I'm sorry but there is no amount of skill that can let you aim and fire at the head of a player who was not inside your field of view within one frame.
Yes there is. Most of these games render every player as the same height, so the head will always be a fixed distance from the ground they are standing on. If you know the map well you know where they going to be taking a shot from and just have to judge how far to turn the mouse so you end up pointing at them. You start by using muscle memory in your arm to spin the mousen enough to do a 180, then start using that to get other angles nailed as well. If you acknowledge that a perfect 180 is possible every time (It is, I promise you) then the rest is just more practice.
Buying a new mouse or changing to a different game might throw you for a while and you have to relearn, but once you have relearned this several times you will start applying it to new games within a matter of days. Some of us have now been play first person shooters for nearly 20 years when DOOM LAN parties were all the rage. I know DOOM did not use the mouse, but even mouse based shooters have been around for at least 10 years, and I fairly sure I wasted too many of them:)
Re:And we're trusting you because....
on
Hiding From Google
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· Score: 1
There's always the chance that this service doesn't take any significant centralized resources to keep running, as in the users are made to contribute the bandwidth and CPU resources needed to keep it running.
All systems take some resource to operate, even if it just the human resource to manage everything. Human resource is often the most expensive.
It isn't merely about people being really good, it's about doing the impossible. I defy you or anyone to move your mouse across 50% of the screen for an accurate headshot so quickly that it doesn't travel on any point in between. Now do it 25 times in a row - all headshots, no misses. Oh, and do it without regard to which weapon you're using.
On AA2 and AA3 I am damn good at turning round and dropping people based purely on the sound of where they are firing from. If you miss me with your first shot, do not expect to get a second shot in before I spin and drop you. If you are on noisy ground like sand or metal, you will not even get that first shot off as I hear your footsteps first. This is not using an aimbot, this is 10 years of online gaming, a very loud damn good headset and enough coffee to give an elephant a heart attack:)
Compared to some of the people I play with I am a noob. When you play any game enough to get to know the best clans out there and join them on TS, you will usually realise that what looked like hacks is actually just far too much practice. Quite often decent players have noob accounts they use when they are drunk or just mucking about. That noob who just joined the server and owned everyone might not be a hacker, he might just be some drunk guy who has far too much time on his hands for online gaming.
You forgot the aimbot hackers that are in 1 in 4 games. That, by far, is the most irritating part of the multi-player experience. While it's easy to tell (thank you kill-cam) it's just irritating after getting connection to host errors 3 games in a row.
Not everyone who pulls of insane shots is using an aimbot. I have never played COD online, but I have played AA2 and AA3 a shitload. I have been banned from plenty of servers for dropping the admin at long range with a crap gun. If you always try for the insane shots, you quite often find you start pulling them off.
I agree, this is at best a curiosity. ReactOS was started back when virtualization was exotic and expensive.
I agree that virtualisation solves many problems, it is not a perfect fit for everything. ReactOS has at least the potential to make far better use of the underlying hardware as virtualisation always comes with a performance hit, however minor. For games any performance hit can be a deal breaker.
I also like this as it has the potential to completely screw MS over. Like it or not many people out there will never use Linux and WINE, it is just too alien. These same people might however use a free clone of windows that could run all their windows applications.
Regardless, WINE works well enough right now. I dont see why anyone would wait for ReactOS to mature. It never will.
As above, for the things WINE is never going to support due to it having to live on top of X Windows. And lets not forget many people thought WINE would never mature to the extent it has.
If it's based on Wine, why not just put their energy into Wine?
After having spent some time reading his presentation it seems that they want to avoid the dependency on X Windows that Wine apparently has. Thy main aim is to come up with a bootable version of WINE such that you can avoid the overhead of effectively running two operating systems. They also hope this will allow them to use certain drivers that WINE cannot as they want lower level access to the hardware than X Windows will ever provide.
Please not I am not an expert on any of this so please do correct me if I am wrong, but I did see some value in their approach since it is rather a lot of work to get Linux install up an running on an old PC if all you want it for is to run a few legacy windows applications and nothing else.
