The thing is, the guy on the street doesn't walk up to you, pretend to be a long lost friend, and then try to sell you the watch. In contrast, a lot of spammers do attempt to do this, and it is really obnoxious.
Much as I dislike junk mail of any kind, I can accept spam as long as it identifies it as such (eg: with ADV at the beginning of the title). That way I can filter the crap out of my main box, and either read it at my leasure or send it to/dev/null
I think a discussion of Java would have also been somewhat redundant. He has made his views on Java fairly well known on several occasions, so asking him here would have been slightly pointless and would probably have been major flamebait too.
Even so, you can pick up some of his attitudes towards java (or more generally, strict OO langs) simply based on the answers he presented here.
Ripping your music to your hard drive is fine when you have a relatively small CD collection, but when you have CD's numbering in the hundreds, it can be a real problem. Plus, services like Beam It make it convenient for you to be able to access your entire library regardless of where you are without having to haul around a huge CD wallet (which can be stolen).
Actually, you are not totally correct here. With regards to the additional libraries, you do have the option not to use them, but they keywords are more difficult to get around. If you have an existing project which uses those keywords as variable names, then in order to compile that project in J++, you would need to rename them all. A significant example of this is the Swing classes. They use the variable delegate extensively in their code, and delegate is a keyword in J++. Consequently, if you need to extend/modify some of the swing libaries, you are SOL.
As many people have pointed out, it simply is not that practical to attempt to hunt down a linux version if you can simply buy the windows version and download an exe.
What would make more sense would be for id to track the number of linux exe downloads and publish those statistics. Or they could ask you to specify the primary OS that will be used for the game as part of the game registration (assuming people would actually take the time to register).
Well, I'm currently in the midst of reading Levy's book Hackers, and from what I recall, Pong was really the first game. Of course it was a very primitive pong. I can't remember whether it ran on the PDP-1 or Tixo, but if effectively consisted of causing the lights of the computer to light up sequentially based on the position of the ball. Using switches, you could send the ball back on its journey. SpaceWars was definitely the first worthwhile computer game.
I think for this movie, the atmosphere was much more important than the facts. The producers seemed to be trying to capture the mentality and competitiveness that surrounded these two icons of the computer industry, and I think they did a good job of it. So what if a few of the events were slightly askew or out of order. My mother actually commented to me after watching that movie that she would love to destroy her computer after realizing how much of an asshole both Gates and Jobs are. Although that is obviously overkill, I think it is a important attitude. A lot of people in American society idolize Gates and Jobs (and many others), and to be honest, these guys really are not very good ideals. This movie helps show that.
The problem with this argument is that is centers around the structure of the game industry as an example, and to be honest, I don't think the game industry needs to be regulated. Much as it is irritating when a game is buggy or doesn't live up to the hype, that is not a good reason to start fining the publisher. As a gamer, you have a choice if and when to buy a game. If you are the type who has to get a game the day it comes out the door, then you should also realize that you are taking a risk. You always have the option to wait a few weeks for reviews to come in or for sufficient patches to come out. If that never happens, then don't buy the game. Like the writer said, if you buy a ford that never runs, you'll never buy another ford and you'll tell others not to buy one either. That's what a free market economy is all about. Its also important to note that you are not always stuck with a buggy game. Some companies (such as Sierra Online) have 30 day return guarantees, so that if you truly can't stand the game, then you can return it. And perhaps most importantly, the worst thing that will usually happen if a game doesn't work is that you lose $50 or so. No significant time is lost, and except in the most extreme cases, your computer is not harmed.
Actually, I've heard a mixture of both ideas. In general it seems that splitting up the company into 3 companies with the same IP is more likely than the 3 division method. The problem with the 3 division method is that it really would not stop the new companies from collaborating with each other in order to optimize their products to work together. The other method would at least impose some element of competition. I think a bigger issue is that regardless of how they might decide to break MS up structurely, how will they actually go about implementing it? Its not like MS actually has several divisional/regional offices that you can separate. Nearly all of the heavy work is handlded in Redmond (I've seen the campus, its huge). How exactly to you divide something like that up so that it makes sense? With AT&T, they could at least divide the company up into the regionals.
One problem that I can see with the system is that it might have a tendency to favor old timers simply because they've had an oppurtunity to post more and thus gain a better default score. Considering how rapidly the net and/. are growing, I don't know that this is a good thing. There's a decent chance that/. will continue to attract new and interesting people whose comments might be overlooked simply because they do not carry the initial higher weight.
