I'm a little doubtful about using a segway in the mountains. If a segway can go 12mph up a steep hill and keep on doing that for a few hours I'll grant you a point for mountain use.
A segway will have the same problem as a bike: it'll have to brake down the hill and accelerate up the hill. If it uses its motor for braking then it's going to have big problems in the mountain.
Even if it doesn't I think it would lose its charge. But this is all speculation as I'm not gonna shell out $3k to find out.
At segway speeds on a bike you aren't going to work up a sweat at all, you'll use less energy than walking. Mostly you'll just be coasting along, and you'll pedal only every now and then.
Powered individual transit ought to be able to merge in either with pedestrians or with cars. Otherwise it's too limited--if you can only ride on the road, or only on the sidewalk, if you can't hop curbs, etc., then it's kind of pointless.
A non-motorized scooter, by the way, can hop curbs pretty easily: take your foot off for one second and step over the curb. You can do it smoothly and hardly breaking your speed.
The self-balancing thing, I think, is a boondoggle. I'm not sure it's really that useful: a powered tricycle would also suit you but it wouldn't be so "cool".
A reasonable bicycle can be had for around $100 and will get you anywhere you want to go, and get you into better shape as well. You won't sweat on your bike if you travel at segway speeds either.
I really don't see the appeal of this $3000 upright motoroized wheelchair--what will it do for me that my bike won't?
Can it hop curbs? Is it easy to lock up on the street? I just don't get it, sorry.
1. A new keyboard isn't a good solution to an RSI problem. The only good solution is to type less. Changing your keyboard may "feel" better for awhile because you will be stressing different muscles. But you will still be stressing muscles and unless you make a fundamental change the problem will come back again.
2. Posture matters more than anything else. Perhaps with "more resistence" you are forced into a better posture. A good typing posture leaves your arms free so that all of the muscles through your arms, shoulders, and even back can come into play while you type. By distributing the work throughout as many different muscle groups as you can you eliminate the stress on each muscle.
3. You stress your muscles even when you are not typing, just by sitting in the "typing position" you are creating stress. It takes work to hold your fingers ready over the home row, and if you don't get a break from that, that alone can contribute to your RSI.
I had two rounds with RSI problems and I'll tell you how I solved it--today I'm seemingly healthy again. I tried all kinds of different keyboards, mouses, workstation arrangements, etc., but only the fundamentals worked in the end.
My first round at RSI I won by changing the fundamentals: I drastically cut the amount of time I spend sitting in front of a computer by giving up video games completely. Nothing else worked, but cutting the time I spent in front of a computer in half made a difference.
My second round with RSI was more difficult to beat, I had to change my attitude. First I took a two month hiatus from touching computers--I was consulting, so I simply stopped consulting for awhile until I felt normal again. When I returned I tried to make some changes, like altering my keyboard, and I failed. Back to another two month break. In the end I had to learn to get up and leave my workstation every so often--anywhere from 15 minutes to 30min, and just go for a little walk around the office. I also had to learn that no matter how pressing my deadlines were, if I didn't feel right, it was time to go home.
It took me a LONG time to change my work attitudes, so that I no longer sat in front of a computer for too many hours, or worked too much in a day. I learned to think while walking around the room rather than sitting at my desk, I learned to take more breaks, and these are FUNDAMENTAL things that matter--changing your keyboard is a minor factor at best.
Before I recovered I'd lost a total of five months to long breaks required to get me back to a healthy state. I was paranoid about it, I stopped on pain and took long breaks--many people feel work pressure and try to find ways to work through the pain, I just gave it up. I figured that although I suffered financially at the time (and still feel some effects of that) it was more important to me to have a long and full career in the future.
I've had things pretty well under control for the past five years now, but it takes dedication and paranoia and you have to grow a pretty serious attitude about it.
I think people who feel they can "fix it" by changing keyboards or rearranging their workstation are only prolonging their suffering.
I think a lot of you guys missed my point. Sure I could run IPSec, but that doesn't really make my life easier.
I have to go around and secure _every_ client on my network, because I have to fear that my network was broken. With ether cable I know that my network is physically secure--I control the area that the cable runs though. With 802.11 I don't control the area that the radio waves travel through--anybody can and probably will listen.
Running IPSec isn't a great solution. That protects my bandwidth, but it doesn't protect ME. Someone who cracked WEB could hack any host on my network unless I go through and carefully secure every single one.
With ethernet cable I can install a firewall between my internal and external network, and then worry a lot less about whether some stupid windows box has an open share. With 802.11 an open share on an internal box is obviously a problem.
You could firewall down every box so it only listens to IPSec but you still have to keep the TCP stacks up to date or they'll be subject to protocol stack errors.
I'd feel reasonably secure if 256 bit web actually gave me 256 bits worth of key--but it won't, and WEP can't change the keys either so once it's cracked it's a LOT of work to manually reinstall all the keys--bleh.
