do not give me the batch file crap, batch does not do regex or any of that stuff, nor can I pipe my outputs and inputs
Actually, you can pipe inputs and outputs in batch. However, batch is in fact dead. Years ago, Microsoft devised the Windows Scripting Host to replace it, and it is very very nice. You can run it in GUI mode or command line. It supports RegEx as well as any scripting-enabled COM component (including a lot of standard Windows calls).
I agree with you. That's why I'm torn. I use XP at home and at work. I love it! For me, at least, it's extremly stable, extensible (love making DHTML pages to stick in the taskbar to show family photos, or look up phone numbers in my address book), fun (themes), etc. BUt MS is evil. What do I do???
XP takes much of that configurability away from you
It doesn't take it and lock it away. It just gets it out of your way. Try Start->Run->gpedit.msc. Or how about just perusing the HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrrentVersion section of the regsitry. Dig through the control panel. Dig through the My Computer properties. There's an almost endless number of things you can play with and tweak.
How does Linux react to a bad driver? Does it magically fix it with digital pixie dust?
I have better things to do with my time than be an administrator
This is exactly why I use XP. Its ready to go out of the box (minus the constant barage of security patches) and easy to use. The last time I messed with Linux, I helped a friend re-write a buggy bti of network driver detection code in the OS. And all of my *nix experiences have been troublesome. This is mostly because I'm a novice on any *nix but a pro on Windows just because of the amount of time spent using it. But I will not let you get away with a blanket statement that someone one OS is administration free while Windows requires constant babysitting.
You might want to take those guys over in the Network Department out to lunch. Sounds like the've been working their tail off to keep your computer from the dozens of viruses and worms that are loose on the internet
Yeah, no kidding! Somehow, my home XP box never crashed when those hit because I had already installed the MS secutiry patches for them weeks before the exploits were taken advantage of. Yet at work, they sat on their hands and someone brought one in on their notebook and we were doomed! They just never installed the patches.
Now, is that hard? I don't think so. I let Windows Update download them in the background, notify me of them, and I decide if I want to install them (and I usually do some moderate investigation to make sure its not MS's latest DRM advancement).
How hard is it to get the latest patches for Linux? Seriously, I'm not a Linux user (as soona s I can scrouneg up another box, I'm gonna start toying with it), so I really do want to know if its as easy to keep "up to date".
"It's not like it's terribly hard to keep Windows stable"
Word crashes frequently
Thought they are made by the same company, my friend, a Word Processor and an Operating System are very different things. An OS should crash under none but the most extreme cases (i.e. hardware failure). The grandparent was talking about Windows being stable. My Windows XP system is stable too. Sure, Shareaza crashes, IE crashes, eclipse crashes -- even Mozilla Thunderbird crashed on me once. But the OS itself has not yet crashed. Similar in my *nix days, I never crashed the OS but had plenty of core dumps from early development versions of some of our programs.
"NT wouldn't stay up for more than a few days of heavy work"
"From corrupt registries to tons of spyware"
Where do you think that stuff comes from? Microsoft? Does Microsoft write spyware? No, crappy marketing companies and spammers write trojan spywares, purposely trying to evade detection, and uninstallation, burying themeselves through the registry. WHyd oesn't Linux have that problem? Becuase the market share for Linux of people susceptible enough to get these things go on with their computer is non-existent.
I bet the number of Windows based PCs far outnumbers the number of Linux boxes. So Linux just hasn't been plagues as much by the crap sofwtare. And when someone does produce crap software for linux, the generally more technically adept Linux users don't stand for it and switch to something else. My flippin dad won't even uninstall crap he tris and doesn't like!
Try to have a little perspective with this sort of thing. Yes, Microsoft is full of security holes, is an evil monopoly, etc. But many of the times, the thinsg that "corrupt the registry" and royally screw things up are horrible pieces of third party software.
Sometimes I hope everyone inlcuding my mother does use Linux one day so it have its day on top and have to deal with this crap too.
And just to keep on keepin' on with the gradparent posts' thoughts: my Windows XP box I'm psoting from is about to be rebooted tonight for the first time in... well 5 days because of a power outage (no UPS), and before that it was weeks if not months. And I'm only rebooting tonight because I just flashed by BIOS. Hell, we had an NT server at mylast job with an uptime of more than 365 days -- running one special server program that wasn't available on Solaris like everything else we ran. So, yes, Windows itself (especially 2000/XP) can be relatively stable so long as you don't load it up with crap software.
This is exactly right. People pirate because the TCO (to borrow a buzz word) is less. The total cost of "owning" a pirated MP3 is the time you spent surfing the Internet/P2P for it, sifting through broken/terrible copies, dealing with the lack of lyrics and cover art, etc. There's no direct monetary cost. The value is worse in some cases (you don't get as much), but better in others (you can select tracks individually). There is a time investment, but its probably less than the time it takes to get in your car and drive to the CD store. Shall I even mention the risk of getting snagged by the RIAA's nets?
Review (for easier rebuttal):
Flexible packaging
Relatively instant delivery
Takes time to locate copies
Takes time to select a quality copy
Lack of packaged lyrics (although I think there are ways of embedding them in MP3s)
Takes time to download (trivial on broadband)
Risk of litigation & legal penalties
No direct monetary cost
The RIAA needs tom combat this by providing a better TCO -- either more value, less cost (than present), or both. I know they could compete with items 1-5 directly by allowing people to download individual MP3 tracks directly and legitimately. Item 6 is a wash. Number 7 they could beat piracy on because it would be legit by nature. Number 8 depends on if they can pick a price that is compatible with how consumers value their product.
