This may be more of a limitation of USB 1.1 then anything, but whenever I connect my Archos Jukebox to USB and use it as a hard drive, my USB wireless mouse just stops working whenever I copy files back and forth. My own theory is just that the Jukebox is sucking up the bandwidth and my mouse just disappears.
If this were the only problem I've had with USB mice, I would just write it off as a need to get USB 2.0 for that kind of data transfer. But I've also used older Macs and other machines with USB mice and they always had problems with forgetting the mice or just mysteriously stops working.
I guess what I'm getting at is, I kinda prefer PS/2 for keyboard and mice if only because the methods for user input into the system don't have to share with, and can't be blocked by, other peripherals. I'm willing to live with two small ports just for mouse and keyboard and attaching everything else with USB and Firewire.
I always liked Construx better than Legos as well... they were the first building set I ever had that included a motor. What I liked best about them was that they had all of the hinges and other moving pieces that the Lego sets didn't seem to have. You could also build REALLY big with them. I had enough parts to build a decent sized model aircraft carrier with working elevators and a few planes. The light kits in the alien sets were also nice for putting the finishing touches on.
Re:Serious flaws in the current semantic web model
on
Practical RDF
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· Score: 1
URI's don't have to point to a domain necessarily. URN's seem useful here; or globally unique identifiers that are quasi-independent of domains.
I think one issue might be that anybody can make a statement about any URI and have it merged into a model... how do you know what is authoritative?
I'm curious to know what is broken with OWL that makes it unsuitable for commerical use? My understanding is that it isn't final yet, so that might be an issue. Is there something fundamentally wrong with it?
Re:Inside RDF is a smaller language...
on
Practical RDF
·
· Score: 1
Actually, you don't have to use XML with RDF; that's a fairly common misconception. RDF/XML is the 'blessed' serialization, but there are others and most of the RDF tools understand them. One example would be N3. Jena understands that and can actually spit out RDF/XML from N3 if you really need it.
Personally, I would agree that RDF/XML is a losing mapping of RDF... too complicated to read and just seems like a poor fit for XML. It seems to me that RDF is definitely more graph-like, but you are trying to describe the graph in a language that is more tree-like. It works, it doesn't leave a nice taste. From the lurking I've done in other RDF forums and reading the articles, it seems like this opinion is not uncommon.
I'm not a radio expert... but theoretically, couldn't a system like that be attacked by beaming out a strong known signal with limited range on the frequencies (or possibly spill across a broad spectrum) utilized by the random system? Then the attacker could guess the random series since it forced the generator to use a known seed.
At least an optical system is tougher to interfere with since the local user knows what the camera is looking at.
If you have already the service pack mentioned in this slashdot article, then according to the Microsoft Security bulletin linked in the article you already have the fix. So you might as well get the whole Service Pack while your at it.
Should have had more faith.... there always seems to be a setting somewhere in this IDE that does what you want.:-)
Re:Are they reinventing the wheel ?
on
Eclipse in Action
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· Score: 1
Actually, it can do vi as well. The vi Plugin can be found here I'm not really a vi guy, though I can use it in a pinch, so I can't vouch for how usable it is for vi experts.
Eclipse 2.1.1 does have some support for overlapping folders using exclusion filters on folders, and as someone mentioned earlier, you can also have virtual folders pointing to folders outside the project. Perhaps that isn't a true sub-project, but it would exhibit the behavior you seem to want.
That said, there are other irritating things about the way projects are managed... like having just one huge, flat list of projects, and not having the option to hide closed projects.
Of course, I'm not really familiar with the plugins for PHP development, so if the plugins functionality also don't match HomeSite, then use the best tool for the job. For Java development, the small annoyances of project management are far out-weighed by the tools that deal with the source code.
Re:netbeans vs eclipse
on
Eclipse in Action
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· Score: 2, Informative
Eclipse 2.1 has added the feature of being able to integrate external (that is, not actually under the project directory on disk) folders and files into a project. I have only used NetBeans briefly at JavaONE, but from what I saw, Eclipse's feature seems similar.
