... and doesn't support java 1.5 and hasn't been updated in a loooong time. I checked it out a few months ago and unless something has changed in the meantime, it's basically a dead project and not usable for anyone working on non-legacy systems.
Sadly, after downloading it and playing with it for the first time tonight, I'm gonna have to agree with this.
Executive summary: the documentation is utter garbage, the last release was more than a year ago, and it doesn't support Java 1.5.
To back it up: they take great pains to hide the forum from users of the site (hint: you have to go to the download page before you can find a link to it), and the documentation doesn't even cover such basic functionality as running in command line mode. The suggested fix to support Java 1.5 didn't work, and finally, the ant target is broken.
Other than the documentation jRat was probably pretty good a year or two ago when everything probably worked (judging from the screenshots), but now it's useless abandonware for anyone working with java 1.5. I'm still looking for a good non-commercial profiler. OptimizeIt is the best I've ever used, but it's expensive.
And that Apple UI design philosophy has led to the incredibly intuitive mac interface - except when programmers have to work around it, then it totally blows.
Say you have a link to a file on a web page, and you want to download it to your hard drive. Using the one button mouse you have to hold down a key on the keyboard (either ctrl or alt or open-apple, it's been a while since I've used a mac) to bring up the "save link target as" option you need.
Tell me that's more intuitive then the Windows/Linux right-click menu.
Well, no. It's not that bad, and here's where the/. folk can actually do something useful: donate your time and computer skills to help with the audit.
I'm trying to get in touch with blackboxvoting.org to donate whatever skills I can muster (Degree in course 6 from MIT should be worth something...) There were 110+ million votes cast, but the Diebold and other assorted electronic voting machines only made up a fraction of that, and by focusing efforts on Ohio and Florida, where the exit polls diverged from the actual count by far more than the exit poll's margin of error, the task becomes manageable. If we have your help.
Please, oh please stop with calling it "Global Warming" already. Humans effects on the climate will NOT lead to universally higher temperatures. From the best we can tell it will instead lead to greater variance in most places around the globe, including these severe storms, droughts, floods, and even more snowstorms in certain places. It is my pet peeve when it's referred to as "Global Warming" because then people who don't know what they're talking about (but still vote and drive SUV's) think there's no problem every time we have a cooler than average summer. Global climate change *is* a serious problem and having half the population ignore it because "damn, it didn't get hotter than 70 the last week in august" doesn't help.
This guy wasn't harassed, he's been faking it and getting a HUGE amount of free publicity. It's a great idea: come up with a pretty cool concept and then claim you're shutting down because "hackers have sent you threats". High tech new company + shady hackers + "They don't like me because I'm giving away their secrets" = big story, and in such a way that their target market would LOVE to learn more about them. However, I think it's totally bullshit because:
No company that size, with no clients and no money coming in, would have made a big enough splash within three days that hackers would have heard about them and gotten pissed off.
They're not competing against hackers anyway, hackers can go about doing what they've always done.
According to the story, he's not filing a claim with the cops, even after having a death threat taped to his door because:
"...since he did not know specifically who was threatening him, he thought it would be fruitless to seek help from the police. "I don't want to go to the cops, who might not know what a hacker is," he said."
Yeah, bullSHIT. He's not going to the cops because filing a false claim is a crime and this whole thing is a big publicity stunt.
Umm... how exactly a lot of muscle mass will help overweight people?
Well, having more muscle mass is the best way to increase your metabolism. Muscle burns more calories than fat at rest, so having more muscle == speeding up metabolism.
In order to lose weight you must eat less. That's it. It is really, really simple. Forget about metabolism, muscle mass, etc. etc. Just eat less.
Close, but not quite. You must eat less calories than you burn, which means increasing muscle mass and keeping the amount of food you eat the same WILL help you lose weight. The parent poster had it right on all counts where you challenge him. sorry:(
This is a site for news for nerds and I'm way more interested in when genetic engineering will allow us to overclock our brains. This interesting tidbit was on CNN yesterday about how blocking dopamine receptors in monkey's turned them from procrastinators into workaholics. I personally would be very interested in taking a pill that made me sit my ass down and do work instead of posting to slashdot.
