Actually I have to revert my conclusion about nimbuzz the latency is really better, however the latest version does seem to have a noice volume problem if you call someone on skype (android 2.2 frf91 on a n1 that is), the volume is so low the person cann hardly hear you, and yes I have turned up all internal volume controls to max on my mobile. I checked the forums, seems to be a problem with that version, they are investigating.
Actually I would not rate Nimbuzz high either, the problem is that both have latencies, depending on your location because they have to route through a central server before going into the skype network. Both Nimbuzz and Fring also drain the battery like nothing (they are pretty much the only apps which do that except for the pointless task killers which no one really needs on android)
My personal preference for VOIP on Android simply is to setup a sip account and use SIP, best voice quality and you can call into normal phones and can be called back.
Too bad Google has not opened its voice talk over Android (nimbuzz and fring however have decent connectors), it is superior to anything skype delivers and definitely as good as SIP, but easier to setup.
Fring allows also voip to other networks, Google voice chat for instance, which google for now does not deliver itself for android. (Works way more reliable than Skype, Google Voice Chat that is, btw...)
Heck the fix would be to send out Silicon Gel covers, Apple seems to be too stingy to even to do that. Even Nintendo did it to fix their slipping problem.
Problem with skype at least on Android is that they delivered a close to unusable client, now Fring and others have jumped in where skype failed to deliver. The skype client on Android does a normal phone call to the next dial in server btw. which is exactly what a user of the software who already has an ip connection does not want. So they should stop to complain if others deliver and they dont
Heck there was even an entire industry founded on piracy, the us movie industry, they went to califorina to avoid payments to edison who dragged everyone into court who made movies without paying him royalities for the patents he stole.
If you count out endless stats rolls, I would call a lot of the european RPGs pretty hardcore although they are more action RPGs, but they are definitely from a role playing aspect more hardcore than the typical bioware game or the mostly pointless Japo RPGs which are endless stats rollers. It really depends on what your taste in RPGs is, is it the bookkeeping and stats, is it the story (mostly on rails) or is it really roleplaying within a story. My personal taste favors the Witcher, Gothic 1,2 Risen and others way over any Bioware game from the last 5 years which seem to be designed all after the same meta template using the same environmentalless on rails engine.
Actually the witcher is not really obscure, it sold over 1 mio copies worldwide, and yes it is very good already a classic. The sequel is in the works and this time they wont reuse the Bioware engine, thank god. Cannot wait for the sequel, love the first part, and definitely longer than the 120 hours dragon age which shrank to 15 hours in reality.
Here are a few spoilers, the surrounding will be entirely non interactive with artificial barries placed left and right, and crates as the only means of storing items. The story will revolve around something evil to be beaten, and you have to find 4 whatever or unite 4 whatever before the final showdown. Ah yes, also expect the first payware DLC about 1 day before the release of the final game, and then another bunch of pointless shoddy additions and 2 hour campaigns all for cash of course one every week.
Well it is bad enough even if there are no apparent health risks on GM food that the combination of gm crops + extremely strong pestisides which the crops are resistent to ruin the soil for generations, also the short term benefits are questionable since the insects seem to be able to adapt after a few generations.
But what I fear worse is the dependency on non reproducable crops we have had for generations now in the western world, a major economic crisis and the lack of reproducable seeds on the farmers hands could result in a serious famine though we theoretically could breed enough food. That is a major issue which we have had now since the 1960s when the corporations stepped in as seed suppliers. (this stuff already has caused famines in africa at that time, when Europe and the USA dropped those seeds on local farmers there to help out with shortages on seed)
I have to if you look at JEE from outside you might somewhat get the impression this is the same. After all Hibernate was there before JPA, Tapestry before JSF etc... but the situation is somewhat different, usually an expert group defines the JEE apis which usually either the corresponding OSS people participate or lead and hence from the research ground the OSS people did a spec is defined. JPAs lead was Gavin King who has been the lead dev and starter of Hibernate. JSF has seen many people in the EG, McClanahan from Struts, people from Oracle which defined UIX etc... even the Tapestry lead dev was for a brief period in the EG (but left shortly after, different mentality I guess)
Spring on the other hand is just an OSS project where they do their own stuff as they want, most of the time it works out sometimes it does not. Completely different mentality than forking opensource projects and closing them up under their own terms. The entire JEE and spring stack is nowadays opensourced under different licenses from different organisations and companies and parts if not all of the specs are developed as opensource reference implementations. The commercial vendors then close the apis in their impls for their high end irons which you do not have to use, but you can but they still stay within the bounds of the specs.
