Now you get to use science to disprove God. That, as difficult as it is for you to understand, is how it works. Established beliefs get to stick around until disproved. Theism has been around a long time, so it's up to you to dethrone it.
You failed to answer the grandparents question, how the hell is he going to come up with proof for the nonexistance of a being?
Believer: Worship the invisible pink unicorn. Atheist: Sorry, I don't believe he exists. Believer: Prove it. Atheist: Huh?? Why should *I* come up with proof? Ok, I can try: I don't see him. Believer: That is because he is invisible. Also he is pink. That is one of his divine properties. Atheist: I don't hear him. Believer: He only speak to believers. I hear him answer when I pray to him, I'm convinced of that. Atheist: Ok, here I have an infrared camera. I don't see anything. Believer: He doesn't emit heat. Atheist: Ok, I throw around flour and see if anything stick to him, or if we see any footprints appearing. Believer: Sorry, he is immaterial. Atheist: Ok, what is the difference between a totally undetectable creature and one that doesn't exist? Believer: When rain falls, the invisible pink unicorn caused it, whenever a child laughs, the IPU caused it. Also 6000 years of belief shows I am right. Atheist:...whatever.
What could possibly be enough "evidence of nonexistance" for you - do you want a signed death certificate from his doctor? Face it, if you want us to believe something, it is up to YOU to give us some evidence.
The PS3 FUD has driven away the majority of people who use to read Slashdot for general gaming news.
Oh, how I wish it was so. There are plenty of good gaming sites available for them, perhaps we could get some good in-depth developer or hardware stories again at Slashdot?
The difference here is, Apple put their specific extension in the com.apple namespace, like people should. Microsoft, despite having signed a contract promising they would not, started making incompatible changes in java.lang, java.util etc namespaces.
Maybe as open source software people will be able to look at it and ask *why* does it have to take up so much memory to do such simple jobs? Compare for example Azureus (in Java) to bittorrent (in Python).
You have been allowed to look at the code for many years. It is not like there is some easily fixed bug, I think it has more to do with the them spending more time on stability and getting more speed. Sun engineers have been working hard on the memory use issue for a while now. For instance, in the upcoming Java 6 they moved away from memory mapping whole jars, and instead only mmaps the file "central directory" and read in the rest of the file only as needed.
Also, they appearently liked what Ethan Nicholas wrote so much they hired him to work on a minimal kernel version of Java. See also JSR 270 and JSR 277 which for the first time will allow removing parts of java, and if they are needed later, dynamically loaded at runtime. So you can have server java without including AWT/Swing/3D/Media, and desktop Java without xml parsing etc.
Why the heck didn't Sun do this 10 years ago? It would have save the world a LOT of grief.
Because 10 years ago, before Java had built up the momentum it has today, a certain company deliberately embraced, extended and corrupted the core libraries with their own OS specific extensions, and shipped this version with their operating system until they were forced by court to stop. Had they succeeded Sun would have lost control of the language to the other company, or it would have been forked to irrelevance. This understandably made Sun a bit paranoid about having total control over Java for quite a while.
My own personal and highly subjective opinion of this is - don't worry too much about making strategic choices. I think as programmers, we all have a small nagging worry that one of the technologies we didn't pick is going to dominate the market, and cause our hardwon skills to become obsolete. But no matter how hard you study and try to keep up, that worry is never going to go away. If you pick.Net, you are going to worry that Java is going to continue its dominance, if you spend all your spare time mastering.Net, Java AND Perl to hedge your bets, well, it might be a new framework in Ruby or Python that all the cool kids are talking about next year. But if you are skilled enough, there is always going to be some jobs available in your favourite language, and you are probably going to pick up the new technology fairly quickly if you have to.
Pick a technology you like. If you get a job in it, fantastic. You are having fun, and you are earning money, and getting experience. Now, you can spend some time reading up on other languages, but if I were you, I'd concentrate on enjoying life.
