Another semester down

Well in another week I will be one semester away from recieving my first degree in Computer Engineering. The only thing is that apparently I’ve been studying about it for four years and know one really seems to know what the degree is all about. I mean seriously Electrical Engineers are normally hardware troubleshooters/designers and Computer Science majors are either developers/testers, so you’d think that Computer Engineers are the happy middle right? Well after going through the motions all I have to say is that is a damm good question. I know a lot of people who are about to graduate as Computer Engineers and have no idea what their going to do or what company really needs a Computer Engineer. I think of all the majors this seems to be one of the more vague degrees one can get but you do straddle the line between Electrical Engineers and Computer Science majors often, but you never really focus on anything specific and the only scary thing is that when applying for a job your not sure what the hell your suited to do, at least based on your degree. In any case I got lucky and decided to specialize in software which took a lot more effort than I wanted. The only kind of sad thing is that for those who don’t know what to do right away may be forced into graduate school. At least until they figure out what the hell they want to do, what an education system, its not like I have anything better but thats just my two cents.

New iTrip..

This past Thanksgiving weekend I got a iTrip for my trip back home, by the way it’s a good little device for those long drives, but the signal is kind of weak. In either case I went over the unofficial apple weblog and saw this cool little hack to help boost that little transmitters signal. You can check out the hack here .

Two cents on Xbox 360 and Sony

Okay with in the last two weeks, just about every other post has dealt with either the Xbox 360 or Sony’s DRM software. I was going to do another week in review but decided to put in my two cents on the issues. So let’s start off with the new Xbox.

This shiny little box will cost you a pretty penny with all of the options, during its initial weeks, but speculations about supply shortages has generated a lot of additional buzz about the new platform and at least seems to have created a large demand for a next-generation console that only a few months ago only a small few were truly exited about. Now I know all about the specs and how everything will have the ability to look that much better, especially in HD; but the bottom line is that the game developers are the only ones who should really care about these new next-generation platforms, yes it’s nice to have a potentially cheap new multi-processor computer, but this is a gaming platform. So why should game developers be pretty much the only ones who care about the console specifications? Well simply put their making the games, hence they have direct control over how well it runs and looks on these new consoles. so why anyone makes a big deal about the hardware just seems dumb to me. Okay on that note, these consoles, at least in the case of the Xbox, are hoping to become more home media machines, meaning it can stream media content from your computer and other things, in general its a great idea and was one of the main reasons to mod the original xbox. The problem is their not quite their yet, why? Not enough people use their xbox’s as a media device, this is where Microsoft can really gain some ground, but we’ll have to wait and see. The main thing that will prove the new Xbox 360’s success is games, just like every other console out there if the good games aren’t on xbox no one is gonna care about it even if they can’t get one.

Now for the Sony topic which quite frankly I’m tired of reading about, but would like to comment on. Yes, what they did was wrong in almost every way. Now let me clarify that statement, there is nothing wrong with protecting one’s own content, what is wrong is using poorly designed software to protect it. Don’t think so? If you release software to the public, in a final release, you should be accountable if it creates vulnerabilities and can do harm to another computer system other companies do; especially if that piece of software damages systems when you try to remove it, the “rootkit” software released to the public by Sony contained such software that has potentially compromised many systems. So what did they do? Well after a lot of media attention, they’ve started to fix the problem by re-calling CD’s and to some degree apologize for their actions. I for one really hope Sony, learns from this and starts to be more consumer friendly and starts producing better products that don’t compromise the consumers trust. The sad thing is that the damage has been done and it doesn’t seem like Sony has learned anything from this except to not get caught next time or have a better way to contain the situation. In the end this has tarnished Sony’s image but probably not for long, since most people aren’t really concerned with things like “rootkits” unless it breaks something their currently using. Which is a shame since Sony really needs to be held accountable for their actions.

Digg the new Slashdot?

Okay so Wired has this posting about the growth of Digg.com and comparing it to the popular technology news site Slashdot. It looks like their setting up a battle of the technology news sites or something; in either case both sites have posts about the article so what does this all prove? Wired is slashdot and digg resistant, no seriously thats got to be a lot of hits, bottom line Slashdot has been around for years but tends to be slow on posting new articles consistently but its well edited. While digg has its community doing its posts and has a user ranking system, but their post tend to need refinement. So if you don’t want to weed out your own articles then stick with Slashdot otherwise try the fast unrefined Digg.

