The question is just: How do you know he's guilty?
on
Online Revenge
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· Score: 1
I would reserve judgement until we know one way or the other, first of all. Secondly, I would think that someone referencing the bible as an authoritative document would be Christian, and thusly be a bit more willing to forgive...but what do I know, I'm not Christian.
Actually, the real constraint was the network lag.
on
A Whirlwind of Game Design
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· Score: 2, Informative
The phone hacking was fine. The server setup was, while sort of a hack, also fine and fast. The browser-end actionscript was super fine too. The NETWORK LATENCY sucked balls.
Okay, you've got me--that's much worse considering it was a professional situation--I'd MUCH rather have to deal with this for my own personal stuff than work. Yeesh.
These kinds of things just really makes me wonder how some places stay in business!
...was about a month or so ago. One day, a Saturday I'm pretty sure, I found that my email from the last three or so weeks was gone. Just...gone. I poked around for a while and realized that my DNS had changed without any warning! They had moved the server over and changed the DNS and had used a version of my data that was almost a MONTH old. They didn't even send a warning email telling me they would be moving servers. Granted this was personal email, and personal web site, but I was pissed.
I emailed back and forth with the sysadmin and could not figure out what the hell was going on, why they were using old data, etc. His final response was, "well, I guess I'll move your up-to-date data over from the old server for you if you want..." I ignored his last email for a day, found a new hosting company (site5.com who I'm quite happy with, they are a LOT better in many big and small ways) moved my data over to my new host (I still could log in using the IP of the old server so I grabbed everything that way as soon as I figured out what was up) and switched DNS. It only took me about a day to get back up and running.
At that point I emailed the admin a response, saying "if I did what you did at my job I would be FIRED. So, you're fired." The name of the company was imagelinkusa--I recommend you stay away from them.
P.S. Yeah, I know I should have been doing backups anyways...
It's not about revenue. The point is that when a second sale is made the costs to the publisher go up.
Publishers have to pay for their 1-800 support lines, multiplayer servers, online community, etc. Have you played a Live! enabled game yet? The goal is to provide value to the player long after the sale of a game is made.
What are you talking about? Please explain to me how one person buying a game off of another one--one cumulative user per copy--is costing the publisher more? Is the first person who no longer has the game to play for some reason still calling the support line and getting into the server?
Or--are you talking about the first person illegally copying the game to use after they have sold the first copy? Well, shouldn't the licensing key or whatever is on every single freaking game today prevent that? If not, aren't you talking about piracy here rather than abuse of a publisher's 'magnanimity?' Your statement is preposterous and based only in greed as far as I can tell. Suck it up and review the business model before you complain about publishers losing money when people do what they have an absolute right to do.
Oh, and by the way--I'd like you to explain to me how providing an online community forum which is used by everyone and their grandma is something other than marketing dollars well spent. You want people who aren't playing to go on there and use it--it creates a potential (probable) base for customers. That's business. It costs money to make money.
No. We are selling an experience, a community.
...which comes in the form of a media with content on it and perhaps a server connection fee. Spare us the corporate-marketing-drone b.s. please!
Right now, for example, Blizzard charges for the media that has the World of Warcraft game on it and then they charge monthly to login to their server. If I stop paying that monthly cost, sell my copy of WoW to someone else, how is Blizzard entitled to any more money that what they'll get when they start getting that monthly fee paid to them again? They are making all the money they possibly could deserve (and then some). Frankly, I'm acting as an extension of their sales department by hooking up another steady revenue stream to their money funnel. The should be writing me a freaking check for assuring them another year of dough after I would be long gone.
Car makers only allow transfership of warranty under strict guidelines. Publishers haven't decided what they think their guidelines should be.
Assuming we're both in the U.S. here: if I buy a car or a book then I can sell it to someone else. That's all there is to it.
And by that, I mean people who have experience and know what they're doing. In some ways I might argue that it's actually more difficult to properly admin a Windows box well.
Well, think about this: if you save that object in a PHP session, what are you doing? You're either writing it to a file (session file in/tmp) or to a database entry. So, that makes any sort DB caching mechanism it may be providing you pointless, right?--'cause ideally you'd have that sucker sitting in memory waiting for you.
