~10 years ago certain company DID embrace, extend java with their OS specific extensions and ship this lame and incompatible version with their operating system until they were forced by court to stop. If you were coding java in these days, you would what abominition Microsoft Java was... And don't remind me MS J++
So what did Sun gain keeping java closed source for 10 years? Hostility of open-software coders? Losing war of java on desktop?
How could this article make a list of best game levels and not include DooM? All this horror/hell-techno gothic stile pretty much defined how level and moster designs are done for FPS games.
I have a Linksys WRT54GL router (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54GL). It uplinks via 36-54mbit (depending on conditions) wireless connection, and acts as a router for a network of ~10 computers with quite heavy p2p traffic. It is stable and rarely slows down. Of course, I run a custom linux firmware on top of it (HyperWRT Thibor, original firmware sucks quite bad).
I just wanted to say that ATI cards up to 9250 had very nice open-source drivers by DRI. I use them still, and I won't upgrade my 9250 until i can get a card that has 100% open-source drivers.
Too bad more recent cards don't have anything. r300.sf.net (drivers for more recent ATI cards) seems to be stagnating. There is not much more luck with noveau.sf.net either (project trying to make open-source linux nvidia drivers).
Oh, and also, driver support for wireless cards on Linux sucks so much... And there are problems with drivers with NCQ capable SATA controllers too. This annoys me to no end. It is impossible to use recent hardware and have decent linux support for it. I know hardware companies are mostly to blame, but this doesn't improve the situation much.
Crap crap crap. On win2k, the.NET control center takes 2 minutes to load on my 1 Ghz Athlon, and If I install directx9 (the card is a bit dated, radeon 9250), framerate drops to ~1-2 FPS where it was 50-70 FPS. And AFAIK directx9 is required to run the latest greatest drivers.
ATI drivers still suck. Thanks to DRI guys for making an open-source driver for Linux for this card, so I don't have to put up with ATIs bullshit.
One recent cyberpunk movie caught my attention. It was Cypher. Try to see it. It doesn't have that dark cyberpunkish city (like Neuromancer's Chiba), but it does have enough mind games and a good story. And a good ending.
But I cannot help thinking the parent poster is right.
Sun FAILED to make java a viable desktop app platform. They also failed to make java a Free (in a GNU way) platform, and in doing this alienated a whole lot of would be users/developers. Also, this made java less platform independent than it could be if it was open-source, and less advanced.
Java is a good platform and a good programming language. But it could have been so much more... And it's Sun's fault for not making it much more.
--Coder
Re:I liked the first one better. :(
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 1
Hi,
Do you have any idea how to get SS1 working under win2k or linux? With sound and all? Use dosbox? Besides- SS1 also had monster respawning.
There are projects that attempt to rewrite/renovate SS1, but none of them seem to be fully working. There is even some half-cooked 3d accelerared engine that looks promising.
About Deus Ex. I often compare it to SS2. It is somewhat more linear in its scenario, but it has every problem solvable via different approaches. Usually you can go through the front door blasting, or sneak/hack yourself in, and maybe do stuff some third way. It is a good game, and well worth playing. And scenario is quite nice too. Oh, and unlike SS1/SS2 it has other people (NPCs) you can talk to. I miss that a lot in SS1/SS2. I remember rushing to level 4 in SS1 to see if there are other survivors left, also trying to find Delacroix in SS2 and hoping she'd still be alive.
Agreed, Ultima Underworld 1 was wonderful. I think I spent more time playing UW1 than Doom. I'm still waiting to get a chance to play through Underworld 2.
You seem to think game makers will voluntarily make life harder for themselves by competing with legally distributed/marketed old games to improve some overall playability? Remember, corps are out there to make money. That's it. They cannot have morals, they have no other purpose. They will make money as easy as possible, as quick as possible, using methods as dirty as feasible. If this means stopping distribution of old games via some new laws, or actively using existing laws (most abandonware is still copyrighted), they will (at least try to) do it.
