The reason Sun (and any other company with trademarks or servicemarks) appends nouns to their marks is to protect the trademark. The way trademark law works here is that you have to actively protect your trademarks or else lose them to common usage. The textbook example is Xerox, where "xeroxing" became a generic term for photocopying paper. Because Xerox didn't do enough to discourage the generic use of their trademarks, they ended up losing their trademark protections.
It's the same reason why Google officially wants you to "use a Google search for 'trademark issues'", not 'google 'trademark issues'".
I make no claims about how useful or rational or successful this legal strategy is, but that's the back-story.
This is true. I meant that EJB and Hibernate were both attempts to solve the object persistence problem.
Before 3.0 there were three types of EJBs: session beans, for business logic; message beans for messaging; entity beans for object persistence. Entity beans have been replaced by the Java Persistence API, which is, essentially, Hibernate.next (Hibernate now is a Java Persistence provider, as is TopLink). So the more correct phrasing would be "Entity EJBs and Hibernate were both attempts to solve the object persistence problem."
This is incorrect. Hibernate uses CGLIB and ASM to do runtime magic. They explain this in their FAQs. Rails is possible because Ruby gives developers power that Java denies unless you do magic like that.
That's not what I meant, and it's a non-sequitor anyway. Hibernate uses CGLIB to do runtime optimization, which they admit provides a very minor improvement over the JVM's reflection API. A Hibernate user doesn't deal with any bytecode optimization. That is, these are backend performance improvements completely separate from the developer, and are in no way special to Hibernate or EJB containers or whatever. I fail to see what this has to do with either the end developer or with Ruby, especially since Ruby is no performance champ. The fact that there's bytecode optimization happening in the JVM at runtime neither proves nor disproves that Java APIs are powerful/easy to use. I imagine the Ruby interpreter does optimization, just like the JVM, so the same could be said of Ruby. What does this have to do with the APIs that developers are coding to?
Regardless, you're right that Hibernate and TopLink and other alternate object persistent frameworks caused Sun to rethink the existence of entity beans. Session and message beans are a different story, though.
And note that Hibernate came from outside Sun. Sun's attempt at the same the same thing was EJB, which has been deservedly, if belatedly, shot in the head.
Absolutely not true. First of all, Hibernate came after EJB, and neither Hibernate nor EJB does any bytecode manipulation or other JVM tricks. Second, EJB is very much alive (3.0 was just was voted final by the JCP, yesterday, along with the Java EE 5 platform spec), and was designed with a lot of the features of Hibernate in mind (Gavin King is on the EJB 3.0 expert committee). EJB 3.0 beans are much simpler to write (they're regular Java classes decorated with annotations) and configure (no more XML deployment descriptors, and the container provides reasonable defaults that you change on a case-by-case basis via annotations).
You should really check out the features in Java EE 5. It was designed to make developer's lives easier.
"I still can't fathom why people think Ruby lacks transaction, security, and connectivity."
With Java EE, I can define business methods which automatically gain transaction attributes. I don't have to explicitly define transaction attributes, and ensure that any calls to a particular method happen within a transaction context. The transaction context is implicit, and goes beyond just database calls.
I've never tried to connect to connect a RoR app into a legacy datasource that uses CORBA, but I can imagine it would be a nightmare. Is there even a Ruby ORB? I doubt it. Granted, CORBA isn't used all that much, but if you need it you need it. With J2EE Connectors it's treated as just another datasource. That's what I mean by "connectivity."
Security contexts are defined on the app server level, and can be configured at deploy time and altered at run time rather than coded into the app. Do you want to make a component only accessible to a particular role? How about a particular method? Or an entire app? All of this can be configured pretty easily. If you need to integrate your app with an outside authorization mechanism, it's just a matter of configuring a particular realm in the app server.
The point is, these features are practically useless to developers working on a solitary web app (even one that gets a lot of hits). RoR or one of the other quick development frameworks really shine in these cases. But Java EE exists for a reason. A pickup truck can haul a lot of things, and is a really useful thing to have around. If you have to move a family of 5 to another city, the limitations are overwhelming.
No offense, but the oft-repeated anecdote about hundreds of poor schlups being forced to code horrendously overweight J2EE-apps while consultants wheel-away wheelbarrows full of cash doesn't ring true to me. What organization has this kind of money and time, especially since the downturn and what with offshoring development and all? Where are these companies?
