... By not supporting complex types or lambda expressions Java becomes a more straightforward language, but the cost is that Java APIs are generally more complicated than equivalent APIs in other languages. Take a look at almost any library written in Ruby and contrast the API to an equivalent library in Java; 9 times out of 10, the Java API will a large number of methods and classes that the Ruby version can sidestep through the use of blocks and dynamic classes....
I think a good way of explaining this is to say that the Java way of doing things compartmentalizes the complexity of a system. This is great from a damage control perspective, but makes it very difficult for adding new features, because for that you need to be able to see the big picture.
Ideas that are "forced into a complex object oriented structure" don't produce maintainable code. It produces a codebase with a very good self-defense mechanism: there's so much to grok about how those ideas are being awkwardly expressed that you really have to sit down and study the code before you know where to begin modifying it. That tends to prevent coders inexperienced with that codebase from making major changes that don't break things in really obvious ways. Thus, code maintenance all but ceases to be a misnomer, as it is reduced to a fairly systematic process. This is in contrast to more dynamic languages, where code can often be written concisely enough that you can understand what a file does by reading just that file, and you can implement dramatic changes in behavior without correspondingly large changes to a large number of files.
I do agree with you that Java's standard library is very good, very massive, and very mature, and it's the centerpiece of a large, stable software ecosystem. This formula works for a lot of applications, but not nearly as many as it gets applied to. There's definitely something to be said for spending a bit more money to hire programmers smart enough to use a dynamic language well, because your development team will then tend to be faster and more flexible, and thus able to fix bugs or implement new features faster than the competition.
Note that the above is not intended to disparage Java itself so much as the typical way it is used in large projects conducted by large companies. A brilliant programmer can still do amazing things with Java, though as another poster has alluded to: why do it in plain Java when you can use a more dynamic, expressive JVM language and still get the benefits of all those third party libraries?
Ok, I was mistaken about the market/revenue issue. However, in order for Dell et al to have 10 times the volume of Apple in the $1000+ market, even if you assume that the average price of a Dell/etc. in the $1000+ segment is exactly $1000, that would require Apple's average sale price to be $90000, when in reality it almost certainly is under $3000. If we assume that Dell et al's average sale price in the $1000+ market is $1000 and Apple's is $3000, then Apple will be outselling the competition by 3 to 1, which translates to a market share of 75%.
Sure, there are a variety of Symbian phones that add up to more market share than the iPhone, but they're not the homogeneous platform that the iPhone is, what with there being a variety of user interfaces you have to target. The same goes for Blackberries and Windows Mobile, though to a lesser extent. There's no doubt that the iPhone version of an app is the binary that can be installed and run on the most physical phones owned by consumers. For other operating systems, you end up having to produce several different builds and a lot of the infrastructure to get the right app on to the phone.
Why iPhone specific? Because the iPhone is the single most popular smartphone for personal use, and is much easier to develop and deliver apps for than most other camera phones. Eventually, USAA might make a similar app for the Pre or some Blackberries, but the market of potential users is probably too small to justify the expense.
You also need some kind of loan with USAA (it can be a credit card) so that they can instantly debit your account to return the money if a check turns out to be fraudulent.
I've never had any trouble using Deposit@Home with dozens of versions of Firefox and Safari on my Mac, though I'll admit I've never tried it under Windows. It looks to me like the Windows version tries to interface directly with the scanner, whereas the Mac version is just a Java applet that lets you upload 200dpi grayscale jpeg images. That would explain a failure to work with 64-bit IE.
So, you're saying you wouldn't do your banking with USAA because they're willing to trust that you, as their customer, won't attempt check fraud? Regardless of the fact that I use USAA, I prefer my bank to think I'm more trustworthy about depositing checks than, say, a grocery store.
USAA has allowed customers to scan and electronically deposit checks for quite a while. The only new thing here is the iPhone app. Still, it's pretty cool, especially compared to mailing checks in. (For those who don't know, USAA doesn't have physical branches. They were established by and for members of the military, and they've pretty much always been pioneers of remote banking, first by mail and phone, and now over the internet.)
Apple all but owns the high-end consumer market, with reports of up to 90% market share for computers selling for $1000+. Incidentally, this is the only market segment Apple is trying to go after, and they're doing a great job of it. They may not look like much, but that's because their goal is maintaining profit margins, not world domination.
