Re:Assuming that Java has that firm of a market...
on
C# To Crush Java?
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· Score: 1
You can develop on cheap windows workstations and deploy the code (without recompiling) on your Sun servers.
Ha! Pull the other one, it's got bells on it. I can tell you from personal experience, having worked on a couple large projects in which Java was developed on Windows and deployed on Solaris, that it don't work like that for much beyond HelloWorld.class.
Sure, it's not as fast as C. A decade ago people were still complaining that C was not as fast as assembly.
Hmm...well, I have to admit that Java compilers will undoubtedly get better as time goes on. Nonetheless, I don't think the analogy is quite perfect; C and assembly both get turned into machine code, so the issue becomes one of how good your compiler is at compile-time, while Java still has another step to go before running, and I doubt that will ever be entirely overcome.
In business, execution speed takes a back seat to development speed and ease of mainenance. If you're a project manager, you need to get whizbang feature X added as soon as possible, and anything that lets your developers get it up and running sooner is pure gold!
Spoken like a true developer. From the customer's point of view, a project written in Java requires more hardware and more careful tuning to run at a speed equivalent to C, and usually hasn't been tested adequately (if at all) on the target platform ('cause it just runs everywhere, right?)
Alternately, the whole thing may have been a setup by the Queen's intelligence service. The way in which the "conspiracy" was discovered was a little fishy, Fawkes was tortured until he confessed, the other "conspirators" pleaded not guilty (not having had the uh, "benefit" of the same treatment), and the trial seems to have been a foregone conclusion.
A reader writes:
(something mindless and inflammatory)
So is there any particular evidence that Slack is fading away? It's never seemed to me that Slack's goal was to sell 8 billion copies, dethrone MS, make lots of money, be a "respectable" company, etc. (unlike some Linux companies we could mention). Rather, it was to make a good distribution and some money, and in that sense, it's never going to fade away as long as there are people using and maintaining it.
Do you really think the heat insulation factor is significant? Heat is carried away from your CPU (or whatever) by three possible mechanisms: convection, conduction, and radiation. Radation is negligible. Conduction - well, your heat sink is not connected directly to your case, is it? Convection is handled by the air moved by the fans. There may be some conduction between (inside air) -> (case) -> (outside air), but I really doubt it's much of a factor. I just got my temperature sensors working, though, and I have some extra foam laying around, so I'll give it a shot and see what I get.
temp1: +34.0C
temp2: +35.5C
temp3: +37.5C
is what I've got now (dual Celeron 366 in a BP6), so I can afford to experiment a bit.
It seems to depends on/what/ Unix you're talking about. On my Linux box, NS 4.x was/is horribly unstable. On my Irix box, it's pretty good. Not that I really care too much; I'm mostly an Opera guy now.
A bunch of people have mentioned 1984, but I think/Fahrenheit 451/ is equally apropos. (Good Unix word, that.) "They're [excluding words]...to match the sensibilities of their audience." All jokes about "fool" and the Microsoft audience aside, I'm reminded of what Bradbury said about F451: if people have the "right" to not be offended, and you can't say anything that might offend them, pretty soon you end up not being able to say much of anything at all.
...you don't go to college to learn, you go there to learn how to learn.
Crud, that was what my teachers were telling me in/high school/. Not that I'm saying that my education was better than yours, just that I'm wondering if teachers ever stop using that line. If you're supposed to be "learning how to learn" in freaking/college/, then what were high school and elementary school for? (The cynical part of me wants to say "keeping kids off the street and out of the workforce and teaching them to take orders meekly"...)
Thank you, I think that needed to be said. It's not like "Closed Source Programmers" are the sons of Abel and "Open Source Programmers" are the spawn of Cain, after all; they come from pretty much the same place. I code Open Source stuff (I blush to say it, since I readily admit that I'm a lame programmer to whom 50 lines of C is a big deal. Sysadminning is my real gig.), and I always try to be careful to catch any possible errors, even the weird ones like being unable to open ".".
I've been working with a custom module written for ATG Dynamo (large, closed-source web app server) recently, and the general quality of it stinks. If it gets a message off the queue that isn't in exactly the format it was expecting, the whole thing blows up in your face (with one of those wonderful Java stack traces). Just the other day, one of the programmers on the project chortled out loud, "Hyuk hyuk! I named that variable FOOUSANYC - I hope they never move out of New York City!" and it honest to God seemed like a big joke to him. Don't anybody tell me that the quality of closed-source code is any higher than open...
Oh no, Al will burn. It's not so easy to ignite as Mg or K, but once you get it going, it burns pretty fiercely too. IIRC, Allied pilots in WWII could tell a burning German plane even at a great distance, because the aluminum content made them burn bright white.