Jepp I noticed that as well, recently Microsoft is stealing a lot from existing JEE webframeworks instead of participating on the already relatively old ported direct.net versions of those frameworks. The Microsoft build system is also such an example, it is a blatant somewhat incompatible copy of ANT, and instead of having pourde resources into NANT which has been there for years they decided to just copy almost everything in an incompatible manner under their own commercial terms (not that ANT really would have a problem with a closed commercial fork since it is ASL2 licensed) ASP.NET mvc is a copy of Spring MVC btw... the NHibernate situation you already mentioned, same issue, copy of JPA/Hibernate under their own incompatible API and terms.
Add to that the dreaded windows file locking, I cannot count the number of times I cursed Windows for its file locking behavior when I started a build and the system told me it cannot build because the erasing of a file or target directory failed because it is locked. One of the reasons why I prefer to develop on Unix systems although the toolset itself is the same I use on both types of systems.
Infriltrate schools enough, nice quote. When I was studying they started with the infiltration by luring students to be Microsoft spokespersons trying to lure institutes to enforce their tooling etc...
Besides that you can get every Microsoft tooling almost for free if not free in a university surrounding and being not enforced enough into that tooling is also not it. The problems really start once you leave university and have to pay cash, being threatend by mob like auditing practices, which are not officially done by Microsoft but everyone knows who is behind it, having to deal with the fact that Microsoft might screw you anyway in a few years whenever the next big thing comes along etc... Add to that an OS which is an insult to a free thinking brain by being a mixture of dictatorship and nagscreen.
Not quite a good mentality to become hip among the startup crowd again or generelly ComSci students. The alternative is sometimes not so good tools, but usually a nice community, no we sue you into oblivion Mafia behind it and generally less "lets fork up the cash first then being screwed" mentality.
One of the reasons why Java is so big in Banking and Insurance environments, the language simply scales beyound Windows. Windows always introduced an artifcial scaling barrier serverwise, sure the barrier has ben constantly raised, but it is like that, once you hit the barrier and believe me banks hit that relatively soon you have everything, beginning from Sun to IBM Mainframes to whatever you name it what is expensive (still nothing for a bank) and the software has to run on it. Good luck with the Microsoft tooling... Windows can be found in such environments but mostly on the desktops where it is unfortunately mostly mandatory (Although the deployment always happens on a Solaris, AIX or whatever scenario, speaking of pure stupidity) and some server side stuff mostly dealing with email (if there is not Lotus Notes)
There are enough Microsoft shops who swallow that without any hickup. Just have a look at the ASP situation, they literally screwed millions of small shops with the ASP -> ASP.NET conversion, but only a subset of those abandoned the platform towards cross platform development (which already was popular due to Java and its web dev ecosystem)
Microsoft shops tend to do whatever Microsoft tells them and usually they do not even know about alternatives or do not even have a look at then if they know. That is Microsofts real portfolio, the army of third party dumb development drones. But most of those shops stem from the 90s and they are loosing ground gathering new such shops (see the article above)
to work with them as a hobby, because as young, hip, students we don't have any money to just fling around.
Not to mention that.NET seems to be losing some speed - I don't know if I want to keep writing for it.
The reason why it is loosing speed is, that they are running out of patterns from the JEE world which they can copy in incompatible ways. The latest blank copy I saw was the Microsoft build system, which was such a blatant ANT ripoff that it almost hurt, they did not even bother to rename the tagnames, just making them incompatible in various ways to ant. Given that NANT has been there for ages (.net variation of ant) and is opensource and free this really hurts, especially since Microsoft could have pushed the resources they obviously spent into their build system towards NANT.
I just wonder who swallows such a bullshit they are pulling without criticism, it must be their league of developer houses who do not know anything outside of what Microsoft produces (yes there are enough of those, the number is diminishing though).Net is really funny in this are, sometimes they try different approaches then they fail , somtimes multiple times and (orm layer) then they revert to a jee solution and copy it in an incompatible manner instead of trying to port the stuff over (Spring MVC is another example, Hibernate another one) and participate officially in the project.
Well at least they now have reverted from trial and error then copy to not even trying anymore and simply copying, so there is hope that one day they might even participate.
This hurts especially since the language c# itself is absolutely at the frontiers of development within its own bounds and they try and sometimes really pull off cool stuff. As good as the core is as miserable is the surrounding.
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Actually a nexus one + android 2.2 is hardly part of the fragmentation, that phone is the reference platform.
Actually I have to revert my conclusion about nimbuzz the latency is really better, however the latest version does seem to have a noice volume problem if you call someone on skype (android 2.2 frf91 on a n1 that is), the volume is so low the person cann hardly hear you, and yes I have turned up all internal volume controls to max on my mobile. I checked the forums, seems to be a problem with that version, they are investigating.