I also question your use of the term "mainstream." One person's niche technology is the next person's mainstream one. There are different market segments for development frameworks and technologies. Ones that require the sort of transaction, security, and connectivity capabilities that exist in Java EE would find RoR severely lacking. As you found out, stand-alone web apps with low numbers of concurrent users don't need the security, transaction, and connectivity support in Java EE, so those developers don't use it.
If you're using J2EE/Java EE for simple data-driven web sites a la RoR, then you're probably not the target developer for the Java EE platform. I have nothing against these web frameworks and the people who love them, I should add. It's just that the average/.er doesn't see the need for the features that are at the core of enterprise Java, and therefore they dismiss the platform as being too heavyweight. Sure, for small-scale development. The same mentality pops up in discussions on whether, e.g. MySQL needs transactions. It's kind of like hearing somebody who once built a dog house talk about the design requirements of a skyscraper.
With that being said, Java EE 5 will make enterprise Java developer's lives much easier. EJBs, everyone's favorite whipping boy, are a lot easier to code now.
"...research shows that UltraSPARC T1 processor performance could eliminate the number of Web servers in the world by half, slashing power requirements and having the same effect in reducing carbon dioxide emissions as planting one million acres of trees.(1)" (1) Discover Magazine Vol 26 No. 08 August 2005
So, for all the Slashbots out there complaining about this bit of marketing hoo-haa, you'll have to up your rhetoric accordingly.
I know you were being sarcastic, but I was responding more to the idea that San Francisco is going to turn into a Kurt Russell movie set post-handgun ban. A law which will likely get thrown out in court, I might add (which is why I voted against it).
1) That's a bit of tautalogy, isn't it? 2) Sure, but per capita gun violence and murder is a lot lower in London compared to SF, and England as a whole is a lot safer than the US. Canada, on the other hand, has more guns, but less gun violence, so there's that (although handguns aren't as prevalent in Canada). 3) Don't know much about gun violence down under.
I think the mythology surrounding guns in the US has a lot more to do with our violent crime rate than simple gun ownership. I have no idea how to change that.
I live in San Francisco, and not a day goes by that I don't see a cackling criminal hellbent on destruction, twirling his mustache, about to cause untold carnage with a firearm, only to be thwarted by a civilian carrying a legal, licensed handgun. It's truly a sight to behold. The only thing keeping San Francisco from turning into Lagos is the vast handgun toting populace, not the police, not the legal system. And now we've gone ahead and ruined it.
It'll be just like the veritable river of blood that is...London, England.
Disclaimer: I voted against the handgun ban, but give me a break.
The universe is getting more disordered and more simplified, as dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. However, the theory of Evolution has the basic principle that everything is getting more organized and more complex.
Nope. Try reading (and understanding) your scientific principles again.
a) Evolution doesn't say that everything is getting more organized over time. b) The second law of thermodynamics describes closed systems. The universe as a whole is a closed system, but an enormous one. The earth isn't a closed system. For one, it receives energy from the sun. The second law of thermodynamics doesn't require an "orderly" entropy; it only says that, eventually, all states in a closed system move to disorder. The operative word is "eventually." c) According to your (mis)understanding of the second law of thermodynamics, it would be impossible for anything to grow more complex. For you to be consistent, you'd have to also believe that plants wouldn't grow, fertilization of sperm & egg could not occur, and ionic bonding is impossible.
1. The Big Bang cannot be true as it contradicts the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Again, you don't understand what you are talking about. Not the Big Bang, not E=MC2. Matter and energy cannot be unqualifiably substituted. No Big Bang theory ever suggested that any energy is created during the event.
If you are truly trying to understand how these theories work together, and are not just parroting the anti-Evolution crowd's talking points, I suggest you take some time to understand the science underpinning the theories you use in your argument.
Sun already has several engineers working on Derby through Apache. Sun bundles Derby with Glassfish (the newly open-sourced Java EE 5 app server), which also integrates Derby into the app server for the EJB timer service, and bundles it with the Java Enterprise System stack. Sun is actively promoting Derby as a development database. There was a story about it here on Slashdot not too long ago.
Sun used to bundle Cloudscape before IBM bought Informix, and subsequently switched to Pointbase. For App Server 9/Glassfish, they pulled Pointbase and replaced it with Derby.
Based on your original statement, then, a single cancer specialist is not good enough to make a diagnosis so you would need to see many and have all of them confer about your condition for it to be a valid diagnosis. That is foolish.