The cheapest way for them to compete with old games for now seems to be marketing. They already have 98% of population convinced to judge and to buy games based on their looks, not on their playability. And since making nice graphics is expensive (you need to hire lots of artists, etc), this can also exclude small companies and amateurs from the game market.
Hi, just a quick question. Does it consume 300 Mb of virtual memory or resident memory? Can you check ps or top? Or are you running freenet on windows? Oh, and which JVM do you use? Sun? IBM? GIJ?
Some VMs have a habbit of mmaping huge gobs of ram (Sun's JVM v1.5 for AMD64 linux takes up ~1.7gb of VIRTUAL memory). This memmory is not really consumed, it is just shown in various diagnostic tools.
I tried running java apps and checking how much free memory got decreased. An app with default memory settings uses ~80-120 mb RAM. Most of it is JVM overhead/libraries/etc. Apps run with 64 mb of heap maximum by default, so they should not be able to grow to 300 mb real usage, unless freenet does start java with -XmxLOTSmb switches.
Well with Java Applets and with Java not comming with Windows or some of the more Anal GNU Linux Distributions by default it is up the IT staff or the User to install Java on their system, plus you get some nasty compatibility issues across different java versions. At lest with Web Apps the browsers are usualy part of the normal updates.
Hell, I know that. I know perfectly well that AJAX/webapps will be made and used in the Real World. I was just thinking how should things work if they were made The Right Way. I think some application client could be distributed with OS just as easy as a web browser. Too bad this won't happen as long as MS controls 90% of desktops. And I don't think that application client must necessarily be java, but java is the closest thing we have right now.
There are a lot of firewall issues you need to take into consideration. A lot of time thin clints solutions are defaultly locked by firewalls, HTTP and HTTPS are usually open. It is not about performance it is about less IT Infrastructure reorginization.
Dumb firewall admins are just another thing that annoys me to no end. Internet was designed with multiple applications in mind, using different ports. Now stupid administrators block everything that is not port 80 or HTTP. And then application vendors make ALL applications tunel all data over HTTP/port 80. Now you have video streaming over HTTP, applications over HTTP, instant messenging over HTTP, email over HTTP (webmail), viruses over HTTP, malware over HTTP, exploits over HTTP, EVERYTHING over HTTP. And this makes blocking other ports/protocols completely useless from security standpoint. Too bad it is not possible to change this in Real World. And one more thing i noticed- bigger corporations have more brain damaged firewall configurations, and it is less possible to change anything there...
Oh, and I agree about "trained" people. It's a good thing I can interview people myself before they get hired in this company.
P.S. I don't like slashdot <blockquote> tags anymore:)
The best languages and designs are rarely used in the mainstream. Why HTTP why not LaTex, Why Windows why not Mac OS, or Unix. Why VB over PRP (Python/Ruby/Perl).
I know that, and it is a very sad situation when marketing/sales trumps technology/engineering/quality in Information TECHNOLOGY market. Unfortunately this problem will only be worse in the future, as people who make the decisions are not and never will be able to competently judge the quality, price/performance, TCO, quality of IT products. So they listen to marketspeak and base their decisions on that
1. Good enough platform independence. Every modern computer has a web browser, Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS X, xBSD... And even though the graphics may not render the same they are for the most part usable.
Well, with web apps you might have "platform" independence, but you run into problems of browser incompatibility, especially so with AJAX apps. And these problems are not much easier. In a way, "platform" becomes the browser, not the OS. Besides, you can have good enough platform independence with java/PRP.
2. Installation Ease. Every OS Normally comes with a "good" web browser by default. So when creating a new web app all you need to do is put a link on the default home page. and not go to every system and reinstall update the libraries, check to see if it works then check the other apps and make sure you didn't break anything else.
Thin client apps can also have similar installation ease. Take a look at applets/java web start. They might not be the best possible solutions, but they are the way to go. And about not breaking stuff- you can install these apps sandboxed, like java applets. These don't break anything. Or like AJAX webapps- make thin client only run widgets and place the app logic on the server, just use some sensible protocol and client instead of HTTP/HTML.
