Unless it was in source control, where you had to take a lock on each file you wanted to modify. Getting locks released on the various files you needed to change could take a good amount of time depending on how easy it is to track down the lock owners.
I don't know where you heard that Blu-ray players won't play DVDs, but you're mistaken. It's possible to make a blu-ray player that won't play DVDs, but it's highly, highly unlikely that anyone will make such a drive at this time.
Do you have any sources for this? I've been wondering about this for a long time. I've seen reports that producing biofuels from corn was terribly inefficient, but I've wondered about the efficiency of using other materials like sugarcane/sugar beets and oilseed (rapeseed, canola, sunflower, safflower, etc) crops. It's obvious why the focus of most of these U.S.-centric articles is corn (huge subsidies), but I'd like to know about the various other crops that can be used for these purposes.
Supply and demand only holds for free markets. OPEC controls the price, and represents the interests with the largest oil deposits in the world. The diamond market (De Beers) also works like this. Supply is purposefully limited to push prices sky-high.
I realise you're fond of your mac, but do you realise how absurd your suggestion is? Buying a mac mini JUST to stream radio? There may be many reasons to buy a mac, but just to stream radio is a pretty weak one.
Oh, get over yourself. You're not the first libertarian with a chip on his shoulder who's ever posted to Slashdot. Besides, you're not even original -- you're just repeating anything the Cato Institute and every other Libertarian think tank has ever published. You still haven't outlined how dissolving these socialist structures will solve the problems they were created to solve. Your entire argument boils down to "I don't like paying taxes, so these things that eat up tax money should go away", which is a valid argument, but not very compelling.
Yup. The notion that people might actually become educated without the government coercing it on everyone - I told you, it is simply too radical for people to handle.
Sure, abolishing public education would probably increase the average educational level of your nation, but the bottom would fall out, too. There would be a large portion of people who end up not receiving an education at all. Illiteracy would sharply increase from the current 3% the U.S. currently enjoys. But I'm sure you've never thought about these things because you figure the tax benefit you'll enjoy would far outweigh the guilt you'd feel about poor folks receiving virtually no education.
You can keep your greed and "purity" in capitalism. I live in a world where pure capitalism doesn't work, nor does pure socialism. I'm a Canadian, and I'm happy to accept certain compromises in the areas of health care, and public education because I believe the benefits outweigh the downsides. On the other hand, I'll rag on the government for bailing out uncompetitive companies (Air Canada, for example) and creating artificial unhealthy markets. Life is compromise, and sometimes you have to trade efficiency and quality for universality and scope, and sometimes you shouldn't.
The fact that the sequels often suck is a problem, but it has more to do with filmmakers (and more precisely, studio heads) who have no affinity for (or who probably never even read) the source material.
I'm not sure that's it. I think they're more adverse to taking any risks, so when they make a sequel, they end up remaking the previous movie with the character names changed. In this case, it doesn't matter how closely it follows the source material, or if they did a good job or not. Nothing is more unmemorable than watching a minor variation of a movie you've already watched, especially if the previous one was a very good movie.
Now, we're taking genes from another species and inserting them into completely different DNA set. I think one famous example is fish DNA inserted into tomato DNA. Before you could only breed species that were close but now a fish and a tomato.
The GM panic patrol always brings out this one. Do you have any evidence this has actually happened, or is in use anywhere in the world? Greenpeace literature doesn't count. Things like this might happen in labs, but have never made it to the point where it would be approved for human (or livestock) consumption, and the gene wasn't even directly taken from the fish.
The hysteria has to stop. It doesn't do anyone any good. There are valid concerns about GM crops, but this is not one of them.
It really would depend on the downtime difference between the two systems. If the AS/400 never or rarely goes down, it might be cheaper even if the IBM support contracts are highway robbery. Everytime a server goes down or needs a reboot during business hours means that you're losing productivity from every user of that server at the time. Hiring reboot monkeys doesn't fix that money sinkhole.
That was describing the first year (2004) when all the teams failed. The 2005 race was different. No doubt CMU improved their automatic recognition for this race, but the article implies that they used the same strategy of premapping the course.