Now, the remaining question of what to value most - the money or the job enjoyment, that you can only answer yourself, and is the very essence of an economic transaction.
Well, I was SOO happy when I read the positive reviews for the new Sam & Max game, I went over to Gametap with the intention of signing up immediately, only to be met by "Your IP number says you are from Europe. This service is for US customers only. Sorry".
Why, oh why, do you set up a online delivery system and deliberately design your system to exclude potential customers? Do they get a kick out of pissing me off? Is my money not good enough?
You can of course go through a web proxy to hide your IP adress, and fake a US adress. Many people have apperently already done so. Also, I heard that Gametap was going to open up for international customers later, but I am so upset by now, I'll probably boycott them. I think Telltale games are going to sell the boxed game themselves later, so I will wait for that.
Forget Super Mario and Wing Commander, there are some classic franchises that NEED to be brought to the silver screen...I don't know about you, but I'd pay $10 to see Tetris: The Movie or Dig Dug: Forever
Seems Sourceforge is porting at least some of its backend architecture to Java. From the job posting: "The Open Source Technology Group is seeking a Senior Java Developer to work on the backend architecture powering SourceForge.net, the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications."
So keep up the funny work, in2mind! I'm sure the guy who gets the job will be crying all the way to the bank.
The JVM and Write Once Debug Everywhere has no real place in the Free Software world.
Sez you. In the real world, java has been the language with the most projects on Sourceforge for quite some time. There are also many other repositories. So you don't speak for the majority.
In the Free world portability comes from automake/autoconf and doesn't need to pay the emulation overhead of a virtual machine or any of the other problems.
Again, the majority of languages today, including the open source world, target a virtual machine or an script interpretor. JVM, Mono, Python virtual machine, Parrot, the Lisp virtual machine, and all the scripting languages - Ruby, Javascript, PHP, Lua...oh what the hell, all of them.
Problems like each major Java app tending to bring along an entire JVM and set of libraries to solve compatibility issues.
Apps coming with their own virtual machine rather uncommon today. And what application doesn't come with a set of libraries today?
"Please resist the urge to talk to love ones, or have sex, as years of TV radiation has made your genitals withered and useless". Chief Wiggum: *lifts blanket and looks* "Well I'll be damned!"
This is a great story, and I feel a bit of local pride. Uppsala, finally we aren't just known for good stuff like Linneaus, 18th centry scientists and mySQL!:-)
However, the description of Eriksson and the images are pretty glamorising, he looks like a Sin City tough guy. I was told by one of his old classmates that he used to be known as Fat Steve in school, and if you look up the images from the net where he stands next to the car, he still looks pretty chubby and he has a surprisingly open and boyish face.
The old classmate in question also said that he wasn't very smart, at least in the old days... wily, perhaps even clever, but like many criminals totally unable to comprehend consequences of their actions and doing long time planning.
Ok, so we have all this neat info about the Intel chip; what about the AMD processor (it gets a whole sentence and a half)? If this is supposed to be a "battle", it seems that most of the comparison has already been done in favor of Intel before the event even takes place, if this article is any reference.:P
Ooh, but dont' count out AMD yet! According to the nifty diagram from TFA, the Windsor has a "HT1.0", and the Altair a "HT3.0", and I can't see anything like that for the Intel processors. I don't know what a HT1.0 is, but I'm TERRIBLY excited about it, let me tell you.
More bullet points or higher numbers in a press release indicates a superior system much more clearly than any real life performance tests.
Sounds like they are trying to succeed in a non-existant market. The actual applications of Bluetooth are few and far between. The 'wireless' office never amounted to much and you know you look like an idiot with that earpiece and talking to yourself at Starbucks.
Maybe in the US, but Bluetooth is pretty popular in Europe actually. It is very common for blue collar workers to have handsfree headsets for instance. Very handy to be able to talk to your colleagues on the roof and still have your hands free.