On a similar note, when I was at MIT there were a number of people (predominantly course 7 and 18 majors for some reason) who took ritalin or aderall to help them stay up all night and be super focused on work. There was no sort of outrage around campus for that though, much more of a "hey, that's a great idea! Where can I get some?" You can definitely make identical arguments about "fair play" with this type of doping too, but I never agreed with the naysayers. If I want to be an elite thinker and knowledge worker, why shouldn't I do whatever I can to acheive that? If sometime in the future scientists could get a genetic modification which raised their IQs by 30 points, wouldn't we want that? It seems to me that the only reason there's an uproar about atheletes doping themselves up is because all of atheletics is truly and fundamentally about unimportant little games. If cancer researchers boosted their brainpower they'd be lauded for making a "sacrifice" in the name of the common good.
This sounds a bit like Alloy. Alloy is both a code modelling language (like UML), but structured in such a way that the model can be analysed automatically using SAT solvers (yeah, I didn't know what those were at first either. Here's a site with some good info on them).
Alloy's cool because you can use it to model code at a very abstract, high level (much like SPARK, it seems), although with Alloy you aren't tied to any specific language. The downside is that since the model isn't embedded in the code it's more useful as a design tool than something which will "guarantee" correctness every time you compile.
Great idea! That's what we do.;) I'm involved in a startup called
Listen Digital that's getting into
both online distribution of live shows and onsite CD burning. We've
got a store called Download Live
Music that lets artists sell downloads of their show online right
after it's over.
Basically, we're a bunch of guys who are sick of the whole top 40
shit and sick of the fact that a lot of great artists aren't able to
support themselves in mainstream distribution channels. The main
thing that we're interested in is creating a new form of production
and distribution that's viable for local bands local bands who have
great live shows and a dedicated fan base but haven't made it big yet,
not just the Phish's and DMB's.
This USB keychain idea
is going to be a fad. People going to check out small bands aren't
going to want to drop $30 to get a recording of it, and even at larger
ones, as geeky-cool as having a USB keychain with the band's logo on
it may be, it doesn't have the same wide appeal of a high-fidelity CD
recording with customized artwork. Quality-wise, unlike the uncited
claim that 192 kbps audio is indistinguishable from CDs, there are
plentyofstudies
that show otherwise.
...but I didn't use a genetic alg. Here's
what I came up with by hand. It's almost a full keyboard change, not
just 30 characters like this guy did. I've been using it for about 2
years now, and although most people think I'm crazy it really has
helped my wrists: they used to be really bad but now they're fine most
of the time; I only get a painful day once a month or less now.
The full story:
I bought a kinesis after I got low-grade
carpal-tunnel syndrome from too much programming, and decided that
since it was going to take me a while to get used to I might as well
switch to Dvorak too. After about a week I realized Dvorak had some serious problems:
It didn't take finger strength into account
Commonly used programming symbols (brackets, semi's, >'s,
<'s) are a pain to get to
Your fingers rest differently on a kinesis
Some other things I can't remember anymore
The first one was my biggest concern because my main goal was to be
comfortable while typing. Under Dvorak your little fingers rest on
the extremely common "a" and "s", the uncommon "u" is right under the
index finger and is thus easier to type than it needs to be,
etc. etc.
I found some letter usage charts online but didn't trust them so I
made up my own with a simple perl script, the Linux HOWTO files and a
bunch of and coding (in java and perl mostly) that I'd done. The raw
results are here. I found
my letter usage to be slightly but importantly different, so I spent a
few hours designing the above mentioned
keyboard layout with comfort as the goal. I targeted it towards
programming java and perl in Emacs on a kinesis by putting the most
common letters within easy reach of the strongest fingers, making
common two letter combos easy to get to, and making common
programming chars and emacs commands easy to type.
Let me know if you try it, I'd be interested to hear if it helps.