The idea of getting both groups contributing to the WINE higher level code also does now add to the WINE pool of developers too. This could actually help both projects considerably. So in a way, they are going to be putting their energy into WINE. They are not planning to fork the WINE source, they want to do regular merges into their tree. He quotes that it only takes 30 minutes to to this on a fresh WINE snapshot. It might then take a little longer to fix their code to take into account of changes in WINE but this is still pretty good.
It is thing like this that are only really possible with Open Source.
The only problem that MySQL is having with its licensing model is that Monty is a fucking idiot who wants to have his cake and eat it too. I'm sorry, you sold it. It's not yours any more. What you want no longer matters. Now shut up and go away.
If only life was that simple. He did not sell it to SUN, the MySQL shareholders did of which he was only one of them. Monty had not been a majority shareholder since he went for venture capital support in 2001.
That's an awfully big assumption. Sure he collected $34,000 from donations but if his online billing/expenses were $40,000 then he's not really getting rich, is he?
The $300,000 in a paypal account kind of shows he was doing a little better than breaking even:)
It seems that google has moved firmly into politics.
Hardly. This is about Google getting annoyed with China flouting their own laws.
As a server admin I routinely see hacking attempts on our servers emanating from within China. Any attempt to follow this up with the owner of the netblock where the attacks originate from is usually just met with a bounceback from the abuse address or silence.
This has been the case for years as China have no interest in a clampdown on their own citizens hacking. I have long suspected that this was because they were actively recruiting hackers who broke the law if the hackers in question were pro-government and did not want to cut off their own recruiting stream.
I think it is probably most likely that Google saw themselves being attacked, and got fairly aggressive in trying to determine who was attacking them. They almost certainly would have had to break the law to do this so are going to be a little cagey about exactly what they did. They did however probably notice that this was being organised from within certain government IP ranges and instantly went running to the US state department.
The fact is that China is not willing to even pretend to play by the rules of common netiquette. Until they change this I would much rather have an option to have all traffic to any of our servers from China dropped far upstream. I know I can do this at a firewall level but then we still can billed for bandwidth if we go over a certain level and they still have the option of DoS by overload. No, what I want is the ability to have our upstream provider drop all traffic into our IP range if it even looks like it came from China. We have no interest in doing business there so allowing traffic from an internet rogue state is just a liability for us.
Disclaimer: I actually read the FA (yes, I know this is slashdot). This guy is angry because, amongst other things, Google has made 40% of his debugging skills useless. Apperantly, his problem is that this means that other people without his "superskills" can develop software for Android.
I don't think much of his article should be taken seriously. He makes some very valid points but most of it is written to be very tongue in cheek. In other words, he does not really sound very angry. He even mentions at the end of the article that Android is one of his favourite platforms to develop for.
The beta particle (electron) is of such low energy that it won't even penetrate the dead layer of skin. It is much less dangerous than the radioactive potassium humans have evolved with in their bodies.
"Beta particles are high-energy, high-speed electrons or positrons emitted by certain types of radioactive nuclei such as potassium-40. The beta particles emitted are a form of ionizing radiation also known as beta rays."
"Beta particles are able to penetrate living matter to a certain extent (radiation intensity from a small source of radioactive material decreases as one over the distance squared) and can change the structure of struck molecules."
Since you are so fond of wikipedia links, here is one for you that I took the above quotes from.
Beta radiation certainly is not the most damaging type of radiation, but it is still harmful if you get hit by enough of it. After all, low penetration means it can still give you skin cancer if nothing else. To be honest though, it was you calling them low energy that made me check.
Mod parent up. This "Ask Slashdot" is a typical reaction of someone who is very very new to the workforce and doesn't understand (yet) it has a human component.
Yup. When I first started in the world of work I felt exactly like the person who originally posted this. Now I have been doing it for 6 or 7 years I fully understand.
People used to say to me, you cant keep up 8.5 hour straight days with only an hour for lunch. I had come from doing manual labour type work where flat out was the norm. If you have to concentrate seriously on what you are doing, year in year out you will soon settle down to a more sustainable work rate.
