Eg - for each breakthrough in transistor density and such like, there is some naff mathematically nice nonsense like Java which runs like a lame donkey after a heavy meal, and is practically useless unles you can boost the power of your computer by an order of magnitude:)
hehe as long as you have a didgital connection to the server - I find CS lags over 300ms more than to a Q2 server on the same network.
Still - you are absolutely right - Q3 requires a hefty investment in kit to play at any level above casual.
Have you seen Serious Sam? I just got it, and have it installed on an old PIII at work with 64Mb ram, and an old VooDoo2 that I had lying about - and it rocks: check out the lens flares, reflections and bump mapping - on a VooDoo2 ffs! And it runs smoother than the ancient Q2 on the same hardware. If I turn on lens flares in Q3 on that card, it'd melt!
CS - the maps look very dated - you can tell its the old Quake2/valve engine from "Quiet Life" and the game play levaes me cold. 10 Blokes hide for a bit and then die. No 2moves" are possible - its like your trousers are round your ankles when you walk in CS. But as you point out - if you cant run Q3, Q2 dissappeared out of most shops, and "Half Speed" is still available, then your gonna end up playing CS. I play lots of games, including Q3, SS, and UT (sometimes:) but I still come back to Q2 (I connect over a modem or would probably switch to Q3)
yeah Id agree with all of that, but still somehow Q3 "feels" better. I think it must be to do with the physics model, and the way your man moves. In Quake (2 and 3 ) you can jump and run, and do all kinds of tricks with the jumping and strafing etc to gain extra height/speed etc. UT man moves like he's wearing lead underpants, and the same goes for all those "Half Speed" based games like CS (or is that "Quiet Life":P) Even Serious Sam, which is a hilarious laugh, plods along like his shoe laces are tied together. I also think they tried too hard in UT to make different weapons - all that green slime gun, blade gun, stuff...
Agree with you about the maps though - not only are they all the same visually, you can't figure a purpose for them. The original Q2 maps (not the dm ones) had a deffinite purpose such as "the base" or "the comms centre" and the design reflected this. The later Q3 maps are all "generic random castle type thing". either that or those joke maps with no walls. Tedious stuff indeed. Mind you, its not thatits not possible to make good maps in Q3 - I have some very UT like maps for Q3 (moving trains, starships and so on)
As for CS - 10 blokes with sniper rifles hiding behind boxes for 10 minutes - oh joy.
So lets see if I have this straight: they shoved enormous amounts of electricity down a superconducting something through a massive magnetic field and some nearby stuff moved about? Q'uel surprise...
Will it be shot in black and white with an orange filter over the "desert" bits?
Lucas! Nooooooooooooo
You spend all this time money and effort making the damm things - for fecks sake man - think of a better title. As the above post says - if its about the clone wars - er.. well hmm what springs to mind?
I remember seeing a brief piece on TV here in the UK about this about 2 years ago, when they were trialing this "noise" on emergency vehicles. White noise, is apprentley easier to pinpoint then the regular siren - thus avoiding an intersection full of bemused drivers wondering from which direction the bread van on steroids will appear from.
This is a bigger problem with certain types of intersection - in Europe there tend to be a lot of traffic "islands" - big circular pieces of road with routes hanging off them - the theory is, that unless its very crowded, nobody stops. Certain nations (ie the French) take this a little too literally:-))
Hehe imagine a train full of chuffing cellphones - and will we be able to download personalised ones that do, - say the drum track from ZZ Top's "Gi'me all your Lovin'"?:-/
When I buy a CD, the first and only time I play it is usually to rip the contents onto my music server. Then I file them - in the roof space.
Just as I would never consider using a paper based encyclopedia or phone book these days, I don't want to wade through hundreds of 5 inch plastic disks to find a track, when I can just get my PC to search for it in seconds (not to mention those awful cases that break as soon as you open them, or eject the CD at 30 mph across your living room).
