It has got to end, the heat is unbearable. I thought it was hot last year, but that was not a real heatwave, or at least that is what they are telling us now (although they called it a heatwave last year too, it seems it did not qualify).

During this heat a lot of people are losing their sanity and start attacking other people. It seems it is turning us all into zombies like in the 'Dawn of the Dead' movie (the old one, because everybody moves real slow in this heat).
We already had several shootings and traffic aggression is rising every day. My dear colleague even attacked our manager with a football this afternoon, truly amazing.

Our water supply is running out and in some cities they have to hand out water in bottles. At the same time we are no longer allowed to wash our cars, water our gardens or most other watery stuff. If you do, you can get a fine or even prison time. As you can imagine the Tom Cruise incident has caused serious controversy here, as precious water should not be used in pranks or spilled during these days.

You can help! Send as much water as you can to Belgium, we and our dry tongues will thank you.

Take a look at this, and follow the thread '1. Re: LAN failover (Maurice Peterse)'.

Now just imagine working with this guy, sheez! And no complaining, you asked for it!

I have been reading every now and then a few pages from Open Sources - voices from the Open Source Revolution from O'Reilly.

This book, from 1999, has some interesting bits on SCO (the text has been adjusted a bit, for the full story buy the book);

SCO' s OS is essentially all the have, and in their case, that's not good enough. What will SCO do?
In the beginning of 1998, SCO sent out a letter to its vast mailing list of users slamming open Unixes like Linux and FreeBSD as unstable and unprofessional. SCO eventually published a retraction on their web site.
In late 1998, SCO sent out a press release talking about how SCO Unix now has a Linux compatibility layer. The response was underwhelming.
SCO is in a unique position. They must, however, make a leap of faith. Instead of seeing Open Source as a threat.

Just funny, we should have seen it coming from miles away. The writing was on the wall, still it took us all by surprise.

Sony said that the PS3 HDD extension will come with Linux installed. First, this could be a pure marketing stunt by Sony, and secondly it doesn't mean we'll get a bash prompt (but an interface that runs on top of the Linux kernel) when powering on our playstation.

But imagine for once that Sony really delivers and gives us full access to PS3-Linux. With that they will turn the PS3 into what the XBOX is now, a hacker-lovable machine. The advantage is that the system is already open by default and you can go hacking straight away.

I'm sure the XBOX360 will get hacked as well, after a few months, or longer. But then we are just booting a kernel, no sound or gfx yet. Which will make it rather useless.
Sony should not fear indie game producers. Simply because it will be hard for them to top the commercial games. I don't think indie games are bad, but the production costs are much lower, and although they can have really good gameplay, the gfx and music/sound is not up to the same level.

I know people who have bought and XBOX simply for one reason; the media center software available thanks to the hackability of the device. Sony should keep its promise and deliver on this one and they will at least have all the geeks on their side.

The apple has fallen of the tree! Nah, nothing exciting, I say, good for them. I'm referring to Apple changing to Intel in the future.
Who says this is surprising? The never ever made it a secret that they have an x86 port of OSX running along their available PPC version internally, using a FreeBSD/Mach-UNIX as their core, which is highly portable. If they wanted, they could switch to something else again, in a few years, probably in a snap.
I have made a post on slashdot about why it might be a good time for Apple to switch, so I'm not going to repeat that here. What I would like to comment on is the fact that a lot of people are predicting the end of everything that is Apple. Can anybody tell me why it would be? Is there a reason to believe the x86 Macs will be bad or will OSX suddenly be less 'sexy'? They will still be Macs and if they would release models with x86 CPUs in the same case as G5 machines, the user will not even notice the difference.
'Oh, but it will not run PPC software, it will be hell.' - Is that many software on OSX using low level calls, directly accessing hardware so that it would be a problem running OLD software with the PPC emulator included on those machines? Will it be something a recompile won't be able to fix? How fast will the popular programs be ported/recompiled?
Let me tell you this much, I run Linux both on x86-64/32 and PPC (G3) and for Linux there is no difference, everything that runs on my AMD box runs on the PPC as well, except stuff like shockwave plugins and some media codecs. But guess what? You can be damn sure Apple will be taking care of those.
So Apple lovers worry not, in fact, it will be probably be a good thing (tm), even for you.

I don't know how old java is exactly, though I remember the first releases way back. They didn't teach it in school or the college I went to, until a good few years later. Still, bad things like this discussion have never stopped. The whole 3 page article is already summarized at the beginning; memory and speed are the big problems.

Really now, when it first came out, it was even more a problem then it is these days. Because everybody has plenty of RAM, but mid 90's I was stuck with 8 or 16MB max, and the CPU wasn't much faster as the first Pentiums just started to roll out the door. In those days, Java was even worse then it is today on those two points and still today perception hasn't changed much. That is the least you can say about the whole thing.

The most complete website I could find about total performance comparison of languages is The Computer Language
Shootout Benchmarks site, which not only takes a bunch of different tasks to perform, but also considers memory usage, cpu and amount of code lines into the test. Even more sweet is the possibility to select a large amount of languages to compare (against Java or something else).

