It could also be for some sort of wireless device, like the rumored "Airport Express for video" thing.
Intel has some pretty decent wireless chipsets. I'm guessing it's that, if anything. Just a hunch.
Although I know it's technically possible for Apple to ship an Intel-based Macintosh, somehow I don't think the time is right for that. If NeXT could make NeXTStep for Intel, why not? Except business reasons... NeXTStep for Intel didn't exactly take off, and although you could pick apart why a million different ways... now wouldn't be the time for Apple to make Intel-based motherboards, I don't think.
If they're in talks, it's likely for something that's not a PC.
Plus I *REALLY* don't see how Apple can switch architectures at this point.
They could quite reasonably switch architectures. Or even support and produce both. This was a new reality starting with OS X, and it's strange, but it's true. Pretty much every single bit of the Apple hardware stack could run on a different gcc-supported CPU with a simple recompile. Darwin X86 is totally doable. Device drivers would be the biggest problem, but... just switching out CPUs with a slightly different motherboard and keeping everything else the same should make writing device drivers unnecessary. What wouldn't work would be very old OS 9 applications, but the vast majority of stuff would "just work" with a recompile. The structure already exists to distribute multiple-target binaries in OS X. It's been done before, with NeXTStep, it could certainly be done again.
If they were to do this they would need a damn good reason, and thats whats missing, whats the *REASON*?
Very insightful, that bit. It almost makes up of for the rest of your post... what, indeed, would be the reason ? Unless there's some sort of cost savings, or we're talking about a non-PC device, I don't see it. But it certainly could happen.
Apple hardware is expensive for two reasons, one being volume, and the other being the fact that Apple actually does R&D. But R&D is not the major factor. If they could increase volume... I'm going to guess that's going to be a difference of more like $200 between Linux on Intel and Apple on Intel, and to the average user, it'll be money well spent.
I am among those who are 100% certain that somewhere, in the bowls of 1 Infinity Loop, behind several layers of locked doors, is a PC lab with Darwin, Cocoa, and major portions of the OS X software stack running on Intel ( or AMD ) hardware. It may never see the light of day, but the simple fact that you *can* compile Darwin for X86 tells me it's there...
I agree, which is why I specified J2EE patterns for a J2EE position. If someone gave me a GoF pattern or some other pattern, I wouldn't fault him, though. Interviews can be stressful.
What I'm trying to get at is that even design patterns that are commonly referred to as "J2EE design patterns" work as designs outside of J2EE. Nothing stops me from having Data Access Objects in Objective-C. I have them. When I hear someone say something like "J2EE Design Patterns", I think "oh, goody, you read a book...". Here is a diagram of design patterns from a Sun article. Every single design concept listed could just as easily apply to a language that is not Java. Can you think of a design pattern that can't be generalized to some object-oriented language other than Java? I can't.
I wouldn't fault you for leaving off MDBs. But why do you think of EJBs as nothing more than the javax.ejb API? Those are some of the basic building blocks of J2EE architecture, and I'd want a J2EE architect to at least be able to tell me what an entity bean is good for, a session bean (stateless or stateful). I mean, what is a session bean anyway (from a logical standpoint) and why would I use it? I would be scared of someone who could recite the entire Java API for me, but I do want to hear how I can build something from the building blocks. I feel that's a fair question.
I agree that it's a fair question, but... I do think of EJBs as things that implement the APIs in javax.ejb.*. Why? Because I'm a technical person, and that's the technical definition. I could go a step further and specify subclasses of EnterpriseBean. Your J2EE server and it's EJB containers aren't going to do much 'bean-like' stuff with any class that doesn't implement that, are they?!
You could take the question to a more abstract level and ask what the point of EJBs are, or even Java Beans more generally, but... that's a rather technically different question. If you are looking for someone to say "Session, Message and Entity", then you are basically looking for someone to list the interfaces in javax.ejb.*, if you realize it or not. Ok, maybe just the interfaces that implement EnterpriseBean, but still... what is a session bean good for and why would you choose stateless vs. stateful, now, that's a more interesting question, and one which is revealing to ask a candidate.
I left out MDBs because I haven't needed to use them much, if at all, which is part of why I'm not terribly comfortable claiming I'm "expert"... this stuff is complex, and plenty of reasonably-sized applications don't benefit immediately from portions of it, which is why you're seeing plenty of JSP folks but few "J2EE experts". Your needs are specialized, and you have to do a lot of searching to get the right candidate as a result.
I want people who can hit the ground running.
Yea, and I want a gig that pays well enough to allow me to break into the SF Bay Area housing market, preferably without having to commute from the north bay to the south bay. Good luck to us both.
