If Vista itself requires this much RAM just to work well, imagine how much more you would need to run anything ELSE? What a pig! No wonder MS was giving away those free laptops. That way they could mask the horrible performance of this shitpile under a realistic machine. I don't even own machine that could hold that much ram. Who are they fooling?
Leave it to JavaScript--the hacker's best friend. How funny that this all came down to a race to see who could assemble the injectable fields fast enough. Not only do you need to be a skilled hacker--but a quick one to boot.
Slogging through this guy's admirable grasp of statistics, it appears that the intuitive solution is that MSN (Microsoft) is far and away the least accurate.
Why does this not surprise? The company that brought us the blue screen of death, that brought us Hacker Heaven (AKA Windows) is wildly inaccurate.
Well,
I was referring to cases of outsourcing that I knew of, where the particular problems that I outlined did occur.
In the case of Netscape, the generic problems with outsourcing are en force. In this case, the same weaknesses of outsourcing may apply. Lax control. The impossibility of defining everything. Lack of the company culture being en force.
While I agree that nobody ever went broke betting on the intelligence of the government. But, all it takes is ONE hotshot programmer and your theory is defunct. I just know that it's going to happen, one DB at a time.
About living in Russia, you are correct, or at least you were correct. I lived there in 1997 [See Russian Plumbers. For a time, I lived in the apartment of friends while I rented out my own St. Petersburg apartment. The electric bill arrived and so--not wanting to mess up my Russian friends--I set out to pay it. That was not easy. When I finally found the place to pay it, the woman behind the counter was really surprised that I did. She dutifully took my money and I paid the bill.
When my Russian friends returned from the dacha, they were amused that I had bothered to pay the bill.
"Nobody pays the electric bill in Russia," they said.
Because there were no separate electric meters in the apartment building, there was no way for the government in Russia to know their individual electricity usage, let alone shut it off for anybody.
Likewise, when I got paid from the Russian newspaper where I worked, I was told I would be making 146,000 rubles (about $42.00). When payday arrived, I was paid in cash exactly the amount I had been promised. No taxes whatsoever.
I don't know if it is still that way but in 1997 Russia was the wild west. So if you're looking to avoid government, Russia used to be the place to be. Just the mafia to worry about.
You are absolutely right but different databases would mean different licenses and I expect the bean counters would demand that all those dbs be put on the same instance and so--eventually--they will interoperate.
We're all putting our privacy hopes on the chance that all these problems will never be worked out. Sure, during the short run they would never work but eventually it's going to be some hotshot programmer's job to make them work and I expect--eventually--they will get this problem solved and those databases are going to work well enough to violate all of our privacy.
Look how long it has taken the FBI to get their shit together. Decades. However, are you willing to bet that the NSA does not have enough money to solve these problems? I'm not. Given enough money, enough smart coders, I fear that these databases are going to be talking. Sure, not efficiently enough for real time. So that means the feds are going to be knocking on your door in a week rather than a day. The end result is the same.
As a fellow New Yorker, I agree that NYC is a great place for citizen involvement. However, this is the exception. In most cities, government can do what it wants because nobody cares. I have lived all over the US from Omaha, Phoenix, Cincinnati, Houston and Salt Lake City and no where do people notice or care what government is doing until it is done and directly affects them. It is a common experience to have people complaining about the horse after it escaped the barn months before.
Stopping these kinds of things takes constant vigilence. It's akin to stopping the gentrification of an old neighborhood. Drop your guard for one day and that old building you loved is a pile of ruble. In NYC, there have even been buildings that were protected under a court order that were taken down on a Sunday.
So, while I agree with your sentiment, my expectations are much more pessimistic.
It's not racist to identify a weakness where one exists, my friend. I notice you did not bring up any examples to counter my point. There is an expression: you get what you pay for. Granted, the $8/hr programmers wrote bad code. What I objected to was their supposition that they produced code of equal quality to domestic coders. Even the Indians who we had in the states had this same problem. I went on a crusade with our onshore Indian developers to raise this issue with them--albeit gingerly--to get them to be more creative. They were capable--so it is not a racial deficiency--rather their culture did not instill this tendency.
