They cannot and should not retroactively punish companies for things they decide after the fact. We don't allow this in our judicial system, and should not in our politics either.
Not to mention that internet filtering software is hardly "sensitive". It's not even encryption, and there are open-source tools that do the same thing.
At 720p you can barely tell a difference. At 1080p the difference is more noticeable.
However, the difference between Blue-Ray and DVD isn't just in the picture, it's in the sound. If you have a true HT setup (I have a 7.1 home theater room with a 1080p projector), and the difference between a DVD and a Blue-Ray is noticeable in the picture quality, but especially in the sound quality.
Encryption doesn't protect you from the legal system. It may physically keep them out, but once a judge orders you to provide the password and you refuse, you get to go to jail until you comply.
I got a $50 itunes gift card for Christmas. I have $49 left on it in June. Why? Because there hasn't been a single album that has come out that I didn't want to own the whole thing (and thus bought the CD), and there's not been a good movie out of the theater released onto DVD this year.
What the hell out there is worth stealing, when I can't even find something worth getting legally?
Coward's Law: "As an online discussion of open-source grows longer, the probability of the sentiment 'it's free, why are you complaining?' approaches 1."
Maybe I have been blind, but I have yet to come across a decent IDE for javascript development. All the nice features like code completion and even syntax checking are now no longer a given.
I now code my dynamic web components in java in my regular (eclipse) IDE, debug it in Eclipse, then deploy (compile) to Javascript. It's robust, full featured, maintainable, and easily debugged.
Apple is a hardware company. If they cease to make money on hardware, the will exit the market. Legalizing clones would cause the Mac to disappear, and Mac OS X with it. The OS is not profitable by itself and never will be. The market is just too small.
They tried it once before, for those who do not know. Clones nearly killed Apple.
The notion that a judge would rule that Apple doesn't have the right to restrict what computers can run the software that they create is ridiculous. If this succeeds, the next step will be Apple having to add ROMs back into their machines to prevent this sort of crap.
A lot of development is moving away from the waterfall model that helped MS project become so entrenched in the first place.
We've moved to using scrum (a form of agile development), which has no use for MS Project. We do use ScrumWorks Pro, but that's mostly because we have developers and QA spread around the word. It's a java app that works on Windows, Linux, and Mac, so there's no platform lock-in.
It has a lot of and graphs for the manager types to look at, and does seem to help developers spend more time developing and less time deciding what they should do next. It's not perfect, but it's better than a bunch of Gantt charts.
Not only were they unlikely to run a positive story on McCain, but if they did then all other stories on the main page would be negative. If the biz section had a downbeat story on the economy, then the political section would have a McCain story. If the Science section told of some breakthrough, they would run an Obama story in National or Politics.
I worked for CNN.com about 7 years ago. I don't know if it's still this way, but the placement of stories was not done by any political partisans back then -- it was done by story rank. With as many stories as CNN runs and has in their database, all pages were generated from a template that would iterate through and put in the top "n" stories based on the template definition. The top science story or business story appearing on the same page as the top political story and having the tone be positive or negative would be purely coincidental.
Then again, this was several years ago, but I have no reason to believe it would have changed since then.
I can't help but think that all of these JavaScript/AJAX libraries keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. How many grid widgets written in JavaScript do we really need? How many toolkits for a progress bar or a div-based dialog box have to be developed? Is one of them really that compelling over the others. Consider:
Those are just the ones I have used personally. It's getting ridiculous. Personally, I like the approach GWT has, but of course that's only relevant to the java developers of the world. I'd love to see all of these "widgets" be compatible with one another.
I hate it. I was one of the people stuck with it early on, and I complained the day I got it.
My wife got converted the other day and immediately complained to me. I wish there were a way to disable the side bar -- it's completely worthless, annoying, and takes up lots of space.
I am a geek, but sorry geeks have no power to turn a market. What turns the crank on a geek != turn the crank on a consumer.
Geekdom is a leading indicator of future market mindshare. Look at google. When google first came out, everyone used Yahoo. The geeks immediately saw google for what it was and what it would become.
Conservatives are for less government intrusion and smaller government. They're for protecting our borders and against illegal immigration an amnesty programs.
You're making the mistake of associating Republicans with conservatives. I am not sure exactly when it happened, but sometime between Reagan and now the Republican party became the "religious nut/warmonger/gun nut/military spending" party. Their budgets are just as big as the Democrats.