Actually, the general thrust of the blogs mentioned seems to be that Jakarta stuff is one of the few things that IS okay to use. The Apache license is different than the LGPL and GPL and was written with commercial use in mind. Jakarta's FAQ on the license explains this pretty well.
I would guess that using XML is to some degree a political issue that can't be avoided. Which is really symptomatic of the age-old problem of the business and technical sides not really listening to each other.
Hmm.. that is a good point... I figured there was a reason Debian didn't allow this by default, but it is a major pain in the butt when you want to run graphical configuration tools from a regular user shell. Seems like both Debian and Red Hat should be setup to use the options you mention. Perhaps the kde's graphical su takes care of that case.
I tried out Debian 3.0 recently and basically came to the same conclusion as the author: Debian really needs to advance in usability.
I'm a fairly technical user that has used Linux in some form since 1998, so I'm not exactly a newbie. I wanted to use Debian since it was truly free and I heard a lot of good things about apt.
The actual experience, however, was very unpleasant. I had to run through the installer twice to get a system that could run X. And then managing apt packages and locations was kind of a pain... pointing it to a valid KDE location because I wanted the very latest stable, trying to find multimedia apps for DVDs, etc. I found it very easy to screw up an apt-based system when trying to learn it. I wanted to keep some stable Debian packages while using some unstable packages , which meant all kinds of acrobatics to keep apt from being confused. Compiling your own software meant creating apt placeholders to avoid corrupting your build.... moving the kernel source to a 'standard' location could mean that apt loses track of it. Not to mention that dselect is a real pain to use; I was always selecting the wrong packages or downloading things I didn't want. Synaptic was an improvement, but not a huge one. It has been awhile, but I don't recall having as many problems learning rpm (granted, rpm can be susceptible to the same problems, I guess I'm mostly talking about what comes with the distro out-of-the-box).
In the end, I went back to Windows for a while since I really didn't have to time to be bothered with getting Debian running the way I wanted it. I then downloaded Red Hat 9 (via BitTorrent, I don't recall seeing a Debian torrent anywhere) and got font anti-aliasing, multimedia apps that worked, MP3 support once I downloaded the appropriate RPMs, an X-Windows and KDE install that would allow graphical apps running as root to display without any thought... in short, a desktop system I could pretty much use without thinking about it too much. I even upgraded to KDE 3.1.2 without any pain. And if I decide someday to try apt again, I can get it.
I agree with another post that if I was setting up a server, I probably would think about Debian again, but for a system I can use as a desktop, I would pick Mandrake or Red Hat any day. I can compile my own kernel and install GATOS drivers, etc... but just because I can doesn't mean that I always feel like it.
I think you perhaps stretched the quote from my comment a little bit... I was mostly making a point that every language has its own semantics and different rules of thumbs for getting the most out of it. I think it is a bit of stretch to say Java's flaws ultimately doom it any more than saying C++ is dead because of its losing object system.
I also am not really comfortable with some of your assertions. The IDEA problem you mentioned could stem from any number of reasons unrelated to the context you mentioned it in; I've seen similar problems in some Swing apps and none in others. The latest SunONE studio struck me as being well-behaved in that regard. The unevenness of Java GUI apps says more to me about the implementation of the program rather than the language.
I'm also not sure about your contention that Java doesn't scale to modern software. EBay switched from a C (I believe, may have been C++) codebase to J2EE for reasons of maintainability and their site seems to scale very well.
It also seems to me that some of the problems you raise in the limitations of JIT implementations may also be a general problem that applies to.Net and others. I seem to recall that someone implemented a JVM on.Net and found Java performed better than Sun's implementation. Unfortunately I couldn't track the story down, so I guess I'm stuck with proof by vigorous assertion.:-) I have also heard that JDK 1.4.2 has made significant gains in reflection performance that may ease those concerns.
That said, the points you raise are interesting and definitely gave me some new things to think about. I hope you are wrong about Java going by the wayside if only to keep the market competitive against.Net, but we are still early in the game and anything can happen.
