Well it certainly will feel like it when you factor in the latency.
Guy on ISS: Hey, what the heck? Why do I keep getting fragged before I even know it is coming!?! Ping time? Oh, let me check. One and a half seconds. Oh, I see. Local server, yes. Great idea. We'll have NASA send one up next time Soyuz docks....
(Fucking shit, Slashdot's software sucks ass. Let's try again.)
Yeah, I wondered how you could possibly have called that the best of the bunch....
They were almost all better ads. At least they all mentioned the product/company/technology more than just as a passing reference at the end of the ad, and most were at least slightly entertaining (as opposed to just stupid---wearing clothes in the shower!?!)....
No matter how you look at it, Windows is just not funny. Funny looking, perhaps---the whole Teletubbies UI and all---but not funny.... Of course, I guess it's a match made in heaven. Seinfeld isn't funny, either.... It can't be any more perfect than that....
I think what people are missing is that unions are only as good or as bad as the people who run them. If all you care about is short term improvement for workers, they are often very effective when working conditions are unreasonable. However, most of today's more established unions are, IMHO, just as greedy and corrupt as the corporations they claim to protect their workers from. Eventually, any union is likely to degrade towards that. Part of the reason for this is that power corrupts, and unions not designed specifically to prevent that corruption on the part of its leadership are pretty much guaranteed to end up with the worst possible people running them. As they say, cream and bastards rise.
If I were creating a union for a tech field, part of its constitution/bylaws/articles of incorporation/* would state that it will never not be a master/apprentice style of union---that its purpose is not to dictate who can do what, that its purpose is not to create seniority-structured pay scales, etc. Its purpose would be to set reasonable minimum standards for working conditions---limits to hours, mandatory overtime pay, mandatory double-time pay for anyone who has to work at night, the guaranteed right to opt out of night shifts without fear of reprisal, strong encouragement to management to pay separate people to handle night duties, etc.---reasonable standards for pay scales---minimum cost-of-living adjustments, minimum pay for new hires, etc., with merit-based raises on top of a certain guaranteed base increase every year mandated by a non-negotiable COLA in your employment contract---and reasonable benefits (though in my experience, things like medical benefits are usually not a problem in tech outside of startups).
If the union is constructed in a way that is designed to not be anti-management and designed to prevent it from turning into a rigid annual-contract-based nightmare and instead designed to focus on guaranteeing reasonable base standards, I don't think such unions would be bad for IT. That said, it must be organized by someone whose goal is worker protection rather than consolidating power, and it must be specifically crafted in such a way that prevents future leaders (by immutable rules) from abusing their leadership to consolidate their own power.
That said, if I'm in a reasonably public place, I know that there's no expectation of privacy, and therefore you won't see somebody taking a photo of me doing something in public that I don't want other people to see.... That's really common sense, and it's more a question of having reasonable self control in public rather than a question of whether I want every aspect of my life scrutinized.
But you said Java is "a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses", so surely you can't mean that there are actually more people using Java than Objective-C, right? Or are you ready to retract that hilariously wrong statement yet?
I never said that Objective-C was more common than Java. I said that C-based languages (of which ObjC is one) are more common than Java, and that by learning Objective-C, you would gain skills that are more broadly deployable because it is based on C. I stand by that statement.
Again, this is not an example of dynamic binding. If you add a "Dequeue" method to the list type, then every time you call "list.Dequeue()" it's nothing but a syntactic shortcut for "MyExtensions.Dequeue(list)" -- you're calling a static method whose identity is known at compile time. It saves you a bit of typing, that's all. (Extension methods provide a more tangible benefit when the compiler is looking for a method with a particular name, e.g. when you're using LINQ, but the call is still bound at compile time.)
Fair enough. I read somewhere that they were basically the same conceptually, so I assumed they used the same underlying techniques. My bad. Looking at it more closely, it looks to me like C# extensions affect all classes. That's a pretty gross hack, as it doesn't allow you do define different methods to extend different classes except through object introspection, and IMHO, any time you have to introspect an object to determine behavior, it's a sure sign that either the language or your own design is wrong....:-) But I digress....
My point still remains, though, that ObjC is an easy way to get you started in C, making it possible to create simple (but not hackish-looking) graphical apps literally in seconds, and that most of the language skills you learn in ObjC can easily be transferred to other C-based languages. I suppose that's also true for C#....
My point also remains that in order to truly understand what's going on in your system, you need to understand pointers, so teaching in Java leaves students lacking critical skills that are necessary for understanding languages like Perl, kernel programming, most other systems programming, end-user application programming, etc., thus significantly narrowing the possible opportunities for employment. By contrast, if you understand the C-based languages, picking up Java is fairly trivial, as it mostly feels like a subset of the knowledge you already have. Thus, someone who learns a complex C-based language like ObjC++or C# is in a much better position than someone who learns Java.
