The Farnsworth fusor is very dirty producing lots of fast neutrons, which make everything in the vicinity a hot isotope of what it once was, including people.
I wouldn't mind being hot for a change! As for isotope, i'll have to look that up.
That was my reaction to IDEs in general, and for Java I was using Emacs+JDE for years.
Eclipse is an IDE without all the crap you usually
associate with an IDE. JDE isn't bad, but it's nothing like Eclipse.
Eclipse's debugging support in particular is way
better than JDEs (which took me some hours to configure properly). Not to mention that Eclipse
let's you do really neat things, like stop the debugger right before an exception was thrown,
fix the bug, and continue with the debugging as if nothing had happened!
Eclipse is distributed under the CPL, which is a free but GPL-incompatible license.
I don't think this will be a problem with the Classpath library, since iits license provides the "library exception", but in general it will make linking with other GPL licensed software a hassle.
Don't get me wrong, I like Eclipse and use it a lot. It's faster and better looking than Netbeans (plus I have no use for the GUI builder part of Netbeans), and SWT is a great idea.
I'm just pointing out that there are still license incompatibilities lying around between major free
software projects (remember the Python licensing controversy?), and wish that copyright holders will do something to resolve them.
You're right, ignorance of the law is no excuse, but Microsoft is not the one breaking the law here. The publicly funded college/university is.
Worst case for Microsoft is that the "cheap licenses" contract is no longer binding. The university still has to obtain licenses for the software it's already using.
The copyright on Beethoven's 9th has expired, but there is definitely a copyright on its performances.
You may be able to form your own orchestra and start
performing Beethoven without paying royalties to anyone, but record companies still hold the rights to most recordings of his music. Actually I don't think that the copyright on any
recording or film has expired yet (maybe some early phonograph records).
The copyright on music you hear now won't expire until some time in the next century.
Interesting, but not new...
on
Software For Ransom
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Check for example Kelsey and Schneier's "Street Performer Protocol", published a couple years back in First Monday:
There the idea is that the "author" promises to deliver his "work" (a novel, software, anything),
as soon as he receives a certain amount of donations.
Stephen King actually tried to publish a book like that, chapter by chapter, a few years ago, but I think he concluded that the time wasn't right
for it yet.
No. If they can't protect my data, they have no business storing them in the first place. If they do, it's their responsibility to keep them safe, and, at the very least, let me know when they're compromised.
Not to mention the healthy effect of getting companies to actually pay some attention to security, or face at least some bad publicity if they don't.
The subset of SQL most people are using is not,
but SQL is Turing complete. The latest version of the standard, SQL3, is Turing complete (Its object sublanguage also supports some features you won't find in regular OO languages, like generalized dispatch.)
You could probably get Turing-completeness in
SQL92 using triggers, if you felt like it.
His use of terminology is inconsistent, but he's right.
You can have pieces of data that a commited transaction has changed, but are still in memory buffers and have not gone to disk yet. Then some idiot trips on the power cord.
Now, the transaction was commited, but the data on disk still reflect the old state of the database. That's why when the database comes back up, it has to replay the log, and make sure that the changes do make it to disk.
There's a beautiful (family of) algorithm(s) called ARIES
that specifies how you do that properly.
It's tricky, especially when you want to ensure that the process will work, even if the server goes down while the database is trying to recover
The only thing this 'study' proves is that ONE SPECIFIC native compiler, gcj, is sometimes slower than mature JIT implementations, for this guy's specific setup.
Using a CS101 quality 'primes' program as one of his 'benchmarks' didn't impress me either.
That's just because the US changed the way it measures unemployment, and only counts people that are eligible, and have applied for unemployment benefits.
So if you stay unemployed for more than N months, and are now ineligible for unemployment benefits, you're no longer counted.
my 'build.pl' invokes javac once for all the files that need compilation - it checks my source folders for changed timestamps and recompiles all the changed files with one invocation of 'javac'.
The problem with that is that there may be files that were not changed, but still need to be recompiled (suppose for example you remove a public method from class A, and you're using that method in class B - how does your perl script discover that B.java should be recompiled, even if it has not changed?)