WEB is not secure at 256 bits or any other number: the extra "bits" don't actually increase the security by much at all as the protocol is fundamentally broken. It's not a brute force attack that brings it down. It would NOT take "months" to crack 256 bit keys, it's not an exponential increase over 128 or 64: it's a linear increase because WEP is stupid.
People are working on fixes to this, what I was getting at is that I wonder how many people realize it ISN'T fixed yet and are rolling out their cool wireless network.
Just the level of ignorance HERE about it kind of proves my point.
I'm a little worried about this mad dash to 802.11 technology before any viable security is in place. Of course this is great for those who want to create open networks--but many will use it to create corporate networks, or home networks with unsecured machines attached.
I'm running an 802.11 network and it drives me crazy that there is no way to wholly secure it: I have to secure each and every host on my network as it's impossible to create any kind of firewall (someone will just hack the air interface and get around my firewall).
Hopefully in addition to cool new bandwidth there are some hardcore security features in this one. 802.11 is "ad hoc" in more ways than one:-)
There is no place for a patent in an "open standard", period.
The current proposal offers to admit patented techniques into the W3 standards if a special grant is made allowing the technique to be used with the web.
This is wrong-headed for two reasons.
First, it would not be fair to a patent holder if the W3C, in the future, extended the definition of "web infrastructure" to include new technologies and techniques which may not now be considered part of the web infrastructure. The W3C therefore would not be allowed to extend and build on the current standards in the future.
It is crucial that the W3C be permitted to build on its current standards, and so this barrier to innovation and progress must be cast aside. Thus there is an unresolvable conflict between the interests of the patent holder and the future interests of the web community, and as a result, patent restricted techniques have no place in the standards of the W3C.
Second, it limits the development of web infrastructure. For it is by outside innovation and creativity that the infrastructure of the web has been constructed: much of it passed to the W3C from outside hands. Successful and innovative techniques have been widely adopted and subsequently standardized. Almost all of the core standards of the W3C were derived thus.
By limiting development to approved "web infrastructures" only this leading edge of creativity will be blunted: no innovation will occur ahead of the standards curve, for that work shall be considered not a part of the "web infrastructure" and therefore subject to the restrictive patent.
In order that the W3C members and general public receive the benefit of outside innovation it is critical that innovators be permitted to extend and experiment with W3C technologies in any way they like--pushing out the definition and scope of "web infrastrcuture" as they go, in unforseen ways.
The current policy is therefore shortsighted and may even ultimately doom the W3C to irrelevance, as creativivity and innovation is directed elsewhere, and innovation on the web infrastructure itself withers away.
The current policy is therefore shortsighted, unhelpeful, suicidal, and unfair. It ought to be abandoned: patented techniques may enrich their innovators justly, but ought not to be considered for inclusion in a W3C standard.
First and foremost I think that Tokien was inspired by the war he fought in, WW1: Huge battles and complex alliances between murky powers in which little English folk from the countryside get caught up, don't fully understand, and yet trust that somehow they are acting for the better--meanwhile massive slaughter, marshes full of dead people, and so on.
On the literary side, though, he does seem to have borrowed from all sorts of great legends. I'm sure Beowulf must be one, as the LOTR, etc., are quests. Tolkien clearly believes (in his stories anyway) in caste society: dividing people up into noble classes, low classes, and so on--the line of kings figures prominently in his work.
Moreover his creation mythology interestingly enough mixes the Christian mythology of Lucifer into a Norse mythology setting. You have Melkor rebelling against Eru much as Lucifer rebelled against God, and the whole Melkor/Morgoth/Sauron thing sounds remarkably like the story of Lucifer's fall from grace. And you have the Elves being kicked out of Valinor much as Christian mythology has men being kicked out of the Garden of Eden--with the twist of free choice.
And yet the whole thing is in a Norse mythological setting--with the gods living in great halls across the ocean--and you could even sail there if you were a good enough seafarer, and a range of gods who are somehow a higher caste than men, and yet somehow also their equals. (The Vala, Elves and Men all having been created by the same maker, Eru).
In a way I think much of British quest literature has been an attempt to weave the old tales of Beowulf into the fabric of Christian mythology, and I think that's exactly what Tolkien does.
You're talking about a very different kind of situation: where an outside attacking army supplies an internal resistence with weapons. Without the outside pressure the Germans would have had little trouble squashing it.
But that's not even the point--the point is that if there hadn't been an invading Red Army, and if the Germans were still unable to suppress it, the likely outcome is a failed state with feuding warlords.
So while a well armed population might present a problem for an invading army, it doesn't exactly preserve or protect the rights of the local citizens--it simply devolves them from being an occupied territory controlled by an external force, into a chaotic failed state run by criminals.