Now, for the inevitable car analogy: the C++/C#/ObjC vs. Java question is like the question of learning on stick vs. automatic. Somebody who knows stick can more easily switch to automatic (albeit wearing a hole in the left floorboard in the process) than someone who knows automatic can switch to stick.:-)
Sheesh. And I even singled out that comment individually to see whether anyone had replied only a few seconds before I posted that reply. Now I reload the main page and see a half dozen replies from half an hour earlier. Has anybody else noticed that Slashdot's comment nesting handling seems to be massively broken lately?
Just like you'd have to have been living under a rock to think that Objective-C skills are in higher demand than Java skills.
Once again, you twist my words. I never said that they were. I said your job prospects if you were good at either were much better in Objective-C than Java because the candidate pool for the limited jobs is so much smaller.
1. "id" in ObjC is closer to Java's Object type than C#'s, since -- correct me if I'm wrong -- ObjC has a dichotomy between primitive and object types, just like Java, while in C# every value type (including primitives like int) descends from System.Object.
Very true. That said, people rarely use the base types in ObjC except when writing glue code that interfaces with C code, at which point there's good reason for them to not be objects.... For the most part, folks use things like NSNumber, NSString, etc., which are objects.
2. Java has the same function declaration syntax, the concept of interfaces, and the same kind of "dynamic bindings" as C# (i.e. reflection). It also has "extensions to support variable length arrays", although if you're ignoring the syntax differences, that's true of just about every high level language.
Java doesn't have categories or anything like it, so therefore Java doesn't use dynamic bindings to nearly the degree of C# or ObjC. The concept of categories is similar to a subclass except that you effectively add additional methods to every object of some particular class without the code that allocates the class instance having to change to allocate a subclass. C# provides the same thing with language extensions. This is a very powerful concept that AFAIK is completely alien to Java. For example, say I'm writing a piece of code that uses a library that maintains an ordered list. Let's say that there's another library I have that allocates lots of these lists for me and I want to be able to manipulate those resulting lists as queues. Let's say that both of those libraries are provided by a third party and I can't change them. What do I do? I can either rewrite all my code to immediately wrap those lists with some wrapper class and make a real mess of things or I can just create a category that blows those functions into every instance of the class. Done. Now, when I need those methods, they are there.
The Java use of dynamic binding basically is limited to calling member functions that don't exist in a base class but just happen to be known to exist in the particular object (of a subclass of that class) that you've assigned to a variable of the base class type. While the effect is similar, Java only dynamically binds calls to functions that are not in the base class, and IIRC you get an exception thrown if the class doesn't have that function. With ObjC, there's no exception because sending a message that the object doesn't understand is not an error. This can cause some interesting bugs, but also permits some interesting designs.
I can't imagine how you could claim that C# has those similarities but Java doesn't....
Also, Java doesn't have properties, delegates (function pointers), operator overloading (okay, so that's ObjC++), output parameters, pointers, goto, unsigned types....
C# is much more similar to C and its derivative languages than it is to Java....
Ah yes, unlike all those commercial software packages written in Objective-C. You know, like, um... iLife!
Almost all commercial apps on the Mac are written at least partially in ObjC. That said, you're deliberately avoiding my point, which was that nearly all commercial apps on the planet are written in some form of C.
That said, as the third largest computer manufacturer in the U.S. market, the Mac programmer market is growing rather rapidly at the moment. Add to that all the apps for the iPhone, which is a huge market opportunity for folks getting in right now. You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last year to think that the only commercial software package written in ObjC is iLife....
Not even close. If you want to learn C# by studying another language, you're much better off choosing Java. ObjC 2.0 has garbage collection, but that's where the similarities stop.
I don't know where to begin arguing with you. They both have everything descending from a single core type (object in C#, id in ObjC), they both have basically the same function declaration syntax (ObjC methods notwithstanding), they both have extensions to support variable length arrays (albeit with very different syntax), they both have properties (variables with built-in getters and setters) with at least somewhat similar syntax, they both have the concept of interfaces, both have categories (though C# calls them "language extensions"), they both have dynamic bindings (optional in C#), etc. Conceptually speaking, C# takes a lot of Objective-C concepts and redeploys them using a syntax that more closely resembles C++. They have, of course, also added a few new things, many of which Apple has since added in ObjC 2.0.
Syntactically, the Objective-C extensions look very different from their C# counterparts, but conceptually, I can't imagine how you could claim that the only similarity is garbage collection unless you know nothing whatsoever about ObjC 2.0....
Really, if the facts were known about asbestos, people wouldn't buy something asbestos-lined, and there would be demand for another product.
That sounds like a pretty naive statement. The consumer in general is very nearly powerless compared with the corporation when it comes to actually finding out the facts. It's not like the company is going to say, "Buy our new product---now with more asbestos and lead paint." That's why we have product safety laws. The consumer generally isn't in a position to judge whether a product is safe because the consumer is not and cannot reasonably be expected to be an expert in every possible field (chemistry, metallurgy, etc.).