3. Networkable if a person is located in your office or on the moon (provided they had an internet connection) there is a way they can use the application.
Well, thin client apps are networkable by definition, they run on server. And they should have higher performance and allow for bigger network latency than AJAX apps, because with good design, they would need less communication with the server. Especially AJAX suffers from poor response times and requires a fast (low latency, not high bandwidth) connection to the server. So if you'd use AJAX apps from the moon (300000 km/300000km/s = 1 second), you'd have 1 second latency due to speed of light, which means that each click on smart AJAX control would thing for 1 second before responding. This would make a WEB2.0 app completely unusable.
4. High level of "trained" people. Most kids out of high school know HTML to some degree, and as far as some businesses go adding Ajax support and Javascript is just an extending the same language and though process (which is wrong but it is what they think) So it is easy to find "qualified" people to maintain the apps
Well, sorry but this is bull. It takes well trained people to write web apps, especially AJAX web apps. And don't get me started on fancy Model-View-Controller/component and Object-Relational mapping frameworks, these are not easy to learn and they are pretty much required if you make a larger/more complex application
5. Fancy Graphics.
Agred. HTML can be designed by designers and it usually does look better.
6. Psychological advantage for training.
Also agreed.
7. Controlled server.
Same thing is possible with thin client apps.
Web Development is flaky and has a lot of stupid workarounds and hacks to get it to work and there are a million of tools that can do every function in the web better. But shit happens and you either deal with it and make the best out of the situation or complain and
I'm sick sick sick to see HTTP+HTML+JS used for APPLICATIONS instead of a thin client. Browsers make horrible thin clients, and HTML+HTTP+JS is a horrible way to write remote applications for thin clients. Some solution that was designed from the start for this purpose would be so much better. HTML+HTTP should be used for information transfer and PRESENTATION, not applications... To bad- while Microsoft controls desktop, this isn't going to change.
Sun did have a shot at this with java, but they failed horribly, and this opportunity is lost forever. It's a shame, i'd like to see java dominating desktop application programming, not.NET
Oh, and one more thing. If all (ok, most) applications become web applications, who needs a computer anymore? A zero-administration appliance with integrated browser would do just as well... This reminds me we're living in a post-Microsoft computer renaissance, client-server model of computing was used and then abandoned in favor of MS solutions years ago. It is comming back now.
You have hit the nail on the head. That's the problem with 99.5% of RPGs and space shooters out there. Both single and multi player. Your actions don't really influence the world. I wish someone at long last would combine Civilisation/Master of Magic global strategy engine + RPG, so that you are one man in a world that develops by itself. Make it so that if you sack a town it remains poor/broken/slaughtered, but eventually gets slowly rebuilt of abandoned. Make it so that if there is an unattended wilderness, various beasts start breeding there and expanding into adjacent areas and overruning/harrasing nearby towns. Make groups of monsters moving around the world with purpose (raiding other towns and expanding their own lairs). Add multiplayer capabilites to that world, and you have a massive hit.
Also, it is possible, and maybe easier to make a space shooter along similar lines. Master of orion/Space empires world (galaxy) development combined with something like Privateer space shooter. Such a game would make a killer hit.
This would require some game AI development, and lots of balancing, but creating such a game is mangeable with 1/20 of the budget Blizzard has. I'm still curiuos what is it that none of the game developers tried to make such a game, when the capabilites were there for that last 5 years or so...
I once wanted to make a similar free game myself, but then i got a job, way too much work, and the project got abandoned...
I have been around computers somewhat professionally since ~1995. I have survived and i have done quite well.
Around the time MS released win95, i despised it and switched to linux. I had done some hobby programming under win31, read books about 'programming in windows' and thought windows was quite advanced (compared to DOS). I didn't even like Linux at first.
What I did was get into web programming. It doesn't really matter what OS do you use and what tools do you use if you make your applications available for any user with a browser. I tried CGI skripts, perl, PHP, and finally settled on Java.
