But if the constants of the universe aren't constant in place or in time, then those quasars may not even be as far away or as old as we think them to be (the light may have sped up to ludicrous speed underway, you know) - and then maybe those crazy religious people are right after all; the universe is just a lightshow put up for our entertainment and the universe is only fourthousand years old or whatever age it's going to be next tuesday !
"modern Islamic states (where intellectuals are consistently jailed or killed)"
Journalists maybe, or activists. But engineers, rocket scientists or nuclear physicists (whose very usefulness you seem to imply) ? Name one such state. I don't mean to apologize for modern Islamic states, but I fear that rhetoric has got the better of you. You should not let that happen to you, unless, of course, you could prove me wrong.
"Tools for other languages (in most cases, Perl) are mentioned in passing, nearly all of the code snippets are in PHP. MySQL 4.1 is the basis for most of the database-centered material."
I somehow thought that this was about building serious webapps for serious companies (i.e. the ones with the money to create scalable infrastructure). The semi-last sentence in the write-up killed all that. I have a title for other editions in the same series: 'Using legos to build skyscrapers', or 'Building scalable rockets using play-doh'.
Seriously though - such books mustn't focus on one technology or the other. I'm no java-fanboy myself (per se, that is; I like java). But scalability is much better documented using abstraction, divided in all of its relevant parts; networking, hardware, operating systems (lots of it should be here) and software. And not even mentioning php or mysql. Describing scalability in this way immediately erases all your claims of being a professional.
Thank you. Couldn't find that two years ago, or must have rejected it for some reason.
]] image: well, ever got a look at the standard libraries?
Do they contain methods like 'saveAsPNG' ? Oh. I didn't think so either.
]] DBM: I guess you mean database (DB),
No. I don't. This is not freaky stuff. Look it up. And if you don't understand what a DBM is after reading that, then hand in your geek card at the door.
]] I have no clue what you are talking about. To me, the gang of four is known for their design patterns book.
Exactly. What happened when that came out ? A lot of major APIs (java.nio, the saxparser, for example) were redesigned to fit the fashion (and become completely inaccessible as a result). About the same time that Sun sort-of completed their instrospection API. So that everybody and their dog started to write their own sub-language-inside-a-webserver instead of focussing on usefull stuff. The GOF is, in my eyes, responsible for this whole quagmire; when are people going to learn that we don't want infinetely extensible API-APIs; we want easy to use APIs ! Go on Sun, be sensible ! Stop rewriting your own APIs according to the latest hype every release, set up some sort of CPAN for java, and free its source code. Well, in my dreams, I guess.
Thanks. These days, however, because we're talking about a two or three years ago here (an eternity in java's terms), we have FOP. Which is hell on earth to work with because it assumes that one can somehow like XML.
What I'd really want out of a PDF generating java API, would be something along the lines of what PDF::API2 does for perl. Simple, adequate and easy to be made complete, however, only focussed on PDF, say:
PDF pdf = new PDF(); PDFPage page = pdf.createPage("A4"); page.line(10,10,200,200); page.stroke();
The grand parent poster said nothing of standard libraries, and I didn't mean that either, so it's a bit disingenious of you to try and frame it that way. I said what I meant, which was: library support. And java is doing poorly in that department. Every time I had a java project which had to, eh, I don't know; produce a PDF, or an RTF, or an image, or print something using LPP, or extract something from a DBM, dial a number to a faxline, you know - do actual work, java gave up and we had to re-spec the project to include shell-tools, or perl-tools, or C-tools as requirements. True, they (the java folks) are catching up, and java really isn't that old, so there's a lot of forgiving to go around. But it's just a bit of a shame that the gang of four spent so much time making everybody re-invent a web-framework, while there could be people actually working on usefull APIs.
- Java is adequate for just about every programming task
Except for systems programming. And really big GUI project (photoshop) programming. And small handy script programming. Which is a lot of programming altogether.
- Java's generics are mostly adequate
Java's generics have nothing to do with your argument; you just mention them because they're new. If your aim is new, then I know a few others: overloadable operators, literal regexes, a preprocessor language..