Plus, the RIAA could do more to increase the value of their product compared to the pirated version becuase of their unique position with the artists and their generally deep pockets. BY offering legit music downloads, they could actually build direct relationships with their consumers. I don't mean to spam, but to offer real desirable value to the consumers:
E-mail advanced concert ticket options or discounted tickets to downloaders of music (provided they've entered their e-mail address).
Offer exclusive merchandise only available when you buy your songs through their legit channels.
Contests for free stuff, to meet with artists, appear as guest judge on American Idol, etc.
They just need to wake up and realize you can't beat piracy 100% even if they spent every last cent on it, but they could increase revenue, profits and positive opinions if they tried to COMPETE with piracy!
"More people died in 9/11 than all the soldiers killed in the Iraq war to date."
How in the hell is that relevant to a discussion of whether the war is justified?
It's relavent becausethe grandparent post implied that there were more attacks in Iraq than at home -- I was trying to point that while the quantity of attacks in Iraq are greater, the actual number of casualties from terrorists at home is still greater.
These are not insurgents.
Well, they aren't necessarily terrorists either, now, are they? What do you call the freelance American bounty hunters who went ot Iraq for the price tag on his head? They non-Iraqis in Iraq -- and they brought guns. If insrugent can only be applied to someone who is native to Iraq, then what do you call someone who came to Iraq to fight American military forces (the most prevalent target -- the civilian contractor casualties have been far less numerous)? Is it because they use roadside bombs? Would switching from car bombs to land mines -- a more traditional military weapon -- then make them mercenaries or freedom fighters or... terrorists still?
THe sense I Get is from hearing interviews of Iraqi's on the street. Yes, those interviews came through the media and might have been edited. The general sense in those interviews, however, is that they're glad that Saddam is gone, but are still worried about security, joblessness, etc. Unexployment is significantly up. And, even in BIG cities like Najaf, Basra and Baghdad there is danger. If I were living there, I'd have to worry about getting shot as a suspected terrorist, caught in the cross fire, or getting blown up by a roadside bomb - or perhaps tortured... I mean... interrogated.
Being humiliated by a woman looking at your genitals and being forced to wear panties on your head is not even remotely the same as the torture, maiming, and killing that was going on in this prison before US occupation.
I heard a reference on NPR this morning that there were some 37 deaths in the prisons. 9 are still under investigation. Others were ruled "justifiable homicide". Are theseless than under Saddam? Yes. But if I was an Iraqi, I'd still be worried. Hell, I'm worried my very own Mr. John Ashcroft might label be a terrorist, ship me off to Guantanomo Bay for a long vacation, and maybe even "interrogate me".
In addition, WMDs are being found in Iraq.
I don't need to google. I've already heard all about it. They did NOT find Sarin in the way you think. What they found were two chemicals in an OLD shell that when fired owuld've mixed. However, used as it was, they didn't mix into Sarin as intended. Perhaps al little bit did, but it certainly didn't kill all sorts of poeple with the toxic gas as its original wartime design was intended. I think they found one other shell too that had some old trace of something in it. But, I was told BEFORE the war that Iraq had WMD, they said they destroyed them, but now can't prove they destroyed them. I was told BEFORE the WAR that he had hard evidence of Itaq's attempt to buy uranium, of their mobile chemical faiclities, of their chemical storage bunkers... all of which have been proven FALSE. If one or two shells is all they can find, then YOU give ME a break. That is not proof of a WMD program. That's proof that one or two slipped through through the cracks, or that some rogue person stole them from Saddam BEFORE the rest were destroyed. If there was some huge, secret, hidden stockpile the insurgents/terrorists/whatever had access to, do you really think they'd be using them so sparingly?
Let me repeat. I am not a terrorist. I'm not a Republican. I'm ont a Democrat. I vote for candidates who share my views with the issues I deem most important at the time (when I feel the need to follow a single group, I choose a good baseball team and stick with them.) I just can't believe that every where I turn, everyone is so polarized on their beleifs abotu the so-called facts, and no one is willing to discuss them. All of your points are valid, but only partially so -- and the only way I know how to balance that is by presenting partial facts from the opposing point of view. Reality is probably somewhere inbetween.
I'm perplexed by the cetrainty by which you dismissed my rebuttals. You so much as called me a Democrat as if I was being political about it. Yet, every stance you have taken is exactly what the Republican's stance is. Since I was playing devil's advocate, naturally my rebuttal would seem like that of a Democrat, but that's why I prefixed it that way.
The truth of the matter is that nobody now knows the truth, and might not ever. Maybe those soldiers abusing prisoners were given direct orders. Maybe they were rogue. Or, maybe theose guys were given indirect orders to permit plausible deniability by the superiors and hang the soldiers out to dry. We just don't know. If you have real evidence, run -- don't walk -- to the nearest media outlet so we can put it to rest one way or another.
What scares me is that you seem even too stubborn to even consider the remote possibilities of these alternatives. It is exactly these alternatives views that the terrorists are thriving under. You completely dismiss these alternatives as the ideas of madmen just as they completely dismiss your views as the thoughts of the devil westerners.
These opposing views will never come to terms. Only an attempt at understanding, and a real desire to ghet at the truth will be. I for one cannot believe that one side is totally right and the other totally wrong.
