Oh god, don't mention summer movies. I can feel my brain start to rot even now. I can already hear the "man, you HAVE to see it, everyone else is!" comments. Yes, paying to have my intelligence insulted again and again. I really MUST see it. Please repeat after me children!
while (true) {
System.out.println("You MUST see it."); }
Global Warming is very real... but you can bet the Slashdot crowd will ignore the facts on this one.
Hear hear. Whenever this issue is raised on Slashdot, someone posts something about the greenhouse effect being alarmist and poor science and it gets modded up to five pretty much instantly. They also (like one of the posts above) usually post Rush comments like the ones about sensors in warmer cities skewing the statistics even though this effect has been known and included in calculations for a long time.
The JSPA agreement that one has to sign to participate in the JCP [jcp.org] is WAY too restrictive for Open Source developers. The Apache Software Foundation has a good document where they drawn the line in the sand [apache.org] on their participation.
[...]
As far as C# vs.Java. I am really impressed with the CLR/CLI stuff. Right now, as it stands, Java is a proprietary language. Unless we see SUN Open Source Java (or push it through a standards committee), we *may* see a JDK 1.5... but no one will use it.
Now that Microsoft is kept busy plagiarising...oops, I mean creating a competing C#, perhaps Sun wont have to fear embrace and extend tactics against Java itself, and dares to open up a bit more to open source and open standards. Maybe they will even be forced to do it to survive.
Hmm, if SDK v1.2 became "Java2", shouldn't v1.4 be called "Java4"? Oh I see, "Java2" was a "marketing trick" used in the tough year 1997 and the name has stuck.
Perhaps,but remember that the change from 1.1 to 1.2 contained some major rehaul of APIs.
In this 1.4 release Sun kept a carefully budgeted set of new features and emphasized quality and performance, like they said they would. You can expect more changes in 1.5 (codename Tiger) which is planned to come some time around the middle of 2003. If that will be Java3, who knows, they have just started working on it.
It has been mentioned in subthreads above, so this might be modded down as redundant. However, since several posters are arguing that freedoms are being taken away by the Evil Liberal Soccer Moms of Australia, I'll risk it by saying that John Howards Liberal party in Australia is actually deeply conservative. Their main opposition is the Labor party which are more social-democrat/liberal in the European sense.
As for you libertarians who seem to think liberals are the greatest threat to freedom, who are the ones currently taking away US freedoms in the old excuse of national security? It ain't the liberals anyway.
Yeah, or The Thirteenth Floor. Not as good as eXistenZ or Matrix, but ok on a rainy afternoon. I especially liked the 1930s scenes, but I'm a big film noir fan.:-)
Folks like to ostracize and hurt people. Very lord of the flies. Once they get rid of the first freeloaders they'll find they like it too much and then keep on selecting somebody else.
Maybe this is why they call Economics "the dismal science".;)
It's saddening to me to see the optimization skills software engineers *used* to have back in the day diminishing year by year as the ability to right crappy code is justified by ever-faster CPU's.
Well, its just a matter of economics. In the beginning of computing, you could get maybe 50 programmers for the price of one computer. So the time of the computer was valued more than the time of the programmers. The programmers had to spend a lot of time optimizing.
Now, the price of computers has fallen, until you get a lot of computing power for the price of one programmer. The time of programmers is valued a *lot* more than the time of computers. So the rational economic choice is to buy more (or more powerful computers) to make life easier for programmers.
When you look at how some of the old time programmers react to this change, I think it is insteresting to look at the medieval guilds. The programmers are angry at the newcomers and try to put them down, and make it as hard as possible for them to advance ("RTFM!"). The guilds on the other hand made it forbidden by law to practice the craft in question outside the guild. Both guilds and programmers occasionally justify their behaviour by the need to preserve the fine traditions of the art, and distrust new techniques and technologies that make things "too easy".
But what it really is, is a fear of competition. Instead of trying to improve themselves and keep up with the times they try to stomp out the competition.
****
"By the year 2005," said Bob Rowell, president of the American Association of Broadcasters, "90 percent of American homes will enjoy their favourite heap of dung on a high-definition TV."