It seems like all you've accomplished is a leap out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Preservation of rights takes a combination of a strong democratic will among the people combined with a reasonably powerful central government. Every successful democracy has followed this model. None have emerged directly from anarchic criminal feuding.
Gun ownership is widespread in those places and the net effect has been a lack of central government and rule by local warlords. The myth is that gun ownership somehow increases the foundations of a democracy. The truth is that guns destabilize a government, and there's no guarantee that the warlord who steps in when things fall apart is going to value freedom at all.
You dig back fifty years to pull up examples that aren't even that well founded historically. Arms were widespread in many nations invaded by Japan but that didn't deter them. In the case of America the more likely explanation would be unsustainably long supply lines versus a well equipped American military.
In the case of Germany Hitler was widely popular with German people throughout all that period so it isn't clear that the people who were disarmed felt in any way oppressed. Certainly the German police would have been capable of outgunning any Jewish resistence even had guns been widespread.
The basic flaw with your premise in that case is that a few isolated individuals with guns in an overwhelmingly hostile state have any chance against an effectively organized army or police force. Sure they could have shot a few soldiers, but the German army was remarkably effective, and would have had little trouble using the gunfire as an excuse to shoot them all on the spot.
You're daydreaming here--take a look at the present day world. There are lots of countries where guns are much more prolific than in the United States, and they are NOT doing well.
The NRA and such always whinge about government control over guns. And what? The government regulates the storage of gasoline, what kind of cars are allowed on the road, who can drive a car, who can own and do what with cyanide, even the production and storage of basic foods.
We accept all these things because they increase the general level of safety and security.
Guns are reasonably safe when they are handled by people with adequate training,and I think simple requirements that people get that training, and checks to make sure they're responsible, are in the same leage as other similar regulations.
Can anyone point to a democracy that has been saved from totalitarianism by widespread gun ownership?
On the contrary I can think of a zillion countries wehre widespread gun ownership has led to an absolute loss of rights and freedom to rampaging local warlords who wind up outgunning the forces of law and order.
I think the idea that guns protect people from state oppression is an absolute myth which cannot be substantiated by any real world example.
Sorry for screaming, but I hadn't seen that mentioned yet, and it's day two.
Perhaps it's possible to write ant scripts that execute as efficiently as make, but it must not be very easy to do, since I have never seen one.
It's really nice when you're in a compile/edit cycle if it takes only a few seconds for your compile to build you a new version of your system. If it takes a minute you'll be walking around the room getting a coffee, talking to your co-worker, and totally losing your train of thought.
Most make systems I've seen compile java code a zillion times faster than ant. Sure, ant can look deeper into the java files and compile just the classes it has to, whereas with make you frequently have to compile everything. But here's the trouble: make has already finished compiling everything before Ant has even parsed all of its XML.
I really would like to use Ant. It feels like it's the right thing to do. But I can't afford it, my time is too valuable, and it's too damn slow.
Also I find complex Ant scripts FAR more difficult to understand than complex make scripts. Sure for simple build scripts the "tab and space" thing may be an issue--but for less trivial applications these issues wash away and you start wondering where bits of information came from and with Ant you sometimes just don't know.
I've seen Ant scripts break in ways that were not obvious to anybody, and took hours to debug. I've never had such trouble with make unless I was trying to do something brutally stupid with it.
Maybe I'm wrong about all this. I sure hope so, because I would like to have a good Java centric tool. My main concern is that Ant sucks, and yet it's established enough market share that it's locking out further innovation in the area.
Yeah but imagine if the cable breaks in the middle, then 50,000 km of cable is going to hit the earth, and the remainder is going to fly off into space.
well.. i worked with perl for about three years, and C++ for about two years and java for three or four (some overlap here, but more or less) and i don't agree with you at all.
you're right about performance not mattering most of the time. it does matter some of the time, though, and then it's usually memory performance.
and if you had a project with just one or two people coding i don't think it would matter which language you chose to work in.
but in my experience perl is a disaster for projects with more than 10 people. i'm sure there are exceptions or you won't agree, but that's my experience.
the program being "half as long" is not necessarily a good thing. it depends what information you cut out. if it's half as long because you used powerful langauge features to reduce the number of program instructions then that's probably a good thing.
but if it's half as long because you cut out type declaration then what are you really saving? you type less, but someone reading your program also has less to go on when they figure it out.
this is why in large projects perl is just not viable: it's not possible to isolate program error effects from one component from spilling all over the application and turning up in unexpected places. you then spend hours and hours debugging your code, or more probably, bothering the person who wrote some section or other to have them explain it to you since it's unreadable. hopefully they still work for the company.
some people answer to this that you can just do ever more testing, and that your unit tests will eventually catch all the errors.
at that point i ask you, isn't a type declaration which is checked by your compiler exactly that? a little test? a little check?
so it seems that with perl you throw out the compiler checking and then have to write all the same checks by hand all over again.
i like langauges like perl because of the powerful features that can reduce 100 lines of code to 10. but please don't take away from me the 10-20 lines that were declarative, that told me what was what and how it fit together. that information is for *me*, it's not really for the compiler. cutting out the type definitions is a bad thing.
java also has a fairly powerful library available, comparable to perls most of the time, and depending on the application either better or worse than perl's. but it also is a strongly typed langauge, and in my view, that makes it viable for projects with many people.