As you can see, Java isn't that bad, according to these benchmark results (lies, damn lies and benchmarks), but talk to anybody who is not a Java programmer and I'm sure you'll get nothing but badmouthing about it. I'm not a Java programmer, and I can tell you it isn't my favorite language either. I prefer python, which, although should be slower then Java, feels so much faster. The cause of all this is the fact that Java is easy to pick up, but few really master this beast. It is not impossible to make really good software using Java (we are talking desktop here), and a really good proof of this is azureus. If only all Java apps where like this!

The solution? Well, should there be any? the market always has a natural selection. On the desktop I don't really see Java taking off, if it hasn't happened after all these years, it's never going to happen, excluding a few apps now and then. But in business software it is already the defacto standard, and it will be long before this will change, and for some reason nobody gives a damn about memory and CPU usage there.

Boy oh boy, the last few months have gotten me addicted to 2 of the newly available MMORPGs available. The first one is City of Heroes while the other is the well known World of WarCraft. CoH won several awards the year it was released in the US, now ofcourse WoW is getting its share of awards as well. I have been playing both on and off, so I can share some of my views with you, if you don't like RPGs stop reading now and avoid possible brain damage.

First point of discussion are the virtual worlds you reside in. Now in sheer size It is difficult to tell because I have only explored so much in any of the two. And it seems that the maps are smaller in WoW, ofcourse dungeons and cities are huge, but in CoH the dungeons can be quite big as well. The maps in WoW might seem large but they are mostly not that big, once you get into a new area it is quickly explored and your whole map is discovered. While in CoH there is only one city divided by districts, which are really huge and when you have no transportation powers at the start of the game it is frustrating because it takes so long to get somewhere. Getting the whole map explored is also not as easy as it sounds, some places are even so hard to discover you get awards (badges) to do so. The quality of the virtual world graphics is best in WoW, the environment and dungeons are rather dull in CoH, but at the same time it never stands in your way or is really ugly, lets call it simple but functional. This is valid in both worlds, except I found the player characters in CoH to be much better then WoW. There is almost an infinite number of possibilities to change the look, which is really nice.

This brings us to the character development, which is one of the important parts of playing RPGs. I received CoH one month in advance because some delays at amazon, where I had ordered both games. So at the beginning I had only one game to play, and got a nice head start with CoH. I always though my character would me more developed and higher level in CoH, which turned out not to be true. Character development in WoW is fast, XP is received constantly and when you are 'rested' it even speeds up the whole leveling process. This is good, because at each lvl-up you get something new to play with, new powers, enhancements or possibilities to wear better gear etc. As everybody knows by now, WoW doesn't know debt while all other MMORPGs use this particular system. I'm not sure yet if I like this or not, a lot of times you will get yourself into a dangerous situation and if you don't make it, you don't lose anything (except 10% of equipment endurance). So where is the danger? The worst that can happen is some downtime/delay before you can resurrect again. While in CoH people are still punished for getting them self in a bad situation and must plan their attacks better, play more as a team (or at least try) or fear to build up debt upon debt upon debt.

As versatile as the look of the characters is in CoH, at least as different are the possibilities for adding super-powers. The creators clearly had in mind that each player should be different and although some powers are very popular, it is again almost impossible to have a hero with exact the same powers, just like in the comic books. In WoW you can differ your character mostly by specializing in certain talents and the equipment you carry, but this does not even begin to compare the diversity of possibilities in CoH.

Anybody playing CoH will agree that in the lower levels endurance is a real problem. During fights you will always run out of endurance, which each class uses to perform special powers, it is the same thing as mana in fact. This problem can exist in WoW as well, except they have developed a genuine system for fighting classes like the warrior where you have to build up rage to perform your attacks. Thus preventing, that type of class at least, to run out of mana. I feel like this should be incorporated into each future MMORPG, as it makes more and more sense after playing like that for a while.

Missions are done differently in CoH then WoW, that is my impression at least. WoW will allow you to have up to 20 open missions at a time, you can in fact mix story lines and do each mission in the order you like the most or is most convenient at that time. While playing in CoH I tend to stick to one contact providing me mission after mission and following the whole storyline in one go, certainly gets you more into the game at some points.

When WoW was released, it was marketed as the 'quick' MMORPG where you could jump in for an hour and do something. I don't see it that way, the only straight-on game is CoH. It is made simple, there are no extras but contains enough to play it for short sessions or hours on end. WoW is really a time sucker if you want to get something done, and there is too much to do and maintain or take care off. The only thing that is correct is that levels advance pretty quick, at least in the beginning they do.

Both games get updates at regular times. CoH has already doubled in size compared to the first version, and we all know blizzard won't sit still adding new features and other things to WoW, just like they do with all their other games.

So which is my favorite MMORPG? Hard to say, they are both very good games. And perhaps my preference still goes out to CoH. It seems the people who play that game are more friendly and willing to help each other (just like real heroes), you can be sure you will be adding a lot of people to your friends list in CoH. I never had that in WoW, there are parties but they contain no spark. It is fun playing WoW because the game itself is really well made and a lot of people are playing that game, and in fact all my real friends play it too.