I usually work on Linux, use open-source IDE (eclipse), applications use open-source application servers (tomcat) and SQL servers (postgresql). And there are a lot of open-source libraries & frameworks to help (jakarta.apache.org). Servers usually also run Linux (my preference- debian). Unless some religious customers demand otherwise without realizing that running that our java app made to run on win2k/mssql or solaris/oracle could be made to run just as well on linux/postgres. Applications work quite well.
I think you can have good resume even when you cut MS out of your life.
I'm using mplayer windows binaries with all the non-free DLL codecs, it plays everything I throw at it. It's fast, stable, and I can use same thing under windows I do use under linux.
Capitalism under ideal circumstances should be a very good thing, however there are many problems with capitalism in real life.
1. Market failures. There are many ways which prevent competition and free market from working. Monopolies, cartels, couple of companies dominating market (ATI+nvidia). All of those screw up the life of people (consumers) and entrepreneurs trying to make/sell something new/better.
2. Corporations have vested interest in making people (consumers) easily brainwashed/dumb mob. And with TV and other means of mass media it is quite easy to do.
3. Customers are misinformed on purpose (marketing) and cannot make rational decision on which product to buy. This distorts free market, and decreases competion based on product.
4. Publicly traded corporations have behavioral model of a psycho. CEO MUST increase profit at all cost, or he'll be removed and replaced by one who does. The only thing stopping corporations from selling babies is law, or more precisely, there would be too much risk and too little profit to do that. Screw the law is the risks are low and the profits are high, and you have enough money for lobbying. Publicly traded Corporations as an entity DO NOT AND CANNOT HAVE MORALS.
5. Corporations usually have hierarchical control structure. Big corporations are dictatorships inside democratic society.
I think capitalism with very very well protected competition and free market, and very very well informed and educated consumers is something awesome, but reality is much worse.
Um, kill -HUP forces postgres to reload config, it works for some (all?) configuration changes, and I didn't notice it being a real restart- clients don't get disconnected.
Fix me if I'm wrong, i didn't use this feature much. But it worked for me when I needed it.
What about good database abstraction layer like JDBC? What about distributed caching or just plain caching? What about a good O-R mapping layer like Hybernate/JDO/Cayenne?
What about MVC2 frameworks, component frameworks, capabilities to build distributed applications? RPC? Object serialization? Messenging APIs (like JMS)?
PHP is good for many things, but there are so many things lacking. I'm sure I'll get some responses pointing out PHP solutions for the problems I described here, but I doubt any of them are as mature as their Java counterparts. Of course, it's been a while since i worked with PHP, so things might have changed since then.
There's usually no need to integrate PHP with Java and use PHP for page rendering, because there are tools in Java that do page rendering just as well as PHP, if not better. If you need integration anyway, you can integrate Tomcat with Apache- then all your static (images, CSS) and PHP stuff will run on apache, for java stuff tomcat will get called. This will both increase performance (as Apache is better suited for serving static stuff than Tomcat) and allow PHP to be used on same box, same port.
Java is not slow in server-side, it is just slow on desktop with Swing. Get Tomcat and try benchmarking some JSPs if you don't believe me. Templates with java might be slower than JSP, but anyway, page rendering is something that impacts the performance of web application the least.
With java you EXTREMELY RARELY need to write extensions, usually you can find java libraries (most of them open source) that do the stuff you need. Or you can just use standart java class libraries, that are enough for 95% of cases. This way you can get a platform-independent solution for no additional cost. While your DLLs (.so's?) will have to be compiled for each architecture, coded to be cross-platform, installed by system administrators, etc.
If you need to interface with C++/C, there is JNI (Java native interface, It is hairy and unfriendly though). Of you can integrate via some kind of interprocess communication (pipes still work, as will TCP, with java you can write TCP client/server in 10-30 lines of code). This way you can have any language on the other side of IPC. You can use webservices/CORBA/XML RPC if you want to be fancy.
