Yep, did that. Clean install via via steam. Same problem. Did the diagnostic. No problems with the game itself. The bug is affecting BOTH retail and Steam users, ATI and Nvida, good specs, bad specs.
I have tried everything from bios setting changes through to Windows tweaks, to no avail. Valve has it listed on support, but there's no fix... just a messsage to submit details from msinfo32.
Like hundreds (if not thousands) of others, I am suffering from a "Memeory read error" that appears to be related to the stuttering bug we saw earlier. Half Life 2 crashes immediately after the intro sequence, and often at the menu screen itself! I haven't even seen the game yet...
While I we're waiting for a patch to make this game usable, anyone want to buy a set of coasters?
A little while ago, inspired by helpful members of the Prevayler mailing list I created a generic Prevayler system for object persistence in one of my current projects.
Basic objects implement a 'Persistent' interface and can also be 'Containers' which are simply Persistent objects that contain other Persistent objects. Basic CRUD operations can then be performed with a couple of simple Prevayler transactions. The system maintains the object graph hierarchy, aloowing you to perform transactions and queries using a 'path' that maps through the various containers. The code below shows the creation of a new persistent object (myItem) and Adds this to an object at the path 'item/subitem' (so there is a Container object located at 'item' which Contains a another Container called 'subitem' - myItem will be placed in the 'subitem' Container. The code then executes a 'select' , which will return the 'subitem' Container, which we can then use to access our newly created object if we so desired. We could also execute select("item/subitem/myItem.id") to access directly the object we just created.
Persistent myItem= new Persistent( id,... ); AddPersistent addSub = new AddPersistent("item/subitem", myItem); Container container = store.selectItem("item/subitem");
There is also a Prevayler Transaction to Update Persistent objects, using a similar path methodology. After we make changes to myItem, we can then use code like that below to execute the Update.
UpdatePersistent update = new UpdatePersistent("item/subitem/myItem.id", myItem);
Notes: the query language is obviously begging for XPath.
As the whole system is generic, it means that after a select you have to cast to the correct type, which can be a pain. For example, you may have a Customer object which implements Container. The Container returned from a select will have to be explicitly cast to Customer. I guess you could write a typed wrapper.
Generic typing also means that if you want a single Container to maintain more than one collection of Persistent or sub-Containers in a transactional manner, you may have to have the one actual Map behind the scenes, and have accessor methods that grab objects from this Map and cast to the correct type. I haven't quite worked this part out in much detail..
I think I will publish the source code after I have done some refactoring and come up with a robust Exception mechanism. Although I must admit that Exceptions often do my head in. It seems that a lot of the time if your system breaks, you are simply fucked and there is often not a lot that you can do other than get out as gracefully as you can.
As Java is strongly typed and needs to be compiled, I think that it is not as effective as a language like Python or JavaScript for scripting. JavaScript is an interesting one because there are a number of free interpreters (including the one in Mozilla) and it has a pretty familiar structure to most programmers.
Although I think that it remains a very long way off before ID will be developing the 'next big 3d thing' (tm) in Java, there is perhaps room on the server side end of things, particularly as MMORPGs start to garner more attention.
No matter what the marketeers at Sun tell you, Java will never perform as well as C/C++ and when it comes to creating realtime 3d environments, every bit of speed is crucial. That said, Java has some pretty extensive graphics APIs and hooks into OpenGL and DirectX, which can be useful. For games that are not graphics intensive (and they do exist), Java may well be useful, particularly as you get all sorts of libraries and memory management for free. With JDK 1.4, Java is actually pretty fast on the client-side these days, you mat be pleasantly surprised if your experience is with older versions of Java. Coupled with modern processors (gHz!!) you can end up with a pretty responsive system. But client-side Java was never my cup of tea and it is still not even close to your C++ 3d engine.
However, many modern games are moving online, and the possiblities of Java are much better here. MMORPGs are interesting because you connect graphical clients with servers. The servers are essentially gigantic rule engines and state machines - client input is taken, processed, perhaps things are stored in databases (this is essentially what you do when you save your character) - . The system may have to integrate with payment engines and credit card processing facilities provided by third parties. None of this stuff is graphical at all, it is all about pure data processing and distributed computing.