When you add in the competitive effects Apple's designs have had on hardware manufacturers and on Microsoft's OS design, it is clear that Apple has done far more than dent the market.
The drives don't have to be idle, just the portion being garbage collected. Flash drives typically consist of many independent memory chips united by a single drive. If the block being erased by the GC is on a chip that isn't being read from at that time, then the controller can issue the erase command without affecting the latency of any request from outside the drive. It would take a very full, random workload (and a very fast disk interface) to be able to detect the garbage collection, and even then, it couldn't be worse than the current method of erasing on an as-needed basis.
In discussions of rigorous statistics, the word "implies" is typically used in the strict mathematical sense, where it is essentially the same as "proves". In this context, an unambiguous way to convey your point would be to say that correlation suggests causation.
They're hypothesized causes. You can't make any valid claims about the correlation between causes when you can't actually test for either one, so while it may be true that conflating the two terms is improper, the OP still managed to be wrong, too.
My understanding is that Alice 3.0 is supposed to fix this, by allowing you to completely eschew the drag-and-drop programming if you want and drop down to the underlying Java. However, I haven't actually tested this, because I've yet to install the beta. Regardless, there seems to be plenty of evidence that Alice 2 can be an effective introduction to programming, particularly for younger and less nerdy students. (My own experience using Alice 2 to introduce high school students to programming supports this.) Even if Alice doesn't teach you what a compiler and linker are, it does teach you about looping, event driven programs, object oriented programming, and many other important programming concepts. I've seen more than a few students go from zero programming experience to a full understanding of the difficulty of implementing collision detection and a physics engine, in the span of a week. In my opinion, getting somebody hooked so quickly that they're ready and motivated to start learning about complex data structures after a week is pretty cool.
Presumably, in using it strictly as a themeing engine, the version of WebKit used wouldn't incude a JavaScript interpreter by default, since only the CSS layout and rendering code is needed. Without JavaScript, what attack vectors do you expect to remain?
Presuming that ethnicity equates to a particular culture is racist, actually. If someone makes an assumption about your attitudes and beliefs based on your race, what else can it be?
Statistically valid?
If you're trying to target your marketing to a specific culture, it's often a lot easier to collect data on race and risk offending the 15% that aren't part of the expected culture, rather than try to collect meaningful data about cultural identification. There are no value judgments in a process like this, no offense is intended to anybody, and it does not arise out of hate. Thus, it doesn't fit under any useful definition of "racism". The only way it can be racist is if you generalize the concept of racism to be "anything not completely color-blind", at which point it is no longer at all connected to bigotry.
It's estimated that more than 12% of the global population was watching or listening to live broadcasts of the first moon walk. Or, to put it differently, about 4 times as many people as there are currently households in the US with a television. That market share would today be equivalent to about 850M people. Compare that to the roughly 500M people who speak English as their native language.
Why? It's not like Comcast is going to be intercepting all DNS traffic and routing it through their spammy DNS servers. Only the people who get their resolvers from DHCP (ie the people who don't know enough to care) will be affected.
No smartphone can do what my field guide GPS can do. (Give me elevation maps... oh the iphone cant do that? sowwwy.)
Sure it can -- log into google maps, and use the elevation maps feature.
Google Maps' terrain feature doesn't include anywhere near enough data to be useful for even day hiking. You can't zoom in far enough (the best you can get is 40 foot contour intervals), it doesn't include trails or the smaller streams that are key water sources on multi-day backpacking treks, and you can't pre-download the maps to your smartphone so that you can use them once you get out of range of the network.
Besides, as others have said, the battery life of a smartphone (especially one that has to download maps on the fly) isn't anywhere close to what a handheld hiking-oriented GPS receiver can get. Nor can they work as well under tree cover, because the antennas are far smaller than what standalone GPS units have.
A smartphone is only good for casual road navigation. For any off-road use, or even serious on-road use, it is a mere toy.
Businesses generally don't have privacy concerns. They have concerns over liability arising from privacy problems. Who wouldn't want to shift that liability over to a bigger corporation with more privacy expertise and more lawyers?
Slashdot Mirror
... By not supporting complex types or lambda expressions Java becomes a more straightforward language, but the cost is that Java APIs are generally more complicated than equivalent APIs in other languages. Take a look at almost any library written in Ruby and contrast the API to an equivalent library in Java; 9 times out of 10, the Java API will a large number of methods and classes that the Ruby version can sidestep through the use of blocks and dynamic classes. ...