According to the HSE who are a government body in charge of workplace safety in the UK, they recommend a 5-10 minute break every 50-60 minutes if using a VDU (http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/vdubreaks.htm). This advice is not just magicked up out of thin air, it is based on not causing serious eye strain that over your entire working life could cause serious eye problems. Staring at a VDU all day tricks your eyes into thinking they are blinking regularly when they are not.
Personally, I still adhere to the 4h/day effective work. If you have worked fully concentrated on your work for 4h during the work day, you did have a productive day. At least in my eyes.
A while ago I seem to remember the figure of a coder producing 100 lines of fully debugged code per day as a rough average. I have no idea of the source, but to me it sounds roughly correct if you are working on a reasonably taxing problem. Obviously, if you are working on something that my gran could program you should be working a little quicker.
The important thing to remember is that when you start work, you no longer get 3 months of holiday per year after your exams like you did as a student. You probably get roughly a month but not always taken straight after a deadline so you might have to to several crunches in a row before you can take a 2 week break to recuperate.
Anyway, enough of Slashdot. Some of us have deadlines to meet and lunchtime is almost over.
Migrating your typical apps from MySQL to PgSQL can take a bit of effort, but it definitely isn't difficult.
Are you insane? In the current economic climate finding time to make a coffee is difficult.
In order to stay in business you have had to be damn lean recently. For a lean business finding the time to rewrite legacy applications is almost impossible as you have to concentrate on work that will bring in money and hence pay wages. Some legacy applications however might be reasonably mission critical and hence need continued security patches coming from upstream to the underlying database. There are going to be a lot of companies who built large web based applications on the LAMP stack and now have to try and find a way to recode a system for a different DB when they should be doing paid work.
Ok, maybe it will be a year or so before Oracle can screw MySQL into the ground, but that is still not very much time if you already have 6 months of booked in paid work. Normally you might be able to borrow money to fund an expansion of the development team, but you go to a bank as a small business and try and get some cash? If you do not have a house to offer up as security they are not interested, and who wants to put their house on the line. If MySQL does get bought by Oracle we can only hope that the recovery is in full swing before the ill effects of the takeover take hold.
The other issue here that currently SUN hold various patents covering MySQL for defensive purposes. This might cause substantial problems if an attempt was made to fork the project. I am not a lawyer so have no idea the extent of this issue, but just the uncertainty regarding this may put larger organisations from sponsoring a fork of the MySQL project.
Maybe then we will be able to call it the LAPP stack, but that is a long way off. In the mean time I would much rather see Oracle forced to sell MySQL or spin it off as a separate company as a condition of the purchase of SUN.
If this is an English website, there's a lot of foul spelling - looks more like an American if you ask me!
I always used to take the piss out of the Americans not being to speak English correctly. Then a friend of mine who was a Phd student studying the evolution of languages pointed out to me that the way Americans write and pronounce certain words is closer to original English and it is us who can no longer speak our own language the same way as we did when the American forefathers left.
An 80 column line limit is also OLD, I never edit in narrow windows >160 common.
How you edit is not important, how the team you are part of all edit is. By making lines 160 characters long you force everyone to have to code the same way you do. What is lost to you by breaking a line at 80 characters since it is much easier to scroll up and down in a document than it is to have to scroll left and right once a line.
This the single worst trait found in developers, (I know I suffer from it) a lack of consideration for being part of a team.
Solution: Go to concerts, or download then pay the artists directly.
Why should concerts be any different? Most concerts pay the artist a pittance compared to the venue, promoter and everyone else higher up the food chain. Tours by most bands are actually something the record company force them to do in order to sell more records.
I am all for artists selling there wares directly on websites but very few are able to do this until they have a core of followers who will seek out there music. Up and coming artists have to sign to a label to have any hope of exposing their products to a larger market. They need a large number of people to be interested in their music in order to make enough money to survive just by playing music. Should all artists have to have a full time job that pays the rent then treat music as a hobby?
