You raise a very good question: what makes an email app written in Java better than the other fantastic open source email apps that are out there? (And there are many!)
Over apps written in C, C++, or other native languages, Java has to offer enhanced security. But that's about it. I say that as a pretty experienced Java programmer. Unless the Java app is written using SWT (www.eclipse.org/swt), it is probably NOT going to look and feel sufficiently well to entice your interest.
So, I would remain skeptical of Java applications, unless security is your primary consideration. And even then, it is still possible to write insecure applications in Java. Food for thought.
> The fact you heard it in a commercial means you > have the right to it for free? That doesn't even > make sense.
Wait a second -- are you saying that you don't own the right to remember your sensory experiences?
In less than a generation from now, we'll have the ability to record everything we see and hear. Actually, you can do it today, but it is simply expensive. That cost is going to fall like a rock.
So what you're saying is, even though a person HEARS something, they don't own the right to store that in their memory? Oh wait, you want to differentiate between neurons and silicon. Nice try!
The simple fact is, if its on the radio, and you hear it, you should be able to store it. If you hear it at a concert, it's in your brain, you OWN IT.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO YOUR MEMORIES. People don't have the right to charge you 100x for the same goddamn bits.
The post you're responding to never said they'd infringe on copyrights, did it? Just that they wouldn't give the RIAA any money. Nice try.
On top of that, have you actually listened to the music being produced today? It is largely crap. Go look at what people are actually downloading over the P2P networks -- a lot of it is older music, music that under a reasonable copyright system would already be public domain.
(Or wait, do you think people should still be paying for Beatles and Elvis albums that have been burned into their neurons by radio, TV, freaking elevators for the last 40 years?)
I agree 100%; this activity deserves application of the RICO hammer. This is basically the actions of a corporate mafia.
The longer the RIAA gets away with this, the federal DAs stand silent, the less any of us should feel that our government is for the people. When the government becomes corrupt, there is only one course to take for the citizenry...
Perhaps Microsoft uses the moderation system on this site to astroturf its own FUD....
There will always be idiots on Slashdot who use their moderation points to mod flamebait as interesting, and vice-versa. Meta-moderation can only go so far.
Just reading your post reminds me why I could care less if corporate cogs understand open source.
Very soon now either another company will be eating your lunch because they chose an open source system, or alternatively you will succeed due to your conservative path in regards to all this "hobby" stuff.
Whichever way, you'll still be doing all the work for the CIO you are underneath, spending your time trying to decide which shiny box has the most interesting marketing speak on it, and I will be content inventing things I love with my "hobby" time.
I'll snicker to myself at the CIOs of all those companies that thought PCs were just for hobbiest, or the Internet was too unreliable (omg, they can't give away network access! the net will implode!!1!), or VOIP is unreliable, etc....
I encourage you to continue to believe OSS can't have its cake and eat it too.
The rest of us will go on changing the world by writing open source software, and "the big boys" (I laugh at the label "big", maybe more like, "overinflated") in Redmond can keep their blinders on and stay in denial mode. It will just speed up their demise that much quicker.
But hey, you're entitled to your opinion.
"How seriously can anyone take software that's just a hobby?"
I encourage you to continue to not take it seriously.
If anyone gets hauled to court over their use of BT and these "amount shared" statistics are used as evidence against them, having the data be easily forged should help the defendent.
Both IE and Firefox will have bugs that cause security issues. One critical difference is that Firefox empowers the community to fix the issues ASAP, whereas with IE you will *always* be waiting on Microsoft.
I use the Fedora distribution and typically an announced Firefox bug is patched and available via 'yum' within a day or two, if not faster.
Firefox allows you to put your trust in the open source community, while IE requires your trust in Microsoft. I think that's pretty much a no-brainer decision for anyone with a passing knowledge of Microsoft history...