The age of the Martian surface has been calculated by
examining the number of craters on Mars, Mittlefehldt
explained. The oldest surfaces would have been exposed to
meteorite impacts from space for the longest time, and thus
would have the most craters on them. Young surfaces would be
relatively free of craters.
Using the current understanding of crater density, a maximum
of 15 percent of the Martian surface could be as young as 175
million years old, Mittlefehldt said. Even getting that high of a
percentage is really stretching the model, he said. It simply
doesn't make sense that half the meteorites from Mars and half
the big impact events that sent them to Earth just happened to
hit the 15 percent of the surface that is young, he said.
This method of determining the surface age of Mars seems to
assume that the meteorite strikes occur at consistent intervals.
Therefore, the older the surface, the more impact craters. However,
what if there was some reason that a surface which is relatively new
(say, 175 million years old) has a much higher density of crater
impacts for some reason? Here's what I think: There were very high
levels of volcanic activity when these meteorites we're finding were
formed. Soon after, one or several large impacts caused a great deal
of this newly formed rock to be thrown into space. Several bits made
it to earth where we can now puzzle over them, but more importantly,
most fell back to Mars, causing heavy cratering over most of the
surface.
Thus, the surface of Mars has seen recent volcanic activity, but
still shows heavy cratering because the same impact that sent the
meteorites to us also sent up large rocks that came back down to form
many new impact craters; many more than would be normally be formed in
that time span.
But, IANAMG (Martian Geologist). Is any one here who is know if
this would work?
Read Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. There are several excellent books (Consider Phelbas and Excession both talk about wars/conflicts being managed by machines far more intelligent than humans. He's a great author, and unfortunately not too well known in this country.
You know, the porno industry's really going to be the force driving this one. Who cares about geopolitics and mind-games carried out on a national scale: politicians and the non-apathetic, that's who. But porno... there's a universal audience in that one. Think about it... anyone, any time, doing anything. No longer need to wait till they're legal either. There'll be fake movies going around the net that look just as good as the real thing. Fantasies about the neighbor? Take a 10 minute film of them in the backyard and turn it into an orgy before it leaves the camcorder. This is frightening, yet somehow intriguing...
This post sounds too uninformed to be anything other than a troll, but whatever.
Why port scans are a Good Thing:
If I'm going to do business/trust someone, I need to check the security of their boxen.
I always run port scans on any "unknown" net company I'm dealing with. I once ran a port scan on a web hosting service a friend of mine was using, and it was wide open. He got a better provider, and my paranoia was further cultivated.
I figure one of two things can happen from port-scanning someone who doesn't expect it:
They are incompetant, and their gaping security holes warn me away. Other net-saavy people follow this lead, and soon all such careless businesses die off. Bereft of such wide open targets, script K1dd3z give up on UNIX boxes and stick to windows, leaving the net a safer, happier place.
Yeah, right.
They are not incompetant, and their box is sound. If my probing freaks out an already paranoid sys-admins, no harm is done, and they will be all the more likely to keep up to date on any security advisories. Thus prepared, they will be able to resist attacks from more malicious intruders, and the net will be a safer, happier place because of it.
So I have to ask, if someone is a competant sys-admin, why be afraid of a portscan?
I was really looking forward to seeing the movie when it first came out in the US, and it was a huge letdown. Even with the big name actors doing voice, the feel of the movie was killed. Serious scenes were laughable, and funny ones were just bizarre. After seeing dozens of classic Samurai movies from Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and the like (all in Japanese and subbed), I can't even watch dubs anymore. I have yet to hear an English voice actor who can accurately capture the mood of a Japanese movie without sounding lame.
But now we non-Japanese speakers will finally be able to see the movie the way it was meant to be seen. Hopefully be worth the wait...
Aside from Programming Perl, which was mentioned earlier, another book, that focuses on more some more obscure optimizations, is "Advanced Perl Programming", by Sriram Srinivasan. O'Reilly, of course.
Yeah, but the reason those nice people don't have BG's job is that nice people don't make businesses as successful as M$. It takes a real bastard to do the kinds of things necessary to make a business go from being merely successful into the realm of history making.
