I went to a strong engineering school. In hindsight the biggest plus for me vs a good liberal arts school was at job fair time, where hundreds of companies recruited heavily and I had a chance to explore many solid options (btw go to these even as a freshman).
Other than that, if your fundamentals are strong, you'll find you learn more in the 4 years after school than in. From a career standpoint I think it comes down to what first job you were able to land - preferably something with a strong opportunity for with working with bright, seasoned coworkers on non-trivial projects.
There isn't a right answer. Go with the liberal arts college if that's where you'd be happiest. Learn how to learn. Few care where you went anyway after the first job.
"The class data sharing feature is aimed at reducing application startup time and footprint. The installation process loads a set of classes from the system jar file into a private, internal representation, then dumps that representation to a "shared archive" file. During subsequent JVM invocations, the shared archive is memory-mapped in, saving the cost of loading those classes and allowing much of the JVM's metadata for these classes to be shared among multiple JVM processes."
It's only enabled for the client VM. Incidently, it was developed and submitted to Sun by Apple.
Java performance "truths" change over time
on
Java Faster Than C++?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Check out this recent IBM Developerworks article which looks at how modern JVMs handle allocation and garbage collection.
Some very surprising tidbits there. For instance:
"Performance advice often has a short shelf life; while it was once true that allocation was expensive, it is now no longer the case. In fact, it is downright cheap, and with a few very compute-intensive exceptions, performance considerations are generally no longer a good reason to avoid allocation. Sun estimates allocation costs at approximately ten machine instructions. That's pretty much free -- certainly no reason to complicate the structure of your program or incur additional maintenance risks for the sake of eliminating a few object creations."
Read the article for an excellent nuts-and-bolts analysis of many current performance considerations. From the posts in this thread, it's pretty clear a lot of people haven't looked into what's actually done in a server JVM these days.
another poster mentioned the Salling Clicker software, but it's cool enough to mention again.
I have this for my Palm Tungsten and Nokia 3650 phone, both bluetooth enabled. You can basically control most any application on your mac. ITunes is the most compelling example. Bring it up on your phone and it connects via Bluetooth to you Mac. From there you can start itunes, and navigate to the songs/playlists/browse-whatever (just like the iPod) and completely control iTunes. You can pause, fast forward, control the volume. The album art shows up for the currently playing song. It really is unbelievably cool. The only thing missing up to now was an actual use, for me at least. I can now control my stereo fully from my phone.
Oh, another cool thing: incoming calls cause it to pause. Same with DVDs.
In fact the relatively high cost of dsl right now is one of the main incentives for many users of these hacked linksys boxes.
Raising the rate would increase the value of the services offered by someone letting others tap into their line. Obviously it would bump up the break even point as well.
And, btw, dsl rate hikes would only increase the user base of cable modems. Gotta love competition.
This doesn't show up in my gmail account, which still shows a measly 1GB.
I suspect they're seeing how users respond to having this much storage, to see if they want to offer it more widely. If it doesn't change most users email habbits, offering 1TB or any amount wouldn't necessarily cost google much.
In Jobs' keynote he mentioned that making sure just "anybody" couldn't offer their stuff on iTMS was a "feature" (he called it "editing"). No offense meant at all to your band in particular, which I know nothing about. But in general, I agree that it's nice to know that if it's on iTMS, it's pretty damn high quality. Having said that, they just signed with something like 200 independent labels, so there obviously are ways to make this happen.
That's true. Apple seems to have given some leeway to artists/labels to vary prices and album completeness. I suspect this was neccessary to get them to signon...after all, since the per-song price is fixed, it isn't unreasonable to give some ability to control album price or download policies.
What's amazing is what _is_ common. The usage rights for the user are both constant and very generous.
First, the fact that images already have some compression doesn't mean they can't be smaller and still decent.
Second, markup, css, js, etc., are very sizeable given today's non-standards-based pages.
Something else to think about. Compressing the markup alone has a big effect in speed because to view a page the browser must: 1) get the html, 2) parse the html (hopefully concurrently with getting it), and 3) find additional resources like images, etc and only then start requesting those too.