Yeah, I mean, a for-profit company, like OSDN and Slashdot, for example, could never have a.org. Err... (Yes, I know the story behind the.org; I'm just being snarky.)
Thank you, you took the words from my fingers. 30 years...yeah, right. People have consistently underestimated how difficult a lot of AI-related tasks are. I refer you to the old chestnut about Minsky assigning "machine vision" to a graduate as a summer project (an urban legend, I think, but not so far from the truth).
What I want to know is: why solar cells? It seems to me it would be much easier to make a space-based heat engine. One side is black and faces the sun, and one is white and is in shade, and you just run a heat engine off the difference. (The Moon has a difference of about 350C between dark and light sides, for example.) I realize that this is a great simplification (you have to thermally isolate the sides from each other, you have to figure that the satellite is not going to be face-locked to the sun, you have to figure out how exactly to run a turbine off the temperature differential) but I think it has the potential to be smaller, simpler, and more efficient than solar cells.
"The majority of the economy is predicated on not so cheap power."
"Not so cheap power"? What planet are you living on? In the "industrialized" world, energy is incredibly cheap by historical standards. Think about the electricity that powers your refrigerator, lights, computers, etc., the gasoline in your car, the oil in your water heater. Think about how much wood you'd have to burn (or muscle power you'd have to use) to equal that. We use energy in a way that would be staggering to people from only a few hundred years ago, and we hardly blink an eye at it.
"Whizbang", yes. Useful? My experience is that the marginal utility of these things is very low compared to the marginal cost over plain old dumb phones. (I saw my phone at work rebooting yesterday. Honest to Crom rebooting.) But what do I know...my main phone at home is a heavy old red one marked "PROPERTY OF NEW YORK TEL CO".
Tab completion isn't perfect, but I've never yet seen a browser that does autocompletion _well_. It's always the equivalent of:
(I type)/u
(and the computer says) "Oh, you must mean/usr/X11R6/bin/xscreensaver!"
when maybe I _meant_/usr/share/dict/ or even/u! I usually spend more time correcting the autocompletion than I save using it. Amazingly enough, IE seems to have gotten it more right than anyone else.
As for "terminals with widgets" - how is the terminal supposed to know what options the command has? If it's so easy, _you_ write it. It _is_ relatively easy when you write the command, the shell, and the terminal window - which is why MS is pretty good at this sort of thing. When you break out of the monopoly prison, though, things get more complicated. Shells do a pretty good job of understanding what tab completion should be by having a primitive understanding of "grammar" (ie, this must be a command, this must be a filename, etc.) but even they don't get it completely right (and they certainly don't understand program arguments!)
Two button mice are difficult for novice users to understand!
It really makes me wonder how people ever manage to learn to drive cars. "Left, right...no, wait - right, left...man, this stuff is complicated." Come to think of it, maybe that's why there are so many dumbass accidents where someone hits the gas instead of the brake...
The problem with forked metadata (or, quite possibly, any kind of metadata) is that it clashes with the Unix vision of a file as simply a stream of bytes. Suppose that "myfile.txt" has some metadata associated with it. Then we do "sed 's/foo/bar/g newfile.txt". What happens to the metadata? Is sed supposed to understand it and copy it to the new file? Is the shell? Is the metadata supposed to get copied at all, or do we start with a clean slate?
The problem with forks is that they require everyone to be using the same filesystem if you want to be able to exchange metadata. (Remember the bad old days of trying to transfer files between PCs and Macs?) Metadata stored in a per-host registry-like structure might be better, but you're still going to lose it every time you transfer a file unless you're using a metadata-aware file transfer mechanism.
"...of course there're never going to be gasoline filling stations on every corner unless there's a market for it. i.e. there's gasoline cars. There's never going to be any gasoline cars because there's no filling stations...ad infinitum. Now go invest some more money in horse tackle."
Re:I know it's always fun to whip PHMs, but...
on
Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 1
$79?!?!?!
If we're talking about Quake, maybe. Try using some "enterprise-level"* software. It costs thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars, and eats up the time of a lot of highly-paid people. For example, I personally have been spending the last two weeks working pretty much full-time on one particular piece of horribly shoddy software, trying to get it to work. It's eaten about two man-months of time here, I estimate, and support from the vendor has been on the level of "Well, it works for us."
* You know why they call it "enterprise-level"? Because it takes the resources of a whole damn enterprise to use the thing.
Re:Perl Software Pet Peeve: not using warn and str
on
Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 1
Maybe when you have the time you could fix it and submit a diff to the author. Or perhaps you can submit a bug report. It couldn't hurt.