I never claimed anything like that. An individual medical diagnosis is nothing like a scientific theory. A better way of putting my point using your scenario is: (a single cancer researcher's opinion) (the sum total of all cancer researcher's opinions)
"The masses" have nothing to do with consensus among scientists. I strongly disagree with your idea that science by committee is bad science.
First of all, no need for name calling. Ad hominems are not legitimate argument points, and are beside the point in this question.
Secondly, it is simply not true that there is consensus among climatologists regarding the effects of our warming climate on severe weather, regardless of Gray's views or the Colorado study (a study which, as you point out, refers to Gray's views).
I find it odd that you claim that there is no link between gloabl warming and hurricane strength or frequency, definitively, on the basis of a handfull of experts, but then choose caution when considering the subject matter in full ("...tropical cyclogenesis is so far from full understanding...."). The research is ongoing, and not conclusive, and anyone (Gray, researchers at the U. of Colorado, random dudes on Slashdot) who makes definitive claims about the results of that research is likely wrong. Scientists are usually extremely careful about making such definitive claims.
Your trust in Gray and his views on tropical cyclones has no bearing on the subject matter. He might be right, but sound science is based on an aggregate of research and theory, not faith that this guy understands it better than his peers.
I agree, actually. That's what I was hinting at by caring about the aggregate of scientific opinion on this matter.
There are still geologists that don't accept plate tectonics, for example, and they are smart people at legitimate institutions. I don't care, though, because the vast majority of geologists accept plate tectonics.
The process of misrepresenting the handfull of doubting experts as widespread dissent within the scientific community is entirely political: it's done to sway public opinion and therefore influence public policy, not due to any good-faith debate on the subject by scientists.
Actually, I don't particularly care what one scientist says, or even a small group of scientists says. I care what scientists in aggregate say. Scientists often disagree about what data means.
The problem with the global warming debate as depicted in the press and in the public sphere (as in this Slashdot discussion) is that it is too infused with politics and misrepresentation to be a legitimate discussion of the issues.
Your post is a good example. You cited two sources, and then made this overstatement: "So the brightest minds in hurricanes don't see it and I doubt that they would be in denial....."
The thing is, your customers were basically right. Your (former?) belief that support contracts are a waste of money because the customers rarely if ever call on Microsoft/Sun/Novell ignores the main reason why someone gets a support contract: it's a hedge against their systems failing. It's like claiming that fire insurance is a waste of money because fires are extremely rare. Yes, they're rare, but if you have a fire and don't have insurance, you are SOL.
All the posts here about how newsgroups, IRC, and Google searches provide all the support they need is irrelevent. Support is insurance. They're paying somebody to be an expert in case something bad happens, so if they can't figure it out themselves (maybe after doing some searches on Google etc.) somebody will come in and fix it.
Note that I'm not saying that all support contracts are good investments, or making any claim about the quality of support. I'm talking about the motivation for having them.
It is true that the older systems like HP-UX, Tru64 and VMS aren't GPL'ed, but as I said in another post, it's probably very difficult to do so without either heavy recoding or relicensing of other codebases.
...and that's why Sun came up with and is using the CDDL, as it can be applied per file to avoid having to rewrite or relicense every bit of code that Sun doesn't have full rights to. Plus some stuff about patents.
This whole thing is pure theater, like politicians wearing short-sleeved shirts and baseball caps. Not that IBM and Sun are above these tactics as well....
"No one uses Sun's app server cause its new and immature."
Um, the Application Server is the base of the Java Enterprise Edition SDK, the reference implementation of the Java Enterprise Edition (nee J2EE) platform.
After iPlanet fell apart, Sun combined the SDK team with the remaining iPlanet team to produce the Application Server/Java EE SDK. The code base has been around since the platform was invented.
Granted, the Application Server's gone through way too many name changes (thanks, marketing!), which has probably caused this confusion. But, in a rare bout of sanity, note that J2EE is now Java EE, and J2SE is now Java Standard Edition.
While I agree that many people who watch the Star Wars movies don't understand the plot beyond the basics, I don't think it has anything to do with Episodes I-III themselves, but the fact that plenty (if not most) of people watch movies (Episodes IV-VI included) looking at only explosions and the like.