The consumer similarly can't reasonably be expected to keep mental track of every possible dangerous substance that might be in a product. Human memory covers the big two or three---lead, asbestos, mercury---but when you're buying toothpaste, do you know to look in the ingredients list and avoid buy products that contain diethylene glycol? Tetrachlorobiphenyl? Methyl tertiary butyl ether? For that matter, without consumer protection laws, do you honestly expect that the manufacturers would continue to list ingredients at all? After all, if you don't list the ingredients, you can get away with cutting corners. And lest you believe that one business would rat out the other to gain a market advantage if they caught them doing something unsafe, that business will just rat out the other one (whether truthfully or not), and nobody will know who to believe, so they'll just keep buying what they've always bought.
How about a little personal responsibility? Oh, I'm sorry, I suppose it's for the government to decide what your responsibility is, as well?
I agree that consumers should take personal responsibility for egregious abuse---somebody suing for injury because he stuck his hand into a toaster, for example---but that doesn't mean it's acceptable for a company to build a lawnmower with no cover over the blades and "let the market decide". A reasonable degree of protection from egregious abuse by companies is just as important as having a reasonable degree of protection from frivolous suits by complete idiots. You really have to draw a line somewhere or the corporations will walk all over you.
Java is used primarily in IT (and at least for now, cell phones, though that's starting to show signs of changing). Those jobs tend to pay less than programming jobs for software companies writing commercial software. I can't think of a single (end user) commercial software package used outside of IT shops that is written in Java.
By contrast, if you know ObjC, you also know C, and if taught correctly, C++. And from ObjC 2.0, C# is trivial, as they are based on a lot of similar concepts. Therefore, the job market for a good ObjC programmer by your numbers is basically 6476. or more than half again more jobs than Java.
Also, job counts aren't a good indicator of shortages. Companies get thousands of applicants for each of those Java jobs and end up heavily filtering by keyword just to pare it down to a list small enough to look through. The ObjC jobs get one or two candidates every few months. Therefore, your odds of getting a job are still far better in spite of it being a smaller market.
But seriously, I've never much liked any of the textbooks I've read, so I can't suggest anything specific. All I can give is one piece of general advice: whatever you do, don't fall into the trap of using Java as your core language. I understand why some schools do so---the ability to ignore such things as pointers and memory management is tempting---but the result is a bunch of students who don't understand memory management or pointers and only know how to program in a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses, is fundamentally contrary to performance (at least where GUI apps are concerned), and is nearly impossible to force to integrate well with the OS the apps are running on. It's even worse than Pascal was in the 90s---at least Pascal skills transferred fairly easily to C....
If you have access to a Mac lab, you might consider teaching them Objective-C. There seems to be a shortage of good ObjC programmers out there, and the Xcode/Interface Builder combination makes it relatively easy for students to get their hands dirty and start writing interactive visual apps without having to resort to an abortion like Visual Basic or clumsy programmatic UI widget systems like [insert most GUI libraries here].:-D
While that does describe about 80% of the political leaders---most politician don't help anyone other than themselves---every now and then you get one who actually does things for the common good. Let's see. In my lifetime, we have Clinton's aid/peacekeeping missions to Kosovo and Somalia (though he didn't do anything in Rwanda in part because he was bitten so badly by events in Somalia). Before that, we had Lincoln, who took the country to war to free people who didn't get the right to vote for another 5 years. We had Herbert Hoover, who organized a food relief effort to help Belgium during WWI, putting U.S. ships into harm's way. We had Roosevelt, who created TVA and the FDIC, did the whole land-lease act to help Britain in WWII prior to our forced entrance into the war, etc.
So the U.S. actually has some history of at least helping out European countries when bad things happen. In the rest of the world, it has been pretty spotty unless it involved the red scare or a war on "terrah" or some other boogeyman.
Regardless of which Georgia you mean, that's not entirely accurate. In the U.S., there's oil shale in NW Georgia. I don't think that it is being actively exploited right now, AFAIK, but still, the reservoirs are there, and I found a few hints that there may have been some low yield wells at one time in some parts of GA. Consider that last part "citation needed", though.:-)
Whether he was ultimately right or wrong on Iraq, I really think he went in at the beginning because he thought it was the right thing to do, and not because he thought it would get him political points.
Bush knew damn well it was not the right thing to do. There's substantial evidence (which seems to be rapidly mounting) that he was fully aware that all of the accusations against Iraq were bogus, and some recent evidence actually implicates the Bush administration in deliberately forging evidence to trick Congress and the American public into going to war.
What's not clear is the real motivation---whether Bush thought it was a potential political win, wanted revenge against the Iraqi government for trying to kill his father, or just wanted to throw some money to Cheney's buddies at Halliburton---but there's no way be believed it was "right" unless his ability to discern right from wrong is borderline sociopathic....