Hey, some of us are working at real jobs, you know. Unfortunately, in much of the real world, you aren't given the source, so you can't fix it, and if you submit a bug report (assuming the vendor even has a formal channel for it), a) your boss will wonder why you're helping them with their job instead of doing yours, and b) they'll ignore it; chances are that they've already gone through three minor revisions between the time they shipped the thing and the time you send in the report.
Re:Is Intelink More Secure Than Enigma?
on
Real Cyber-Spying
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· Score: 1
Hey! Get it right! Libya is.ly, not.lb. And yes, there is such a domain, hosted by some firm out of England. It's not a heavily used TLD...can't imagine why.
This is why certain high-security systems have a "panic code" - an alternate code that will authorize the user, but will also set off an alarm somewhere else. (Of course, as a sysadmin, I'm inclined to sourly suspect that 99% of the alarms end up with the user saying, "Well, I forgot my passcode, so I just used the alternate one...")
It's very hard to "un-register" yourself to vote, in my experience. All these organizations are gung-ho about getting you to register, but nobody ever explains how to change your registration. I suppose it's supposed to be automatic: when you register in one place, your registration elsewhere gets cancelled. Sometimes it works (within two weeks of my moving out of Arizona, they'd notified me at my new address that they'd cancelled my registration), and sometimes it doesn't (New York still considered me registered at my parents' home after I hadn't been living there for seven years and had been registered elsewhere for two.)
But that's the general problem of public databases, it seems: it's easy to get data into them, but not to get it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! Pull the other one, it's got bells on it. I can tell you from personal experience, having worked on a couple large projects in which Java was developed on Windows and deployed on Solaris, that it don't work like that for much beyond HelloWorld.class.
Hmm...well, I have to admit that Java compilers will undoubtedly get better as time goes on. Nonetheless, I don't think the analogy is quite perfect; C and assembly both get turned into machine code, so the issue becomes one of how good your compiler is at compile-time, while Java still has another step to go before running, and I doubt that will ever be entirely overcome.
Spoken like a true developer. From the customer's point of view, a project written in Java requires more hardware and more careful tuning to run at a speed equivalent to C, and usually hasn't been tested adequately (if at all) on the target platform ('cause it just runs everywhere, right?)
Alternately, the whole thing may have been a setup by the Queen's intelligence service. The way in which the "conspiracy" was discovered was a little fishy, Fawkes was tortured until he confessed, the other "conspirators" pleaded not guilty (not having had the uh, "benefit" of the same treatment), and the trial seems to have been a foregone conclusion.
Do you really think the heat insulation factor is significant? Heat is carried away from your CPU (or whatever) by three possible mechanisms: convection, conduction, and radiation. Radation is negligible. Conduction - well, your heat sink is not connected directly to your case, is it? Convection is handled by the air moved by the fans. There may be some conduction between (inside air) -> (case) -> (outside air), but I really doubt it's much of a factor. I just got my temperature sensors working, though, and I have some extra foam laying around, so I'll give it a shot and see what I get.
temp1: +34.0C
temp2: +35.5C
temp3: +37.5C
is what I've got now (dual Celeron 366 in a BP6), so I can afford to experiment a bit.
It seems to depends on /what/ Unix you're talking about. On my Linux box, NS 4.x was/is horribly unstable. On my Irix box, it's pretty good. Not that I really care too much; I'm mostly an Opera guy now.
Only you aren't. misremember
A bunch of people have mentioned 1984, but I think /Fahrenheit 451/ is equally apropos. (Good Unix word, that.) "They're [excluding words]...to match the sensibilities of their audience." All jokes about "fool" and the Microsoft audience aside, I'm reminded of what Bradbury said about F451: if people have the "right" to not be offended, and you can't say anything that might offend them, pretty soon you end up not being able to say much of anything at all.
I've been working with a custom module written for ATG Dynamo (large, closed-source web app server) recently, and the general quality of it stinks. If it gets a message off the queue that isn't in exactly the format it was expecting, the whole thing blows up in your face (with one of those wonderful Java stack traces). Just the other day, one of the programmers on the project chortled out loud, "Hyuk hyuk! I named that variable FOOUSANYC - I hope they never move out of New York City!" and it honest to God seemed like a big joke to him. Don't anybody tell me that the quality of closed-source code is any higher than open...
3D, alpha blending, /and/ network transparency? Wow! And only 15 years after SGI did it, too! ;^)
Oh no, Al will burn. It's not so easy to ignite as Mg or K, but once you get it going, it burns pretty fiercely too. IIRC, Allied pilots in WWII could tell a burning German plane even at a great distance, because the aluminum content made them burn bright white.
