J2ME isn't a subset of J2SE and hasn't been for a long time. It includes many JSR:s not present in J2SE. CLDC 1.1 and MIDP 2.0 which virtually all handsets support makes quite a well featured standard library.
Can you please tell us the name of the handset with the botched J2ME implementation? Because what you're describing is beyond stupid, wouldn't pass the JCK test suite and would be via a legally binding contract forbidden from being called "Java." I'd rather not just take your word for it, Mr Coward.
And it is not true that manufacturers buy J2ME from 3rd parties. Most build their own JVM:s which is the reason why there are so many incompatibility problems in J2ME land. Most manufacturers have very mature J2ME implementations and you actually can play very good games with them. iPhone may have a better SDK, but at the end of the day, there are 1 billion J2ME phones out there compared to a few hundred thousand iPhones.
It can also be very useful to find out how profitable a company is before accepting a job offer there. In countries where tax data is public information, it is always a good idea to find out how much key employees of the company earn. For example, if you know that the CEO takes home 500k/year, then you have a much better salary bargain position than if it is merely 50k. So yeah, it definitely goes both ways.
That is a great explanation of why NULL is bad.However, note that in imperative languages, NULL can almost always be eliminated. For example, an OCaml function for finding an item in a list could return a string option. In an imperative language, you would throw an exception instead of returning anything at all. For default values, you can use NullObjects. Unfortunately, most programmers does not practice proper "null avoidance" which is why problems with null are so pervasive.
While it is true that the US does not have the lowest corporate tax, the total tax burden for American companies are lower than most other Western countries. The higher corporate tax is offset by lower taxes on wages. You can find "statistics" from lobbying organisations with names like Tax Foundation for basically any industrialized country proclaiming that they have the highest taxes in the world. Generally these organisations have been very successful in their propaganda which is why Americans think they have the worst taxes, Danish think they have the worst, Swedes, Germans, French, Norweigans, Japanese and Italians think it too.
I don't think you understand how the consulting business works. In this case, Microsoft and Volt has an agreement. Volt gets to be one of Microsofts preferred suppliers meaning that they get certain benefits, like exclusive access to most of Microsofts consulting purchases. In return, Volt gets to sell consultants to Microsoft for X$/hour. MS then wants to renegotiate that contract and pay 10% less. Volt is free to decline the offer. If so MS, is free to let another consulting company become their preferred supplier.
This is all a negotiation between businesses identical to how any other company would want to try to lower the prices of the wares they buy. It is Volt's salespeople that failed here in that they couldn't keep the price they were previously selling for. They are the ones that should take the cut, if any. They are also the ones that get the biggest bonuses when they make large sales so it seem only fair.
And believe me, it is not a wash between consultant rates and salaried employees. How else would companies like Volt survive? Ask your local consultant whether he makes more money consulting than as an employee.
Especially since the story isn't even about Microsoft! Microsoft negotiates a new contract with Volt in which they pay 10% less for each consultancy hour bought. Which is not unreasonable since it costs them 2-3 times as much for consultants as for full-time employees. Volt chooses to put the lost income on each individual consultant as 10% lower salary.
Which is reasonable if their salaries are proportional to their hourly fee. Except it usually isn't, in good times consultant companies can charge exorbitant rates while not raising salaries much which means that they have insane profit margins on their services. It is supposed to be a give and take, consultants give up some of their earning potential for greater security in bad times. But the security is just an illusion and consultants working for companies are just as vulnerable as incorporated ones. These companies are the scum of the IT industry, they offer no value neither to companies they sell to who would rather hire new employees if they were available nor to consultants that work for them.
This is not a new problem, for years it has been trivial to search for passwords.txt and find hundreds of email passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive information. Even if this is a PEBKAC issue, there are still several things that could be done to mitigate or cure the problem:
Special NIC:s that drops non-VPN traffic.
Hardware firewalls that drop all outgoing traffic except for HTTP and SMTP.