For example, we know prisoners in the Iraq prison were abused. We don't know if they were guilty or not because they never faced trial, so you can't say with cetrainty they are terrorists. Thus, it is true, if only a partial truth, to say that the people tortured there weren't terrorists. At the same time it is logical that some of those people were terrorists (or insurgents who view themselves as liberators) and thus we were only using interrogation tacticts to try and get ifnormation that would save lives.
Now, to address some specific points:
1. There are conflicting statements about whether or not the soliders were or were not ordered to abuse the prisoners. Will we ever know the truth?
2. Yes, there were conflicting reports about the wedding party. Will we ever know the truth? (I agree that it is stupid to fire loaded weapons in the air at any time, especially in a war zone -- unless you WANT to get shot)
3. The graveyard battle happened in Najaf with Muqtadr's militia. Part of the reason the rest of the Shia Clerics wanted a cease fire and help pressure Muqtadr into it was because their holy sites, including graveyards, were caught in the middle. And regardless of the inhabitants of those graves being dead, descratign a grave is a bad thing in Iraqi culture and ours -- or shall I poop on your grandmother's grave?
4. (out of order now). We also tried to have Saddam Hussein assasinated. Everyone pretends assasination is a nasty thing. But its a brilliant tactic. Did you know that Lincoln tried to have [whoever the Southern president was] assasinated during the civil war? And the Southerners tried to plant dynamite under the white house?
5. I bet there is a mix of people are involved in the attacks as well. That doesn't make them all terrorists. What do you think the Brothers of Liberty were when they dumped tea in the harbor? What do you think the lined-up British tropps thought the American's hiding behind trees and hills were during the revolutionary war? The labels all depend on your point of view, and labelling everyone too coarsely is a dangerous thing. We all know the baggage that comes with the term terrorist. I don't think that fits with someone shooting a gun at an American soldier holding a gun. Just because we took over his country doesn't mean that he has no country to defend -- even if its a misguided defense against an occupying force that really does want to liberate it if they'd just stop shooting at us!
Well, as reported earlier on the news today, the said soldier who did leak the photos, etc., to the press has had his security clearance revoked, is being brought up on a separate set of charges, and is probably in the process of getting a "big chicken dinner" (Bad Conduct Discharge)
The pictures were leaked by soldiers from everything I've read...
I've even heard hints that those pictures were PURPOSEFULY leaked to set an example of the kind of torture/humiliation you'd face if you don't cooperate with American interrogations.
I'm not on one side or the other in particular, but for the sake of devil's advocacy:
1. Terrorists are more inclined to attack US troops in Iraq than civilians on American soil. It's cheaper, quicker and easier for the terrorists than trying to strike on American soil.
How is that a fact? More people died in 9/11 than all the soldiers killed in the Iraq war to date. And what about non-Americans such as the people on the train in Madrid? There is no real evidence the "terrorists"/"insurgents" in Iraq are al Queda. Most of them are al Sadr's militia. In fact, it was announced today that our own government believes the terrorists are going to strike big again this summer. The attacks in Iraq are more frequent, mind you, but those are "insurgents" who may believe they're liberating their country instead of terrorists hell-bent on removing the United States and its people from existence.
2. The war in Iraq may bring stability to the country and a regime that is more US friendly.
The fact, as you stated is that it "may" bring stability. Logically, then, it is also a fact that it may NOT bring stability to Iraq. In fact, the sense I get is that Iraq is less stable now than it was under its former dictator. And, apparently, you still have about the same chance of getting tortured in prison!
3. The war in Iraq will show the middle eastern countries that the US will follow through on military actions despite casualties.
That remains to be seen. Will we follow through? We have so far. It may also show that we will attack a country that doesn't have WMDs and they they did, while leaving alone those thonry countries we KNOW have WMD, such as North Korea. In that case, all the more reason to obtain WMDs to defend yourself.
4....
See response to number 3.
5. With a friendly Iraq, perhaps gas prices will come down in the US (not likely though).
This is not really a "fact", is it? You even admit its not likely. So what was the point of this? In fact, the instability in Iraq has likely contributed to higher oil prices.
And the number 6 point, which I'll add, is thatthis is only giving more evidence to for the terrorists to twist as propoganda. American's sexually uhmiliating and toruturing innocent Iraqis. Americans firing on wedding parties. American tanks shooting at graveyards.
I saw a short clip on some educational channel a couple of years ago. They showed the temperature and gasueous activity in an exinct land fill. Then, by forcing some fresh gas into the ground (I can't remember for certain, but it may have been O2), the bacteria in the ground began to thrive, the temperature soared to the point there was steam coming out of the ground, and much more gas was produced.
It turns out, land fills pretty much don't decay because the decomposers are nearly suffocating (they've found barley-decomposed hotdogs buried in 50-year-old landfills).
I wonder if if your power company could squeeze even more "energy" out of the land fills all while contributing even more to the decomposition of the wate in the landfill.
I would agree with other posters that P2P software does not have a large quantity of on-infringing uses. FTP does. FTP is used all the time for legitimate distrbution by companies and indidivudals. Even BitTorrent (somewhat P2P-ish) is used quite a bit for the legitimate distribution of files. But when is the last time you've gone to some corporate website and seen a link to "download our newest software trial from P2P now!"? For me, it was Shareaza, but that's sort of a self-fullfilling prophecy.
How about the fact that digital media rots and becomes useless a relatively short period of time. How about the fact that the library of congress will undoubtedly lose all of its digital media to secuh decay unless they back it up. But, of course, how can they legally back it up?
