I agree wholeheartedly with the parent. Of course, as anything that's often associated with Java, people will just dump on Test Driven Development as another "buzzword," rather than try it.
Using well-established design patterns where appropriate is another helpful technique that is also susceptible to rejection by the smug ignorant hordes of people screaming "Java buzzword!"
I hate reading code written by someone who finds 10 different new ways to solve the same old problem, does not understand the core libraries of the programming language they're using, or invents their own unique terminology for reasonably standard, straightforward things.
Read lots of other people's code. Read the classic literature of the field. Study all the standard libraries at your disposal. Don't reinvent the wheel. When given the choice between a clever solution or a straightforward one, choose the straightforward one. If you're using an object oriented language, a class-level comment with a couple of sentences explaining what your class does should usually suffice unless your class does something unusual. If you can't sum it up in a few sentences, you probably should break your class into smaller pieces that are easier to explain.
I've used both quite a bit for J2EE development in the last 2-3 years. My J2EE development with Eclipse has been done using the JBoss-IDE plugins, and my JBuilder work was done using JBuilder 9 - 2005 on OS X.
JBuilder provides a reasonably decent GUI-driven interface for creating entity beans directly from a database schema, which for me was very convenient. It also has GUI-based deployment descriptor editors. The UI is all Swing based, and is a little bit clunky on OS X, but still a big timesaver compared to doing things manually. The learning curve was very easy to get over, and this helped me get my foot in the door with J2EE when I was starting out with it.
Eclipse/JBoss-IDE uses XDoclet tags to generate your EJB code, which is harder to learn if you're a newbie with J2EE. I've been mucking around with the stuff for around 2 years, so I've pretty much stuck with Eclipse since the XDoclet-based setup, while more work to develop with up front, is ultimately more powerful. IMHO, at least.
With Eclipse, running JBoss inside the IDE to do hot code swapping (change one or two lines of EJB code and you don't need to redeploy the whole app to make live) and debugging works very well. I have not attempted this with JBuilder lately, but as of a few versions back it made the whole thing run as slow as molasses in January.
The main benefit to Eclipse, for me, though, was the fact that it's free, compared to $5000+ for JBuilder. Gee, and you wonder why their revenue was dropping.
Hopefully Borland will continue to make some positive impact in the IDE world; I liked their software before but just could not afford to use it. Being able to have the best of JBuilder and Eclipse as one program will be of great benefit to a lot of people, if it ever happens.
wish they'd be a little more radical...
on
Greenbacks No More
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I hate the choices they made about who and what to put on US currency. Why do we have to have all politicians and images of government buildings on our currency? What about artists, scientists, and people who have made important contributions to US and world culture? What about national parks and beautiful non-governmental buildings? Why the hell do we still have Andrew "Indian killer" Jackson (the president responsible for the Cherokee trail of tears) on our 20 dollar bill? Why is Alexander Hamilton on the 10 dollar bill?
Here are some of the people and things I'd love to see on there instead of what we've currently got:
the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley or Mt. Ranier
the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge
Martin Luther King or Harriet Tubman
Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman or John Muir
Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland or John Coltrane
beautiful birds like the Eastern Bluebird or the Great Blue Heron (OK, I know we've already got the Bald Eagle)
Imagine a beautiful full color panorama of the Grand Canyon on the back of a 20 instead of the White House... wouldn't that be nicer?
The list could go on and on and on... but those are just a few ideas I've had ever since they did the first redesign in the 90's. I guess the US government is too busy trying to
create an image of grandeur to actually use symbols that come from the country's cultute and natural heritage.
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be OK to leave guys like Washington and Jefferson on there - they are some of the founders of the country and deserve to be represented. But having some more focus on culture as opposed to government as the things symbolic of our country would be nice. You know, "of the people, by the people, for the people..."
They're pretty old - I've been buying them regularly in the Pacific Northwest for almost 10 years. Very, very tasty. They're usually best baked, then they also retain their purple color through the cooking. When you fry or boil them they lose most of their color and "exotic" appeal.
The potatoes the article is about are probably a different purple strain, though.
There are several reviews of various dual AMD motherboards at Anandtech. In essence, the chipsets are not yet up to snuff, but they're getting pretty close.