I have no doubt that there are genius programmers in India. I have met a few. But the vast majority we worked with were just not creative or that bright. So, to assume that India is a vast pool of untapped genius is naive. To think that you can just offshore a project and forget about it for two months until it comes back finished is nonsense. I have never seen a larger group of sloppy coders in my life. We had to do extensive code reviews and send the code back and send it back until we just gave up and rewrote it ourselves. The end result was not cost savings but having salaried developers such as myself silently work long hours after I had worked on my onshore work to rewrite their damned code.
You may get some traction calling me a racist but that's not the point. For example, if an Indian programmer grew up in the United States, then they were born into our creative culture and brought up to be creative. Therefore, their race was not the issue: the Indian culture was. Can you comprehend the difference? It's not racial, it's cultural.
Those of us who work everyday with databases should know the futility of opposing any linkages of all DBs in the world. It is only through government stupidity and lethargy that this hasn't happened already. Anybody who has a DB is going to link them up if at all possible. The only thing we have on our side is the delay caused by government sloth.
Your best bet if you don't like this is to go off the grid. But we know what an exercise in futility that is unless you're willing to live in Montana ala Ted Kazinsky.
The glaring point in this story that no one is commenting on is this: the outsourcing of Netscape 8 produced shit software. Having worked in two companies in a row over the last five years that did forays into outsourcing, I can say that it just doesn't work. The people we got to work for us overseas were little more than trained monkeys.
I defy you to find a gram of creativity in your average Indian programmer. This was my experience over years of programming with them. The could follow detailed-to-the-nth-degree instructions but if they encountered any difficulties, they could not innovate their way out of a paper bag. They were constantly producing the most ridiculous software that drove me nuts. For about a year we silently rewrote what they did until finally we started pointing out the problems to management and they got the picture. If you have a repetitive task that you need to have done by the offshore team--they can repeat a pattern. If you expect them to innovate one millimeter away from that--forget it.
At one company, we were having the offshore team create us some CMP EJBs. I started looking at their EJB code and I saw all these: lines at the beginning: Connection con = null; PreparedStatement ps = null; ResultSet rs = null;
Well, anybody who knows CMP EJBs knows that you don't include those objects--that code is written for you. So, obviously, those references were never used in that particular method. So, as I started looking at our new code coming from the offshore team, each and every one of their CMP EJBs contained those exact three unused references. What would that tell you? That they were all copy and pasting code they did not understand in the slightest.
For that matter, for all the Indian programmers we have working today, we should be seeing a stream of innovation coming out of there. We should be seeing lots of open source projects--hundreds of them.
It is my considered opinion that the real reason that the tech industry was born and nurtured in the US is because we are raised to be creative and innovate. From our childhoods, kids are building, whether it's making their own toys, taking things apart, building tree forts or assembling Radio Shack projects, etc. This will remain our singular edge despite the alleged cost savings of having trained monkeys implement our designs.
Why does every boring TV show deserve a re-birth. Let it die.
Re:Storytelling Ability Is the Primary Requirement
on
Game Writing
·
· Score: 1
I read a book called "Shakespeare's Plots" and that's where my information came from. I will agree that Shakespeare did not ever say his plots were designed like that. We inferred it. I also think there will in infiite set of variations on the topic as we, in essence, dissect the workings of Shakespeare's brain.
Glad you liked the post. Please now go and vote for my novel at Gather.com
Re:Storytelling Ability Is the Primary Requirement
on
Game Writing
·
· Score: 1
guaigean,
I have been a software developer for around 11 years. I make my living writing code. When you make code, you are solving a problem whose outline and parameters are defined. You are "solving" a problem. Writing code is not that hard.
In writing the story, the parameters are not decided. You must create both the problem and its solution. Creative work such as writing is infinitely more complex than writing code. And I'm not some foofy English major. I know code. I'm not talking about theme bs, I'm talking about writing a story. Why does Stephen King make millions? Why does Joe Koder make $80,000? Becuase the former is much more difficult to do. Your foofy English major didn't know what they were talking about either.