But I was not limiting my post to just music anyway. The idea of honesty payments might have some merit, but I remember the days of shareware when people distributed programs then asked you to pay if you liked it. Most people just assumed it was free and never paid anything. The only way around this was a reminder or to cripple it in some way and that just annoyed people and would not apply to music, books or film anyway without some sort of DRM or something.
Everything in this world costs money upfront, why should digital works be any different?
While I have great love for the large media conglomerates that hold the copyright on much of what is illegally distributed, I also do not exactly like the idea of starting a business based on taking something else that you had no part in creating, and profiting from it.
Aww crap, should have used preview. I meant no great love. Guess that might have been a Freudian slip:)
The only thing it *will* do is to slowly erode yet another form of legal freedom in Italy and afterwards in the rest of Europe.
Do we really need to have the legal freedom to download any digital work without paying the creator of said work? I know whenever I post this I get moderated as a troll but it is a legitimate question. Should we really do away with all IP laws and let people copy and distribute as they see fit?
Unfortunately we do all need money to live in this world so what is the big problem with trying to make it via selling digital works that can be duplicated endlessly. You still had to put time and effort into creating the original after all.
Also, lets not forget that many torrent sites are filled with adverts. This must generate them some revenue and they are not paying any of it to the people who created the works they are distributing. I know that many sites claim they do not turn a profit and the adverts only pay for hardware and bandwidth costs, but we only have their word for it.
While I have great love for the large media conglomerates that hold the copyright on much of what is illegally distributed, I also do not exactly like the idea of starting a business based on taking something else that you had no part in creating, and profiting from it.
I used to use bittorrent and gnutella a lot in my youth. One of my friends who was in a band that had a record deal refused to give me an early copy of their album as he did not want it posted to the internet and hence cost him money. It might have cost the record company more, but he needed every penny he got from his records. Unfortunately, trying to harm the record companies via copyright infringement also hurts artists.
I am also not convinced that even if we bankrupted all the current record companies that more of the same ilk would not just grow up to replace them. If a company goes bankrupt, the liquidators end up with the property (including intellectual), and they would then just sell it all of to the highest bidder.
We have to find a way of fighting the current state of affairs without shooting ourselves in the foot in the process by driving all people who make any work that can be digitised into a different career.
Make sure that they buy you at least 5 shirts per person, so that you don't have to do laundry every night and end up with faded out pink shirts.
Are you kidding? You only give your average IT worker 1 shirt and I can assure the problem wont be it turning pink, the problem will be you turning green when you smell him on Thursday afternoon:)
I was going to comment about America's Army too, but you beat me to the punch. IMO AA 2 was far better than its sequal. They really botched everything and shoved it down the tubes. It used to be really fun but now its just a buggy, laggy mess. I would gladly buy an updated commercial game based on what AA was 4 years ago and flush what they have now.
I have played a few versions of AA2 that were pretty terrible on the bugs front.
As for lag the only issue is that if you rent a 26 slot server it generally cant cope with anything more than 20 players without being constantly restarted. The other difference seems to be that it is loads more fussy about you joining a local server (low ping) than AA2 was.
I agree, I personally do not like realistic war-games. The Battlefield & Call of Duty games hold exactly 0 interest to me. Give me an unrealistic Unreal Tournament or Quake or Advent Rising any day.
Battlefield and Call of Duty are not realistic at all. They are both graphically pretty, but suffer from the same issue mentioned in the article, you shrug off bullets. In COD you do not even need a gargoyle to cure you, you just wait for the red mist to clear then go back to killing.
For true realism try Americas Army 3, the slightest bullet wound can leave you slowly bleeding to death.
By train, the shortest travel time I could find was about 17 hours from station to station. Add on time to get to/from the stations and you are just a little longer than the less than an hour flight time. Though you do have to add on security for that.
I was not talking about trains in a country that has deliberately run them into the ground to encourage car travel. I was talking about train journeys in Europe or pretty much anywhere apart from the US. That was my point, trains could be quicker for certain journeys but in the US they are not for the same distance, go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry but there is no amount of skill that can let you aim and fire at the head of a player who was not inside your field of view within one frame.
