The reason why it was located in Britain was because the author is britisch.
The book itself could play in any country of the world.
I consider George Orwell to be a genious. He bascially extracted the base of ever suppressive government out of the sign of the times (Back then he had Stalin and Hitler as good examples) and made a timeless metapher out of those things he could gather.
Both books animal farm and 1984 would fit perfectly in every country which shows the signs of totality or the stages of beginning.
Don't get me wrong my american friends, but back then animal farm and 1984 was more or less a mockery of communism, but I consider it essential political literature, because there are signs in your society is as well, which are the dawn of totality and oppression which were clearly shown in the book (and in the history)
Totality always has the same face being it communism, being it and oppressive democracy (those things exist, look at Fujimoris Peru) being it a dictatorship or a plutocracy ( a government form where the people with the money dictate things)
Actually Echelon does exist and it is a US thing (in the past a few times used by the US for business and technology spying on their own friends)
One of those Echelon installations was until recently located in southern Bavaria.
Until the 9/11 thing local politicians were not too happy about the whole Echelon issue, it somehow dissapeared from the media after 9/11 (I am not talking about the Chilenean 9/11 here which brought Pinochet to power...)
Dont be so harsh, actually
games pretty much have taken the same road early cinema did. The first few years were experimental and some really amazing games (works of art) came out.
The works of Dani Bunten, Pitfall, PacMan, pretty much everything which came out from EA the first two til three years of its existence.
Then "master" game developers arrived, with amazing early works. Dani Bunten, Bill Bugde, David Crane, Richard Garriot, to name a few.
The mid nineties the whole thing became an industry, and with a few exceptions the quality went down the drain. Being replaced with endless clones of endless clones. Just like the movie industry.
Ahem...
Popoulous was done by him
Syndicate not, although published by his company
Dungeon keeper was the same mission again and again with harvesting units replaced by digging monsters and attackers replaced by foreign knights. Did I mention the missing level design which basically served you the same mission again and again? At least you could slam chickens.
Magic carpet was done by him
And Black and White as well, given his track record, his games are hit and miss.
And Pirates was done by Sid Meyer not Molineux and it was crafted after a board game by Avalon Hill.
But there is one thing all Molineux games have in common, too much hype!!!!!!!!
Intel shrinks the number of commands of the x86 architecture by 30% thus resulting in less heat and a global saving of energy of multiple gigawatts per month.
Well the BeOS filesystem is exactly what Microsoft wants to achieve with WinFS.
Reiser4 also has the meta data mechanisms needed, but lacks an indexing and query service, which can be provided by a user level process.
Actually what they planned was (according to the released specs) to pin the SQL Server underneath the File access system and add metadata to the existing system.
What we have then, is nothing more than an extended NTFS with an indexing and query mechanism.
Nothing more than BeOS already had (they also had a full blown database server underneath but failed performancewise and went for the lightweight approach in the end)
Microsoft tried the same approach as Be and seems to fail in the same areas, now they will end up with NTFS meta attributes and an indexing service with some kind of query language behind, like everybody else.
Reiser already went for the meta data mechanism, but optimized at the storage level with everything being a file with meta data and a balanced tree as storage structure (here is your so called OO filesystem, which is nothing more than marketing fog)
Remember Microsoft always came out with vaporware which it cut down in the end.
They had this mysterious Cairo project which failed in the end, others were there before and succeeded, instantly, NeXT comes to my mind, or the workplace shell from OS/2, also StarOffice on a smaller scale. Also KDE although not as old as the Cairo idea (which originated in NeXT) basically is what Cairo should have become.
There are other examples but the Cairo history seems to repeat itself with WinFS.
In the end all those projects within Microsoft failed because there was too much bloat conntected to it. Cairo failed because somebody at Microsoft insisted to use COM instead of something more lightweight.
WinFS now fails in its original concept because they try to cram the SQL server into it (a concept where others have failed in the past)
Microsoft may have smart people, but never underestimate the Bill Gates factor...