P2P software that disallows sharing of files less than say 1mb in size. Or disallow sharing of plain text files or other documents. Usually, people are sharing media or archived software. If a.ppt file is shared, then in 99 cases out of 100, it wasn't supposed to be shared.
None of these ideas are foolproof, someone dumb enough would eventually screw up anyway. But that is not the point, the point is that there are simple engineering steps that can be taken to reduce the amount of inadvertantly shared data.
It doesn't bode well for the Samba option when the first google hit for "Samba Active Directory" is an outdated wiki page on the official samba site...
I used to think that too. Most women are not interested in technology but they could be as good at it that the most talented (male) hackers are. But there are six billion people in this world and I can't think of a single open source project headed by a female programmer. Not even seem a female patch contributor (but pseudonyms makes it hard sometimes). I have never personally met a female programmer that was above average. The best female programmers didn't even play in the same division as the good male ones. If great female hackers exist, then where the hell are they?
In professional sports, they do almost just as well as men despite obvious anatomical drawbacks. The fastest woman is only three seconds slower than the fastest person. In politics, there are just as many good/bad females as men. Same thing with art, music and science. But when it comes to technology and software development in particular, it seems like men are better.
Actually, case-sensitive filenames are very useful. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to represent filenames with upper and lowercase letters. Case-sensitive *matching* on the other hand, is just stupid.
There is not a single technology on the web that has not been abused in the same way flash has. Javascript is mostly used for popup ads and page hit tracking cookies, CSS by designers who creates pixel perfect sites on their system but breaks down on any other browser and creates a nightmare for accessability. And don't forget HTML, it is a mess of marque tags, ugly framesets and unclosed P tags. Oh and don't forget images, they are just for porn, animated gif ads and for 1x1 alignment images because the designer couldn't be bothered to read up about css classes. Let's just do away with http completely, telnet, smtp and gopher works fine.
Is it that hard to figure out? They are dogfooding their software by giving out prototypes to employers. It is the best method to get early user feedback. I used to work for a phone manufacturer and regularly brought home phones whose release dates were 6-12 months in the future. All manufacturers does it.
I've been in the same situation. I tried to correct some articles with obvious biases but got stuck in endless edit wars with those article guardians. It is extremely frustrating when you know that you are right, can cite secondary sources citing primary sources but are still reverted. A common tactic of "them" is to first ask for sources, then better sources and then claim that the fact is irrelevant to the article anyway. They are experts at wasting your time and making your editing experience frustrating. They also have more ties with the wiki-management so their viewpoint always prevail.
But here is the thing, to Wikipedia it doesn't matter if you like the process or not. It takes your edits that does not challenge the article guardians viewpoint and discards the rest. You get heavily biased articles that are still full with facts. The end result is articles that are improving at the cost of thousands of pissed of and frustrated editors. But the amount of people that wants to waste their time with Wikipedia is infinite which keeps the process working. I stopped contributing years ago because it was just to excruciating, others have taken my place which is what keeps Wikipedia going.
Even if none of the scares so far has come true it doesn't mean that their conclusion is not inevitable. The amount of raw materials on earth is limited, we consume raw materials at an exponential rate (x % increase pear year). As a consequence, there will not be enough raw materials available in the future.
The sad thing is that there is no Linux equivalent, which seems to be the sole reason for all the criticism.:/ My Ubuntu has been broken for months because PulseAudio butchered the sound system. For some reason, the Ubuntu team has not been able to push an update through the update manager to fix it, despite this being a "Long Term" release. Possibly, the fix involves editing configuration files which is hard to automate using the apt system. For situations like these, a FixIt script written in bash or something would be perfect.
And there are millions of how to guides on Linux. How to fix nvidia drivers, proprietary network drives, Compiz, installing windows fonts, repairing broken file systems etc. All contain dozens of shell commands that has to be typed in by the reader. FixIt would be very useful for those occasions.
