Slashback: Facebook Un-Ban, Exploding Laptop, FFXI II 113
Kent State Facebook ban reversed. Corvaith writes "Just a few days after it was originally noted that Kent State University had banned athletes from posting on Facebook, the Kent Stater announced that the ban was reversed. From the article: 'The athletic department had previously expressed concern about athletes' personal information being available to the public, allowing for possible stalking situations. They were also concerned about athletes displaying inappropriate information on their profiles.' But, in the end, they 'had a change of heart after reviewing the privacy measures available on Facebook.' Athletes must now lock their profiles to friends only."
Exploding laptop old news to Dell? Anonymous writes "CRN is reporting that Dell had about a dozen reports of burned laptops before they announced last year's battery recall. The recall was launched in response to a exploding laptop caught on film at a Japanese conference. Dozens more cases popped up with apparently severe overheating, melted cases, etc., according to the report."
XM moves to dismiss RIAA suit. mikesd81 writes "Apparently, XM is asking a judge to dismiss a a copy right law suit brought by the recording industry. The law suit is over the ipod-like device that can store up to 50 hours of music. XM Satellite said the 1992 Home Recording Audio act protects it from being sued over its $400 handheld device. From the article: 'In a court filing, XM Satellite said the 1992 protections represent Congress' efforts to insure that the powerful recording industry would not be able to restrict the right of consumers to record songs that are broadcast over the radio or stifle innovation by chilling the development and use of the latest recording technologies.'"
J2EE death greatly exaggerated. Peter writes "A recent Burton Group report has stated that the Java Enterprise Edition platform is 'dying due to its complexity and lack of suitability for SOA.' Major vendors supporting JEE have responded with rebuttals, stating that the complexity has arisen due to customer needs and that it is well positioned for companies to build SOA solutions on."
Square's next MMOG not FFXI II. Despite some of the rumblings around the net, it appears that the next MMOG to come out of Square will not be a sequel to the popular FFXI. While Square may have shot down this rumor, the question still remains, what MMO are they working on?
XM?? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:XM?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only time will tell...
P.S: Sorry for all the analogies, won't happen again.
Re:XM?? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:XM?? (Score:2)
Gratuitis Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] quotes:
Re:XM?? (Score:1)
Re:XM?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:XM?? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:XM?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:XM?? (Score:1)
Yes, the restriction is that you have to dock it to record anything. You can make 'live' recordings. Of course lugging a brick around isn't very useful either.
It depends (Score:2, Insightful)
(1) It requires digital recorders to use the Serial Copy Management System (SCMS), which prevents digital dubbing beyond one generation (section 1002(a))
(2) Imposes a "royalty" on digital recorders (section 1004(a))
I don't know what the SCMS is, but I suppose if XM can show that it implemented some sort of SCMS system (or if it can demonstrate that the device is not able to tra
Re:It depends (Score:2)
You don't know what it is because SCMS killed DAT (digital audio tapes) which were supercool but ended up crippled and expensive beyond salvation.
You do realize that iTunes, XM, and other dist mediums all give money to RIAA right?
Re:XM?? (Score:2)
Re:XM?? (Score:2)
Well the creator starting asking for money for the program. This generated a little conroversy in the area. Not a lot, but enough for the R
Re:XM?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:XM?? (Score:2)
Re:XM?? (Score:2)
Square and MMOs (Score:2, Interesting)
Thank God. While I did play some of the MMOFF and enjoyed it this is not what Square does best. I hope they return to their roots and release a game with innovative game elements and a great story line. Oh, and for the love of God, NO DANCE SPHERES.
World of Mana? (Score:2)
Re:World of Mana? (Score:2)
Re:World of Mana? (Score:1)
If I was to take a guess at them adapting any of their existing franchises to MMO, I'd pick either Dragon Quest for the brand recognition (at least in Japan) or Kingdom Hearts, which has been stupidly successful and has pretty much got the largest and most MMO-ready world.
Re:World of Mana? (Score:2)
Re:Square and MMOs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Square and MMOs (Score:3, Interesting)
Also the next MMORPG should be based on Crystal chronicles, there isn't anyone alive who could tell me CC wouldn't make for an original MMORPG with some intresting elements like having each race focus on different goals. For example you could use people who keep the roads clear and safe for caravans, you'd have to travel
Re:Square and MMOs (Score:1)
Re:Square and MMOs (Score:5, Funny)
Facebook Ban (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Adblock (Score:2, Interesting)
This place is too paranoid...