I still think that Lucas and the filmmakers rightfully deserve the criticism that their movies are poorly executed. The acting is not good in any of the movies, but 4-6 overcame it with a decent story and impressive, spare imagery. It is groan-worthy in 1-3. The plot is convoluted and not explained well. The obvious care taken in the action sequences gives way to sloppy exposition, when not descending to excruciating melodrama.
Anthony Lane's review of "Revenge of the Sith" in the New Yorker details Lucas' shortcomings pretty well, and is hilarious.
The key difference is that in Episode 4, if you didn't understand the scroll, the action immediately reinforces and expands the background in the text.
Episode 3 (and 1-3 generally) doesn't make clear to the audience the key plot points, and it's not great filmmaking if the only key to understanding the action is a brief, scrolling text prologue.
If adults can't understand why the characters are doing whatever they're doing onscreen, how are kids (and these are kids movies for the most part) supposed to figure it out?
From TFA: "One hyperverbal friend was able to spit it out because he had read and memorized the opening crawl."
Stephenson's point is that the important back story for this section of the movie is only explicitly (and only partially) explained in the text prologue. Further, the viewing audience doesn't seem to care much whose ship it is, and happily make the movie a blockbuster without understanding the important plot points. In other words, the plot is secondary to the action sequences in the new movie, and it doesn't matter (the geeks get their background elsewhere, and the non-geeks get to veg out and watch cool f/x).
Want further proof? Ask 10 random people what the the phantom menace referred to in Episode 1's title was, why was it a chimera, and why was it important to the events in the series? I'd be surprised if more than one or two people were able to explain it.
Stephenson has a lot more clout than whining Star Wars fanboys, and knows a thing or two about storytelling.
Second quarter, 2005 is when the source will be available for the core OS (non-essential stuff will be released sometime later). It's the beginning of the second quarter now, so sometime between now and the end of June the source will be up.
They usually do provide both. I work on the J2EE Tutorial, which documents the APIs included in the J2EE platform. There's also the Java Tutorial, which documents the standard JDK/JRE platform APIs. For other APIs, check the BluePrints or other tutorials & code camps. Not to mention the case studies and the code samples bundled with other distributions.
The problem with including tutorial or extensive sample material in API documentation is it's too disparate, and not useful when dealing with more complex applications that use a number of APIs. If you're writing a servlet that uses JDBC to pull data from a database, where does the sample code go?
Slashdot Mirror
The reason Sun (and any other company with trademarks or servicemarks) appends nouns to their marks is to protect the trademark. The way trademark law works here is that you have to actively protect your trademarks or else lose them to common usage. The textbook example is Xerox, where "xeroxing" became a generic term for photocopying paper. Because Xerox didn't do enough to discourage the generic use of their trademarks, they ended up losing their trademark protections.
It's the same reason why Google officially wants you to "use a Google search for 'trademark issues'", not 'google 'trademark issues'".
I make no claims about how useful or rational or successful this legal strategy is, but that's the back-story.
This is true. I meant that EJB and Hibernate were both attempts to solve the object persistence problem.
Before 3.0 there were three types of EJBs: session beans, for business logic; message beans for messaging; entity beans for object persistence. Entity beans have been replaced by the Java Persistence API, which is, essentially, Hibernate.next (Hibernate now is a Java Persistence provider, as is TopLink). So the more correct phrasing would be "Entity EJBs and Hibernate were both attempts to solve the object persistence problem."
This is incorrect. Hibernate uses CGLIB and ASM to do runtime magic. They explain this in their FAQs. Rails is possible because Ruby gives developers power that Java denies unless you do magic like that.
That's not what I meant, and it's a non-sequitor anyway. Hibernate uses CGLIB to do runtime optimization, which they admit provides a very minor improvement over the JVM's reflection API. A Hibernate user doesn't deal with any bytecode optimization. That is, these are backend performance improvements completely separate from the developer, and are in no way special to Hibernate or EJB containers or whatever. I fail to see what this has to do with either the end developer or with Ruby, especially since Ruby is no performance champ. The fact that there's bytecode optimization happening in the JVM at runtime neither proves nor disproves that Java APIs are powerful/easy to use. I imagine the Ruby interpreter does optimization, just like the JVM, so the same could be said of Ruby. What does this have to do with the APIs that developers are coding to?
Regardless, you're right that Hibernate and TopLink and other alternate object persistent frameworks caused Sun to rethink the existence of entity beans. Session and message beans are a different story, though.