Where I live, we have things like unions. They do, among other things, salary surveys in companies so that if two people are doing the same work with widely disparaging salaries, then the company is forced to correct that. If they don't, they suffer consequences like blacklisting which means that no unionized employees will work there. But considering how much most American IT workers seem to hate unions.. well suit yourself.
Good for you. But what you wrote was that smoking pot leads to spiritual enlightenment. Which makes me wonder what the hell you've been smoking.. In my personal and anecdotal experience, pot does not bring you closer to nirvana. I haven't been able to detect any extra insightfulness in people who smoke it regularly either. If anything, the detachment from things leads to a higher attachment to weed.
Either you are addicted to your 40" plasma TV or your stash box, you're an addict either way. How come it's so much better to be attached to mind-altering crops than "physical stuff"?
I have in the past smoked and it is a neuro-seditive. Side effects? Yeah, smoke too much, you get paranoid, short term memory lapses, etc. Same with alchohol though, in addition, you can die from alchohol poisoning (and yes it would be possible to OD on THC, but I don't think anyone could stay concious long enough to smoke that much, you'd have to have a high dose IV drip of it or something).
I really hate this argument. No one has ever said that alcohol isn't dangerous, additive or bad for society. Alcohol is involved in something like 90% of all domestic violence and so on. Pot may not be worse than booze, that still doesn't mean that it is the right thing for society to legalize it. Yeah, using pot isn't harmful if you do smoke it "responsibly." However, if you already suffer psychological problems, pot makes it worse. If you already are a drunk, being addicted to pot compounds the problems and creates greater costs for society as a whole.
I use Vista every day at work and Ubuntu 8.04 every day at home:
Frankly, given their history at Microsoft, I have no doubt to give them the benefit of. They're going to have to deliver a slim, fast, stable OS and I'll actually have to try it before I believe a word of it.
Some facts:
Aero is beautiful and fast. Compiz makes xorg leak and causes random lock ups.
Sound works flawlessly in Vista. Thanks to PulseAudio, Ubuntu can only play sound from one application at a time.
Flash is just broken, it is not in Vista.
I can't figure out how to setup dual screen without tweaking xorg.conf. It's plug and play in Vista.
trackerd is horribly slow. Whatever Vista is using, it is fast.
GNOME icons have lower resolution and are much uglier than Vista ones.
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J2ME isn't a subset of J2SE and hasn't been for a long time. It includes many JSR:s not present in J2SE. CLDC 1.1 and MIDP 2.0 which virtually all handsets support makes quite a well featured standard library.
Can you please tell us the name of the handset with the botched J2ME implementation? Because what you're describing is beyond stupid, wouldn't pass the JCK test suite and would be via a legally binding contract forbidden from being called "Java." I'd rather not just take your word for it, Mr Coward.
And it is not true that manufacturers buy J2ME from 3rd parties. Most build their own JVM:s which is the reason why there are so many incompatibility problems in J2ME land. Most manufacturers have very mature J2ME implementations and you actually can play very good games with them. iPhone may have a better SDK, but at the end of the day, there are 1 billion J2ME phones out there compared to a few hundred thousand iPhones.
It can also be very useful to find out how profitable a company is before accepting a job offer there. In countries where tax data is public information, it is always a good idea to find out how much key employees of the company earn. For example, if you know that the CEO takes home 500k/year, then you have a much better salary bargain position than if it is merely 50k. So yeah, it definitely goes both ways.
That is a great explanation of why NULL is bad.However, note that in imperative languages, NULL can almost always be eliminated. For example, an OCaml function for finding an item in a list could return a string option. In an imperative language, you would throw an exception instead of returning anything at all. For default values, you can use NullObjects. Unfortunately, most programmers does not practice proper "null avoidance" which is why problems with null are so pervasive.