One thing that doesn't seem to have been addressed is whether people's threshholds will be taken into account. Presumably, for someone to be an effective moderator, they need to be open to all of the posts (not just those with positive values, etc); otherwise, you have people moderating only those items which have already been moderated. Perhaps a person's default threshhold should be taken into account in the selection process. If a person does use a higher threshhold, this should not necessarily eliminate them, but if they are selected as a potential moderator, then they have lower their threshhold.
The only problem with lowering the defaults (or removing them altogether) is that since by default, the pages are sorted chronologically, you end up having the first wave of first post/this sux/rob sux comments right at the top of the article. I know this irritates me (which is why I have configured my browser otherwise), and it might also be a turn off for new readers. I think that if we do choose to lower the default threshhold, then we might also want to set the default mode to order by score. That way, the better comments will quickly filter to the top, but the other ones will be available for the masochists. *grin*
The MDI is the primary reason I use Opera. When you are doing searches across multiple engines, nothing is more irritating than having 20 million instances of Netscape/IE floating around. Opera does a good job of containing them and at the same time permits quick switching using the KB. So the GUI's not as pretty as the Beasts, but its faster and in general quicker than the competition. At least that's true in my experience.
On thing that we really have to remember is that although the DOJ winning the case against MS would definitely be a good thing, it is not the final result that we all are pushing for. What we all seem to want is freedom of choice in the computer world. We want computer products to be chosen on technical merit, not marketing power. If the DOJ winning its case does this, then great, but it would be even better if they same thing occured simply by the computer world making the choice not to bow down to MS. Let's face it, regardless of the outcome of the trial, Windows is going to be around for awhile. Only be providing a viable alternative to Winblows will we break free of MS's dominance, and I think I am safe in saying that the DOJ can't do that.
COM technologies may be create for VB applications, but they are a royal pain in the ass for any other language. Because of its heavy use if variant's, using COM in any strongly typed language becomes exceedingly complicated. In C++ or J++, you end up going through like 5 different layers of translations on both ends simply to pass a simple integer array. Until Microsoft improves their COM support for other languages, I think I'll stick to Corba.
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The thing is, the guy on the street doesn't walk up to you, pretend to be a long lost friend, and then try to sell you the watch. In contrast, a lot of spammers do attempt to do this, and it is really obnoxious.
/dev/null
Much as I dislike junk mail of any kind, I can accept spam as long as it identifies it as such (eg: with ADV at the beginning of the title). That way I can filter the crap out of my main box, and either read it at my leasure or send it to
I think a discussion of Java would have also been somewhat redundant. He has made his views on Java fairly well known on several occasions, so asking him here would have been slightly pointless and would probably have been major flamebait too.
Even so, you can pick up some of his attitudes towards java (or more generally, strict OO langs) simply based on the answers he presented here.
Ripping your music to your hard drive is fine when you have a relatively small CD collection, but when you have CD's numbering in the hundreds, it can be a real problem. Plus, services like Beam It make it convenient for you to be able to access your entire library regardless of where you are without having to haul around a huge CD wallet (which can be stolen).
Its been a little while since I've used VJ++, so that apparently slipped my mind. Point to you.
Actually, you are not totally correct here. With regards to the additional libraries, you do have the option not to use them, but they keywords are more difficult to get around. If you have an existing project which uses those keywords as variable names, then in order to compile that project in J++, you would need to rename them all. A significant example of this is the Swing classes. They use the variable delegate extensively in their code, and delegate is a keyword in J++. Consequently, if you need to extend/modify some of the swing libaries, you are SOL.
As many people have pointed out, it simply is not that practical to attempt to hunt down a linux version if you can simply buy the windows version and download an exe.
What would make more sense would be for id to track the number of linux exe downloads and publish those statistics. Or they could ask you to specify the primary OS that will be used for the game as part of the game registration (assuming people would actually take the time to register).
Well, I'm currently in the midst of reading Levy's book Hackers, and from what I recall, Pong was really the first game. Of course it was a very primitive pong. I can't remember whether it ran on the PDP-1 or Tixo, but if effectively consisted
of causing the lights of the computer to light up sequentially based on the position of the ball. Using switches, you could send the ball back on its journey. SpaceWars was definitely the first worthwhile computer game.