"Soon, your children will be able to watch shrill, grating Hanna-Barbera re-runs on the Cartoon Network with a degree of crispness unheard of when you first watched that crap in the '70s," Roswell said. "And those whose lives are so empty that each Thursday night they actually watch all of NBC's so-called 'Must-See TV' lineup will be amazed at the clarity and resolution with which all those stupid people's apartments come through."
In addition, big-budget movies such as Independence Day and Eraser will soon be available in HDTV digital-cassette format, which manufacturers promise will offer an experience comparable to shaking your head and thinking "This sucks," in an actual movie theater.
You know, now that I have looked at the official page and read the viewpoint of the development team, I actually regret posting the link. My apologies to the MPlayer team.
"The MPlayer gang seems to relish nothing more than belittling their users and reminding them of just how little they know about Linux and computing in general. I don't know about the rest of you, but I suffer enough of that on my own. I do not need any outside assistance to reinforce that point of view.
Naturally, I was drawn to the project like a moth to a flame. Bring it on, I thought. Whatever it takes, I'll get it installed. I won't be asking that infantile band of RTFM-spewing bozos who maintain it for help, either. My own hardheadedness is probably the only reason I sit here today with MPlayer installed, with a custom GUI skin enabled no less, barely more than a full day after I started."
I often agree with him, and even when I disagree I can usually respect his opinions. Being a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fan I bought his "I hated, hated, HATED this movie".
Most of it was laugh out loud stuff, but really didn't agree with his slagging of
a) Clive Barker's Hellraiser. Ebert listed lots of "plotholes" that were actually misunderstandings of the movie from his side. He also seemed very upset with the S/M and anti-religious themes and mocked those who call the film a classic. Well, it IS a classic damnit!:)
b) Priest. Again he seemed very prudish. His main objection is that joining the priesthood and taking a vow of celibacy is a voluntary choice, so claiming that you are opressed later for that or because you are gay is just PC whining. Maybe - but giving such a well written, acted and well shot film such a low score just because of that? One suspects he is subconsciously offended by the topic of the movie and the way it portrayed the Catholic church.
On the other hand, I really liked how he butchered these two films, so I guess it evens out:
a) Armageddon. "The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."
b) Starship Troopers. "The action sequences are heavily laden with special effects, but curiously joyless. We get the idea right away: Bugs will jump up, troopers will spray counless rounds at them, the Bugs will impale troopers with their spiny giant legs, and finally dissolve in a spray of goo. Later there are refinements, like fire-breathing beetles, flying insects, and giant Bugs that erupt from the earth. All very elaborate, but not interesting in the way, say, that the villains in the Alien pictures were. Even their planet is boring; Bugs live on ugly rock worlds with no other species, raising the question of what they eat."
And he also made me aware of some weak spots in films I really liked and made me re-evaluate them, for instance Blue Velvet, Doom Generation, Dead Poets Society, Caligula.
Well, getting back to Totoro I must say it sounds interesting. I wish I had read this review before Christmas, it would have been a good present for my brother's kids, and then I would have had an excuse to see it too.
:)
SPOILER - the gay theme and the ending
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 2
One theme I found interesting was the gay theme, which was very open minded for its time. To combat overpopulation on earth, the human race is genetically manipulated so that all people born are gay. The allegory is a bit heavy handed when Mandela is discriminated against for being the only straight person aboard a battleship... He suspects a female officer might be a closet straight after she makes a pass at him when she is very drunk.
SPOILER -
The author chickens out toward then end of the book though. They have essentially reached "the end of history". Genetic manipulation has become so advanced that they can retailor living humans. Mandela's gay friends all choose to be reenginered straight and all live happily ever after in utopia as straight couples. Why would they choose to turn straight if all they had known in their life was to be gay and presumably suffered no discrimination for it? It would imply that being straight is the only natural choice. But I know I wouldn't want to change if I was offered a magic pill today.
Would you change the core of who you are to fit in?
I haven't seen the film yet, but reviews have mentioned that the Ringwraiths among other things are truly terrifying. There are appearently also at least one beheading and a fair amount of gore.