While it is true that the US does not have the lowest corporate tax, the total tax burden for American companies are lower than most other Western countries. The higher corporate tax is offset by lower taxes on wages. You can find "statistics" from lobbying organisations with names like Tax Foundation for basically any industrialized country proclaiming that they have the highest taxes in the world. Generally these organisations have been very successful in their propaganda which is why Americans think they have the worst taxes, Danish think they have the worst, Swedes, Germans, French, Norweigans, Japanese and Italians think it too.
I don't think you understand how the consulting business works. In this case, Microsoft and Volt has an agreement. Volt gets to be one of Microsofts preferred suppliers meaning that they get certain benefits, like exclusive access to most of Microsofts consulting purchases. In return, Volt gets to sell consultants to Microsoft for X$/hour. MS then wants to renegotiate that contract and pay 10% less. Volt is free to decline the offer. If so MS, is free to let another consulting company become their preferred supplier.
This is all a negotiation between businesses identical to how any other company would want to try to lower the prices of the wares they buy. It is Volt's salespeople that failed here in that they couldn't keep the price they were previously selling for. They are the ones that should take the cut, if any. They are also the ones that get the biggest bonuses when they make large sales so it seem only fair.
And believe me, it is not a wash between consultant rates and salaried employees. How else would companies like Volt survive? Ask your local consultant whether he makes more money consulting than as an employee.
Especially since the story isn't even about Microsoft! Microsoft negotiates a new contract with Volt in which they pay 10% less for each consultancy hour bought. Which is not unreasonable since it costs them 2-3 times as much for consultants as for full-time employees. Volt chooses to put the lost income on each individual consultant as 10% lower salary.
Which is reasonable if their salaries are proportional to their hourly fee. Except it usually isn't, in good times consultant companies can charge exorbitant rates while not raising salaries much which means that they have insane profit margins on their services. It is supposed to be a give and take, consultants give up some of their earning potential for greater security in bad times. But the security is just an illusion and consultants working for companies are just as vulnerable as incorporated ones. These companies are the scum of the IT industry, they offer no value neither to companies they sell to who would rather hire new employees if they were available nor to consultants that work for them.
None of these ideas are foolproof, someone dumb enough would eventually screw up anyway. But that is not the point, the point is that there are simple engineering steps that can be taken to reduce the amount of inadvertantly shared data.
It doesn't bode well for the Samba option when the first google hit for "Samba Active Directory" is an outdated wiki page on the official samba site...
See Great Hackers for an explanation. The women you mention would not qualify.
I used to think that too. Most women are not interested in technology but they could be as good at it that the most talented (male) hackers are. But there are six billion people in this world and I can't think of a single open source project headed by a female programmer. Not even seem a female patch contributor (but pseudonyms makes it hard sometimes). I have never personally met a female programmer that was above average. The best female programmers didn't even play in the same division as the good male ones. If great female hackers exist, then where the hell are they?
In professional sports, they do almost just as well as men despite obvious anatomical drawbacks. The fastest woman is only three seconds slower than the fastest person. In politics, there are just as many good/bad females as men. Same thing with art, music and science. But when it comes to technology and software development in particular, it seems like men are better.
Ok... I'd stay of the crack pipe for a while if I where you.
Actually, case-sensitive filenames are very useful. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to represent filenames with upper and lowercase letters. Case-sensitive *matching* on the other hand, is just stupid.
There is not a single technology on the web that has not been abused in the same way flash has. Javascript is mostly used for popup ads and page hit tracking cookies, CSS by designers who creates pixel perfect sites on their system but breaks down on any other browser and creates a nightmare for accessability. And don't forget HTML, it is a mess of marque tags, ugly framesets and unclosed P tags. Oh and don't forget images, they are just for porn, animated gif ads and for 1x1 alignment images because the designer couldn't be bothered to read up about css classes. Let's just do away with http completely, telnet, smtp and gopher works fine.
Is it that hard to figure out? They are dogfooding their software by giving out prototypes to employers. It is the best method to get early user feedback. I used to work for a phone manufacturer and regularly brought home phones whose release dates were 6-12 months in the future. All manufacturers does it.