I'm not out to rip anyone off - people deserve to be paid for their work, but RedHat don't insist I keep the damm distro CD in the drive when I use my PC - why should I have to keep the delivery media for the music I buy to hand just to listen to it?
I'll probably do the same with the DVDs I have when I can get sufficent storage online, and figure out a way to do it without loss of content.
These guys need to break free of the concept that the delivery media is the product. They are trying to adapt something rather than come up with a solution to the catual problem. I see the future of music distribution being network based - I'll donwload what I want from mp3.com or similar and they will bill me, and keep some sort of record of what I've paid for.
All I have to then, is figure out what to do with the big pile of VHS tapes I have. Hmm I wonder if my WinTV card can digitize those:P
Myst? I saw a a picture once (in fact wasn't it just that - a series of nice pre-rendered piccies) but I can't claim to know a single person who has actually played it..
Surely art is an expression of the artists feeling about something, or view of the world (or just cos it looks nice with abstract art) so whether we use paint, clay, wood, or a CRT as long as it expresses something surely it is art.
Hell people stare for hours at my PC if I fire up winamp and activate the visualisation plugins. That to me is a fine example of computer art - its not totally random, the artists had a look in mind for each visualisation.
Perhaps the critics worry that any image looking too perfect cannot be art, but I've seen large paintings in galeries all over the place that are phot-realistic, but they are held up as examples of fine art (getting a camera would have been quicker though guys). Perhaps they get recognition for the sheer amount of manual labour involved:)
Check out the screen savers that come with most Linux distributions - some of those are fantastic.
The only reason I bought a DVD player originally, was becuase I naively thought "heck yes the Star Wars Trilogy will be on disc.." It never occurred to me that the company that pioneered digital effects, and now is the first to actual film a full length movie staright onto digital media, would not also be among the first to release the damm things onto a digital medium. I mean, half of the Star Wars trilogy is John Williams' fantastic score, together with the extra load, extra bass soudn effects that rattled your part digested pop-corn as Vader's star destroyer went past at the beggining of episode IV. I already have 2 copies of each movie on tape, but lets face it - tape sucks. I mean, who now buys music on tape? (unless they just play it in the car) The damm things wear out so fast, and are not brilliant in the first place. I went to all the troible of buying a large widesreen screen, DVD player, Dolby decoder and 5.1 speakers and I'm still waiting to watch the very films that were crying out for it.
I'd go to the cinema to watch them again definitely, but they are not always on when I want to watch them (read never). Besides - I have developed a hatred of the cinema experience - you can't smoke, pause the film to make coffee, and there is a distinct lack of sofas in every cinema I've been in. Also, there are the usual people throwing pop-corn, kicking me in the back of the head, rustling those specially designed 150Db packets made only for cinemas, talking away explaining the plot to their thick friends, and so on. Not to mention the odours that some of them give off... And do they make the seats that uncomfortable on purpose? The final irony, is that if you are real unlucky, you are so close to the damm screen you get whiplash following the action, and you can see that hair the camera operator missed on his lens.. some films I've seen in cinemas looked like they forgot to turn up the colour, and were so scrathed youd think they were half a century old.
So. I'd like the next best thing in my house, where I can lie back on my sofa, smoke on, and adjust the damm picture. DVD's unlike film or VHS tape, do not wear out.
One final thing - I couldn't care less for "additional features" - I don't give a s*** about how many hours some guy spent in make up - its a FANTASY - I don't want to see behind the curtain ffs! I know its not real - don't rub it in:P
hehe so they've (rather crudely) bolted a palm pilot or something to the fascia. Even worse, it's almost behind the steering wheel. Similarly, the mobile phone is s seperate thing in yet another bolt on cradle. I could have bought those bits from Dixons for £600!!
I was expecting to see a nice built in LCD touch screen actually in the dash, integrating the phone functions, mp3, radio, Nav/Traffic and Web functions, with possible some voice recognition, and text to voice to avoid crashing the damm car whilst reading Slashdot..