And note that Hibernate came from outside Sun. Sun's attempt at the same the same thing was EJB, which has been deservedly, if belatedly, shot in the head.
Absolutely not true. First of all, Hibernate came after EJB, and neither Hibernate nor EJB does any bytecode manipulation or other JVM tricks. Second, EJB is very much alive (3.0 was just was voted final by the JCP, yesterday, along with the Java EE 5 platform spec), and was designed with a lot of the features of Hibernate in mind (Gavin King is on the EJB 3.0 expert committee). EJB 3.0 beans are much simpler to write (they're regular Java classes decorated with annotations) and configure (no more XML deployment descriptors, and the container provides reasonable defaults that you change on a case-by-case basis via annotations).
You should really check out the features in Java EE 5. It was designed to make developer's lives easier.
Here's the article the guy was probably referring to. Maybe things have changed since then, maybe not.
"I still can't fathom why people think Ruby lacks transaction, security, and connectivity."
With Java EE, I can define business methods which automatically gain transaction attributes. I don't have to explicitly define transaction attributes, and ensure that any calls to a particular method happen within a transaction context. The transaction context is implicit, and goes beyond just database calls.
I've never tried to connect to connect a RoR app into a legacy datasource that uses CORBA, but I can imagine it would be a nightmare. Is there even a Ruby ORB? I doubt it. Granted, CORBA isn't used all that much, but if you need it you need it. With J2EE Connectors it's treated as just another datasource. That's what I mean by "connectivity."
Security contexts are defined on the app server level, and can be configured at deploy time and altered at run time rather than coded into the app. Do you want to make a component only accessible to a particular role? How about a particular method? Or an entire app? All of this can be configured pretty easily. If you need to integrate your app with an outside authorization mechanism, it's just a matter of configuring a particular realm in the app server.
The point is, these features are practically useless to developers working on a solitary web app (even one that gets a lot of hits). RoR or one of the other quick development frameworks really shine in these cases. But Java EE exists for a reason. A pickup truck can haul a lot of things, and is a really useful thing to have around. If you have to move a family of 5 to another city, the limitations are overwhelming.
No offense, but the oft-repeated anecdote about hundreds of poor schlups being forced to code horrendously overweight J2EE-apps while consultants wheel-away wheelbarrows full of cash doesn't ring true to me. What organization has this kind of money and time, especially since the downturn and what with offshoring development and all? Where are these companies?
I also question your use of the term "mainstream." One person's niche technology is the next person's mainstream one. There are different market segments for development frameworks and technologies. Ones that require the sort of transaction, security, and connectivity capabilities that exist in Java EE would find RoR severely lacking. As you found out, stand-alone web apps with low numbers of concurrent users don't need the security, transaction, and connectivity support in Java EE, so those developers don't use it.
If you're using J2EE/Java EE for simple data-driven web sites a la RoR, then you're probably not the target developer for the Java EE platform. I have nothing against these web frameworks and the people who love them, I should add. It's just that the average /.er doesn't see the need for the features that are at the core of enterprise Java, and therefore they dismiss the platform as being too heavyweight. Sure, for small-scale development. The same mentality pops up in discussions on whether, e.g. MySQL needs transactions. It's kind of like hearing somebody who once built a dog house talk about the design requirements of a skyscraper.
With that being said, Java EE 5 will make enterprise Java developer's lives much easier. EJBs, everyone's favorite whipping boy, are a lot easier to code now.
From the press release:f lash.20051114.2.html
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-11/sun
"...research shows that UltraSPARC T1 processor performance could eliminate the number of Web servers in the world by half, slashing power requirements and having the same effect in reducing carbon dioxide emissions as planting one million acres of trees.(1)"
(1) Discover Magazine Vol 26 No. 08 August 2005
So, for all the Slashbots out there complaining about this bit of marketing hoo-haa, you'll have to up your rhetoric accordingly.
I know you were being sarcastic, but I was responding more to the idea that San Francisco is going to turn into a Kurt Russell movie set post-handgun ban. A law which will likely get thrown out in court, I might add (which is why I voted against it).
1) That's a bit of tautalogy, isn't it?
2) Sure, but per capita gun violence and murder is a lot lower in London compared to SF, and England as a whole is a lot safer than the US. Canada, on the other hand, has more guns, but less gun violence, so there's that (although handguns aren't as prevalent in Canada).
