While I have noticed a huge uptick in the number of jobs which request Java experience (it's among the top), I personally have a lot of trouble adopting Java for projects because of three primary reasons:
-There are lots of nasty things about the language that are unintuitive and lead to sloppy code. If it weren't for the power of Sun and a couple of Sun partners such as Bea and IBM, Java would have been relegated as a poor attempt at improving C++ and would have been supplanted by better languages long ago. Hence Java's success is a VHS-type phenomena.
-The performance of Java on every JVM that I have tried has been horrible.
-Java is controlled by Sun. If someone fixed the numberous flaws of Java and created PowerJava, or some other variant, all of the religious nuts would flood Slashdot berating those "non-standard" crazies, and Sun would have the lawyers beating down their door.
Especially enjoyed his nasty insult of Mr. Oliphant (whose work I'm not aware of) relating to penis size and sneezing. Anyways it's a great read for anyone who is curious.
The real competition isn't between vendors on the same medium (because really one would naturally think that the people that own the wires going to your house would likely have the possibility of being the lowest priced), but rather between different technologies: i.e. here in Ontario, like in most places in the States, we have ADSL and Cable fighting for the consumer's business, both backed by very large companies (the cable conglomerate and the telephone conglomerate), and now there is two-way satellite and in some areas high speed radio access.
We are on that long, scary road of analogies and straw-men arguing...;-)
If Smith and Wesson sold weapons that were intentionally engineered to be convertable to full-autos, then yes they should up against in the wall. If Smith and Wesson set up shop on the corner of Gangsta & Hoodville and started selling guns called "The Killaz Choice" and "The Smoke 'em 10000" to drug dealers, and they marketed them to hold-up crews, and they knew that >98% of them were used in murders, then yes they should be held against the wall.
It is offensive when corporations hide behind laws and rights, and it is equally offensive when people hide behind rights to allow them to pursue anti-social activites: Saying "Gosh darnit, I'm just letting people share files!" doesn't wash when the overwhelming majority of users are using your site to trade copyright infringed material. See Napster as a great case in point.
The concrete evidence is absolutely, positively irrelevant (and indeed these guys are just as guilty if users of their site bought 100x as much music) : If the people who own the copyright on the music (or whatever) don't want it to be shared in that manner, then so be it: As the owners of the copyright they have the right to choose how they want their creations distributed.
I remember hearing a month or so ago about a huge virtual host with several hundred THOUSAND websites being hosted switched from Apache to IIS, and this was almost completely responsible for the Netcraft changes. Anyone remember anything about this?
I may be very, very wrong, however it was my impression that the "rendered" graphics of modern video cards are shortcut 3D images that are very, very unlike raytraced images: i.e. Quake3 looks nice, but it looks absolutely nothing like the stunning beauty of a Truespace or 3dsmax image (i.e. one is averaging surface point lighting, whereas the other is actually tracing the rays of light throwing shadows, umbras, etc). I though the Quadra cards were only really relevant for modeling (i.e. moving stuff around and such), but they still used an FPU for the real rendering.
In a nutshell this is saying "Someone said something, but it might be bogus, and the cycle speed really doesn't mean much anyways.". Alrighty then. This is like a "nothing to see here, move along!" type articles.
I applied to ATI in their driver development team once a long time ago, but alas they never responding (bastards!). ATI has, IMHO, pure crap drivers, and while I want to support them out of patriotism, the reality is that I encourage friends and coworkers not to get ATI cards because of that simple fact. From machines that spontaneously rebooted, to machines to BSOD'd when the screensaver became active: I would wager that a good portion of Microsoft's stability perception problem is actually because of ATI's incredibly poor driver quality (IMHO).
Quake 3 visually BRUTALIZES Unreal Tournament (UT looks like a Quake 2 engine with simplistic structures, etc.), and this is pretty much generally accepted. UT has much more weapon variety, and shipped with a lot more play modes, however feeling wise I liked Q3a a lot more: It feels like you're more in control and the response is ultra snappy, whereas UT felt sort of mushy to me.