Ideally, what I would want to see is something like an Ipaq or Palm, in colour, with built in cellular radio for voice and data functions, a permanent Internet connection with a cradle in the car that hooks it up to a large hard disk (with all those mp3's), and external antenna.
VW's attempt is crude and overpriced, not to mention downright dangerous. Geez I could do that to my old Ford in a weekend.
I've only heard of one of those things (Borland's) and seen none of them! Why not try something less - er.. obscure. Perhaps a language for developing apps that generates HTML and can therefore be used by any client that can render HTML. The obvious one being Java/JSP. My current fave is PHP - runs in the web server (well it does if your server is Apache anyway), you can knock up your forms in the HTML designer widget of your choice, and then edit the resulting HTML code to insert PHP, or write the whole thing in PHP and use style sheets and so on. Truly cross platform! JSP's offer similar flexibilty, but then who the hell wants to fight with Java to make an overweight, unstable and dog slow product?;-) (hehe and yes that is a sweeping generalisation but my opinions can only be shaped by experience - I've been paged by monitoring software at all hours to beat some piece of Java based rubbish into life too many times. The PHP based sites running next to them have yet to fail...)
Hmm so - back around tea time then.
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
I seem to remember the original definition of "warp speed" being the speed of light raised to the "warp factor". If you take this then:-
661797846884160000000 Distance in meters. (70K light years)
7.2597926626745539199273892718133e+50 Speed in m/s at warp 6
Ie - er they could go back and forth til they got bored. No wonder they had a re-think - Capt. Kirk could have commuted to other galaxies from Starbase 1....
Over here:- http://www.netmoon.com/startrek/warp/warp9.htm
is a much lower definition that puts warp 9 at 1516c. That still only puts the answer at 46 years (assuming it can run at warp 9 for that long).
Oh this is right up there with dissections of Shakespeare (wrote some rip roaring yarns with lots of bawdy lines and the odd car chase/murder to keep the scum interested. OK I lied about the car chases but you get the point - he didn;t sit down and think "hmm time for another classic peice of fine literature" - he just wanted another hit play!) And those archeologists who find a body next to a bronze axe head and off the back of that decide he had 4 kids, his last meal was ground sparrow and he shaved every 3 days...
Stonehenge is a similar story - people ooing and ahing and scratching their heads over why the stones are arrmaged like that - til they realise some guys with big ropes and a lot of time on their hands put them like that in the 19th century.
Kubrick was making a film - not starting a religion - even though the story has western religious overtones. The hexagons were hexagons becuase they tesselate nicley to form a strong structure (and the model designer probably thought it looked nice).
As for all that winamp screensaver stuff at the end - I often wonder if film makers and authors just invent this stuff and let the auidience invent the meaning afterwards. Imagine the script meetings:- "hey lets put in some wierd lights and stuff with some footage of a unborn baby - that'll really throw them"
I wouldn't be suprised if bronze age man didn't randomly distribute axe heads just to confound Time Team.
I'm off to bury 4 elephants and a karaoke machine in my back yard. Let's see the Wheats of the far future figure THAT one out:)
Indeed - I don't want to replace open source stuff from GNU with commercial products - I already have those commercial products by the tonne - I just want to replace the OS underneath with something more stable than NT Server - so I want Linux versions.
We have recently *bought*:-
RedHat Enterprise (optimised for Oracle 8i) - $2000
Oracle 8i for Linux - cost $40,000+ (depends on CPU(s) size)
Oracle Internet Application Server for Linux - actually this IS open source (Apache, Apache JServ) but tweaked by Oracle with the addition of SSL, and their own dispatcher code.
We have had IBM in to pitch us WebSphere too, and Its great they are producing it for Linux - its just a pity its a collection of 32 re-hashed barely related products.