3) Don't know much about gun violence down under.
I think the mythology surrounding guns in the US has a lot more to do with our violent crime rate than simple gun ownership. I have no idea how to change that.
I live in San Francisco, and not a day goes by that I don't see a cackling criminal hellbent on destruction, twirling his mustache, about to cause untold carnage with a firearm, only to be thwarted by a civilian carrying a legal, licensed handgun. It's truly a sight to behold. The only thing keeping San Francisco from turning into Lagos is the vast handgun toting populace, not the police, not the legal system. And now we've gone ahead and ruined it.
It'll be just like the veritable river of blood that is...London, England.
Disclaimer: I voted against the handgun ban, but give me a break.
Nope. Try reading (and understanding) your scientific principles again.
a) Evolution doesn't say that everything is getting more organized over time.
b) The second law of thermodynamics describes closed systems. The universe as a whole is a closed system, but an enormous one. The earth isn't a closed system. For one, it receives energy from the sun. The second law of thermodynamics doesn't require an "orderly" entropy; it only says that, eventually, all states in a closed system move to disorder. The operative word is "eventually."
c) According to your (mis)understanding of the second law of thermodynamics, it would be impossible for anything to grow more complex. For you to be consistent, you'd have to also believe that plants wouldn't grow, fertilization of sperm & egg could not occur, and ionic bonding is impossible.
Again, you don't understand what you are talking about. Not the Big Bang, not E=MC2. Matter and energy cannot be unqualifiably substituted. No Big Bang theory ever suggested that any energy is created during the event.
If you are truly trying to understand how these theories work together, and are not just parroting the anti-Evolution crowd's talking points, I suggest you take some time to understand the science underpinning the theories you use in your argument.
Sun already has several engineers working on Derby through Apache. Sun bundles Derby with Glassfish (the newly open-sourced Java EE 5 app server), which also integrates Derby into the app server for the EJB timer service, and bundles it with the Java Enterprise System stack. Sun is actively promoting Derby as a development database. There was a story about it here on Slashdot not too long ago.
Sun used to bundle Cloudscape before IBM bought Informix, and subsequently switched to Pointbase. For App Server 9/Glassfish, they pulled Pointbase and replaced it with Derby.
Based on your original statement, then, a single cancer specialist is not good enough to make a diagnosis so you would need to see many and have all of them confer about your condition for it to be a valid diagnosis. That is foolish.
I never claimed anything like that. An individual medical diagnosis is nothing like a scientific theory. A better way of putting my point using your scenario is:
(a single cancer researcher's opinion) (the sum total of all cancer researcher's opinions)
"The masses" have nothing to do with consensus among scientists. I strongly disagree with your idea that science by committee is bad science.
First of all, no need for name calling. Ad hominems are not legitimate argument points, and are beside the point in this question.
Secondly, it is simply not true that there is consensus among climatologists regarding the effects of our warming climate on severe weather, regardless of Gray's views or the Colorado study (a study which, as you point out, refers to Gray's views).
I find it odd that you claim that there is no link between gloabl warming and hurricane strength or frequency, definitively, on the basis of a handfull of experts, but then choose caution when considering the subject matter in full ("...tropical cyclogenesis is so far from full understanding...."). The research is ongoing, and not conclusive, and anyone (Gray, researchers at the U. of Colorado, random dudes on Slashdot) who makes definitive claims about the results of that research is likely wrong. Scientists are usually extremely careful about making such definitive claims.
Your trust in Gray and his views on tropical cyclones has no bearing on the subject matter. He might be right, but sound science is based on an aggregate of research and theory, not faith that this guy understands it better than his peers.
I agree, actually. That's what I was hinting at by caring about the aggregate of scientific opinion on this matter.
There are still geologists that don't accept plate tectonics, for example, and they are smart people at legitimate institutions. I don't care, though, because the vast majority of geologists accept plate tectonics.
The process of misrepresenting the handfull of doubting experts as widespread dissent within the scientific community is entirely political: it's done to sway public opinion and therefore influence public policy, not due to any good-faith debate on the subject by scientists.
Actually, I don't particularly care what one scientist says, or even a small group of scientists says. I care what scientists in aggregate say. Scientists often disagree about what data means.
The problem with the global warming debate as depicted in the press and in the public sphere (as in this Slashdot discussion) is that it is too infused with politics and misrepresentation to be a legitimate discussion of the issues.