I think a good way of explaining this is to say that the Java way of doing things compartmentalizes the complexity of a system. This is great from a damage control perspective, but makes it very difficult for adding new features, because for that you need to be able to see the big picture.
Ideas that are "forced into a complex object oriented structure" don't produce maintainable code. It produces a codebase with a very good self-defense mechanism: there's so much to grok about how those ideas are being awkwardly expressed that you really have to sit down and study the code before you know where to begin modifying it. That tends to prevent coders inexperienced with that codebase from making major changes that don't break things in really obvious ways. Thus, code maintenance all but ceases to be a misnomer, as it is reduced to a fairly systematic process. This is in contrast to more dynamic languages, where code can often be written concisely enough that you can understand what a file does by reading just that file, and you can implement dramatic changes in behavior without correspondingly large changes to a large number of files.
I do agree with you that Java's standard library is very good, very massive, and very mature, and it's the centerpiece of a large, stable software ecosystem. This formula works for a lot of applications, but not nearly as many as it gets applied to. There's definitely something to be said for spending a bit more money to hire programmers smart enough to use a dynamic language well, because your development team will then tend to be faster and more flexible, and thus able to fix bugs or implement new features faster than the competition.
Note that the above is not intended to disparage Java itself so much as the typical way it is used in large projects conducted by large companies. A brilliant programmer can still do amazing things with Java, though as another poster has alluded to: why do it in plain Java when you can use a more dynamic, expressive JVM language and still get the benefits of all those third party libraries?
The application that comes to mind first for me is using this technique to capture realistic bump maps for use in 3d graphics.
Ok, I was mistaken about the market/revenue issue. However, in order for Dell et al to have 10 times the volume of Apple in the $1000+ market, even if you assume that the average price of a Dell/etc. in the $1000+ segment is exactly $1000, that would require Apple's average sale price to be $90000, when in reality it almost certainly is under $3000. If we assume that Dell et al's average sale price in the $1000+ market is $1000 and Apple's is $3000, then Apple will be outselling the competition by 3 to 1, which translates to a market share of 75%.
Sure, there are a variety of Symbian phones that add up to more market share than the iPhone, but they're not the homogeneous platform that the iPhone is, what with there being a variety of user interfaces you have to target. The same goes for Blackberries and Windows Mobile, though to a lesser extent. There's no doubt that the iPhone version of an app is the binary that can be installed and run on the most physical phones owned by consumers. For other operating systems, you end up having to produce several different builds and a lot of the infrastructure to get the right app on to the phone.
Why iPhone specific? Because the iPhone is the single most popular smartphone for personal use, and is much easier to develop and deliver apps for than most other camera phones. Eventually, USAA might make a similar app for the Pre or some Blackberries, but the market of potential users is probably too small to justify the expense.
You also need some kind of loan with USAA (it can be a credit card) so that they can instantly debit your account to return the money if a check turns out to be fraudulent.
I've never had any trouble using Deposit@Home with dozens of versions of Firefox and Safari on my Mac, though I'll admit I've never tried it under Windows. It looks to me like the Windows version tries to interface directly with the scanner, whereas the Mac version is just a Java applet that lets you upload 200dpi grayscale jpeg images. That would explain a failure to work with 64-bit IE.
So, you're saying you wouldn't do your banking with USAA because they're willing to trust that you, as their customer, won't attempt check fraud? Regardless of the fact that I use USAA, I prefer my bank to think I'm more trustworthy about depositing checks than, say, a grocery store.
I'm pretty sure that the IRS and the various state treasuries still issue more checks each year than old people.
USAA has allowed customers to scan and electronically deposit checks for quite a while. The only new thing here is the iPhone app. Still, it's pretty cool, especially compared to mailing checks in. (For those who don't know, USAA doesn't have physical branches. They were established by and for members of the military, and they've pretty much always been pioneers of remote banking, first by mail and phone, and now over the internet.)
Apple all but owns the high-end consumer market, with reports of up to 90% market share for computers selling for $1000+. Incidentally, this is the only market segment Apple is trying to go after, and they're doing a great job of it. They may not look like much, but that's because their goal is maintaining profit margins, not world domination.