Java Smalltalk and others are cool by your standards, you just should apply a little bit more focus on what you learn.
VM OO languages are extremely good testbeds for patterns and OO design, because they allow a rapid development for large scale apps, where you have to apply those techniques constantly.
As for functional languages, old stuff, which basically is going back 20 years...
Neither cool not that relevant outside of theory anymore, and totally unsuitable for modern
software architectural problems.
Modern problems are not caused by the semantics but, by the layer which is already again becoming too low, functional programming does not help in this regard.
Anyway
If you really want to see something cool, then look at the Beta system from Mjoln, or at AOP, which at least are new angles to old Problems.
Actually java is not perfect but it is quite good. I recently developed an application with including the frameworks had about several hundred thousand lines of code.
The system was developed for an AIX RS6000 with Oracle on it. I developed the thing on Linux, later ran it on Windows without a single line of code that had to be changed and I ported it to the IBM SDK on Linux. One line of code had to be changed due to a bug in the IBM sdk. One line of several hundred thousands.
The application was delivered in binary form to the customer and ran on the RS6000 without a problem. The day I delivered tha app I saw the RS6000 for the first time.
Python has its own share of problems.
The non declarative approach is a matter of taste, but in the end you have to write much more unit tests than with a declarative approach, thus nullifying the loc argument basically to a negative factor.
The other thing is the speed claimed by python. Face it the VM is rather slow (until parrot or another VM takes over), most modern vms including the java one (which is one of the best) runs circles around Python. I would never program a bigger system in Python, there are too many problems which are totally ignorable for smaller stuff but can become deadly for a bigger system.
You totally missed my point, you just showed another shortcut to a very special problem, hello world.
But also in ruby, you end up pretty much with the same amount of lines as in java C# and other languages once you have a larger system.
The problem lies within the mentality as soon as you have too many shortcuts to fundamental problems a larger system is hard to write and maintain.
A simple hello world is a bad example for the quality of a language, by this definition it is very easy to write totally stable rock solid systems in C++ in a short period of time, which it isnt. And it is totally easy to maintain a foreign perl system which is badly documented.
My dear friend, this is easy to answer.
The reason why your hello world is as verbose at it is, is that java in the core is OO (not really pure thanks to the hack... core datatypes and operators, but pure enough, that the example is justified as it is)
Perl on the other hand is in its core procedural, like C++ has a procedural core.
Perl is not harder to understand, but the main problem of the language simply is, that it has so many shortcuts to problems that you easily end in a mess of shortcuts, ditto for C++
Java basically sacrifices some of those shortcuts for the sake of readability.
What in the end comes out, is probably 10-15% more locs but much more readability and less bugs.
Well if you go for the fast hack this approach might not be the best, but if you have to design huge software systems, are more readable approach which some security nets builtin is heavens sent.
Now if we go to Python, python developers always claim less code, but I did a few things with Python, and the less code approach is more or less not justified, the class libs of this language arent too far off the ones java and C# use, and the only code reduction i could see was to use inlining instead of brackets for block signing (which is a matter of taste but saves a few lines per class, not very much) and the non declarative character which removes you of the responsibility of having to declare a variabe.
The non declarative approach maybe in the long term saves around 1-2% of code, but causes lots if trouble regarding typos in variable names, idiotic assignments and so on, which have to be covered by unit tests, which add another 15% to the code, to reach the same stability.
So non talkativity in large systems is a question on how fast you can achieve an elegant decent result, and often non talkative languages with shortcuts, prove to be worse solutions for middle sized and large systems, than ones which look on the first sight not that elegant.
the last time I checked it lots of "hackers" used it, heck look at the jakarta project,
95% of the code the apache foundation produces is java related.
java is an interesting language if you go for true multiplatform, it is a really interesting language if you are interested in total stability and design issues and software engineering, it is a lousy language if you want to do low level systems hacking, that basically sums it up.