It's also worth noting that the Stanford vehicle was still manually drivable and street legal (according to the Technical papers). The CMU vehicle could also be driven manually, but the vehicle had been heavily modified to accept the sensors and stabilize them and it was evident from it's appearance. The technical papers are quite an interesting read, even if they don't go into much detail.
Don't trust the summary. The article doesn't mention much about tailgating, other than the fact the Stanford Touareg wanted to pass the CMU Hummer, but couldn't because of the DARPA imposed speed limit, so it followed for the first 100 miles, until charging ahead for the last 32 miles. The incredible thing about it is the fact that while the CMU entry required massive amounts of pre-race manual (human) data entry to tell the vehicle what to avoid and where the road was, the Stanford vehicle didn't.
Frankly, I'd prefer if C# and friends supported checked exceptions as a warning condition rather than error as it is in Java. If you want to hack something out quick, then feel free to ignore the warnings or turn them off. If you want to make a real production app, then you ought to make sure your exception handling is proper. In this way, checked exceptions would be a tool to use to get your error handling working properly, rather than being surprised when a bit of code throws an exception you weren't expecting. While writing a program to do a one-off task could skip building this infrastructure altogether.
While Java's exception handling system isn't great, neither is C#'s. Java's exception handling can feel like a straitjacket, while it's all too easy to miss exceptions that you need to handle in C#.
Yes, you were just lazy. They're called assemblies in C#, and you can dynamically load them via the System.Reflection.Assembly.Load() method. It'd be pretty silly to be missing something like dlopen or LoadLibrary in C#, wouldn't it? You typically have to combine that with an application domain so you can unload the assemblies.
.Net's reflection capabilities are quite a bit more extensive than Java's (there is native support for outputting byte-code and even entire classes at run time). If you want to pick on C#/.Net, pick on it's limited exception handling (unchecked exception handling only makes 'black box' use of objects more difficult), or simply the fact that C#'s feature set is obviously derived from Java.
As for features that C# offers that Java doesn't... Wikipedia has a list and links to other sites with more. Whether or not you find these features useful or painful is a matter of taste, though. Many of the features of C# were created to make Visual Basic-style GUI creation easy and painless. C# offers operator overloading, true multidimensional arrays, delegates and unsigned types. Unless you have the pleasure of running in an entirely Java/managed environment, those unsigned types are a life saver (or at least a sanity saver). Delegates (multicast function pointers) make wiring up event-based GUIs a little easier. True multidimensional arrays are either invaluable or useless, depending on the kind of software you write. Operator overloading can also be useful, provided it's used carefully (and can cause no end of confusion if it's not).
I can think of a few reasons. It'd be really nice if you could do simple arithmetic in CSS. Positioning things not on the right, left or dead centre is a bit painful. It would be nice to be able to say position right side - 43em - 15px, or width = viewport width - 20em - 5px. The positioning capabilities of CSS leave something to be desired. And when you get to the point where your CSS renders properly in compliant browsers, you have to get IE working. Is it any wonder that people end up going back to table layouts?
Fine. I didn't know that Nice was strongly typed (I thought you were just talking about a theoretical language). And, yes, it has a slightly simpler syntax for declaring local variables that you initialise imediately. If you're not initialising the variable immediately, you're stuck with the Java syntax, or the slightly longer Nice syntax (add var to the beginning of the Java syntax). That leaves you with three different ways to declare a variable: the Java/C style Type variable;, the Nice implicit typing of var variable = new Type();, and the Nice explicit typing of var Type variable;.
My point was that, yes, String s = new String() has redundant type information in it, but that's not the only type that will ever be assigned a String object. Object s = new String() does not have any redundant type information in it.
No, you've just misunderstood the legislation. The law only says that broadcasters have to switch over to digital signals (ATSC), and new TVs will need to be equipped with ATSC tuners. They need not be capable of HD resolutions. Face it, SDTV will be with us for at least another decade, and quite possibly longer.