Slashdot Mirror
~10 years ago certain company DID embrace, extend java with their OS specific extensions and ship this lame and incompatible version with their operating system until they were forced by court to stop. If you were coding java in these days, you would what abominition Microsoft Java was... And don't remind me MS J++
So what did Sun gain keeping java closed source for 10 years? Hostility of open-software coders? Losing war of java on desktop?
--Coder
How could this article make a list of best game levels and not include DooM? All this horror/hell-techno gothic stile pretty much defined how level and moster designs are done for FPS games.
--Coder
I have a Linksys WRT54GL router (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRT54GL). It uplinks via 36-54mbit (depending on conditions) wireless connection, and acts as a router for a network of ~10 computers with quite heavy p2p traffic. It is stable and rarely slows down. Of course, I run a custom linux firmware on top of it (HyperWRT Thibor, original firmware sucks quite bad).
Oh, and it cost me ~70 USD.
--Coder
Um, xmms uses GTK1- no antialiased fonts. I prefer beep-media-player myself, it's xmms with GTK2, and looks better.
--Coder
Hey, there is aptitude moo :) try adding a few -v switches.
Cheers,
--Coder
Hi,
I just wanted to say that ATI cards up to 9250 had very nice open-source drivers by DRI. I use them still, and I won't upgrade my 9250 until i can get a card that has 100% open-source drivers.
Too bad more recent cards don't have anything. r300.sf.net (drivers for more recent ATI cards) seems to be stagnating. There is not much more luck with noveau.sf.net either (project trying to make open-source linux nvidia drivers).
Oh, and also, driver support for wireless cards on Linux sucks so much... And there are problems with drivers with NCQ capable SATA controllers too. This annoys me to no end. It is impossible to use recent hardware and have decent linux support for it. I know hardware companies are mostly to blame, but this doesn't improve the situation much.
--Coder
Crap crap crap. On win2k, the .NET control center takes 2 minutes to load on my 1 Ghz Athlon, and If I install directx9 (the card is a bit dated, radeon 9250), framerate drops to ~1-2 FPS where it was 50-70 FPS. And AFAIK directx9 is required to run the latest greatest drivers.
ATI drivers still suck. Thanks to DRI guys for making an open-source driver for Linux for this card, so I don't have to put up with ATIs bullshit.
NVidia isn't much better though.
--Coder
The movie is called Death Machine (I think). I found it by searching the net, I have not watched it.
Oh, and I remembered one more movie featuring noirish dark city- "Dark city". It is not really cyberpunk, but it is still quite nice.
--Coder
One recent cyberpunk movie caught my attention. It was Cypher. Try to see it. It doesn't have that dark cyberpunkish city (like Neuromancer's Chiba), but it does have enough mind games and a good story. And a good ending.
--Coder
I love java. I code java web apps for living.
But I cannot help thinking the parent poster is right.
Sun FAILED to make java a viable desktop app platform. They also failed to make java a Free (in a GNU way) platform, and in doing this alienated a whole lot of would be users/developers. Also, this made java less platform independent than it could be if it was open-source, and less advanced.
Java is a good platform and a good programming language. But it could have been so much more... And it's Sun's fault for not making it much more.
--Coder
Hi,
Do you have any idea how to get SS1 working under win2k or linux? With sound and all? Use dosbox? Besides- SS1 also had monster respawning.
There are projects that attempt to rewrite/renovate SS1, but none of them seem to be fully working. There is even some half-cooked 3d accelerared engine that looks promising.
About Deus Ex. I often compare it to SS2. It is somewhat more linear in its scenario, but it has every problem solvable via different approaches. Usually you can go through the front door blasting, or sneak/hack yourself in, and maybe do stuff some third way. It is a good game, and well worth playing. And scenario is quite nice too. Oh, and unlike SS1/SS2 it has other people (NPCs) you can talk to. I miss that a lot in SS1/SS2. I remember rushing to level 4 in SS1 to see if there are other survivors left, also trying to find Delacroix in SS2 and hoping she'd still be alive.
Agreed, Ultima Underworld 1 was wonderful. I think I spent more time playing UW1 than Doom. I'm still waiting to get a chance to play through Underworld 2.