Great, just what we need - another insipid, Pokemon-esque TV show devised solely to sell some company's product. I won't be watching; I have less commercial things to watch, like baseball and soccer and... oops. Never mind.
Sometimes you have to speed, like when you're being chased by a homicidal maniac, or your wife is in labor in the back seet and you're trying to get her to a hospital.
A few years ago in Portland, Oregon a guy was driving his truck through a flooded area and a hillside next to the road fell apart and started sliding towards the truck. His friend in the seat next to him had a camcorder and taped the hill literally chasing them for about 2 minutes. (It's one of the most amazing pieces of film I've ever seen.)
They'd be dead if they could not have broken the speed limit in this case.
Uh, isn't it a tad rude/pretentious to post in a language that most readers will not understand? Considering that this site is in the USA and is an English-speaking forum, it would be more considerate to at least try to use the local language. Considering that the poster knew enough English to read the article, they could just have well written in English, even if their grammar was not perfect. (heck , Taco and Hemos are guilty of that already!)
Of course, I guess it does give a couple of moderators the chance to mod it up to 3 and feel smug that *they* understood it.:-)
And please don't berate me for being an ignorant monolingual American - I speak, read and write Spanish, Portuguese and English. All I'm saying is I wouldn't post here in one of those languages just because the topic concerned Spain or Brazil and I could.
Today in Washington state they anounced the funding of a wind farm in the Columbia Gorge that will provide electricity to 70,000 homes in 11 Western states. (see www.seattletimes.com for details; it's on the front page today) This will be the world's largest wind farm and hopefully the start of a trend toward the usage of more more renewable resources.
This won't be too hard to get around, but someone will have to code up a utility. Basically here's what I would do:
1) reverse engineer the protocol that it uses to connect to the MS server and authenticate itself
2) write a utility to "authenticate" installs of the OS.
3) make the machine with the new install use a local machine for the verification rather than an MS one. You could do this by running your own nameserver, or something to that effect.
If MS releases their OS with this kind of dumbass authentication scheme for the installs, it will only be a matter of days before a crack is available.
Personally I hope they do it, because it will be just another nail in the coffin.
HTML was designed to be reasonably easy for non-hackers to use, and this has been part of its success. Although it's a lot more powerful, Latex would be harder for the average non-technical computer user to use.
XML already fills the void that Latex could have filled; i.e., a language that can simultaneously encode page-layout and page-meaning in an separable and intelligible way. At this point there is really no motivation to change that.
When languages cease to change, they die. Like Latin.
Latin never ceased to change. It changed into Spanish, French, Romanian, Italian, Catalan, etc. These languages are still changing, and some people don't like it - which is the whole point of the article.
People are tempted to think that Latin stopped changing because the Romans left excellent written records that we still know how to read. Written records don't change, but that does not mean the spoken language they were meant to encode stopped changing!
Languages are not subject to the evolutionary force of natural selection. There's no natural selection that makes it more likely for you or your language to survive if you use a bilabial fricative for "b" (like Spanish) instead of a bilabial plosive for the same sound (like Latin). For this and other reasons linguists tend to characterize linguistic change as "drift" because the way it occurs is chaotic, random, and (so far) inexplicable.
Whoever wins will be hamstrung by a divided congress and have to deal with accusations of cheating for the next four years. The party of the winner will almost certainly lose some seats in the House of Representatives in two years, so if that's Bush, he'll probably be dealing with a Democratic majority in congress by 2002.
My prediction is that Bush will be a one-termer just like his daddy. If he's as big a dolt as many people think he is, then he'll just tie a noose with the rope he's been handed and hang himself with it.
If Gore wins, well then
g/Bush/s//Gore/
g/Democrat/s//Republican/
Sure. Some people will probably switch to it when Linux becomes even more popular than it already has. Some people are fans of an underdog and when Linux loses that status they will complain it is "too corporate" and move on to the next project in development. That could be Hurd, or a couple of other operating systems.
The USA spans several time zones, a problem most European countries don't have to deal with in their elections. Television stations at least do not report polls or figures for any time zone until all polls are closed in that time zone. Because the president is elected not by a popular majority or plurality but by a majority of statewide electoral college votes, the 3-hour window west-cost voters have to view the results of the election in east-coast states is close to irrelevant. Some west-coast voters complain that they feel "their vote never counts" but I think that complaint is brought on by ignorance of how the system works.
