If you only wanted to cite Indiana, then there was no reason to reference Snopes...
Sure there was...it was my source for the Indiana story. There's no "factual inconsistancy"; the only *fact* involved was that I relied on Snopes for the Indiana item, so they got the attribution. I wasn't about to go get two other sources for it; t'was good enough to rely on to back/refute the Heinlien story--which, after all, came from a work of fiction. Henlein is famous for telling *almost*-true tales; one reason his work has such verisimilitude.
In one instance, a computer system owned and operated pursuant to a service for the city operated by our company in a city water resulted in the county taxing our company for the water tower (which was city property).
Time for a note to the city: "The county says we own the water tower now that our box is 'attached' to it. Help us clarify this issue with them or you'll receive an invoice from us for lease payments on your use of 'our' water tower from the time the computer was attached, sufficient to cover our tax bill...and then some."
The Snopes article specically concerns Alabama, not Indiana, although it does make mention of the 1897 Indiana House decision, which fortunately died in the state's senate.
I cited the Indiana bill because it was probably the real-world basis for the the Heinlein conceit. That there's a version of the urban legend involving Alabama is irrelevant.
Do you live in Indiana or something? Or did you just want to get into the thread that badly?
How do you tax a revokeable roight-to-use as property?...Maybe they can tax the right to vote, and other abstractions as well.
No more outlandish than the idea that an algorithm or a business method, or a gene sequence can be property. Of course, that's pretty outlandish.
Heinlein fans among us will recall a passage in Stranger in a Strange Land describing a Tennessee statute setting the value of pi to be exactly 3. But Snopes tells us it was apparently the Indiana House of Representatives who unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi.
I have yet to see the politician who can resist a brand new source of revenue to pocket simply because "it's a bad idea" or "it makes no sense".
I guess to each his or her own when it comes to the heavy-weight IDEs.
True dat.
However here's one last attempt to defend Eclipse. Since it is free I haven't really had a problem using it in jobs where the "official" IDE is JBuilder or something else.
And since I have a personal IDEA licence, it's just as free as Eclipse as far as my clients/employers are concerned.
How could someone who is so right about SWT (Swing, like democracy, isn't perfect but it is better than the alternatives) be so wrong about IDEs:-) Eclipse is free, cross-platform, and much better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick
Now that's damning by faint praise. "Better than JBuilder"? Joy.
If you've never tried jEdit, perhaps you can see your way clear to forgiving me for avoiding such sharp sticks in the eye. If you can see past the stick, that is.:-)
I don't mind feauture bloat so much if it stays out of my way. But in Eclipse it doesn't--IMHO Eclipse lacks the "conceptual integrity" we've known is important since before Brooks gave it a name in "The Mythical Man-Month". "It's free" isn't a reason to turn a blind eye (maybe the one with the stick) to its flaws.
Also, Eclipse *is* an SWT app, and inherits all *those* problems.
My own toolset is: jEdit for tactical use, with
IntelliJ IDEA as a strategic WMD,
suitable for surgical strikes on large legacy code bases while causing limited collateral damage. Add to this SQuirreL for mucking about in the DBMS. yEd is handy for diagramming things. All kinds of things.
In fact I usually keep a copy of jEdit running *alongside* IDEA to use as a lightweight file system browser, Beanshell framework, and GUI tool for the grepping of things ungrokable by IDEA. All these tools will run in any Java GUI environment without sweating how SWT will run on Platform X. And they're all free, (except for IDEA...if you're willing to run beta code, you can get that free too).
"Grepping the ungrokable"... I like the sound of that.:-)
As big a fan as I am of open source software, Eclipsoids drive me batty. Some software is worth buying if you have the cash available, and I think IDEA is a perfect example.
But the original poster specified "programming as a hobby", and jEdit should be perfect for that.
If you listen carefully, you'll notice that the word 'Firefly' isn't said at all in the film.
"Ensign: We got a pos on a retinal--man carrying her out is Malcolm Reynolds, captains a Firefly-class transport ship 'Serenity'. Bound by law five times..."