Re:Adblock (Score:2)
Re:Adblock (Score:2)
Re:Adblock (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Facebook Ban (Score:4, Informative)
No ads, no problems.
Re:Facebook Ban (Score:2)
Re:Facebook Ban (Score:2)
Carry on.
Virg
Re:Facebook Ban (Score:2)
Re:Say NO to RMS (Score:4, Insightful)
I think everyone else is way ahead of you.
Is there another operating system for the Linux kernel?
Re:Say NO to RMS (Score:2)
The GPL and the FSF are the direct result of an intellectual exercise to determine the best way to get to the end goal of freedom-to-modify code/Software. You may call that self-righteous and moralizing, I call it brilliant. RMS may seem a little too passionate for some, but that's because he is passionate, idealistic, and uncompromising in his beliefs. If you disagree with his beliefs, that fine. But saying, The FSF doesn't need him, bullocks I
Athletes are representatives... (Score:3, Insightful)
when you choose to be an athelete and get your schooling comped for the trouble, you take the public persona that comes with it.
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:3, Insightful)
How many student athletes receive full or partial athletic scholarships? You don't give up your rights when you become a student athlete.
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2)
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2)
You just know that you have to behave with decorum and that any misdemeanors could be made public.
I have a friend who's father & brother are a famous professional athletes. The family has always been aware that anything they do that is a bit risque could appear in the public eye any time.
The rule of thumb that seems to have been forgotten in recent years by some of Englands professional footballers is "if you want to have gang sex in a hotel room, try
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2)
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2, Insightful)
Public institutions (government, states, colleges, and anything in between) don't get to abridge the Bill of Rights by virtue of making functions optional or by invitation. The Supreme Court has placed the line with the "compelling interests" test. It is very unlikely that even a somewhat conservative court would agree that
Bill of Rights (Score:2)
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2)
no, its apparently worse than that. you give up many of your rights by merely becoming a college student these days.
google around - there are so many stories of the 'pc police' stopping free exchange of communication and ideas across the campuses today.
not to mention the net.filtering that the schools are doing by PANDERING to the *AA.
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2)
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2)
My sister was the only one on her basketball team without a full scholorship, and it was a very non-sportsy school.
College sports are very difficult to participate in, and only the most dedicated or masochistic would do the practice schedule to warm the bench (if you didn't get any scholorship, you are not starting).
I am sure there are schools that are exceptions, but in general college athletes get some type of scholorship.
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:1)
I fail to see the difference here. So trash talking around the school, in other public places, and in school newspapers is ok, but once it gets on the internet it is no longer alright? It's also ok if I'm not an athlete and I say "Team X from college Z licks my nuts" online, but an athlete
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2)
What happens in Cleveland stays in Cleveland! (Apologies to Las Vegas and Tijuana)
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2)
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:1)
Whoosh [sonymediasoftware.com].
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2)
"We're really hoping he doesn't get jail time - we don't think he should, that'd not be good for him - his start to the season has been exceptional and he's kicked 2 goals in the first blah blah".
Or really, "he's betraying his teammates and friends, being a common cri
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Athletes are representatives... (Score:1)
J2EE (Score:5, Interesting)
For one, we use primarialy redhat-based linux installs for desktop and server, including Fedora, RHEL, and Centos. Sun Java, for reasons that I've never fully understood (something to do with the licensing, and it makes my brain hurt to figure it out) cannot be distributed with Linux distros. Or, that's what I thought, but then I heard that Mepis comes with java installed and working. See? Wierd already. But, at any rate, when you install a RH-based Linux install, you get the gnu java. Since I support University professors, most of them have been using Sun's java, and the GNU has (appearantly) enough querks that they don't like using it (same with the g77 fortran, but that's a different story).
So, at that point, you need to install Java. Which one? Nobody knows. People want to be able to use java plugins in their web browser (more on that in a sec), they want to be able to compile java, and they want to be able to run java apps in some sort of java environment. I think. But which one do you install? Java_jdk, Java_Jre, or Java_j2ee? Some of them include functionality replicated in the others, but there's no like clear-cut FAQ on the java website to tell you which (like, a simple four-column by X row table with the distros across the top and the expected functionality down the left side, and X's or O's, or green and red squares, to indicate which versions include which functionality). If you independantly read the descriptions, it's a LOT of buzzwords, and very short on substance.