Perhaps it sounds arrogant to you. Fine. That does not detract from the substance of the point. It remains true.
Storytelling Ability Is the Primary Requirement
on
Game Writing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Developers always spend a lot of time worrying about the technical aspects of Game Writing. In fact, coding is the easy part. Storytelling, the art of making us care about the game play and become engaged in the story, is the central problem. Although developers spend most of their time learning how to make cool graphics, they should learn how to tell a good story.
For example, Gather.com is running a novel writing contest right now. First prize is $5,000.00 and publication by Simon & Schuster. The central problem with the majority of the entries? Lack of storytelling skills.
Here is an example that does have a story and that has been highly rated:
Here is an article that attempts to address the problem of: What Is A Story
Anyone who has set off to write a novel or even a short story will eventually confront this question: what is a story? There are many books available, those that were published in the past fifty years and those that more recently entered print.
As a budding author, you may commence to write a story or what you think is a story by trying to relate an anecdote that you heard. Unless you are quite fortunate, this approach does not yield very good fruit. The explanation of why this doesn't is as mysterious as the entire writing process. One cannot go to a single place and find the answer, as one could hope to do with an encyclopedia. Rather, one must investigate the answer and attempt to get close to the solution.
Ernest Hemingway's Advice: "Don't Describe, Invent"
I began my life as a writer back in 1983, when I was 18 years old. I first began by reading Ernest Hemingway's "First 49" short stories. I was amazed at how effective they were. I dissected them sentence by sentence, trying to figure out by the arrangement of clauses, the control over concrete verbs and the avoidance of adjectives what he had accomplished. I did not arrive at an obvious answer and in fact just got more confused. I turned to the many biographies and analytical works that strove to understand what Hemingway was trying to achieve. I accomplished the same thing I would have if I had just read each of the stories over and over a hundred times. I achieved a critical close reading by reading these biographies and critical analyses.
More importantly, though, I heard related a lot of the comments Hemingway himself made about his writing life. He was always making pronouncements that I did not understand and that frustrated me. One of the first ones I heard was: "Don't describe, Invent." Well, I thought. What the devil does that mean? It took me about two years of my own writing to start to understand what he was meaning by this cryptic comment. Hemingway was describing the process of story writing. When a writer tries to create a story out of something that actually happened to them, they are apt to describe what actually happened. That might work except that a person's imagination--driven by their subconscious--is always limited by what actually happened to them. Their imagination can go no further than the real events. If the writer does not base their story on a real event, then what we just described (description) is not an option. If the writer makes up a story from whole cloth, then they are not describing, they are inventing. In this situation, the imagination--driven by the subconscious--is not hampered by the real events that happened. Instead, the mind is free to live in the story, to make it up as it goes along. This is the first secret that a writer must learn. Usually a writer will not get around to inventing stories until they have used up all the stories they know or have heard. So, it isn't until you use up all the crap you know that you start to really engage your imagination and write some good stuff.
Hemingway's Iceberg Principle
Hemingway was full of these little nuggets of wisdom. I am fort
The whole AJAX craze was a big bait and switch. Everybody oohed and aahed over Google maps. Then the developers ran out and added to their projects. And then the big ol' wait happened. Unless the data you're getting is miniscule, AJAX is pig slow. My business customers all assumed that every bit of data was free and so they all started asking for these post-less pages full of AJAX. I cursed the day they ever heard that damned acronym.
Google maps is a super easy and uncomplicated implementation of AJAX. The way it works is: if you're about to go to a cell for which the image is not already downloaded, it is triggered to go get it. That's it. It just gets images as needed. No hard-core calculations or anything. So simple because the job it's doing is really simple.
Why is IBM even bothering to write their own JDKs? Don't they know that WebSphere and WSAD are dead? JBoss and Eclipse have murdered them in their sleep. Having had to deploy on WebSphere and develop on WSAD, I would say it was a mercy killing.