The closest thing to a conservative party in the US these days are the Libertarians, but some of their ideas on personal responsibility give people entirely too much credit. There are way too many stupid, self-destructive people out there for some of their ideas to actually work.
You know, I don't buy this in the least. Not that I buy the "maverick" crap either, but McCain isn't really a guy that Republicans love. If it weren't for what an awful job that GW Bush did the last 8 years, they'd never have a guy as moderate as him in their #1 slot. You'd see Romney with Huckabee instead. The simple fact is that McCain is enough of a moderate that Republican primary voters saw him as a change from the status quo.
Honestly, I think we'll be ok with either Obama or McCain. The real scary part of this election is Palin. She's completely unqualified to hold any elected office. She took 6 years and 6 colleges to get an undergraduate degree in journalism, and apparently she has absolutely no grasp of foreign affairs at all. If McCain wins, everyone should pray for/toast to his continued health.
Duly impressed in their success in porting in less than two weeks, I downloaded the Mac port. Alas, the joy is short-lived. It's terribly slow, locked up for short periods a couple of times, and had a generally poor user experience. It was not dock-aware, had odd-looking widgets that looked poor compared to Firefox or Safari, and didn't integrate with the OS at all. I suspect that's par for the course for a Wine-ported app, but the end experience is worse than running Chrome in Parallels desktop in Coherence mode.
If you read the "comic" that describes Chrome, you see that they plan to create a separate PROCESS per tab in the browser. Not a thread, an actual process. Gecko is quite heavy and likely would fare poorly in this space. Webkit by comparision is small enough to be used on the iPhone, Nokia S60 devices, and Android devices of various sizes. It's very compact, and its code base is easy to integrate and work with.
Honestly, all of these acronyms you can list, and yet you don't have the initiative to learn another language without posting silly questions like this?
It's not about "learning a new language". Learning Java is trivial. The problem is the hundreds of bloated, redundant, incompatible "frameworks" and "libraries" that exist for Java. Which one to learn is a valid question (albeit, it doesn't have a good answer).
The thing about the frameworks though, is you learn the ones you need.
First you learn Java. Then you pick an IDE and get proficient in it. Any of the major ones will work, though most people end up with NeatBeans or Eclipse. Then, you get a project you need to work on. If it's a web project, you learn jsp and servlets, then decide what else you need (J2EE, JPA, Hibernate, Spring, etc). You pick the ones that make sense for your project and learn them.
I've been doing java for about 7 or 8 years. I'm still learning new bits all the time. We've recently started doing GWT for web UI, and we're adding JPA in for persistence to a new project. You don't need to know all the frameworks. You only need to thoroughly understand the language so you can pick up any frameworks that you need to do your work.
Applets? Oh come on. Applets were never what Java is about. A large majority of corporate server-side software is written in java. The only part of commercial software that java doesn't dominate is the desktop, and it's even becoming the de-facto standard for corporate apps now.
Java isn't perfect, but it's infinitely more maintainable than Perl. Most places I know of use java for apps they are going to sell, and use python for automation and testing. Perl is generally reviled by anyone who's ever had to deal with it in the past.
So for all the Java programmers who need to bash together a UI, it's a dream come true.
For everyone who already does web design and development, it's pointless because they already know Javascript.
Wrong. Even if you know JavaScript, there's value in not having to write code in two different languages and two different places. With GWT you write your code once, in one language, then deploy on the client and server. The fact that the output is HTML and JavaScript is almost inconsequential to the developer -- all he see is Java.
The really great thing about GWT is it takes the browser quirks out of the equation. You create a single UI using a swing-like API, test and debug it with your Java IDE, then compile it out to your site. Site users with any modern browser can use it all and see the same thing, with no effort at all on the part of the developer. Oh, and it's less data sent to the client than hand-coded JS in most cases too.
I'm not suggesting that it's perfect (it's not), but it has merit even to those of us who know JavaScript. If your site's already running Java and the client side is interactive, gwt is pretty compelling.
We're using it for our enterprise/carrier commercial software that we sell. So far, I like it pretty well. I can do UI stuff that would make me cringe to write in JavaScript in just a couple of minutes. It's pretty nice in that respect.