But there is! Consider the following code in plain Java:
String foobar = new Integer(3);
Very good, now try:
object foobar = new Integer(3); foobar = new String();
(contrived example; you'd normally use an interface type plus implementations of that interface)
In java, the type of the object and the type assigned to it can be different. In a real program, I might create an object with the interface type, and get a reference to a type based on a factory class that may choose from a number of classes that implement that interface. It's a common practice when dealing with database engines, logging engines, etc, that have mostly the same interface, but can be used generically if you only use the interface's public interface. The compiler will tell you immediately if you're using a member that's not part of the interface, in this case, and you can avoid some very annoying bugs. You can't do this with dynamically typed languages at compile time, which means you can get unexpected results at runtime.
I won't argue that Java (and it's evil twin brother, C#) have the best syntax for creating new objects, but declaring the object type twice is intentional. It's used in real situations to solve real problems.
Folks have been talking about high definition television since the 1980s. Now, they're finally getting popular in stores, and you think they'll be mainstream by 2007? I'm afraid not. TV lifespans are measured in 1 to 2 decades, not 3 to 5 years like consoles and computers. Over half the western population might have a HD capable screen by 2015, assuming low-end models from no-name companies start coming out so stores stop selling SD TVs.
I'll say it again for all you techno-utopians: Most people do not buy televisions like you buy computer equipment!
Some of the functionality that was added to IE to support it's integration into Windows is also responsible for it's share of security flaws. In order to integrate IE into the Windows shell (explorer.exe), they added the fundamentally flawed concept of "zones" to Internet Explorer. A large number of security flaws revolved around getting internet content running in either the Local computer zone, or intranet zone, where certain protections are disabled (virtually all in local, and the signed activex warnings in intranet).
iexplore.exe is little more than a thin wrapper around shdocvw.dll, which is also loaded by explorer.exe (which also explains why iexplore loads so fast), so you can never really get away from internet explorer. If you kill off system file protection, and remove iexplore.exe, simply typing a URL into any explorer window will make Internet Explorer reassert itself. If you remove the REAL bits that make up Internet Explorer, shdocvw and mshtml, explorer, windows media player (version 7+), windows help (XP), MSN messenger and many other components will stop working.
Personally, I find the X Edge and SOHO fireboxes can be a little annoying with their limitations on maximum LAN users. Buying a "user license" for your network printer can be a little annoying. The X50 and the entire X Core series are far less annoying (unlimited users on each). The mobile and branch office VPN licenses are easier to manage because they're rarely "unintentionally" used, and simply controlling where you install the mobile user VPN software is enough to control the MUVPN licensing.
I'd have to agree, although you may not need X1000s. Depending on the requirements, anything from the X Core series (with either the Fireware Pro, or high availability upgrade) would probably be sufficient. The configuration management system takes a little getting used to, but they're powerful firewalls and are pretty easy to manage once you get the hang of it. Disclaimer: I work for a Watchguard reseller.
Sonicwall also makes some comparable products that sell for comparable prices. They're much easier to configure, but have a few less features. Virtually any of the Pro series with the SonicOS Enhanced upgrade should be able to do what is being requested. We don't sell these, but we do have customers with them.
One side benefit of using one of these appliances instead of Windows or Linux to do your firewall is that the same virus can't walk over both your firewall and your internal network servers. Additionally, adding a branch location is as simple as adding one of the lower end boxes (Watchguard Firebox X Edge or Sonicwall TZ series) to that location. The costs are much lower, and the configuration and software update overhead is much lower (no monthly patching of IE on these boxes). You also get to avoid the temptation to put other services on that firewall machine.
I remember people saying the same thing about 500MB drives, and 2GB drives and 10GB drives and 40GB drives. Today, many programs install well over 500MB of data for only themselves, and many games exceed 2GB quite easily. When Bluray or HD-DVD comes to PC, I can see 10-15GB game installs becoming common. The space will get filled, one way or another.
What a terrible attitude! As an adult you are expected (heavens!) to make some choices about you future, and project your life a few years out.
Because blindly rushing headlong into something and finding yourself overwhelmed is a much better strategy. Which is more immature? Screwing up because you were too proud to ask for help, or admitting you don't fully understand what's required and asking for advice? Don't forget that students are paying for the privilege of being educated, and advisers are supposed to be part of that package. The advisers are supposed to understand the labyrinth of offered courses and degree requirements in order to give the student good advice on how reach these requirements based on what the student wants to learn.