Well ext3 has another advantage, although I prefer Reiserfs (being a mostly java developer I love the performance on thousands of small files).
The main problem ReiserFS has is that there is no decent read/write way from windows, which makes it on dual boot machines (face it those are the most common machines) a pain.
For ext3 you have the explorer like program to export and import data, and a commercial driver.
For reiser, there is nothing non commercial or commerical, I would love to pay a small amount of money for a good reiserfs driver for windows.
And I am sure lots of people would (here me namesys?)
Ran a huge article on Reiser4 a while ago. (Around 2 issues ago) They said it was blazingly fast, but had problems, that the performance went down the drain once the processor did something not reiserfs related, thus IO is a higher burden on the processor, due to the tree structure they use.
The other problem is fragmentation, which should be resolved by a defrag daemon/tool running in the background, which was not available back then.
So my question, have those two problems been resolved already?
After the first world war, lots of the gas produced simply was dumped into the atlantic and still comes up as poisnous foam from time to time.
Some of the islands in the Bikini area still are not inhabitable.
I am sure there are numours other relics of World War 1 and 2 lying around on the planet, most people dont know of.
I dont think the classpath project would be a good idea, they want to emulate the core libs as good as possible.
The best point to donate extensions to, is the jakarta commons project which already has many useful extensions and already has become a second core lib to many developers.
Donate your solutions to the Jakarta project, namely to the Apache commons project, which is basically already a second inofficial core library, used by most programs out there.
I dont think you really need a revamp of the
core libary addition process, Sun is doing a fine job there, since there are so many alternatives out there.
Now that Postgres 8.0 has hit beta and this one is the first version which supports windows natively, I think if MySQL does stupid tricks people have switched to PostgresSQL faster as the can say GP(L).
In the long run people will switch anyway since Postgres is more mature, has more features and is rock stable also the momentum of opensource database development switches slowly to postgres with Fujitsu as one of the major supporters of the project.
The only thing which has held postgres back in the past seriously was the lack of a decent windows implementation (which is necessary to gather the masses) this limit now is solved.
MySQL has a serious problem on its hands.
and of course Independence Day, this one basically is the worst.
The funny thing a classic like Plan 9 from outer space is in my opinion quite good, it has a certain charme and definitely lots of soul in it.
Id rather see the complete works of Ed Wood 3 times than once Independence Day or the typical Bruckheimer Bay idiocy.
Almost every company who did business with Microsoft basically was screwed by them in the end.
IBM, Stac, Borland, Sun (who had to fight tooth and nails so that M$ didnt take over java), Mosaic (who had to fight for years to get a decent compensation for the Mosaic code, Netscape and a ton of others
I think Hollywood really should try to avoid them as much as possible
Both share the same roots, the akademic ingres database.
The recently OSSed ingres was the akademic ingres which has turned commercial and was lately in the hands of CA.
Postgres was a fork of the akademic Ingres and didnt have anything in common with Ingres for more than a decade now.
I think LA has been creatively dead for almost 10 years now.
Face it, the best people left the company around the mid nineties. The once creative company just put out one garbage star wars game after the other. The spark of creativity which once kept
this company running was lost back then.
They tried to revive older franchises with mediocre sequels instead of getting the old peopled on board (monkey island) and the only good game in the last years was done by the ex Black Isle division which has reformed under another name (Obsidian)
I think the doom of this company was the day when Tim Schaefer and others left the company.
The final nail onto the coffin was the day they decided to focus on mediocre Star Wars games.
(The ones which came out after X-Wing and Tie Fighter, which were both excellent)
4000 lines is not a medium sized app it is a better hello world.
I recently deployed an info system, with around 30.000 loks from ourself and around 100.000 more from the underlying framework.
It was developed on Linux on a Blackdown VM, later ported to the IBM vm and then deployed under Windows Linux and AIX.
There was exactly one problem, and that one was caused by a bug in the IBM VM. Speaking about portable... three platforms covered one line of code had to be changed in around 150.000 loks.