I contrast this with the Clinton administration, in which the U.S. went into Bosnia and Somalia, neither of which were of any significant military importance. During Bush Jr's term, the same sort of ethnic cleansing and/or forcible ejection from people's homes has been happening in Sudan (Darfur region), Kenya, South Africa, Burma, Zimbabwe, etc. but because those places aren't of military significance, have no oil, etc., Bush and the U.N. haven't done jack, and the Bush administration has even used signing statements to actively undermine legislation passed overwhelmingly by Congress designed to put pressure on the Sudanese government to get things back under control. That's not even counting all the ethnic cleansing that has occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan under the watchful eye of the weak puppet governments that the Bush administration has installed with their largely dismantled military forces....
The difference between the last two administrations in this area is quite appalling, frankly.... No administration in my recollection did more to foster good will and help out the people of the world than the Clinton administration. No administration in my recollection has done more to foster bad will and screw the rest of the world than the Bush administration. I'm surprised Bush hasn't been tried for treason yet.... The guy makes Nixon look like a pretty good idea by comparison.
Was the lynched person critical of the Bush administration's energy policy? If so, Canada having oil and all....
I can see it now. The next day, Bush sends an email to Stephen Harper that says simply, "You're next." A week later, there's a news story that says the Bush administration suspects terrorists are being harbored in Canada and allowed to enter the U.S. across unprotected parts of the border without any challenge from Canadian authorities. Three weeks later, the U.S. has troops in Winnipeg. Apparently Bush thought it was the capital city. Either that or he figured nobody lived in North Dakota, so he could invade and no one would notice. Hard to say which.
Upon his capture, the Canadian prime minister notes that the Canadian prisoners are Americans, too, being from North America and all, and that they therefore cannot be jailed without trial as enemy combatants. The Supreme Court reluctantly agrees. The various political leaders are subsequently tried, found to be almost as clueless as their American counterparts---but still not guilty, per se---and then released.
Six months and eighteen billion dollars later, the U.S. soldiers return home in defeat after being successfully sued in Canadian courts for not painting their Humvee signage in both English and French.
Problem this time is, the US and Europe aren't going to let Russia roll their tanks into every Eastern European nation bulldozing their people into submission.
Of course we will. You don't see any U.S. peacekeepers on their way to Georgia, do you? Well, except maybe for the other Georgia just in case the hurricane goes four or five hundred miles to the east before it makes landfall, that is....:-)
Okay, to be fair, if they start to encroach on Georgia's oil fields, the U.S. might get involved. The rest of those former Soviet states, though---the ones who aren't sitting on oil---I think it's safe to say they're on their own. I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying that if you think the current U.S. government is going to lift a finger to help anybody without it being for their own significant political gain, you've clearly been living under a rock the last eight years.
A few inches? I was hoping to see Adam and Jamie with a parabolic antenna reading people's CC tokens from a couple of blocks. No, seriously. RFID security ranks right up there with Congressional oversight in the list of the top oxymorons of all time... okay, not all RFID hardware---some actually do use crypto in the right way---but a large enough percentage that my level of trust for RFID CCs is somewhere between zero and negative infinity.
I kind of wish someone would record (and post on YouTube et al) a MythBusters parody in which they act like Adam and Jamie et al and do an RFID shootout to see who can assemble the best RFID remote reader rig. Score the contest on accuracy, on ability to distinguish multiple cards, on range, and if they are really feeling lucky, on whether they were able to successfully make a purchase using the skimmed data with the opponent's credit card....:-)
I doubt I'm going to see that any time soon, but it would be fun to watch the inevitable train wreck in a couple of CC companies' stock as they scrambled to dismantle those systems and come up with a more secure means of payment....
It sucks already. If you watch one HD movie a day, you'll exceed the quota.
Indeed, I suspect that's why they're doing this now. Call me cynical, but my gut says this isn't about bandwidth at all.
Services like Amazon Unbox and the iTunes Store are reducing their non-Internet (cable TV) offerings to mere commodities. By making TV shows available for immediate purchase instead of having to wait a year for them to come out on DVD, many people are realizing they really don't need cable TV. Worse for Comcast, many find that they would pay less per month to buy a season pass for the shows and own the recordings instead of only being allowed to time shift them for a limited period of time.
Add to that the impact that online movie download services (Unbox, iTS, NetFlix, etc.) have on pay per view movies, and you'll quickly understand that this has virtually nothing to do with their bandwidth costs or preserving quality of service for other users and everything to do with anticompetitive price fixing and consumer lock-in....
Make no mistake, if bandwidth were the culprit, the would be charging based on how much traffic came in from off-network sites, not for all traffic across the board. They would be in favor of P2P and would be encouraging services like Unbox and iTS to use P2P designs to maximize the efficiency of customer delivery. Instead, they're deliberately creating barriers to scare people away from obtaining TV and movie content from anyone but them.
Here's hoping the next administration lets the antitrust lawsuits fly against Comcast and their ilk.