Microsoft Bit

Quick bit on Microsoft and its latest news

Windows Live – looks a lot like google personal homepage, first of all no this isn’t an operating system, its a customized portal page. They use a similar AJAX interface that google does, so what’s the big advantage now ? We’ll I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Check it out here

Visual Studio 2005 – Release date coming up (Nov. 7) Yay one of Microsofts most robust/usefull products finally gets an update. The betas we’re pretty good and showed off a lot of the new features of the new framework. Check out the press release for more info.

XBOX 360 – no HD-DVD? Gizmodo has a posting how the yet to be release XBOX 360 probably won’t support HD-DVD for games, um okay I’ll bit but one has to ask why would a company that has publicly supported HD-DVD, not try to push it with their products.

Web based Microsoft Office Beta – signup here http://www.microsoft.com/office/officelive/default.mspx, it has the potential to be really cool. Yes, they’ve had the ability to do this for a while, especially with outlook for anyone whose used Exchange should know. This is the one web service Google doesn’t currently offer, but then again technically Microsoft hasn’t launched this yet.

Online Linux Desktop

For all you KDE fans out there looking for a network desktop hosting service check out ComsmoPod.com . You get your own personal desk space to create documents and save them on a remote server, the service is currently free and requires a connection client which can be downloaded from there site.  KDE.News   has the interview article which goes over a few things about the setup and cost.

Sauce Boss

Last night I went to Downtown Disney with a bunch of friends to see this blues guitarists named the Sauce Boss and I have to admit he puts on a good show. For those of you haven’t seen or heard of this guy he’s actually a really good performer, great stage presence and he feeds you for free, hmmmmmmmmm …… gumbo. In any case check out his site for more information.

.NET Framework 2.0

It looks like with the new version of Visual Studio just a stones throw away, Microsoft has released its second version of it’s .NET framework. The updated framework includes tons of updates to the popular development API including additional tools for web application development among a whole bunch of other improvements which can be found by checking out the developer site.

Talking Pac-Man?

I was looking at a post on Kotaku and it looks like Pac-Man will say his first words in the new Pac-Man game. Apparently there is a back-story to all the dot-eating and ghost chasing. In either case, this just seems like another attempt to reinvent something that was just fine the way it was.

Java references

WARNING: This just a little rant about the Java programming language so if you don’t know what the hell that is or care I suggest skipping this article.

A few hours and a lot of caffeine later I have finished my first incursion into programming in Java with out some one standing over my shoulder smacking me up the head for doing something stupid. Need less to say it was an interesting experience, now I’ve been coding in C# for the better part of a 2 years now and was told that this transition should be easy and it was sort of. The sort of part is basically why I’m going on about this little rant, in writing my little application I wanted to reference a primitive type basically things like integers, booleans, ect, in a function except as far as I can tell Java won’t let me do that, it only passes objects by reference and even then it doesn’t really do that; it passes a pointer to the object. First of all this is a big difference that no one bothered to inform me of and I thought that the guys who did Java were all object oriented nuts that made everything an object, apparently not in this case. After looking around for information on why this is the case I found a somewhat weak argument about how it makes the language too complicated or something. First of all what’s so hard about the concept of the value stays changed? Fundamentally higher-level programming languages are basically tools that help make the development process easier, so that they can simplify basic functionality so you can create more sophisticated applications. Okay just for the sake of argument let’s say it complicates things too much, I personally don’t see it that way but I’ve said my piece, how does this help in development? From my point of view it doesn’t.

So far I’ve found that the only real work around for this is to either encapsulate your data in a custom class or design the method call to return a state; this only works if you only need one referenced value otherwise encapsulation seems to be the only way to go. Now don’t get me wrong I don’t hate the Java language, I’m just frustrated with it, if someone can give me a good explanation of why I would gladly shut up, but until then I’ll be smashing my head on my keyboard the next time I want a simple little reference.