The AMD64 platform is a better platform than Intel's at the moment, in every way. And on top of that, Sun has a hell of a lot more experience in building bulletproof hardware. When you factor in Solaris & a lower price tag... you can see why Sun has no problem mentioning Dell in the ads.
You can spin this whatever way you want, but I'm looking forward to seeing Sun trash the company that brought us the "Dell dude". Dell can go back to selling their overpriced PCs at Christmas, and the people who actually run the important servers in the world, doing billion dollar transactions, have a clear path to keep the Windows/Dell bozos out of the server room in the basement of the bank.
Yes, it is somehow insightful on Slashdot that previous unfulfilled predictions of doom for Microsoft means that Microsoft will not make a mistake this next release.
Seriously, some of you should try the arguments section on the LSAT. You wouldn't last a minute with your leaps of logic.
Its the "Raph" way to have to overhaul large portions of the game post-release. It basically has to do with the game being launched a year ahead of time. The same thing happened with Star Wars Galaxies.
The formula is basically: 1. Release game a year early due to market pressures; 2. Overhaul entire game a year later; 3. Don't profit.
Buy-bye EQ2; the tendrals of the FSM do not bless you.
Well, you're correct that Netware didn't win vs. the Microsoft stack, but then you'd also be forgetting that TCP/IP and internet protocols trumped everyone.
And you're missing the point that a lot of great decisions have happened at Novell, regardless of whether they've "won" vs. Microsoft. (Like anyone can win a battle against a monopoly unchecked by the government; a monopoly that was CONVICTED of illegal practices, but gosh that apparently doesn't have any relevance, does it?)
For example: Open Office? Guess where Sun bought that from.
And guess who had the forsight to sink their teeth into Unix, and now Linux. Who's helping against SCO? That's right, Novell. And who bought Suse? Novell.
Novell has actually been doing quite well in a completely fixed game, and the fact that they are still around while MANY other good companies have disappeared discredits everything in your post.
If it is flamebait to point out on Slashdot that this latest round of corporate spending seems like the sillyness of the pre-dot-com-bomb era, then so be it. I'll assume some bozo(s) just got moderator points today and also own ebay stock.
Myspace, IGN, Skype... Google worth more than major media companies...
Sure, we've got a costly war in Iraq, 100+B hurriance, an economy still kicked in the balls from 9/11; what we need now is some CRAZY INTERNET SPECULATION! WOOHOO!
Come on boys and girls, let's create some easily replaceable, shiny trinkets that we can sell these bozos for billions! This will fix the economy!!!!
I will add that I don't see that listed as a supported feature of this particular product, but the scheme works something like this:
You buy two phones on a plan that allows unlimited in-network calls. You leave one phone at home hooked up via bluetooth to software that connects that cell phone to VOIP. Then you go out with the other cell phone and... (3) profit.
I think I'm seeing the light of the other posts though, and I definately don't see this listed as a feature of this particular package...
The prices paid for Myspace and IGN are, to put it mildly, insane. Batshit crazy.
When business people run off and do something this retarded, it is usually with an ulterior motive. My guess is that someone is trying to reignite the insane speculation on the Internet that caused so many regular people to lose tons of cash in the stock market in the dot com implosion.
Myspace and IGN are so easily replaceable, and hold so little in the way of solid equity, that if I was the SEC I would be looking long and hard at this.
"Hey it's Bush on the line. He needs things to be like 1997. Pay too much for a bunch of Internet companies. We'll get the word just before the bottom falls out!"
Actually, you don't have to do memory-snooping to make it distributed or persistent... it was capable of distributed servers out of the box and persistence was added in a pretty early patch.
You're right, it does let you link servers together through portals, and there's auto-save.
I should have said, "distributed module across multiple server processes" and "database persistence." If those are part of NWN, I missed it.
I agree with the previous posts that Marvel movie rights are worth a ton. And I love comic books, having spent many lazy days of my youth flipping through them. But I'd like to take a moment and complain about this deal anyways:
I predict many of these movies will be more Hulk than Spiderman. In other words, most of them will be crap, with few gems. And that is disappointing.