Q3As big mistake is that it seemed to be released presuming a tonne of great mods would quickly fill the void in the gameplay (I spent many hours playing ActionQuake which is a game I absolutely loved, however I don't believe it was ever ported to Q3A).
Tomb Raider was the hardware "killer application", not Quake.
I have to disagree, although it depends on how you define "killer application". Tomb Raider might have reached more people, but Quake has driven hardware development since day 1.
I happened to be in sales (earning my wings) in the early days of 3d accelerators, and without a doubt the selling point for the new 3dfx cards (the original Voodoo) was Tomb Raider (it was the stock demo for anyone selling 3dfx cards): It was the reason 3d acceleration took off in the first place, and the rest is history.
I remember when Quake first came out: At the time I was a big fan of Duke3d, and the Quake technology demo came out. Personally I thought it looked like crap, but over time (and with the hardware) it developed into something visually amazing.
Throughout the history of time people have brought up an alternative to entrenched products, and naturally people ask the same question "Why should I switch?" While it's often seems like a no-brainer for the "salesperson", it really is a completely valid question that deserves a valid answer. If product A & B are functionally equal and today I am use to product A and product B's only advantage is that it's not product A, well then most people will say "thanks but no thanks". This is the problem that Linux faces on the desktop, and the simple reality is that saying that Microsoft might request the organs of your firstborn at some future point isn't enough to push most people to adopt something new.
This same opposition to change is the reason why Windows Media's format hasn't taken off: People are use to MP3s, and they already have their collection. Even with MS saying it's 1/2 the size for the same quality level, to most users that's barely adequate to make it worthwhile to change.
Congratulations to the OV team. While I haven't used it for a while, when I did it seemed quite nice.
Having said that what I currently use, which is MP3s, sound great and they work great, so why should I as Joe Consumer care about OV? What sort of license fees does the MP3 patent owner (Fraunhofer?) put on companies such as Winamp, or do they only charge MP3 ripper type products?
I guess my question is this: If I don't have a religious problem with patents, why should I care about alternatives if they're only as good as MP3?
i don't mean offense, but it seems really obvious you've neither 'thrown a metal ball' or 'ran down a track' in a seriously competitive way.
I would turn this right around and say that you've never been involved with or been a serious spectator in either competitive Quake 3 playing or a serious chess competition.
the people at the top of these fields practice many hours a day, through intense physical stress/injuries. the mental discipline it takes is absolutely incredible.
And Quake 3 players don't spend thousands of hours practicing and becoming experts at their game? Chess players often start their careers as young children to fully develop a brain that can make the leaps required for chess.
. and i wouldn't be shocked if there reflexes were far superior to most q3 players, as both of the activities you mentioned rely greatly on fast twitch muscle and body/eye coordination. if these people spent the same playing q3 as 99% of q3 players, they'd be better.
Wow that's quite a blanket assertion: The Quake 3 world is just waiting for the day that a 100m athletes comes over and wipes up the field. Sorry, but that is proposterous. There are millions of players who partake in computer gaming, and of those the best of the best of the best, with the best mental abilities (for the requirement) and the best reflexes, move to the top. This idea that "naturally superior" superhuman track and field athletes could be the best Q3 player if they only wanted to is absolutely, positively proposterous (no different than me claiming that the top Q3a player could be the fastest runner and the longest jumper if only that's what he wanted to do). Let me guess: a baseball player would automatically make a great chess player?
Sport, by the traditional definition, only includes "physical activity" so all those who complain that this isn't sport, just as in this thread, do have a valid point: By the traditional definition I will concede that neither chess nor Quake 3 are "sports" because there is a limited physical extertion required (then again, doesn't that exclude baseball?).
Having said that, they are mental (plus in the case of Q3 reflex wise) competitions that are extremely skill based. Whether we modify the definition of sport to include chess and Quake 3, or we make another word, the spirit of competition and the striving for excellence is the same. It is sad to see a jock like attitude on Slashdot of all places berating those people "sitting on their ass" because they aren't competing in the traditional sense. Sorry but I respect the guy who has the most frags more than I respect the guy who throws a metal ball or runs down a track: While both have little value in the real world, the former seems like more of an accomplishment to me.