Funnily enough, this architectural model actually coincides with what the Java people call 'Enterprise Applications' and there are incredible facilities in Java to implement this type of application. And the thing is, raw system performance is only part of the story in this type of application, scalability is perhaps more important (the ability to serve a large volume of clients), amny of the limitations of such systems are actually the I/O level of the application, trasmitting through sockets, writing to disk, communicating with the RDBMS. There are also server-specific implementations of the Java Hotspot JIT compiler, with optimisations for the particular tasks required of server applications and the best thing about this is that as the application runs it gets more and more optimised (and as the server is designed to run indefinitely...) You can purchase or download an Open Source Application Server which will give you things like clustering and failover for free (meaning that you can leverage of this system to provide multiple 'shards' or servers or such things for your game).
DISCLAIMER: I am a server-side Java programmer with a loathing of swing, so I amy be a bit biased.
Check this out for an anyalisis of the $$ side of the industry: http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/proble mwithmusic. html
Big-corp bashing aside (I am an independent musician, so outside their system anyway), music is hell-of expensive to create.
Example, I studied some sonology stuff at the Queensland Conservatorium of music and thier studios where among the best in Austrlia.
We used a Pro-Tools setup with a dedicated Mac hard-disk recording system. Total Cost around $100,000 for hardware and software. To get the most out of Pro-Tools you really need the hardware to back it up. There is all sorts of great home-user tools out there, but they really start falling flat when you get into high-level production.
The mixing desk was worth abuot $500,000 Microphones (and you need heaps) ranged from $1000 to about $25,000 for the best vocal mikes.
Effects units, samplers and synthesisers cost a mint, like several thousand each. Most pro studios will have an unholy number of these things.
Amps and speakers cost so much money you will want to cry. For pro level monitors expect $$$$.
Oh, and the whole studio was three rooms in a seperate wing of the building with floating walls and floors (to isolate from external vibrations and noise).
In my band: We have a bunch of guitars (one is a Fender strat and worth about $1000).
We have a Marshall base amp and a Fender guitar amp so that's another $3000. A Boss effects unit worth about $1200.
My drunk kit is worth about $5,000 and it really isn't stuido production quality.
We have one mike, cause that's all I could afford right now at $500. Pretty crap one too.
And I have a $500 soundcard in my computer for recording.
This is a terribly amateur setup and worth about $10,000. We are going to record some stuff soon and the studio time alone is going to cost us about $2000 plus an engineer, mastering and replication.
All this is in AUD, so divide by a large number to find your local currency:).
He denies that there is an unemployment problem in IT in Australia, which is a total joke because everyone I know in the industry has been feeling the pinch for over 12 months now. I work in tertiary education and enrolments are ~way~ down across all of our computing programs, IS, software engineering, everything, entrance scores (as in ratings of those coming straight from high school) have declined dramtically because of lack of demand. I have friends out of work... etc etc
Some of you people simply have NO idea how code works in the real world, i am sure of it. Hacking perl scripts is so unlike developing the large OO software that drives most information systems.
One of the fundamental issues with software architecture is that more often than not architecture is emergent. 'build one to throw away' is an old old adage (I believe it was Brooks who orginally declared this) and neatly summarises the key problem with developing software architecture.
"Even when one has the time and inclination to take architectural concerns into account, one's experience, or lack thereof, with the domain can limit the degree of architectural sophistication that can be brought to a system, particularly early in its evolution." From the Big Ball of Mud (link below).
We design, we develop, we learn, and then we design again... the sceondary design phase can be called refactoring. There are a number of refactoring patterns (I recomend the 'Refactoring' book) and some of the coolest Java IDEs support refactoring (check IDEA and Eclipse) - you can do things like move methods up the object hierarchy into base/parent/super classes, extract methods from bodies of code, change names, merge classes etc etc). These features let the savvy developer leverage the emergent aspects of design. Driven by time/cost/deadlines, we often do the thing that works rather than the thing that works elgantly. Refactoring lets us recapture some of the elgance of our code. Coupled with test-first methods, we have an incredibly powerful system.