While it's great that modern engines allow lots of neat tricks, you end up limiting games to just those tricks which may not be the best for your game. Case in point: the Thief series. 1+2 had a specialized engine (Dark, IIRC) that didn't focus so much on graphics, but allowed huge, sprawling levels and wonderful sound cues. 3 used some variant of the Unreal engine, and suddenly you were stuck with *tiny* levels and loading zones.
Most of that was actually not due to the limitations of the engine, but the fact that Thief 3 was being developed for the XBox too, and the limited memory meant levels had to be kept small and with low detail.
It is actually a pretty fun game, you should give it another chance just for the plot and the atmosphere.
[...]Windows will still notify me that there is either a new network found or that my computer is at a security risk because of virus subscription expiration in the middle of a Powerpoint presentation!
At the RailsConf in London a couple of weeks ago, almost all the people doing presentations were using Macs or Linux except one guy, and in the middle of his presentation a floating "Warning! Your computer may be at risk!" bubble popped up from the system tray. He quickly closed it with an annoyed grunt, only to - yes, you know it - have it pop up again for a second time. He looked at it for a few seconds and said.
"oh well, life on the edge..." with dripping sarcasm, and closed it again.:-)
I think over 50% of the attendees were using Mac laptops too... and the rest of us were green with envy.
It would have been nice if they could have started by showing some hard sales numbers to back up their statement that it is "being dismissed by consumers". I don't have any special love for either company, next time I'm going to upgrade I'll just pick whatever gives me the biggest bang for the buck, but when you write a whole article about "where did they go wrong", it helps your credibility if you can just quickly show some evidence that they HAVE gone wrong.
Especially since many online hardware sites tend to be pretty low journalistic standards, and pretty high on drooling fanboyism.
Wow. Is it just me, or does anybody else get the impression that this guy is too smart to play well with others?
Nope. He might be a good programmer, but his consistent sweeping generalisations and condencending tone in his blogs shows that he is not a great thinker. "Everyone who doesn't think and work exactly like me is an idiot!"
Often I have, and no doubt you have also, heard the phrase "managing programmers/software engineers is like herding cats". My observation has been, if you are trying to herd cats you are using the wrong management technique. You herd cattle, not cats. With cats you put them in the general area of mice and let them do what they are good at. Cattle you herd to the slaughter house.
Mhm, and who do you think identifies with being herded like cattle? Someone choose a self-glorifying, flattering description for themselves and their type of job, and you go "Oh yeah, that is me, that is so insightful!"
Up until maybe a year ago, I had a pretty one-dimensional view of so-called "Agile" programming,
Sounds like he still has a pretty one-dimensional view actually. Yegge often has interesting things to say, I just wish he didn't constantly have to be so bloody arrogant and condenscending about it, for instance:
anything that calls itself a "Methodology" is stupid, on general principle. [...] And by "stupid", I mean it's "incredibly brilliant marketing targeted at stupid people.
There are some really good refutations of pretty much all his arguments in the blog comments, for instance: "[..]most of us in our industry are writing sotware for paying customers (who might happen to share an employer with us) who have a "soft real time" idea of the value of the features we build: ie, the value of the features is at a maximum at some time t and declines, perhaps rapidly, after that. These three kinds of development are all quite unlike this." [...] "I don't doubt that the Google approach is very enjoyable for the developers, and is a good fit for Google's business model--but there are a lot of other businesses wokring in other business models. For many (not all) of them, agile with any size of "A" can be a big step up from what they've got."
Slashdot Mirror
Now you get to use science to disprove God. That, as difficult as it is for you to understand, is how it works. Established beliefs get to stick around until disproved. Theism has been around a long time, so it's up to you to dethrone it.
...whatever.
You failed to answer the grandparents question, how the hell is he going to come up with proof for the nonexistance of a being?
Believer: Worship the invisible pink unicorn.
Atheist: Sorry, I don't believe he exists.
Believer: Prove it.
Atheist: Huh?? Why should *I* come up with proof? Ok, I can try: I don't see him.