At the risk of publishing a 'me too', I agree with the above post. Java is slow if you write a slow program that doesn't respect the platform and language's unique features and quirks, just like any other language (consider the uneven implementations of STL in C++).
Many programs do use Swing and do it with acceptable performance; JBuilder is one example that comes to mind. Writing a responsive Swing app is possible, it just requires knowledge of the UI toolkit and how to appropriately use it... you can write crap code in QT as well. Eclipse is also written in Java; if the backend was written poorly, it wouldn't matter how fast SWT was, but as it stands the user experience is generally quite good.
I would also like to 'me too' the parent's comment about Sun's JVM. The recent changes in JDK1.4 (concurrent garbage collection, etc.) should help somewhat, but JRockit and Jikes show it is possible to write faster JVMs. Sun just hasn't done it yet.
Sun seems good at the theory, but crappy at implementations. The first time I tried NetBeans (a Swing-based app) it was horribly unresponsive and the second time, it had a terrible look and feel... they relied too heavily on JavaBeans and generic layout heuristics so that every dialog was not appropriately laid out or sized.
Hmm.. good points. Guess it is like Betamax v.s. VHS... Betamax may have looked better but VHS could record two-hour movies and looked good enough, so it won. Or that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was cheaper than the Enyclopedia Galatica and had "Don't Panic" printed on it in large friendly letters. Still seems funny to make these decisions based on little green pieces of paper since the pieces of paper don't really care one way or another.
Strangely, I was just chatting about this with my father (Happy Father's Day to all) and a couple of points came up that I thought were interesting.
The first was: Blackboxes can be mandated on U.S. airplanes (which are privately owned) because the U.S. government can regulate interstate commerce and the airspace above the U.S. belongs to the citizens of the U.S. and are administrated by the government on our behalf.
Similarly, the interstate highway system is basically under the jurisdiction of the federal government and regulated by them (cars must meet federal safety guidelines, etc.) so it seems fairly straightforward to me that requiring black boxes in cars is well within the purvue of what we have allowed the government to handle in the past , especially since more people die in car accidents in the U.S. each year than in airplace crashes.
There is also precident for the concept that you can't just do anything to your own property (e.g. building permits, zoning regulations, child abuse laws..sorta). So this doesn't bother me too much as long as we are vigilent about misuse.
Which leads to the second point we discussed: the big problem is with the insurance companies. Their interest as a business is not really to protect you from harm, but to avoid paying claims since this costs them money. Often times this manifests itself in positive ways (credits for joining a health club, driver safety programs), but can also be rife for abuse. Everyone I know seems to have a story about recalcitrant insurance companies dragging their feet on legitimate claims. Personal injury lawyers prey on those fears all the time.
I could easily see a world where insurance companies look for any scrap of evidence they can to avoid paying your claim... these black boxes can supply it in spades: you were going 5 mph over the limit, zagged left instead of right, etc... until basically there would come a point where it would be difficult or impossible to get the insurance company to perform the service that you pay them for: to help you absorb some of the cost of a tragedy, self-inflicted or otherwise, in your life.
I wonder how many people would start dropping their car insurance because it really provides them with no value since there could always be some momentary fault found with their driving that the insurance company could point to. Perhaps we need to think about how absolutely some of this data should be interpreted; maybe the splitting of blame between parties in an accident handles this already. Should no-fault insurance become mandatory? Or should the adoption of this technology herald the beginning of individualized mass transit (that makes my head hurt typing it, I mean basically smart highways)?
I've seen a lot of posts in this thread that make the point that QNX isn't really for workstations/PCs etc... it is for when things absolutely, positively must work always.
I grant that this is not a requirement for desktop users, for example, because no one's life is usually at stake if your instant message or e-mail doesn't go through (in fact that might be a blessing considering the content of some of them). And it would be really expensive to require all computer programs to be as robust as QNX appears to be.