It's obvious, isn't it? Microsoft has exclusive control over the ECMA standard. Only Microsoft can release another OpenXML standard and the "standard" states that clearly. On the other hand, anyone from the ODF group could update the Open Document format, and release a new standard through the normal OASIS procedures. If Sun became disinterested in maintaining the standard, the remaining members could. If Microsoft becomes disinterested in maintaining OpenXML (say, for example, they successfully killed the ODF threat), that would simply be the end of OpenXML. We're exchanging one de facto standard for another de facto standard, and calling it open to keep lawmakers happy. It's all about control.
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Unless it was in source control, where you had to take a lock on each file you wanted to modify. Getting locks released on the various files you needed to change could take a good amount of time depending on how easy it is to track down the lock owners.
I don't know where you heard that Blu-ray players won't play DVDs, but you're mistaken. It's possible to make a blu-ray player that won't play DVDs, but it's highly, highly unlikely that anyone will make such a drive at this time.
Do you have any sources for this? I've been wondering about this for a long time. I've seen reports that producing biofuels from corn was terribly inefficient, but I've wondered about the efficiency of using other materials like sugarcane/sugar beets and oilseed (rapeseed, canola, sunflower, safflower, etc) crops. It's obvious why the focus of most of these U.S.-centric articles is corn (huge subsidies), but I'd like to know about the various other crops that can be used for these purposes.
Supply and demand only holds for free markets. OPEC controls the price, and represents the interests with the largest oil deposits in the world. The diamond market (De Beers) also works like this. Supply is purposefully limited to push prices sky-high.
I realise you're fond of your mac, but do you realise how absurd your suggestion is? Buying a mac mini JUST to stream radio? There may be many reasons to buy a mac, but just to stream radio is a pretty weak one.
You can keep your greed and "purity" in capitalism. I live in a world where pure capitalism doesn't work, nor does pure socialism. I'm a Canadian, and I'm happy to accept certain compromises in the areas of health care, and public education because I believe the benefits outweigh the downsides. On the other hand, I'll rag on the government for bailing out uncompetitive companies (Air Canada, for example) and creating artificial unhealthy markets. Life is compromise, and sometimes you have to trade efficiency and quality for universality and scope, and sometimes you shouldn't.
The hysteria has to stop. It doesn't do anyone any good. There are valid concerns about GM crops, but this is not one of them.
It really would depend on the downtime difference between the two systems. If the AS/400 never or rarely goes down, it might be cheaper even if the IBM support contracts are highway robbery. Everytime a server goes down or needs a reboot during business hours means that you're losing productivity from every user of that server at the time. Hiring reboot monkeys doesn't fix that money sinkhole.
The Church of Jack "God's foot soldier" Thompson
It's also worth noting that the Stanford vehicle was still manually drivable and street legal (according to the Technical papers). The CMU vehicle could also be driven manually, but the vehicle had been heavily modified to accept the sensors and stabilize them and it was evident from it's appearance. The technical papers are quite an interesting read, even if they don't go into much detail.
Don't trust the summary. The article doesn't mention much about tailgating, other than the fact the Stanford Touareg wanted to pass the CMU Hummer, but couldn't because of the DARPA imposed speed limit, so it followed for the first 100 miles, until charging ahead for the last 32 miles. The incredible thing about it is the fact that while the CMU entry required massive amounts of pre-race manual (human) data entry to tell the vehicle what to avoid and where the road was, the Stanford vehicle didn't.
While Java's exception handling system isn't great, neither is C#'s. Java's exception handling can feel like a straitjacket, while it's all too easy to miss exceptions that you need to handle in C#.
As for features that C# offers that Java doesn't... Wikipedia has a list and links to other sites with more. Whether or not you find these features useful or painful is a matter of taste, though. Many of the features of C# were created to make Visual Basic-style GUI creation easy and painless. C# offers operator overloading, true multidimensional arrays, delegates and unsigned types. Unless you have the pleasure of running in an entirely Java/managed environment, those unsigned types are a life saver (or at least a sanity saver). Delegates (multicast function pointers) make wiring up event-based GUIs a little easier. True multidimensional arrays are either invaluable or useless, depending on the kind of software you write. Operator overloading can also be useful, provided it's used carefully (and can cause no end of confusion if it's not).