It's not perfect. When integrating it into a larger existing server-side code base, you have to be very careful about what you access from the java code that ultimately goes on the client as javascript. You end up reorganizing packages and creating some odd data object conversion routines. There are also some oddities on how the modules are organized and referenced, like putting java source on your classpath instead of compiled class files. It makes sense when you understand how the Java-to-JS compiler works, but it's very different from regular java programming.
I think in the longer term, tools like GWT, if not GWT itself, are the future for web apps. You can handle all your client and server code and UI in the same language and with a consistent means of communication, and that leads to a far more seamless user experience.
We use perforce here. I've been using it for about a year now, and honestly, the benefits of it must not be at the end user level. It's substantially the same as SVN, CVS, etc. I suspect the advantages are at the administration level (reorganizing, branching, merging, etc).
From a user perspective, it actually feels like a step backward from the old standby, CVS. It requires you to "lock" a file before editing it, and often seems to lose track of what files you have "checked out". It also seems to have issues determining differences with whitespace/linebreak changes when you have developers on Linux and Windows checking in code together.
It's not that hot in Georgia, it's just humid as hell. If you think GA is bad, head south to Florida. it's 15 degrees warmer, with 10% more humidity, plus mosquitos the size of Cessnas.
Truthfully, Georgia is a great place to live. The spring and fall are both long and temeperate. The cost of living is relatively low, the people are generally friendly and far better educated than Alabama, South Carolina, or most other southern states, and the government is fairly technologically progressive. You can renew your license online, pay traffic tickets online, check/pay/dispute land assessments online, check the traffic on major highways online (complete with pictures from the cameras), and more.
With towns like Suwanee leading the way, there's a strong resurgence in building and maintaining greenspace too. If not for the horrendous drought, it would be one of the better places in America to live.
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They cannot and should not retroactively punish companies for things they decide after the fact. We don't allow this in our judicial system, and should not in our politics either.
Not to mention that internet filtering software is hardly "sensitive". It's not even encryption, and there are open-source tools that do the same thing.
At 720p you can barely tell a difference. At 1080p the difference is more noticeable.
However, the difference between Blue-Ray and DVD isn't just in the picture, it's in the sound. If you have a true HT setup (I have a 7.1 home theater room with a 1080p projector), and the difference between a DVD and a Blue-Ray is noticeable in the picture quality, but especially in the sound quality.
Encryption doesn't protect you from the legal system. It may physically keep them out, but once a judge orders you to provide the password and you refuse, you get to go to jail until you comply.
I got a $50 itunes gift card for Christmas. I have $49 left on it in June. Why? Because there hasn't been a single album that has come out that I didn't want to own the whole thing (and thus bought the CD), and there's not been a good movie out of the theater released onto DVD this year.
What the hell out there is worth stealing, when I can't even find something worth getting legally?
I like it.
Coward's Law: "As an online discussion of open-source grows longer, the probability of the sentiment 'it's free, why are you complaining?' approaches 1."
Maybe I have been blind, but I have yet to come across a decent IDE for javascript development. All the nice features like code completion and even syntax checking are now no longer a given.
I felt like this for a long time. Finally I discovered , which is Google's own solution to this problem.
I now code my dynamic web components in java in my regular (eclipse) IDE, debug it in Eclipse, then deploy (compile) to Javascript. It's robust, full featured, maintainable, and easily debugged.
Apple is a hardware company. If they cease to make money on hardware, the will exit the market. Legalizing clones would cause the Mac to disappear, and Mac OS X with it. The OS is not profitable by itself and never will be. The market is just too small.
They tried it once before, for those who do not know. Clones nearly killed Apple.
The notion that a judge would rule that Apple doesn't have the right to restrict what computers can run the software that they create is ridiculous. If this succeeds, the next step will be Apple having to add ROMs back into their machines to prevent this sort of crap.
Maybe, maybe not. Very often climber's bodies are left on Everest because it's too dangerous to retrieve them.
Don't they have gravity up there? The solution to this problem is quite obvious, if a bit gruesome.
A lot of development is moving away from the waterfall model that helped MS project become so entrenched in the first place.
We've moved to using scrum (a form of agile development), which has no use for MS Project. We do use ScrumWorks Pro, but that's mostly because we have developers and QA spread around the word. It's a java app that works on Windows, Linux, and Mac, so there's no platform lock-in.