Actually, considering we've found paper thousands of years old, paper's not too bad. Granted, the paper is degraged, has holes, dyes fade, etc. but they're still partially legible. Stone, even more so.
The thing is, when you say digital, most people think electromagnetic. That's not what digital means, though. It means discrete values rather than an analog continuum. There were mechanical digitasl clocks that just flipped numbers over and over again. Right a series of 0 and 1s on paper is also digital. Because you only have two discrete digits, it is digital. Even with quite a bit of deterioration, you can still tell a 1 from a 0.
Thus, I would suspect stone/paper/non-corosive-metals would all be good choices so long as the way you encode the digital information is stable and and capable of being recognizable after sustaining damage.
As for punch cards, the problem I've heard with those is that the more edge-area exposed on paper (the inside edge of evert punched hole), the faster it degrades. Thus, stable ink on paper would be better than punched holes.
It's very difficult to manage files with CMD.EXE, however, as anyone who's tried can attest.
OK, I call your bluff. I manage files with CMD.EXE sometimes (more often, just Explorer, btu not always). I find it difficult to have to type file anmes instead of click them for many trivial tasks, but that is not the fault of CMD.EXE, but rather the nature of CLIs.
Perhaps I'm not understanding your concept of "managing files"?
I feel like I've been poisoned. I used MS Word )and the other Office programs) for years. I recently dumped it in favor of OO. Mind you, I never used Word heavily, nor do I use OO heavily now.
But I still can'y (read: not patient enough to) figure out how to do some of the things I could easily do in Word. The arrangement of the menus and toolbars just feel foreign after growing accustomed to Microsoft's.
This isn't necessarily MIcrosoft's fault (I could just as easily have been addicted to an alternative program, just less likely due to Microsoft's dominance.) And it's not OO's faultm either. They shouldn't make their toolbars and menus look just like Microsoft's and limit their "innovation" (I hope MS hasn't trademarked that word!)
Nonetheless, my mind is poisoned and its taking some time (instead of effort) to purge myself.
"Sounds like they are wasting power by having unnecesary steps here..."
Consider the typical coal and oil we get energy from today. How easy is it to have bilogical life forms soaking up the suns energy to organize themselves and reproduce, only to be consumes by predators that die, or die directly, wait a millions of years for them to be compressed by a slow burial process and heated by geothermal energy, causing chemical reactions resulting in oil and coal then is then recombined with oxygen to relase the energy to heat water, which drives a turbine, which then turns a generator to actually generate electricity.
I think splitting water into H2 and O2 for a little while (hours or days) and then recombining it is a lot simpler concept, and probably more efficient.
I still don't understand frame dragging, but I'm hoping my friend Google will after I post this.
The term "dragging" implies some sort of friction or direct force pulling something along with a rotating body. You give the analogy of the electric motor, but at least there you have dipoles in both electricity and magnetism (do opposite potentials for each of two forces). But gravity is a single force, and it is a monopole.
And if the theoretical rotating body is a perfect sphere, there aren't even any bumps or anomolies to rely upon. The mere orientation of the body would have no discernable difference on a system since it is entirely symmetric, so it must be from the motion -- but how?
A good way of thinking about exceptions is that whenever possible, you shoudl provide a way for the programmer to avoid encountering the exception programatically.
For example:
- You can avoid NoSuchElementExceptions by checking the index against the size()
- You can avoid FileNotFoundExceptions by using File.exists()
Note that the standard Java API failed this in some cases. For example, how do you determine if a String is parsable as an Integer without potentially getting an Exception? You can't. Of course, all of the work you would need to check such a String for integerness would be nearly as much work as parsing it into an integer anyways, so perhaps there was a method to their madness.
Anyways, the point is, you are right that exceptions should not be used for normal conditions. Map.remove() returns null instead of throwing NoSuchElemntExceptions, and you can use List.size() to avoid accessing an item that is beyodn the size of the List.
Regarding #3, that is not generally true. Check out Brian Goetz's article, where he points out:
Object pooling is a straightforward concept -- maintain a pool of frequently used objects and grab one from the pool instead of creating a new one whenever needed. The theory is that pooling spreads out the allocation costs over many more uses. When the object creation cost is high, such as with database connections or threads, or the pooled object represents a limited and costly resource, such as with database connections, this makes sense. However, the number of situations where these conditions apply is fairly small.
In addition, object pooling has some serious downsides. Because the object pool is generally shared across all threads, allocation from the object pool can be a synchronization bottleneck. Pooling also forces you to manage deallocation explicitly, which reintroduces the risks of dangling pointers. Also, the pool size must be properly tuned to get the desired performance result. If it is too small, it will not prevent allocation; and if it is too large, resources that could get reclaimed will instead sit idle in the pool. By tying up memory that could be reclaimed, the use of object pools places additional pressure on the garbage collector. Writing an effective pool implementation is not simple.
In his "Performance Myths Exposed" talk at JavaOne 2003 (see Resources), Dr. Cliff Click offered concrete benchmarking data showing that object pooling is a performance loss for all but the most heavyweight objects on modern JVMs. Add in the serialization of allocation and the dangling-pointer risks, and it's clear that pooling should be avoided in all but the most extreme cases.
To be complete, it's not Java 1.4.x that's slow, it's Sun's implementation. java.lang.Math is generally faster, but does not produce identical results on all platforms. If you want identical results, you have to use java.lang.StrictMath. However, their documentation points out that some of the Math routines simply call StrictMath (my guess is the trig routines fall into that category, for example).