We do also have IBM MQseries for Linux (which is now a WebSphere labelled product)for talking to those old steam driven 390's. - cost $7000
It's neither cost nor some highly principled concept of open source niceness that drives these decisions for me - it is purely performance and reliability. The alternative is to get something like Solaris running on Sparc servers - but I have to say I am always underwhelmed by the primitive crap that you get from Sun for 10 times the money you can spend on modern Intel/PCI based boxes with decent RAID controllers. Sun may have a decent storage platform, but their servers suck the big one - but now I can get Solaris reliability and *better* performance for less money by using Linux on Intel iron - *but* only if the apps exist!
I wait for the day when I dont have to run *any* mission critical processes on Windows - which is a daft idea in this day and age.
"And besides, I already know HTML inside out, I don't want to have to learn another markup:) "
And thats really the point ain't it? If you've got one script type thing that does a job - why oh why do we have to have 6 more? When a certain critical mass of popularity is reached - it makes sense to make the existing one better rather than trying to replace it all the time. Just look at all the obscure scripting thingies on your average Linux box - perl, python, korn, csh, bash, tcl etc. - I don't use *any* of em. Even though I'm sure they're all really clever - I learnt C so I just go with that. Yeah sure any one of those things can probably do what I need in one line of code that looks like a cat if you squint your eyes and has no vowels in it whatsoever - but well - life's too short!
So er.. lAtEX put it on the pile and take a receipt - my poor old brain has too many new widgets like xml, java beans, java sprouts, active java server component bean pages with electric mirrors, MQ, Jserv, Tomcat, middleware, underware and a dozen other ways of getting data from A to B to worry about another way of making marks on paper - virtual or not. And there is that small matter of er.. links? I don't understand why PDF still exists - let alone latex:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe - Moores other law of computing:-
:)
"The actual speed of operation is a constant."
Eg - for each breakthrough in transistor density and such like, there is some naff mathematically nice nonsense like Java which runs like a lame donkey after a heavy meal, and is practically useless unles you can boost the power of your computer by an order of magnitude
and just what colour IS the sky on your planet?
hehe as long as you have a didgital connection to the server - I find CS lags over 300ms more than to a Q2 server on the same network.
:) but I still come back to Q2 (I connect over a modem or would probably switch to Q3)
Still - you are absolutely right - Q3 requires a hefty investment in kit to play at any level above casual.
Have you seen Serious Sam? I just got it, and have it installed on an old PIII at work with 64Mb ram, and an old VooDoo2 that I had lying about - and it rocks: check out the lens flares, reflections and bump mapping - on a VooDoo2 ffs! And it runs smoother than the ancient Q2 on the same hardware. If I turn on lens flares in Q3 on that card, it'd melt!
CS - the maps look very dated - you can tell its the old Quake2/valve engine from "Quiet Life" and the game play levaes me cold. 10 Blokes hide for a bit and then die. No 2moves" are possible - its like your trousers are round your ankles when you walk in CS. But as you point out - if you cant run Q3, Q2 dissappeared out of most shops, and "Half Speed" is still available, then your gonna end up playing CS. I play lots of games, including Q3, SS, and UT (sometimes
yeah Id agree with all of that, but still somehow Q3 "feels" better. I think it must be to do with the physics model, and the way your man moves. In Quake (2 and 3 ) you can jump and run, and do all kinds of tricks with the jumping and strafing etc to gain extra height/speed etc. UT man moves like he's wearing lead underpants, and the same goes for all those "Half Speed" based games like CS (or is that "Quiet Life" :P) Even Serious Sam, which is a hilarious laugh, plods along like his shoe laces are tied together. I also think they tried too hard in UT to make different weapons - all that green slime gun, blade gun, stuff...
Agree with you about the maps though - not only are they all the same visually, you can't figure a purpose for them. The original Q2 maps (not the dm ones) had a deffinite purpose such as "the base" or "the comms centre" and the design reflected this. The later Q3 maps are all "generic random castle type thing". either that or those joke maps with no walls. Tedious stuff indeed. Mind you, its not thatits not possible to make good maps in Q3 - I have some very UT like maps for Q3 (moving trains, starships and so on)
As for CS - 10 blokes with sniper rifles hiding behind boxes for 10 minutes - oh joy.
fine but I still think it's a slimey way to go about things, knocking something anonymously. Have the guts to stand by your words.
hmm good job field ploughing is not high on my list of computing tasks...
