Don't write games in Java idiots.

Yeah, nothing good can come of it.

When are people going to grow up and admit MS has released several top-of-the-line products recently? IE is getting much nicer, especially with 9, and Windows 7 blows away any other OS available, except for certain *nix distributions for specific reasons. Likewise, if you would actually give the .NET framework and its associated languages a try you may find yourself impressed with the capabilities.

Surely you jest. Just because IE 9 and Windows 7 are vastly better than their horrid predecessors does not make them top-of-the-line. And .Net is just Java with a flood of feature creep and syntactic candy. As Microsoft has done so many times before, they took something successful and copied it, while completely overlooking the reason for its success: Java's strength was and is in its lack of syntactic fluff. It makes the code take slightly longer to write but dramatically and mercifully faster to read and maintain.

As far as I can work out, this is a follow on from a game previously released 14 years ago? is this correct? So who will care about its release apart from some very old-skool gamers? I guess it's just a kind of in-joke for old slashdot fans these days?

It's a sequel to one of the best games ever made. That's why everyone who remembers it cares.

More than that, we know that 3DRealms, who was responsible for the predecessor, created much of the content for this one, so there is ample reason to believe Duke Nukem Forever will be as fun as Duke Nukem 3D. Most gamers understand that what makes a game great isn't the polygon count, it's the gameplay. And Duke 3D was both a lot of fun and had excellent level design. If you can stand to play an FPS that lacks free-look, you should try it; you'll quickly understand what the big deal is.

We wouldn't continue to deride Duke Forever's epic tale of mismanagement if the previous game hadn't captivated our interest as much as it did.

Companies have no interest in paying more for people more skilled in software engineering. They want people who can "just write code." The medium-term to long-term consequences of writing unmaintainable, disorganized, undocumented code are almost never recognized by management. And even if they were recognized, we live in a short-term-profit world, where it is standard practice to run a project or company into the ground by releasing a shoddy product which holds together just enough to avoid lawsuits.

A company who values older developers is a company who values the quality and long-term viability of its products. Good luck finding one of those.

The .NET platform is leaps and bounds ahead of the Java platform in nearly every way.

When you're older and you've done tons of code maintenance, especially maintenance of code written by others, you'll realize Java's simplicity and lack of "features" are what make it superior. No language can guarantee maintainable code, but certainly having fewer means to write heinously complicated code betters one's chances. Syntactic sugar rots productivity the way cane sugar rots teeth.

Yeah, I know, I just fed a troll....

How nice of them. They apologized for calling Linux a cancer.

Still waiting for an apology for the OOXML atrocity. In fact, it's going to take a lot more than a few contributions and nice words to make me put OOXML and its enormously dirty dealings in the past.

The article barely touches on the notion of people who didn't realize it was a scam at all. It's obvious to us technical types, but I doubt it's obvious to non-technical people.

Most retail Windows PCs are loaded up with obnoxious adware that nags at every login. I got a brand new PC from Staples last year which had a MacAfee nagger installed in the startup sequence, and while I was eventually able to disable it, it took more than one try and considerably more effort than just one or two clicks. If it was nontrivial for me to banish, I have to believe non-technical users would just give up.

On top of that, anti-virus is pretty low-level, as software goes, so how many non-technical people will even know that it's not doing anything after they pay for it?

Okay, I see your point. Too much of the software supporting the web is not Unicode-aware.

Slashdot isn't the only site where I've had to make a conscious effort to avoid non-Latin-1 characters, because I fear it will break the underlying software.

With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue.

To what "bad unicode support" is the submitter referring? The Web has excellent Unicode support. Every browser supports just about every BMP Unicode character I can throw at it (except IE in Windows XP, but even that does at least a fair job).

As everyone's pointed out, emulators have already covered the preservation of things like Star Raiders.

What really needs preservation are (relatively) newer games buried by copyright holders. Games like "System Shock 2," "KISS Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child," and the PC version of "Turok 2: Seeds of Evil," all of which are no longer published and cannot be bought brand new anymore, leaving only eBay and warez as viable sources.

Reading the article, I see that Verizon is against this, so I'm probably for it.

I especially grimaced when I read this part:

[Verizon's top lobbyist said] "Rather than attempting to make the new world of broadband fit into the regulatory scheme of the old telephone world, the FCC should acknowledge that this is an issue Congress should address."

That's more transparent than usual, isn't it? In case it's not, I'll translate: "How are we supposed to have free reign to let America's infrastructure steadily decay, if regulation comes from someone other than the politicians we bought?"

Because of what they've encoded in the Private Use Area block at code point U+E0F2. Check STIXv1.0.0/Glyphs/STIXNonUnit.otf.pdf in the zip file to see it, and check the last link in the summary for the character's name. I hope that gets folded back into the Unicode Standard someday....

I just tried a couple quick tests of two irritating shortcomings which I had remembered off the top of my head: the <object> element and 'inherit' as a CSS property value.

They actually do work. So I retract my complaint. I can only offer the meager defense that I tried those things many times as various IE versions appeared over the years, including in recent years. But clearly not recently enough.