Thus, it's Sun's laziness to not provide a full "fast" implementation of Math that leads to the slowdown of FP. Perhaps other library implementations handle it better?
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do not give me the batch file crap, batch does not do regex or any of that stuff, nor can I pipe my outputs and inputs
Actually, you can pipe inputs and outputs in batch. However, batch is in fact dead. Years ago, Microsoft devised the Windows Scripting Host to replace it, and it is very very nice. You can run it in GUI mode or command line. It supports RegEx as well as any scripting-enabled COM component (including a lot of standard Windows calls).
Actually, the J2SE 1.5 New Features clearly state that footprint is in fact reduced.
Speaking as a geek, I guess I dislike Micro$oft
I agree with you. That's why I'm torn. I use XP at home and at work. I love it! For me, at least, it's extremly stable, extensible (love making DHTML pages to stick in the taskbar to show family photos, or look up phone numbers in my address book), fun (themes), etc. BUt MS is evil. What do I do???
XP takes much of that configurability away from you
It doesn't take it and lock it away. It just gets it out of your way. Try Start->Run->gpedit.msc. Or how about just perusing the HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrrentVersion section of the regsitry. Dig through the control panel. Dig through the My Computer properties. There's an almost endless number of things you can play with and tweak.
Is it a bad driver?
How does Linux react to a bad driver? Does it magically fix it with digital pixie dust?
I have better things to do with my time than be an administrator
This is exactly why I use XP. Its ready to go out of the box (minus the constant barage of security patches) and easy to use. The last time I messed with Linux, I helped a friend re-write a buggy bti of network driver detection code in the OS. And all of my *nix experiences have been troublesome. This is mostly because I'm a novice on any *nix but a pro on Windows just because of the amount of time spent using it. But I will not let you get away with a blanket statement that someone one OS is administration free while Windows requires constant babysitting.
You might want to take those guys over in the Network Department out to lunch. Sounds like the've been working their tail off to keep your computer from the dozens of viruses and worms that are loose on the internet
Yeah, no kidding! Somehow, my home XP box never crashed when those hit because I had already installed the MS secutiry patches for them weeks before the exploits were taken advantage of. Yet at work, they sat on their hands and someone brought one in on their notebook and we were doomed! They just never installed the patches.
Now, is that hard? I don't think so. I let Windows Update download them in the background, notify me of them, and I decide if I want to install them (and I usually do some moderate investigation to make sure its not MS's latest DRM advancement).
How hard is it to get the latest patches for Linux? Seriously, I'm not a Linux user (as soona s I can scrouneg up another box, I'm gonna start toying with it), so I really do want to know if its as easy to keep "up to date".
"It's not like it's terribly hard to keep Windows stable"
Word crashes frequently
Thought they are made by the same company, my friend, a Word Processor and an Operating System are very different things. An OS should crash under none but the most extreme cases (i.e. hardware failure). The grandparent was talking about Windows being stable. My Windows XP system is stable too. Sure, Shareaza crashes, IE crashes, eclipse crashes -- even Mozilla Thunderbird crashed on me once. But the OS itself has not yet crashed. Similar in my *nix days, I never crashed the OS but had plenty of core dumps from early development versions of some of our programs.
Give OS X a spin sometime.
I'd love to! Just point me to the x86 binaries download so I can install it tonight!
"NT wouldn't stay up for more than a few days of heavy work"
"From corrupt registries to tons of spyware"
Where do you think that stuff comes from? Microsoft? Does Microsoft write spyware? No, crappy marketing companies and spammers write trojan spywares, purposely trying to evade detection, and uninstallation, burying themeselves through the registry. WHyd oesn't Linux have that problem? Becuase the market share for Linux of people susceptible enough to get these things go on with their computer is non-existent.
I bet the number of Windows based PCs far outnumbers the number of Linux boxes. So Linux just hasn't been plagues as much by the crap sofwtare. And when someone does produce crap software for linux, the generally more technically adept Linux users don't stand for it and switch to something else. My flippin dad won't even uninstall crap he tris and doesn't like!
Try to have a little perspective with this sort of thing. Yes, Microsoft is full of security holes, is an evil monopoly, etc. But many of the times, the thinsg that "corrupt the registry" and royally screw things up are horrible pieces of third party software.
Sometimes I hope everyone inlcuding my mother does use Linux one day so it have its day on top and have to deal with this crap too.
And just to keep on keepin' on with the gradparent posts' thoughts: my Windows XP box I'm psoting from is about to be rebooted tonight for the first time in... well 5 days because of a power outage (no UPS), and before that it was weeks if not months. And I'm only rebooting tonight because I just flashed by BIOS. Hell, we had an NT server at mylast job with an uptime of more than 365 days -- running one special server program that wasn't available on Solaris like everything else we ran. So, yes, Windows itself (especially 2000/XP) can be relatively stable so long as you don't load it up with crap software.
I'd mod the parent higher if I had points.
This is exactly right. People pirate because the TCO (to borrow a buzz word) is less. The total cost of "owning" a pirated MP3 is the time you spent surfing the Internet/P2P for it, sifting through broken/terrible copies, dealing with the lack of lyrics and cover art, etc. There's no direct monetary cost. The value is worse in some cases (you don't get as much), but better in others (you can select tracks individually). There is a time investment, but its probably less than the time it takes to get in your car and drive to the CD store. Shall I even mention the risk of getting snagged by the RIAA's nets?