And if you do use deep packet inspection, you got it all wrong. It should be:
if ($packet->['httpHeader']['HTTP_REFERER'] eq "slashdot.org") {
$packet->sendICMP(ICMP_TYPE_RST, SEND_ICMP_TO_SOURCE);
$packet->sendICMP(ICMP_TYPE_RST, SEND_ICMP_TO_DESTINATION);
$packet->drop();
return 1; # packet was reinjected or handled in this layer; do not continue to propagate through filter chain
}
Sort of. If I read the specification correctly, PPM only supports up to 16-bit color using a fixed color table, and attempts to store both the metadata (length, width, etc.) and the data in a single file. I suggested encoding the length and width parameters in ASCII in a separate file, and using the raw per-color data. It also encodes the file data in ASCII, which is very inefficient. I suggested including the raw bytes, not an ASCII representation of the numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it certainly will feel like it when you factor in the latency.
Guy on ISS: Hey, what the heck? Why do I keep getting fragged before I even know it is coming!?! Ping time? Oh, let me check. One and a half seconds. Oh, I see. Local server, yes. Great idea. We'll have NASA send one up next time Soyuz docks....
Yeah, I wondered how you could possibly have called that the best of the bunch....
They were almost all better ads. At least they all mentioned the product/company/technology more than just as a passing reference at the end of the ad, and most were at least slightly entertaining (as opposed to just stupid---wearing clothes in the shower!?!)....
If by talking about, you mean saying that it was the worst commercial in the history of television and that even Linux folks produce better ads---much better ads---did I mention better ads? Then yes.
No matter how you look at it, Windows is just not funny. Funny looking, perhaps---the whole Teletubbies UI and all---but not funny.... Of course, I guess it's a match made in heaven. Seinfeld isn't funny, either.... It can't be any more perfect than that....
Lame.
I think what people are missing is that unions are only as good or as bad as the people who run them. If all you care about is short term improvement for workers, they are often very effective when working conditions are unreasonable. However, most of today's more established unions are, IMHO, just as greedy and corrupt as the corporations they claim to protect their workers from. Eventually, any union is likely to degrade towards that. Part of the reason for this is that power corrupts, and unions not designed specifically to prevent that corruption on the part of its leadership are pretty much guaranteed to end up with the worst possible people running them. As they say, cream and bastards rise.
If I were creating a union for a tech field, part of its constitution/bylaws/articles of incorporation/* would state that it will never not be a master/apprentice style of union---that its purpose is not to dictate who can do what, that its purpose is not to create seniority-structured pay scales, etc. Its purpose would be to set reasonable minimum standards for working conditions---limits to hours, mandatory overtime pay, mandatory double-time pay for anyone who has to work at night, the guaranteed right to opt out of night shifts without fear of reprisal, strong encouragement to management to pay separate people to handle night duties, etc.---reasonable standards for pay scales---minimum cost-of-living adjustments, minimum pay for new hires, etc., with merit-based raises on top of a certain guaranteed base increase every year mandated by a non-negotiable COLA in your employment contract---and reasonable benefits (though in my experience, things like medical benefits are usually not a problem in tech outside of startups).
If the union is constructed in a way that is designed to not be anti-management and designed to prevent it from turning into a rigid annual-contract-based nightmare and instead designed to focus on guaranteeing reasonable base standards, I don't think such unions would be bad for IT. That said, it must be organized by someone whose goal is worker protection rather than consolidating power, and it must be specifically crafted in such a way that prevents future leaders (by immutable rules) from abusing their leadership to consolidate their own power.
Yikes. Apparently nobody recognizes sarcasm.... :-)
That said, if I'm in a reasonably public place, I know that there's no expectation of privacy, and therefore you won't see somebody taking a photo of me doing something in public that I don't want other people to see.... That's really common sense, and it's more a question of having reasonable self control in public rather than a question of whether I want every aspect of my life scrutinized.
I never said that Objective-C was more common than Java. I said that C-based languages (of which ObjC is one) are more common than Java, and that by learning Objective-C, you would gain skills that are more broadly deployable because it is based on C. I stand by that statement.
Fair enough. I read somewhere that they were basically the same conceptually, so I assumed they used the same underlying techniques. My bad. Looking at it more closely, it looks to me like C# extensions affect all classes. That's a pretty gross hack, as it doesn't allow you do define different methods to extend different classes except through object introspection, and IMHO, any time you have to introspect an object to determine behavior, it's a sure sign that either the language or your own design is wrong.... :-) But I digress....
My point still remains, though, that ObjC is an easy way to get you started in C, making it possible to create simple (but not hackish-looking) graphical apps literally in seconds, and that most of the language skills you learn in ObjC can easily be transferred to other C-based languages. I suppose that's also true for C#....
My point also remains that in order to truly understand what's going on in your system, you need to understand pointers, so teaching in Java leaves students lacking critical skills that are necessary for understanding languages like Perl, kernel programming, most other systems programming, end-user application programming, etc., thus significantly narrowing the possible opportunities for employment. By contrast, if you understand the C-based languages, picking up Java is fairly trivial, as it mostly feels like a subset of the knowledge you already have. Thus, someone who learns a complex C-based language like ObjC++or C# is in a much better position than someone who learns Java.