Believer: That is because he is invisible. Also he is pink. That is one of his divine properties.
Atheist: I don't hear him.
Believer: He only speak to believers. I hear him answer when I pray to him, I'm convinced of that.
Atheist: Ok, here I have an infrared camera. I don't see anything.
Believer: He doesn't emit heat.
Atheist: Ok, I throw around flour and see if anything stick to him, or if we see any footprints appearing.
Believer: Sorry, he is immaterial.
Atheist: Ok, what is the difference between a totally undetectable creature and one that doesn't exist?
Believer: When rain falls, the invisible pink unicorn caused it, whenever a child laughs, the IPU caused it. Also 6000 years of belief shows I am right.
Atheist:
What could possibly be enough "evidence of nonexistance" for you - do you want a signed death certificate from his doctor? Face it, if you want us to believe something, it is up to YOU to give us some evidence.
The PS3 FUD has driven away the majority of people who use to read Slashdot for general gaming news.
Oh, how I wish it was so. There are plenty of good gaming sites available for them, perhaps we could get some good in-depth developer or hardware stories again at Slashdot?
The difference here is, Apple put their specific extension in the com.apple namespace, like people should. Microsoft, despite having signed a contract promising they would not, started making incompatible changes in java.lang, java.util etc namespaces.
I, for one welcome our new Duke overlord.
Well, he has been open sourced too, so there really is no escaping!
Maybe as open source software people will be able to look at it and ask *why* does it have to take up so much memory to do such simple jobs? Compare for example Azureus (in Java) to bittorrent (in Python).
You have been allowed to look at the code for many years. It is not like there is some easily fixed bug, I think it has more to do with the them spending more time on stability and getting more speed. Sun engineers have been working hard on the memory use issue for a while now. For instance, in the upcoming Java 6 they moved away from memory mapping whole jars, and instead only mmaps the file "central directory" and read in the rest of the file only as needed.
Also, they appearently liked what Ethan Nicholas wrote so much they hired him to work on a minimal kernel version of Java. See also JSR 270 and JSR 277 which for the first time will allow removing parts of java, and if they are needed later, dynamically loaded at runtime. So you can have server java without including AWT/Swing/3D/Media, and desktop Java without xml parsing etc.
Why the heck didn't Sun do this 10 years ago? It would have save the world a LOT of grief.
Because 10 years ago, before Java had built up the momentum it has today, a certain company deliberately embraced, extended and corrupted the core libraries with their own OS specific extensions, and shipped this version with their operating system until they were forced by court to stop. Had they succeeded Sun would have lost control of the language to the other company, or it would have been forked to irrelevance. This understandably made Sun a bit paranoid about having total control over Java for quite a while.
Some more articles I have found, with some substance to them:
InfoQ, also mentions Glassfish.
eWeek.
There is also going to be a official webcast about this by Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green 9.30 a.m. PT.
In related news, apparently Project Looking Glass, the 3d desktop, is likely to be included in the Ubuntu Feisty release.
My own personal and highly subjective opinion of this is - .Net, you are going to worry that Java is going to continue its dominance, if you spend all your spare time mastering .Net, Java AND Perl to hedge your bets, well, it might be a new framework in Ruby or Python that all the cool kids are talking about next year. But if you are skilled enough, there is always going to be some jobs available in your favourite language, and you are probably going to pick up the new technology fairly quickly if you have to.
don't worry too much about making strategic choices. I think as programmers, we all have a small nagging worry that one of the technologies we didn't pick is going to dominate the market, and cause our hardwon skills to become obsolete. But no matter how hard you study and try to keep up, that worry is never going to go away. If you pick
Pick a technology you like. If you get a job in it, fantastic. You are having fun, and you are earning money, and getting experience. Now, you can spend some time reading up on other languages, but if I were you, I'd concentrate on enjoying life.
Now, the remaining question of what to value most - the money or the job enjoyment, that you can only answer yourself, and is the very essence of an economic transaction.