The thing is, even with a great, established comic book franschise, it takes some real talent in writing, acting, directing to pull things off; it takes a lot of individual, creative miracles to produce something worth spending $7.50 ticket + $3.50 popcorn and two hours of your life on.
I really, really hope the studios focus on getting the right people in there at every step of the production process, because lately they haven't been doing so hot, and all these nostalgia-based scripts are hollow and boring.
A good, core plot is a 100x more valuable, in my mind, than a recognized icon. I hope that the writers can provide us with interesting, SURPRISING plots, because without it, this is all fluff.
It's funny, because it is just history at this point, but Minneapolis was actually quite a tech center for awhile. Control Data was headquartered here in Arden Hills, employed like 60,000 people locally, and they were an IBM-league company for awhile. Most people today are like "Control who?"
We also had Cray (now SGI); I knew some cool gamers there; helped run a MUD with them;) I think most people on Slashdot know the name Cray.
On top of that, lots of cool MUD stuff happened locally. CDC "Cyber" (yes, that was their brand name, before "Cyberpunk") mainframes, and systems like Plato, were used in some of the first MUDs. Some of that work was done at the U of M. Also one of the developers of MudOS is a TC native.
But this is a cold place, and apparently game companies like it warm. And most of them are too paranoid to let their developers telecommute. (Unless it is from India.) So screw em, I'll work for meself.
Slashdot Mirror
You raise a very good question: what makes an email app written in Java better than the other fantastic open source email apps that are out there? (And there are many!)
Over apps written in C, C++, or other native languages, Java has to offer enhanced security. But that's about it. I say that as a pretty experienced Java programmer. Unless the Java app is written using SWT (www.eclipse.org/swt), it is probably NOT going to look and feel sufficiently well to entice your interest.
So, I would remain skeptical of Java applications, unless security is your primary consideration. And even then, it is still possible to write insecure applications in Java. Food for thought.
> The fact you heard it in a commercial means you
> have the right to it for free? That doesn't even
> make sense.
Wait a second -- are you saying that you don't own the right to remember your sensory experiences?
In less than a generation from now, we'll have the ability to record everything we see and hear. Actually, you can do it today, but it is simply expensive. That cost is going to fall like a rock.
So what you're saying is, even though a person HEARS something, they don't own the right to store that in their memory? Oh wait, you want to differentiate between neurons and silicon. Nice try!
The simple fact is, if its on the radio, and you hear it, you should be able to store it. If you hear it at a concert, it's in your brain, you OWN IT.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO YOUR MEMORIES. People don't have the right to charge you 100x for the same goddamn bits.
The post you're responding to never said they'd infringe on copyrights, did it? Just that they wouldn't give the RIAA any money. Nice try.
On top of that, have you actually listened to the music being produced today? It is largely crap. Go look at what people are actually downloading over the P2P networks -- a lot of it is older music, music that under a reasonable copyright system would already be public domain.
(Or wait, do you think people should still be paying for Beatles and Elvis albums that have been burned into their neurons by radio, TV, freaking elevators for the last 40 years?)
I agree 100%; this activity deserves application of the RICO hammer. This is basically the actions of a corporate mafia.
...
The longer the RIAA gets away with this, the federal DAs stand silent, the less any of us should feel that our government is for the people. When the government becomes corrupt, there is only one course to take for the citizenry
Perhaps Microsoft uses the moderation system on this site to astroturf its own FUD....
There will always be idiots on Slashdot who use their moderation points to mod flamebait as interesting, and vice-versa. Meta-moderation can only go so far.
Just reading your post reminds me why I could care less if corporate cogs understand open source.
...
Very soon now either another company will be eating your lunch because they chose an open source system, or alternatively you will succeed due to your conservative path in regards to all this "hobby" stuff.