If I had kids, I would probably ask them to wait until they were older...
>Even the graduates aren't all that bright sometimes. I once was reading the program at a graduation and it listed all the students' thesis subjects. One of them was entitled "Object Oriented Programming: Visual Basic vs. Visual C++". Talk about having your head in the sand.
That's a bit unfair. Microsoft says that VB has some OO concepts these days. And before someone flames me, I *know* that it is very limited, not real OO, trying to jump on the OO bandwagon, etc. But maybe that was the conclusion that the student reached in the thesis, right? Not revolutionary research, but perhaps it was in-depth and well written anyway, something that might help teach beginners and pointy-haired bosses the difference between real object orientation and VB fakery.
To dismiss the student as "not very bright" just from reading the title of the thesis seems a bit rude to me.
Does anyone know if they plan to release the DVD of the first film soon after the movie premiere, or if they wait releasing all the DVDs until all the films have been shown?
It's also based on Netbeans, so you can install it as a module in Forte, which is pretty neat. I've done that for the project I'm currently doing (Servlet/JSP based), so I can use Forte for Java, Poseidon for UML and Tomcat for Servlets; all in one program.
All free, all platform independent. But as others have pointed out, its an incredible resource hog.
Try Poseidon from Gentleware, a German company. It's based on ArgoUML but they have developed it further. Reverse engineering, code/documentation generation etc. The community edition is free. If you pay you can get some nifty plugins as well. I haven't tried them though.
Slashdot Mirror
One advantage of homeopathic medicines is that since they're actually water, they can't hurt you!
;-)
Then what is this aching feeling I have in my wallet?
Oh god, don't mention summer movies. I can feel my brain start to rot even now. I can already hear the "man, you HAVE to see it, everyone else is!" comments. Yes, paying to have my intelligence insulted again and again. I really MUST see it. Please repeat after me children!
while (true) {
System.out.println("You MUST see it.");
}
I think RIM is a very unfortunate name for any technology. It only invites South Park jokes.
Global Warming is very real ... but you can bet the Slashdot crowd will ignore the facts on this one.
Hear hear. Whenever this issue is raised on Slashdot, someone posts something about the greenhouse effect being alarmist and poor science and it gets modded up to five pretty much instantly. They also (like one of the posts above) usually post Rush comments like the ones about sensors in warmer cities skewing the statistics even though this effect has been known and included in calculations for a long time.
Thanks for a well written article.
.Java. I am really impressed with the CLR/CLI stuff. Right now, as it stands, Java is a proprietary language. Unless we see SUN Open Source Java (or push it through a standards committee), we *may* see a JDK 1.5... but no one will use it.
The JSPA agreement that one has to sign to participate in the JCP [jcp.org] is WAY too restrictive for Open Source developers. The Apache Software Foundation has a good document where they drawn the line in the sand [apache.org] on their participation.
[...]
As far as C# vs
Now that Microsoft is kept busy plagiarising...oops, I mean creating a competing C#, perhaps Sun wont have to fear embrace and extend tactics against Java itself, and dares to open up a bit more to open source and open standards. Maybe they will even be forced to do it to survive.
Hmm, if SDK v1.2 became "Java2", shouldn't v1.4 be called "Java4"? Oh I see, "Java2" was a "marketing trick" used in the tough year 1997 and the name has stuck.
Perhaps,but remember that the change from 1.1 to 1.2 contained some major rehaul of APIs.
In this 1.4 release Sun kept a carefully budgeted set of new features and emphasized quality and performance, like they said they would. You can expect more changes in 1.5 (codename Tiger) which is planned to come some time around the middle of 2003. If that will be Java3, who knows, they have just started working on it.
A summary of all the new features is available here:e s.html
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/relnotes/featur
Articles about the news APIs and how to use them available here:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/articles.html
It has been mentioned in subthreads above, so this might be modded down as redundant. However, since several posters are arguing that freedoms are being taken away by the Evil Liberal Soccer Moms of Australia, I'll risk it by saying that John Howards Liberal party in Australia is actually deeply conservative. Their main opposition is the Labor party which are more social-democrat/liberal in the European sense.