It has a lot of and graphs for the manager types to look at, and does seem to help developers spend more time developing and less time deciding what they should do next. It's not perfect, but it's better than a bunch of Gantt charts.
Not only were they unlikely to run a positive story on McCain, but if they did then all other stories on the main page would be negative. If the biz section had a downbeat story on the economy, then the political section would have a McCain story. If the Science section told of some breakthrough, they would run an Obama story in National or Politics.
I worked for CNN.com about 7 years ago. I don't know if it's still this way, but the placement of stories was not done by any political partisans back then -- it was done by story rank. With as many stories as CNN runs and has in their database, all pages were generated from a template that would iterate through and put in the top "n" stories based on the template definition. The top science story or business story appearing on the same page as the top political story and having the tone be positive or negative would be purely coincidental.
Then again, this was several years ago, but I have no reason to believe it would have changed since then.
I can't help but think that all of these JavaScript/AJAX libraries keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. How many grid widgets written in JavaScript do we really need? How many toolkits for a progress bar or a div-based dialog box have to be developed? Is one of them really that compelling over the others. Consider:
http://dojotoolkit.org/ - DoJo Toolkit
http://www.activewidgets.com/ - ActiveWidgets
http://www.prototypejs.org/ - Prototype
http://script.aculo.us/ - Scriptaculous
http://jquery.com/ - jQuery
http://extjs.com/ - Ext JS
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ - YUI
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ - Google Web Toolkit (GWT)
http://www.sproutcore.com/ - SproutCore
Those are just the ones I have used personally. It's getting ridiculous. Personally, I like the approach GWT has, but of course that's only relevant to the java developers of the world. I'd love to see all of these "widgets" be compatible with one another.
I hate it. I was one of the people stuck with it early on, and I complained the day I got it.
My wife got converted the other day and immediately complained to me. I wish there were a way to disable the side bar -- it's completely worthless, annoying, and takes up lots of space.
I am a geek, but sorry geeks have no power to turn a market. What turns the crank on a geek != turn the crank on a consumer.
Geekdom is a leading indicator of future market mindshare. Look at google. When google first came out, everyone used Yahoo. The geeks immediately saw google for what it was and what it would become.
Conservatives are for less government intrusion and smaller government. They're for protecting our borders and against illegal immigration an amnesty programs.
You're making the mistake of associating Republicans with conservatives. I am not sure exactly when it happened, but sometime between Reagan and now the Republican party became the "religious nut/warmonger/gun nut/military spending" party. Their budgets are just as big as the Democrats.
The closest thing to a conservative party in the US these days are the Libertarians, but some of their ideas on personal responsibility give people entirely too much credit. There are way too many stupid, self-destructive people out there for some of their ideas to actually work.
Maybe he meant McCain = Yet Another Bush
You know, I don't buy this in the least. Not that I buy the "maverick" crap either, but McCain isn't really a guy that Republicans love. If it weren't for what an awful job that GW Bush did the last 8 years, they'd never have a guy as moderate as him in their #1 slot. You'd see Romney with Huckabee instead. The simple fact is that McCain is enough of a moderate that Republican primary voters saw him as a change from the status quo.
Honestly, I think we'll be ok with either Obama or McCain. The real scary part of this election is Palin. She's completely unqualified to hold any elected office. She took 6 years and 6 colleges to get an undergraduate degree in journalism, and apparently she has absolutely no grasp of foreign affairs at all. If McCain wins, everyone should pray for/toast to his continued health.
"Two wrongs don't make a right."
But 4 lefts do.
Sadly, that's incorrect. 4 lefts makes you go straight. Try three next time :)
Duly impressed in their success in porting in less than two weeks, I downloaded the Mac port. Alas, the joy is short-lived. It's terribly slow, locked up for short periods a couple of times, and had a generally poor user experience. It was not dock-aware, had odd-looking widgets that looked poor compared to Firefox or Safari, and didn't integrate with the OS at all. I suspect that's par for the course for a Wine-ported app, but the end experience is worse than running Chrome in Parallels desktop in Coherence mode.
If you read the "comic" that describes Chrome, you see that they plan to create a separate PROCESS per tab in the browser. Not a thread, an actual process. Gecko is quite heavy and likely would fare poorly in this space. Webkit by comparision is small enough to be used on the iPhone, Nokia S60 devices, and Android devices of various sizes. It's very compact, and its code base is easy to integrate and work with.