C++ is a different story. sometimes i think you do need to code in a low level langauge to get the performance you want--the linux OS will never be written in perl. but for general applications i wouldn't choose it, however, it's a good systems langauge programming envirnoment.
i still write perl programs--when i have a little one-off just for me, or to fix up a trashed file, or parse some data out of some stream, or something, i turn to perl for these quick little one-offs.
in fact i found a great use of perl is that it's the perfect langauge for running through all my.java source files when i decide to do a Great Renaming and i want to automate it.
the languages are not in competition really, just different purposed. java is for large scale application development. perl is for quick and dirty one-off applications. C++ is for systems programming.
a good developer, in my view, should be comfortable with all three (or an equivalent set of three).
Sure, Canadians and Americans and Europeans are also more concerned about their government and their day to day lives than their operating system.
And yes, only a small percentage of the Chinese population has a computer at home. And only a small percentage of those sign on to the net. And only a small percentage of those will care about Linux.
Nevertheless, we're talking about 20% of the worlds population, and the small percentage thats interested in the net adds about a million users a month to the internet--just a drop in China's huge bucket, but even 1% of those would be 10000 new Linux users a month.
China is just huge. Add up any group of people in China and you come up with a big number.
This has NOTHING to do with the net. It has to do with putting up a physical sign, and whether a municipality (a city) can order you to take the sign down.
What this has to do with the net, or why it's on/., I have no idea.
Brand new Linux distribution, and this has devolved into some kind of China bashing political rampage.
What happened to the software?
I heard it installs slow. Well, OK for a first release. China is signing about a million people a month on to the net, and this is a *big* win for Linux in my view.
Why don't you guys see it that way?
Who cares about the Chinese government anyway? I care about all the millions of Chinese who can now access Linux a little easier than before, now that they have a distribution targetted in their own language.
I've been writing Java code for five years. I've put some of my code into high performance situations. I've put some of it into high availability situations. I've written stuff quickly under pressure, and also other things that I took time to develop. I've worked on opensource projects (webmacro, now running AltaVista, is java) and after all that time, and all that experience, I just don't think I know enough about it to say "JAVA SUCKS! IT MUST DIE!" or to say "JAVA IS GREAT! GIVE UP ON C/PERL/XXX RIGHT NOW!"
Sometimes it's been difficult to get what I need to do done, or to make it fast, or reliable enough. But I've always managed to do it, and I haven't found my life any more or less difficult than when I wrote C++ or PERL. I tend to find that Java fits the work that I have to do, but I can see quite clearly that it doesn't fit other work.
I wish that on slashdot the size and strength of peoples opinion was somehow proportional to their expertise or experience--but unfortunately it's not.
I came here expecting something interesting and instead found a bunch of technically inaccurate crap coupled with some ridiculous opinions (I really liked the "I learned all I need to know about Java from a bookstore--it sucks!" obviously the voice of experience there).
It seems the more experience people have the more likely they are to judge that a tool does fit some things and fails to fit others.
It seems the less experience people have the more likely they are to thump on their favorite bible and insist that the whole programming would should switch to use their favorite tool, and everything else "must die!".
I'll let you judge whether you think that sounds like the voice of expertise.
Some experts who have never used Java want to tell me that it's no good, and will never be any good--why? They don't know, but they know!
And some experts who want to tell me all about why Java's compilation, why it is hard or easy even though they really don't know anything about a compiler.
And some experts on Java's market share who really don't know anything about who uses Java.
And some experts who sat in a room where Java was... gosh gee... being implemented, telling me... well I don't quite know what, but gosh!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little doubtful about using a segway in the mountains. If a segway can go 12mph up a steep hill and keep on doing that for a few hours I'll grant you a point for mountain use.
A segway will have the same problem as a bike: it'll have to brake down the hill and accelerate up the hill. If it uses its motor for braking then it's going to have big problems in the mountain.
Even if it doesn't I think it would lose its charge. But this is all speculation as I'm not gonna shell out $3k to find out.
At segway speeds on a bike you aren't going to work up a sweat at all, you'll use less energy than walking. Mostly you'll just be coasting along, and you'll pedal only every now and then.