I would be curious to see the sources to see how they did it. See the compromises.
Java Lectures for Free - Free Java Lectures
If Google had been the owner of this patent, I would love the idea. When it's Microsoft I feel the inclination to slap my hand over my wallet. Not only don't I trust Microsoft to get anything right, but I'm sure they would find a way in the future to tap into my wallet after I was already committed.
If Microsot cannot get their bread and butter OS to work correctly after all these years and attempts, what would lead anyone to believe they could get this right?
Folks,
Popularity has its price. Google has temporarily shut down my "Free Java Lectures" website due to popularity. Should be fixed in a few days. By the way, that website is now listed as having a google page ranking of 6/10. I guess that means free stuff is always valued. Anybody wants the content while the page is shut down, just email me and I will send you a zip of all the content on the site. --Tom
Despite the flaw of lacking a lecture on EJBs, the usage of that Free Java Lectures sight is through the roof. In January 2007 alone, here are the stats:
Total hits this month: 748
Total hits yesterday: 71
Total hits today: 97
More importantly, people are not just hitting and running. They are doing something very rare on the web: staying for long times:
97 hits today, some of the longer visitors.
8 hours 41 mins 0 secs Poland
8 mins 38 secs Tennessee
15 mins 4 secs Canada
3 hours 23 mins 3 secs Istanbul Turkey
9 hours 22 mins 39 secs New York, Westbury
1 hour 24 mins 28 secs Ohio, Columbus
1 hour 36 mins 33 secs Pennsylvannia
58 mins 8 secs North Carolina
17 mins 43 secs Texas Fort Worth
13 mins 7 secs Etela-suomen Laani, Helsinki, Finland
I don't know if you have ever tried to create a course that is taught in a university setting, but it takes a tremendous amount of work. Each of those lectures has at least 60 hours of work in the planning, creation and tweaking phases. As you well know, the EJB standard is huge. I cannot do a lecture that is half assed, okay? I just have not gotten around to completing the one on EJBs. I have the session beans part long done but the CMP part of the spec is so detailed, I just have not had time to finish it.
I know the standard around slashdot is ridicule and negativity. I would not expect anything else. However, according to www.statcounter.com, my http://curmudgeon99.googlepages.com/ gets an average of 50 hits a day, many of those hits are people who stay on the site for up to 12 hours at a time--a few up to 29 hours! They come from all over the world and I get an overwhelmingly positive response to it. So, although you may get your jollies by ridiculing it because it lacks a lecture on EJB, that really is not the point. Google the site and you'll see there are lauding appraisals from all over the place, even in a variety of non-English sites such as French and even Arabic websites. They all say variants of "this is not to be missed."
Therefore, have your laughs. The site is proving very valuable to a great many people and I have nothing to apoligise for.
I'll take that bait. I had tried to write up a lecture for EJBs but they were so goofy--especially the original version--that I abandoned trying to teach them. You can't do a class on EJBs unless you do all of them and CMP beans were a mess.
EJBs:
Stateless session beans (useful in SOA, and for that I recommend them highly).
Stateful session beans (never used them, can't imagine needing them. Smacks of poor design.)
CMP--began to use these once at HP but had to abandon them. Was stuck on an WebLogic 5.1 and so was stuck on the OLD EJB standard. Nightmare.
BMP--was forced to use them at HP to resolve the aforementioned problem.
Prefer Hibernate to any of that CMP crap.
Since you say you have no experience, I would recommend two parts:
First, go to my Free Java Lectures website: (no ads or any other crap)
http://curmudgeon99.googlepages.com/
And use them to learn J2EE fast (the later lectures are most of J2EE)
Then, build yourself at least one complex application that includes a webapp, JDBC using a DataSource and possibly even Stateless Session beans (sorry no lecture from me on EJB)
The act of doing a project will fix in your mind what you have learned from my Free Java Lectures.
Then, get yourself a book on the certification and bone up on all the gotchas.