I do have a problem with people changing textures or lighting levels and that does go against the idea of all players playing on equal hardware, though in this case all players had the option of equal modifications.
"It simply is not complex enough to warrant being a sport." ? How do you think you would do if you played these guys? Seriously? Q3A is easily as complex as running the 100 or jumping over hurdles, and as I mentioned it is not a game of luck (though like in all things chance can affect things, just as chance affects the wind in the throw of the javelin): The results are not random but are rather a ranking of those with the best reflexes and best strategy (or rather best combination thereof). If that isn't sport then I would like to know what is.
Of course if you're talking about team sports there are team variations as well: Play CTF and you'll quickly see that there are those that play as single individuals, but they quickly get beaten into oblivion by a team that plays as a team (just like in any team sport).
Re:Bad domain name...
on
Linux Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Funny
Agreed. BTW: Could you please stop picking your nose and wiping it under the desk? Viewers of the KGraci-Hidden-Cam have been complaining.
Anyone who has played Q3 (or any comparable game) knows that it isn't just "running around shooting people", but rather the game becomes incredibly finely tuned with extreme muscle control and mental reflexes needed to excel : Some of the best Quake 3 players are absolutely amazing when they're at the pinnacle of their game, and just as seeing a high jumper set a new record (pushing the human body further than ever before) is amazing, it's amazing seeing the reflexes/mind combination push these super-players.
For anyone to brush off this as being just a "game" whereas throwing a pole or moving your legs is "sport" is silly. As long as all competitors are using equal hardware, etc., this is absolutely sport and it is enthralling to watch the best of the best playing.
Sidenote -> The way, IMHO, that you can usually determine if something is truly a competitive sport or not is consistency: Do the same people generally come out near the top, with natural ascents up the ranks and down the ranks, or is it more of a hodge-podge random ordering at each event? In the former it is competitive sport, whereas in the latter it's just odds, yet it's amazing how many such "sports" exist as sanctioned.
@Home would then basically be running a relative of Carnivore, and imagine if every time I tried to look at your post @Home suddenly clamped the connection shut.
The logistics of something like that be MASSIVE, as normal stateful firewalling is simply saying "who connected to who and has there been any data in the last X interval?" Actually keeping track of the content of each stream, while as mentioned guaranteed to incide outrage on sites such as this, would be a massive undertaking for millions of users with millions of connections. Although on the "bright" side, once they have that in place they can then turn it on for connection dropping for keywords like "linux", "warez", "crackz", "porn", "drugs", etc.
The thing is this: They decide what they're going to offer, and the price at which they'll offer it, and then you decide if you'll pay it or not (or alternately continue to pay it), doing the voting with your dollars if need be. @Home isn't a government service and you can't pound your firsts and express moral outrage because they don't do things the way you want: Again they don't owe you, but rather they offer you a given service at a given price.
I hardly think it's MCSEs that are the culprits for the spread of this virus: Instead it's full of themselves, sure they know everything wankers who installed IIS to show how 31337 they are (the first step of most "MCSEs" is to remove all of the unnecessary ISAPI modules, which are pretty much all of them. So far the.ada and.printer extensions, which are used by probably
In effect, a ban on servers prevents citizens from competing affordably for so-called "mindshare" with big corporations and others who don't sweat the cost of dual redundant T3 connectivity.
You can get a webhosting account on any number of major services, each with multiple T3s/ OC3s/ SuperQuadMondoplexes, for
If I pay $50/month for a 256k pipe, and if I want to do my own personal development and want to be able to show others my site from work, or setup a private FTP so that I can grab files offsite, they sure as hell better not stop me.
Or what? You'll beat them up? They can do whatever they want, and if you don't like it you can look at the competitors (which in this case would be one of the many tetering on the edge of bankruptcy DSL providers). Let your dollars do the voting for you, but as the previous poster mentioned indignation is just sad: They don't owe you anything, and you know what the deal is every month that you pay the bill.
That's right: With DSL you have a direct peered T3 with every major network company. While it was rather expensive for the phone companies to drop a hundred or so T3s at every subscribers line, it obviously paid off due to the unshared bandwidth.