But, what about speeding up object instantiation? Well, you've still got to create a 'new' object in memory even if you have the data structure mapped for the 'old' object--then you've got to repopulate it. Perhaps they've got some shortcuts going here in the Zend engine but it seems to me that this is marginally better and, again, caching in memory is what you really want--you want an object life-span not bound to the HTTP protocol. It might even be slower because you have to do some lookups to a DB or a file and it's faster to pull data from memory every time. I'm sure there are app servers out there doing this for PHP, but last I looked they were in their infancy--especially with so many new features being added to PHP--and that was my main point: PHP just ain't there yet.
With just the differences between PHP 4 and 5 one could say these are two different languages--and I won't even go into previous versions. The change in OO features has been dramatic, I don't think you can debate that. While Java has also changed significantly over the years, entire basic syntactical structures have not received nearly as dramatic changes--I've mostly seen upheaval in libraries and additions to syntax, including evolution in the way design patterns have been approached as people have learned to use the core syntax of Java effectively. But I digress...
For this and this alone I will make the claim that Java is 'older,' whether or not this is absolutely true. It certainly is more mature, and does not suffer as dramatically as PHP from the "language by committee" problem.
Java is called a language but in this context it is more of a platform which, frankly, is older, more robust and better thought-out than anything PHP has to offer--at this point. I believe PHP is great for small to medium scale web sites, but once you start to deal with the large structures that enterprise systems require, PHP is just not an option--if you want packages already available to you which are thought-out, mature and stable, like all the various J2EE solutions available.
PHP very well may be faster for an individual page--but what are you comparing that to? Tomcat set up to use JSP? Well, there's a lot of infrastructure there that a PHP developer is probably not going to use for a simple dynamic page. And the fact is, PHP is incorporating a lot of 'heavier' OO features now whose effective use is debatable when considering web apps tied to the HTTP protocol--why build and tear down your entire OO structure every time you load a page? To do that intelligently you want an application server caching these objects...and then we start talking about Java and all the years it has on PHP there.
So, I'm really just saying--some things are right for some projects, others for other projects. Choose wisely.
This summary starts by talking about the new Harry Potter book, then somehow ends up talking about DRM and Richard Stallman. Even more interesting is how the post comes out in favor of DRM and is somehow sympathetic to Stallman at the same time. Good work! This should get a lot of posts Timothy, helping to increase that ad revenue...whoops, looks like I just got sucked in...
At the last place I worked we were using MySQL but the DB programmer we hired, an expert with 15+ years experience almost immediately started coming up against limitations with MySQL when he started to use anything fancier than simple INSERT, UPDATE, and SELECT. I think he was creating a temporary table when he noticed that some data was lost in the process. And because of the way replication was handled, the error was propagated to our replication servers, so we had no backup (yes, I know replication is not a good backup solution, but--that's something else that MySQL is really bad at--providing a scheme to reliably back up your data while keeping 100% uptime and no slowdown).
We then started looking into other options. On a challenge from management ("well, they're using it, why should we have to pay for Oracle?") we called up a few organizations with enterprise needs that were using MySQL and were listed in the MySQL customer list, and we found that they were generally using it in small ways and some were moving away from using it as they scaled up.
It's a fun, fast database, but it is a toy so far. And the previous poster is dead-on when he states that the 5.0 release is going to take a while to 'take.' One lesson I've learned is that you don't install 5.0 software for the most part and expect it to work in a mission-critical environment.
I get to do a lot of troubleshooting and interesting problem-solving in the process of helping these students figure out their pieces during the semester. They are doing everything from motion-capture software to OpenGL game dev. to physical computing stuff (like connecting a light bulb through a serial port to an ethernet port and transmitting messages over the network to signal another light bulb on the other end...one project I helped a student with this past semester). While (more than) half the time the students know more about the specific technology they're using than I do, it's really interesting for me to learn about this stuff and incredibly rewarding (I also find my more straightforward troubleshooting skills are useful to them no matter how little I know about the technology...artists/designers think differently, which itself is GREAT to be around for me)--whatever I do next I'm going to have learned a lot here!
I'm working as the lab director, tech guy, sysadmin, what have you for the Design + Tech. department at a school in NYC (Parsons School of Design). I get to set the lab up, build machines, take stuff apart and put it back together, set up and build web apps, administer our servers, cart equipment around and set up projectors, maintain classroom equipment, etc. Recently I got to run all over the place helping students set up their equipment for their pieces during our thesis show (http://dt.parsons.edu/show2005/) and while it was tough I did enjoy parts of the setup a lot--I was doing everything from lugging Apple flat-screen monitors down to the gallery to helping students hang projectors perched on a ladder to sitting on the floor for an hour crimping networking cable. Currently I'm spending a lot of time redesigning the lab and that's been fun too.