Yes there is. Most of these games render every player as the same height, so the head will always be a fixed distance from the ground they are standing on. If you know the map well you know where they going to be taking a shot from and just have to judge how far to turn the mouse so you end up pointing at them. You start by using muscle memory in your arm to spin the mousen enough to do a 180, then start using that to get other angles nailed as well. If you acknowledge that a perfect 180 is possible every time (It is, I promise you) then the rest is just more practice.
Buying a new mouse or changing to a different game might throw you for a while and you have to relearn, but once you have relearned this several times you will start applying it to new games within a matter of days. Some of us have now been play first person shooters for nearly 20 years when DOOM LAN parties were all the rage. I know DOOM did not use the mouse, but even mouse based shooters have been around for at least 10 years, and I fairly sure I wasted too many of them :)
There's always the chance that this service doesn't take any significant centralized resources to keep running, as in the users are made to contribute the bandwidth and CPU resources needed to keep it running.
All systems take some resource to operate, even if it just the human resource to manage everything. Human resource is often the most expensive.
It isn't merely about people being really good, it's about doing the impossible. I defy you or anyone to move your mouse across 50% of the screen for an accurate headshot so quickly that it doesn't travel on any point in between. Now do it 25 times in a row - all headshots, no misses. Oh, and do it without regard to which weapon you're using.
On AA2 and AA3 I am damn good at turning round and dropping people based purely on the sound of where they are firing from. If you miss me with your first shot, do not expect to get a second shot in before I spin and drop you. If you are on noisy ground like sand or metal, you will not even get that first shot off as I hear your footsteps first. This is not using an aimbot, this is 10 years of online gaming, a very loud damn good headset and enough coffee to give an elephant a heart attack :)
Compared to some of the people I play with I am a noob. When you play any game enough to get to know the best clans out there and join them on TS, you will usually realise that what looked like hacks is actually just far too much practice. Quite often decent players have noob accounts they use when they are drunk or just mucking about. That noob who just joined the server and owned everyone might not be a hacker, he might just be some drunk guy who has far too much time on his hands for online gaming.
You forgot the aimbot hackers that are in 1 in 4 games. That, by far, is the most irritating part of the multi-player experience. While it's easy to tell (thank you kill-cam) it's just irritating after getting connection to host errors 3 games in a row.
Not everyone who pulls of insane shots is using an aimbot. I have never played COD online, but I have played AA2 and AA3 a shitload. I have been banned from plenty of servers for dropping the admin at long range with a crap gun. If you always try for the insane shots, you quite often find you start pulling them off.
I agree, this is at best a curiosity. ReactOS was started back when virtualization was exotic and expensive.
I agree that virtualisation solves many problems, it is not a perfect fit for everything. ReactOS has at least the potential to make far better use of the underlying hardware as virtualisation always comes with a performance hit, however minor. For games any performance hit can be a deal breaker.
I also like this as it has the potential to completely screw MS over. Like it or not many people out there will never use Linux and WINE, it is just too alien. These same people might however use a free clone of windows that could run all their windows applications.
Regardless, WINE works well enough right now. I dont see why anyone would wait for ReactOS to mature. It never will.
As above, for the things WINE is never going to support due to it having to live on top of X Windows. And lets not forget many people thought WINE would never mature to the extent it has.
If it's based on Wine, why not just put their energy into Wine?
After having spent some time reading his presentation it seems that they want to avoid the dependency on X Windows that Wine apparently has. Thy main aim is to come up with a bootable version of WINE such that you can avoid the overhead of effectively running two operating systems. They also hope this will allow them to use certain drivers that WINE cannot as they want lower level access to the hardware than X Windows will ever provide.
Please not I am not an expert on any of this so please do correct me if I am wrong, but I did see some value in their approach since it is rather a lot of work to get Linux install up an running on an old PC if all you want it for is to run a few legacy windows applications and nothing else.
The idea of getting both groups contributing to the WINE higher level code also does now add to the WINE pool of developers too. This could actually help both projects considerably. So in a way, they are going to be putting their energy into WINE. They are not planning to fork the WINE source, they want to do regular merges into their tree. He quotes that it only takes 30 minutes to to this on a fresh WINE snapshot. It might then take a little longer to fix their code to take into account of changes in WINE but this is still pretty good.