As for you libertarians who seem to think liberals are the greatest threat to freedom, who are the ones currently taking away US freedoms in the old excuse of national security? It ain't the liberals anyway.
>That little "RC1" means something don't you know?-)
Why yes, it seems so. *blush*. Thanks for telling me though.
Yeah, or The Thirteenth Floor. Not as good as eXistenZ or Matrix, but ok on a rainy afternoon. I especially liked the 1930s scenes, but I'm a big film noir fan. :-)
So, how long before Tor Johnson becomes exposed to the radiation and starts hunting 1950s B-movie babes?
THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (a.k.a. ATOMIC MONSTER; a.k.a. GIRL MADNESS)
If you haven't seen it, you can download the film and other MST episodes here.
Folks like to ostracize and hurt people. Very lord of the flies. Once they get rid of the first freeloaders they'll find they like it too much and then keep on selecting somebody else.
;)
Maybe this is why they call Economics "the dismal science".
It's saddening to me to see the optimization skills software engineers *used* to have back in the day diminishing year by year as the ability to right crappy code is justified by ever-faster CPU's.
Well, its just a matter of economics. In the beginning of computing, you could get maybe 50 programmers for the price of one computer. So the time of the computer was valued more than the time of the programmers. The programmers had to spend a lot of time optimizing.
Now, the price of computers has fallen, until you get a lot of computing power for the price of one programmer. The time of programmers is valued a *lot* more than the time of computers. So the rational economic choice is to buy more (or more powerful computers) to make life easier for programmers.
When you look at how some of the old time programmers react to this change, I think it is insteresting to look at the medieval guilds. The programmers are angry at the newcomers and try to put them down, and make it as hard as possible for them to advance ("RTFM!"). The guilds on the other hand made it forbidden by law to practice the craft in question outside the guild. Both guilds and programmers occasionally justify their behaviour by the need to preserve the fine traditions of the art, and distrust new techniques and technologies that make things "too easy".
But what it really is, is a fear of competition. Instead of trying to improve themselves and keep up with the times they try to stomp out the competition.
This may cost me some karma...
From The Onion's Dispatches from the 10th Circle:
****
"By the year 2005," said Bob Rowell, president of the American Association of Broadcasters, "90 percent of American homes will enjoy their favourite heap of dung on a high-definition TV."
"Soon, your children will be able to watch shrill, grating Hanna-Barbera re-runs on the Cartoon Network with a degree of crispness unheard of when you first watched that crap in the '70s," Roswell said. "And those whose lives are so empty that each Thursday night they actually watch all of NBC's so-called 'Must-See TV' lineup will be amazed at the clarity and resolution with which all those stupid people's apartments come through."
In addition, big-budget movies such as Independence Day and Eraser will soon be available in HDTV digital-cassette format, which manufacturers promise will offer an experience comparable to shaking your head and thinking "This sucks," in an actual movie theater.
You know, now that I have looked at the official page and read the viewpoint of the development team, I actually regret posting the link. My apologies to the MPlayer team.
This review should give you a few hints.
"The MPlayer gang seems to relish nothing more than belittling their users and reminding them of just how little they know about Linux and computing in general. I don't know about the rest of you, but I suffer enough of that on my own. I do not need any outside assistance to reinforce that point of view.
Naturally, I was drawn to the project like a moth to a flame. Bring it on, I thought. Whatever it takes, I'll get it installed. I won't be asking that infantile band of RTFM-spewing bozos who maintain it for help, either. My own hardheadedness is probably the only reason I sit here today with MPlayer installed, with a custom GUI skin enabled no less, barely more than a full day after I started."
http://www.idg.net/go.cgi?id=620307
I often agree with him, and even when I disagree I can usually respect his opinions. Being a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fan I bought his "I hated, hated, HATED this movie".