It's in the script. I'll check my DVD when it gets here this week.
Java sucks big ass sweaty donkey balls. I've finally been forced to use it...
Which is what we usually hear from people who must be forced to use it. Use of diction like "shedding all preconcieved biases aside" is somewhat indicative...:-)
Sad to hear an obvious Browncoat say SWT is "shiny".
It is no such thing.
SWT is a non-solution to a non-problem. If you can't figure out how to use Swing properly, you won't be any better off with SWT, which a non-platform-portable portation of an old Smalltalk API.
Eclipse is almost mostly harmless if you're only coding Java as a hobby. It is rather resource-intensive. But if your involvement is that casual, consider jEdit: small, lightweight, very functional, with plug-ins available for most common tasks. And free.
On a happier note, the Serenity DVD came out today. Talk about shiny....;-)
I don't think keyboard use is the source of most of this...it's much more due to pointing devices. Switching from mouse to trackball has been very helpful to me.
I happen to like the Register very much...it's been a part of my daily scan for many more years than there has been a Wikipedia. But because I'm familiar with it, I also know a bit about the people who write it, and the point of view from which they write. I factor this in when reading it.
It's not all that hard to do the same with Wikipedia.
What terrifies most main-stream media about these new communications channels is that they represent new competition. It's comical to watch my local metro daily newspaper try to react to the blogosphere by running their own blogs and podcasts.
By the way, while having nested parenthetical clauses probably made it difficult for a non-native English speaker to follow, what I meant to say was essentially "Wikipedia scares the mainstream media cross-eyed"...an idiom meaning "the mainstream media are very much afraid of Wikipedia [and other new communications spaces online]".
I wasn't literally calling them "cross-eyed", just saying that having new forms of competition challenges and frightens established media outlets, largely because of the threat to their business models.
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've never seen any serious developper that could tell me he was able to make Java code flawlessly run on every plateform.
Quite a straw man there. Very few real "developpers" will claim to make *anything* run "flawlessly" on even one "plateform". Come back and share your opinion once you're able to write a "flawless" English sentence.
With a parochial attitude, it's easy to introduce an unintended platform dependency. But with a little care about platform issues (especially where access the filesystem is concerned), Java runs smoothly across OSX/Windows/Linux/Solaris/OS400/Mainframes.
If you want to make that comparison, Wikipedia is to encyclopedia as Register is to news.
Which may explain while the Register feels compelled to slag them.
Wikipedia, for all it's flaws, is vastly more successful than the Register is. Wikipedia scares the mainstream media --which in this context includes (beleive it or not) the Register--cross-eyed.
If you don't understand how Wikipedia is produced, and by whom, you're unlikely to be able to judge its reliability. Of course the same is true of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the New York Times, CNN, DailyKos, moveon.org, FreeRepublic and Little Green Footballs.
People, put your nose out and go visit your neighbours. Thank you.
Might want to wait until the riots are over, though. Otherwise your experience might be "shockingly out of context".
Slashdot Mirror
So here's more detail elsewhere.
If you only wanted to cite Indiana, then there was no reason to reference Snopes...
Sure there was...it was my source for the Indiana story. There's no "factual inconsistancy"; the only *fact* involved was that I relied on Snopes for the Indiana item, so they got the attribution. I wasn't about to go get two other sources for it; t'was good enough to rely on to back/refute the Heinlien story--which, after all, came from a work of fiction. Henlein is famous for telling *almost*-true tales; one reason his work has such verisimilitude.
In one instance, a computer system owned and operated pursuant to a service for the city operated by our company in a city water resulted in the county taxing our company for the water tower (which was city property).
Time for a note to the city: "The county says we own the water tower now that our box is 'attached' to it. Help us clarify this issue with them or you'll receive an invoice from us for lease payments on your use of 'our' water tower from the time the computer was attached, sufficient to cover our tax bill...and then some."