Once you have gotten to a certain point in business, the only way to go farther is to destroy the competition by any means necessary. Nice people can't/won't take those final steps, and those who will eventually beat them out.
Actually the joining will be in less than 4 billion based on their numbers, and the Andromeda will fill our sky long before that. The REAL typo is:
We can only hope that the ozone layer is gone and we are dead before our galaxy joins with Andromeda, from what it says it'll be prety nasty
Damn Hemos, I'd give my friggin' arms to still be around when that happens! I only hope someone will develop near-light speed travel in my lifetime so I actually can still be around.
Slashdot Mirror
much better than I could: http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/eric-buys- an-ipod
... and doesn't support java 1.5 and hasn't been updated in a loooong time. I checked it out a few months ago and unless something has changed in the meantime, it's basically a dead project and not usable for anyone working on non-legacy systems.
Sadly, after downloading it and playing with it for the first time tonight, I'm gonna have to agree with this.
Executive summary: the documentation is utter garbage, the last release was more than a year ago, and it doesn't support Java 1.5.
To back it up: they take great pains to hide the forum from users of the site (hint: you have to go to the download page before you can find a link to it), and the documentation doesn't even cover such basic functionality as running in command line mode. The suggested fix to support Java 1.5 didn't work, and finally, the ant target is broken.
Other than the documentation jRat was probably pretty good a year or two ago when everything probably worked (judging from the screenshots), but now it's useless abandonware for anyone working with java 1.5. I'm still looking for a good non-commercial profiler. OptimizeIt is the best I've ever used, but it's expensive.
And that Apple UI design philosophy has led to the incredibly intuitive mac interface - except when programmers have to work around it, then it totally blows.
Say you have a link to a file on a web page, and you want to download it to your hard drive. Using the one button mouse you have to hold down a key on the keyboard (either ctrl or alt or open-apple, it's been a while since I've used a mac) to bring up the "save link target as" option you need.
Tell me that's more intuitive then the Windows/Linux right-click menu.
Well, no. It's not that bad, and here's where the /. folk can actually do something useful: donate your time and computer skills to help with the audit.
I'm trying to get in touch with blackboxvoting.org to donate whatever skills I can muster (Degree in course 6 from MIT should be worth something...) There were 110+ million votes cast, but the Diebold and other assorted electronic voting machines only made up a fraction of that, and by focusing efforts on Ohio and Florida, where the exit polls diverged from the actual count by far more than the exit poll's margin of error, the task becomes manageable. If we have your help.
For those like me who are not as well versed in D&D lore, Tarrasques are described here.
Microsoft is finally associated with something that DOESN'T crash!
Please, oh please stop with calling it "Global Warming" already. Humans effects on the climate will NOT lead to universally higher temperatures. From the best we can tell it will instead lead to greater variance in most places around the globe, including these severe storms, droughts, floods, and even more snowstorms in certain places. It is my pet peeve when it's referred to as "Global Warming" because then people who don't know what they're talking about (but still vote and drive SUV's) think there's no problem every time we have a cooler than average summer. Global climate change *is* a serious problem and having half the population ignore it because "damn, it didn't get hotter than 70 the last week in august" doesn't help.
This guy wasn't harassed, he's been faking it and getting a HUGE amount of free publicity. It's a great idea: come up with a pretty cool concept and then claim you're shutting down because "hackers have sent you threats". High tech new company + shady hackers + "They don't like me because I'm giving away their secrets" = big story, and in such a way that their target market would LOVE to learn more about them. However, I think it's totally bullshit because:
Yeah, bullSHIT. He's not going to the cops because filing a false claim is a crime and this whole thing is a big publicity stunt.
Umm... how exactly a lot of muscle mass will help overweight people?
:(
Well, having more muscle mass is the best way to increase your metabolism. Muscle burns more calories than fat at rest, so having more muscle == speeding up metabolism.
In order to lose weight you must eat less. That's it. It is really, really simple. Forget about metabolism, muscle mass, etc. etc. Just eat less.