Then, there's the "where does it install" question. They distribute as binaries, so you just kind of chmod u+x file;
Then, you've got to figure out which one to run. "which java" can yeild any one of 50 outputs, and that's if you don't let users set their own shells and rc scripts. Not to mention, you may end up chasing symlinks down for an hour to find the exact binary (/usr/java ->
Then, you have to get it so the plugins run in the web browser. How do you do this? Well, you
ON TOP OF THAT, on o
Re:J2EE (Score:5, Informative)
2. Here's what you need to know about the different versions. JDK/Java SDK is for development. Comes with Javac. You need this for J2EE and for development. JRE is included in the JDK or is available as a standalone download. The JRE is the runtime env, it only includes the VM. J2EE is a specification, you almost never want the J2EE install from Sun since, by itself, it doesn't give you anything. You need an application server, such as Websphere, Geronimo, JBoss, Weblogic, etc. The application server includes the J2EE libraries. It does not always include a JDK.
3. You can always do what I do when you install the sun JDK: move the whole directory so that it is where you want it. AFAIK on Linux it doesn't install any files outside of its directory. Install as many JDKs as you like, then have your users set the JAVA_HOME env variable and add $JAVA_HOME/bin to the path.
As for why you couldn't find documentation for this... I'm not sure if there is any, I thought this stuff was common knowledge in the Java world (but if you don't devel in java, I guess you can't be expected to know this).
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
Yeah, exactly. You've hit on all the major points.
I will look into that redhat thing. THAT would save a lot of headaches. I don't particularly like redhat, and they do some things a bit wonky, but at least it's relatively consistant. Also, the suggestion about $JAVA_HOME is brilliant, I can't believe I haven't thought of it. I'm probably going to do that tomorrow.
If you go back and read:
JDK/Java SDK is for development. Comes with Javac. You need this for J2EE and for development. JRE is included in th
Re:J2EE (Score:3, Insightful)
----
Yeah, exactly. You've hit on all the major points.
I will look into that redhat thing. THAT would save a lot of headaches. I don't particularly like redhat, and they do some things a bit wonky, but at least it's relatively consistant. Also, the suggestion about $JAVA_HOME is brilliant, I can't believe I haven't thought of it. I'm probably going to do that tomorrow.
If you go back and read:
JDK/Java SDK is for development. Comes with Javac.
Re:J2EE (Score:1)
For the novice/sysadmin.
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
Just be glad you dont have to install entrprise software that relies on a specific version of thhe JDK. I have some machines setup with various different versions of Java for different app servers just to keep the applications happy.
Re:J2EE (Score:1, Interesting)
How the hell are you supposed to figure this out? Beats me. The best way to do it appears to be to complain on a forum about how complicated J2EE is and how stupid it is to require all this complexity just to run so
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
It's exasperating and I wonder why people seem to love Java so much. Not to mention that nearly every Java program I
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
The last time I looked at Sun's source code for Java (the real source code, not the cut-down version you get in the JDK download), I noticed that Sun had written a preprocessor so that they could use a #ifdef-style syntax to work around the annoying differences between the various java versions.
Of course they never made it public, because it would conflict with their religion. But I can't see how you could cope with maintaining code compatible with all the different java versions in any other way.
The
Re:J2EE (Score:1)
This is very interesting. I've worked on various preprocessors for java (amongst others one that takes regular expressions as literals), and I'd be very interested to see this. Could you drop us a link ?
Re:J2EE (Score:1)
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
Re:J2EE (Score:1)
System.out
System.err
They work just fine, and exactly like you'd expect. Now whether the developers used System.err is a different story. Personally, these two items should never be used in production code. (There are exceptions, but start with saying never, and then they'll hopefully only be used when they should be used)
As for logging in general, does anyone use anything but Log4J [apache.org]? Yes, I know a lot use commons-logging, why still boggles my mi
Re:J2EE (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll do my best to address your concerns
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
I can't help you with the questions as to why certain versions of Java are suited for certain things. I just repeat what I'm told. Remember, these are University professors - the more brilliant they are, the touchier they get about changes to their environment.
Most of the problems are from a sysadmin point of view, yes. It's just more complicated since I don't develop in java - I'm not sure how to test it, exactly, to see that everything is working. So, at first, I'd install the JDK and
Re:J2EE (Score:1)
Re:J2EE (Score:1)
As an ubuntu user y would say the problem is in the GPs distro, but its kind of a big one, it surely deserves better support.
(you may wanna try one of those Blazing Lures next time
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Re:J2EE (Score:2)
1 and 2 are not rocket science, 5 minutes of googling will tell you the difference between them. 3 is true (can be more of a pain on
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
The 1.4.2_something class loading (or was it class serialization?) issue you are talking about was a specific bug, bugs happen, all software has bugs. (hell, remember when 1.4.1_10 or thereabouts had a bug that would hang the installer, so you couldn't upgrade from it?)