Bottom line is that compression of the text content goes a very long way to speeding up the experience as well as saving bandwidth. Just ask any mod-gzip users.
Because a significant portion of users don't even have high-speed access available as an option. There's definitely a sizeable market for faster surfing over dialup, especially now that modem speeds are pretty much maxed out.
What will be nice is when competition makes this feature standard. It shouldn't really be too hard for smaller ISPs to implement proxy-based compression like this. I'm sure there will be a decent open souce offering available (at least for non-image content) before long if there isn't one available.
One reason is that mod-gzip sometimes conflicts with other modules when used in apache 1.3. Another is that users behind proxies typically don't see any benefit because most proxies are by default set to strip out the accepts-encoding: gzip request header (I think to simplify the job of caching compressed/non-compressed content?).
But you're right: there's no reason not to use it if you can. The bandwidth savings can be massive, saving $$.
Yes apache and all 4.0+ browser support the gzip/mod-gzip combination. But the fact is very few websites implement this. Lots of reasons for that (mod-gzip conflicts with many other modules for one) although many more should than do.
A service like this that acts as a compression proxy can dramatically knock down the size of content. We implemented this at my last client and saw 78-93% compression of everything other than images. That includes css, javascript, dynamic web content, etc. I don't know about images, but this alone is very significant for today's clumsily table-laden pages.
How do you think third world countries grow into places where workers and citizens have rights? You're posturing as someone concerned about developing nations, but your argument seems to be that we should only allow Sweden as an outsourcing country.
Good jobs empower workers. $6000/year may be peanuts here, but are you so naive to think that isn't an excellent salary in much of the world? As these contries develop, they'll be able to compete more strongly, and their incomes and infrastructure will improve. Complain if you want about the effect on programmers here (I'm one too), but don't pretend it's out of concern for other nations.
This is off topic, but I can't keep quiet on this.
Check out the racist tripe this poster submits and, according to his username and homepage link, is apparently proud of. I won't repost it, but take a look if you want a glimpse into a very small mind, and a kind of ugliness that's fortunately no longer mainstream.
I'm glad this is an open forum where all types can voice their opinions. But when people with blatantly racist sigs, etc. get modded up, it feels almost like the slashdot community is saying they're comfortable with this kind of shit.
Any "successful" use of RFID technology (even in the warehouse venue) will lead to an increasing likelyhood of their inclusion at the store level. Since there are a large number of legitimate privacy issues (even acknowledged by the organization behind RFIDs) that have not remotely addressed yet, further usage of RFIDs is in general a negative.
You can't possibly be serious. You're saying that placing RFIDs on pallets and warehouse-size boxes should be fought on the basis of privacy concerns? RFID tech is not inherently evil, and privacy concerns should be raised only for uses where there are actually privacy concerns.
I'm not for RFID tags in my sneakers either, but let's at least try to make arguments that make sense.
First, even the Struts developers themselves consider all but the struts:html tags to be obsoleted by the JSTL (lots of struts newsgroup posts to support this...no time to provide a link). JSTL provides not only a fairly rich set of "nuts and bolts" tags, but more importantly a set of base classes that can be easily extended for custom tags (such as the choose/when/otherwise construct and iterator tags). For Struts, the JSTL expression language has been encorporated into the struts-el tags, included in the latest 1.1 release....the caveat is that this approach requires J2EE 1.3 (Tomcat 4.0+, WebSphere 5.0+, Weblogic since forever-ago).
JSTL also obsoletes most of the Jakarta Taglib project's libraries, which frankly were very ugly from the start (separate tags for interacting with session/request/page objects? come on...check out the Expression Language that applies elegance to this problem, and is used in JavaServer Faces, JSTL, Struts-el, and everything useful from here on out).
As for templating engines, the biggest driver towards them has been the lame scriptlet-laden way JSP has historically been used (see The Problem with JSP). JSTL, Struts-el and before long JS Faces nail this problem, and IDE integration in the next year will make clear the reason why Template engines like Velocity aren't compelling (my opinion...not trying to offend).