I think for this movie, the atmosphere was much more important than the facts. The producers seemed to be trying to capture the mentality and competitiveness that surrounded these two icons of the computer industry, and I think they did a good job of it. So what if a few of the events were slightly askew or out of order. My mother actually commented to me after watching that movie that she would love to destroy her computer after realizing how much of an asshole both Gates and Jobs are. Although that is obviously overkill, I think it is a important attitude. A lot of people in American society idolize Gates and Jobs (and many others), and to be honest, these guys really are not very good ideals. This movie helps show that.
The problem with this argument is that is centers around the structure of the game industry as an example, and to be honest, I don't think the game industry needs to be regulated. Much as it is irritating when a game is buggy or doesn't live up to the hype, that is not a good reason to start fining the publisher. As a gamer, you have a choice if and when to buy a game. If you are the type who has to get a game the day it comes out the door, then you should also realize that you are taking a risk. You always have the option to wait a few weeks for reviews to come in or for sufficient patches to come out. If that never happens, then don't buy the game. Like the writer said, if you buy a ford that never runs, you'll never buy another ford and you'll tell others not to buy one either. That's what a free market economy is all about. Its also important to note that you are not always stuck with a buggy game. Some companies (such as Sierra Online) have 30 day return guarantees, so that if you truly can't stand the game, then you can return it. And perhaps most importantly, the worst thing that will usually happen if a game doesn't work is that you lose $50 or so. No significant time is lost, and except in the most extreme cases, your computer is not harmed.
Actually, I've heard a mixture of both ideas. In general it seems that splitting up the company into 3 companies with the same IP is more likely than the 3 division method. The problem with the 3 division method is that it really would not stop the new companies from collaborating with each other in order to optimize their products to work together. The other method would at least impose some element of competition.
I think a bigger issue is that regardless of how they might decide to break MS up structurely, how will they actually go about implementing it? Its not like MS actually has several divisional/regional offices that you can separate. Nearly all of the heavy work is handlded in Redmond (I've seen the campus, its huge). How exactly to you divide something like that up so that it makes sense? With AT&T, they could at least divide the company up into the regionals.
One problem that I can see with the system is that it might have a tendency to favor old timers simply because they've had an oppurtunity to post more and thus gain a better default score. Considering how rapidly the net and /. are growing, I don't know that this is a good thing. There's a decent chance that /. will continue to attract new and interesting people whose comments might be overlooked simply because they do not carry the initial higher weight.
One thing that doesn't seem to have been addressed is whether people's threshholds will be taken into account. Presumably, for someone to be an effective moderator, they need to be open to all of the posts (not just those with positive values, etc); otherwise, you have people moderating only those items which have already been moderated. Perhaps a person's default threshhold should be taken into account in the selection process. If a person does use a higher threshhold, this should not necessarily eliminate them, but if they are selected as a potential moderator, then they have lower their threshhold.
The trailer for the movie is located at www.muppetsfromspace.com in case your interested. It looks like its gonna rock.
The only problem with lowering the defaults (or removing them altogether) is that since by default, the pages are sorted chronologically, you end up having the first wave of first post/this sux/rob sux comments right at the top of the article. I know this irritates me (which is why I have configured my browser otherwise), and it might also be a turn off for new readers.
I think that if we do choose to lower the default threshhold, then we might also want to set the default mode to order by score. That way, the better comments will quickly filter to the top, but the other ones will be available for the masochists. *grin*
The MDI is the primary reason I use Opera. When you are doing searches across multiple engines, nothing is more irritating than having 20 million instances of Netscape/IE floating around. Opera does a good job of containing them and at the same time permits quick switching using the KB. So the GUI's not as pretty as the Beasts, but its faster and in general quicker than the competition. At least that's true in my experience.
On thing that we really have to remember is that although the DOJ winning the case against MS would definitely be a good thing, it is not the final result that we all are pushing for. What we all seem to want is freedom of choice in the computer world. We want computer products to be chosen on technical merit, not marketing power. If the DOJ winning its case does this, then great, but it would be even better if they same thing occured simply by the computer world making the choice not to bow down to MS.
Let's face it, regardless of the outcome of the trial, Windows is going to be around for awhile. Only be providing a viable alternative to Winblows will we break free of MS's dominance, and I think I am safe in saying that the DOJ can't do that.
COM technologies may be create for VB applications, but they are a royal pain in the ass for any other language. Because of its heavy use if variant's, using COM in any strongly typed language becomes exceedingly complicated. In C++ or J++, you end up going through like 5 different layers of translations on both ends simply to pass a simple integer array. Until Microsoft improves their COM support for other languages, I think I'll stick to Corba.