Now, for the inevitable car analogy: the C++/C#/ObjC vs. Java question is like the question of learning on stick vs. automatic. Somebody who knows stick can more easily switch to automatic (albeit wearing a hole in the left floorboard in the process) than someone who knows automatic can switch to stick. :-)
I think the old line you should be looking for is "If you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime."
Sheesh. And I even singled out that comment individually to see whether anyone had replied only a few seconds before I posted that reply. Now I reload the main page and see a half dozen replies from half an hour earlier. Has anybody else noticed that Slashdot's comment nesting handling seems to be massively broken lately?
It probably means they cost US $84 when purchased in quantities of at least 1000.
Once again, you twist my words. I never said that they were. I said your job prospects if you were good at either were much better in Objective-C than Java because the candidate pool for the limited jobs is so much smaller.
Very true. That said, people rarely use the base types in ObjC except when writing glue code that interfaces with C code, at which point there's good reason for them to not be objects.... For the most part, folks use things like NSNumber, NSString, etc., which are objects.
Java doesn't have categories or anything like it, so therefore Java doesn't use dynamic bindings to nearly the degree of C# or ObjC. The concept of categories is similar to a subclass except that you effectively add additional methods to every object of some particular class without the code that allocates the class instance having to change to allocate a subclass. C# provides the same thing with language extensions. This is a very powerful concept that AFAIK is completely alien to Java. For example, say I'm writing a piece of code that uses a library that maintains an ordered list. Let's say that there's another library I have that allocates lots of these lists for me and I want to be able to manipulate those resulting lists as queues. Let's say that both of those libraries are provided by a third party and I can't change them. What do I do? I can either rewrite all my code to immediately wrap those lists with some wrapper class and make a real mess of things or I can just create a category that blows those functions into every instance of the class. Done. Now, when I need those methods, they are there.
The Java use of dynamic binding basically is limited to calling member functions that don't exist in a base class but just happen to be known to exist in the particular object (of a subclass of that class) that you've assigned to a variable of the base class type. While the effect is similar, Java only dynamically binds calls to functions that are not in the base class, and IIRC you get an exception thrown if the class doesn't have that function. With ObjC, there's no exception because sending a message that the object doesn't understand is not an error. This can cause some interesting bugs, but also permits some interesting designs.
Also, Java doesn't have properties, delegates (function pointers), operator overloading (okay, so that's ObjC++), output parameters, pointers, goto, unsigned types....
C# is much more similar to C and its derivative languages than it is to Java....
Almost all commercial apps on the Mac are written at least partially in ObjC. That said, you're deliberately avoiding my point, which was that nearly all commercial apps on the planet are written in some form of C.
That said, as the third largest computer manufacturer in the U.S. market, the Mac programmer market is growing rather rapidly at the moment. Add to that all the apps for the iPhone, which is a huge market opportunity for folks getting in right now. You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last year to think that the only commercial software package written in ObjC is iLife....
I don't know where to begin arguing with you. They both have everything descending from a single core type (object in C#, id in ObjC), they both have basically the same function declaration syntax (ObjC methods notwithstanding), they both have extensions to support variable length arrays (albeit with very different syntax), they both have properties (variables with built-in getters and setters) with at least somewhat similar syntax, they both have the concept of interfaces, both have categories (though C# calls them "language extensions"), they both have dynamic bindings (optional in C#), etc. Conceptually speaking, C# takes a lot of Objective-C concepts and redeploys them using a syntax that more closely resembles C++. They have, of course, also added a few new things, many of which Apple has since added in ObjC 2.0.
Syntactically, the Objective-C extensions look very different from their C# counterparts, but conceptually, I can't imagine how you could claim that the only similarity is garbage collection unless you know nothing whatsoever about ObjC 2.0....
That sounds like a pretty naive statement. The consumer in general is very nearly powerless compared with the corporation when it comes to actually finding out the facts. It's not like the company is going to say, "Buy our new product---now with more asbestos and lead paint." That's why we have product safety laws. The consumer generally isn't in a position to judge whether a product is safe because the consumer is not and cannot reasonably be expected to be an expert in every possible field (chemistry, metallurgy, etc.).
The consumer similarly can't reasonably be expected to keep mental track of every possible dangerous substance that might be in a product. Human memory covers the big two or three---lead, asbestos, mercury---but when you're buying toothpaste, do you know to look in the ingredients list and avoid buy products that contain diethylene glycol? Tetrachlorobiphenyl? Methyl tertiary butyl ether? For that matter, without consumer protection laws, do you honestly expect that the manufacturers would continue to list ingredients at all? After all, if you don't list the ingredients, you can get away with cutting corners. And lest you believe that one business would rat out the other to gain a market advantage if they caught them doing something unsafe, that business will just rat out the other one (whether truthfully or not), and nobody will know who to believe, so they'll just keep buying what they've always bought.