- Java's library support is above average
Except perl's, python's and C's are about a thousand times as good. Which says a lot about your understanding of 'above average'.
- The Java language is wordy, which mostly has to do with strict typing (and lately, from adding generics)
'Wordy' is an understanding, my friend. Java is so friggin' wordy that a whole new generation of editors and screens had to be invented in order to support the kind of line-length that java is happy with.
All the rest of your points I agree with, though. Well put.
You're FUDding. Big vendors (well, IBM) have their own JVM(s) and have had them for years. MS tried to clone the JVM into something it was not and failed. If you can't call it java what you're brewing, then what's the use ? Brand recognition and certification will do the trick well enough.
Lots and lots of animals; I remember my little son, when he was one, would instinctively shudder when he saw a spider in the garden. I found myself somewhat strangely in a similar position recently - drifting a bit OT here - I was in this zoo in France which was built up against a hill; when you entered it, there was this bit where you could see the chimps moving about, but you couldn't see their perimeter, which was water surrounding their island. It gave me a sudden impression that I shared a piece of uninhibited terrain with a chimp, especially since the zoo was quite empty at that time of day. It made me stand completely still for a moment. Weird.
Which is strange, because the mother of all CMSs, which also comes in a web-based form, has been around for so long. All they'd have to do is copy this.
Re:To answer some of the authors questions
on
Driving Plan 9
·
· Score: 1
I think your experience more or less describes how _anyone_ feels when they're first confronted with an OS. After that's over, I usually only need to know if it has a C compiler on it, and what the quirks are of their libc.
The only thing that this will spawn, is modified versions of Windows; like games and expensive software packages, windows will now not ship as a direct copy of the installer disk + a post-it with an activation key, instead someone clever will hack it, so that it doesn't do the WGA anymore (or ask for an activation key, for that matter). Given the amount of time that MS now has in between releases of their OS, such an investment will be more than worth it. Critical updates and service packs ? That's where chaos will kill this initiative; because MS OSes are so omnipresent, there's no way to deal properly with all the versions that different vendors, in different countries to different types of client have created. Either MS starts enforcing rules very strictly (and piss a lot of people off) and makes Vista their FascistOS, or critical updates and service packs will just have to ship.
>> The last time I looked at Sun's source code for Java (the real source code, not the cut-down version you get in the JDK download)
This is very interesting. I've worked on various preprocessors for java (amongst others one that takes regular expressions as literals), and I'd be very interested to see this. Could you drop us a link ?
Yeah, because being able to directly push bits over in memory in any place that you like (and that is yours to touch) can't have possibly anything to do with it. Or having an API that is the same one that your OS uses (which is mostly the case), which allows you to do all sorts of system calls without checking or conversion; that can't have anything to do with it either.
There's more that they can milk; the artwork on the cover of the CDs can be licensed, as well as works made in the spirit of those covers (if you're in Spain, that is); subsets of the lyrics that are too central to the song to be 'fair use' (I'm thinking for example of 'yeah yeah yeah, nanananananah' by Wham, which could lead to extorting^Wextracting money from people with ordinary websites that use the words 'yeah' or 'nah' or both.) Then there's the whole copyrightable stuff that the record industry have produced themselves; the form-factor of CD-cases that returns in jewelry-cases or books. The 'Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics' logo that goes so well on T-shirts and stuff - I doubt that they're currently cashing in on that.
They could make a business method or a patent out of 'printing copyright notices, authorship mentionings and cautions in a round manner around the edge of a round disc'. They could sue the DVD consortium for taking their medium's form-factor. They could sue the sky for being blue as the sky on the cover of 'Wish you were here', or they could extract royalties from women for having vaginas as one seems to do on the cover of that Whitesnake (?) album. They're not out of options just yet. Or they could start producing good music, but that seems to be far astray from their current business model these days. You know, companies evolve..
Posted this without regard for the thread; couldn't post this morning because of database maintenance, so there !