Actually I would not rate Nimbuzz high either, the problem is that both have latencies, depending on your location because they have to route through a central server before going into the skype network. Both Nimbuzz and Fring also drain the battery like nothing (they are pretty much the only apps which do that except for the pointless task killers which no one really needs on android)
My personal preference for VOIP on Android simply is to setup a sip account and use SIP, best voice quality and you can call into normal phones and can be called back.
Too bad Google has not opened its voice talk over Android (nimbuzz and fring however have decent connectors), it is superior to anything skype delivers and definitely as good as SIP, but easier to setup.
Jepp Google also does not censor they simply ignore threads with more than 100 posts :-)
Consumer Reports is Geek Porn...
Fring allows also voip to other networks, Google voice chat for instance, which google for now does not deliver itself for android.
(Works way more reliable than Skype, Google Voice Chat that is, btw...)
Heck the fix would be to send out Silicon Gel covers, Apple seems to be too stingy to even to do that.
Even Nintendo did it to fix their slipping problem.
To criticize the mighty Jobs and his latest creation... henchmen come over here....
Problem with skype at least on Android is that they delivered a close to unusable client, now Fring and others have jumped in where skype failed to deliver.
The skype client on Android does a normal phone call to the next dial in server btw. which is exactly what a user of the software who already has an ip connection
does not want.
So they should stop to complain if others deliver and they dont
Heck there was even an entire industry founded on piracy, the us movie industry, they went to califorina to avoid payments to edison who dragged everyone into court who made movies without paying him royalities for the patents he stole.
If you count out endless stats rolls, I would call a lot of the european RPGs pretty hardcore although they are more action RPGs, but they are definitely from a role playing aspect more hardcore than the typical bioware game or the mostly pointless Japo RPGs which are endless stats rollers.
It really depends on what your taste in RPGs is, is it the bookkeeping and stats, is it the story (mostly on rails) or is it really roleplaying within a story.
My personal taste favors the Witcher, Gothic 1,2 Risen and others way over any Bioware game from the last 5 years which seem to be designed all after the same meta template using the same environmentalless on rails engine.
Actually the witcher is not really obscure, it sold over 1 mio copies worldwide, and yes it is very good already a classic. The sequel is in the works and this time they wont reuse the Bioware engine, thank god.
Cannot wait for the sequel, love the first part, and definitely longer than the 120 hours dragon age which shrank to 15 hours in reality.
Here are a few spoilers, the surrounding will be entirely non interactive with artificial barries placed left and right, and crates as the only means of storing items.
The story will revolve around something evil to be beaten, and you have to find 4 whatever or unite 4 whatever before the final showdown.
Ah yes, also expect the first payware DLC about 1 day before the release of the final game, and then another bunch of pointless shoddy additions and 2 hour campaigns all for cash of course one every week.
Terminating the locking process to unlock is not quite what you want in such a situation.
Well it is bad enough even if there are no apparent health risks on GM food that the combination of gm crops + extremely strong pestisides which the crops are resistent to ruin the soil for generations, also the short term benefits are questionable since the insects seem to be able to adapt after a few generations.
But what I fear worse is the dependency on non reproducable crops we have had for generations now in the western world, a major economic crisis and the lack of reproducable seeds on the farmers hands could result in a serious famine though we theoretically could breed enough food. That is a major issue which we have had now since the 1960s when the corporations stepped in as seed suppliers. (this stuff already has caused famines in africa at that time, when Europe and the USA dropped those seeds on local farmers there to help out with shortages on seed)
I want to excuse Germany here, they definitely do not have a higher toxoplasmosis infection rate, they just are like that...
I have to if you look at JEE from outside you might somewhat get the impression this is the same. After all Hibernate was there before JPA, Tapestry before JSF etc... but the situation is somewhat different, usually an expert group defines the JEE apis which usually either the corresponding OSS people participate or lead and hence from the research ground the OSS people did a spec is defined. JPAs lead was Gavin King who has been the lead dev and starter of Hibernate. JSF has seen many people in the EG, McClanahan from Struts, people from Oracle which defined UIX etc... even the Tapestry lead dev was for a brief period in the EG (but left shortly after, different mentality I guess)
Spring on the other hand is just an OSS project where they do their own stuff as they want, most of the time it works out sometimes it does not. Completely different mentality than forking opensource projects and closing them up under their own terms. The entire JEE and spring stack is nowadays opensourced under different licenses from different organisations and companies and parts if not all of the specs are developed as opensource reference implementations.