Pretty much ALL modern software lifecycle models are iterative, simply because up front design does not work. The waterfall model is a naive concept of a bygone era.
Refactoring is therefore a crucial aspect of an efficient design process. Typically, I would suggest that refactoring occurs at the end or begginning of each iteration... our refactoring is informed by the evolution of the software - we don't refactor for fun, we clean up code SPECIFCALLY to target aspects of the product we know will change or
To see refactoring in action, join an Open Source project. Most OS teams that I have witnessed in action will employ refactoring of some description, even if they don't call it that. It makes a great deal of sense in OS, because we have large, distributed teams working on software, refactoring helps consolidate changes by disparate team members.
You know, of course, that several games on Playstation have used Flash for the interface - the bits of the interface like game saving and menu selection that don't require a 3d engine to run.
The rationale being that Flash is simple and works out-of-the box for creating interactive screns of this type. Once the actual designs are done it is literally an afternoon's work to tie the screens and buttons together. The Playstation Flash Player communicates with the the game engine through an API and so can be integfrated with any game relatively quickly.
The real issues in this case was that Warner decided to create a tiered system for DVD rental. Retail DVDs where marked as such and sold for standard prices (around $30 or so AUD, which is quite reasonable). Rental DVDs were at least double the price, and the publisher said that it was illegal to use retail movies for rental purposes. Big copyright notices and disclaimers are places in all retails movies to ensure that consumers are alered to the legalities if they rent one.
The effect of this was that the big coroprate rental shops (Blockbuster and VideoEzy among very few others) bore the cost, but the smaller and local rental places could not afford the new system and their business was threatend.
This smaller rental shops are the ones who took legal action.
It is worth noting that there is almost no currently accepted scientific paradigm on this planet that is older than about 100- 200 years. Remember that the entirety of physics was redefined by Einstein, among others, and Darwin (and friends) redefined biology a little earlier. Science is as dogmatic and as rigid as any other religion.
I recommend reading some of Tom Bearden's work for an interesting and slighlty more mainstream example of alternative energy systems.
for win32, ultra-edit is just about the best editing program i have found -> simple, clean, but with enough real features to enhance productivity.
i have created an PHP4 wordfile for syntax highlighting that includes variable highlighting as well...
http://www.info-architects.net/downloads/php_wordf ile.txt.
I think Components, difficult as they can sometimes be are definitely where the action is starting to move. I think as large part of this is being pushed by trhe Internet -> I have watched the dominant paradigm shift slowly as the demands that ecommerce places on high-availbility, scalablity and maitainability drive technology.
Java for example was orginally released with the intention of adding interaction to web pages...BUT after the 5 minutes of applet antics faded, Java begin to shift toward components, middle tiers, transactions, etc etc. Java provides a platform independent base around which which all sorts of development can occur. Perhaps it could be termed what M$ delicately calls a 'framework'.
ALthough you guys will all hate me for saying so, you can all get focked and stop being fundementalists, but C# offers an interesting perspective on the whole programming language issue. Why? For a start M$ has ripped lartge chunks from the three most succesful languages of the last 10-20 years (C,C++, and Java), so we see a large number of the features that make these languages so effective. Secondly, and this is the Java influenced part, C# is integhrated with the NGWS or whatever it is called -> this is really a JIT compiler, with the interesting caveat -> it is essentially language independent. You can use C# to create apps, or C++, or VB, or Perl, or Python, or even COBOL as the delightful interivew that was posted a couple of days ago attests to. What does this mean? I have no idea, save that the platform (the.net platform, anyway) starts to become irrelevant as an influence on language choice.
I think it is indeed something to worry about; an site that uses more than static html to present content falls victim to this issue.
Your own argument reveals the crucial point of the matter: all of the major internet ventures such as Yahoo, Amazon, Hotmail, Slashdot use some form of server-side scripting/programming to serve information...the license issues on the back-end are vital.
I have adapted portions of the ColdFusion Fusebox methodology (http://www.fusebox.org/).