Powered individual transit ought to be able to merge in either with pedestrians or with cars. Otherwise it's too limited--if you can only ride on the road, or only on the sidewalk, if you can't hop curbs, etc., then it's kind of pointless.
A non-motorized scooter, by the way, can hop curbs pretty easily: take your foot off for one second and step over the curb. You can do it smoothly and hardly breaking your speed.
The self-balancing thing, I think, is a boondoggle. I'm not sure it's really that useful: a powered tricycle would also suit you but it wouldn't be so "cool".
Well, if wasting $3000 is cool, welcome to it.
A reasonable bicycle can be had for around $100 and will get you anywhere you want to go, and get you into better shape as well. You won't sweat on your bike if you travel at segway speeds either.
I really don't see the appeal of this $3000 upright motoroized wheelchair--what will it do for me that my bike won't?
Can it hop curbs? Is it easy to lock up on the street? I just don't get it, sorry.
This just needs to be said:
1. A new keyboard isn't a good solution to an RSI problem. The only good solution is to type less. Changing your keyboard may "feel" better for awhile because you will be stressing different muscles. But you will still be stressing muscles and unless you make a fundamental change the problem will come back again.
2. Posture matters more than anything else. Perhaps with "more resistence" you are forced into a better posture. A good typing posture leaves your arms free so that all of the muscles through your arms, shoulders, and even back can come into play while you type. By distributing the work throughout as many different muscle groups as you can you eliminate the stress on each muscle.
3. You stress your muscles even when you are not typing, just by sitting in the "typing position" you are creating stress. It takes work to hold your fingers ready over the home row, and if you don't get a break from that, that alone can contribute to your RSI.
I had two rounds with RSI problems and I'll tell you how I solved it--today I'm seemingly healthy again. I tried all kinds of different keyboards, mouses, workstation arrangements, etc., but only the fundamentals worked in the end.
My first round at RSI I won by changing the fundamentals: I drastically cut the amount of time I spend sitting in front of a computer by giving up video games completely. Nothing else worked, but cutting the time I spent in front of a computer in half made a difference.
My second round with RSI was more difficult to beat, I had to change my attitude. First I took a two month hiatus from touching computers--I was consulting, so I simply stopped consulting for awhile until I felt normal again. When I returned I tried to make some changes, like altering my keyboard, and I failed. Back to another two month break. In the end I had to learn to get up and leave my workstation every so often--anywhere from 15 minutes to 30min, and just go for a little walk around the office. I also had to learn that no matter how pressing my deadlines were, if I didn't feel right, it was time to go home.
It took me a LONG time to change my work attitudes, so that I no longer sat in front of a computer for too many hours, or worked too much in a day. I learned to think while walking around the room rather than sitting at my desk, I learned to take more breaks, and these are FUNDAMENTAL things that matter--changing your keyboard is a minor factor at best.
Before I recovered I'd lost a total of five months to long breaks required to get me back to a healthy state. I was paranoid about it, I stopped on pain and took long breaks--many people feel work pressure and try to find ways to work through the pain, I just gave it up. I figured that although I suffered financially at the time (and still feel some effects of that) it was more important to me to have a long and full career in the future.
I've had things pretty well under control for the past five years now, but it takes dedication and paranoia and you have to grow a pretty serious attitude about it.
I think people who feel they can "fix it" by changing keyboards or rearranging their workstation are only prolonging their suffering.
Hook this up to AirSnort or something and then you could listen to other people's private web pages while driving
I think a lot of you guys missed my point. Sure I could run IPSec, but that doesn't really make my life easier.
I have to go around and secure _every_ client on my network, because I have to fear that my network was broken. With ether cable I know that my network is physically secure--I control the area that the cable runs though. With 802.11 I don't control the area that the radio waves travel through--anybody can and probably will listen.
Running IPSec isn't a great solution. That protects my bandwidth, but it doesn't protect ME. Someone who cracked WEB could hack any host on my network unless I go through and carefully secure every single one.
With ethernet cable I can install a firewall between my internal and external network, and then worry a lot less about whether some stupid windows box has an open share. With 802.11 an open share on an internal box is obviously a problem.
You could firewall down every box so it only listens to IPSec but you still have to keep the TCP stacks up to date or they'll be subject to protocol stack errors.
I'd feel reasonably secure if 256 bit web actually gave me 256 bits worth of key--but it won't, and WEP can't change the keys either so once it's cracked it's a LOT of work to manually reinstall all the keys--bleh.
WEB is not secure at 256 bits or any other number: the extra "bits" don't actually increase the security by much at all as the protocol is fundamentally broken. It's not a brute force attack that brings it down. It would NOT take "months" to crack 256 bit keys, it's not an exponential increase over 128 or 64: it's a linear increase because WEP is stupid.
People are working on fixes to this, what I was getting at is that I wonder how many people realize it ISN'T fixed yet and are rolling out their cool wireless network.