Yeah, I mean, a for-profit company, like OSDN and Slashdot, for example, could never have a .org. Err... (Yes, I know the story behind the .org; I'm just being snarky.)
As for machines writing their own novels, How many years' time? 0.
What I want to know is: why solar cells? It seems to me it would be much easier to make a space-based heat engine. One side is black and faces the sun, and one is white and is in shade, and you just run a heat engine off the difference. (The Moon has a difference of about 350C between dark and light sides, for example.) I realize that this is a great simplification (you have to thermally isolate the sides from each other, you have to figure that the satellite is not going to be face-locked to the sun, you have to figure out how exactly to run a turbine off the temperature differential) but I think it has the potential to be smaller, simpler, and more efficient than solar cells.
"Not so cheap power"? What planet are you living on? In the "industrialized" world, energy is incredibly cheap by historical standards. Think about the electricity that powers your refrigerator, lights, computers, etc., the gasoline in your car, the oil in your water heater. Think about how much wood you'd have to burn (or muscle power you'd have to use) to equal that. We use energy in a way that would be staggering to people from only a few hundred years ago, and we hardly blink an eye at it.
"Whizbang", yes. Useful? My experience is that the marginal utility of these things is very low compared to the marginal cost over plain old dumb phones. (I saw my phone at work rebooting yesterday. Honest to Crom rebooting.) But what do I know...my main phone at home is a heavy old red one marked "PROPERTY OF NEW YORK TEL CO".
Tab completion isn't perfect, but I've never yet seen a browser that does autocompletion _well_. It's always the equivalent of: /u
/usr/X11R6/bin/xscreensaver!"
/usr/share/dict/ or even /u! I usually spend more time correcting the autocompletion than I save using it. Amazingly enough, IE seems to have gotten it more right than anyone else.
(I type)
(and the computer says) "Oh, you must mean
when maybe I _meant_
As for "terminals with widgets" - how is the terminal supposed to know what options the command has? If it's so easy, _you_ write it. It _is_ relatively easy when you write the command, the shell, and the terminal window - which is why MS is pretty good at this sort of thing. When you break out of the monopoly prison, though, things get more complicated. Shells do a pretty good job of understanding what tab completion should be by having a primitive understanding of "grammar" (ie, this must be a command, this must be a filename, etc.) but even they don't get it completely right (and they certainly don't understand program arguments!)
It really makes me wonder how people ever manage to learn to drive cars. "Left, right...no, wait - right, left...man, this stuff is complicated." Come to think of it, maybe that's why there are so many dumbass accidents where someone hits the gas instead of the brake...
The problem with forked metadata (or, quite possibly, any kind of metadata) is that it clashes with the Unix vision of a file as simply a stream of bytes. Suppose that "myfile.txt" has some metadata associated with it. Then we do "sed 's/foo/bar/g newfile.txt". What happens to the metadata? Is sed supposed to understand it and copy it to the new file? Is the shell? Is the metadata supposed to get copied at all, or do we start with a clean slate?
The problem with forks is that they require everyone to be using the same filesystem if you want to be able to exchange metadata. (Remember the bad old days of trying to transfer files between PCs and Macs?) Metadata stored in a per-host registry-like structure might be better, but you're still going to lose it every time you transfer a file unless you're using a metadata-aware file transfer mechanism.
"...of course there're never going to be gasoline filling stations on every corner unless there's a market for it. i.e. there's gasoline cars. There's never going to be any gasoline cars because there's no filling stations...ad infinitum. Now go invest some more money in horse tackle."
If we're talking about Quake, maybe. Try using some "enterprise-level"* software. It costs thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars, and eats up the time of a lot of highly-paid people. For example, I personally have been spending the last two weeks working pretty much full-time on one particular piece of horribly shoddy software, trying to get it to work. It's eaten about two man-months of time here, I estimate, and support from the vendor has been on the level of "Well, it works for us."
* You know why they call it "enterprise-level"? Because it takes the resources of a whole damn enterprise to use the thing.
Hey! Get it right! Libya is .ly, not .lb. And yes, there is such a domain, hosted by some firm out of England. It's not a heavily used TLD...can't imagine why.
This is why certain high-security systems have a "panic code" - an alternate code that will authorize the user, but will also set off an alarm somewhere else. (Of course, as a sysadmin, I'm inclined to sourly suspect that 99% of the alarms end up with the user saying, "Well, I forgot my passcode, so I just used the alternate one...")
But that's the general problem of public databases, it seems: it's easy to get data into them, but not to get it out.