So lets see if I have this straight: they shoved enormous amounts of electricity down a superconducting something through a massive magnetic field and some nearby stuff moved about? Q'uel surprise...
which is similar to a hydro spanner but er.. less wet.
They were just clones of the original posts....
LOL - StarWars II:Attack of the Fifty Foot Clone
Will it be shot in black and white with an orange filter over the "desert" bits?
Lucas! Nooooooooooooo
You spend all this time money and effort making the damm things - for fecks sake man - think of a better title. As the above post says - if its about the clone wars - er.. well hmm what springs to mind?
Throw in the Ewoks and he'll get probation...
But also...
:-))
:-/
I remember seeing a brief piece on TV here in the UK about this about 2 years ago, when they were trialing this "noise" on emergency vehicles. White noise, is apprentley easier to pinpoint then the regular siren - thus avoiding an intersection full of bemused drivers wondering from which direction the bread van on steroids will appear from.
This is a bigger problem with certain types of intersection - in Europe there tend to be a lot of traffic "islands" - big circular pieces of road with routes hanging off them - the theory is, that unless its very crowded, nobody stops. Certain nations (ie the French) take this a little too literally
Hehe imagine a train full of chuffing cellphones - and will we be able to download personalised ones that do, - say the drum track from ZZ Top's "Gi'me all your Lovin'"?
They take up so much damm room (physically) !
:P
When I buy a CD, the first and only time I play it is usually to rip the contents onto my music server. Then I file them - in the roof space.
Just as I would never consider using a paper based encyclopedia or phone book these days, I don't want to wade through hundreds of 5 inch plastic disks to find a track, when I can just get my PC to search for it in seconds (not to mention those awful cases that break as soon as you open them, or eject the CD at 30 mph across your living room).
I'm not out to rip anyone off - people deserve to be paid for their work, but RedHat don't insist I keep the damm distro CD in the drive when I use my PC - why should I have to keep the delivery media for the music I buy to hand just to listen to it?
I'll probably do the same with the DVDs I have when I can get sufficent storage online, and figure out a way to do it without loss of content.
These guys need to break free of the concept that the delivery media is the product. They are trying to adapt something rather than come up with a solution to the catual problem. I see the future of music distribution being network based - I'll donwload what I want from mp3.com or similar and they will bill me, and keep some sort of record of what I've paid for.
All I have to then, is figure out what to do with the big pile of VHS tapes I have. Hmm I wonder if my WinTV card can digitize those
hehe surely you jest!
Myst? I saw a a picture once (in fact wasn't it just that - a series of nice pre-rendered piccies) but I can't claim to know a single person who has actually played it..
Surely art is an expression of the artists feeling about something, or view of the world (or just cos it looks nice with abstract art) so whether we use paint, clay, wood, or a CRT as long as it expresses something surely it is art.
:)
Hell people stare for hours at my PC if I fire up winamp and activate the visualisation plugins. That to me is a fine example of computer art - its not totally random, the artists had a look in mind for each visualisation.
Perhaps the critics worry that any image looking too perfect cannot be art, but I've seen large paintings in galeries all over the place that are phot-realistic, but they are held up as examples of fine art (getting a camera would have been quicker though guys). Perhaps they get recognition for the sheer amount of manual labour involved
Check out the screen savers that come with most Linux distributions - some of those are fantastic.
The only reason I bought a DVD player originally, was becuase I naively thought "heck yes the Star Wars Trilogy will be on disc.." It never occurred to me that the company that pioneered digital effects, and now is the first to actual film a full length movie staright onto digital media, would not also be among the first to release the damm things onto a digital medium. I mean, half of the Star Wars trilogy is John Williams' fantastic score, together with the extra load, extra bass soudn effects that rattled your part digested pop-corn as Vader's star destroyer went past at the beggining of episode IV. I already have 2 copies of each movie on tape, but lets face it - tape sucks. I mean, who now buys music on tape? (unless they just play it in the car) The damm things wear out so fast, and are not brilliant in the first place. I went to all the troible of buying a large widesreen screen, DVD player, Dolby decoder and 5.1 speakers and I'm still waiting to watch the very films that were crying out for it.