Good luck!
Slashdot Mirror
If Vista itself requires this much RAM just to work well, imagine how much more you would need to run anything ELSE? What a pig! No wonder MS was giving away those free laptops. That way they could mask the horrible performance of this shitpile under a realistic machine. I don't even own machine that could hold that much ram. Who are they fooling?
Leave it to JavaScript--the hacker's best friend. How funny that this all came down to a race to see who could assemble the injectable fields fast enough. Not only do you need to be a skilled hacker--but a quick one to boot.
Slogging through this guy's admirable grasp of statistics, it appears that the intuitive solution is that MSN (Microsoft) is far and away the least accurate. Why does this not surprise? The company that brought us the blue screen of death, that brought us Hacker Heaven (AKA Windows) is wildly inaccurate.
Well, I was referring to cases of outsourcing that I knew of, where the particular problems that I outlined did occur. In the case of Netscape, the generic problems with outsourcing are en force. In this case, the same weaknesses of outsourcing may apply. Lax control. The impossibility of defining everything. Lack of the company culture being en force.
While I agree that nobody ever went broke betting on the intelligence of the government. But, all it takes is ONE hotshot programmer and your theory is defunct. I just know that it's going to happen, one DB at a time.
About living in Russia, you are correct, or at least you were correct. I lived there in 1997 [See Russian Plumbers. For a time, I lived in the apartment of friends while I rented out my own St. Petersburg apartment. The electric bill arrived and so--not wanting to mess up my Russian friends--I set out to pay it. That was not easy. When I finally found the place to pay it, the woman behind the counter was really surprised that I did. She dutifully took my money and I paid the bill.
When my Russian friends returned from the dacha, they were amused that I had bothered to pay the bill.
"Nobody pays the electric bill in Russia," they said.
Because there were no separate electric meters in the apartment building, there was no way for the government in Russia to know their individual electricity usage, let alone shut it off for anybody.Likewise, when I got paid from the Russian newspaper where I worked, I was told I would be making 146,000 rubles (about $42.00). When payday arrived, I was paid in cash exactly the amount I had been promised. No taxes whatsoever.
I don't know if it is still that way but in 1997 Russia was the wild west. So if you're looking to avoid government, Russia used to be the place to be. Just the mafia to worry about.
You are absolutely right but different databases would mean different licenses and I expect the bean counters would demand that all those dbs be put on the same instance and so--eventually--they will interoperate.
We're all putting our privacy hopes on the chance that all these problems will never be worked out. Sure, during the short run they would never work but eventually it's going to be some hotshot programmer's job to make them work and I expect--eventually--they will get this problem solved and those databases are going to work well enough to violate all of our privacy.
Look how long it has taken the FBI to get their shit together. Decades. However, are you willing to bet that the NSA does not have enough money to solve these problems? I'm not. Given enough money, enough smart coders, I fear that these databases are going to be talking. Sure, not efficiently enough for real time. So that means the feds are going to be knocking on your door in a week rather than a day. The end result is the same.
As a fellow New Yorker, I agree that NYC is a great place for citizen involvement. However, this is the exception. In most cities, government can do what it wants because nobody cares. I have lived all over the US from Omaha, Phoenix, Cincinnati, Houston and Salt Lake City and no where do people notice or care what government is doing until it is done and directly affects them. It is a common experience to have people complaining about the horse after it escaped the barn months before.
Stopping these kinds of things takes constant vigilence. It's akin to stopping the gentrification of an old neighborhood. Drop your guard for one day and that old building you loved is a pile of ruble. In NYC, there have even been buildings that were protected under a court order that were taken down on a Sunday.
So, while I agree with your sentiment, my expectations are much more pessimistic.
It's not racist to identify a weakness where one exists, my friend. I notice you did not bring up any examples to counter my point. There is an expression: you get what you pay for. Granted, the $8/hr programmers wrote bad code. What I objected to was their supposition that they produced code of equal quality to domestic coders. Even the Indians who we had in the states had this same problem. I went on a crusade with our onshore Indian developers to raise this issue with them--albeit gingerly--to get them to be more creative. They were capable--so it is not a racial deficiency--rather their culture did not instill this tendency.