Now that is portable.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason why it was located in Britain was because the author is britisch. The book itself could play in any country of the world. I consider George Orwell to be a genious. He bascially extracted the base of ever suppressive government out of the sign of the times (Back then he had Stalin and Hitler as good examples) and made a timeless metapher out of those things he could gather. Both books animal farm and 1984 would fit perfectly in every country which shows the signs of totality or the stages of beginning. Don't get me wrong my american friends, but back then animal farm and 1984 was more or less a mockery of communism, but I consider it essential political literature, because there are signs in your society is as well, which are the dawn of totality and oppression which were clearly shown in the book (and in the history) Totality always has the same face being it communism, being it and oppressive democracy (those things exist, look at Fujimoris Peru) being it a dictatorship or a plutocracy ( a government form where the people with the money dictate things)
Actually Echelon does exist and it is a US thing (in the past a few times used by the US for business and technology spying on their own friends) One of those Echelon installations was until recently located in southern Bavaria. Until the 9/11 thing local politicians were not too happy about the whole Echelon issue, it somehow dissapeared from the media after 9/11 (I am not talking about the Chilenean 9/11 here which brought Pinochet to power ...)
Dont be so harsh, actually games pretty much have taken the same road early cinema did. The first few years were experimental and some really amazing games (works of art) came out. The works of Dani Bunten, Pitfall, PacMan, pretty much everything which came out from EA the first two til three years of its existence. Then "master" game developers arrived, with amazing early works. Dani Bunten, Bill Bugde, David Crane, Richard Garriot, to name a few. The mid nineties the whole thing became an industry, and with a few exceptions the quality went down the drain. Being replaced with endless clones of endless clones. Just like the movie industry.
Ahem... Popoulous was done by him Syndicate not, although published by his company Dungeon keeper was the same mission again and again with harvesting units replaced by digging monsters and attackers replaced by foreign knights. Did I mention the missing level design which basically served you the same mission again and again? At least you could slam chickens. Magic carpet was done by him And Black and White as well, given his track record, his games are hit and miss. And Pirates was done by Sid Meyer not Molineux and it was crafted after a board game by Avalon Hill. But there is one thing all Molineux games have in common, too much hype!!!!!!!!
Intel shrinks the number of commands of the x86 architecture by 30% thus resulting in less heat and a global saving of energy of multiple gigawatts per month.
Well the BeOS filesystem is exactly what Microsoft wants to achieve with WinFS. Reiser4 also has the meta data mechanisms needed, but lacks an indexing and query service, which can be provided by a user level process.
Actually what they planned was (according to the released specs) to pin the SQL Server underneath the File access system and add metadata to the existing system. What we have then, is nothing more than an extended NTFS with an indexing and query mechanism. Nothing more than BeOS already had (they also had a full blown database server underneath but failed performancewise and went for the lightweight approach in the end) Microsoft tried the same approach as Be and seems to fail in the same areas, now they will end up with NTFS meta attributes and an indexing service with some kind of query language behind, like everybody else. Reiser already went for the meta data mechanism, but optimized at the storage level with everything being a file with meta data and a balanced tree as storage structure (here is your so called OO filesystem, which is nothing more than marketing fog) Remember Microsoft always came out with vaporware which it cut down in the end. They had this mysterious Cairo project which failed in the end, others were there before and succeeded, instantly, NeXT comes to my mind, or the workplace shell from OS/2, also StarOffice on a smaller scale. Also KDE although not as old as the Cairo idea (which originated in NeXT) basically is what Cairo should have become. There are other examples but the Cairo history seems to repeat itself with WinFS. In the end all those projects within Microsoft failed because there was too much bloat conntected to it. Cairo failed because somebody at Microsoft insisted to use COM instead of something more lightweight. WinFS now fails in its original concept because they try to cram the SQL server into it (a concept where others have failed in the past) Microsoft may have smart people, but never underestimate the Bill Gates factor...