What did poor people ever do for me? Nothing! That's what.
Dude, who do you think works on the farms that produce the food you eat, or work in the factories that pump out the clothes you wear? Sure, they have jobs, but they're just as sure poor...
have needs come up all the time, and I have a hell of a time filling them. I can tell you right know I don't give a fuck how old you are, and 99% of the open needs pay 6 figures, so if that's being a cheapskate, I'm not sure what to tell you. As far as the skillsets, well if you don't have the skills then why are you applying for the job? My clients know what they want, they are willing to pay for it, but the folks just aren't out there! They're all taken!
Yea, the good ones are taken. I have a job... but I'm looking for a better-paying one... it's crazy how hard it is to look while working, though.
I've read a few of your posts, and I do think part of your problem is your Washington, D.C. location. It's crazy, given housing prices out here, but I think you'd have an easier time in California. Relocating to the east coast is a bit of a non-starter for me ( well, I guess it depends on _what_ those six figures are, but... ).
Just for the record:
favorite J2EE design pattern? Few design patterns are language or implementation-specific. I've found Factory-based implementations of the Data Access Object design pattern to be one of the more ubiquitous and generally useful, though that's not specifically a J2EE design by any means.
Different types of EJBs? What are you looking for there? Stateful and stateless? Session and entity? An EJB is an object like any other, just implementing a specific set of interfaces that mainly allow for introspection. There are as many different types of EJBs as you need to create, so it's sort of a strange question to ask, isn't it? Are you looking for someone to rattle off the different interfaces in javax.ejb.* ?? Because that's what the package documentation is for.
Difference between Java and C++? You mean besides memory management, security, available libraries and that whole JVM/platform independant code thing? Where to start...
Here's a hint : you might want to look for someone who knows enough to not call themselves a "J2EE expert". You're looking for an experienced Java programmer with knowledge of EJBs and J2EE well beyond basic JSP programming. I know just enough that I'm not sure I'd be willing to go with "expert", although my staffing-consultant friends would strongly argue otherwise. To be honest, that over-the-top "J2EE expert" is really rare, and one willing to spew the answers you're looking for _is_ going to have a job, and might not want to work for you, especially if it means living near D.C... investing time in a few less-well-experienced but technically able programmers might be a good thing for you to consider, if you're really having a tough time. That, or you may not actually be offering a good enough salary- remember you are looking to make someone move from a already-comfortable job to an unknown...
It doesn't matter whether you oppose "cheap labor conservatism" or not, eventually wages will be set by supply and demand. If your job can be done in a third-world sweatshop, chances are you're overpaid.
While this is true to a degree, sometimes the location at which a job is being done is actually important. While you can pay someone a relative pittance to do work where housing prices are low, if you want someone to do that same job where housing prices are high, you have to pay more, because nobody can change the fact that people require housing.
If your gardener can do their work from a third-world country, great, but if they have to be in California, you might have to pay your gardener a higher wage. Same goes for IT workers or other employees.
Wages are still strongly influenced by the location work needs to be done, unless you have a cheap way to move people very, very long distances in very, very short periods of time. Invent a cheap-to-operate teleporter, and you'll be 100% right. Otherwise, you're vastly oversimplifying a complex economic puzzle.
What does this mean? If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in theater during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000.
The rate in DC is 80.6 per 100,000.
The conclusion should be that DC is a scary-ass, crime-laden ghetto, but anyone could tell you that. Fact is, firearms aren't what are being used to kill our troops, it's explosives and RPGs. Statistics are funny that way; they need to be about the right things, or they're even more pointless than usual.
I personally see no downside to this, it's only 5 dollars a month, which is cheaper than the TiVo monthly fee
$5 a month?!? I guess that's decent for the average off-air or cable user, but... actually, for my DirecTV, the 'Tivo Service' part of the my monthly fee is $4.99. So, really, building my own MythTV box ( which is typically going to cost a *lot* more than the $99 I put down for my Tivo ) and using this service is going to still leave me spending more money monthly, without integration with my signal source. Honestly, I'm not sure $5 a month is cheap enough.
If I was getting only over-the-air broadcasts, I'd definitely go with MythTV, don't get me wrong... I'd at least try it. But only because I think it'd be a fun project, not because it's 'cheaper' or 'less corporate'. It's not, really. And I'm just not getting over-the-air. Don't ask me to live without South Park- that's just barbaric. MythTV has a long, long way to go before it's really competitive with Tivo, and I'm not really sure adding a monthly service fee makes it more attractive. I might rather program in record times myself and save a few bucks if I was babysitting a homebrew creation anyway.