Slashdot Mirror
While I have noticed a huge uptick in the number of jobs which request Java experience (it's among the top), I personally have a lot of trouble adopting Java for projects because of three primary reasons:
-There are lots of nasty things about the language that are unintuitive and lead to sloppy code. If it weren't for the power of Sun and a couple of Sun partners such as Bea and IBM, Java would have been relegated as a poor attempt at improving C++ and would have been supplanted by better languages long ago. Hence Java's success is a VHS-type phenomena.
-The performance of Java on every JVM that I have tried has been horrible.
-Java is controlled by Sun. If someone fixed the numberous flaws of Java and created PowerJava, or some other variant, all of the religious nuts would flood Slashdot berating those "non-standard" crazies, and Sun would have the lawyers beating down their door.
Is there a list of advantages/improvements of the new version?
Especially enjoyed his nasty insult of Mr. Oliphant (whose work I'm not aware of) relating to penis size and sneezing. Anyways it's a great read for anyone who is curious.
The real competition isn't between vendors on the same medium (because really one would naturally think that the people that own the wires going to your house would likely have the possibility of being the lowest priced), but rather between different technologies: i.e. here in Ontario, like in most places in the States, we have ADSL and Cable fighting for the consumer's business, both backed by very large companies (the cable conglomerate and the telephone conglomerate), and now there is two-way satellite and in some areas high speed radio access.
We are on that long, scary road of analogies and straw-men arguing... ;-)
If Smith and Wesson sold weapons that were intentionally engineered to be convertable to full-autos, then yes they should up against in the wall. If Smith and Wesson set up shop on the corner of Gangsta & Hoodville and started selling guns called "The Killaz Choice" and "The Smoke 'em 10000" to drug dealers, and they marketed them to hold-up crews, and they knew that >98% of them were used in murders, then yes they should be held against the wall.
It is offensive when corporations hide behind laws and rights, and it is equally offensive when people hide behind rights to allow them to pursue anti-social activites: Saying "Gosh darnit, I'm just letting people share files!" doesn't wash when the overwhelming majority of users are using your site to trade copyright infringed material. See Napster as a great case in point.
The concrete evidence is absolutely, positively irrelevant (and indeed these guys are just as guilty if users of their site bought 100x as much music) : If the people who own the copyright on the music (or whatever) don't want it to be shared in that manner, then so be it: As the owners of the copyright they have the right to choose how they want their creations distributed.
I remember hearing a month or so ago about a huge virtual host with several hundred THOUSAND websites being hosted switched from Apache to IIS, and this was almost completely responsible for the Netcraft changes. Anyone remember anything about this?
I may be very, very wrong, however it was my impression that the "rendered" graphics of modern video cards are shortcut 3D images that are very, very unlike raytraced images: i.e. Quake3 looks nice, but it looks absolutely nothing like the stunning beauty of a Truespace or 3dsmax image (i.e. one is averaging surface point lighting, whereas the other is actually tracing the rays of light throwing shadows, umbras, etc). I though the Quadra cards were only really relevant for modeling (i.e. moving stuff around and such), but they still used an FPU for the real rendering.
In a nutshell this is saying "Someone said something, but it might be bogus, and the cycle speed really doesn't mean much anyways.". Alrighty then. This is like a "nothing to see here, move along!" type articles.
I applied to ATI in their driver development team once a long time ago, but alas they never responding (bastards!). ATI has, IMHO, pure crap drivers, and while I want to support them out of patriotism, the reality is that I encourage friends and coworkers not to get ATI cards because of that simple fact. From machines that spontaneously rebooted, to machines to BSOD'd when the screensaver became active: I would wager that a good portion of Microsoft's stability perception problem is actually because of ATI's incredibly poor driver quality (IMHO).
Quake 3 visually BRUTALIZES Unreal Tournament (UT looks like a Quake 2 engine with simplistic structures, etc.), and this is pretty much generally accepted. UT has much more weapon variety, and shipped with a lot more play modes, however feeling wise I liked Q3a a lot more: It feels like you're more in control and the response is ultra snappy, whereas UT felt sort of mushy to me.