The Snopes article specically concerns Alabama, not Indiana, although it does make mention of the 1897 Indiana House decision, which fortunately died in the state's senate.
I cited the Indiana bill because it was probably the real-world basis for the the Heinlein conceit. That there's a version of the urban legend involving Alabama is irrelevant.
Do you live in Indiana or something? Or did you just want to get into the thread that badly?
How do you tax a revokeable roight-to-use as property?...Maybe they can tax the right to vote, and other abstractions as well.
No more outlandish than the idea that an algorithm or a business method, or a gene sequence can be property. Of course, that's pretty outlandish.
Heinlein fans among us will recall a passage in Stranger in a Strange Land describing a Tennessee statute setting the value of pi to be exactly 3. But Snopes tells us it was apparently the Indiana House of Representatives who unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi.
I have yet to see the politician who can resist a brand new source of revenue to pocket simply because "it's a bad idea" or "it makes no sense".
I haven't heard near the hype about Ruby and Python that I heard about Java.
Then you haven't been listening in the right places. Ruby is at about the same hype level that Python was at in 2001.
And from what I'm able to see, for about the same reasons.
I guess to each his or her own when it comes to the heavy-weight IDEs.
True dat.
However here's one last attempt to defend Eclipse. Since it is free I haven't really had a problem using it in jobs where the "official" IDE is JBuilder or something else.
And since I have a personal IDEA licence, it's just as free as Eclipse as far as my clients/employers are concerned.
How could someone who is so right about SWT (Swing, like democracy, isn't perfect but it is better than the alternatives) be so wrong about IDEs :-) Eclipse is free, cross-platform, and much better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick
:-)
:-)
Now that's damning by faint praise. "Better than JBuilder"? Joy.
If you've never tried jEdit, perhaps you can see your way clear to forgiving me for avoiding such sharp sticks in the eye. If you can see past the stick, that is.
I don't mind feauture bloat so much if it stays out of my way. But in Eclipse it doesn't--IMHO Eclipse lacks the "conceptual integrity" we've known is important since before Brooks gave it a name in "The Mythical Man-Month". "It's free" isn't a reason to turn a blind eye (maybe the one with the stick) to its flaws. Also, Eclipse *is* an SWT app, and inherits all *those* problems.
My own toolset is: jEdit for tactical use, with IntelliJ IDEA as a strategic WMD, suitable for surgical strikes on large legacy code bases while causing limited collateral damage. Add to this SQuirreL for mucking about in the DBMS. yEd is handy for diagramming things. All kinds of things.
In fact I usually keep a copy of jEdit running *alongside* IDEA to use as a lightweight file system browser, Beanshell framework, and GUI tool for the grepping of things ungrokable by IDEA. All these tools will run in any Java GUI environment without sweating how SWT will run on Platform X. And they're all free, (except for IDEA...if you're willing to run beta code, you can get that free too).
"Grepping the ungrokable"... I like the sound of that.
As big a fan as I am of open source software, Eclipsoids drive me batty. Some software is worth buying if you have the cash available, and I think IDEA is a perfect example.
But the original poster specified "programming as a hobby", and jEdit should be perfect for that.
I didn't remember that being said when I saw it in the theaters, and just got done watching the DVD and it isn't said.
:-)
That's a shame...I was hoping it would at least be a "deleted scenes" extra.
I fear this means we won't get to see the "Inara teaches the girls how to kiss" scene either. How sad.
"They've gotta wrestle. It's a law or something." --MST3K
"I'll be in my bunk." -- Jayne
Two words: Battlestar Galactica.
Of course, Serenity was *in* BG.
see: http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=2&t=15563
If you listen carefully, you'll notice that the word 'Firefly' isn't said at all in the film.
"Ensign: We got a pos on a retinal--man carrying her out is Malcolm Reynolds, captains a Firefly-class transport ship 'Serenity'. Bound by law five times..."
It's in the script. I'll check my DVD when it gets here this week.