But leaving that aside for a second, why shouldn't people expect all computer programs to be that reliable? Why do I have to put up with the annoyance of killing processes or rebooting even if it is just an annoyance? Shouldn't we try to making computing that reliable always? Is it possible?
I guess it might not be for certain kinds of applications since a user could theoretically input or try to process anything, but it seems that the QNX system isn't written to be bulletproof in that way, it is just written with the assumption to trust nothing and recover gracefully from all errors. Should programs just be that way? Or is it improbable to be able to create a 3-D graphics card/word processor/what-have-you with that kind of reliability?
Maybe we can't do this because of the anomaly that will become the One or maybe I should have laid off the peyote before writing this, or maybe I would remember something from my CS degree that reveals I am being stupid but can't because I'm too tired. I'm getting ver-clemped: feel free to discuss amongst yourselves or mod me down.
I sure you have a valid point in general, but I'm not sure if this is a concern with the changes described. The description of the features in the article indicate to me that your concerns were taken into consideration. For instance, they explicitly mention that foreach and in weren't added as keywords to avoid killing programs that may have used these as variable names (kinda lousy variable names if you ask me, but I'm sure it happens).
Looking at the examples in the article, I didn't see anything that would break the semantics of already existing code... assuming the generics feature uses Object if no other class is used.
Do you have an example of the proposed semantics breaking some existing code? I would be interested in any examples and I'm sure the JCP would be too. I'm certainly not willing to go along with the JCP blindly if there is a practical, concrete example of where they are going wrong.
Ant is also capable of checking to see if required libraries are available. The sample JBoss development project includes this capability to check for the existence of the XDoclet task.
For instance, there is this task that ships with Ant: Available Task
Most of the time in Java you don't have to worry that much about what endianness, etc. that you would normally do with C or C++, so I think in practice Ant does a very capable job.
If one uses BeanShell you can also do some pretty powerful custom tasks, including writing light-weight Java scripts (not a typo:-) to do all kinds of checks if you need to... not to mention that it is relatively simple to write Ant tasks for all kinds of build needs, including creating jars of classes by dependencies, code metric collection, etc.
I know of a development house that generated a pretty sophisticated code work set system using Ant scripts, add-on tasks, and some bean shell scripts.
It also has some options to avoid recompiling all Java files when only some have changed, just like make.
Any Java project I have seen that uses Ant and distributes source has been very easy for me to compile... I would say as easy as autoconf if not easier... and I've found Ant a lot simpler to learn than autoconf.
Having said that, there are some irritating things with Ant (trying to make filesets out of paths is one that springs to mind). And I am certainly a fan of./configure;make;make install.... but it is all about the right tool for the right job, and Ant is pretty much the de facto answer as far as Java development is concerned.
My father recently set up solar in his house and has been looking to convert as much as possible to use solar energy. 12 volt lights are a major part of the plan... they are extremely bright but pull very little amperage.... with the 10 marine grade batteries in his basement he could power all of his indoor and outdoor lighting for at least a week before he needs to recharge.
Now he is looking for ways to convert appliances and other systems to run off the solar panel. It occurred to us that it should be relatively simple to power a computer directly off of 12 volt wiring, provided that the circuit can support the amps needed for the machine. Then you would have a quieter computer that doesn't eat power through its transformer... it seems to me that all you need is the molex and motherboard connectors wired into some sort of 12 volt plug, something like a car trailer light plug.
Has anybody tried this? I can't get to the article due to/. effect so I couldn't read their solution... seems workable to me. For other things like TVs and home theater we may have to punt and use a power inverter to step up the voltage.... I don't relish tearing apart a stereo system to yank the power supply.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thing Douglas Adams already figured all of this out:
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
So Wolfram cannot find those 4 lines, because the universe will instantly change to a new algorithm. "Oh!" said Wolfram and vanished in a puff of facetiousness.