All of that said, there is certainly a long list of stuff I can't do with my DirecTV Tivo that would be nice-to-have. On the other hand, directly burning DVDs of broadcast stuff and playing music and showing photos on my TV, well... those things are priorities, and I have ways of doing them if I really want.
I actually wouldn't be shocked if Sony decided to use a price point just slightly higher than whatever Microsoft picks, at least at first, with a rather justified "and worth every penny" mentality. "You're getting a Blu-ray player as well", that sort of thing... extra network ports, all that. "Factor in the cost of a Blu-ray player, router, and the fact that it simply has better graphics, it's worth more than the XBox360". Also expect typical Sony 'bargain bundle' tactics ala the PSP. A PS3 and a BD of Spiderman 2 ( or 1 and 2 on a single disc, in HD? ) or whatever they have, that sort of thing. Remember this is every bit as much about Blu-ray to Sony as it is about video games.
It will be interesting, though, that's for sure, and there will be a bit of a price war, especially if Sony sees market numbers and survey trends pointing to Microsoft actually having an advantage. Sony wants badly for us to all have these things in our homes.
I've said it before, competition is good. I just hope IBM and other component suppliers can keep up with demand.
Personally, I won't be buying either console for a few years, though, short of some sort of huge financial windfall. I still have playstation _one_ games I haven't finished, haven't even bought GTA:SA, and have plenty of play-time ready to go on my PS2 ( and my Mac! ) should I ever find time to spend playing games again... and I certainly don't have the cash for a decent HD display, so the alure of HD video is sort of missing for me. If I had the cash, though... that KillZone demo... wow...
A couple of key points from TFA, just so you don't have to be bothered to inform yourself before having an opinion :
The HF frequency spectrum -- from 3MHz to 30MHz -- and the VHF spectrum - 30MHz to 80MHz -- are the two that would suffer the most interference from Access BPL. These spectrums are used by thousands of public safety agencies: police departments, fire departments, and emergency medical services. They are also used by the military, by government entities at all levels, by ships and planes, and by many other licensed users. The communications of all of these critical functions would be subjected to the interference generated by Access BPL.
and
... transformers can eat the broadband traffic at points between the power plant and its final destination. Now that we know the signal has to carried by other means in order to get it into the neighborhoods being served, a large chunk of the original cost savings have disappeared...
In other words, it doesn't work _anywhere_ you have to cross over a transformer ( think about how many places you see those ) and would cause problems for public safety, TV, low-frequency radio, and a host of other wireless spectrum uses. We'd be much better off looking at municipal wireless WiMAX-style systems or other means of encouraging broadband network build-out. I agree that both government and industry need to get behind broadband... just not over unshielded high-voltage lines, thanks. There are other methods, many of which are just as cost-effective without the major downsides.
Oh that's right you are just looking for more reasons to bash Bush...
No, just the FCC this time, really. Bush is just too easy of a target, that gets dull, why do it here? Though fingers do point at the administration backing BPL, now that you mention it.
Besides, it's not just HAM radio. There are other frequencies used for public safety and science which would likely see problems, too. It's just about what the article is about- the FCC ignoring science to push some business agenda.
Yes, the public is interested in broadband. But BPL? Please, there are better ways.
Say it's not so! I'm shocked ! Where is the administration looking out for the public interest that I've become so accustomed to?!?
What's that you say? Someone from the White House told them to get broadband-over-power-lines through no matter what, even if it destroys HAM radio and other public-use frequencies through interference? Why on earth would anyone do that? There isn't any corruption or corporate favoritism in Washington, is there?!?
What do you mean lawyers outnumber engineers at the FCC by a near-infinite margin!?! How could that be so?!?
not a joke at all, and Anything By Anything is tech nically orderable at In-N-Out it is just a matter of asking.
Of course. How silly of me. They are like that, aren't they, you can order it however you like there... yeow. So is that thing the price of 16 cheeseburgers or what? Why am I asking? No, I don't want to know...
must... resist... urge... to order...
I know people who routinely get 6x6's
Uh... wow... routinely?!? I hope they don't have desk jobs...
I wonder if it would beat the three PPC cells in the 360.
Cells? Cores. Single chip. Three cores. Floating-point cores, most likely they don't do integer math, or do it poorly if at all. Probably you could get a nice AMD processor and motherboard for less than $300 and slap it into a cheap-ass case, and after adding a little memory and whatnot, it would likely out-perform the 360 on most tasks you'd normally do. Though of course there's the graphics card, which would be expensive to duplicate on a PC ( I'm guessing ). It's a question of what you want to do with your hardware. Graphics? The cut-rate price of the Xbox or PS3 is going to be hard to beat.
