse them ? I use K-Meleon. There's a green icon on my desktop - I double click it and it takes me to slashdot.org, where I read the coolest stuff and then I click the tiny X button ontop when I finished.
Heard about a proggie, though: Internet Exploder that would supposedly take you places where you wanted to go that thay - I always thought it's some travel/tourism/ticket booking application or stuff like that....
Gone researching how to get to the others 4 or 9 web sites...
Thanks Slava and all jEdit developers
jEdit