Nobody except the people who brought you BeOS and Hans reiser has done a filesystem like WinFS :-)
WinFS is a blatant ripoff of the BeOS filesystem.
Java Smalltalk and others are cool by your standards, you just should apply a little bit more focus on what you learn. VM OO languages are extremely good testbeds for patterns and OO design, because they allow a rapid development for large scale apps, where you have to apply those techniques constantly. As for functional languages, old stuff, which basically is going back 20 years... Neither cool not that relevant outside of theory anymore, and totally unsuitable for modern software architectural problems. Modern problems are not caused by the semantics but, by the layer which is already again becoming too low, functional programming does not help in this regard. Anyway If you really want to see something cool, then look at the Beta system from Mjoln, or at AOP, which at least are new angles to old Problems.
Actually java is not perfect but it is quite good. I recently developed an application with including the frameworks had about several hundred thousand lines of code. The system was developed for an AIX RS6000 with Oracle on it. I developed the thing on Linux, later ran it on Windows without a single line of code that had to be changed and I ported it to the IBM SDK on Linux. One line of code had to be changed due to a bug in the IBM sdk. One line of several hundred thousands. The application was delivered in binary form to the customer and ran on the RS6000 without a problem. The day I delivered tha app I saw the RS6000 for the first time.
Python has its own share of problems. The non declarative approach is a matter of taste, but in the end you have to write much more unit tests than with a declarative approach, thus nullifying the loc argument basically to a negative factor. The other thing is the speed claimed by python. Face it the VM is rather slow (until parrot or another VM takes over), most modern vms including the java one (which is one of the best) runs circles around Python. I would never program a bigger system in Python, there are too many problems which are totally ignorable for smaller stuff but can become deadly for a bigger system.
You totally missed my point, you just showed another shortcut to a very special problem, hello world. But also in ruby, you end up pretty much with the same amount of lines as in java C# and other languages once you have a larger system. The problem lies within the mentality as soon as you have too many shortcuts to fundamental problems a larger system is hard to write and maintain. A simple hello world is a bad example for the quality of a language, by this definition it is very easy to write totally stable rock solid systems in C++ in a short period of time, which it isnt. And it is totally easy to maintain a foreign perl system which is badly documented.
My dear friend, this is easy to answer. The reason why your hello world is as verbose at it is, is that java in the core is OO (not really pure thanks to the hack... core datatypes and operators, but pure enough, that the example is justified as it is)
Perl on the other hand is in its core procedural, like C++ has a procedural core.
Perl is not harder to understand, but the main problem of the language simply is, that it has so many shortcuts to problems that you easily end in a mess of shortcuts, ditto for C++
Java basically sacrifices some of those shortcuts for the sake of readability. What in the end comes out, is probably 10-15% more locs but much more readability and less bugs.
Well if you go for the fast hack this approach might not be the best, but if you have to design huge software systems, are more readable approach which some security nets builtin is heavens sent.
Now if we go to Python, python developers always claim less code, but I did a few things with Python, and the less code approach is more or less not justified, the class libs of this language arent too far off the ones java and C# use, and the only code reduction i could see was to use inlining instead of brackets for block signing (which is a matter of taste but saves a few lines per class, not very much) and the non declarative character which removes you of the responsibility of having to declare a variabe.
The non declarative approach maybe in the long term saves around 1-2% of code, but causes lots if trouble regarding typos in variable names, idiotic assignments and so on, which have to be covered by unit tests, which add another 15% to the code, to reach the same stability.
So non talkativity in large systems is a question on how fast you can achieve an elegant decent result, and often non talkative languages with shortcuts, prove to be worse solutions for middle sized and large systems, than ones which look on the first sight not that elegant.
the last time I checked it lots of "hackers" used it, heck look at the jakarta project, 95% of the code the apache foundation produces is java related. java is an interesting language if you go for true multiplatform, it is a really interesting language if you are interested in total stability and design issues and software engineering, it is a lousy language if you want to do low level systems hacking, that basically sums it up.