Actually, the release notes claim that it has fair amount of performance enhancements to the Java2D API including support for 2D hardware acceleration. On UNIX X-Windows calls are used to implement the Swing GUI classes to improve speed. Sounds like we will see some significant performance gains on all platforms, if you believe the documentation. I haven't seen a Swing app run under 1.4, so I'll reserver judgement.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be more of a limitation of USB 1.1 then anything, but whenever I connect my Archos Jukebox to USB and use it as a hard drive, my USB wireless mouse just stops working whenever I copy files back and forth. My own theory is just that the Jukebox is sucking up the bandwidth and my mouse just disappears.
If this were the only problem I've had with USB mice, I would just write it off as a need to get USB 2.0 for that kind of data transfer. But I've also used older Macs and other machines with USB mice and they always had problems with forgetting the mice or just mysteriously stops working.
I guess what I'm getting at is, I kinda prefer PS/2 for keyboard and mice if only because the methods for user input into the system don't have to share with, and can't be blocked by, other peripherals. I'm willing to live with two small ports just for mouse and keyboard and attaching everything else with USB and Firewire.
I always liked Construx better than Legos as well... they were the first building set I ever had that included a motor. What I liked best about them was that they had all of the hinges and other moving pieces that the Lego sets didn't seem to have. You could also build REALLY big with them. I had enough parts to build a decent sized model aircraft carrier with working elevators and a few planes. The light kits in the alien sets were also nice for putting the finishing touches on.
URI's don't have to point to a domain necessarily. URN's seem useful here; or globally unique identifiers that are quasi-independent of domains.
I think one issue might be that anybody can make a statement about any URI and have it merged into a model... how do you know what is authoritative?
I'm curious to know what is broken with OWL that makes it unsuitable for commerical use? My understanding is that it isn't final yet, so that might be an issue. Is there something fundamentally wrong with it?
Actually, you don't have to use XML with RDF; that's a fairly common misconception. RDF/XML is the 'blessed' serialization, but there are others and most of the RDF tools understand them. One example would be N3. Jena understands that and can actually spit out RDF/XML from N3 if you really need it.
Personally, I would agree that RDF/XML is a losing mapping of RDF... too complicated to read and just seems like a poor fit for XML. It seems to me that RDF is definitely more graph-like, but you are trying to describe the graph in a language that is more tree-like. It works, it doesn't leave a nice taste. From the lurking I've done in other RDF forums and reading the articles, it seems like this opinion is not uncommon.
I'm not a radio expert... but theoretically, couldn't a system like that be attacked by beaming out a strong known signal with limited range on the frequencies (or possibly spill across a broad spectrum) utilized by the random system? Then the attacker could guess the random series since it forced the generator to use a known seed.
At least an optical system is tougher to interfere with since the local user knows what the camera is looking at.
If you have already the service pack mentioned in this slashdot article, then according to the Microsoft Security bulletin linked in the article you already have the fix. So you might as well get the whole Service Pack while your at it.
Should have had more faith.... there always seems to be a setting somewhere in this IDE that does what you want. :-)
Actually, it can do vi as well. The vi Plugin can be found here I'm not really a vi guy, though I can use it in a pinch, so I can't vouch for how usable it is for vi experts.
Eclipse 2.1.1 does have some support for overlapping folders using exclusion filters on folders, and as someone mentioned earlier, you can also have virtual folders pointing to folders outside the project. Perhaps that isn't a true sub-project, but it would exhibit the behavior you seem to want.
That said, there are other irritating things about the way projects are managed... like having just one huge, flat list of projects, and not having the option to hide closed projects.
Of course, I'm not really familiar with the plugins for PHP development, so if the plugins functionality also don't match HomeSite, then use the best tool for the job. For Java development, the small annoyances of project management are far out-weighed by the tools that deal with the source code.
Eclipse 2.1 has added the feature of being able to integrate external (that is, not actually under the project directory on disk) folders and files into a project.
I have only used NetBeans briefly at JavaONE, but from what I saw, Eclipse's feature seems similar.
Actually, the general thrust of the blogs mentioned seems to be that Jakarta stuff is one of the few things that IS okay to use. The Apache license is different than the LGPL and GPL and was written with commercial use in mind. Jakarta's FAQ on the license explains this pretty well.