This technique makes perhaps excessive use of includes for code organisation, but it seems to work (with adaptation) for a range of situations...ASP, PHP, Python.
Re:ASP with Java Middle-Tier
on
ASP or JSP?
·
· Score: 1
If you are on a Micro$oft platform, go with ASP, especially with W2K...performance is pretty spectacular and once you start getting into COM/MTS/COM+ things really start moving. Once your head is around VB, it is really fast to develop in (which is why code factories always go for it).
I have been working with ASP for a while now (IIS 3 days) and it has really matured as a platform...JSP still seems to be relatively new and I have not been impressed with what it offers, other than cross-platform capability. In reality, most companies will lock a platform in as a part of a strategic plan so the need to change platforms should be remote on most sites...in two years time you may have to change, but will you be working at the same place...python may even have taken over the world.
As observed, within ASP objects can be coded in Java, so this may be of some benefit.
And the presentation layer should be very thin and should also be pretty straight forward...logic should be limited to some loops, some conditional statements, some output and formating.
The entire problem with software is that it has been designed by the people who build it. This is not a new idea at all. Time and time again software geeks like the good members of slashdot miss the point entirely...people just don't give a shit about operating systems, file systems, any sort of system. They just want something that will help them do their job/task and have fun.
Because we all tend to live in software we think that software is the point. Well, it isn't. In fact, the best software is completely irrelevant. Grab hold of a recent non-wap Nokia mobile phone, for example and see how seemless the software and interface is. When I was raving at my Dad about the software on his phone, he was taken aback...it works so ~well~ that he hadn't even realised that it was actually software at all.
If that is not a sad indictment on the sad state of this entire bloated, outmoded industry, then I don't know what is.
Slashdot Mirror
Brand new box, bought it last weekend. Memory is fine, other games run.
Seriously, tried everything, lots of people have simialr issues.
Yep, did that. Clean install via via steam. Same problem. Did the diagnostic. No problems with the game itself. The bug is affecting BOTH retail and Steam users, ATI and Nvida, good specs, bad specs.
... just a messsage to submit details from msinfo32.
I have tried everything from bios setting changes through to Windows tweaks, to no avail. Valve has it listed on support, but there's no fix
Like hundreds (if not thousands) of others, I am suffering from a "Memeory read error" that appears to be related to the stuttering bug we saw earlier. Half Life 2 crashes immediately after the intro sequence, and often at the menu screen itself! I haven't even seen the game yet ...
m &i tem=4339088136
While I we're waiting for a patch to make this game usable, anyone want to buy a set of coasters?
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIte
A little while ago, inspired by helpful members of the Prevayler mailing list I created a generic Prevayler system for object persistence in one of my current projects.
.. );
Basic objects implement a 'Persistent' interface and can also be 'Containers' which are simply Persistent objects that contain other Persistent objects. Basic CRUD operations can then be performed with a couple of simple Prevayler transactions. The system maintains the object graph hierarchy, aloowing you to perform transactions and queries using a 'path' that maps through the various containers. The code below shows the creation of a new persistent object (myItem) and Adds this to an object at the path 'item/subitem' (so there is a Container object located at 'item' which Contains a another Container called 'subitem' - myItem will be placed in the 'subitem' Container. The code then executes a 'select' , which will return the 'subitem' Container, which we can then use to access our newly created object if we so desired. We could also execute select("item/subitem/myItem.id") to access directly the object we just created.
Persistent myItem= new Persistent( id,.
AddPersistent addSub = new AddPersistent("item/subitem", myItem);
Container container = store.selectItem("item/subitem");
There is also a Prevayler Transaction to Update Persistent objects, using a similar path methodology. After we make changes to myItem, we can then use code like that below to execute the Update.
UpdatePersistent update = new UpdatePersistent("item/subitem/myItem.id", myItem);
Notes: the query language is obviously begging for XPath.
As the whole system is generic, it means that after a select you have to cast to the correct type, which can be a pain. For example, you may have a Customer object which implements Container. The Container returned from a select will have to be explicitly cast to Customer. I guess you could write a typed wrapper.