--Coder
You seem to think game makers will voluntarily make life harder for themselves by competing with legally distributed/marketed old games to improve some overall playability? Remember, corps are out there to make money. That's it. They cannot have morals, they have no other purpose. They will make money as easy as possible, as quick as possible, using methods as dirty as feasible. If this means stopping distribution of old games via some new laws, or actively using existing laws (most abandonware is still copyrighted), they will (at least try to) do it.
The cheapest way for them to compete with old games for now seems to be marketing. They already have 98% of population convinced to judge and to buy games based on their looks, not on their playability. And since making nice graphics is expensive (you need to hire lots of artists, etc), this can also exclude small companies and amateurs from the game market.
--Coder
Hello,
this is what varchar2 and nvarchar2 types in oracle ar for- unicode characters.
I agree, it is extremely idiotic that normal varchar type is useless in oracle, but you can still use oracle and unicode.
--Coder
Hi, just a quick question. Does it consume 300 Mb of virtual memory or resident memory? Can you check ps or top? Or are you running freenet on windows? Oh, and which JVM do you use? Sun? IBM? GIJ?
Some VMs have a habbit of mmaping huge gobs of ram (Sun's JVM v1.5 for AMD64 linux takes up ~1.7gb of VIRTUAL memory). This memmory is not really consumed, it is just shown in various diagnostic tools.
I tried running java apps and checking how much free memory got decreased. An app with default memory settings uses ~80-120 mb RAM. Most of it is JVM overhead/libraries/etc. Apps run with 64 mb of heap maximum by default, so they should not be able to grow to 300 mb real usage, unless freenet does start java with -XmxLOTSmb switches.
--Coder
Well with Java Applets and with Java not comming with Windows or some of the more Anal GNU Linux Distributions by default it is up the IT staff or the User to install Java on their system, plus you get some nasty compatibility issues across different java versions. At lest with Web Apps the browsers are usualy part of the normal updates.
:)
Hell, I know that. I know perfectly well that AJAX/webapps will be made and used in the Real World. I was just thinking how should things work if they were made The Right Way. I think some application client could be distributed with OS just as easy as a web browser. Too bad this won't happen as long as MS controls 90% of desktops. And I don't think that application client must necessarily be java, but java is the closest thing we have right now.
There are a lot of firewall issues you need to take into consideration. A lot of time thin clints solutions are defaultly locked by firewalls, HTTP and HTTPS are usually open. It is not about performance it is about less IT Infrastructure reorginization.
Dumb firewall admins are just another thing that annoys me to no end. Internet was designed with multiple applications in mind, using different ports. Now stupid administrators block everything that is not port 80 or HTTP. And then application vendors make ALL applications tunel all data over HTTP/port 80. Now you have video streaming over HTTP, applications over HTTP, instant messenging over HTTP, email over HTTP (webmail), viruses over HTTP, malware over HTTP, exploits over HTTP, EVERYTHING over HTTP. And this makes blocking other ports/protocols completely useless from security standpoint. Too bad it is not possible to change this in Real World. And one more thing i noticed- bigger corporations have more brain damaged firewall configurations, and it is less possible to change anything there...
Oh, and I agree about "trained" people. It's a good thing I can interview people myself before they get hired in this company.
P.S. I don't like slashdot <blockquote> tags anymore
--Coder
I know that, and it is a very sad situation when marketing/sales trumps technology/engineering/quality in Information TECHNOLOGY market. Unfortunately this problem will only be worse in the future, as people who make the decisions are not and never will be able to competently judge the quality, price/performance, TCO, quality of IT products. So they listen to marketspeak and base their decisions on that
Well, with web apps you might have "platform" independence, but you run into problems of browser incompatibility, especially so with AJAX apps. And these problems are not much easier. In a way, "platform" becomes the browser, not the OS. Besides, you can have good enough platform independence with java/PRP.