Close, but not quite. You must eat less calories than you burn, which means increasing muscle mass and keeping the amount of food you eat the same WILL help you lose weight. The parent poster had it right on all counts where you challenge him. sorry
This is a site for news for nerds and I'm way more interested in when genetic engineering will allow us to overclock our brains. This interesting tidbit was on CNN yesterday about how blocking dopamine receptors in monkey's turned them from procrastinators into workaholics. I personally would be very interested in taking a pill that made me sit my ass down and do work instead of posting to slashdot.
On a similar note, when I was at MIT there were a number of people (predominantly course 7 and 18 majors for some reason) who took ritalin or aderall to help them stay up all night and be super focused on work. There was no sort of outrage around campus for that though, much more of a "hey, that's a great idea! Where can I get some?" You can definitely make identical arguments about "fair play" with this type of doping too, but I never agreed with the naysayers. If I want to be an elite thinker and knowledge worker, why shouldn't I do whatever I can to acheive that? If sometime in the future scientists could get a genetic modification which raised their IQs by 30 points, wouldn't we want that? It seems to me that the only reason there's an uproar about atheletes doping themselves up is because all of atheletics is truly and fundamentally about unimportant little games. If cancer researchers boosted their brainpower they'd be lauded for making a "sacrifice" in the name of the common good.
This sounds a bit like Alloy. Alloy is both a code modelling language (like UML), but structured in such a way that the model can be analysed automatically using SAT solvers (yeah, I didn't know what those were at first either. Here's a site with some good info on them).
Alloy's cool because you can use it to model code at a very abstract, high level (much like SPARK, it seems), although with Alloy you aren't tied to any specific language. The downside is that since the model isn't embedded in the code it's more useful as a design tool than something which will "guarantee" correctness every time you compile.
Great idea! That's what we do. ;) I'm involved in a startup called
Listen Digital that's getting into
both online distribution of live shows and onsite CD burning. We've
got a store called Download Live
Music that lets artists sell downloads of their show online right
after it's over.
Basically, we're a bunch of guys who are sick of the whole top 40 shit and sick of the fact that a lot of great artists aren't able to support themselves in mainstream distribution channels. The main thing that we're interested in is creating a new form of production and distribution that's viable for local bands local bands who have great live shows and a dedicated fan base but haven't made it big yet, not just the Phish's and DMB's.
This USB keychain idea is going to be a fad. People going to check out small bands aren't going to want to drop $30 to get a recording of it, and even at larger ones, as geeky-cool as having a USB keychain with the band's logo on it may be, it doesn't have the same wide appeal of a high-fidelity CD recording with customized artwork. Quality-wise, unlike the uncited claim that 192 kbps audio is indistinguishable from CDs, there are plenty of studies that show otherwise.
The full story:
I bought a kinesis after I got low-grade carpal-tunnel syndrome from too much programming, and decided that since it was going to take me a while to get used to I might as well switch to Dvorak too. After about a week I realized Dvorak had some serious problems:
The first one was my biggest concern because my main goal was to be comfortable while typing. Under Dvorak your little fingers rest on the extremely common "a" and "s", the uncommon "u" is right under the index finger and is thus easier to type than it needs to be, etc. etc.
I found some letter usage charts online but didn't trust them so I made up my own with a simple perl script, the Linux HOWTO files and a bunch of and coding (in java and perl mostly) that I'd done. The raw results are here. I found my letter usage to be slightly but importantly different, so I spent a few hours designing the above mentioned keyboard layout with comfort as the goal. I targeted it towards programming java and perl in Emacs on a kinesis by putting the most common letters within easy reach of the strongest fingers, making common two letter combos easy to get to, and making common programming chars and emacs commands easy to type.
Let me know if you try it, I'd be interested to hear if it helps.
From the story:
The age of the Martian surface has been calculated by examining the number of craters on Mars, Mittlefehldt explained. The oldest surfaces would have been exposed to meteorite impacts from space for the longest time, and thus would have the most craters on them. Young surfaces would be relatively free of craters.