Most of the time when you need multiple versions of java it's because of problems with the software using it, not the runtime itself. A good practice is to always build your softwa
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
And honestly, if it's part of your job to support java, you don't seem to be doing too well at it.
Emphasis on the "part of". I have to support pretty much everything. My official title is Computer Systems Engineer, Linux Support or something along those lines. I support labs of 60+ machines running linux, a remote login load balanced cluster of 20 machines, and am partially responsible for the department's infrastructure. I support servers, desktops, workstations, clusters, etc. I build, repair, and ma
Good Java/J2EE advise (Score:1)
IMHO there is nothing fundamentaly wrong with Java, only sometimes in ways of using it.
My setup under Linux used to be something like:
In (K)ubuntu you c
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
Fair enough. I was just pointing out that the stuff you mention is pretty basic, and most of your problems are to do with your highly heterogeneous and demanding environment. For most people those issues don't even register, so "why would ANYONE code in it" is pretty dramatic, given the evidence.
(ugh, CVS, now there's something where the maintenance actually, physically hurts)
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
No, the point of the diatribe really boils down to this:
Java is supposed to be a free download, but Sun do not allow Linux distributions to package the download. Everyone who wants to use the JDK must download it themselves.
Linux distributions employ experts to sort out all the sort of mess that the original poster described, so that when you install the distribution, it "just works". But Sun won't allow these experts to distribute their code. Each individual user must sort out the mess for themselves
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
Speaking of which - does Sun's new "as close to open source as you can get without being open source" licence allow for bundling with distros? Or does it depend on the distro now, the more "pure" ones won't bundle it, but they generally can?
As for the mess, I support java on about a dozen servers and 100 or so desktops, yes it does get annoying at times (best example was when we tried bundling a specific jre with InstallAnywhere for one of o
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
The "impure" distros like Suse - the ones you pay money for - have always packaged Sun's java. I can only suppose that they paid money to Sun to make the problem go away.
The acid test is whether Debian are bundling it, since that is the distro that is the most obsessive about keeping true to the faith and to the letter of the license agreements. I haven't looked to see what they are doing.
Recently added to Debian! (Score:2)
Since lifting these restrictions a couple of months ago, Sun's java has made it into Debian's Universe repositories. It's even in the multiverse repository for the latest version of Ubuntu. Installing is now as simple as:
apt-get install sun-java5-jdk
or
apt-get install sun-java5-jre
And you're done. If Sun properly open-sources Java like
Re:J2EE (Score:2)
I really don't understand what's the problem.
You download the appropriate version (whatever client wants) and unpack it.
Then you copy it to /opt or /usr/local, whatever you prefer.
Then client sets JAVA_HOME=/opt/java-1.5.0 and PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH
Re:And I have a Mac. (Score:2)
Again, I point out. THIS ISN'T THE CHOICE. IT'S MY JOB TO SUPPORT IT ON LINUX.
That's why they hire me. They want to run bumfuck linux distro, and then when stuff doesn't work, they want me to fix it.
People saying "Oh, just use a Mac", or "If your code breaks between releases, it's your fault" aren't recognizing that while this all may be true, it won't change the situation! I have to deal with it as is!
I love my job, but Java gives me headaches!
Don't worry the BOB nature of JEE brings SOA (Score:2)
really? (Score:4, Funny)
Really? So now you lose your scholarship if you don't use Facebook? Or is it just really late and my mind is working way too literally?
--
This is a joke. I am joking. You have been joked with.
Oh, really... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not surprised, since there is a good chance that out of the thousands and thousands of laptops they sell, a couple bad batteries could be a fluke, and you need a bigger sample to see a trend... It's hard to fault them for this unless you make money off page impressions...
On the other hand, if this were an Apple story it would have made the front page as it's own story, and would be parroted across the web. Funny how that stuff goes.
PMG DELL KNEW!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Star Trek? (Score:1, Funny)
Mod parent up. (Score:1)
What's that smell? (Score:3, Funny)
Lady switching off her laptop: Are there a lot of these kinds of explosions?
Dude: You wouldn't believe.
Shocked lady: Which computer company do you work for?
Dude: A major one.
Re:I have an idea... (Score:2, Funny)
Needs a tad more work though. I recommend going for four sylable words next time.
Re: Kent Sate Athletics (Score:3, Informative)
I think they're plenty big enough to have sports teams.
Re: Kent Sate Athletics (Score:2)
Headline-grabbing those guys are.