The commercial vendors then close the apis in their impls for their high end irons which you do not have to use, but you can but they still stay within the bounds of the specs.
Jepp I noticed that as well, recently Microsoft is stealing a lot from existing JEE webframeworks instead of participating on the already relatively old ported direct .net versions of those frameworks. The Microsoft build system is also such an example, it is a blatant somewhat incompatible copy of ANT, and instead of having pourde resources into NANT which has been there for years they decided to just copy almost everything in an incompatible manner under their own commercial terms (not that ANT really would have a problem with a closed commercial fork since it is ASL2 licensed)
ASP.NET mvc is a copy of Spring MVC btw... the NHibernate situation you already mentioned, same issue, copy of JPA/Hibernate under their own incompatible API and terms.
Add to that the dreaded windows file locking, I cannot count the number of times I cursed Windows for its file locking behavior when I started a build and the system told me it cannot build because the erasing of a file or target directory failed because it is locked.
One of the reasons why I prefer to develop on Unix systems although the toolset itself is the same I use on both types of systems.
Infriltrate schools enough, nice quote. When I was studying they started with the infiltration by luring students to be Microsoft spokespersons trying to lure institutes to enforce their tooling etc...
Besides that you can get every Microsoft tooling almost for free if not free in a university surrounding and being not enforced enough into that tooling is also not it. The problems really start once you leave university and have to pay cash, being threatend by mob like auditing practices, which are not officially done by Microsoft but everyone knows who is behind it, having to deal with the fact that Microsoft might screw you anyway in a few years whenever the next big thing comes along etc...
Add to that an OS which is an insult to a free thinking brain by being a mixture of dictatorship and nagscreen.
Not quite a good mentality to become hip among the startup crowd again or generelly ComSci students. The alternative is sometimes not so good tools, but usually a nice community, no we sue you into oblivion Mafia behind it and generally less "lets fork up the cash first then being screwed" mentality.
They are simply not getting it!
As far as I know, EBay is running JEE in the backend, only their frontend is somewhat IISish
One of the reasons why Java is so big in Banking and Insurance environments, the language simply scales beyound Windows. Windows always introduced an artifcial scaling barrier serverwise, sure the barrier has ben constantly raised, but it is like that, once you hit the barrier and believe me banks hit that relatively soon you have everything, beginning from Sun to IBM Mainframes to whatever you name it what is expensive (still nothing for a bank) and the software has to run on it. Good luck with the Microsoft tooling...
Windows can be found in such environments but mostly on the desktops where it is unfortunately mostly mandatory (Although the deployment always happens on a Solaris, AIX or whatever scenario, speaking of pure stupidity) and some server side stuff mostly dealing with email (if there is not Lotus Notes)
There are enough Microsoft shops who swallow that without any hickup. Just have a look at the ASP situation, they literally screwed millions of small shops with the ASP -> ASP.NET conversion, but only a subset of those abandoned the platform towards cross platform development (which already was popular due to Java and its web dev ecosystem)
Microsoft shops tend to do whatever Microsoft tells them and usually they do not even know about alternatives or do not even have a look at then if they know. That is Microsofts real portfolio, the army of third party dumb development drones. But most of those shops stem from the 90s and they are loosing ground gathering new such shops (see the article above)
to work with them as a hobby, because as young, hip, students we don't have any money to just fling around.
Not to mention that .NET seems to be losing some speed - I don't know if I want to keep writing for it.
The reason why it is loosing speed is, that they are running out of patterns from the JEE world which they can copy in incompatible ways. The latest blank copy I saw was the Microsoft build system, which was such a blatant ANT ripoff that it almost hurt, they did not even bother to rename the tagnames, just making them incompatible in various ways to ant. Given that NANT has been there for ages (.net variation of ant) and is opensource and free this really hurts, especially since Microsoft could have pushed the resources they obviously spent into their build system towards NANT.
I just wonder who swallows such a bullshit they are pulling without criticism, it must be their league of developer houses who do not know anything outside of what Microsoft produces (yes there are enough of those, the number is diminishing though) .Net is really funny in this are, sometimes they try different approaches then they fail , somtimes multiple times and (orm layer) then they revert to a jee solution and copy it in an incompatible manner instead of trying to port the stuff over (Spring MVC is another example, Hibernate another one) and participate officially in the project.
Well at least they now have reverted from trial and error then copy to not even trying anymore and simply copying, so there is hope that one day they might even participate.
This hurts especially since the language c# itself is absolutely at the frontiers of development within its own bounds and they try and sometimes really pull off cool stuff. As good as the core is as miserable is the surrounding.
Well Zune might be a fantastic player if it was available outside of the US.