:P
I'd go to the cinema to watch them again definitely, but they are not always on when I want to watch them (read never). Besides - I have developed a hatred of the cinema experience - you can't smoke, pause the film to make coffee, and there is a distinct lack of sofas in every cinema I've been in. Also, there are the usual people throwing pop-corn, kicking me in the back of the head, rustling those specially designed 150Db packets made only for cinemas, talking away explaining the plot to their thick friends, and so on. Not to mention the odours that some of them give off... And do they make the seats that uncomfortable on purpose? The final irony, is that if you are real unlucky, you are so close to the damm screen you get whiplash following the action, and you can see that hair the camera operator missed on his lens.. some films I've seen in cinemas looked like they forgot to turn up the colour, and were so scrathed youd think they were half a century old.
So. I'd like the next best thing in my house, where I can lie back on my sofa, smoke on, and adjust the damm picture. DVD's unlike film or VHS tape, do not wear out.
One final thing - I couldn't care less for "additional features" - I don't give a s*** about how many hours some guy spent in make up - its a FANTASY - I don't want to see behind the curtain ffs! I know its not real - don't rub it in
hehe so they've (rather crudely) bolted a palm pilot or something to the fascia. Even worse, it's almost behind the steering wheel. Similarly, the mobile phone is s seperate thing in yet another bolt on cradle. I could have bought those bits from Dixons for £600!!
I was expecting to see a nice built in LCD touch screen actually in the dash, integrating the phone functions, mp3, radio, Nav/Traffic and Web functions, with possible some voice recognition, and text to voice to avoid crashing the damm car whilst reading Slashdot..
Ideally, what I would want to see is something like an Ipaq or Palm, in colour, with built in cellular radio for voice and data functions, a permanent Internet connection with a cradle in the car that hooks it up to a large hard disk (with all those mp3's), and external antenna.
VW's attempt is crude and overpriced, not to mention downright dangerous. Geez I could do that to my old Ford in a weekend.
I've only heard of one of those things (Borland's) and seen none of them! Why not try something less - er.. obscure. Perhaps a language for developing apps that generates HTML and can therefore be used by any client that can render HTML. The obvious one being Java/JSP. My current fave is PHP - runs in the web server (well it does if your server is Apache anyway), you can knock up your forms in the HTML designer widget of your choice, and then edit the resulting HTML code to insert PHP, or write the whole thing in PHP and use style sheets and so on. Truly cross platform! JSP's offer similar flexibilty, but then who the hell wants to fight with Java to make an overweight, unstable and dog slow product? ;-) (hehe and yes that is a sweeping generalisation but my opinions can only be shaped by experience - I've been paged by monitoring software at all hours to beat some piece of Java based rubbish into life too many times. The PHP based sites running next to them have yet to fail...)
I seem to remember the original definition of "warp speed" being the speed of light raised to the "warp factor". If you take this then:-
661797846884160000000 Distance in meters. (70K light years)
7.2597926626745539199273892718133e+50 Speed in m/s at warp 6
Distance / speed gives:-
9.1159331627571503158813050949698e-31 seconds (e-56 at warp 9 )
Ie - er they could go back and forth til they got bored. No wonder they had a re-think - Capt. Kirk could have commuted to other galaxies from Starbase 1....
Over here:- http://www.netmoon.com/startrek/warp/warp9.htm
is a much lower definition that puts warp 9 at 1516c. That still only puts the answer at 46 years (assuming it can run at warp 9 for that long).
I always wondered why she didn't simply do the heel after....
(and can you really die from being shot in the heel?) I guess Achilles was hit in the heel by a large bomb or something..