Generic typing also means that if you want a single Container to maintain more than one collection of Persistent or sub-Containers in a transactional manner, you may have to have the one actual Map behind the scenes, and have accessor methods that grab objects from this Map and cast to the correct type. I haven't quite worked this part out in much detail..
I think I will publish the source code after I have done some refactoring and come up with a robust Exception mechanism. Although I must admit that Exceptions often do my head in. It seems that a lot of the time if your system breaks, you are simply fucked and there is often not a lot that you can do other than get out as gracefully as you can.
http://www.info-architects.net/vapourized/
As Java is strongly typed and needs to be compiled, I think that it is not as effective as a language like Python or JavaScript for scripting. JavaScript is an interesting one because there are a number of free interpreters (including the one in Mozilla) and it has a pretty familiar structure to most programmers.
Although I think that it remains a very long way off before ID will be developing the 'next big 3d thing' (tm) in Java, there is perhaps room on the server side end of things, particularly as MMORPGs start to garner more attention.
...) You can purchase or download an Open Source Application Server which will give you things like clustering and failover for free (meaning that you can leverage of this system to provide multiple 'shards' or servers or such things for your game).
No matter what the marketeers at Sun tell you, Java will never perform as well as C/C++ and when it comes to creating realtime 3d environments, every bit of speed is crucial. That said, Java has some pretty extensive graphics APIs and hooks into OpenGL and DirectX, which can be useful. For games that are not graphics intensive (and they do exist), Java may well be useful, particularly as you get all sorts of libraries and memory management for free. With JDK 1.4, Java is actually pretty fast on the client-side these days, you mat be pleasantly surprised if your experience is with older versions of Java. Coupled with modern processors (gHz!!) you can end up with a pretty responsive system. But client-side Java was never my cup of tea and it is still not even close to your C++ 3d engine.
However, many modern games are moving online, and the possiblities of Java are much better here. MMORPGs are interesting because you connect graphical clients with servers. The servers are essentially gigantic rule engines and state machines - client input is taken, processed, perhaps things are stored in databases (this is essentially what you do when you save your character) - . The system may have to integrate with payment engines and credit card processing facilities provided by third parties. None of this stuff is graphical at all, it is all about pure data processing and distributed computing.
Funnily enough, this architectural model actually coincides with what the Java people call 'Enterprise Applications' and there are incredible facilities in Java to implement this type of application. And the thing is, raw system performance is only part of the story in this type of application, scalability is perhaps more important (the ability to serve a large volume of clients), amny of the limitations of such systems are actually the I/O level of the application, trasmitting through sockets, writing to disk, communicating with the RDBMS. There are also server-specific implementations of the Java Hotspot JIT compiler, with optimisations for the particular tasks required of server applications and the best thing about this is that as the application runs it gets more and more optimised (and as the server is designed to run indefinitely
DISCLAIMER:
I am a server-side Java programmer with a loathing of swing, so I amy be a bit biased.
Check this out for an anyalisis of the $$ side of the industry:e mwithmusic. html
:).
http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/probl
Big-corp bashing aside (I am an independent musician, so outside their system anyway), music is hell-of expensive to create.
Example, I studied some sonology stuff at the Queensland Conservatorium of music and thier studios where among the best in Austrlia.
We used a Pro-Tools setup with a dedicated Mac hard-disk recording system. Total Cost around $100,000 for hardware and software. To get the most out of Pro-Tools you really need the hardware to back it up. There is all sorts of great home-user tools out there, but they really start falling flat when you get into high-level production.
The mixing desk was worth abuot $500,000
Microphones (and you need heaps) ranged from $1000 to about $25,000 for the best vocal mikes.
Effects units, samplers and synthesisers cost a mint, like several thousand each. Most pro studios will have an unholy number of these things.
Amps and speakers cost so much money you will want to cry. For pro level monitors expect $$$$.
Oh, and the whole studio was three rooms in a seperate wing of the building with floating walls and floors (to isolate from external vibrations and noise).
In my band:
We have a bunch of guitars (one is a Fender strat and worth about $1000).
We have a Marshall base amp and a Fender guitar amp so that's another $3000. A Boss effects unit worth about $1200.