I have no doubt that there are genius programmers in India. I have met a few. But the vast majority we worked with were just not creative or that bright. So, to assume that India is a vast pool of untapped genius is naive. To think that you can just offshore a project and forget about it for two months until it comes back finished is nonsense. I have never seen a larger group of sloppy coders in my life. We had to do extensive code reviews and send the code back and send it back until we just gave up and rewrote it ourselves. The end result was not cost savings but having salaried developers such as myself silently work long hours after I had worked on my onshore work to rewrite their damned code.
You may get some traction calling me a racist but that's not the point. For example, if an Indian programmer grew up in the United States, then they were born into our creative culture and brought up to be creative. Therefore, their race was not the issue: the Indian culture was. Can you comprehend the difference? It's not racial, it's cultural.
Those of us who work everyday with databases should know the futility of opposing any linkages of all DBs in the world. It is only through government stupidity and lethargy that this hasn't happened already. Anybody who has a DB is going to link them up if at all possible. The only thing we have on our side is the delay caused by government sloth.
Your best bet if you don't like this is to go off the grid. But we know what an exercise in futility that is unless you're willing to live in Montana ala Ted Kazinsky.
The glaring point in this story that no one is commenting on is this: the outsourcing of Netscape 8 produced shit software. Having worked in two companies in a row over the last five years that did forays into outsourcing, I can say that it just doesn't work. The people we got to work for us overseas were little more than trained monkeys.
I defy you to find a gram of creativity in your average Indian programmer. This was my experience over years of programming with them. The could follow detailed-to-the-nth-degree instructions but if they encountered any difficulties, they could not innovate their way out of a paper bag. They were constantly producing the most ridiculous software that drove me nuts. For about a year we silently rewrote what they did until finally we started pointing out the problems to management and they got the picture. If you have a repetitive task that you need to have done by the offshore team--they can repeat a pattern. If you expect them to innovate one millimeter away from that--forget it.
At one company, we were having the offshore team create us some CMP EJBs. I started looking at their EJB code and I saw all these: lines at the beginning:
Connection con = null;
PreparedStatement ps = null;
ResultSet rs = null;
Well, anybody who knows CMP EJBs knows that you don't include those objects--that code is written for you. So, obviously, those references were never used in that particular method. So, as I started looking at our new code coming from the offshore team, each and every one of their CMP EJBs contained those exact three unused references. What would that tell you? That they were all copy and pasting code they did not understand in the slightest.
For that matter, for all the Indian programmers we have working today, we should be seeing a stream of innovation coming out of there. We should be seeing lots of open source projects--hundreds of them.
It is my considered opinion that the real reason that the tech industry was born and nurtured in the US is because we are raised to be creative and innovate. From our childhoods, kids are building, whether it's making their own toys, taking things apart, building tree forts or assembling Radio Shack projects, etc. This will remain our singular edge despite the alleged cost savings of having trained monkeys implement our designs.
It was crude. It was not witty enough to make it as a cartoon that looked like it was drawn by somebody's feet.
Danalien, Looks like you need to go back on your lithium. Your psychosis is showing...
Why does every boring TV show deserve a re-birth. Let it die.
I read a book called "Shakespeare's Plots" and that's where my information came from. I will agree that Shakespeare did not ever say his plots were designed like that. We inferred it. I also think there will in infiite set of variations on the topic as we, in essence, dissect the workings of Shakespeare's brain.
Glad you liked the post. Please now go and vote for my novel at Gather.com
The Butcher of Leningrad
thank you,
Tom
guaigean, I have been a software developer for around 11 years. I make my living writing code. When you make code, you are solving a problem whose outline and parameters are defined. You are "solving" a problem. Writing code is not that hard. In writing the story, the parameters are not decided. You must create both the problem and its solution. Creative work such as writing is infinitely more complex than writing code. And I'm not some foofy English major. I know code. I'm not talking about theme bs, I'm talking about writing a story. Why does Stephen King make millions? Why does Joe Koder make $80,000? Becuase the former is much more difficult to do. Your foofy English major didn't know what they were talking about either. Perhaps it sounds arrogant to you. Fine. That does not detract from the substance of the point. It remains true.