I agree that consumers should take personal responsibility for egregious abuse---somebody suing for injury because he stuck his hand into a toaster, for example---but that doesn't mean it's acceptable for a company to build a lawnmower with no cover over the blades and "let the market decide". A reasonable degree of protection from egregious abuse by companies is just as important as having a reasonable degree of protection from frivolous suits by complete idiots. You really have to draw a line somewhere or the corporations will walk all over you.
Java is used primarily in IT (and at least for now, cell phones, though that's starting to show signs of changing). Those jobs tend to pay less than programming jobs for software companies writing commercial software. I can't think of a single (end user) commercial software package used outside of IT shops that is written in Java.
By contrast, if you know ObjC, you also know C, and if taught correctly, C++. And from ObjC 2.0, C# is trivial, as they are based on a lot of similar concepts. Therefore, the job market for a good ObjC programmer by your numbers is basically 6476. or more than half again more jobs than Java.
Also, job counts aren't a good indicator of shortages. Companies get thousands of applicants for each of those Java jobs and end up heavily filtering by keyword just to pare it down to a list small enough to look through. The ObjC jobs get one or two candidates every few months. Therefore, your odds of getting a job are still far better in spite of it being a smaller market.
I feel like being a BOFH and suggesting this one:
Shell Scripting Primer
:-D
But seriously, I've never much liked any of the textbooks I've read, so I can't suggest anything specific. All I can give is one piece of general advice: whatever you do, don't fall into the trap of using Java as your core language. I understand why some schools do so---the ability to ignore such things as pointers and memory management is tempting---but the result is a bunch of students who don't understand memory management or pointers and only know how to program in a language that almost nobody in the industry actually uses, is fundamentally contrary to performance (at least where GUI apps are concerned), and is nearly impossible to force to integrate well with the OS the apps are running on. It's even worse than Pascal was in the 90s---at least Pascal skills transferred fairly easily to C....
If you have access to a Mac lab, you might consider teaching them Objective-C. There seems to be a shortage of good ObjC programmers out there, and the Xcode/Interface Builder combination makes it relatively easy for students to get their hands dirty and start writing interactive visual apps without having to resort to an abortion like Visual Basic or clumsy programmatic UI widget systems like [insert most GUI libraries here]. :-D
While that does describe about 80% of the political leaders---most politician don't help anyone other than themselves---every now and then you get one who actually does things for the common good. Let's see. In my lifetime, we have Clinton's aid/peacekeeping missions to Kosovo and Somalia (though he didn't do anything in Rwanda in part because he was bitten so badly by events in Somalia). Before that, we had Lincoln, who took the country to war to free people who didn't get the right to vote for another 5 years. We had Herbert Hoover, who organized a food relief effort to help Belgium during WWI, putting U.S. ships into harm's way. We had Roosevelt, who created TVA and the FDIC, did the whole land-lease act to help Britain in WWII prior to our forced entrance into the war, etc.
So the U.S. actually has some history of at least helping out European countries when bad things happen. In the rest of the world, it has been pretty spotty unless it involved the red scare or a war on "terrah" or some other boogeyman.
Regardless of which Georgia you mean, that's not entirely accurate. In the U.S., there's oil shale in NW Georgia. I don't think that it is being actively exploited right now, AFAIK, but still, the reservoirs are there, and I found a few hints that there may have been some low yield wells at one time in some parts of GA. Consider that last part "citation needed", though. :-)
Bush knew damn well it was not the right thing to do. There's substantial evidence (which seems to be rapidly mounting) that he was fully aware that all of the accusations against Iraq were bogus, and some recent evidence actually implicates the Bush administration in deliberately forging evidence to trick Congress and the American public into going to war.
What's not clear is the real motivation---whether Bush thought it was a potential political win, wanted revenge against the Iraqi government for trying to kill his father, or just wanted to throw some money to Cheney's buddies at Halliburton---but there's no way be believed it was "right" unless his ability to discern right from wrong is borderline sociopathic....
I contrast this with the Clinton administration, in which the U.S. went into Bosnia and Somalia, neither of which were of any significant military importance. During Bush Jr's term, the same sort of ethnic cleansing and/or forcible ejection from people's homes has been happening in Sudan (Darfur region), Kenya, South Africa, Burma, Zimbabwe, etc. but because those places aren't of military significance, have no oil, etc., Bush and the U.N. haven't done jack, and the Bush administration has even used signing statements to actively undermine legislation passed overwhelmingly by Congress designed to put pressure on the Sudanese government to get things back under control. That's not even counting all the ethnic cleansing that has occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan under the watchful eye of the weak puppet governments that the Bush administration has installed with their largely dismantled military forces....
The difference between the last two administrations in this area is quite appalling, frankly.... No administration in my recollection did more to foster good will and help out the people of the world than the Clinton administration. No administration in my recollection has done more to foster bad will and screw the rest of the world than the Bush administration. I'm surprised Bush hasn't been tried for treason yet.... The guy makes Nixon look like a pretty good idea by comparison.