Your post is a good example. You cited two sources, and then made this overstatement:
"So the brightest minds in hurricanes don't see it and I doubt that they would be in denial....."
Two sources do not a consensus make.
The thing is, your customers were basically right. Your (former?) belief that support contracts are a waste of money because the customers rarely if ever call on Microsoft/Sun/Novell ignores the main reason why someone gets a support contract: it's a hedge against their systems failing. It's like claiming that fire insurance is a waste of money because fires are extremely rare. Yes, they're rare, but if you have a fire and don't have insurance, you are SOL.
All the posts here about how newsgroups, IRC, and Google searches provide all the support they need is irrelevent. Support is insurance. They're paying somebody to be an expert in case something bad happens, so if they can't figure it out themselves (maybe after doing some searches on Google etc.) somebody will come in and fix it.
Note that I'm not saying that all support contracts are good investments, or making any claim about the quality of support. I'm talking about the motivation for having them.
This whole thing is pure theater, like politicians wearing short-sleeved shirts and baseball caps. Not that IBM and Sun are above these tactics as well....
"No one uses Sun's app server cause its new and immature."
Um, the Application Server is the base of the Java Enterprise Edition SDK, the reference implementation of the Java Enterprise Edition (nee J2EE) platform.
After iPlanet fell apart, Sun combined the SDK team with the remaining iPlanet team to produce the Application Server/Java EE SDK. The code base has been around since the platform was invented.
Granted, the Application Server's gone through way too many name changes (thanks, marketing!), which has probably caused this confusion. But, in a rare bout of sanity, note that J2EE is now Java EE, and J2SE is now Java Standard Edition.
Look at definitions 1b and 2 here:n ary&va=chimera&x=0&y=0
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictio
You can use "chimera" to mean "illusory." Just like "phantom" doesn't have to mean "apparition" or "wraith."
I still think that Lucas and the filmmakers rightfully deserve the criticism that their movies are poorly executed. The acting is not good in any of the movies, but 4-6 overcame it with a decent story and impressive, spare imagery. It is groan-worthy in 1-3. The plot is convoluted and not explained well. The obvious care taken in the action sequences gives way to sloppy exposition, when not descending to excruciating melodrama.
Anthony Lane's review of "Revenge of the Sith" in the New Yorker details Lucas' shortcomings pretty well, and is hilarious.
The key difference is that in Episode 4, if you didn't understand the scroll, the action immediately reinforces and expands the background in the text.
Episode 3 (and 1-3 generally) doesn't make clear to the audience the key plot points, and it's not great filmmaking if the only key to understanding the action is a brief, scrolling text prologue.
If adults can't understand why the characters are doing whatever they're doing onscreen, how are kids (and these are kids movies for the most part) supposed to figure it out?
From TFA:
"One hyperverbal friend was able to spit it out because he had read and memorized the opening crawl."
Stephenson's point is that the important back story for this section of the movie is only explicitly (and only partially) explained in the text prologue. Further, the viewing audience doesn't seem to care much whose ship it is, and happily make the movie a blockbuster without understanding the important plot points. In other words, the plot is secondary to the action sequences in the new movie, and it doesn't matter (the geeks get their background elsewhere, and the non-geeks get to veg out and watch cool f/x).
Want further proof? Ask 10 random people what the the phantom menace referred to in Episode 1's title was, why was it a chimera, and why was it important to the events in the series? I'd be surprised if more than one or two people were able to explain it.
Stephenson has a lot more clout than whining Star Wars fanboys, and knows a thing or two about storytelling.
If you looked at the links on the left hand side of the page, you'd see a button called Roadmap, which points here:
http://www.opensolaris.org/roadmap/index.html
Second quarter, 2005 is when the source will be available for the core OS (non-essential stuff will be released sometime later). It's the beginning of the second quarter now, so sometime between now and the end of June the source will be up.
-i
They usually do provide both. I work on the J2EE Tutorial, which documents the APIs included in the J2EE platform. There's also the Java Tutorial, which documents the standard JDK/JRE platform APIs. For other APIs, check the BluePrints or other tutorials & code camps. Not to mention the case studies and the code samples bundled with other distributions.
The problem with including tutorial or extensive sample material in API documentation is it's too disparate, and not useful when dealing with more complex applications that use a number of APIs. If you're writing a servlet that uses JDBC to pull data from a database, where does the sample code go?
-ian