I know it's time ot look for aerial pork.
Going to join the Mile High club eh? I've never understood the appeal, but each to his own.
Well, I was SOO happy when I read the positive reviews for the new Sam & Max game, I went over to Gametap with the intention of signing up immediately, only to be met by "Your IP number says you are from Europe. This service is for US customers only. Sorry".
Why, oh why, do you set up a online delivery system and deliberately design your system to exclude potential customers? Do they get a kick out of pissing me off? Is my money not good enough?
You can of course go through a web proxy to hide your IP adress, and fake a US adress. Many people have apperently already done so. Also, I heard that Gametap was going to open up for international customers later, but I am so upset by now, I'll probably boycott them. I think Telltale games are going to sell the boxed game themselves later, so I will wait for that.
Forget Super Mario and Wing Commander, there are some classic franchises that NEED to be brought to the silver screen...I don't know about you, but I'd pay $10 to see Tetris: The Movie or Dig Dug: Forever
Movie posters kindly provided by Something awful.
You'll be happy to know even if a Jackson-inspired Halo isn't coming our way, at least we can look forward to another Street Fighter movie.
So the sex was postponed, but at least we got the syphilis? Awesome! Thank you, Hollywood!
Since when are Java Developers "Engineers"?
Seems Sourceforge is porting at least some of its backend architecture to Java. From the job posting: "The Open Source Technology Group is seeking a Senior Java Developer to work on the backend architecture powering SourceForge.net, the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications."
So keep up the funny work, in2mind! I'm sure the guy who gets the job will be crying all the way to the bank.
The JVM and Write Once Debug Everywhere has no real place in the Free Software world.
Sez you. In the real world, java has been the language with the most projects on Sourceforge for quite some time. There are also many other repositories. So you don't speak for the majority.
In the Free world portability comes from automake/autoconf and doesn't need to pay the emulation overhead of a virtual machine or any of the other problems.
Again, the majority of languages today, including the open source world, target a virtual machine or an script interpretor. JVM, Mono, Python virtual machine, Parrot, the Lisp virtual machine, and all the scripting languages - Ruby, Javascript, PHP, Lua...oh what the hell, all of them.
Problems like each major Java app tending to bring along an entire JVM and set of libraries to solve compatibility issues.
Apps coming with their own virtual machine rather uncommon today. And what application doesn't come with a set of libraries today?
"Please resist the urge to talk to love ones, or have sex, as years of TV radiation has made your genitals withered and useless".
Chief Wiggum: *lifts blanket and looks* "Well I'll be damned!"
You know, as a programmer, you could write it yourself...
;-)
Oh, absolutely. As a programmer, I say it is his SACRED DUTY to uphold the tradition of Not Invented Here!
This is a great story, and I feel a bit of local pride. Uppsala, finally we aren't just known for good stuff like Linneaus, 18th centry scientists and mySQL! :-)
However, the description of Eriksson and the images are pretty glamorising, he looks like a Sin City tough guy. I was told by one of his old classmates that he used to be known as Fat Steve in school, and if you look up the images from the net where he stands next to the car, he still looks pretty chubby and he has a surprisingly open and boyish face.
The old classmate in question also said that he wasn't very smart, at least in the old days... wily, perhaps even clever, but like many criminals totally unable to comprehend consequences of their actions and doing long time planning.
Ok, so we have all this neat info about the Intel chip; what about the AMD processor (it gets a whole sentence and a half)? If this is supposed to be a "battle", it seems that most of the comparison has already been done in favor of Intel before the event even takes place, if this article is any reference. :P
Ooh, but dont' count out AMD yet! According to the nifty diagram from TFA, the Windsor has a "HT1.0", and the Altair a "HT3.0", and I can't see anything like that for the Intel processors. I don't know what a HT1.0 is, but I'm TERRIBLY excited about it, let me tell you.
More bullet points or higher numbers in a press release indicates a superior system much more clearly than any real life performance tests.