When you add in the competitive effects Apple's designs have had on hardware manufacturers and on Microsoft's OS design, it is clear that Apple has done far more than dent the market.
The drives don't have to be idle, just the portion being garbage collected. Flash drives typically consist of many independent memory chips united by a single drive. If the block being erased by the GC is on a chip that isn't being read from at that time, then the controller can issue the erase command without affecting the latency of any request from outside the drive. It would take a very full, random workload (and a very fast disk interface) to be able to detect the garbage collection, and even then, it couldn't be worse than the current method of erasing on an as-needed basis.
In discussions of rigorous statistics, the word "implies" is typically used in the strict mathematical sense, where it is essentially the same as "proves". In this context, an unambiguous way to convey your point would be to say that correlation suggests causation.
They're hypothesized causes. You can't make any valid claims about the correlation between causes when you can't actually test for either one, so while it may be true that conflating the two terms is improper, the OP still managed to be wrong, too.
My understanding is that Alice 3.0 is supposed to fix this, by allowing you to completely eschew the drag-and-drop programming if you want and drop down to the underlying Java. However, I haven't actually tested this, because I've yet to install the beta. Regardless, there seems to be plenty of evidence that Alice 2 can be an effective introduction to programming, particularly for younger and less nerdy students. (My own experience using Alice 2 to introduce high school students to programming supports this.) Even if Alice doesn't teach you what a compiler and linker are, it does teach you about looping, event driven programs, object oriented programming, and many other important programming concepts. I've seen more than a few students go from zero programming experience to a full understanding of the difficulty of implementing collision detection and a physics engine, in the span of a week. In my opinion, getting somebody hooked so quickly that they're ready and motivated to start learning about complex data structures after a week is pretty cool.
Presumably, in using it strictly as a themeing engine, the version of WebKit used wouldn't incude a JavaScript interpreter by default, since only the CSS layout and rendering code is needed. Without JavaScript, what attack vectors do you expect to remain?
Presuming that ethnicity equates to a particular culture is racist, actually. If someone makes an assumption about your attitudes and beliefs based on your race, what else can it be?
Statistically valid?
If you're trying to target your marketing to a specific culture, it's often a lot easier to collect data on race and risk offending the 15% that aren't part of the expected culture, rather than try to collect meaningful data about cultural identification. There are no value judgments in a process like this, no offense is intended to anybody, and it does not arise out of hate. Thus, it doesn't fit under any useful definition of "racism". The only way it can be racist is if you generalize the concept of racism to be "anything not completely color-blind", at which point it is no longer at all connected to bigotry.
It really isn't that big of a leap to implicitly assume that intelligence is normally distributed.
That's a problem with or without digital signing.
It's estimated that more than 12% of the global population was watching or listening to live broadcasts of the first moon walk. Or, to put it differently, about 4 times as many people as there are currently households in the US with a television. That market share would today be equivalent to about 850M people. Compare that to the roughly 500M people who speak English as their native language.
Why? It's not like Comcast is going to be intercepting all DNS traffic and routing it through their spammy DNS servers. Only the people who get their resolvers from DHCP (ie the people who don't know enough to care) will be affected.
No smartphone can do what my field guide GPS can do. (Give me elevation maps... oh the iphone cant do that? sowwwy.)
Sure it can -- log into google maps, and use the elevation maps feature.
Google Maps' terrain feature doesn't include anywhere near enough data to be useful for even day hiking. You can't zoom in far enough (the best you can get is 40 foot contour intervals), it doesn't include trails or the smaller streams that are key water sources on multi-day backpacking treks, and you can't pre-download the maps to your smartphone so that you can use them once you get out of range of the network. Besides, as others have said, the battery life of a smartphone (especially one that has to download maps on the fly) isn't anywhere close to what a handheld hiking-oriented GPS receiver can get. Nor can they work as well under tree cover, because the antennas are far smaller than what standalone GPS units have. A smartphone is only good for casual road navigation. For any off-road use, or even serious on-road use, it is a mere toy.
That EIZO monitor doesn't do color. It's a grayscale monitor for looking at medical images like x-rays.
Businesses generally don't have privacy concerns. They have concerns over liability arising from privacy problems. Who wouldn't want to shift that liability over to a bigger corporation with more privacy expertise and more lawyers?