I've been in the same situation. I tried to correct some articles with obvious biases but got stuck in endless edit wars with those article guardians. It is extremely frustrating when you know that you are right, can cite secondary sources citing primary sources but are still reverted. A common tactic of "them" is to first ask for sources, then better sources and then claim that the fact is irrelevant to the article anyway. They are experts at wasting your time and making your editing experience frustrating. They also have more ties with the wiki-management so their viewpoint always prevail.
But here is the thing, to Wikipedia it doesn't matter if you like the process or not. It takes your edits that does not challenge the article guardians viewpoint and discards the rest. You get heavily biased articles that are still full with facts. The end result is articles that are improving at the cost of thousands of pissed of and frustrated editors. But the amount of people that wants to waste their time with Wikipedia is infinite which keeps the process working. I stopped contributing years ago because it was just to excruciating, others have taken my place which is what keeps Wikipedia going.
downandup.exe is trying to terminate EXCEL.EXE, OUTLOOK.EXE?
Cancel or Allow?
Even if none of the scares so far has come true it doesn't mean that their conclusion is not inevitable. The amount of raw materials on earth is limited, we consume raw materials at an exponential rate (x % increase pear year). As a consequence, there will not be enough raw materials available in the future.
The sad thing is that there is no Linux equivalent, which seems to be the sole reason for all the criticism. :/ My Ubuntu has been broken for months because PulseAudio butchered the sound system. For some reason, the Ubuntu team has not been able to push an update through the update manager to fix it, despite this being a "Long Term" release. Possibly, the fix involves editing configuration files which is hard to automate using the apt system. For situations like these, a FixIt script written in bash or something would be perfect.
And there are millions of how to guides on Linux. How to fix nvidia drivers, proprietary network drives, Compiz, installing windows fonts, repairing broken file systems etc. All contain dozens of shell commands that has to be typed in by the reader. FixIt would be very useful for those occasions.
There are lots of work places where they do not want you to bring classified documents home on a USB stick. Some of them even runs Linux!
Where I live, we have things like unions. They do, among other things, salary surveys in companies so that if two people are doing the same work with widely disparaging salaries, then the company is forced to correct that. If they don't, they suffer consequences like blacklisting which means that no unionized employees will work there. But considering how much most American IT workers seem to hate unions.. well suit yourself.
Good for you. But what you wrote was that smoking pot leads to spiritual enlightenment. Which makes me wonder what the hell you've been smoking.. In my personal and anecdotal experience, pot does not bring you closer to nirvana. I haven't been able to detect any extra insightfulness in people who smoke it regularly either. If anything, the detachment from things leads to a higher attachment to weed.
Either you are addicted to your 40" plasma TV or your stash box, you're an addict either way. How come it's so much better to be attached to mind-altering crops than "physical stuff"?
I have in the past smoked and it is a neuro-seditive. Side effects? Yeah, smoke too much, you get paranoid, short term memory lapses, etc. Same with alchohol though, in addition, you can die from alchohol poisoning (and yes it would be possible to OD on THC, but I don't think anyone could stay concious long enough to smoke that much, you'd have to have a high dose IV drip of it or something).
I really hate this argument. No one has ever said that alcohol isn't dangerous, additive or bad for society. Alcohol is involved in something like 90% of all domestic violence and so on. Pot may not be worse than booze, that still doesn't mean that it is the right thing for society to legalize it. Yeah, using pot isn't harmful if you do smoke it "responsibly." However, if you already suffer psychological problems, pot makes it worse. If you already are a drunk, being addicted to pot compounds the problems and creates greater costs for society as a whole.
Frankly, given their history at Microsoft, I have no doubt to give them the benefit of. They're going to have to deliver a slim, fast, stable OS and I'll actually have to try it before I believe a word of it.
Some facts:
I've been a Linux user for over six years.