Just the level of ignorance HERE about it kind of proves my point.
I'm a little worried about this mad dash to 802.11 technology before any viable security is in place. Of course this is great for those who want to create open networks--but many will use it to create corporate networks, or home networks with unsecured machines attached.
I'm running an 802.11 network and it drives me crazy that there is no way to wholly secure it: I have to secure each and every host on my network as it's impossible to create any kind of firewall (someone will just hack the air interface and get around my firewall).
Hopefully in addition to cool new bandwidth there are some hardcore security features in this one. 802.11 is "ad hoc" in more ways than one
There is no place for a patent in an "open standard", period.
The current proposal offers to admit patented techniques into the
W3 standards if a special grant is made allowing the technique
to be used with the web.
This is wrong-headed for two reasons.
First, it would not be fair to a patent holder if the W3C, in the
future, extended the definition of "web infrastructure" to include
new technologies and techniques which may not now be considered
part of the web infrastructure. The W3C therefore would not be
allowed to extend and build on the current standards in the future.
It is crucial that the W3C be permitted to build on its current
standards, and so this barrier to innovation and progress must
be cast aside. Thus there is an unresolvable conflict between
the interests of the patent holder and the future interests of
the web community, and as a result, patent restricted techniques
have no place in the standards of the W3C.
Second, it limits the development of web infrastructure. For it
is by outside innovation and creativity that the infrastructure
of the web has been constructed: much of it passed to the W3C
from outside hands. Successful and innovative techniques have
been widely adopted and subsequently standardized. Almost all
of the core standards of the W3C were derived thus.
By limiting development to approved "web infrastructures" only
this leading edge of creativity will be blunted: no innovation
will occur ahead of the standards curve, for that work shall
be considered not a part of the "web infrastructure" and
therefore subject to the restrictive patent.
In order that the W3C members and general public receive the
benefit of outside innovation it is critical that innovators
be permitted to extend and experiment with W3C technologies
in any way they like--pushing out the definition and scope
of "web infrastrcuture" as they go, in unforseen ways.
The current policy is therefore shortsighted and may even
ultimately doom the W3C to irrelevance, as creativivity and
innovation is directed elsewhere, and innovation on the web
infrastructure itself withers away.
The current policy is therefore shortsighted, unhelpeful,
suicidal, and unfair. It ought to be abandoned: patented
techniques may enrich their innovators justly, but ought
not to be considered for inclusion in a W3C standard.
Justin Chen-Wells
First and foremost I think that Tokien was inspired by the war he fought in, WW1: Huge battles and complex alliances between murky powers in which little English folk from the countryside get caught up, don't fully understand, and yet trust that somehow they are acting for the better--meanwhile massive slaughter, marshes full of dead people, and so on.
On the literary side, though, he does seem to have borrowed from all sorts of great legends. I'm sure Beowulf must be one, as the LOTR, etc., are quests. Tolkien clearly believes (in his stories anyway) in caste society: dividing people up into noble classes, low classes, and so on--the line of kings figures prominently in his work.
Moreover his creation mythology interestingly enough mixes the Christian mythology of Lucifer into a Norse mythology setting. You have Melkor rebelling against Eru much as Lucifer rebelled against God, and the whole Melkor/Morgoth/Sauron thing sounds remarkably like the story of Lucifer's fall from grace. And you have the Elves being kicked out of Valinor much as Christian mythology has men being kicked out of the Garden of Eden--with the twist of free choice.
And yet the whole thing is in a Norse mythological setting--with the gods living in great halls across the ocean--and you could even sail there if you were a good enough seafarer, and a range of gods who are somehow a higher caste than men, and yet somehow also their equals. (The Vala, Elves and Men all having been created by the same maker, Eru).
In a way I think much of British quest literature has been an attempt to weave the old tales of Beowulf into the fabric of Christian mythology, and I think that's exactly what Tolkien does.
I stopped reading after he started going on about dictators slipping propaganda into the inaudible cracks in your media.
And it started off with such promising analysis! I bet the slashdot moderators didn't read to the bottom of the article before approving it.
You're talking about a very different kind of situation: where an outside attacking army supplies an internal resistence with weapons. Without the outside pressure the Germans would have had little trouble squashing it.
But that's not even the point--the point is that if there hadn't been an invading Red Army, and if the Germans were still unable to suppress it, the likely outcome is a failed state with feuding warlords.
So while a well armed population might present a problem for an invading army, it doesn't exactly preserve or protect the rights of the local citizens--it simply devolves them from being an occupied territory controlled by an external force, into a chaotic failed state run by criminals.
It seems like all you've accomplished is a leap out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Preservation of rights takes a combination of a strong democratic will among the people combined with a reasonably powerful central government. Every successful democracy has followed this model. None have emerged directly from anarchic criminal feuding.