I tried their DVD service for a month late last winter. I've used Netflix for a year or so, and thought it worth a try.
What a disapointment. The UI is terrible, making it awkward to browse titles. They had none of Netflix's 5-star rating functionality. I've found that to be one of the best features, since it makes decent recommendations to me based on my preferences (much like Tivo), and it also lets you view highly rated users. At Walmart you're on your own.
They also had terrible stocking problems, although presumably they will fix that. Lots of "long wait" movies, compared to Netflix where that's quite rare.
Plus the movies took longer to go round trip. In Chicago, the nearest center is in Minnesota, and I get 4-6 day turnaround. Walmart was consistantly several days longer. This varies according to your distance from distribution centers, but friends in other places also have gotten snappy turnaround from Netflix.
Anyway, give it a try for the trial period, but also try Netflix. Walmart has a long way to go to catch up.
First off, full albums cost $9.99 no matter how many tracks. All you $.99 winers, notice this price ceiling drops the average track cost for many albums.
Second, the usability of the itunes interface is striking. It acts like your regular song library. You can search, browse by genre and group, etc., and it lists all of the songs. Choosing a song plays 30 seconds of it, and it starts playing immediately. Sound quality is very high. The itunes threading is, as it's always been, rock solid. You can download an album, transfer stuff to your ipod, burn a dvd AND listen to another album.
Prediction: This will be a success. In spite of a somewhat guilty conscience, I've spent my share of time on Kazaa and LImewire. This is a MUCH nicer experience. It's immediate gratification at its best. I'd much rather use this than buy from a store, where I can't listen to tracks and have to walk around to find the stuff I want.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to a strong engineering school. In hindsight the biggest plus for me vs a good liberal arts school was at job fair time, where hundreds of companies recruited heavily and I had a chance to explore many solid options (btw go to these even as a freshman).
Other than that, if your fundamentals are strong, you'll find you learn more in the 4 years after school than in. From a career standpoint I think it comes down to what first job you were able to land - preferably something with a strong opportunity for with working with bright, seasoned coworkers on non-trivial projects.
There isn't a right answer. Go with the liberal arts college if that's where you'd be happiest. Learn how to learn. Few care where you went anyway after the first job.
Check out their Beta FAQ
tiger Keynote
2004 WWDC Keynote
Doesn't work yet, but I got it right from Apple
Check out Class Data Sharing.
"The class data sharing feature is aimed at reducing application startup time and footprint. The installation process loads a set of classes from the system jar file into a private, internal representation, then dumps that representation to a "shared archive" file. During subsequent JVM invocations, the shared archive is memory-mapped in, saving the cost of loading those classes and allowing much of the JVM's metadata for these classes to be shared among multiple JVM processes."
It's only enabled for the client VM. Incidently, it was developed and submitted to Sun by Apple.
Check out this recent IBM Developerworks article which looks at how modern JVMs handle allocation and garbage collection.
Some very surprising tidbits there. For instance:
"Performance advice often has a short shelf life; while it was once true that allocation was expensive, it is now no longer the case. In fact, it is downright cheap, and with a few very compute-intensive exceptions, performance considerations are generally no longer a good reason to avoid allocation. Sun estimates allocation costs at approximately ten machine instructions. That's pretty much free -- certainly no reason to complicate the structure of your program or incur additional maintenance risks for the sake of eliminating a few object creations."
Read the article for an excellent nuts-and-bolts analysis of many current performance considerations. From the posts in this thread, it's pretty clear a lot of people haven't looked into what's actually done in a server JVM these days.
another poster mentioned the Salling Clicker software, but it's cool enough to mention again.
I have this for my Palm Tungsten and Nokia 3650 phone, both bluetooth enabled. You can basically control most any application on your mac. ITunes is the most compelling example. Bring it up on your phone and it connects via Bluetooth to you Mac. From there you can start itunes, and navigate to the songs/playlists/browse-whatever (just like the iPod) and completely control iTunes. You can pause, fast forward, control the volume. The album art shows up for the currently playing song. It really is unbelievably cool. The only thing missing up to now was an actual use, for me at least. I can now control my stereo fully from my phone.