I would guess that using XML is to some degree a political issue that can't be avoided. Which is really symptomatic of the age-old problem of the business and technical sides not really listening to each other.
Hmm.. that is a good point... I figured there was a reason Debian didn't allow this by default, but it is a major pain in the butt when you want to run graphical configuration tools from a regular user shell. Seems like both Debian and Red Hat should be setup to use the options you mention. Perhaps the kde's graphical su takes care of that case.
I tried out Debian 3.0 recently and basically came to the same conclusion as the author: Debian really needs to advance in usability.
I'm a fairly technical user that has used Linux in some form since 1998, so I'm not exactly a newbie. I wanted to use Debian since it was truly free and I heard a lot of good things about apt.
The actual experience, however, was very unpleasant. I had to run through the installer twice to get a system that could run X. And then managing apt packages and locations was kind of a pain... pointing it to a valid KDE location because I wanted the very latest stable, trying to find multimedia apps for DVDs, etc. I found it very easy to screw up an apt-based system when trying to learn it. I wanted to keep some stable Debian packages while using some unstable packages , which meant all kinds of acrobatics to keep apt from being confused. Compiling your own software meant creating apt placeholders to avoid corrupting your build.... moving the kernel source to a 'standard' location could mean that apt loses track of it. Not to mention that dselect is a real pain to use; I was always selecting the wrong packages or downloading things I didn't want. Synaptic was an improvement, but not a huge one. It has been awhile, but I don't recall having as many problems learning rpm (granted, rpm can be susceptible to the same problems, I guess I'm mostly talking about what comes with the distro out-of-the-box).
In the end, I went back to Windows for a while since I really didn't have to time to be bothered with getting Debian running the way I wanted it. I then downloaded Red Hat 9 (via BitTorrent, I don't recall seeing a Debian torrent anywhere) and got font anti-aliasing, multimedia apps that worked, MP3 support once I downloaded the appropriate RPMs, an X-Windows and KDE install that would allow graphical apps running as root to display without any thought... in short, a desktop system I could pretty much use without thinking about it too much. I even upgraded to KDE 3.1.2 without any pain. And if I decide someday to try apt again, I can get it.
I agree with another post that if I was setting up a server, I probably would think about Debian again, but for a system I can use as a desktop, I would pick Mandrake or Red Hat any day. I can compile my own kernel and install GATOS drivers, etc... but just because I can doesn't mean that I always feel like it.
I think you perhaps stretched the quote from my comment a little bit... I was mostly making a point that every language has its own semantics and different rules of thumbs for getting the most out of it. I think it is a bit of stretch to say Java's flaws ultimately doom it any more than saying C++ is dead because of its losing object system.
.Net and others. I seem to recall that someone implemented a JVM on .Net and found Java performed better than Sun's implementation. Unfortunately I couldn't track the story down, so I guess I'm stuck with proof by vigorous assertion. :-) I have also heard that JDK 1.4.2 has made significant gains in reflection performance that may ease those concerns.
.Net, but we are still early in the game and anything can happen.
I also am not really comfortable with some of your assertions. The IDEA problem you mentioned could stem from any number of reasons unrelated to the context you mentioned it in; I've seen similar problems in some Swing apps and none in others. The latest SunONE studio struck me as being well-behaved in that regard. The unevenness of Java GUI apps says more to me about the implementation of the program rather than the language.
I'm also not sure about your contention that Java doesn't scale to modern software. EBay switched from a C (I believe, may have been C++) codebase to J2EE for reasons of maintainability and their site seems to scale very well.
It also seems to me that some of the problems you raise in the limitations of JIT implementations may also be a general problem that applies to
That said, the points you raise are interesting and definitely gave me some new things to think about. I hope you are wrong about Java going by the wayside if only to keep the market competitive against
At the risk of publishing a 'me too', I agree with the above post. Java is slow if you write a slow program that doesn't respect the platform and language's unique features and quirks, just like any other language (consider the uneven implementations of STL in C++).