Afghanistan?
Somalia?
Congo?
Gun ownership is widespread in those places and the net effect has been a lack of central government and rule by local warlords. The myth is that gun ownership somehow increases the foundations of a democracy. The truth is that guns destabilize a government, and there's no guarantee that the warlord who steps in when things fall apart is going to value freedom at all.
You dig back fifty years to pull up examples that aren't even that well founded historically. Arms were widespread in many nations invaded by Japan but that didn't deter them. In the case of America the more likely explanation would be unsustainably long supply lines versus a well equipped American military.
In the case of Germany Hitler was widely popular with German people throughout all that period so it isn't clear that the people who were disarmed felt in any way oppressed. Certainly the German police would have been capable of outgunning any Jewish resistence even had guns been widespread.
The basic flaw with your premise in that case is that a few isolated individuals with guns in an overwhelmingly hostile state have any chance against an effectively organized army or police force. Sure they could have shot a few soldiers, but the German army was remarkably effective, and would have had little trouble using the gunfire as an excuse to shoot them all on the spot.
You're daydreaming here--take a look at the present day world. There are lots of countries where guns are much more prolific than in the United States, and they are NOT doing well.
The NRA and such always whinge about government control over guns. And what? The government regulates the storage of gasoline, what kind of cars are allowed on the road, who can drive a car, who can own and do what with cyanide, even the production and storage of basic foods.
We accept all these things because they increase the general level of safety and security.
Guns are reasonably safe when they are handled by people with adequate training,and I think simple requirements that people get that training, and checks to make sure they're responsible, are in the same leage as other similar regulations.
Can anyone point to a democracy that has been saved from totalitarianism by widespread gun ownership?
On the contrary I can think of a zillion countries wehre widespread gun ownership has led to an absolute loss of rights and freedom to rampaging local warlords who wind up outgunning the forces of law and order.
I think the idea that guns protect people from state oppression is an absolute myth which cannot be substantiated by any real world example.
Sorry for screaming, but I hadn't seen that mentioned yet, and it's day two.
Perhaps it's possible to write ant scripts that execute as efficiently as make, but it must not be very easy to do, since I have never seen one.
It's really nice when you're in a compile/edit cycle if it takes only a few seconds for your compile to build you a new version of your system. If it takes a minute you'll be walking around the room getting a coffee, talking to your co-worker, and totally losing your train of thought.
Most make systems I've seen compile java code a zillion times faster than ant. Sure, ant can look deeper into the java files and compile just the classes it has to, whereas with make you frequently have to compile everything. But here's the trouble: make has already finished compiling everything before Ant has even parsed all of its XML.
I really would like to use Ant. It feels like it's the right thing to do. But I can't afford it, my time is too valuable, and it's too damn slow.
Also I find complex Ant scripts FAR more difficult to understand than complex make scripts. Sure for simple build scripts the "tab and space" thing may be an issue--but for less trivial applications these issues wash away and you start wondering where bits of information came from and with Ant you sometimes just don't know.
I've seen Ant scripts break in ways that were not obvious to anybody, and took hours to debug. I've never had such trouble with make unless I was trying to do something brutally stupid with it.
Maybe I'm wrong about all this. I sure hope so, because I would like to have a good Java centric tool. My main concern is that Ant sucks, and yet it's established enough market share that it's locking out further innovation in the area.
I really think Ant blows.
The ISP was holding her personal private data and not granting her access to it--that was the issue.
They would have been OK if they had destroyed it.
They would have been OK if they had bounced it.
What they did was silently accept more email after the suspension but refuse to let her access it.
The court is saying the email is her private personal data and she has an "access to information" right to see it.
The ISP had every right to cancel her account. But why not bounce her email at that point?
They kept her email because they believed that holding her personal private data hostage was a way to force her to settle the dispute.
That's wrong.
To be the next Microsoft RedHat would have to turn an enormous profit. As a shareholder, I can tell you that isn't happening just yet.
Let's worry about keeping the company going first, and fret about monopolies later.
Yeah but imagine if the cable breaks in the middle,
then 50,000 km of cable is going to hit the earth,
and the remainder is going to fly off into space.
well.. i worked with perl for about three years, and C++ for about two years and java for three or four (some overlap here, but more or less) and i don't agree with you at all.