Oh, another cool thing: incoming calls cause it to pause. Same with DVDs.
Not bad for $20.
In fact the relatively high cost of dsl right now is one of the main incentives for many users of these hacked linksys boxes.
Raising the rate would increase the value of the services offered by someone letting others tap into their line. Obviously it would bump up the break even point as well.
And, btw, dsl rate hikes would only increase the user base of cable modems. Gotta love competition.
This doesn't show up in my gmail account, which still shows a measly 1GB.
I suspect they're seeing how users respond to having this much storage, to see if they want to offer it more widely. If it doesn't change most users email habbits, offering 1TB or any amount wouldn't necessarily cost google much.
http://www.jroller.com/page/rickard
Rickard was a key contributor to JBoss early on, and seems to have a long running gripe with the JBoss major players since they parted ways.
He later worked for TheServerside.com, who added this user tracking which caught JBoss in the act after Rickard's prompting.
Go Rickard!
PS, he's also the author of XDoclet, WebWork and something else I can't remember right now. And no, I'm not him. Check my IP!
The keynote outlines the features (heavily covered in the review obviously), but also gives a sense of what Jobs and Apple have in mind for this.
Very interesting.
In Jobs' keynote he mentioned that making sure just "anybody" couldn't offer their stuff on iTMS was a "feature" (he called it "editing"). No offense meant at all to your band in particular, which I know nothing about. But in general, I agree that it's nice to know that if it's on iTMS, it's pretty damn high quality. Having said that, they just signed with something like 200 independent labels, so there obviously are ways to make this happen.
That's true. Apple seems to have given some leeway to artists/labels to vary prices and album completeness. I suspect this was neccessary to get them to signon...after all, since the per-song price is fixed, it isn't unreasonable to give some ability to control album price or download policies.
What's amazing is what _is_ common. The usage rights for the user are both constant and very generous.
First, the fact that images already have some compression doesn't mean they can't be smaller and still decent.
Second, markup, css, js, etc., are very sizeable given today's non-standards-based pages.
Something else to think about. Compressing the markup alone has a big effect in speed because to view a page the browser must: 1) get the html, 2) parse the html (hopefully concurrently with getting it), and 3) find additional resources like images, etc and only then start requesting those too.
Bottom line is that compression of the text content goes a very long way to speeding up the experience as well as saving bandwidth. Just ask any mod-gzip users.
Because a significant portion of users don't even have high-speed access available as an option. There's definitely a sizeable market for faster surfing over dialup, especially now that modem speeds are pretty much maxed out.
What will be nice is when competition makes this feature standard. It shouldn't really be too hard for smaller ISPs to implement proxy-based compression like this. I'm sure there will be a decent open souce offering available (at least for non-image content) before long if there isn't one available.
One reason is that mod-gzip sometimes conflicts with other modules when used in apache 1.3. Another is that users behind proxies typically don't see any benefit because most proxies are by default set to strip out the accepts-encoding: gzip request header (I think to simplify the job of caching compressed/non-compressed content?).
But you're right: there's no reason not to use it if you can. The bandwidth savings can be massive, saving $$.
Yes apache and all 4.0+ browser support the gzip/mod-gzip combination. But the fact is very few websites implement this. Lots of reasons for that (mod-gzip conflicts with many other modules for one) although many more should than do.
A service like this that acts as a compression proxy can dramatically knock down the size of content. We implemented this at my last client and saw 78-93% compression of everything other than images. That includes css, javascript, dynamic web content, etc. I don't know about images, but this alone is very significant for today's clumsily table-laden pages.
Surprising. Check out http://codegeneration.net/ , one of many sites on this OMG standard.
How do you think third world countries grow into places where workers and citizens have rights? You're posturing as someone concerned about developing nations, but your argument seems to be that we should only allow Sweden as an outsourcing country.
Good jobs empower workers. $6000/year may be peanuts here, but are you so naive to think that isn't an excellent salary in much of the world? As these contries develop, they'll be able to compete more strongly, and their incomes and infrastructure will improve. Complain if you want about the effect on programmers here (I'm one too), but don't pretend it's out of concern for other nations.