It is thing like this that are only really possible with Open Source.
The only problem that MySQL is having with its licensing model is that Monty is a fucking idiot who wants to have his cake and eat it too. I'm sorry, you sold it. It's not yours any more. What you want no longer matters. Now shut up and go away.
If only life was that simple. He did not sell it to SUN, the MySQL shareholders did of which he was only one of them. Monty had not been a majority shareholder since he went for venture capital support in 2001.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL_AB
Did he gain anything from the sale? Of course, but he had no real say in it.
Maybe he did deserve it, but do you not think the artists who created the works in the first place deserved at least a share of his profits?
That's an awfully big assumption. Sure he collected $34,000 from donations but if his online billing/expenses were $40,000 then he's not really getting rich, is he?
The $300,000 in a paypal account kind of shows he was doing a little better than breaking even :)
It seems that google has moved firmly into politics.
Hardly. This is about Google getting annoyed with China flouting their own laws.
As a server admin I routinely see hacking attempts on our servers emanating from within China. Any attempt to follow this up with the owner of the netblock where the attacks originate from is usually just met with a bounceback from the abuse address or silence.
This has been the case for years as China have no interest in a clampdown on their own citizens hacking. I have long suspected that this was because they were actively recruiting hackers who broke the law if the hackers in question were pro-government and did not want to cut off their own recruiting stream.
I think it is probably most likely that Google saw themselves being attacked, and got fairly aggressive in trying to determine who was attacking them. They almost certainly would have had to break the law to do this so are going to be a little cagey about exactly what they did. They did however probably notice that this was being organised from within certain government IP ranges and instantly went running to the US state department.
The fact is that China is not willing to even pretend to play by the rules of common netiquette. Until they change this I would much rather have an option to have all traffic to any of our servers from China dropped far upstream. I know I can do this at a firewall level but then we still can billed for bandwidth if we go over a certain level and they still have the option of DoS by overload. No, what I want is the ability to have our upstream provider drop all traffic into our IP range if it even looks like it came from China. We have no interest in doing business there so allowing traffic from an internet rogue state is just a liability for us.
Disclaimer: I actually read the FA (yes, I know this is slashdot). This guy is angry because, amongst other things, Google has made 40% of his debugging skills useless. Apperantly, his problem is that this means that other people without his "superskills" can develop software for Android.
I don't think much of his article should be taken seriously. He makes some very valid points but most of it is written to be very tongue in cheek. In other words, he does not really sound very angry. He even mentions at the end of the article that Android is one of his favourite platforms to develop for.
Please learn about paragraphs, reading that much text in one block hurts my eyes too much.
The beta particle (electron) is of such low energy that it won't even penetrate the dead layer of skin. It is much less dangerous than the radioactive potassium humans have evolved with in their bodies.
"Beta particles are high-energy, high-speed electrons or positrons emitted by certain types of radioactive nuclei such as potassium-40. The beta particles emitted are a form of ionizing radiation also known as beta rays."
"Beta particles are able to penetrate living matter to a certain extent (radiation intensity from a small source of radioactive material decreases as one over the distance squared) and can change the structure of struck molecules."
Since you are so fond of wikipedia links, here is one for you that I took the above quotes from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_particle
Beta radiation certainly is not the most damaging type of radiation, but it is still harmful if you get hit by enough of it. After all, low penetration means it can still give you skin cancer if nothing else. To be honest though, it was you calling them low energy that made me check.
Mod parent up. This "Ask Slashdot" is a typical reaction of someone who is very very new to the workforce and doesn't understand (yet) it has a human component.
Yup. When I first started in the world of work I felt exactly like the person who originally posted this. Now I have been doing it for 6 or 7 years I fully understand.
People used to say to me, you cant keep up 8.5 hour straight days with only an hour for lunch. I had come from doing manual labour type work where flat out was the norm. If you have to concentrate seriously on what you are doing, year in year out you will soon settle down to a more sustainable work rate.