MS have re-hired Paul Allen and are making him head honcho of MS headquarters in Reading, UK. Mr Allen's first secret assignment will be taking Mrs Kroes out for a date where he will try to obtain a signed release from prosecution which he is told, is hidden in Mrs Kroes's panties.
I suppose that if you want to be treated like an adult (have a market, be eligible to profit as well as be monitored and, if necessary, fined), you've got to behave like an adult, right ? I know plenty of software companies (IBM, Oracle) and non-companies (The Open Group (or are they incorporated ?), the FSF (here and there), the Apache Foundation, Sleepycat Software (oops, they are a company too !)) that document their stuff well and plentifull. If the EU were to fine IBM for their anticompetitive business practices in the, eh.. message queuing market for example, and it were to demand that IBM show them complete and comprehensive documentation of Q-series, then I'm sure that all IBM would have to do is point at the bookshelf.
I guess the point I'm making is, to use a metaphore, that after a certain amount of growing up, you can pretend to be a boy still, and therefore not liable. But at some point people around will stop believing that, and expect that you're going to start behaving like a man.
That seems to be the problem with MS's attitude; it's like; oh, but we're just making software - which is innocent kids-stuff, really. How can an pubelescent technology like computers and software fall under any legislation whatsoever ? To which any government would respond; but, we're using your stuff in our banks and our military - you'd better grow up, and we know you can, because there are others that behave like adults, too !
The EU isn't MS's problem; it's the IBMs and Sleepycats (oh, open source !) of this world that are MS's problem; they're showing how it can be done too; they're the ones raising the bar in the field that MS so desperately wants to play in.
If admins are this worried about such a usefull feature being used within companies, then there's still a very simple way to deal with it; make it crystal clear that any data lost due to this feature is simply tough luck, or, if they're really frantic about it, that any use of this feature will lead to immediate termination of contract.
I mean, they do this (have company policy) for porn-browsing, right ? Are admins so concerned about lost productivity due to happy browsing ? No - they're too busy doing it themselves usually, and it doesn't affect them (just the company bottom line).
I anything, I think MS should expand this feature into their whole network-/groupware-thinking, namely; have windows shares that are public to certain sections of users, and are gibberish to the others.
And if all else fails, MS could release a tool that tells the admin that the folder has been encrypted (when it scours the network at night) so that unauthorized use of the feature can be discovered, or, indeed, create a tool that can decrypt such folders within a larger (company-) setting.
>> In a large company, there are IT standards, and one of the standards at my company is that applications shall never, ever, ever fork(), even if running on a large dedicated machine.
We need proper event devices in systems programming, both between threads and processes. I want to be able to select() (or poll() or epoll() dammit) and wait on not only file-descriptors, but semaphores, system signals, threads waking up out of a sleep() call, and even a crucial variable changing its value. And I want it API-proof (no signals) and statically initializable. And tomorrow. And a pony.
Seriously though, I'm not sure what methods the WIN32 API has, under the hood, of its event waiting calls, but they have a good side to them. For any device that has a potentially blocking system call associated with it, I can define an event that I can wait for. Of course the rest of the whole interface is clunky as hell, but why hasn't anyone come up with something similar in *IX ?
Well, if MicroSoft have a Director of Standards Affairs, then I'm sure it won't take threehundred people years to comply with a simple EU-ruling, now will it ?
You can't 'make' a transaction, and then cancel it 1 week later!!
I'm not talking about a week. I'm talking about getting an email right away, but anyway:
Yes you can. This is a phenomenon with a tradition within banking. It simply means that someone or something will have to stand for the risk involved, which is quite low, actually. A kind of insurance. Credit cards do it, online divisions of banks do it. But the risk involved is so low, that it's practically without a price - especially if the transaction is booked back within a short period of time.
Obviously your bank allows you to change you email address online, because they only think of email as a vehicle for their marketing efforts. If it were to be drawn in with the whole security setup, which is what we were talking about here, then I'm sure you'd not be able to change it online. Obviously.