They're probably not the ideal machines to build Linux kernels on, that's all I'm saying. If you hadn't talked about doing a kernel build, I wouldn't have said a thing... for physical modeling and graphical rendering, these things are specialized hardware devices that clearly rule... Yikes. Did you see that freakin' KillZone demo? If they can get the gameplay even remotely near that... damn...
Re:MS vs Sony vs Ninetndo -- my take.. what is you
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· Score: 1
I love how people argue over which system is "better". Who cares?
People who are trying to decide which console to buy.
Nintendo simply can not compete with Sony & Microsoft.
I will speculate that Nintendo is gunning for a market that Sony and Microsoft are both passing over, namely the younger market. There are people who ( for whatever reason, I'm not one of them ) really, really, really like those Nintendo-proprietary games. You won't see Mario, Super Smash Bros, etc on any other system. The 'secret weapon' they're talking about today is the ability to download, store on flash ROM, and play 'classic games', like N64 games and such. They're putting out a system that can play *any* Nintendo game ever. Which even I think could be fun. On a system that looks as graphically capable as the Xbox 360, if not the PS3, so it *can* play more immersive, modern games. Frankly, in this market, Nintendo can be a somewhat-distant 3rd and still make plenty of money for their investors. They're the 'second console' of choice.
Personally, I'm more interested to see how this alters the PC market.
It *will* be interesting to see what this does to the PC market. It will also be interesting to see if the PS3 gives Sony any advantage in the HD-DVD/BD format wars scheduled for uh... next spring, when both the PS3 and HD-DVD players are set for launch. IMHO, Sony is quite possibly more interested in Blu-ray than battling the Xbox, not that Microsoft isn't a factor in all of this... it's just one front in a larger war. The true winner does look to be IBM. Here's hoping they can keep up with demand and not end up looking silly. They sure didn't come up with G5s at high clockrates as quickly ( or in quantities ) that they had promised Steve Jobs... it'll be interesting to see if they can keep up with the new demands Sony, Microsoft _and_ Nintendo will be placing on them! I'm also excited to think of the extra processor R&D that's happened because of all of this, and how it'll be available to Power-based systems in the near future.
My final take is that all of this competition is good. I'm actually glad MS has decided to enter this market- they need to spend all that cash somehow, and Sony needed the competition. It's fun to watch the fanboys flame each other, too...
The primary issue with XBox backwards compatibility is that games were loaded onto the hard disk and played from there
Really? I could have sworn it was that both the CPU and graphics chips are _completely_ different, along with some nonsense about patented stuff in the older graphics system that couldn't be directly done in the new one. And yea, there's a hard drive in the new Xbox. So,
I value my ignorance of such things higher than my credibility with those who do not.
bully for you. You don't work at the White House, by any chance ? Sorry. I couldn't resist...
the real make-or-break will be the ease of programmability
I know it's all part of the hype, but we have this quote from the Gamespot article:
Epic Games' Tim Sweeney was on hand to vouch for the PS3, saying it was "easy to program for" and that Epic had received its first PS3 hardware two months ago. He proved the tech demo was real-time by showing it again and by manipulating the camera and zooming in.
Of course, it does remain to be seen how difficult this thing is to really work with, but... there seem to be plenty of PS2 games, I think the difficulty may be a bit overblown, and once a few SDKs are written, the difficulty is hidden and the game designs can roll... besides, smart folks tend to like a good challenge...
Does the speed of floating point operations do anything for your kernel builds? No. You want a Cell for graphics and physical modeling simulations, not compile-time-variety integer performance.
Not that integer performance is all that bad for these Power-based designs, but... even a P4 would probably beat the Cell ( or the Xbox 360 processor ) for integer preformance, that's just not what it's optimized for.
Why would people have a reason to upgrade *all* their cherished DVD's, which they spent oodles of cash on, just so they can play them on their *gaming console*? And what's so wrong with DVD's anyway that a new standard is needed?
People aren't going to replace their current DVDs. Well, not most of us. I still have a bunch of VHS tapes, for that matter, and I'm not re-purchasing those on DVD as a general rule. But, WHEN we get HD displays, AND happen to have a PS3 because we want to play GTA:USA (or whatever), we'll want _new_ movies we purchase look at least as good on our HD consoles as our games, and we'll want as few disks taking up space on our shelves as possible. A few of our favorite DVDs with serious cinematography, we'll replace those ( I'm thinking the Lord of the Rings movies, stuff like that ). We certainly won't buy more DVDs when higher-definition sources with more content per disc are available... IF the player is cheap enough and/or already in the house because we wanted a PS3.