Of course, if we put an end to the electoral college (as we should), your observation would become very relevant.
If you know SQL and know how to set up and mantain a database engine like Oracle, MySQL or Postgres you won't have a hard time finding work in the Seattle area. There definitely is an extreme shortage of people with those skills here.
Same thing for experienced Java programmers; you just can't find people with the background and some reasonable amount of experience that easily.
So I would say in my experience that for some key areas the shortage is real. Now you know what to study if you want to get a job in Seattle after you graduate:)
I have been weighing the two DBMS's for a few weeks for a project I am developing. I have learned that Postgres has some other features that might make you want to consider it. One very nice one is the ability to embed a Perl interpreter in the application so that you can write functions in Perl rather than Postgres's own procedural language. (There has been some talk of doing the same with MySQL and PHP/Zend, but AFAIK nothing so far has come of it). The query language that Postgres supports is, as is well known, much richer than that of MySQL, allowing for views and subselects; two very addictive features.
Postgres, however has an 8k (32k if you recompile) column data limit, meaning that storing large amounts of data in a row can be difficult. Although for most people this should not matter, it's a make or break feature for my work and so I had to go with MySQL. This will supposedly be corrected by version 7.02 of Postgres.
Both are great projects and now that MySQL is under the GPL maybe some cross-pollination will occur and enrich each one.
It just warms my heart to see a Linux user getting to gloat on CNN:)
One small nitpick: I hear this line from so many authors:
Linux promotes competition.
I don't know about you, but it never seemed to me that pine and mutt, (or even vi and emacs for that matter) were in competition with each other.
The design of Linux is more fundamentally about cooperation. You can use whatever editor and email client you want and neither one is going to screw with the other because Linux/Unix apps are written to work in their own space, minus the stray buffer overflow or two. Want to use pine? Go ahead! How about switching over to Netscape? No problem. I use them both - one on the console and the other in X and they don't interfere with each other at all.
If competition existed in the world of Windows, people would stop using Outlook and switch to another client.
But competition does exist (remember Eudora?). It's being stifled by the lack of cooperation. The design of Windows encourages apps to hog the whole system and gives them way too much access to fragile system resources that can affect every other app. If cooperation existed in the world of Windows, you could use Outlook without hosing your system every time a new email-attachment virus comes out.
Is there a market for the "Salad Shooter," a device that turns cucumbers and carrots into little edible projectiles you shoot into a bowl?
How about the "Clapper," a switch that turns on and off lights with the clap of your hands?
People will buy almost anything if it's marketed right. Just ask Bill Gates. Considering that an MP3 player for your car might actually even be cool and useful, though, it might be a little harder to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
Javascript is not Java. Other than some of its syntax the only thing it has in common with Java is the name.
The intuitiveness of Java and the expressive power of Fortran.
What a bunch of beer noobs. True beer geeks brew all grain.
I agree wholeheartedly with the parent. Of course, as anything that's often associated with Java, people will just dump on Test Driven Development as another "buzzword," rather than try it.
Using well-established design patterns where appropriate is another helpful technique that is also susceptible to rejection by the smug ignorant hordes of people screaming "Java buzzword!"
I hate reading code written by someone who finds 10 different new ways to solve the same old problem, does not understand the core libraries of the programming language they're using, or invents their own unique terminology for reasonably standard, straightforward things.
Read lots of other people's code. Read the classic literature of the field. Study all the standard libraries at your disposal. Don't reinvent the wheel. When given the choice between a clever solution or a straightforward one, choose the straightforward one. If you're using an object oriented language, a class-level comment with a couple of sentences explaining what your class does should usually suffice unless your class does something unusual. If you can't sum it up in a few sentences, you probably should break your class into smaller pieces that are easier to explain.
I've used both quite a bit for J2EE development in the last 2-3 years. My J2EE development with Eclipse has been done using the JBoss-IDE plugins, and my JBuilder work was done using JBuilder 9 - 2005 on OS X.