Slashdot Mirror
But if the constants of the universe aren't constant in place or in time, then those quasars may not even be as far away or as old as we think them to be (the light may have sped up to ludicrous speed underway, you know) - and then maybe those crazy religious people are right after all; the universe is just a lightshow put up for our entertainment and the universe is only fourthousand years old or whatever age it's going to be next tuesday !
"modern Islamic states (where intellectuals are consistently jailed or killed)"
Journalists maybe, or activists. But engineers, rocket scientists or nuclear physicists (whose very usefulness you seem to imply) ? Name one such state. I don't mean to apologize for modern Islamic states, but I fear that rhetoric has got the better of you. You should not let that happen to you, unless, of course, you could prove me wrong.
"Tools for other languages (in most cases, Perl) are mentioned in passing, nearly all of the code snippets are in PHP. MySQL 4.1 is the basis for most of the database-centered material."
I somehow thought that this was about building serious webapps for serious companies (i.e. the ones with the money to create scalable infrastructure). The semi-last sentence in the write-up killed all that. I have a title for other editions in the same series: 'Using legos to build skyscrapers', or 'Building scalable rockets using play-doh'.
Seriously though - such books mustn't focus on one technology or the other. I'm no java-fanboy myself (per se, that is; I like java). But scalability is much better documented using abstraction, divided in all of its relevant parts; networking, hardware, operating systems (lots of it should be here) and software. And not even mentioning php or mysql. Describing scalability in this way immediately erases all your claims of being a professional.
]] PDF: see iText
Thank you. Couldn't find that two years ago, or must have rejected it for some reason.
]] image: well, ever got a look at the standard libraries?
Do they contain methods like 'saveAsPNG' ? Oh. I didn't think so either.
]] DBM: I guess you mean database (DB),
No. I don't. This is not freaky stuff. Look it up. And if you don't understand what a DBM is after reading that, then hand in your geek card at the door.
]] I have no clue what you are talking about. To me, the gang of four is known for their design patterns book.
Exactly. What happened when that came out ? A lot of major APIs (java.nio, the saxparser, for example) were redesigned to fit the fashion (and become completely inaccessible as a result). About the same time that Sun sort-of completed their instrospection API. So that everybody and their dog started to write their own sub-language-inside-a-webserver instead of focussing on usefull stuff. The GOF is, in my eyes, responsible for this whole quagmire; when are people going to learn that we don't want infinetely extensible API-APIs; we want easy to use APIs ! Go on Sun, be sensible ! Stop rewriting your own APIs according to the latest hype every release, set up some sort of CPAN for java, and free its source code. Well, in my dreams, I guess.
Nah. You need your arm to steer with. Your penis, on the other hand, creates a lot drag..
Furthermore - just to pre-empt:
Hey - you have your penis on your other hand ?
Thanks. These days, however, because we're talking about a two or three years ago here (an eternity in java's terms), we have FOP. Which is hell on earth to work with because it assumes that one can somehow like XML.
What I'd really want out of a PDF generating java API, would be something along the lines of what PDF::API2 does for perl. Simple, adequate and easy to be made complete, however, only focussed on PDF, say:
PDF pdf = new PDF();
PDFPage page = pdf.createPage("A4");
page.line(10,10,200,200);
page.stroke();
etc..
The grand parent poster said nothing of standard libraries, and I didn't mean that either, so it's a bit disingenious of you to try and frame it that way. I said what I meant, which was: library support. And java is doing poorly in that department. Every time I had a java project which had to, eh, I don't know; produce a PDF, or an RTF, or an image, or print something using LPP, or extract something from a DBM, dial a number to a faxline, you know - do actual work, java gave up and we had to re-spec the project to include shell-tools, or perl-tools, or C-tools as requirements. True, they (the java folks) are catching up, and java really isn't that old, so there's a lot of forgiving to go around. But it's just a bit of a shame that the gang of four spent so much time making everybody re-invent a web-framework, while there could be people actually working on usefull APIs.
- Java is adequate for just about every programming task
Except for systems programming. And really big GUI project (photoshop) programming. And small handy script programming. Which is a lot of programming altogether.