It's clear from your post you don't have an HD display. If you get your hands on one, compare an early-generation DVD with a newer one that lists itself as "Widescreen Animorphic" or "Enhanced for HD". The second one will blow the first away, and an HD-DVD or BD disc on a 1080i or 1080p player will likely blow the regular DVD away in a similar manner. The BD disc will also have plenty of room to sqeeze in even more extra features on a single disc, or collapse 2-3 disc sets to one.
You're right with a condition. Until you get an HD display, there's no need for another DVD format. Once you do, DVD, even multi-layer, is a bit restrictive.
Unreal Tournament demo was real-time.
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How do we know that Sony is not lying like they did with the PS2?
While we know there is marketing hype involved, at least one demo was shown to be real-time. From the Gamespot article:
To show off the PlayStation 3's graphical brawn, Sony showed several game demos, including an Unreal 3 engine show-off of what appeared to be Unreal Tournament 2007. In what must come as a relief to developers, Epic Games' Tim Sweeney was on hand to vouch for the PS3, saying it was "easy to program for" and that Epic had received its first PS3 hardware two months ago. He proved the tech demo was real-time by showing it again and by manipulating the camera and zooming in.
Why is it hard to believe that Sony, working on this project for the past 3 years or more, might just be able to best Microsoft's 18-month project? It should not be. While the specs might be a tad inflated, it's probably safe to say that the PS3 is a more graphically and computationally capable machine than the Xbox 360. What that means for market share remains to be seen.
Both MS and Sony are going to be pulling out all the stops. Nintendo is likely to step up to the plate as well. You know what? Competition is good.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel has some pretty decent wireless chipsets. I'm guessing it's that, if anything. Just a hunch.
Although I know it's technically possible for Apple to ship an Intel-based Macintosh, somehow I don't think the time is right for that. If NeXT could make NeXTStep for Intel, why not? Except business reasons... NeXTStep for Intel didn't exactly take off, and although you could pick apart why a million different ways... now wouldn't be the time for Apple to make Intel-based motherboards, I don't think.
If they're in talks, it's likely for something that's not a PC.
They could quite reasonably switch architectures. Or even support and produce both. This was a new reality starting with OS X, and it's strange, but it's true. Pretty much every single bit of the Apple hardware stack could run on a different gcc-supported CPU with a simple recompile. Darwin X86 is totally doable. Device drivers would be the biggest problem, but... just switching out CPUs with a slightly different motherboard and keeping everything else the same should make writing device drivers unnecessary. What wouldn't work would be very old OS 9 applications, but the vast majority of stuff would "just work" with a recompile. The structure already exists to distribute multiple-target binaries in OS X. It's been done before, with NeXTStep, it could certainly be done again.
If they were to do this they would need a damn good reason, and thats whats missing, whats the *REASON*?
Very insightful, that bit. It almost makes up of for the rest of your post... what, indeed, would be the reason ? Unless there's some sort of cost savings, or we're talking about a non-PC device, I don't see it. But it certainly could happen.
Apple hardware is expensive for two reasons, one being volume, and the other being the fact that Apple actually does R&D. But R&D is not the major factor. If they could increase volume... I'm going to guess that's going to be a difference of more like $200 between Linux on Intel and Apple on Intel, and to the average user, it'll be money well spent.
I am among those who are 100% certain that somewhere, in the bowls of 1 Infinity Loop, behind several layers of locked doors, is a PC lab with Darwin, Cocoa, and major portions of the OS X software stack running on Intel ( or AMD ) hardware. It may never see the light of day, but the simple fact that you *can* compile Darwin for X86 tells me it's there...
What I'm trying to get at is that even design patterns that are commonly referred to as "J2EE design patterns" work as designs outside of J2EE. Nothing stops me from having Data Access Objects in Objective-C. I have them. When I hear someone say something like "J2EE Design Patterns", I think "oh, goody, you read a book...". Here is a diagram of design patterns from a Sun article. Every single design concept listed could just as easily apply to a language that is not Java. Can you think of a design pattern that can't be generalized to some object-oriented language other than Java? I can't.
I wouldn't fault you for leaving off MDBs. But why do you think of EJBs as nothing more than the javax.ejb API? Those are some of the basic building blocks of J2EE architecture, and I'd want a J2EE architect to at least be able to tell me what an entity bean is good for, a session bean (stateless or stateful). I mean, what is a session bean anyway (from a logical standpoint) and why would I use it? I would be scared of someone who could recite the entire Java API for me, but I do want to hear how I can build something from the building blocks. I feel that's a fair question.