This is off topic, but I can't keep quiet on this.
Check out the racist tripe this poster submits and, according to his username and homepage link, is apparently proud of. I won't repost it, but take a look if you want a glimpse into a very small mind, and a kind of ugliness that's fortunately no longer mainstream.
I'm glad this is an open forum where all types can voice their opinions. But when people with blatantly racist sigs, etc. get modded up, it feels almost like the slashdot community is saying they're comfortable with this kind of shit.
Any "successful" use of RFID technology (even in the warehouse venue) will lead to an increasing likelyhood of their inclusion at the store level. Since there are a large number of legitimate privacy issues (even acknowledged by the organization behind RFIDs) that have not remotely addressed yet, further usage of RFIDs is in general a negative.
You can't possibly be serious. You're saying that placing RFIDs on pallets and warehouse-size boxes should be fought on the basis of privacy concerns? RFID tech is not inherently evil, and privacy concerns should be raised only for uses where there are actually privacy concerns.
I'm not for RFID tags in my sneakers either, but let's at least try to make arguments that make sense.
This book sounds pretty lame.
...the caveat is that this approach requires J2EE 1.3 (Tomcat 4.0+, WebSphere 5.0+, Weblogic since forever-ago).
First, even the Struts developers themselves consider all but the struts:html tags to be obsoleted by the JSTL (lots of struts newsgroup posts to support this...no time to provide a link). JSTL provides not only a fairly rich set of "nuts and bolts" tags, but more importantly a set of base classes that can be easily extended for custom tags (such as the choose/when/otherwise construct and iterator tags). For Struts, the JSTL expression language has been encorporated into the struts-el tags, included in the latest 1.1 release.
JSTL also obsoletes most of the Jakarta Taglib project's libraries, which frankly were very ugly from the start (separate tags for interacting with session/request/page objects? come on...check out the Expression Language that applies elegance to this problem, and is used in JavaServer Faces, JSTL, Struts-el, and everything useful from here on out).
As for templating engines, the biggest driver towards them has been the lame scriptlet-laden way JSP has historically been used (see The Problem with JSP). JSTL, Struts-el and before long JS Faces nail this problem, and IDE integration in the next year will make clear the reason why Template engines like Velocity aren't compelling (my opinion...not trying to offend).
The reviewer said the book covers Hibernate. This is an O/R mapping tool.
I tried their DVD service for a month late last winter. I've used Netflix for a year or so, and thought it worth a try.
What a disapointment. The UI is terrible, making it awkward to browse titles. They had none of Netflix's 5-star rating functionality. I've found that to be one of the best features, since it makes decent recommendations to me based on my preferences (much like Tivo), and it also lets you view highly rated users. At Walmart you're on your own.
They also had terrible stocking problems, although presumably they will fix that. Lots of "long wait" movies, compared to Netflix where that's quite rare.
Plus the movies took longer to go round trip. In Chicago, the nearest center is in Minnesota, and I get 4-6 day turnaround. Walmart was consistantly several days longer. This varies according to your distance from distribution centers, but friends in other places also have gotten snappy turnaround from Netflix.
Anyway, give it a try for the trial period, but also try Netflix. Walmart has a long way to go to catch up.
Apple did an amazing job implementing this.
First off, full albums cost $9.99 no matter how many tracks. All you $.99 winers, notice this price ceiling drops the average track cost for many albums.
Second, the usability of the itunes interface is striking. It acts like your regular song library. You can search, browse by genre and group, etc., and it lists all of the songs. Choosing a song plays 30 seconds of it, and it starts playing immediately. Sound quality is very high. The itunes threading is, as it's always been, rock solid. You can download an album, transfer stuff to your ipod, burn a dvd AND listen to another album.
Prediction: This will be a success. In spite of a somewhat guilty conscience, I've spent my share of time on Kazaa and LImewire. This is a MUCH nicer experience. It's immediate gratification at its best. I'd much rather use this than buy from a store, where I can't listen to tracks and have to walk around to find the stuff I want.