Thin client apps can also have similar installation ease. Take a look at applets/java web start. They might not be the best possible solutions, but they are the way to go. And about not breaking stuff- you can install these apps sandboxed, like java applets. These don't break anything. Or like AJAX webapps- make thin client only run widgets and place the app logic on the server, just use some sensible protocol and client instead of HTTP/HTML.
Well, thin client apps are networkable by definition, they run on server. And they should have higher performance and allow for bigger network latency than AJAX apps, because with good design, they would need less communication with the server. Especially AJAX suffers from poor response times and requires a fast (low latency, not high bandwidth) connection to the server. So if you'd use AJAX apps from the moon (300000 km/300000km/s = 1 second), you'd have 1 second latency due to speed of light, which means that each click on smart AJAX control would thing for 1 second before responding. This would make a WEB2.0 app completely unusable.
Well, sorry but this is bull. It takes well trained people to write web apps, especially AJAX web apps. And don't get me started on fancy Model-View-Controller/component and Object-Relational mapping frameworks, these are not easy to learn and they are pretty much required if you make a larger/more complex application
5. Fancy Graphics.
Agred. HTML can be designed by designers and it usually does look better.
6. Psychological advantage for training.
Also agreed.
7. Controlled server.
Same thing is possible with thin client apps.
I'm sick sick sick to see HTTP+HTML+JS used for APPLICATIONS instead of a thin client. Browsers make horrible thin clients, and HTML+HTTP+JS is a horrible way to write remote applications for thin clients. Some solution that was designed from the start for this purpose would be so much better. HTML+HTTP should be used for information transfer and PRESENTATION, not applications... To bad- while Microsoft controls desktop, this isn't going to change.
.NET
Sun did have a shot at this with java, but they failed horribly, and this opportunity is lost forever. It's a shame, i'd like to see java dominating desktop application programming, not
Oh, and one more thing. If all (ok, most) applications become web applications, who needs a computer anymore? A zero-administration appliance with integrated browser would do just as well... This reminds me we're living in a post-Microsoft computer renaissance, client-server model of computing was used and then abandoned in favor of MS solutions years ago. It is comming back now.
--Coder
You have hit the nail on the head. That's the problem with 99.5% of RPGs and space shooters out there. Both single and multi player. Your actions don't really influence the world. I wish someone at long last would combine Civilisation/Master of Magic global strategy engine + RPG, so that you are one man in a world that develops by itself. Make it so that if you sack a town it remains poor/broken/slaughtered, but eventually gets slowly rebuilt of abandoned. Make it so that if there is an unattended wilderness, various beasts start breeding there and expanding into adjacent areas and overruning/harrasing nearby towns. Make groups of monsters moving around the world with purpose (raiding other towns and expanding their own lairs). Add multiplayer capabilites to that world, and you have a massive hit.
Also, it is possible, and maybe easier to make a space shooter along similar lines. Master of orion/Space empires world (galaxy) development combined with something like Privateer space shooter. Such a game would make a killer hit.
This would require some game AI development, and lots of balancing, but creating such a game is mangeable with 1/20 of the budget Blizzard has. I'm still curiuos what is it that none of the game developers tried to make such a game, when the capabilites were there for that last 5 years or so...
I once wanted to make a similar free game myself, but then i got a job, way too much work, and the project got abandoned...
--Coder
I have been around computers somewhat professionally since ~1995. I have survived and i have done quite well.
Around the time MS released win95, i despised it and switched to linux. I had done some hobby programming under win31, read books about 'programming in windows' and thought windows was quite advanced (compared to DOS). I didn't even like Linux at first.
What I did was get into web programming. It doesn't really matter what OS do you use and what tools do you use if you make your applications available for any user with a browser. I tried CGI skripts, perl, PHP, and finally settled on Java.
I usually work on Linux, use open-source IDE (eclipse), applications use open-source application servers (tomcat) and SQL servers (postgresql). And there are a lot of open-source libraries & frameworks to help (jakarta.apache.org). Servers usually also run Linux (my preference- debian). Unless some religious customers demand otherwise without realizing that running that our java app made to run on win2k/mssql or solaris/oracle could be made to run just as well on linux/postgres. Applications work quite well.