I agree that it's a fair question, but... I do think of EJBs as things that implement the APIs in javax.ejb.*. Why? Because I'm a technical person, and that's the technical definition. I could go a step further and specify subclasses of EnterpriseBean. Your J2EE server and it's EJB containers aren't going to do much 'bean-like' stuff with any class that doesn't implement that, are they?!
You could take the question to a more abstract level and ask what the point of EJBs are, or even Java Beans more generally, but... that's a rather technically different question. If you are looking for someone to say "Session, Message and Entity", then you are basically looking for someone to list the interfaces in javax.ejb.*, if you realize it or not. Ok, maybe just the interfaces that implement EnterpriseBean, but still... what is a session bean good for and why would you choose stateless vs. stateful, now, that's a more interesting question, and one which is revealing to ask a candidate.
I left out MDBs because I haven't needed to use them much, if at all, which is part of why I'm not terribly comfortable claiming I'm "expert"... this stuff is complex, and plenty of reasonably-sized applications don't benefit immediately from portions of it, which is why you're seeing plenty of JSP folks but few "J2EE experts". Your needs are specialized, and you have to do a lot of searching to get the right candidate as a result.
I want people who can hit the ground running.
Yea, and I want a gig that pays well enough to allow me to break into the SF Bay Area housing market, preferably without having to commute from the north bay to the south bay. Good luck to us both.
Dude, who do you think works on the farms that produce the food you eat, or work in the factories that pump out the clothes you wear? Sure, they have jobs, but they're just as sure poor...
My kid ( 3 years old ) wants to be a dentist. We're going to encourage that, with the modification "try for Oral Surgeon"...
Yea, the good ones are taken. I have a job... but I'm looking for a better-paying one... it's crazy how hard it is to look while working, though.
I've read a few of your posts, and I do think part of your problem is your Washington, D.C. location. It's crazy, given housing prices out here, but I think you'd have an easier time in California. Relocating to the east coast is a bit of a non-starter for me ( well, I guess it depends on _what_ those six figures are, but... ).
Just for the record :
favorite J2EE design pattern? Few design patterns are language or implementation-specific. I've found Factory-based implementations of the Data Access Object design pattern to be one of the more ubiquitous and generally useful, though that's not specifically a J2EE design by any means.
Different types of EJBs? What are you looking for there? Stateful and stateless? Session and entity? An EJB is an object like any other, just implementing a specific set of interfaces that mainly allow for introspection. There are as many different types of EJBs as you need to create, so it's sort of a strange question to ask, isn't it? Are you looking for someone to rattle off the different interfaces in javax.ejb.* ?? Because that's what the package documentation is for.
Difference between Java and C++? You mean besides memory management, security, available libraries and that whole JVM/platform independant code thing? Where to start...
Here's a hint : you might want to look for someone who knows enough to not call themselves a "J2EE expert". You're looking for an experienced Java programmer with knowledge of EJBs and J2EE well beyond basic JSP programming. I know just enough that I'm not sure I'd be willing to go with "expert", although my staffing-consultant friends would strongly argue otherwise. To be honest, that over-the-top "J2EE expert" is really rare, and one willing to spew the answers you're looking for _is_ going to have a job, and might not want to work for you, especially if it means living near D.C... investing time in a few less-well-experienced but technically able programmers might be a good thing for you to consider, if you're really having a tough time. That, or you may not actually be offering a good enough salary- remember you are looking to make someone move from a already-comfortable job to an unknown...
While this is true to a degree, sometimes the location at which a job is being done is actually important. While you can pay someone a relative pittance to do work where housing prices are low, if you want someone to do that same job where housing prices are high, you have to pay more, because nobody can change the fact that people require housing.
If your gardener can do their work from a third-world country, great, but if they have to be in California, you might have to pay your gardener a higher wage. Same goes for IT workers or other employees.
Wages are still strongly influenced by the location work needs to be done, unless you have a cheap way to move people very, very long distances in very, very short periods of time. Invent a cheap-to-operate teleporter, and you'll be 100% right. Otherwise, you're vastly oversimplifying a complex economic puzzle.
It'll still be a while before this is in wide use, if it ever is
Yea, too bad one of these HD discs won't be in some really desirable machine, like a super-cool fancy new console game machine or something. Oh, wait...
The conclusion should be that DC is a scary-ass, crime-laden ghetto, but anyone could tell you that. Fact is, firearms aren't what are being used to kill our troops, it's explosives and RPGs. Statistics are funny that way; they need to be about the right things, or they're even more pointless than usual.