I spend a lot of time on my feet and while some might classify a lot of the work as grunt work I'm really enjoying it as I get to do a lot of different stuff. So, you might want to think about what opportunities are available like that in an academic environment (or maybe even a small business where you have to do a lot of different things) if it sounds interesting to you. I know it's not for everyone but I dig it.
Alsa is incredibly powerful, sophisticated, and has some really high-level audio engineers working on software that uses it to the exclusion of other not as good solutions. It is AMAZING what is going on with Linux sound right now. Just take a look at a system like Ardour w/Jack using Alsa and then tell me that this is a "fragmented half baked audio scheme." You are confused.
This is the way to go. You can do crazy stuff with this software, like control all your apps, and even write your own scripts. I actually paid for it and there's precious little software I do buy.
Actually, with my last mac, a powerbook g3, I broke the screen--with a little research, I found a replacement screen on ebay for around 275 and replaced it myself. It's all just *parts* in the end, it's not like Apple makes its parts--they order them from OEMs just like Dell or Gateway--they're just different parts (...sometimes). Some things are definitely going to be more specialized, like the mobos for G5s and whatnot, but that's not usually the stuff that breaks anyways, right? More likely the hard drive (standard), ram goes bad (easy to order from a bazillion places), etc.
It's funny 'cause I used to think the same thing as the other posters about Macs, until I owned one...I think the benefits outweigh the negatives in the end.
Don't confuse it with nihilism or belief in a completely subjective universe or whatever it is that you are trying to make it into. What existentialism is really about is the idea that we exist, there is not necessarily any explanation for it that can impose its own meaning upon us, and therefore we can impose whatever meaning upon existence that we like. In the end, it is a hopeful and positive philosophy because it suggests that the ability to create a better world lies within our control. It is profoundly humanistic and based on the most sincere belief that we have control over our lives.
As far as talking about objectivity vs. subjectivity, which it seems is what you are trying to get at, I don't think anyone who's thought about it in some depth would argue that nothing can be known objectively or existence is completely a subjective experience--I'm talking practically here, not in terms of some sort of abstruse and reductionist philosophical theory. I mean, it seems clear that some things we interact with are clearly there, and some things we experience are clearly subjective, and that there is also a vague boundary state where these things aren't so easy to understand (quantum physics springs to mind). But, I can't really prove any of that.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I would reserve judgement until we know one way or the other, first of all. Secondly, I would think that someone referencing the bible as an authoritative document would be Christian, and thusly be a bit more willing to forgive...but what do I know, I'm not Christian.
The phone hacking was fine. The server setup was, while sort of a hack, also fine and fast. The browser-end actionscript was super fine too. The NETWORK LATENCY sucked balls.
Okay, you've got me--that's much worse considering it was a professional situation--I'd MUCH rather have to deal with this for my own personal stuff than work. Yeesh.
These kinds of things just really makes me wonder how some places stay in business!
...was about a month or so ago. One day, a Saturday I'm pretty sure, I found that my email from the last three or so weeks was gone. Just...gone. I poked around for a while and realized that my DNS had changed without any warning! They had moved the server over and changed the DNS and had used a version of my data that was almost a MONTH old. They didn't even send a warning email telling me they would be moving servers. Granted this was personal email, and personal web site, but I was pissed.
I emailed back and forth with the sysadmin and could not figure out what the hell was going on, why they were using old data, etc. His final response was, "well, I guess I'll move your up-to-date data over from the old server for you if you want..." I ignored his last email for a day, found a new hosting company (site5.com who I'm quite happy with, they are a LOT better in many big and small ways) moved my data over to my new host (I still could log in using the IP of the old server so I grabbed everything that way as soon as I figured out what was up) and switched DNS. It only took me about a day to get back up and running.
At that point I emailed the admin a response, saying "if I did what you did at my job I would be FIRED. So, you're fired." The name of the company was imagelinkusa--I recommend you stay away from them.
P.S. Yeah, I know I should have been doing backups anyways...
What are you talking about? Please explain to me how one person buying a game off of another one--one cumulative user per copy--is costing the publisher more? Is the first person who no longer has the game to play for some reason still calling the support line and getting into the server?