Many programs do use Swing and do it with acceptable performance; JBuilder is one example that comes to mind. Writing a responsive Swing app is possible, it just requires knowledge of the UI toolkit and how to appropriately use it... you can write crap code in QT as well. Eclipse is also written in Java; if the backend was written poorly, it wouldn't matter how fast SWT was, but as it stands the user experience is generally quite good.
I would also like to 'me too' the parent's comment about Sun's JVM. The recent changes in JDK1.4 (concurrent garbage collection, etc.) should help somewhat, but JRockit and Jikes show it is possible to write faster JVMs. Sun just hasn't done it yet.
Sun seems good at the theory, but crappy at implementations. The first time I tried NetBeans (a Swing-based app) it was horribly unresponsive and the second time, it had a terrible look and feel... they relied too heavily on JavaBeans and generic layout heuristics so that every dialog was not appropriately laid out or sized.
Anyway my $.02.
Hmm.. good points. Guess it is like Betamax v.s. VHS... Betamax may have looked better but VHS could record two-hour movies and looked good enough, so it won. Or that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was cheaper than the Enyclopedia Galatica and had
:-)
"Don't Panic" printed on it in large friendly letters. Still seems funny to make these decisions based on little green pieces of paper since the pieces of paper don't really care one way or another.
I think I hear the sound of my karma dropping.
Strangely, I was just chatting about this with my father (Happy Father's Day to all) and a couple of points came up that I thought were interesting.
The first was:
Blackboxes can be mandated on U.S. airplanes (which are privately owned) because the U.S. government can regulate interstate commerce and the airspace above the U.S. belongs to the citizens of the U.S. and are administrated by the government on our behalf.
Similarly, the interstate highway system is basically under the jurisdiction of the federal government and regulated by them (cars must meet federal safety guidelines, etc.) so it seems fairly straightforward to me that requiring black boxes in cars is well within the purvue of what we have allowed the government to handle in the past , especially since more people die in car accidents in the U.S. each year than in airplace crashes.
There is also precident for the concept that you can't just do anything to your own property (e.g. building permits, zoning regulations, child abuse laws..sorta). So this doesn't bother me too much as long as we are vigilent about misuse.
Which leads to the second point we discussed: the big problem is with the insurance companies. Their interest as a business is not really to protect you from harm, but to avoid paying claims since this costs them money. Often times this manifests itself in positive ways (credits for joining a health club, driver safety programs), but can also be rife for abuse. Everyone I know seems to have a story about recalcitrant insurance companies dragging their feet on legitimate claims. Personal injury lawyers prey on those fears all the time.
I could easily see a world where insurance companies look for any scrap of evidence they can to avoid paying your claim... these black boxes can supply it in spades: you were going 5 mph over the limit, zagged left instead of right, etc... until basically there would come a point where it would be difficult or impossible to get the insurance company to perform the service that you pay them for: to help you absorb some of the cost of a tragedy, self-inflicted or otherwise, in your life.
I wonder how many people would start dropping their car insurance because it really provides them with no value since there could always be some momentary fault found with their driving that the insurance company could point to. Perhaps we need to think about how absolutely some of this data should be interpreted; maybe the splitting of blame between parties in an accident handles this already. Should no-fault insurance become mandatory? Or should the adoption of this technology herald the beginning of individualized mass transit (that makes my head hurt typing it, I mean basically smart highways)?
I've seen a lot of posts in this thread that make the point that QNX isn't really for workstations/PCs etc... it is for when things absolutely, positively must work always.
I grant that this is not a requirement for desktop users, for example, because no one's life is usually at stake if your instant message or e-mail doesn't go through (in fact that might be a blessing considering the content of some of them). And it would be really expensive to require all computer programs to be as robust as QNX appears to be.
But leaving that aside for a second, why shouldn't people expect all computer programs to be that reliable? Why do I have to put up with the annoyance of killing processes or rebooting even if it is just an annoyance? Shouldn't we try to making computing that reliable always? Is it possible?