$5 a month?!? I guess that's decent for the average off-air or cable user, but... actually, for my DirecTV, the 'Tivo Service' part of the my monthly fee is $4.99. So, really, building my own MythTV box ( which is typically going to cost a *lot* more than the $99 I put down for my Tivo ) and using this service is going to still leave me spending more money monthly, without integration with my signal source. Honestly, I'm not sure $5 a month is cheap enough.
If I was getting only over-the-air broadcasts, I'd definitely go with MythTV, don't get me wrong... I'd at least try it. But only because I think it'd be a fun project, not because it's 'cheaper' or 'less corporate'. It's not, really. And I'm just not getting over-the-air. Don't ask me to live without South Park- that's just barbaric. MythTV has a long, long way to go before it's really competitive with Tivo, and I'm not really sure adding a monthly service fee makes it more attractive. I might rather program in record times myself and save a few bucks if I was babysitting a homebrew creation anyway.
All of that said, there is certainly a long list of stuff I can't do with my DirecTV Tivo that would be nice-to-have. On the other hand, directly burning DVDs of broadcast stuff and playing music and showing photos on my TV, well... those things are priorities, and I have ways of doing them if I really want.
I actually wouldn't be shocked if Sony decided to use a price point just slightly higher than whatever Microsoft picks, at least at first, with a rather justified "and worth every penny" mentality. "You're getting a Blu-ray player as well", that sort of thing... extra network ports, all that. "Factor in the cost of a Blu-ray player, router, and the fact that it simply has better graphics, it's worth more than the XBox360". Also expect typical Sony 'bargain bundle' tactics ala the PSP. A PS3 and a BD of Spiderman 2 ( or 1 and 2 on a single disc, in HD? ) or whatever they have, that sort of thing. Remember this is every bit as much about Blu-ray to Sony as it is about video games.
It will be interesting, though, that's for sure, and there will be a bit of a price war, especially if Sony sees market numbers and survey trends pointing to Microsoft actually having an advantage. Sony wants badly for us to all have these things in our homes.
I've said it before, competition is good. I just hope IBM and other component suppliers can keep up with demand.
Personally, I won't be buying either console for a few years, though, short of some sort of huge financial windfall. I still have playstation _one_ games I haven't finished, haven't even bought GTA:SA, and have plenty of play-time ready to go on my PS2 ( and my Mac! ) should I ever find time to spend playing games again... and I certainly don't have the cash for a decent HD display, so the alure of HD video is sort of missing for me. If I had the cash, though... that KillZone demo... wow...
No, just the FCC this time, really. Bush is just too easy of a target, that gets dull, why do it here? Though fingers do point at the administration backing BPL, now that you mention it.
Besides, it's not just HAM radio. There are other frequencies used for public safety and science which would likely see problems, too. It's just about what the article is about- the FCC ignoring science to push some business agenda.
Yes, the public is interested in broadband. But BPL? Please, there are better ways.
Where is the administration looking out for the public interest that I've become so accustomed to?!?
What's that you say? Someone from the White House told them to get broadband-over-power-lines through no matter what, even if it destroys HAM radio and other public-use frequencies through interference? Why on earth would anyone do that? There isn't any corruption or corporate favoritism in Washington, is there?!?
What do you mean lawyers outnumber engineers at the FCC by a near-infinite margin!?! How could that be so?!?
I assumed it was doing scheduling. Are you in the right story?
Of course. How silly of me. They are like that, aren't they, you can order it however you like there... yeow. So is that thing the price of 16 cheeseburgers or what? Why am I asking? No, I don't want to know...
must... resist... urge... to order...
I know people who routinely get 6x6's
Uh... wow... routinely?!? I hope they don't have desk jobs...
Cells? Cores. Single chip. Three cores. Floating-point cores, most likely they don't do integer math, or do it poorly if at all. Probably you could get a nice AMD processor and motherboard for less than $300 and slap it into a cheap-ass case, and after adding a little memory and whatnot, it would likely out-perform the 360 on most tasks you'd normally do. Though of course there's the graphics card, which would be expensive to duplicate on a PC ( I'm guessing ). It's a question of what you want to do with your hardware. Graphics? The cut-rate price of the Xbox or PS3 is going to be hard to beat.
They're probably not the ideal machines to build Linux kernels on, that's all I'm saying. If you hadn't talked about doing a kernel build, I wouldn't have said a thing... for physical modeling and graphical rendering, these things are specialized hardware devices that clearly rule... Yikes. Did you see that freakin' KillZone demo? If they can get the gameplay even remotely near that... damn...
People who are trying to decide which console to buy.
Nintendo simply can not compete with Sony & Microsoft.