I can think of a few reasons. It'd be really nice if you could do simple arithmetic in CSS. Positioning things not on the right, left or dead centre is a bit painful. It would be nice to be able to say position right side - 43em - 15px, or width = viewport width - 20em - 5px. The positioning capabilities of CSS leave something to be desired. And when you get to the point where your CSS renders properly in compliant browsers, you have to get IE working. Is it any wonder that people end up going back to table layouts?
My point was that, yes, String s = new String() has redundant type information in it, but that's not the only type that will ever be assigned a String object. Object s = new String() does not have any redundant type information in it.
No, you've just misunderstood the legislation. The law only says that broadcasters have to switch over to digital signals (ATSC), and new TVs will need to be equipped with ATSC tuners. They need not be capable of HD resolutions. Face it, SDTV will be with us for at least another decade, and quite possibly longer.
In java, the type of the object and the type assigned to it can be different. In a real program, I might create an object with the interface type, and get a reference to a type based on a factory class that may choose from a number of classes that implement that interface. It's a common practice when dealing with database engines, logging engines, etc, that have mostly the same interface, but can be used generically if you only use the interface's public interface. The compiler will tell you immediately if you're using a member that's not part of the interface, in this case, and you can avoid some very annoying bugs. You can't do this with dynamically typed languages at compile time, which means you can get unexpected results at runtime.
I won't argue that Java (and it's evil twin brother, C#) have the best syntax for creating new objects, but declaring the object type twice is intentional. It's used in real situations to solve real problems.
I'll say it again for all you techno-utopians: Most people do not buy televisions like you buy computer equipment!
iexplore.exe is little more than a thin wrapper around shdocvw.dll, which is also loaded by explorer.exe (which also explains why iexplore loads so fast), so you can never really get away from internet explorer. If you kill off system file protection, and remove iexplore.exe, simply typing a URL into any explorer window will make Internet Explorer reassert itself. If you remove the REAL bits that make up Internet Explorer, shdocvw and mshtml, explorer, windows media player (version 7+), windows help (XP), MSN messenger and many other components will stop working.
Personally, I find the X Edge and SOHO fireboxes can be a little annoying with their limitations on maximum LAN users. Buying a "user license" for your network printer can be a little annoying. The X50 and the entire X Core series are far less annoying (unlimited users on each). The mobile and branch office VPN licenses are easier to manage because they're rarely "unintentionally" used, and simply controlling where you install the mobile user VPN software is enough to control the MUVPN licensing.
Sonicwall also makes some comparable products that sell for comparable prices. They're much easier to configure, but have a few less features. Virtually any of the Pro series with the SonicOS Enhanced upgrade should be able to do what is being requested. We don't sell these, but we do have customers with them.
One side benefit of using one of these appliances instead of Windows or Linux to do your firewall is that the same virus can't walk over both your firewall and your internal network servers. Additionally, adding a branch location is as simple as adding one of the lower end boxes (Watchguard Firebox X Edge or Sonicwall TZ series) to that location. The costs are much lower, and the configuration and software update overhead is much lower (no monthly patching of IE on these boxes). You also get to avoid the temptation to put other services on that firewall machine.
I remember people saying the same thing about 500MB drives, and 2GB drives and 10GB drives and 40GB drives. Today, many programs install well over 500MB of data for only themselves, and many games exceed 2GB quite easily. When Bluray or HD-DVD comes to PC, I can see 10-15GB game installs becoming common. The space will get filled, one way or another.
It's obvious, isn't it? Microsoft has exclusive control over the ECMA standard. Only Microsoft can release another OpenXML standard and the "standard" states that clearly. On the other hand, anyone from the ODF group could update the Open Document format, and release a new standard through the normal OASIS procedures. If Sun became disinterested in maintaining the standard, the remaining members could. If Microsoft becomes disinterested in maintaining OpenXML (say, for example, they successfully killed the ODF threat), that would simply be the end of OpenXML. We're exchanging one de facto standard for another de facto standard, and calling it open to keep lawmakers happy. It's all about control.