Honestly, all of these acronyms you can list, and yet you don't have the initiative to learn another language without posting silly questions like this?
It's not about "learning a new language". Learning Java is trivial. The problem is the hundreds of bloated, redundant, incompatible "frameworks" and "libraries" that exist for Java. Which one to learn is a valid question (albeit, it doesn't have a good answer).
The thing about the frameworks though, is you learn the ones you need.
First you learn Java.
Then you pick an IDE and get proficient in it. Any of the major ones will work, though most people end up with NeatBeans or Eclipse.
Then, you get a project you need to work on. If it's a web project, you learn jsp and servlets, then decide what else you need (J2EE, JPA, Hibernate, Spring, etc). You pick the ones that make sense for your project and learn them.
I've been doing java for about 7 or 8 years. I'm still learning new bits all the time. We've recently started doing GWT for web UI, and we're adding JPA in for persistence to a new project. You don't need to know all the frameworks. You only need to thoroughly understand the language so you can pick up any frameworks that you need to do your work.
Applets? Oh come on. Applets were never what Java is about. A large majority of corporate server-side software is written in java. The only part of commercial software that java doesn't dominate is the desktop, and it's even becoming the de-facto standard for corporate apps now.
Java isn't perfect, but it's infinitely more maintainable than Perl. Most places I know of use java for apps they are going to sell, and use python for automation and testing. Perl is generally reviled by anyone who's ever had to deal with it in the past.
My first thought was "spammer". I suspect that says more about me than the owner of the email.
So for all the Java programmers who need to bash together a UI, it's a dream come true.
For everyone who already does web design and development, it's pointless because they already know Javascript.
Wrong. Even if you know JavaScript, there's value in not having to write code in two different languages and two different places. With GWT you write your code once, in one language, then deploy on the client and server. The fact that the output is HTML and JavaScript is almost inconsequential to the developer -- all he see is Java.
The really great thing about GWT is it takes the browser quirks out of the equation. You create a single UI using a swing-like API, test and debug it with your Java IDE, then compile it out to your site. Site users with any modern browser can use it all and see the same thing, with no effort at all on the part of the developer. Oh, and it's less data sent to the client than hand-coded JS in most cases too.
I'm not suggesting that it's perfect (it's not), but it has merit even to those of us who know JavaScript. If your site's already running Java and the client side is interactive, gwt is pretty compelling.
We're using it for our enterprise/carrier commercial software that we sell. So far, I like it pretty well. I can do UI stuff that would make me cringe to write in JavaScript in just a couple of minutes. It's pretty nice in that respect.
It's not perfect. When integrating it into a larger existing server-side code base, you have to be very careful about what you access from the java code that ultimately goes on the client as javascript. You end up reorganizing packages and creating some odd data object conversion routines. There are also some oddities on how the modules are organized and referenced, like putting java source on your classpath instead of compiled class files. It makes sense when you understand how the Java-to-JS compiler works, but it's very different from regular java programming.
I think in the longer term, tools like GWT, if not GWT itself, are the future for web apps. You can handle all your client and server code and UI in the same language and with a consistent means of communication, and that leads to a far more seamless user experience.
We use perforce here. I've been using it for about a year now, and honestly, the benefits of it must not be at the end user level. It's substantially the same as SVN, CVS, etc. I suspect the advantages are at the administration level (reorganizing, branching, merging, etc).
From a user perspective, it actually feels like a step backward from the old standby, CVS. It requires you to "lock" a file before editing it, and often seems to lose track of what files you have "checked out". It also seems to have issues determining differences with whitespace/linebreak changes when you have developers on Linux and Windows checking in code together.
It's not that hot in Georgia, it's just humid as hell. If you think GA is bad, head south to Florida. it's 15 degrees warmer, with 10% more humidity, plus mosquitos the size of Cessnas.
Truthfully, Georgia is a great place to live. The spring and fall are both long and temeperate. The cost of living is relatively low, the people are generally friendly and far better educated than Alabama, South Carolina, or most other southern states, and the government is fairly technologically progressive. You can renew your license online, pay traffic tickets online, check/pay/dispute land assessments online, check the traffic on major highways online (complete with pictures from the cameras), and more.
With towns like Suwanee leading the way, there's a strong resurgence in building and maintaining greenspace too. If not for the horrendous drought, it would be one of the better places in America to live.