Q3As big mistake is that it seemed to be released presuming a tonne of great mods would quickly fill the void in the gameplay (I spent many hours playing ActionQuake which is a game I absolutely loved, however I don't believe it was ever ported to Q3A).
Tomb Raider was the hardware "killer application", not Quake.
I have to disagree, although it depends on how you define "killer application". Tomb Raider might have reached more people, but Quake has driven hardware development since day 1.
I happened to be in sales (earning my wings) in the early days of 3d accelerators, and without a doubt the selling point for the new 3dfx cards (the original Voodoo) was Tomb Raider (it was the stock demo for anyone selling 3dfx cards): It was the reason 3d acceleration took off in the first place, and the rest is history.
I remember when Quake first came out: At the time I was a big fan of Duke3d, and the Quake technology demo came out. Personally I thought it looked like crap, but over time (and with the hardware) it developed into something visually amazing.
Throughout the history of time people have brought up an alternative to entrenched products, and naturally people ask the same question "Why should I switch?" While it's often seems like a no-brainer for the "salesperson", it really is a completely valid question that deserves a valid answer. If product A & B are functionally equal and today I am use to product A and product B's only advantage is that it's not product A, well then most people will say "thanks but no thanks". This is the problem that Linux faces on the desktop, and the simple reality is that saying that Microsoft might request the organs of your firstborn at some future point isn't enough to push most people to adopt something new.
This same opposition to change is the reason why Windows Media's format hasn't taken off: People are use to MP3s, and they already have their collection. Even with MS saying it's 1/2 the size for the same quality level, to most users that's barely adequate to make it worthwhile to change.
Congratulations to the OV team. While I haven't used it for a while, when I did it seemed quite nice.
Having said that what I currently use, which is MP3s, sound great and they work great, so why should I as Joe Consumer care about OV? What sort of license fees does the MP3 patent owner (Fraunhofer?) put on companies such as Winamp, or do they only charge MP3 ripper type products?
I guess my question is this: If I don't have a religious problem with patents, why should I care about alternatives if they're only as good as MP3?
i don't mean offense, but it seems really obvious you've neither 'thrown a metal ball' or 'ran down a track' in a seriously competitive way.
I would turn this right around and say that you've never been involved with or been a serious spectator in either competitive Quake 3 playing or a serious chess competition.
the people at the top of these fields practice many hours a day, through intense physical stress/injuries. the mental discipline it takes is absolutely incredible.
And Quake 3 players don't spend thousands of hours practicing and becoming experts at their game? Chess players often start their careers as young children to fully develop a brain that can make the leaps required for chess.
. and i wouldn't be shocked if there reflexes were far superior to most q3 players, as both of the activities you mentioned rely greatly on fast twitch muscle and body/eye coordination. if these people spent the same playing q3 as 99% of q3 players, they'd be better.
Wow that's quite a blanket assertion: The Quake 3 world is just waiting for the day that a 100m athletes comes over and wipes up the field. Sorry, but that is proposterous. There are millions of players who partake in computer gaming, and of those the best of the best of the best, with the best mental abilities (for the requirement) and the best reflexes, move to the top. This idea that "naturally superior" superhuman track and field athletes could be the best Q3 player if they only wanted to is absolutely, positively proposterous (no different than me claiming that the top Q3a player could be the fastest runner and the longest jumper if only that's what he wanted to do). Let me guess: a baseball player would automatically make a great chess player?
Sport, by the traditional definition, only includes "physical activity" so all those who complain that this isn't sport, just as in this thread, do have a valid point: By the traditional definition I will concede that neither chess nor Quake 3 are "sports" because there is a limited physical extertion required (then again, doesn't that exclude baseball?).
Having said that, they are mental (plus in the case of Q3 reflex wise) competitions that are extremely skill based. Whether we modify the definition of sport to include chess and Quake 3, or we make another word, the spirit of competition and the striving for excellence is the same. It is sad to see a jock like attitude on Slashdot of all places berating those people "sitting on their ass" because they aren't competing in the traditional sense. Sorry but I respect the guy who has the most frags more than I respect the guy who throws a metal ball or runs down a track: While both have little value in the real world, the former seems like more of an accomplishment to me.