If you still have your balls and haven't turned sissy, then the only choice is vi in an xterm...
:-)
I'm sure the ultimate authority on cojones is to be found posting as a AC on Slashdot.
There's just so many out there who seem to be using balls for what brains are meant to do...
Java sucks big ass sweaty donkey balls. I've finally been forced to use it...
:-)
Which is what we usually hear from people who must be forced to use it. Use of diction like "shedding all preconcieved biases aside" is somewhat indicative...
Sad to hear an obvious Browncoat say SWT is "shiny".
It is no such thing.
SWT is a non-solution to a non-problem. If you can't figure out how to use Swing properly, you won't be any better off with SWT, which a non-platform-portable portation of an old Smalltalk API.
Eclipse is almost mostly harmless if you're only coding Java as a hobby. It is rather resource-intensive. But if your involvement is that casual, consider jEdit: small, lightweight, very functional, with plug-ins available for most common tasks. And free.
On a happier note, the Serenity DVD came out today. Talk about shiny....;-)
Unfortunatly the only thing inferior to a typical undergrad CS student's social skills are his programming skills.
I don't think keyboard use is the source of most of this...it's much more due to pointing devices. Switching from mouse to trackball has been very helpful to me.
I happen to like the Register very much...it's been a part of my daily scan for many more years than there has been a Wikipedia. But because I'm familiar with it, I also know a bit about the people who write it, and the point of view from which they write. I factor this in when reading it.
It's not all that hard to do the same with Wikipedia.
What terrifies most main-stream media about these new communications channels is that they represent new competition. It's comical to watch my local metro daily newspaper try to react to the blogosphere by running their own blogs and podcasts.
By the way, while having nested parenthetical clauses probably made it difficult for a non-native English speaker to follow, what I meant to say was essentially "Wikipedia scares the mainstream media cross-eyed"...an idiom meaning "the mainstream media are very much afraid of Wikipedia [and other new communications spaces online]".
I wasn't literally calling them "cross-eyed", just saying that having new forms of competition challenges and frightens established media outlets, largely because of the threat to their business models.
I've never seen any serious developper that could tell me he was able to make Java code flawlessly run on every plateform.
Quite a straw man there. Very few real "developpers" will claim to make *anything* run "flawlessly" on even one "plateform". Come back and share your opinion once you're able to write a "flawless" English sentence.
With a parochial attitude, it's easy to introduce an unintended platform dependency. But with a little care about platform issues (especially where access the filesystem is concerned), Java runs smoothly across OSX/Windows/Linux/Solaris/OS400/Mainframes.
If you want to make that comparison, Wikipedia is to encyclopedia as Register is to news.
Which may explain while the Register feels compelled to slag them.
Wikipedia, for all it's flaws, is vastly more successful than the Register is. Wikipedia scares the mainstream media --which in this context includes (beleive it or not) the Register--cross-eyed.
If you don't understand how Wikipedia is produced, and by whom, you're unlikely to be able to judge its reliability. Of course the same is true of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the New York Times, CNN, DailyKos, moveon.org, FreeRepublic and Little Green Footballs.
Does your comany have enough emplyees to write a spell checker? You'va could make that your next project easilly.
Only because prior to 1938 he did not have the means. Maybe you didn't mean to infer otherwise..
"Imply", not "infer"
January 5th: 20th anniversary of the Grammar Nazi Party.
Among neo-Nazis, "88" is a codeword for "Heil Hitler"
Among radio amateurs, "88" is a code word for "love and kisses". In communications, context is everything.
If you read it really fast, try not to pay too much attention, and throw in a bit of dyslexia plenty of sense.
You might not even notice sentences that no verb.
t's easy to say hire local, but when you put an ad in several papers in the area and get zero resumes from experienced people, you just can't.
Erm...experienced developers read newspapers?
I bet you were watching for resumes by the fax machine too...
People, put your nose out and go visit your neighbours. Thank you.
Might want to wait until the riots are over, though. Otherwise your experience might be "shockingly out of context".