Review (for easier rebuttal):
The RIAA needs tom combat this by providing a better TCO -- either more value, less cost (than present), or both. I know they could compete with items 1-5 directly by allowing people to download individual MP3 tracks directly and legitimately. Item 6 is a wash. Number 7 they could beat piracy on because it would be legit by nature. Number 8 depends on if they can pick a price that is compatible with how consumers value their product.
Plus, the RIAA could do more to increase the value of their product compared to the pirated version becuase of their unique position with the artists and their generally deep pockets. BY offering legit music downloads, they could actually build direct relationships with their consumers. I don't mean to spam, but to offer real desirable value to the consumers:
They just need to wake up and realize you can't beat piracy 100% even if they spent every last cent on it, but they could increase revenue, profits and positive opinions if they tried to COMPETE with piracy!
"More people died in 9/11 than all the soldiers killed in the Iraq war to date."
How in the hell is that relevant to a discussion of whether the war is justified?
It's relavent becausethe grandparent post implied that there were more attacks in Iraq than at home -- I was trying to point that while the quantity of attacks in Iraq are greater, the actual number of casualties from terrorists at home is still greater.
These are not insurgents.
Well, they aren't necessarily terrorists either, now, are they? What do you call the freelance American bounty hunters who went ot Iraq for the price tag on his head? They non-Iraqis in Iraq -- and they brought guns. If insrugent can only be applied to someone who is native to Iraq, then what do you call someone who came to Iraq to fight American military forces (the most prevalent target -- the civilian contractor casualties have been far less numerous)? Is it because they use roadside bombs? Would switching from car bombs to land mines -- a more traditional military weapon -- then make them mercenaries or freedom fighters or... terrorists still? THe sense I Get is from hearing interviews of Iraqi's on the street. Yes, those interviews came through the media and might have been edited. The general sense in those interviews, however, is that they're glad that Saddam is gone, but are still worried about security, joblessness, etc. Unexployment is significantly up. And, even in BIG cities like Najaf, Basra and Baghdad there is danger. If I were living there, I'd have to worry about getting shot as a suspected terrorist, caught in the cross fire, or getting blown up by a roadside bomb - or perhaps tortured... I mean... interrogated.
Being humiliated by a woman looking at your genitals and being forced to wear panties on your head is not even remotely the same as the torture, maiming, and killing that was going on in this prison before US occupation.
I heard a reference on NPR this morning that there were some 37 deaths in the prisons. 9 are still under investigation. Others were ruled "justifiable homicide". Are theseless than under Saddam? Yes. But if I was an Iraqi, I'd still be worried. Hell, I'm worried my very own Mr. John Ashcroft might label be a terrorist, ship me off to Guantanomo Bay for a long vacation, and maybe even "interrogate me".
In addition, WMDs are being found in Iraq.
I don't need to google. I've already heard all about it. They did NOT find Sarin in the way you think. What they found were two chemicals in an OLD shell that when fired owuld've mixed. However, used as it was, they didn't mix into Sarin as intended. Perhaps al little bit did, but it certainly didn't kill all sorts of poeple with the toxic gas as its original wartime design was intended. I think they found one other shell too that had some old trace of something in it. But, I was told BEFORE the war that Iraq had WMD, they said they destroyed them, but now can't prove they destroyed them. I was told BEFORE the WAR that he had hard evidence of Itaq's attempt to buy uranium, of their mobile chemical faiclities, of their chemical storage bunkers... all of which have been proven FALSE. If one or two shells is all they can find, then YOU give ME a break. That is not proof of a WMD program. That's proof that one or two slipped through through the cracks, or that some rogue person stole them from Saddam BEFORE the rest were destroyed. If there was some huge, secret, hidden stockpile the insurgents/terrorists/whatever had access to, do you really think they'd be using them so sparingly?
Let me repeat. I am not a terrorist. I'm not a Republican. I'm ont a Democrat. I vote for candidates who share my views with the issues I deem most important at the time (when I feel the need to follow a single group, I choose a good baseball team and stick with them.) I just can't believe that every where I turn, everyone is so polarized on their beleifs abotu the so-called facts, and no one is willing to discuss them. All of your points are valid, but only partially so -- and the only way I know how to balance that is by presenting partial facts from the opposing point of view. Reality is probably somewhere inbetween.
I'm perplexed by the cetrainty by which you dismissed my rebuttals. You so much as called me a Democrat as if I was being political about it. Yet, every stance you have taken is exactly what the Republican's stance is. Since I was playing devil's advocate, naturally my rebuttal would seem like that of a Democrat, but that's why I prefixed it that way.
The truth of the matter is that nobody now knows the truth, and might not ever. Maybe those soldiers abusing prisoners were given direct orders. Maybe they were rogue. Or, maybe theose guys were given indirect orders to permit plausible deniability by the superiors and hang the soldiers out to dry. We just don't know. If you have real evidence, run -- don't walk -- to the nearest media outlet so we can put it to rest one way or another.
What scares me is that you seem even too stubborn to even consider the remote possibilities of these alternatives. It is exactly these alternatives views that the terrorists are thriving under. You completely dismiss these alternatives as the ideas of madmen just as they completely dismiss your views as the thoughts of the devil westerners.
These opposing views will never come to terms. Only an attempt at understanding, and a real desire to ghet at the truth will be. I for one cannot believe that one side is totally right and the other totally wrong.
For example, we know prisoners in the Iraq prison were abused. We don't know if they were guilty or not because they never faced trial, so you can't say with cetrainty they are terrorists. Thus, it is true, if only a partial truth, to say that the people tortured there weren't terrorists. At the same time it is logical that some of those people were terrorists (or insurgents who view themselves as liberators) and thus we were only using interrogation tacticts to try and get ifnormation that would save lives.