I guess it might not be for certain kinds of applications since a user could theoretically input or try to process anything, but it seems that the QNX system isn't written to be bulletproof in that way, it is just written with the assumption to trust nothing and recover gracefully from all errors. Should programs just be that way? Or is it improbable to be able to create a 3-D graphics card/word processor/what-have-you with that kind of reliability?
Maybe we can't do this because of the anomaly that will become the One or maybe I should have laid off the peyote before writing this, or maybe I would remember something from my CS degree that reveals I am being stupid but can't because I'm too tired. I'm getting ver-clemped: feel free to discuss amongst yourselves or mod me down.
I sure you have a valid point in general, but I'm not sure if this is a concern with the changes described. The description of the features in the article indicate to me that your concerns were taken into consideration. For instance, they explicitly mention that foreach and in weren't added as keywords to avoid killing programs that may have used these as variable names (kinda lousy variable names if you ask me, but I'm sure it happens).
Looking at the examples in the article, I didn't see anything that would break the semantics of already existing code... assuming the generics feature uses Object if no other class is used.
Do you have an example of the proposed semantics breaking some existing code? I would be interested in any examples and I'm sure the JCP would be too. I'm certainly not willing to go along with the JCP blindly if there is a practical, concrete example of where they are going wrong.
Ant is also capable of checking to see if required libraries are available. The sample JBoss development project includes this capability to check for the existence of the XDoclet task.
:-) to do all kinds of checks if you need to... not to mention that it is relatively simple to write Ant tasks for all kinds of build needs, including creating jars of classes by dependencies, code metric collection, etc.
./configure;make;make install.... but it is all about the right tool for the right job, and Ant is pretty much the de facto answer as far as Java development is concerned.
For instance, there is this task that ships with Ant:
Available Task
Most of the time in Java you don't have to worry that much about what endianness, etc. that you would normally do with C or C++, so I think in practice Ant does a very capable job.
If one uses BeanShell you can also do some pretty powerful custom tasks, including writing light-weight Java scripts (not a typo
I know of a development house that generated a pretty sophisticated code work set system using Ant scripts, add-on tasks, and some bean shell scripts.
It also has some options to avoid recompiling all Java files when only some have changed, just like make.
Any Java project I have seen that uses Ant and distributes source has been very easy for me to compile... I would say as easy as autoconf if not easier... and I've found Ant a lot simpler to learn than autoconf.
Having said that, there are some irritating things with Ant (trying to make filesets out of paths is one that springs to mind). And I am certainly a fan of
My father recently set up solar in his house and has been looking to convert as much as possible to use solar energy. 12 volt lights are a major part of the plan... they are extremely bright but pull very little amperage.... with the 10 marine grade batteries in his basement he could power all of his indoor and outdoor lighting for at least a week before he needs to recharge.
... it seems to me that all you need is the molex and motherboard connectors wired into some sort of 12 volt plug, something like a car trailer light plug.
/. effect so I couldn't read their solution... seems workable to me. For other things like TVs and home theater we may have to punt and use a power inverter to step up the voltage.... I don't relish tearing apart a stereo system to yank the power supply.
Now he is looking for ways to convert appliances and other systems to run off the solar panel. It occurred to us that it should be relatively simple to power a computer directly off of 12 volt wiring, provided that the circuit can support the amps needed for the machine. Then you would have a quieter computer that doesn't eat power through its transformer
Has anybody tried this? I can't get to the article due to
Piiigggss innnnn Spaaaaaace!
So Wolfram cannot find those 4 lines, because the universe will instantly change to a new algorithm. "Oh!" said Wolfram and vanished in a puff of facetiousness.
Actually, the release notes claim that it has fair amount of performance enhancements to the Java2D API including support for 2D hardware acceleration. On UNIX X-Windows calls are used to implement the Swing GUI classes to improve speed. Sounds like we will see some significant performance gains on all platforms, if you believe the documentation. I haven't seen a Swing app run under 1.4, so I'll reserver judgement.