Was the lynched person critical of the Bush administration's energy policy? If so, Canada having oil and all....
I can see it now. The next day, Bush sends an email to Stephen Harper that says simply, "You're next." A week later, there's a news story that says the Bush administration suspects terrorists are being harbored in Canada and allowed to enter the U.S. across unprotected parts of the border without any challenge from Canadian authorities. Three weeks later, the U.S. has troops in Winnipeg. Apparently Bush thought it was the capital city. Either that or he figured nobody lived in North Dakota, so he could invade and no one would notice. Hard to say which.
Upon his capture, the Canadian prime minister notes that the Canadian prisoners are Americans, too, being from North America and all, and that they therefore cannot be jailed without trial as enemy combatants. The Supreme Court reluctantly agrees. The various political leaders are subsequently tried, found to be almost as clueless as their American counterparts---but still not guilty, per se---and then released.
Six months and eighteen billion dollars later, the U.S. soldiers return home in defeat after being successfully sued in Canadian courts for not painting their Humvee signage in both English and French.
Am I close?
"In Soviet Russia, government changes you."
Of course we will. You don't see any U.S. peacekeepers on their way to Georgia, do you? Well, except maybe for the other Georgia just in case the hurricane goes four or five hundred miles to the east before it makes landfall, that is.... :-)
Okay, to be fair, if they start to encroach on Georgia's oil fields, the U.S. might get involved. The rest of those former Soviet states, though---the ones who aren't sitting on oil---I think it's safe to say they're on their own. I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying that if you think the current U.S. government is going to lift a finger to help anybody without it being for their own significant political gain, you've clearly been living under a rock the last eight years.
Bush Presidency Countdown Clock
Fool me... you can't get fooled again....
A few inches? I was hoping to see Adam and Jamie with a parabolic antenna reading people's CC tokens from a couple of blocks. No, seriously. RFID security ranks right up there with Congressional oversight in the list of the top oxymorons of all time... okay, not all RFID hardware---some actually do use crypto in the right way---but a large enough percentage that my level of trust for RFID CCs is somewhere between zero and negative infinity.
I kind of wish someone would record (and post on YouTube et al) a MythBusters parody in which they act like Adam and Jamie et al and do an RFID shootout to see who can assemble the best RFID remote reader rig. Score the contest on accuracy, on ability to distinguish multiple cards, on range, and if they are really feeling lucky, on whether they were able to successfully make a purchase using the skimmed data with the opponent's credit card.... :-)
I doubt I'm going to see that any time soon, but it would be fun to watch the inevitable train wreck in a couple of CC companies' stock as they scrambled to dismantle those systems and come up with a more secure means of payment....
No, the address you give out is 127.0.0.1, not 192.168.1.1. Get it right. :-D
Indeed, I suspect that's why they're doing this now. Call me cynical, but my gut says this isn't about bandwidth at all.
Services like Amazon Unbox and the iTunes Store are reducing their non-Internet (cable TV) offerings to mere commodities. By making TV shows available for immediate purchase instead of having to wait a year for them to come out on DVD, many people are realizing they really don't need cable TV. Worse for Comcast, many find that they would pay less per month to buy a season pass for the shows and own the recordings instead of only being allowed to time shift them for a limited period of time.
Add to that the impact that online movie download services (Unbox, iTS, NetFlix, etc.) have on pay per view movies, and you'll quickly understand that this has virtually nothing to do with their bandwidth costs or preserving quality of service for other users and everything to do with anticompetitive price fixing and consumer lock-in....
Make no mistake, if bandwidth were the culprit, the would be charging based on how much traffic came in from off-network sites, not for all traffic across the board. They would be in favor of P2P and would be encouraging services like Unbox and iTS to use P2P designs to maximize the efficiency of customer delivery. Instead, they're deliberately creating barriers to scare people away from obtaining TV and movie content from anyone but them.
Here's hoping the next administration lets the antitrust lawsuits fly against Comcast and their ilk.
And if you do use deep packet inspection, you got it all wrong. It should be:
if ($packet->['httpHeader']['HTTP_REFERER'] eq "slashdot.org") {
$packet->sendICMP(ICMP_TYPE_RST, SEND_ICMP_TO_SOURCE);
$packet->sendICMP(ICMP_TYPE_RST, SEND_ICMP_TO_DESTINATION);
$packet->drop();
return 1; # packet was reinjected or handled in this layer; do not continue to propagate through filter chain
}
Emphasis mine.
Sort of. If I read the specification correctly, PPM only supports up to 16-bit color using a fixed color table, and attempts to store both the metadata (length, width, etc.) and the data in a single file. I suggested encoding the length and width parameters in ASCII in a separate file, and using the raw per-color data. It also encodes the file data in ASCII, which is very inefficient. I suggested including the raw bytes, not an ASCII representation of the numbers.