My drunk kit is worth about $5,000 and it really isn't stuido production quality.
We have one mike, cause that's all I could afford right now at $500. Pretty crap one too.
And I have a $500 soundcard in my computer for recording.
This is a terribly amateur setup and worth about $10,000. We are going to record some stuff soon and the studio time alone is going to cost us about $2000 plus an engineer, mastering and replication.
All this is in AUD, so divide by a large number to find your local currency
And I, for one, am sick of his dickotry.
... etc etc
He denies that there is an unemployment problem in IT in Australia, which is a total joke because everyone I know in the industry has been feeling the pinch for over 12 months now. I work in tertiary education and enrolments are ~way~ down across all of our computing programs, IS, software engineering, everything, entrance scores (as in ratings of those coming straight from high school) have declined dramtically because of lack of demand. I have friends out of work
but NO, there is no downturn in IT at all.
~sigh~
... the sceondary design phase can be called refactoring. There are a number of refactoring patterns (I recomend the 'Refactoring' book) and some of the coolest Java IDEs support refactoring (check IDEA and Eclipse) - you can do things like move methods up the object hierarchy into base/parent/super classes, extract methods from bodies of code, change names, merge classes etc etc). These features let the savvy developer leverage the emergent aspects of design. Driven by time/cost/deadlines, we often do the thing that works rather than the thing that works elgantly. Refactoring lets us recapture some of the elgance of our code. Coupled with test-first methods, we have an incredibly powerful system.
... our refactoring is informed by the evolution of the software - we don't refactor for fun, we clean up code SPECIFCALLY to target aspects of the product we know will change or
Some of you people simply have NO idea how code works in the real world, i am sure of it. Hacking perl scripts is so unlike developing the large OO software that drives most information systems.
One of the fundamental issues with software architecture is that more often than not architecture is emergent. 'build one to throw away' is an old old adage (I believe it was Brooks who orginally declared this) and neatly summarises the key problem with developing software architecture.
"Even when one has the time and inclination to take architectural concerns into account, one's experience, or lack thereof, with the domain can limit the degree of architectural sophistication that can be brought to a system, particularly early in its evolution." From the Big Ball of Mud (link below).
We design, we develop, we learn, and then we design again
Pretty much ALL modern software lifecycle models are iterative, simply because up front design does not work. The waterfall model is a naive concept of a bygone era.
Refactoring is therefore a crucial aspect of an efficient design process. Typically, I would suggest that refactoring occurs at the end or begginning of each iteration
To see refactoring in action, join an Open Source project. Most OS teams that I have witnessed in action will employ refactoring of some description, even if they don't call it that. It makes a great deal of sense in OS, because we have large, distributed teams working on software, refactoring helps consolidate changes by disparate team members.
further reading: http://www.laputan.org/mud/
You know, of course, that several games on Playstation have used Flash for the interface - the bits of the interface like game saving and menu selection that don't require a 3d engine to run.
The rationale being that Flash is simple and works out-of-the box for creating interactive screns of this type. Once the actual designs are done it is literally an afternoon's work to tie the screens and buttons together. The Playstation Flash Player communicates with the the game engine through an API and so can be integfrated with any game relatively quickly.
UM, the client is the game. Servers are fun to build, don't get me wrong, but most of the game is actually the client...
Um, it was a joke? The figure 9/10 was made up for humorous purposes.
Anyway...
Wow, 9/10 Open Source developers are personally convinced that they are 'professionals' who know more than everyone else.
This is news why?
DISCLAIMER: i am australian
The real issues in this case was that Warner decided to create a tiered system for DVD rental. Retail DVDs where marked as such and sold for standard prices (around $30 or so AUD, which is quite reasonable). Rental DVDs were at least double the price, and the publisher said that it was illegal to use retail movies for rental purposes. Big copyright notices and disclaimers are places in all retails movies to ensure that consumers are alered to the legalities if they rent one.
The effect of this was that the big coroprate rental shops (Blockbuster and VideoEzy among very few others) bore the cost, but the smaller and local rental places could not afford the new system and their business was threatend.
This smaller rental shops are the ones who took legal action.