JBuilder provides a reasonably decent GUI-driven interface for creating entity beans directly from a database schema, which for me was very convenient. It also has GUI-based deployment descriptor editors. The UI is all Swing based, and is a little bit clunky on OS X, but still a big timesaver compared to doing things manually. The learning curve was very easy to get over, and this helped me get my foot in the door with J2EE when I was starting out with it.
Eclipse/JBoss-IDE uses XDoclet tags to generate your EJB code, which is harder to learn if you're a newbie with J2EE. I've been mucking around with the stuff for around 2 years, so I've pretty much stuck with Eclipse since the XDoclet-based setup, while more work to develop with up front, is ultimately more powerful. IMHO, at least.
With Eclipse, running JBoss inside the IDE to do hot code swapping (change one or two lines of EJB code and you don't need to redeploy the whole app to make live) and debugging works very well. I have not attempted this with JBuilder lately, but as of a few versions back it made the whole thing run as slow as molasses in January.
The main benefit to Eclipse, for me, though, was the fact that it's free, compared to $5000+ for JBuilder. Gee, and you wonder why their revenue was dropping.
Hopefully Borland will continue to make some positive impact in the IDE world; I liked their software before but just could not afford to use it. Being able to have the best of JBuilder and Eclipse as one program will be of great benefit to a lot of people, if it ever happens.
Here are some of the people and things I'd love to see on there instead of what we've currently got:
- the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley or Mt. Ranier
- the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge
- Martin Luther King or Harriet Tubman
- Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman or John Muir
- Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland or John Coltrane
- beautiful birds like the Eastern Bluebird or the Great Blue Heron (OK, I know we've already got the Bald Eagle)
Imagine a beautiful full color panorama of the Grand Canyon on the back of a 20 instead of the White House... wouldn't that be nicer?The list could go on and on and on... but those are just a few ideas I've had ever since they did the first redesign in the 90's. I guess the US government is too busy trying to create an image of grandeur to actually use symbols that come from the country's cultute and natural heritage.
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be OK to leave guys like Washington and Jefferson on there - they are some of the founders of the country and deserve to be represented. But having some more focus on culture as opposed to government as the things symbolic of our country would be nice. You know, "of the people, by the people, for the people..."
When I click the link, Konqueror barfs. Oh well.
They're pretty old - I've been buying them regularly in the Pacific Northwest for almost 10 years. Very, very tasty. They're usually best baked, then they also retain their purple color through the cooking. When you fry or boil them they lose most of their color and "exotic" appeal.
The potatoes the article is about are probably a different purple strain, though.
There are several reviews of various dual AMD motherboards at Anandtech. In essence, the chipsets are not yet up to snuff, but they're getting pretty close.
Great, just what we need - another insipid, Pokemon-esque TV show devised solely to sell some company's product. I won't be watching; I have less commercial things to watch, like baseball and soccer and ... oops. Never mind.
eh? Then what's the point of having it at all?
A few years ago in Portland, Oregon a guy was driving his truck through a flooded area and a hillside next to the road fell apart and started sliding towards the truck. His friend in the seat next to him had a camcorder and taped the hill literally chasing them for about 2 minutes. (It's one of the most amazing pieces of film I've ever seen.)
They'd be dead if they could not have broken the speed limit in this case.
Of course, I guess it does give a couple of moderators the chance to mod it up to 3 and feel smug that *they* understood it. :-)
And please don't berate me for being an ignorant monolingual American - I speak, read and write Spanish, Portuguese and English. All I'm saying is I wouldn't post here in one of those languages just because the topic concerned Spain or Brazil and I could.
-Your friendly neightborhood Mr. Manners
OK, so it's ever so slightly off-topic...
Today in Washington state they anounced the funding of a wind farm in the Columbia Gorge that will provide electricity to 70,000 homes in 11 Western states. (see www.seattletimes.com for details; it's on the front page today) This will be the world's largest wind farm and hopefully the start of a trend toward the usage of more more renewable resources.
This won't be too hard to get around, but someone will have to code up a utility. Basically here's what I would do:
1) reverse engineer the protocol that it uses to connect to the MS server and authenticate itself
2) write a utility to "authenticate" installs of the OS.
3) make the machine with the new install use a local machine for the verification rather than an MS one. You could do this by running your own nameserver, or something to that effect.
