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Comment Ok for Front Office, less for Back Office (Score 1) 304

In our company, we are exploring the use of node.js / javascript as a substantial part of our development strategy. What most people tend to forget is that most enterprises really don't like to develop anything but buys everything out of the box, looking closely what their competition is buying and using. We don't develop CRM systems on our own, we don't develop a billing system, we don't develop any ERP like system. We buy SAP, Siebel, Microsoft Dynamics and other programs to do this. We are not an IT software development company, it is not our core business nor do we have experience enough in house to start these kind of risky projects.

However, what we will do, is "customise" and integrate the whole landscape of applications and have a single "online presence". In this area we do have a lot of development, consisting out of an enormous amount of relatively small changes. Most of these changes has to do with marketing campaigns, online web / applications and simply GUI or input validation logic, so to say the "Front Office" without much of business logic or processes. Most of these changes are temporary or very tailer made for a specific product and requirements will be altered during build... In the past, developers altered the "standard" back office applications for this, resulting in non-upgradable software and lots and lots of scattered code in ABAP, C#, Java, SQL and what else these applications uses. Just in case for these kind of changes, it is better to have this contained in one single environment. For this environment we had two choices: Java application server or Javascript Node.js. Both are sufficient for this kind of development. It is easier/cheaper to get Java programmers, however, since most of our changes are directly related to online/web stuff, most online developers do understand and know about javascript. Again, we didn't need the performance, en most of the changes are very, very simpel solved in a few lines of javascript using standard node.js functions and libraries. The only thing you have to be aware of is to choose one kind of framework and version & release system.
We have measured projects doing it the "java way" and doing it the "node.js way", en we came to the conclusion that node.js projects delivered faster results with same quality. Not that much, but more like 10 java design/coding/testing mandays is comparable with 8 node.js mandays.

The only issues we are facing is the availability of "real" javascript developers, keeping quality good enough and the terrible or often outdated documentation surrounding node.js libraries or components.

Piracy

Call of Duty: Black Ops the Most Pirated Game of the Year 5

Torrentfreak reports that after calculating download frequency for pirated copies of popular video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops has won the dubious honor of being the most pirated game of 2010. The PC version of the game was torrented roughly 4,270,000 times, and the Xbox 360 version was downloaded an additional 930,000 times. (The most pirated Wii game was Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Dante's Inferno somehow managed to accrue the most downloads of Xbox 360 games.) Fortunately for Activision, the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players have racked up over 600,000,000 man-hours of play time since the game's launch in early November.
Graphics

DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo 201

MojoKid writes "The PC demo for Codemasters' upcoming DirectX 11 racing title, Dirt 2, has just hit the web and is available for download. Dirt 2 is a highly-anticipated racing sim that also happens to feature leading-edge graphic effects. In addition to a DirectX 9 code path, Dirt 2 also utilizes a number of DirectX 11 features, like hardware-tessellated dynamic water, an animated crowd and dynamic cloth effects, in addition to DirectCompute 11-accelerated high-definition ambient occlusion (HADO), full floating-point high dynamic range (HDR) lighting, and full-screen resolution post processing. Performance-wise, DX11 didn't take its toll as much as you'd expect this early on in its adoption cycle." Bit-tech also took a look at the graphical differences, arriving at this conclusion: "You'd need a seriously keen eye and brown paper envelope full of cash from one of the creators of Dirt 2 to notice any real difference between textures in the two versions of DirectX."
Sci-Fi

Star Trek Game To Launch Alongside New Movie 82

Paramount announced yesterday that Star Trek D-A-C will be available for download for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC when the movie is released on May 8th. The acronym in the title stands for different types of gameplay: Deathmatch, Assault, and Conquest. It's an arcade-style game, with a solo mode as well as multiplayer modes that handle up to 12 players. According to Joystiq, "It's a top-down 3D space shooter that doesn't require a lot of hardcore gameplay experience to jump into, but it features a large amount of strategic gameplay that'll please hardcore gamers." Several screenshots have been released.

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