.java source files when i decide to do a Great Renaming and i want to automate it.
you're right about performance not mattering most of the time. it does matter some of the time, though, and then it's usually memory performance.
and if you had a project with just one or two people coding i don't think it would matter which language you chose to work in.
but in my experience perl is a disaster for projects with more than 10 people. i'm sure there are exceptions or you won't agree, but that's my experience.
the program being "half as long" is not necessarily a good thing. it depends what information you cut out. if it's half as long because you used powerful langauge features to reduce the number of program instructions then that's probably a good thing.
but if it's half as long because you cut out type declaration then what are you really saving? you type less, but someone reading your program also has less to go on when they figure it out.
this is why in large projects perl is just not viable: it's not possible to isolate program error effects from one component from spilling all over the application and turning up in unexpected places. you then spend hours and hours debugging your code, or more probably, bothering the person who wrote some section or other to have them explain it to you since it's unreadable. hopefully they still work for the company.
some people answer to this that you can just do ever more testing, and that your unit tests will eventually catch all the errors.
at that point i ask you, isn't a type declaration which is checked by your compiler exactly that? a little test? a little check?
so it seems that with perl you throw out the compiler checking and then have to write all the same checks by hand all over again.
i like langauges like perl because of the powerful features that can reduce 100 lines of code to 10. but please don't take away from me the 10-20 lines that were declarative, that told me what was what and how it fit together. that information is for *me*, it's not really for the compiler. cutting out the type definitions is a bad thing.
java also has a fairly powerful library available, comparable to perls most of the time, and depending on the application either better or worse than perl's. but it also is a strongly typed langauge, and in my view, that makes it viable for projects with many people.
C++ is a different story. sometimes i think you do need to code in a low level langauge to get the performance you want--the linux OS will never be written in perl. but for general applications i wouldn't choose it, however, it's a good systems langauge programming envirnoment.
i still write perl programs--when i have a little one-off just for me, or to fix up a trashed file, or parse some data out of some stream, or something, i turn to perl for these quick little one-offs.
in fact i found a great use of perl is that it's the perfect langauge for running through all my
the languages are not in competition really, just different purposed. java is for large scale application development. perl is for quick and dirty one-off applications. C++ is for systems programming.
a good developer, in my view, should be comfortable with all three (or an equivalent set of three).
Sure, Canadians and Americans and Europeans are also more concerned about their government and their day to day lives than their operating system.
And yes, only a small percentage of the Chinese population has a computer at home. And only a small percentage of those sign on to the net. And only a small percentage of those will care about Linux.
Nevertheless, we're talking about 20% of the worlds population, and the small percentage thats interested in the net adds about a million users a month to the internet--just a drop in China's huge bucket, but even 1% of those would be 10000 new Linux users a month.
China is just huge. Add up any group of people in China and you come up with a big number.
This has NOTHING to do with the net. It has to do with putting up a physical sign, and whether a municipality (a city) can order you to take the sign down.
What this has to do with the net, or why it's on
Brand new Linux distribution, and this has devolved into some kind of China bashing political rampage.
What happened to the software?
I heard it installs slow. Well, OK for a first release. China is signing about a million people a month on to the net, and this is a *big* win for Linux in my view.
Why don't you guys see it that way?
Who cares about the Chinese government anyway? I care about all the millions of Chinese who can now access Linux a little easier than before, now that they have a distribution targetted in their own language.
This is great!
Whatever.
I've been writing Java code for five years. I've put some of my code into high performance situations. I've put some of it into high availability situations. I've written stuff quickly under pressure, and also other things that I took time to develop. I've worked on opensource projects (webmacro, now running AltaVista, is java) and after all that time, and all that experience, I just don't think I know enough about it to say "JAVA SUCKS! IT MUST DIE!" or to say "JAVA IS GREAT! GIVE UP ON C/PERL/XXX RIGHT NOW!"
Sometimes it's been difficult to get what I need to do done, or to make it fast, or reliable enough. But I've always managed to do it, and I haven't found my life any more or less difficult than when I wrote C++ or PERL. I tend to find that Java fits the work that I have to do, but I can see quite clearly that it doesn't fit other work.
I wish that on slashdot the size and strength of peoples opinion was somehow proportional to their expertise or experience--but unfortunately it's not.
I came here expecting something interesting and instead found a bunch of technically inaccurate crap coupled with some ridiculous opinions (I really liked the "I learned all I need to know about Java from a bookstore--it sucks!" obviously the voice of experience there).
It seems the more experience people have the more likely they are to judge that a tool does fit some things and fails to fit others.
It seems the less experience people have the more likely they are to thump on their favorite bible and insist that the whole programming would should switch to use their favorite tool, and everything else "must die!".
I'll let you judge whether you think that sounds like the voice of expertise.
Lots of experts here.
Some experts who have never used Java want to tell me that it's no good, and will never be any good--why? They don't know, but they know!
And some experts who want to tell me all about why Java's compilation, why it is hard or easy even though they really don't know anything about a compiler.
And some experts on Java's market share who really don't know anything about who uses Java.
And some experts who sat in a room where Java was... gosh gee... being implemented, telling me... well I don't quite know what, but gosh!
So many experts here--I must be reading slashdot!
And people used to say opensource software was for servers only... bit by bit all the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place.
It's a sad day for monopolists.