Using the current understanding of crater density, a maximum of 15 percent of the Martian surface could be as young as 175 million years old, Mittlefehldt said. Even getting that high of a percentage is really stretching the model, he said. It simply doesn't make sense that half the meteorites from Mars and half the big impact events that sent them to Earth just happened to hit the 15 percent of the surface that is young, he said.
This method of determining the surface age of Mars seems to assume that the meteorite strikes occur at consistent intervals. Therefore, the older the surface, the more impact craters. However, what if there was some reason that a surface which is relatively new (say, 175 million years old) has a much higher density of crater impacts for some reason? Here's what I think: There were very high levels of volcanic activity when these meteorites we're finding were formed. Soon after, one or several large impacts caused a great deal of this newly formed rock to be thrown into space. Several bits made it to earth where we can now puzzle over them, but more importantly, most fell back to Mars, causing heavy cratering over most of the surface.
Thus, the surface of Mars has seen recent volcanic activity, but still shows heavy cratering because the same impact that sent the meteorites to us also sent up large rocks that came back down to form many new impact craters; many more than would be normally be formed in that time span.
But, IANAMG (Martian Geologist). Is any one here who is know if this would work?
Read Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. There are several excellent books (Consider Phelbas and Excession both talk about wars/conflicts being managed by machines far more intelligent than humans. He's a great author, and unfortunately not too well known in this country.
You know, the porno industry's really going to be the force driving this one. Who cares about geopolitics and mind-games carried out on a national scale: politicians and the non-apathetic, that's who. But porno... there's a universal audience in that one. Think about it... anyone, any time, doing anything. No longer need to wait till they're legal either. There'll be fake movies going around the net that look just as good as the real thing. Fantasies about the neighbor? Take a 10 minute film of them in the backyard and turn it into an orgy before it leaves the camcorder. This is frightening, yet somehow intriguing...
Why port scans are a Good Thing:
If I'm going to do business/trust someone, I need to check the security of their boxen.
I always run port scans on any "unknown" net company I'm dealing with. I once ran a port scan on a web hosting service a friend of mine was using, and it was wide open. He got a better provider, and my paranoia was further cultivated.
I figure one of two things can happen from port-scanning someone who doesn't expect it:
Yeah, right.
So I have to ask, if someone is a competant sys-admin, why be afraid of a portscan?
I was really looking forward to seeing the movie when it first came out in the US, and it was a huge letdown. Even with the big name actors doing voice, the feel of the movie was killed. Serious scenes were laughable, and funny ones were just bizarre. After seeing dozens of classic Samurai movies from Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and the like (all in Japanese and subbed), I can't even watch dubs anymore. I have yet to hear an English voice actor who can accurately capture the mood of a Japanese movie without sounding lame.
But now we non-Japanese speakers will finally be able to see the movie the way it was meant to be seen. Hopefully be worth the wait...
Aside from Programming Perl, which was mentioned earlier, another book, that focuses on more some more obscure optimizations, is "Advanced Perl Programming", by Sriram Srinivasan. O'Reilly, of course.
Yeah, but the reason those nice people don't have BG's job is that nice people don't make businesses as successful as M$. It takes a real bastard to do the kinds of things necessary to make a business go from being merely successful into the realm of history making.
Once you have gotten to a certain point in business, the only way to go farther is to destroy the competition by any means necessary. Nice people can't/won't take those final steps, and those who will eventually beat them out.
Amen. Truly a masterfull troll... 7 pages and not a single mention of grits!
Actually the joining will be in less than 4 billion based on their numbers, and the Andromeda will fill our sky long before that. The REAL typo is:
We can only hope that the ozone layer is gone and we are dead before our galaxy joins with Andromeda, from what it says it'll be prety nasty
Damn Hemos, I'd give my friggin' arms to still be around when that happens! I only hope someone will develop near-light speed travel in my lifetime so I actually can still be around.
What? 75,000 MB * 1 min / MB * 1 hour/60 min = 1250 hours.
I too used to smoke bad crack before posting to slashdot. Never a pretty sight tho.
Try "More evil than satan", also on google