Well ext3 has another advantage, although I prefer Reiserfs (being a mostly java developer I love the performance on thousands of small files). The main problem ReiserFS has is that there is no decent read/write way from windows, which makes it on dual boot machines (face it those are the most common machines) a pain. For ext3 you have the explorer like program to export and import data, and a commercial driver. For reiser, there is nothing non commercial or commerical, I would love to pay a small amount of money for a good reiserfs driver for windows. And I am sure lots of people would (here me namesys?)
Ran a huge article on Reiser4 a while ago. (Around 2 issues ago)
They said it was blazingly fast, but had problems, that the performance went down the drain once the processor did something not reiserfs related, thus IO is a higher burden on the processor, due to the tree structure they use.
The other problem is fragmentation, which should be resolved by a defrag daemon/tool running in the background, which was not available back then.
So my question, have those two problems been resolved already?
After the first world war, lots of the gas produced simply was dumped into the atlantic and still comes up as poisnous foam from time to time. Some of the islands in the Bikini area still are not inhabitable. I am sure there are numours other relics of World War 1 and 2 lying around on the planet, most people dont know of.
I dont think the classpath project would be a good idea, they want to emulate the core libs as good as possible. The best point to donate extensions to, is the jakarta commons project which already has many useful extensions and already has become a second core lib to many developers.
Donate your solutions to the Jakarta project, namely to the Apache commons project, which is basically already a second inofficial core library, used by most programs out there. I dont think you really need a revamp of the core libary addition process, Sun is doing a fine job there, since there are so many alternatives out there.
Now that Postgres 8.0 has hit beta and this one is the first version which supports windows natively, I think if MySQL does stupid tricks people have switched to PostgresSQL faster as the can say GP(L). In the long run people will switch anyway since Postgres is more mature, has more features and is rock stable also the momentum of opensource database development switches slowly to postgres with Fujitsu as one of the major supporters of the project. The only thing which has held postgres back in the past seriously was the lack of a decent windows implementation (which is necessary to gather the masses) this limit now is solved. MySQL has a serious problem on its hands.
and of course Independence Day, this one basically is the worst. The funny thing a classic like Plan 9 from outer space is in my opinion quite good, it has a certain charme and definitely lots of soul in it. Id rather see the complete works of Ed Wood 3 times than once Independence Day or the typical Bruckheimer Bay idiocy.
Almost every company who did business with Microsoft basically was screwed by them in the end. IBM, Stac, Borland, Sun (who had to fight tooth and nails so that M$ didnt take over java), Mosaic (who had to fight for years to get a decent compensation for the Mosaic code, Netscape and a ton of others I think Hollywood really should try to avoid them as much as possible
Both share the same roots, the akademic ingres database. The recently OSSed ingres was the akademic ingres which has turned commercial and was lately in the hands of CA. Postgres was a fork of the akademic Ingres and didnt have anything in common with Ingres for more than a decade now.
I think LA has been creatively dead for almost 10 years now. Face it, the best people left the company around the mid nineties. The once creative company just put out one garbage star wars game after the other. The spark of creativity which once kept this company running was lost back then.
They tried to revive older franchises with mediocre sequels instead of getting the old peopled on board (monkey island) and the only good game in the last years was done by the ex Black Isle division which has reformed under another name (Obsidian)
I think the doom of this company was the day when Tim Schaefer and others left the company. The final nail onto the coffin was the day they decided to focus on mediocre Star Wars games. (The ones which came out after X-Wing and Tie Fighter, which were both excellent)
4000 lines is not a medium sized app it is a better hello world. I recently deployed an info system, with around 30.000 loks from ourself and around 100.000 more from the underlying framework. It was developed on Linux on a Blackdown VM, later ported to the IBM vm and then deployed under Windows Linux and AIX. There was exactly one problem, and that one was caused by a bug in the IBM VM. Speaking about portable... three platforms covered one line of code had to be changed in around 150.000 loks. Now that is portable.