It is worth noting that there is almost no currently accepted scientific paradigm on this planet that is older than about 100- 200 years. Remember that the entirety of physics was redefined by Einstein, among others, and Darwin (and friends) redefined biology a little earlier. Science is as dogmatic and as rigid as any other religion.
I recommend reading some of Tom Bearden's work for an interesting and slighlty more mainstream example of alternative energy systems.
http://www.cheniere.org/
australia is set to become the bangladesh of the 21C.
sorry, the first link was wrong http://www.info-archite cts .net/download/php_wordfile.txt
for win32, ultra-edit is just about the best editing program i have found -> simple, clean, but with enough real features to enhance productivity. i have created an PHP4 wordfile for syntax highlighting that includes variable highlighting as well... http://www.info-architects.net/downloads/php_wordf ile.txt.
I think Components, difficult as they can sometimes be are definitely where the action is starting to move. I think as large part of this is being pushed by trhe Internet -> I have watched the dominant paradigm shift slowly as the demands that ecommerce places on high-availbility, scalablity and maitainability drive technology.
Java for example was orginally released with the intention of adding interaction to web pages...BUT after the 5 minutes of applet antics faded, Java begin to shift toward components, middle tiers, transactions, etc etc. Java provides a platform independent base around which which all sorts of development can occur. Perhaps it could be termed what M$ delicately calls a 'framework'.
ALthough you guys will all hate me for saying so, you can all get focked and stop being fundementalists, but C# offers an interesting perspective on the whole programming language issue. Why? For a start M$ has ripped lartge chunks from the three most succesful languages of the last 10-20 years (C,C++, and Java), so we see a large number of the features that make these languages so effective. Secondly, and this is the Java influenced part, C# is integhrated with the NGWS or whatever it is called -> this is really a JIT compiler, with the interesting caveat -> it is essentially language independent. You can use C# to create apps, or C++, or VB, or Perl, or Python, or even COBOL as the delightful interivew that was posted a couple of days ago attests to. What does this mean? I have no idea, save that the platform (the .net platform, anyway) starts to become irrelevant as an influence on language choice.
I think it is indeed something to worry about; an site that uses more than static html to present content falls victim to this issue.
Your own argument reveals the crucial point of the matter: all of the major internet ventures such as Yahoo, Amazon, Hotmail, Slashdot use some form of server-side scripting/programming to serve information...the license issues on the back-end are vital.
I have adapted portions of the ColdFusion Fusebox methodology (http://www.fusebox.org/).
This technique makes perhaps excessive use of includes for code organisation, but it seems to work (with adaptation) for a range of situations...ASP, PHP, Python.
If you are on a Micro$oft platform, go with ASP, especially with W2K...performance is pretty spectacular and once you start getting into COM/MTS/COM+ things really start moving. Once your head is around VB, it is really fast to develop in (which is why code factories always go for it).
I have been working with ASP for a while now (IIS 3 days) and it has really matured as a platform...JSP still seems to be relatively new and I have not been impressed with what it offers, other than cross-platform capability. In reality, most companies will lock a platform in as a part of a strategic plan so the need to change platforms should be remote on most sites...in two years time you may have to change, but will you be working at the same place...python may even have taken over the world.
As observed, within ASP objects can be coded in Java, so this may be of some benefit.
And the presentation layer should be very thin and should also be pretty straight forward...logic should be limited to some loops, some conditional statements, some output and formating.
The entire problem with software is that it has been designed by the people who build it. This is not a new idea at all. Time and time again software geeks like the good members of slashdot miss the point entirely...people just don't give a shit about operating systems, file systems, any sort of system. They just want something that will help them do their job/task and have fun.
Because we all tend to live in software we think that software is the point. Well, it isn't. In fact, the best software is completely irrelevant. Grab hold of a recent non-wap Nokia mobile phone, for example and see how seemless the software and interface is. When I was raving at my Dad about the software on his phone, he was taken aback...it works so ~well~ that he hadn't even realised that it was actually software at all.
If that is not a sad indictment on the sad state of this entire bloated, outmoded industry, then I don't know what is.