:)
Most of it was laugh out loud stuff, but really didn't agree with his slagging of
a) Clive Barker's Hellraiser. Ebert listed lots of "plotholes" that were actually misunderstandings of the movie from his side. He also seemed very upset with the S/M and anti-religious themes and mocked those who call the film a classic. Well, it IS a classic damnit!
b) Priest. Again he seemed very prudish. His main objection is that joining the priesthood and taking a vow of celibacy is a voluntary choice, so claiming that you are opressed later for that or because you are gay is just PC whining. Maybe - but giving such a well written, acted and well shot film such a low score just because of that? One suspects he is subconsciously offended by the topic of the movie and the way it portrayed the Catholic church.
On the other hand, I really liked how he butchered these two films, so I guess it evens out:
a) Armageddon. "The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."
b) Starship Troopers. "The action sequences are heavily laden with special effects, but curiously joyless. We get the idea right away: Bugs will jump up, troopers will spray counless rounds at them, the Bugs will impale troopers with their spiny giant legs, and finally dissolve in a spray of goo. Later there are refinements, like fire-breathing beetles, flying insects, and giant Bugs that erupt from the earth. All very elaborate, but not interesting in the way, say, that the villains in the Alien pictures were. Even their planet is boring; Bugs live on ugly rock worlds with no other species, raising the question of what they eat."
And he also made me aware of some weak spots in films I really liked and made me re-evaluate them, for instance Blue Velvet, Doom Generation, Dead Poets Society, Caligula.
Well, getting back to Totoro I must say it sounds interesting. I wish I had read this review before Christmas, it would have been a good present for my brother's kids, and then I would have had an excuse to see it too.
:)
One theme I found interesting was the gay theme, which was very open minded for its time. To combat overpopulation on earth, the human race is genetically manipulated so that all people born are gay. The allegory is a bit heavy handed when Mandela is discriminated against for being the only straight person aboard a battleship... He suspects a female officer might be a closet straight after she makes a pass at him when she is very drunk.
SPOILER -
The author chickens out toward then end of the book though. They have essentially reached "the end of history". Genetic manipulation has become so advanced that they can retailor living humans. Mandela's gay friends all choose to be reenginered straight and all live happily ever after in utopia as straight couples. Why would they choose to turn straight if all they had known in their life was to be gay and presumably suffered no discrimination for it? It would imply that being straight is the only natural choice. But I know I wouldn't want to change if I was offered a magic pill today.
Would you change the core of who you are to fit in?
I haven't seen the film yet, but reviews have mentioned that the Ringwraiths among other things are truly terrifying. There are appearently also at least one beheading and a fair amount of gore.
If I had kids, I would probably ask them to wait until they were older...
>Even the graduates aren't all that bright sometimes. I once was reading the program at a graduation and it listed all the students' thesis subjects. One of them was entitled "Object Oriented Programming: Visual Basic vs. Visual C++". Talk about having your head in the sand.
That's a bit unfair. Microsoft says that VB has some OO concepts these days. And before someone flames me, I *know* that it is very limited, not real OO, trying to jump on the OO bandwagon, etc. But maybe that was the conclusion that the student reached in the thesis, right? Not revolutionary research, but perhaps it was in-depth and well written anyway, something that might help teach beginners and pointy-haired bosses the difference between real object orientation and VB fakery.
To dismiss the student as "not very bright" just from reading the title of the thesis seems a bit rude to me.
Voot? "Overrated"? I SAID the jokes were painful. Curse you, moderator...
http://www.stygianlabyrinth.net/ghastlyhumour/101/ lotrjokes/
Three movies? Aren't they 'dragon' this out a bit?
'One Ring to Rule Them All,' wasn't that AT&T's business plan?
Etc...
Does anyone know if they plan to release the DVD of the first film soon after the movie premiere, or if they wait releasing all the DVDs until all the films have been shown?
It's also based on Netbeans, so you can install it as a module in Forte, which is pretty neat. I've done that for the project I'm currently doing (Servlet/JSP based), so I can use Forte for Java, Poseidon for UML and Tomcat for Servlets; all in one program.
All free, all platform independent. But as others have pointed out, its an incredible resource hog.
Try Poseidon from Gentleware, a German company. It's based on ArgoUML but they have developed it further. Reverse engineering, code/documentation generation etc. The community edition is free. If you pay you can get some nifty plugins as well. I haven't tried them though.
www.gentleware.com