Now, to address some specific points:
1. There are conflicting statements about whether or not the soliders were or were not ordered to abuse the prisoners. Will we ever know the truth?
2. Yes, there were conflicting reports about the wedding party. Will we ever know the truth? (I agree that it is stupid to fire loaded weapons in the air at any time, especially in a war zone -- unless you WANT to get shot)
3. The graveyard battle happened in Najaf with Muqtadr's militia. Part of the reason the rest of the Shia Clerics wanted a cease fire and help pressure Muqtadr into it was because their holy sites, including graveyards, were caught in the middle. And regardless of the inhabitants of those graves being dead, descratign a grave is a bad thing in Iraqi culture and ours -- or shall I poop on your grandmother's grave?
4. (out of order now). We also tried to have Saddam Hussein assasinated. Everyone pretends assasination is a nasty thing. But its a brilliant tactic. Did you know that Lincoln tried to have [whoever the Southern president was] assasinated during the civil war? And the Southerners tried to plant dynamite under the white house?
5. I bet there is a mix of people are involved in the attacks as well. That doesn't make them all terrorists. What do you think the Brothers of Liberty were when they dumped tea in the harbor? What do you think the lined-up British tropps thought the American's hiding behind trees and hills were during the revolutionary war? The labels all depend on your point of view, and labelling everyone too coarsely is a dangerous thing. We all know the baggage that comes with the term terrorist. I don't think that fits with someone shooting a gun at an American soldier holding a gun. Just because we took over his country doesn't mean that he has no country to defend -- even if its a misguided defense against an occupying force that really does want to liberate it if they'd just stop shooting at us!
Well, as reported earlier on the news today, the said soldier who did leak the photos, etc., to the press has had his security clearance revoked, is being brought up on a separate set of charges, and is probably in the process of getting a "big chicken dinner" (Bad Conduct Discharge)
You mean the hung the guy out to dry?
The pictures were leaked by soldiers from everything I've read...
I've even heard hints that those pictures were PURPOSEFULY leaked to set an example of the kind of torture/humiliation you'd face if you don't cooperate with American interrogations.
1. Terrorists are more inclined to attack US troops in Iraq than civilians on American soil. It's cheaper, quicker and easier for the terrorists than trying to strike on American soil.
How is that a fact? More people died in 9/11 than all the soldiers killed in the Iraq war to date. And what about non-Americans such as the people on the train in Madrid? There is no real evidence the "terrorists"/"insurgents" in Iraq are al Queda. Most of them are al Sadr's militia. In fact, it was announced today that our own government believes the terrorists are going to strike big again this summer. The attacks in Iraq are more frequent, mind you, but those are "insurgents" who may believe they're liberating their country instead of terrorists hell-bent on removing the United States and its people from existence.
2. The war in Iraq may bring stability to the country and a regime that is more US friendly.
The fact, as you stated is that it "may" bring stability. Logically, then, it is also a fact that it may NOT bring stability to Iraq. In fact, the sense I get is that Iraq is less stable now than it was under its former dictator. And, apparently, you still have about the same chance of getting tortured in prison!
3. The war in Iraq will show the middle eastern countries that the US will follow through on military actions despite casualties.
That remains to be seen. Will we follow through? We have so far. It may also show that we will attack a country that doesn't have WMDs and they they did, while leaving alone those thonry countries we KNOW have WMD, such as North Korea. In that case, all the more reason to obtain WMDs to defend yourself.
4. ...
See response to number 3.
5. With a friendly Iraq, perhaps gas prices will come down in the US (not likely though).
This is not really a "fact", is it? You even admit its not likely. So what was the point of this? In fact, the instability in Iraq has likely contributed to higher oil prices.
And the number 6 point, which I'll add, is thatthis is only giving more evidence to for the terrorists to twist as propoganda. American's sexually uhmiliating and toruturing innocent Iraqis. Americans firing on wedding parties. American tanks shooting at graveyards.
[END DEVIL'S ADVOCACY]
I saw a short clip on some educational channel a couple of years ago. They showed the temperature and gasueous activity in an exinct land fill. Then, by forcing some fresh gas into the ground (I can't remember for certain, but it may have been O2), the bacteria in the ground began to thrive, the temperature soared to the point there was steam coming out of the ground, and much more gas was produced.
It turns out, land fills pretty much don't decay because the decomposers are nearly suffocating (they've found barley-decomposed hotdogs buried in 50-year-old landfills).
I wonder if if your power company could squeeze even more "energy" out of the land fills all while contributing even more to the decomposition of the wate in the landfill.
I would agree with other posters that P2P software does not have a large quantity of on-infringing uses. FTP does. FTP is used all the time for legitimate distrbution by companies and indidivudals. Even BitTorrent (somewhat P2P-ish) is used quite a bit for the legitimate distribution of files. But when is the last time you've gone to some corporate website and seen a link to "download our newest software trial from P2P now!"? For me, it was Shareaza, but that's sort of a self-fullfilling prophecy.
How about the fact that digital media rots and becomes useless a relatively short period of time. How about the fact that the library of congress will undoubtedly lose all of its digital media to secuh decay unless they back it up. But, of course, how can they legally back it up?
Actually, considering we've found paper thousands of years old, paper's not too bad. Granted, the paper is degraged, has holes, dyes fade, etc. but they're still partially legible. Stone, even more so.