- Java's generics are mostly adequate
Java's generics have nothing to do with your argument; you just mention them because they're new. If your aim is new, then I know a few others: overloadable operators, literal regexes, a preprocessor language..
- Java's library support is above average
Except perl's, python's and C's are about a thousand times as good. Which says a lot about your understanding of 'above average'.
- The Java language is wordy, which mostly has to do with strict typing (and lately, from adding generics)
'Wordy' is an understanding, my friend. Java is so friggin' wordy that a whole new generation of editors and screens had to be invented in order to support the kind of line-length that java is happy with.
All the rest of your points I agree with, though. Well put.
You're FUDding. Big vendors (well, IBM) have their own JVM(s) and have had them for years. MS tried to clone the JVM into something it was not and failed. If you can't call it java what you're brewing, then what's the use ? Brand recognition and certification will do the trick well enough.
Lots and lots of animals; I remember my little son, when he was one, would instinctively shudder when he saw a spider in the garden. I found myself somewhat strangely in a similar position recently - drifting a bit OT here - I was in this zoo in France which was built up against a hill; when you entered it, there was this bit where you could see the chimps moving about, but you couldn't see their perimeter, which was water surrounding their island. It gave me a sudden impression that I shared a piece of uninhibited terrain with a chimp, especially since the zoo was quite empty at that time of day. It made me stand completely still for a moment. Weird.
Which is strange, because the mother of all CMSs, which also comes in a web-based form, has been around for so long. All they'd have to do is copy this.
I think your experience more or less describes how _anyone_ feels when they're first confronted with an OS. After that's over, I usually only need to know if it has a C compiler on it, and what the quirks are of their libc.
The only thing that this will spawn, is modified versions of Windows; like games and expensive software packages, windows will now not ship as a direct copy of the installer disk + a post-it with an activation key, instead someone clever will hack it, so that it doesn't do the WGA anymore (or ask for an activation key, for that matter). Given the amount of time that MS now has in between releases of their OS, such an investment will be more than worth it. Critical updates and service packs ? That's where chaos will kill this initiative; because MS OSes are so omnipresent, there's no way to deal properly with all the versions that different vendors, in different countries to different types of client have created. Either MS starts enforcing rules very strictly (and piss a lot of people off) and makes Vista their FascistOS, or critical updates and service packs will just have to ship.
>> The last time I looked at Sun's source code for Java (the real source code, not the cut-down version you get in the JDK download)
This is very interesting. I've worked on various preprocessors for java (amongst others one that takes regular expressions as literals), and I'd be very interested to see this. Could you drop us a link ?
Yeah, stop the propaganda for 225 million year old reptiles - their influence in our daily life is big enough as it is !
Yeah, because being able to directly push bits over in memory in any place that you like (and that is yours to touch) can't have possibly anything to do with it. Or having an API that is the same one that your OS uses (which is mostly the case), which allows you to do all sorts of system calls without checking or conversion; that can't have anything to do with it either.
There's more that they can milk; the artwork on the cover of the CDs can be licensed, as well as works made in the spirit of those covers (if you're in Spain, that is); subsets of the lyrics that are too central to the song to be 'fair use' (I'm thinking for example of 'yeah yeah yeah, nanananananah' by Wham, which could lead to extorting^Wextracting money from people with ordinary websites that use the words 'yeah' or 'nah' or both.) Then there's the whole copyrightable stuff that the record industry have produced themselves; the form-factor of CD-cases that returns in jewelry-cases or books. The 'Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics' logo that goes so well on T-shirts and stuff - I doubt that they're currently cashing in on that.
They could make a business method or a patent out of 'printing copyright notices, authorship mentionings and cautions in a round manner around the edge of a round disc'. They could sue the DVD consortium for taking their medium's form-factor. They could sue the sky for being blue as the sky on the cover of 'Wish you were here', or they could extract royalties from women for having vaginas as one seems to do on the cover of that Whitesnake (?) album. They're not out of options just yet. Or they could start producing good music, but that seems to be far astray from their current business model these days. You know, companies evolve..
Posted this without regard for the thread; couldn't post this morning because of database maintenance, so there !