I will speculate that Nintendo is gunning for a market that Sony and Microsoft are both passing over, namely the younger market. There are people who ( for whatever reason, I'm not one of them ) really, really, really like those Nintendo-proprietary games. You won't see Mario, Super Smash Bros, etc on any other system. The 'secret weapon' they're talking about today is the ability to download, store on flash ROM, and play 'classic games', like N64 games and such. They're putting out a system that can play *any* Nintendo game ever. Which even I think could be fun. On a system that looks as graphically capable as the Xbox 360, if not the PS3, so it *can* play more immersive, modern games. Frankly, in this market, Nintendo can be a somewhat-distant 3rd and still make plenty of money for their investors. They're the 'second console' of choice.
Personally, I'm more interested to see how this alters the PC market.
It *will* be interesting to see what this does to the PC market. It will also be interesting to see if the PS3 gives Sony any advantage in the HD-DVD/BD format wars scheduled for uh... next spring, when both the PS3 and HD-DVD players are set for launch. IMHO, Sony is quite possibly more interested in Blu-ray than battling the Xbox, not that Microsoft isn't a factor in all of this... it's just one front in a larger war. The true winner does look to be IBM. Here's hoping they can keep up with demand and not end up looking silly. They sure didn't come up with G5s at high clockrates as quickly ( or in quantities ) that they had promised Steve Jobs... it'll be interesting to see if they can keep up with the new demands Sony, Microsoft _and_ Nintendo will be placing on them! I'm also excited to think of the extra processor R&D that's happened because of all of this, and how it'll be available to Power-based systems in the near future.
My final take is that all of this competition is good. I'm actually glad MS has decided to enter this market- they need to spend all that cash somehow, and Sony needed the competition. It's fun to watch the fanboys flame each other, too...
Really? I could have sworn it was that both the CPU and graphics chips are _completely_ different, along with some nonsense about patented stuff in the older graphics system that couldn't be directly done in the new one. And yea, there's a hard drive in the new Xbox. So,
I value my ignorance of such things higher than my credibility with those who do not.
bully for you. You don't work at the White House, by any chance ? Sorry. I couldn't resist...
I know it's all part of the hype, but we have this quote from the Gamespot article :
Of course, it does remain to be seen how difficult this thing is to really work with, but... there seem to be plenty of PS2 games, I think the difficulty may be a bit overblown, and once a few SDKs are written, the difficulty is hidden and the game designs can roll... besides, smart folks tend to like a good challenge...Does the speed of floating point operations do anything for your kernel builds? No. You want a Cell for graphics and physical modeling simulations, not compile-time-variety integer performance.
Not that integer performance is all that bad for these Power-based designs, but... even a P4 would probably beat the Cell ( or the Xbox 360 processor ) for integer preformance, that's just not what it's optimized for.
People aren't going to replace their current DVDs. Well, not most of us. I still have a bunch of VHS tapes, for that matter, and I'm not re-purchasing those on DVD as a general rule. But, WHEN we get HD displays, AND happen to have a PS3 because we want to play GTA:USA (or whatever), we'll want _new_ movies we purchase look at least as good on our HD consoles as our games, and we'll want as few disks taking up space on our shelves as possible. A few of our favorite DVDs with serious cinematography, we'll replace those ( I'm thinking the Lord of the Rings movies, stuff like that ). We certainly won't buy more DVDs when higher-definition sources with more content per disc are available... IF the player is cheap enough and/or already in the house because we wanted a PS3.
It's clear from your post you don't have an HD display. If you get your hands on one, compare an early-generation DVD with a newer one that lists itself as "Widescreen Animorphic" or "Enhanced for HD". The second one will blow the first away, and an HD-DVD or BD disc on a 1080i or 1080p player will likely blow the regular DVD away in a similar manner. The BD disc will also have plenty of room to sqeeze in even more extra features on a single disc, or collapse 2-3 disc sets to one.
You're right with a condition. Until you get an HD display, there's no need for another DVD format. Once you do, DVD, even multi-layer, is a bit restrictive.
While we know there is marketing hype involved, at least one demo was shown to be real-time. From the Gamespot article :
Why is it hard to believe that Sony, working on this project for the past 3 years or more, might just be able to best Microsoft's 18-month project? It should not be. While the specs might be a tad inflated, it's probably safe to say that the PS3 is a more graphically and computationally capable machine than the Xbox 360. What that means for market share remains to be seen.
Both MS and Sony are going to be pulling out all the stops. Nintendo is likely to step up to the plate as well. You know what? Competition is good.
We'll all be very curious to see what the price point for this sucker is like...
better image of what can only be a slot-loading drive.