According to the HSE who are a government body in charge of workplace safety in the UK, they recommend a 5-10 minute break every 50-60 minutes if using a VDU (http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/vdubreaks.htm). This advice is not just magicked up out of thin air, it is based on not causing serious eye strain that over your entire working life could cause serious eye problems. Staring at a VDU all day tricks your eyes into thinking they are blinking regularly when they are not.
Personally, I still adhere to the 4h/day effective work. If you have worked fully concentrated on your work for 4h during the work day, you did have a productive day. At least in my eyes.
A while ago I seem to remember the figure of a coder producing 100 lines of fully debugged code per day as a rough average. I have no idea of the source, but to me it sounds roughly correct if you are working on a reasonably taxing problem. Obviously, if you are working on something that my gran could program you should be working a little quicker.
The important thing to remember is that when you start work, you no longer get 3 months of holiday per year after your exams like you did as a student. You probably get roughly a month but not always taken straight after a deadline so you might have to to several crunches in a row before you can take a 2 week break to recuperate.
Anyway, enough of Slashdot. Some of us have deadlines to meet and lunchtime is almost over.
Migrating your typical apps from MySQL to PgSQL can take a bit of effort, but it definitely isn't difficult.
Are you insane? In the current economic climate finding time to make a coffee is difficult.
In order to stay in business you have had to be damn lean recently. For a lean business finding the time to rewrite legacy applications is almost impossible as you have to concentrate on work that will bring in money and hence pay wages. Some legacy applications however might be reasonably mission critical and hence need continued security patches coming from upstream to the underlying database. There are going to be a lot of companies who built large web based applications on the LAMP stack and now have to try and find a way to recode a system for a different DB when they should be doing paid work.
Ok, maybe it will be a year or so before Oracle can screw MySQL into the ground, but that is still not very much time if you already have 6 months of booked in paid work. Normally you might be able to borrow money to fund an expansion of the development team, but you go to a bank as a small business and try and get some cash? If you do not have a house to offer up as security they are not interested, and who wants to put their house on the line. If MySQL does get bought by Oracle we can only hope that the recovery is in full swing before the ill effects of the takeover take hold.
The other issue here that currently SUN hold various patents covering MySQL for defensive purposes. This might cause substantial problems if an attempt was made to fork the project. I am not a lawyer so have no idea the extent of this issue, but just the uncertainty regarding this may put larger organisations from sponsoring a fork of the MySQL project.
Maybe then we will be able to call it the LAPP stack, but that is a long way off. In the mean time I would much rather see Oracle forced to sell MySQL or spin it off as a separate company as a condition of the purchase of SUN.
Sorry, I am too drunk to comprehend all your post. All I can say is that she passed.
If this is an English website, there's a lot of foul spelling - looks more like an American if you ask me!
I always used to take the piss out of the Americans not being to speak English correctly. Then a friend of mine who was a Phd student studying the evolution of languages pointed out to me that the way Americans write and pronounce certain words is closer to original English and it is us who can no longer speak our own language the same way as we did when the American forefathers left.
An 80 column line limit is also OLD, I never edit in narrow windows >160 common.
How you edit is not important, how the team you are part of all edit is. By making lines 160 characters long you force everyone to have to code the same way you do. What is lost to you by breaking a line at 80 characters since it is much easier to scroll up and down in a document than it is to have to scroll left and right once a line.
This the single worst trait found in developers, (I know I suffer from it) a lack of consideration for being part of a team.
Solution: Go to concerts, or download then pay the artists directly.
Why should concerts be any different? Most concerts pay the artist a pittance compared to the venue, promoter and everyone else higher up the food chain. Tours by most bands are actually something the record company force them to do in order to sell more records.
I am all for artists selling there wares directly on websites but very few are able to do this until they have a core of followers who will seek out there music. Up and coming artists have to sign to a label to have any hope of exposing their products to a larger market. They need a large number of people to be interested in their music in order to make enough money to survive just by playing music. Should all artists have to have a full time job that pays the rent then treat music as a hobby?