Or--are you talking about the first person illegally copying the game to use after they have sold the first copy? Well, shouldn't the licensing key or whatever is on every single freaking game today prevent that? If not, aren't you talking about piracy here rather than abuse of a publisher's 'magnanimity?' Your statement is preposterous and based only in greed as far as I can tell. Suck it up and review the business model before you complain about publishers losing money when people do what they have an absolute right to do.
Oh, and by the way--I'd like you to explain to me how providing an online community forum which is used by everyone and their grandma is something other than marketing dollars well spent. You want people who aren't playing to go on there and use it--it creates a potential (probable) base for customers. That's business. It costs money to make money.
...which comes in the form of a media with content on it and perhaps a server connection fee. Spare us the corporate-marketing-drone b.s. please!
Right now, for example, Blizzard charges for the media that has the World of Warcraft game on it and then they charge monthly to login to their server. If I stop paying that monthly cost, sell my copy of WoW to someone else, how is Blizzard entitled to any more money that what they'll get when they start getting that monthly fee paid to them again? They are making all the money they possibly could deserve (and then some). Frankly, I'm acting as an extension of their sales department by hooking up another steady revenue stream to their money funnel. The should be writing me a freaking check for assuring them another year of dough after I would be long gone.
Assuming we're both in the U.S. here: if I buy a car or a book then I can sell it to someone else. That's all there is to it.
Good for you.
The article states clearly that it was Red Hat. Over and over and over and over...
And by that, I mean people who have experience and know what they're doing. In some ways I might argue that it's actually more difficult to properly admin a Windows box well.
It costs money to hire qualified admins, Windows or Linux.
Word.
Well, think about this: if you save that object in a PHP session, what are you doing? You're either writing it to a file (session file in /tmp) or to a database entry. So, that makes any sort DB caching mechanism it may be providing you pointless, right?--'cause ideally you'd have that sucker sitting in memory waiting for you.
But, what about speeding up object instantiation? Well, you've still got to create a 'new' object in memory even if you have the data structure mapped for the 'old' object--then you've got to repopulate it. Perhaps they've got some shortcuts going here in the Zend engine but it seems to me that this is marginally better and, again, caching in memory is what you really want--you want an object life-span not bound to the HTTP protocol. It might even be slower because you have to do some lookups to a DB or a file and it's faster to pull data from memory every time. I'm sure there are app servers out there doing this for PHP, but last I looked they were in their infancy--especially with so many new features being added to PHP--and that was my main point: PHP just ain't there yet.
With just the differences between PHP 4 and 5 one could say these are two different languages--and I won't even go into previous versions. The change in OO features has been dramatic, I don't think you can debate that. While Java has also changed significantly over the years, entire basic syntactical structures have not received nearly as dramatic changes--I've mostly seen upheaval in libraries and additions to syntax, including evolution in the way design patterns have been approached as people have learned to use the core syntax of Java effectively. But I digress...
For this and this alone I will make the claim that Java is 'older,' whether or not this is absolutely true. It certainly is more mature, and does not suffer as dramatically as PHP from the "language by committee" problem.
Java is called a language but in this context it is more of a platform which, frankly, is older, more robust and better thought-out than anything PHP has to offer--at this point. I believe PHP is great for small to medium scale web sites, but once you start to deal with the large structures that enterprise systems require, PHP is just not an option--if you want packages already available to you which are thought-out, mature and stable, like all the various J2EE solutions available.
PHP very well may be faster for an individual page--but what are you comparing that to? Tomcat set up to use JSP? Well, there's a lot of infrastructure there that a PHP developer is probably not going to use for a simple dynamic page. And the fact is, PHP is incorporating a lot of 'heavier' OO features now whose effective use is debatable when considering web apps tied to the HTTP protocol--why build and tear down your entire OO structure every time you load a page? To do that intelligently you want an application server caching these objects...and then we start talking about Java and all the years it has on PHP there.
So, I'm really just saying--some things are right for some projects, others for other projects. Choose wisely.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/28/ 2214245&tid=123
This summary starts by talking about the new Harry Potter book, then somehow ends up talking about DRM and Richard Stallman. Even more interesting is how the post comes out in favor of DRM and is somehow sympathetic to Stallman at the same time. Good work! This should get a lot of posts Timothy, helping to increase that ad revenue...whoops, looks like I just got sucked in...