Developers always spend a lot of time worrying about the technical aspects of Game Writing. In fact, coding is the easy part. Storytelling, the art of making us care about the game play and become engaged in the story, is the central problem. Although developers spend most of their time learning how to make cool graphics, they should learn how to tell a good story.
For example, Gather.com is running a novel writing contest right now. First prize is $5,000.00 and publication by Simon & Schuster. The central problem with the majority of the entries? Lack of storytelling skills.
Here is an example that does have a story and that has been highly rated:
The Butcher of Leningrad
Here is an article that attempts to address the problem of:
What Is A Story
Anyone who has set off to write a novel or even a short story will eventually confront this question: what is a story? There are many books available, those that were published in the past fifty years and those that more recently entered print.
As a budding author, you may commence to write a story or what you think is a story by trying to relate an anecdote that you heard. Unless you are quite fortunate, this approach does not yield very good fruit. The explanation of why this doesn't is as mysterious as the entire writing process. One cannot go to a single place and find the answer, as one could hope to do with an encyclopedia. Rather, one must investigate the answer and attempt to get close to the solution.
Ernest Hemingway's Advice: "Don't Describe, Invent"
I began my life as a writer back in 1983, when I was 18 years old. I first began by reading Ernest Hemingway's "First 49" short stories. I was amazed at how effective they were. I dissected them sentence by sentence, trying to figure out by the arrangement of clauses, the control over concrete verbs and the avoidance of adjectives what he had accomplished. I did not arrive at an obvious answer and in fact just got more confused. I turned to the many biographies and analytical works that strove to understand what Hemingway was trying to achieve. I accomplished the same thing I would have if I had just read each of the stories over and over a hundred times. I achieved a critical close reading by reading these biographies and critical analyses.
More importantly, though, I heard related a lot of the comments Hemingway himself made about his writing life. He was always making pronouncements that I did not understand and that frustrated me. One of the first ones I heard was: "Don't describe, Invent." Well, I thought. What the devil does that mean? It took me about two years of my own writing to start to understand what he was meaning by this cryptic comment. Hemingway was describing the process of story writing. When a writer tries to create a story out of something that actually happened to them, they are apt to describe what actually happened. That might work except that a person's imagination--driven by their subconscious--is always limited by what actually happened to them. Their imagination can go no further than the real events. If the writer does not base their story on a real event, then what we just described (description) is not an option. If the writer makes up a story from whole cloth, then they are not describing, they are inventing. In this situation, the imagination--driven by the subconscious--is not hampered by the real events that happened. Instead, the mind is free to live in the story, to make it up as it goes along. This is the first secret that a writer must learn. Usually a writer will not get around to inventing stories until they have used up all the stories they know or have heard. So, it isn't until you use up all the crap you know that you start to really engage your imagination and write some good stuff.
Hemingway's Iceberg Principle
Hemingway was full of these little nuggets of wisdom. I am fort
The whole AJAX craze was a big bait and switch. Everybody oohed and aahed over Google maps. Then the developers ran out and added to their projects. And then the big ol' wait happened. Unless the data you're getting is miniscule, AJAX is pig slow. My business customers all assumed that every bit of data was free and so they all started asking for these post-less pages full of AJAX. I cursed the day they ever heard that damned acronym. Google maps is a super easy and uncomplicated implementation of AJAX. The way it works is: if you're about to go to a cell for which the image is not already downloaded, it is triggered to go get it. That's it. It just gets images as needed. No hard-core calculations or anything. So simple because the job it's doing is really simple.