If MS releases their OS with this kind of dumbass authentication scheme for the installs, it will only be a matter of days before a crack is available.
Personally I hope they do it, because it will be just another nail in the coffin.
HTML was designed to be reasonably easy for non-hackers to use, and this has been part of its success. Although it's a lot more powerful, Latex would be harder for the average non-technical computer user to use.
XML already fills the void that Latex could have filled; i.e., a language that can simultaneously encode page-layout and page-meaning in an separable and intelligible way. At this point there is really no motivation to change that.
Latin never ceased to change. It changed into Spanish, French, Romanian, Italian, Catalan, etc. These languages are still changing, and some people don't like it - which is the whole point of the article.
People are tempted to think that Latin stopped changing because the Romans left excellent written records that we still know how to read. Written records don't change, but that does not mean the spoken language they were meant to encode stopped changing!
Languages are not subject to the evolutionary force of natural selection. There's no natural selection that makes it more likely for you or your language to survive if you use a bilabial fricative for "b" (like Spanish) instead of a bilabial plosive for the same sound (like Latin). For this and other reasons linguists tend to characterize linguistic change as "drift" because the way it occurs is chaotic, random, and (so far) inexplicable.
Whoever wins will be hamstrung by a divided congress and have to deal with accusations of cheating for the next four years. The party of the winner will almost certainly lose some seats in the House of Representatives in two years, so if that's Bush, he'll probably be dealing with a Democratic majority in congress by 2002.
My prediction is that Bush will be a one-termer just like his daddy. If he's as big a dolt as many people think he is, then he'll just tie a noose with the rope he's been handed and hang himself with it.
If Gore wins, well then g/Bush/s//Gore/ g/Democrat/s//Republican/
Sure. Some people will probably switch to it when Linux becomes even more popular than it already has. Some people are fans of an underdog and when Linux loses that status they will complain it is "too corporate" and move on to the next project in development. That could be Hurd, or a couple of other operating systems.
Of course, if we put an end to the electoral college (as we should), your observation would become very relevant.
Geez moderators, is this post really *informative* and worthy of being moderated up to a 3?
Same thing for experienced Java programmers; you just can't find people with the background and some reasonable amount of experience that easily.
So I would say in my experience that for some key areas the shortage is real. Now you know what to study if you want to get a job in Seattle after you graduate :)
I have been weighing the two DBMS's for a few weeks for a project I am developing. I have learned that Postgres has some other features that might make you want to consider it. One very nice one is the ability to embed a Perl interpreter in the application so that you can write functions in Perl rather than Postgres's own procedural language. (There has been some talk of doing the same with MySQL and PHP/Zend, but AFAIK nothing so far has come of it). The query language that Postgres supports is, as is well known, much richer than that of MySQL, allowing for views and subselects; two very addictive features.
Postgres, however has an 8k (32k if you recompile) column data limit, meaning that storing large amounts of data in a row can be difficult. Although for most people this should not matter, it's a make or break feature for my work and so I had to go with MySQL. This will supposedly be corrected by version 7.02 of Postgres.
Both are great projects and now that MySQL is under the GPL maybe some cross-pollination will occur and enrich each one.
It just warms my heart to see a Linux user getting to gloat on CNN :)
One small nitpick: I hear this line from so many authors:
I don't know about you, but it never seemed to me that pine and mutt, (or even vi and emacs for that matter) were in competition with each other.The design of Linux is more fundamentally about cooperation. You can use whatever editor and email client you want and neither one is going to screw with the other because Linux/Unix apps are written to work in their own space, minus the stray buffer overflow or two. Want to use pine? Go ahead! How about switching over to Netscape? No problem. I use them both - one on the console and the other in X and they don't interfere with each other at all.
But competition does exist (remember Eudora?). It's being stifled by the lack of cooperation. The design of Windows encourages apps to hog the whole system and gives them way too much access to fragile system resources that can affect every other app. If cooperation existed in the world of Windows, you could use Outlook without hosing your system every time a new email-attachment virus comes out.How about the "Clapper," a switch that turns on and off lights with the clap of your hands?
People will buy almost anything if it's marketed right. Just ask Bill Gates. Considering that an MP3 player for your car might actually even be cool and useful, though, it might be a little harder to sell.