The thing is, when you say digital, most people think electromagnetic. That's not what digital means, though. It means discrete values rather than an analog continuum. There were mechanical digitasl clocks that just flipped numbers over and over again. Right a series of 0 and 1s on paper is also digital. Because you only have two discrete digits, it is digital. Even with quite a bit of deterioration, you can still tell a 1 from a 0.
Thus, I would suspect stone/paper/non-corosive-metals would all be good choices so long as the way you encode the digital information is stable and and capable of being recognizable after sustaining damage.
As for punch cards, the problem I've heard with those is that the more edge-area exposed on paper (the inside edge of evert punched hole), the faster it degrades. Thus, stable ink on paper would be better than punched holes.
It's very difficult to manage files with CMD.EXE, however, as anyone who's tried can attest.
OK, I call your bluff. I manage files with CMD.EXE sometimes (more often, just Explorer, btu not always). I find it difficult to have to type file anmes instead of click them for many trivial tasks, but that is not the fault of CMD.EXE, but rather the nature of CLIs.
Perhaps I'm not understanding your concept of "managing files"?
I feel like I've been poisoned. I used MS Word )and the other Office programs) for years. I recently dumped it in favor of OO. Mind you, I never used Word heavily, nor do I use OO heavily now.
But I still can'y (read: not patient enough to) figure out how to do some of the things I could easily do in Word. The arrangement of the menus and toolbars just feel foreign after growing accustomed to Microsoft's.
This isn't necessarily MIcrosoft's fault (I could just as easily have been addicted to an alternative program, just less likely due to Microsoft's dominance.) And it's not OO's faultm either. They shouldn't make their toolbars and menus look just like Microsoft's and limit their "innovation" (I hope MS hasn't trademarked that word!)
Nonetheless, my mind is poisoned and its taking some time (instead of effort) to purge myself.
"Sounds like they are wasting power by having unnecesary steps here..."
Consider the typical coal and oil we get energy from today. How easy is it to have bilogical life forms soaking up the suns energy to organize themselves and reproduce, only to be consumes by predators that die, or die directly, wait a millions of years for them to be compressed by a slow burial process and heated by geothermal energy, causing chemical reactions resulting in oil and coal then is then recombined with oxygen to relase the energy to heat water, which drives a turbine, which then turns a generator to actually generate electricity.
I think splitting water into H2 and O2 for a little while (hours or days) and then recombining it is a lot simpler concept, and probably more efficient.
I still don't understand frame dragging, but I'm hoping my friend Google will after I post this.
The term "dragging" implies some sort of friction or direct force pulling something along with a rotating body. You give the analogy of the electric motor, but at least there you have dipoles in both electricity and magnetism (do opposite potentials for each of two forces). But gravity is a single force, and it is a monopole.
And if the theoretical rotating body is a perfect sphere, there aren't even any bumps or anomolies to rely upon. The mere orientation of the body would have no discernable difference on a system since it is entirely symmetric, so it must be from the motion -- but how?
A good way of thinking about exceptions is that whenever possible, you shoudl provide a way for the programmer to avoid encountering the exception programatically.
For example:
- You can avoid NoSuchElementExceptions by checking the index against the size()
- You can avoid FileNotFoundExceptions by using File.exists()
Note that the standard Java API failed this in some cases. For example, how do you determine if a String is parsable as an Integer without potentially getting an Exception? You can't. Of course, all of the work you would need to check such a String for integerness would be nearly as much work as parsing it into an integer anyways, so perhaps there was a method to their madness.
Anyways, the point is, you are right that exceptions should not be used for normal conditions. Map.remove() returns null instead of throwing NoSuchElemntExceptions, and you can use List.size() to avoid accessing an item that is beyodn the size of the List.
Regarding #3, that is not generally true. Check out Brian Goetz's article, where he points out:
Object pooling is a straightforward concept -- maintain a pool of frequently used objects and grab one from the pool instead of creating a new one whenever needed. The theory is that pooling spreads out the allocation costs over many more uses. When the object creation cost is high, such as with database connections or threads, or the pooled object represents a limited and costly resource, such as with database connections, this makes sense. However, the number of situations where these conditions apply is fairly small.
In addition, object pooling has some serious downsides. Because the object pool is generally shared across all threads, allocation from the object pool can be a synchronization bottleneck. Pooling also forces you to manage deallocation explicitly, which reintroduces the risks of dangling pointers. Also, the pool size must be properly tuned to get the desired performance result. If it is too small, it will not prevent allocation; and if it is too large, resources that could get reclaimed will instead sit idle in the pool. By tying up memory that could be reclaimed, the use of object pools places additional pressure on the garbage collector. Writing an effective pool implementation is not simple.
In his "Performance Myths Exposed" talk at JavaOne 2003 (see Resources), Dr. Cliff Click offered concrete benchmarking data showing that object pooling is a performance loss for all but the most heavyweight objects on modern JVMs. Add in the serialization of allocation and the dangling-pointer risks, and it's clear that pooling should be avoided in all but the most extreme cases.
To be complete, it's not Java 1.4.x that's slow, it's Sun's implementation. java.lang.Math is generally faster, but does not produce identical results on all platforms. If you want identical results, you have to use java.lang.StrictMath. However, their documentation points out that some of the Math routines simply call StrictMath (my guess is the trig routines fall into that category, for example).
Thus, it's Sun's laziness to not provide a full "fast" implementation of Math that leads to the slowdown of FP. Perhaps other library implementations handle it better?