Whichever way, you'll still be doing all the work for the CIO you are underneath, spending your time trying to decide which shiny box has the most interesting marketing speak on it, and I will be content inventing things I love with my "hobby" time.
I'll snicker to myself at the CIOs of all those companies that thought PCs were just for hobbiest, or the Internet was too unreliable (omg, they can't give away network access! the net will implode!!1!), or VOIP is unreliable, etc.
I encourage you to continue to believe OSS can't have its cake and eat it too.
The rest of us will go on changing the world by writing open source software, and "the big boys" (I laugh at the label "big", maybe more like, "overinflated") in Redmond can keep their blinders on and stay in denial mode. It will just speed up their demise that much quicker.
But hey, you're entitled to your opinion.
"How seriously can anyone take software that's just a hobby?"
I encourage you to continue to not take it seriously.
If anyone gets hauled to court over their use of BT and these "amount shared" statistics are used as evidence against them, having the data be easily forged should help the defendent.
Just a reminder as the FF vs. IE flame wars rage:
...
Both IE and Firefox will have bugs that cause security issues. One critical difference is that Firefox empowers the community to fix the issues ASAP, whereas with IE you will *always* be waiting on Microsoft.
I use the Fedora distribution and typically an announced Firefox bug is patched and available via 'yum' within a day or two, if not faster.
Firefox allows you to put your trust in the open source community, while IE requires your trust in Microsoft. I think that's pretty much a no-brainer decision for anyone with a passing knowledge of Microsoft history
Sun has a winning hand here. It is that simple.
... you can see why Sun has no problem mentioning Dell in the ads.
The AMD64 platform is a better platform than Intel's at the moment, in every way. And on top of that, Sun has a hell of a lot more experience in building bulletproof hardware. When you factor in Solaris & a lower price tag
You can spin this whatever way you want, but I'm looking forward to seeing Sun trash the company that brought us the "Dell dude". Dell can go back to selling their overpriced PCs at Christmas, and the people who actually run the important servers in the world, doing billion dollar transactions, have a clear path to keep the Windows/Dell bozos out of the server room in the basement of the bank.
Yes, it is somehow insightful on Slashdot that previous unfulfilled predictions of doom for Microsoft means that Microsoft will not make a mistake this next release.
Seriously, some of you should try the arguments section on the LSAT. You wouldn't last a minute with your leaps of logic.
Its the "Raph" way to have to overhaul large portions of the game post-release. It basically has to do with the game being launched a year ahead of time. The same thing happened with Star Wars Galaxies.
The formula is basically:
1. Release game a year early due to market pressures;
2. Overhaul entire game a year later;
3. Don't profit.
Buy-bye EQ2; the tendrals of the FSM do not bless you.
Well, you're correct that Netware didn't win vs. the Microsoft stack, but then you'd also be forgetting that TCP/IP and internet protocols trumped everyone.
And you're missing the point that a lot of great decisions have happened at Novell, regardless of whether they've "won" vs. Microsoft. (Like anyone can win a battle against a monopoly unchecked by the government; a monopoly that was CONVICTED of illegal practices, but gosh that apparently doesn't have any relevance, does it?)
For example: Open Office? Guess where Sun bought that from.
And guess who had the forsight to sink their teeth into Unix, and now Linux. Who's helping against SCO? That's right, Novell. And who bought Suse? Novell.
Novell has actually been doing quite well in a completely fixed game, and the fact that they are still around while MANY other good companies have disappeared discredits everything in your post.
Cheers!
Every time you post an article like this, Ballmer kills a chair.
Please, think of the chairs!
If it is flamebait to point out on Slashdot that this latest round of corporate spending seems like the sillyness of the pre-dot-com-bomb era, then so be it. I'll assume some bozo(s) just got moderator points today and also own ebay stock.
Myspace, IGN, Skype ... Google worth more than major media companies ...