I do have a problem with people changing textures or lighting levels and that does go against the idea of all players playing on equal hardware, though in this case all players had the option of equal modifications.
"It simply is not complex enough to warrant being a sport." ? How do you think you would do if you played these guys? Seriously? Q3A is easily as complex as running the 100 or jumping over hurdles, and as I mentioned it is not a game of luck (though like in all things chance can affect things, just as chance affects the wind in the throw of the javelin): The results are not random but are rather a ranking of those with the best reflexes and best strategy (or rather best combination thereof). If that isn't sport then I would like to know what is.
Of course if you're talking about team sports there are team variations as well: Play CTF and you'll quickly see that there are those that play as single individuals, but they quickly get beaten into oblivion by a team that plays as a team (just like in any team sport).
Agreed. BTW: Could you please stop picking your nose and wiping it under the desk? Viewers of the KGraci-Hidden-Cam have been complaining.
Anyone who has played Q3 (or any comparable game) knows that it isn't just "running around shooting people", but rather the game becomes incredibly finely tuned with extreme muscle control and mental reflexes needed to excel : Some of the best Quake 3 players are absolutely amazing when they're at the pinnacle of their game, and just as seeing a high jumper set a new record (pushing the human body further than ever before) is amazing, it's amazing seeing the reflexes/mind combination push these super-players.
For anyone to brush off this as being just a "game" whereas throwing a pole or moving your legs is "sport" is silly. As long as all competitors are using equal hardware, etc., this is absolutely sport and it is enthralling to watch the best of the best playing.
Sidenote -> The way, IMHO, that you can usually determine if something is truly a competitive sport or not is consistency: Do the same people generally come out near the top, with natural ascents up the ranks and down the ranks, or is it more of a hodge-podge random ordering at each event? In the former it is competitive sport, whereas in the latter it's just odds, yet it's amazing how many such "sports" exist as sanctioned.
@Home would then basically be running a relative of Carnivore, and imagine if every time I tried to look at your post @Home suddenly clamped the connection shut.
The logistics of something like that be MASSIVE, as normal stateful firewalling is simply saying "who connected to who and has there been any data in the last X interval?" Actually keeping track of the content of each stream, while as mentioned guaranteed to incide outrage on sites such as this, would be a massive undertaking for millions of users with millions of connections. Although on the "bright" side, once they have that in place they can then turn it on for connection dropping for keywords like "linux", "warez", "crackz", "porn", "drugs", etc.
The thing is this: They decide what they're going to offer, and the price at which they'll offer it, and then you decide if you'll pay it or not (or alternately continue to pay it), doing the voting with your dollars if need be. @Home isn't a government service and you can't pound your firsts and express moral outrage because they don't do things the way you want: Again they don't owe you, but rather they offer you a given service at a given price.
I hardly think it's MCSEs that are the culprits for the spread of this virus: Instead it's full of themselves, sure they know everything wankers who installed IIS to show how 31337 they are (the first step of most "MCSEs" is to remove all of the unnecessary ISAPI modules, which are pretty much all of them. So far the .ada and .printer extensions, which are used by probably
In effect, a ban on servers prevents citizens from competing affordably for so-called "mindshare" with big corporations and others who don't sweat the cost of dual redundant T3 connectivity.
You can get a webhosting account on any number of major services, each with multiple T3s/ OC3s/ SuperQuadMondoplexes, for
If I pay $50/month for a 256k pipe, and if I want to do my own personal development and want to be able to show others my site from work, or setup a private FTP so that I can grab files offsite, they sure as hell better not stop me.
Or what? You'll beat them up? They can do whatever they want, and if you don't like it you can look at the competitors (which in this case would be one of the many tetering on the edge of bankruptcy DSL providers). Let your dollars do the voting for you, but as the previous poster mentioned indignation is just sad: They don't owe you anything, and you know what the deal is every month that you pay the bill.
That's right: With DSL you have a direct peered T3 with every major network company. While it was rather expensive for the phone companies to drop a hundred or so T3s at every subscribers line, it obviously paid off due to the unshared bandwidth.