But I was not limiting my post to just music anyway. The idea of honesty payments might have some merit, but I remember the days of shareware when people distributed programs then asked you to pay if you liked it. Most people just assumed it was free and never paid anything. The only way around this was a reminder or to cripple it in some way and that just annoyed people and would not apply to music, books or film anyway without some sort of DRM or something.
Everything in this world costs money upfront, why should digital works be any different?
While I have great love for the large media conglomerates that hold the copyright on much of what is illegally distributed, I also do not exactly like the idea of starting a business based on taking something else that you had no part in creating, and profiting from it.
Aww crap, should have used preview. I meant no great love. Guess that might have been a Freudian slip :)
The only thing it *will* do is to slowly erode yet another form of legal freedom in Italy and afterwards in the rest of Europe.
Do we really need to have the legal freedom to download any digital work without paying the creator of said work? I know whenever I post this I get moderated as a troll but it is a legitimate question. Should we really do away with all IP laws and let people copy and distribute as they see fit?
Unfortunately we do all need money to live in this world so what is the big problem with trying to make it via selling digital works that can be duplicated endlessly. You still had to put time and effort into creating the original after all.
Also, lets not forget that many torrent sites are filled with adverts. This must generate them some revenue and they are not paying any of it to the people who created the works they are distributing. I know that many sites claim they do not turn a profit and the adverts only pay for hardware and bandwidth costs, but we only have their word for it.
While I have great love for the large media conglomerates that hold the copyright on much of what is illegally distributed, I also do not exactly like the idea of starting a business based on taking something else that you had no part in creating, and profiting from it.
I used to use bittorrent and gnutella a lot in my youth. One of my friends who was in a band that had a record deal refused to give me an early copy of their album as he did not want it posted to the internet and hence cost him money. It might have cost the record company more, but he needed every penny he got from his records. Unfortunately, trying to harm the record companies via copyright infringement also hurts artists.
I am also not convinced that even if we bankrupted all the current record companies that more of the same ilk would not just grow up to replace them. If a company goes bankrupt, the liquidators end up with the property (including intellectual), and they would then just sell it all of to the highest bidder.
We have to find a way of fighting the current state of affairs without shooting ourselves in the foot in the process by driving all people who make any work that can be digitised into a different career.
Make sure that they buy you at least 5 shirts per person, so that you don't have to do laundry every night and end up with faded out pink shirts.
Are you kidding? You only give your average IT worker 1 shirt and I can assure the problem wont be it turning pink, the problem will be you turning green when you smell him on Thursday afternoon :)
I was going to comment about America's Army too, but you beat me to the punch.
IMO AA 2 was far better than its sequal. They really botched everything and shoved it down the tubes. It used to be really fun but now its just a buggy, laggy mess. I would gladly buy an updated commercial game based on what AA was 4 years ago and flush what they have now.
I have played a few versions of AA2 that were pretty terrible on the bugs front.
As for lag the only issue is that if you rent a 26 slot server it generally cant cope with anything more than 20 players without being constantly restarted. The other difference seems to be that it is loads more fussy about you joining a local server (low ping) than AA2 was.
I agree, I personally do not like realistic war-games. The Battlefield & Call of Duty games hold exactly 0 interest to me. Give me an unrealistic Unreal Tournament or Quake or Advent Rising any day.
Battlefield and Call of Duty are not realistic at all. They are both graphically pretty, but suffer from the same issue mentioned in the article, you shrug off bullets. In COD you do not even need a gargoyle to cure you, you just wait for the red mist to clear then go back to killing.
For true realism try Americas Army 3, the slightest bullet wound can leave you slowly bleeding to death.
By train, the shortest travel time I could find was about 17 hours from station to station. Add on time to get to/from the stations and you are just a little longer than the less than an hour flight time. Though you do have to add on security for that.
I was not talking about trains in a country that has deliberately run them into the ground to encourage car travel. I was talking about train journeys in Europe or pretty much anywhere apart from the US. That was my point, trains could be quicker for certain journeys but in the US they are not for the same distance, go figure.