Why is IBM even bothering to write their own JDKs? Don't they know that WebSphere and WSAD are dead? JBoss and Eclipse have murdered them in their sleep. Having had to deploy on WebSphere and develop on WSAD, I would say it was a mercy killing. I would be curious to see the sources to see how they did it. See the compromises. Java Lectures for Free - Free Java Lectures
If Google had been the owner of this patent, I would love the idea. When it's Microsoft I feel the inclination to slap my hand over my wallet. Not only don't I trust Microsoft to get anything right, but I'm sure they would find a way in the future to tap into my wallet after I was already committed. If Microsot cannot get their bread and butter OS to work correctly after all these years and attempts, what would lead anyone to believe they could get this right?
Folks, Popularity has its price. Google has temporarily shut down my "Free Java Lectures" website due to popularity. Should be fixed in a few days. By the way, that website is now listed as having a google page ranking of 6/10. I guess that means free stuff is always valued. Anybody wants the content while the page is shut down, just email me and I will send you a zip of all the content on the site. --Tom
Despite the flaw of lacking a lecture on EJBs, the usage of that Free Java Lectures sight is through the roof. In January 2007 alone, here are the stats: Total hits this month: 748 Total hits yesterday: 71 Total hits today: 97 More importantly, people are not just hitting and running. They are doing something very rare on the web: staying for long times: 97 hits today, some of the longer visitors. 8 hours 41 mins 0 secs Poland 8 mins 38 secs Tennessee 15 mins 4 secs Canada 3 hours 23 mins 3 secs Istanbul Turkey 9 hours 22 mins 39 secs New York, Westbury 1 hour 24 mins 28 secs Ohio, Columbus 1 hour 36 mins 33 secs Pennsylvannia 58 mins 8 secs North Carolina 17 mins 43 secs Texas Fort Worth 13 mins 7 secs Etela-suomen Laani, Helsinki, Finland
I don't know if you have ever tried to create a course that is taught in a university setting, but it takes a tremendous amount of work. Each of those lectures has at least 60 hours of work in the planning, creation and tweaking phases. As you well know, the EJB standard is huge. I cannot do a lecture that is half assed, okay? I just have not gotten around to completing the one on EJBs. I have the session beans part long done but the CMP part of the spec is so detailed, I just have not had time to finish it. I know the standard around slashdot is ridicule and negativity. I would not expect anything else. However, according to www.statcounter.com, my http://curmudgeon99.googlepages.com/ gets an average of 50 hits a day, many of those hits are people who stay on the site for up to 12 hours at a time--a few up to 29 hours! They come from all over the world and I get an overwhelmingly positive response to it. So, although you may get your jollies by ridiculing it because it lacks a lecture on EJB, that really is not the point. Google the site and you'll see there are lauding appraisals from all over the place, even in a variety of non-English sites such as French and even Arabic websites. They all say variants of "this is not to be missed." Therefore, have your laughs. The site is proving very valuable to a great many people and I have nothing to apoligise for.
I'll take that bait. I had tried to write up a lecture for EJBs but they were so goofy--especially the original version--that I abandoned trying to teach them. You can't do a class on EJBs unless you do all of them and CMP beans were a mess. EJBs: Stateless session beans (useful in SOA, and for that I recommend them highly). Stateful session beans (never used them, can't imagine needing them. Smacks of poor design.) CMP--began to use these once at HP but had to abandon them. Was stuck on an WebLogic 5.1 and so was stuck on the OLD EJB standard. Nightmare. BMP--was forced to use them at HP to resolve the aforementioned problem. Prefer Hibernate to any of that CMP crap.
Since you say you have no experience, I would recommend two parts: First, go to my Free Java Lectures website: (no ads or any other crap) http://curmudgeon99.googlepages.com/ And use them to learn J2EE fast (the later lectures are most of J2EE) Then, build yourself at least one complex application that includes a webapp, JDBC using a DataSource and possibly even Stateless Session beans (sorry no lecture from me on EJB) The act of doing a project will fix in your mind what you have learned from my Free Java Lectures. Then, get yourself a book on the certification and bone up on all the gotchas. Good luck!