This just in:
MS have re-hired Paul Allen and are making him head honcho of MS headquarters in Reading, UK. Mr Allen's first secret assignment will be taking Mrs Kroes out for a date where he will try to obtain a signed release from prosecution which he is told, is hidden in Mrs Kroes's panties.
I suppose that if you want to be treated like an adult (have a market, be eligible to profit as well as be monitored and, if necessary, fined), you've got to behave like an adult, right ? I know plenty of software companies (IBM, Oracle) and non-companies (The Open Group (or are they incorporated ?), the FSF (here and there), the Apache Foundation, Sleepycat Software (oops, they are a company too !)) that document their stuff well and plentifull. If the EU were to fine IBM for their anticompetitive business practices in the, eh.. message queuing market for example, and it were to demand that IBM show them complete and comprehensive documentation of Q-series, then I'm sure that all IBM would have to do is point at the bookshelf.
I guess the point I'm making is, to use a metaphore, that after a certain amount of growing up, you can pretend to be a boy still, and therefore not liable. But at some point people around will stop believing that, and expect that you're going to start behaving like a man.
That seems to be the problem with MS's attitude; it's like; oh, but we're just making software - which is innocent kids-stuff, really. How can an pubelescent technology like computers and software fall under any legislation whatsoever ? To which any government would respond; but, we're using your stuff in our banks and our military - you'd better grow up, and we know you can, because there are others that behave like adults, too !
The EU isn't MS's problem; it's the IBMs and Sleepycats (oh, open source !) of this world that are MS's problem; they're showing how it can be done too; they're the ones raising the bar in the field that MS so desperately wants to play in.
If admins are this worried about such a usefull feature being used within companies, then there's still a very simple way to deal with it; make it crystal clear that any data lost due to this feature is simply tough luck, or, if they're really frantic about it, that any use of this feature will lead to immediate termination of contract.
I mean, they do this (have company policy) for porn-browsing, right ? Are admins so concerned about lost productivity due to happy browsing ? No - they're too busy doing it themselves usually, and it doesn't affect them (just the company bottom line).
I anything, I think MS should expand this feature into their whole network-/groupware-thinking, namely; have windows shares that are public to certain sections of users, and are gibberish to the others.
And if all else fails, MS could release a tool that tells the admin that the folder has been encrypted (when it scours the network at night) so that unauthorized use of the feature can be discovered, or, indeed, create a tool that can decrypt such folders within a larger (company-) setting.
>> In a large company, there are IT standards, and one of the standards at my company is that applications shall never, ever, ever fork(), even if running on a large dedicated machine.
May I ask - Gods, man ! Why oh why ?
We need proper event devices in systems programming, both between threads and processes. I want to be able to select() (or poll() or epoll() dammit) and wait on not only file-descriptors, but semaphores, system signals, threads waking up out of a sleep() call, and even a crucial variable changing its value. And I want it API-proof (no signals) and statically initializable. And tomorrow. And a pony.
Seriously though, I'm not sure what methods the WIN32 API has, under the hood, of its event waiting calls, but they have a good side to them. For any device that has a potentially blocking system call associated with it, I can define an event that I can wait for. Of course the rest of the whole interface is clunky as hell, but why hasn't anyone come up with something similar in *IX ?
Well, if MicroSoft have a Director of Standards Affairs, then I'm sure it won't take threehundred people years to comply with a simple EU-ruling, now will it ?
You can't 'make' a transaction, and then cancel it 1 week later!!
I'm not talking about a week. I'm talking about getting an email right away, but anyway:
Yes you can. This is a phenomenon with a tradition within banking. It simply means that someone or something will have to stand for the risk involved, which is quite low, actually. A kind of insurance. Credit cards do it, online divisions of banks do it. But the risk involved is so low, that it's practically without a price - especially if the transaction is booked back within a short period of time.
Obviously your bank allows you to change you email address online, because they only think of email as a vehicle for their marketing efforts. If it were to be drawn in with the whole security setup, which is what we were talking about here, then I'm sure you'd not be able to change it online. Obviously.