Sounds like they are trying to succeed in a non-existant market. The actual applications of Bluetooth are few and far between. The 'wireless' office never amounted to much and you know you look like an idiot with that earpiece and talking to yourself at Starbucks.
Maybe in the US, but Bluetooth is pretty popular in Europe actually. It is very common for blue collar workers to have handsfree headsets for instance. Very handy to be able to talk to your colleagues on the roof and still have your hands free.
While it's great that modern engines allow lots of neat tricks, you end up limiting games to just those tricks which may not be the best for your game. Case in point: the Thief series. 1+2 had a specialized engine (Dark, IIRC) that didn't focus so much on graphics, but allowed huge, sprawling levels and wonderful sound cues. 3 used some variant of the Unreal engine, and suddenly you were stuck with *tiny* levels and loading zones.
Most of that was actually not due to the limitations of the engine, but the fact that Thief 3 was being developed for the XBox too, and the limited memory meant levels had to be kept small and with low detail.
It is actually a pretty fun game, you should give it another chance just for the plot and the atmosphere.
[...]Windows will still notify me that there is either a new network found or that my computer is at a security risk because of virus subscription expiration in the middle of a Powerpoint presentation!
:-)
At the RailsConf in London a couple of weeks ago, almost all the people doing presentations were using Macs or Linux except one guy, and in the middle of his presentation a floating "Warning! Your computer may be at risk!" bubble popped up from the system tray. He quickly closed it with an annoyed grunt, only to - yes, you know it - have it pop up again for a second time. He looked at it for a few seconds and said.
"oh well, life on the edge..." with dripping sarcasm, and closed it again.
I think over 50% of the attendees were using Mac laptops too... and the rest of us were green with envy.
It would have been nice if they could have started by showing some hard sales numbers to back up their statement that it is "being dismissed by consumers". I don't have any special love for either company, next time I'm going to upgrade I'll just pick whatever gives me the biggest bang for the buck, but when you write a whole article about "where did they go wrong", it helps your credibility if you can just quickly show some evidence that they HAVE gone wrong.
Especially since many online hardware sites tend to be pretty low journalistic standards, and pretty high on drooling fanboyism.
Wow. Is it just me, or does anybody else get the impression that this guy is too smart to play well with others?
Nope. He might be a good programmer, but his consistent sweeping generalisations and condencending tone in his blogs shows that he is not a great thinker. "Everyone who doesn't think and work exactly like me is an idiot!"
Often I have, and no doubt you have also, heard the phrase "managing programmers/software engineers is like herding cats". My observation has been, if you are trying to herd cats you are using the wrong management technique. You herd cattle, not cats. With cats you put them in the general area of mice and let them do what they are good at. Cattle you herd to the slaughter house.
Mhm, and who do you think identifies with being herded like cattle? Someone choose a self-glorifying, flattering description for themselves and their type of job, and you go "Oh yeah, that is me, that is so insightful!"
Up until maybe a year ago, I had a pretty one-dimensional view of so-called "Agile" programming,
Sounds like he still has a pretty one-dimensional view actually. Yegge often has interesting things to say, I just wish he didn't constantly have to be so bloody arrogant and condenscending about it, for instance:
anything that calls itself a "Methodology" is stupid, on general principle. [...]
And by "stupid", I mean it's "incredibly brilliant marketing targeted at stupid people.
There are some really good refutations of pretty much all his arguments in the blog comments, for instance:
"[..]most of us in our industry are writing sotware for paying customers (who might happen to share an employer with us) who have a "soft real time" idea of the value of the features we build: ie, the value of the features is at a maximum at some time t and declines, perhaps rapidly, after that. These three kinds of development are all quite unlike this."
[...]
"I don't doubt that the Google approach is very enjoyable for the developers, and is a good fit for Google's business model--but there are a lot of other businesses wokring in other business models. For many (not all) of them, agile with any size of "A" can be a big step up from what they've got."