Sure, we've got a costly war in Iraq, 100+B hurriance, an economy still kicked in the balls from 9/11; what we need now is some CRAZY INTERNET SPECULATION! WOOHOO!
Come on boys and girls, let's create some easily replaceable, shiny trinkets that we can sell these bozos for billions! This will fix the economy!!!!
WoooooOOOOOO!!!!!! YeaaaahhhhhhhhhHHH!
You might be surprised to discover that most cell phone plans allow you to add an additional cell phone for around 5 bucks.
So you could get the lowest minute rate plan, say $60 a month, add a phone for $5, and have unlimited VOIP calling.
I'm not saying that is ethical, just possible. And that you're incorrect in equating that cost to be twice the normal cost.
I will add that I don't see that listed as a supported feature of this particular product, but the scheme works something like this:
... (3) profit.
You buy two phones on a plan that allows unlimited in-network calls. You leave one phone at home hooked up via bluetooth to software that connects that cell phone to VOIP. Then you go out with the other cell phone and
I think I'm seeing the light of the other posts though, and I definately don't see this listed as a feature of this particular package...
Except for the fact that you can make calls between cell phones for free on most vendors plans. Do the math.
Please, scientists, develop a way for this to happen without the test tube.
Sure we can have 2F + 1M sex now, but I think this will make it easier to justify to the wife.
The prices paid for Myspace and IGN are, to put it mildly, insane. Batshit crazy.
When business people run off and do something this retarded, it is usually with an ulterior motive. My guess is that someone is trying to reignite the insane speculation on the Internet that caused so many regular people to lose tons of cash in the stock market in the dot com implosion.
Myspace and IGN are so easily replaceable, and hold so little in the way of solid equity, that if I was the SEC I would be looking long and hard at this.
"Hey it's Bush on the line. He needs things to be like 1997. Pay too much for a bunch of Internet companies. We'll get the word just before the bottom falls out!"
Actually, you don't have to do memory-snooping to make it distributed or persistent... it was capable of distributed servers out of the box and persistence was added in a pretty early patch.
You're right, it does let you link servers together through portals, and there's auto-save.
I should have said, "distributed module across multiple server processes" and "database persistence." If those are part of NWN, I missed it.
http://www.nwnx.org/ addresses part of this
Somewhere in Redmond, Ballmer is abusing a chair.
I agree with the previous posts that Marvel movie rights are worth a ton. And I love comic books, having spent many lazy days of my youth flipping through them. But I'd like to take a moment and complain about this deal anyways:
I predict many of these movies will be more Hulk than Spiderman. In other words, most of them will be crap, with few gems. And that is disappointing.
The thing is, even with a great, established comic book franschise, it takes some real talent in writing, acting, directing to pull things off; it takes a lot of individual, creative miracles to produce something worth spending $7.50 ticket + $3.50 popcorn and two hours of your life on.
I really, really hope the studios focus on getting the right people in there at every step of the production process, because lately they haven't been doing so hot, and all these nostalgia-based scripts are hollow and boring.
A good, core plot is a 100x more valuable, in my mind, than a recognized icon. I hope that the writers can provide us with interesting, SURPRISING plots, because without it, this is all fluff.
It's funny, because it is just history at this point, but Minneapolis was actually quite a tech center for awhile. Control Data was headquartered here in Arden Hills, employed like 60,000 people locally, and they were an IBM-league company for awhile. Most people today are like "Control who?"
;) I think most people on Slashdot know the name Cray.
We also had Cray (now SGI); I knew some cool gamers there; helped run a MUD with them
On top of that, lots of cool MUD stuff happened locally. CDC "Cyber" (yes, that was their brand name, before "Cyberpunk") mainframes, and systems like Plato, were used in some of the first MUDs. Some of that work was done at the U of M. Also one of the developers of MudOS is a TC native.
But this is a cold place, and apparently game companies like it warm. And most of them are too paranoid to let their developers telecommute. (Unless it is from India.) So screw em, I'll work for meself.