I think you can have good resume even when you cut MS out of your life.
--Coder
Read what Killjoe and BuildGate said, they are mostly right. Read some books on object oriented design/programming, like design patterns.
Well, there is also Tapestry framework for webapps.
There's lots of stuff that helps at http://jakarta.apache.org/
My advice- stay away from EJBs.
What else? If you run into trouble come to irc.freenode.net #java
--Coder
I'm using mplayer windows binaries with all the non-free DLL codecs, it plays everything I throw at it. It's fast, stable, and I can use same thing under windows I do use under linux.
You should try it too. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
--Coder
Admit it.
Capitalism under ideal circumstances should be a very good thing, however there are many problems with capitalism in real life.
1. Market failures. There are many ways which prevent competition and free market from working. Monopolies, cartels, couple of companies dominating market (ATI+nvidia). All of those screw up the life of people (consumers) and entrepreneurs trying to make/sell something new/better.
2. Corporations have vested interest in making people (consumers) easily brainwashed/dumb mob. And with TV and other means of mass media it is quite easy to do.
3. Customers are misinformed on purpose (marketing) and cannot make rational decision on which product to buy. This distorts free market, and decreases competion based on product.
4. Publicly traded corporations have behavioral model of a psycho. CEO MUST increase profit at all cost, or he'll be removed and replaced by one who does. The only thing stopping corporations from selling babies is law, or more precisely, there would be too much risk and too little profit to do that. Screw the law is the risks are low and the profits are high, and you have enough money for lobbying. Publicly traded Corporations as an entity DO NOT AND CANNOT HAVE MORALS.
5. Corporations usually have hierarchical control structure. Big corporations are dictatorships inside democratic society.
I think capitalism with very very well protected competition and free market, and very very well informed and educated consumers is something awesome, but reality is much worse.
--Coder
Um, kill -HUP forces postgres to reload config, it works for some (all?) configuration changes, and I didn't notice it being a real restart- clients don't get disconnected.
Fix me if I'm wrong, i didn't use this feature much. But it worked for me when I needed it.
--Coder
Um, PHP libraries?
What about good database abstraction layer like JDBC? What about distributed caching or just plain caching? What about a good O-R mapping layer like Hybernate/JDO/Cayenne?
What about MVC2 frameworks, component frameworks, capabilities to build distributed applications? RPC? Object serialization? Messenging APIs (like JMS)?
PHP is good for many things, but there are so many things lacking. I'm sure I'll get some responses pointing out PHP solutions for the problems I described here, but I doubt any of them are as mature as their Java counterparts. Of course, it's been a while since i worked with PHP, so things might have changed since then.
--Coder
There's usually no need to integrate PHP with Java and use PHP for page rendering, because there are tools in Java that do page rendering just as well as PHP, if not better. If you need integration anyway, you can integrate Tomcat with Apache- then all your static (images, CSS) and PHP stuff will run on apache, for java stuff tomcat will get called. This will both increase performance (as Apache is better suited for serving static stuff than Tomcat) and allow PHP to be used on same box, same port.
Java is not slow in server-side, it is just slow on desktop with Swing. Get Tomcat and try benchmarking some JSPs if you don't believe me. Templates with java might be slower than JSP, but anyway, page rendering is something that impacts the performance of web application the least.
With java you EXTREMELY RARELY need to write extensions, usually you can find java libraries (most of them open source) that do the stuff you need. Or you can just use standart java class libraries, that are enough for 95% of cases. This way you can get a platform-independent solution for no additional cost. While your DLLs (.so's?) will have to be compiled for each architecture, coded to be cross-platform, installed by system administrators, etc.
If you need to interface with C++/C, there is JNI (Java native interface, It is hairy and unfriendly though). Of you can integrate via some kind of interprocess communication (pipes still work, as will TCP, with java you can write TCP client/server in 10-30 lines of code). This way you can have any language on the other side of IPC. You can use webservices/CORBA/XML RPC if you want to be fancy.
--Coder