At the last place I worked we were using MySQL but the DB programmer we hired, an expert with 15+ years experience almost immediately started coming up against limitations with MySQL when he started to use anything fancier than simple INSERT, UPDATE, and SELECT. I think he was creating a temporary table when he noticed that some data was lost in the process. And because of the way replication was handled, the error was propagated to our replication servers, so we had no backup (yes, I know replication is not a good backup solution, but--that's something else that MySQL is really bad at--providing a scheme to reliably back up your data while keeping 100% uptime and no slowdown).
We then started looking into other options. On a challenge from management ("well, they're using it, why should we have to pay for Oracle?") we called up a few organizations with enterprise needs that were using MySQL and were listed in the MySQL customer list, and we found that they were generally using it in small ways and some were moving away from using it as they scaled up.
It's a fun, fast database, but it is a toy so far. And the previous poster is dead-on when he states that the 5.0 release is going to take a while to 'take.' One lesson I've learned is that you don't install 5.0 software for the most part and expect it to work in a mission-critical environment.
MySQL just doesn't cut the mustard yet.
I get to do a lot of troubleshooting and interesting problem-solving in the process of helping these students figure out their pieces during the semester. They are doing everything from motion-capture software to OpenGL game dev. to physical computing stuff (like connecting a light bulb through a serial port to an ethernet port and transmitting messages over the network to signal another light bulb on the other end...one project I helped a student with this past semester). While (more than) half the time the students know more about the specific technology they're using than I do, it's really interesting for me to learn about this stuff and incredibly rewarding (I also find my more straightforward troubleshooting skills are useful to them no matter how little I know about the technology...artists/designers think differently, which itself is GREAT to be around for me)--whatever I do next I'm going to have learned a lot here!
I'm working as the lab director, tech guy, sysadmin, what have you for the Design + Tech. department at a school in NYC (Parsons School of Design). I get to set the lab up, build machines, take stuff apart and put it back together, set up and build web apps, administer our servers, cart equipment around and set up projectors, maintain classroom equipment, etc. Recently I got to run all over the place helping students set up their equipment for their pieces during our thesis show (http://dt.parsons.edu/show2005/) and while it was tough I did enjoy parts of the setup a lot--I was doing everything from lugging Apple flat-screen monitors down to the gallery to helping students hang projectors perched on a ladder to sitting on the floor for an hour crimping networking cable. Currently I'm spending a lot of time redesigning the lab and that's been fun too.
I spend a lot of time on my feet and while some might classify a lot of the work as grunt work I'm really enjoying it as I get to do a lot of different stuff. So, you might want to think about what opportunities are available like that in an academic environment (or maybe even a small business where you have to do a lot of different things) if it sounds interesting to you. I know it's not for everyone but I dig it.
That was not the point of your
Alsa is incredibly powerful, sophisticated, and has some really high-level audio engineers working on software that uses it to the exclusion of other not as good solutions. It is AMAZING what is going on with Linux sound right now. Just take a look at a system like Ardour w/Jack using Alsa and then tell me that this is a "fragmented half baked audio scheme." You are confused.
This is the way to go. You can do crazy stuff with this software, like control all your apps, and even write your own scripts. I actually paid for it and there's precious little software I do buy.
Who cares if it seems reasonable! Let's be "skeptical!"
It's funny 'cause I used to think the same thing as the other posters about Macs, until I owned one...I think the benefits outweigh the negatives in the end.
Don't confuse it with nihilism or belief in a completely subjective universe or whatever it is that you are trying to make it into. What existentialism is really about is the idea that we exist, there is not necessarily any explanation for it that can impose its own meaning upon us, and therefore we can impose whatever meaning upon existence that we like. In the end, it is a hopeful and positive philosophy because it suggests that the ability to create a better world lies within our control. It is profoundly humanistic and based on the most sincere belief that we have control over our lives.
As far as talking about objectivity vs. subjectivity, which it seems is what you are trying to get at, I don't think anyone who's thought about it in some depth would argue that nothing can be known objectively or existence is completely a subjective experience--I'm talking practically here, not in terms of some sort of abstruse and reductionist philosophical theory. I mean, it seems clear that some things we interact with are clearly there, and some things we experience are clearly subjective, and that there is also a vague boundary state where these things aren't so easy to understand (quantum physics springs to mind). But, I can't really prove any of that. :)
Man, talk about sticking your foot in your mouth.
No problem--one gets what one asks for. I just thought yours was the most persuasive so I responded to it first.