Oh this is right up there with dissections of Shakespeare (wrote some rip roaring yarns with lots of bawdy lines and the odd car chase/murder to keep the scum interested. OK I lied about the car chases but you get the point - he didn;t sit down and think "hmm time for another classic peice of fine literature" - he just wanted another hit play!) And those archeologists who find a body next to a bronze axe head and off the back of that decide he had 4 kids, his last meal was ground sparrow and he shaved every 3 days...
:)
Stonehenge is a similar story - people ooing and ahing and scratching their heads over why the stones are arrmaged like that - til they realise some guys with big ropes and a lot of time on their hands put them like that in the 19th century.
Kubrick was making a film - not starting a religion - even though the story has western religious overtones. The hexagons were hexagons becuase they tesselate nicley to form a strong structure (and the model designer probably thought it looked nice).
As for all that winamp screensaver stuff at the end - I often wonder if film makers and authors just invent this stuff and let the auidience invent the meaning afterwards. Imagine the script meetings:- "hey lets put in some wierd lights and stuff with some footage of a unborn baby - that'll really throw them"
I wouldn't be suprised if bronze age man didn't randomly distribute axe heads just to confound Time Team.
I'm off to bury 4 elephants and a karaoke machine in my back yard. Let's see the Wheats of the far future figure THAT one out
Is the mod open source? Does it have to be compiled in at conception, or can you dynamically add it once the life process has been started?
:/
I guess if there's problems they have an entry on "life-sourceforge.org" right?
Sorry - I'll get my coat.
Scoot.
Indeed - I don't want to replace open source stuff from GNU with commercial products - I already have those commercial products by the tonne - I just want to replace the OS underneath with something more stable than NT Server - so I want Linux versions.
We have recently *bought*:-
RedHat Enterprise (optimised for Oracle 8i) - $2000
Oracle 8i for Linux - cost $40,000+ (depends on CPU(s) size)
Oracle Internet Application Server for Linux - actually this IS open source (Apache, Apache JServ) but tweaked by Oracle with the addition of SSL, and their own dispatcher code.
We have had IBM in to pitch us WebSphere too, and Its great they are producing it for Linux - its just a pity its a collection of 32 re-hashed barely related products.
We do also have IBM MQseries for Linux (which is now a WebSphere labelled product)for talking to those old steam driven 390's. - cost $7000
It's neither cost nor some highly principled concept of open source niceness that drives these decisions for me - it is purely performance and reliability. The alternative is to get something like Solaris running on Sparc servers - but I have to say I am always underwhelmed by the primitive crap that you get from Sun for 10 times the money you can spend on modern Intel/PCI based boxes with decent RAID controllers. Sun may have a decent storage platform, but their servers suck the big one - but now I can get Solaris reliability and *better* performance for less money by using Linux on Intel iron - *but* only if the apps exist!
I wait for the day when I dont have to run *any* mission critical processes on Windows - which is a daft idea in this day and age.
hehe and they think thats gonna make any difference? you gotta larf sometimes.
"And besides, I already know HTML inside out, I don't want to have to learn another markup
And thats really the point ain't it? If you've got one script type thing that does a job - why oh why do we have to have 6 more? When a certain critical mass of popularity is reached - it makes sense to make the existing one better rather than trying to replace it all the time. Just look at all the obscure scripting thingies on your average Linux box - perl, python, korn, csh, bash, tcl etc. - I don't use *any* of em. Even though I'm sure they're all really clever - I learnt C so I just go with that. Yeah sure any one of those things can probably do what I need in one line of code that looks like a cat if you squint your eyes and has no vowels in it whatsoever - but well - life's too short!
So er.. lAtEX put it on the pile and take a receipt - my poor old brain has too many new widgets like xml, java beans, java sprouts, active java server component bean pages with electric mirrors, MQ, Jserv, Tomcat, middleware, underware and a dozen other ways of getting data from A to B to worry about another way of making marks on paper - virtual or not. And there is that small matter of er.. links? I don't understand why PDF still exists - let alone latex