If you write a typical Makefile for Java the way you do it for C/C++ (with rules for.java.class, dependencies etc.) make takes much too long on any largish project.
This is because it invokes javac (or whatever compiler you're using) once for every changed file, and javac is slow as hell to startup (create a new VM, load the compiler classes and so on).
Ant only invokes javac once, reusing the same VM, thus saving you tons of time.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't mind being hot for a change! As for isotope, i'll have to look that up.
Eclipse is an IDE without all the crap you usually associate with an IDE. JDE isn't bad, but it's nothing like Eclipse. Eclipse's debugging support in particular is way better than JDEs (which took me some hours to configure properly). Not to mention that Eclipse let's you do really neat things, like stop the debugger right before an exception was thrown, fix the bug, and continue with the debugging as if nothing had happened!
I don't think this will be a problem with the Classpath library, since iits license provides the "library exception", but in general it will make linking with other GPL licensed software a hassle.
Don't get me wrong, I like Eclipse and use it a lot. It's faster and better looking than Netbeans (plus I have no use for the GUI builder part of Netbeans), and SWT is a great idea. I'm just pointing out that there are still license incompatibilities lying around between major free software projects (remember the Python licensing controversy?), and wish that copyright holders will do something to resolve them.
Worst case for Microsoft is that the "cheap licenses" contract is no longer binding. The university still has to obtain licenses for the software it's already using.
We won't get those until the year 2525.
and there are several research prototypes that can do it (check out a paper from Cornell, or just google for query-by-humming)
The copyright on Beethoven's 9th has expired, but there is definitely a copyright on its performances.
You may be able to form your own orchestra and start performing Beethoven without paying royalties to anyone, but record companies still hold the rights to most recordings of his music. Actually I don't think that the copyright on any recording or film has expired yet (maybe some early phonograph records).
The copyright on music you hear now won't expire until some time in the next century.
The Street Performer Protocol and Digital Copyrights
There the idea is that the "author" promises to deliver his "work" (a novel, software, anything), as soon as he receives a certain amount of donations. Stephen King actually tried to publish a book like that, chapter by chapter, a few years ago, but I think he concluded that the time wasn't right for it yet.
absolutely. sic transit gloria.
Now I'm amazed...
Not to mention the healthy effect of getting companies to actually pay some attention to security, or face at least some bad publicity if they don't.
The subset of SQL most people are using is not, but SQL is Turing complete. The latest version of the standard, SQL3, is Turing complete (Its object sublanguage also supports some features you won't find in regular OO languages, like generalized dispatch.)
You could probably get Turing-completeness in SQL92 using triggers, if you felt like it.
Very carefully.
Think again. If it is legal to distribute the code, they won't bother.
You can have pieces of data that a commited transaction has changed, but are still in memory buffers and have not gone to disk yet. Then some idiot trips on the power cord.
Now, the transaction was commited, but the data on disk still reflect the old state of the database. That's why when the database comes back up, it has to replay the log, and make sure that the changes do make it to disk.
There's a beautiful (family of) algorithm(s) called ARIES that specifies how you do that properly.
It's tricky, especially when you want to ensure that the process will work, even if the server goes down while the database is trying to recover
Using a CS101 quality 'primes' program as one of his 'benchmarks' didn't impress me either.
So if you stay unemployed for more than N months, and are now ineligible for unemployment benefits, you're no longer counted.
Now there's some creative economics!
Sell a man a fish, and he'll pay you once. Sell him a fish pole, and he'll be paying that service contract for the rest of his life!
Adobe will just stop localizing its software for these markets, so you won't be able to pirate it either.
Goat milk is actually quite good. More taste in there than cow milk, and less fat than sheep milk. You got to try it!
'Roswell that ends well' was hilarious!
The Simpsons are going OK I guess - not great, but still worth watching.
I prefer newfs /dev/hda1 myself, much faster :-)
It's called POSIX
The problem with that is that there may be files that were not changed, but still need to be recompiled (suppose for example you remove a public method from class A, and you're using that method in class B - how does your perl script discover that B.java should be recompiled, even if it has not changed?)
This is because it invokes javac (or whatever compiler you're using) once for every changed file, and javac is slow as hell to startup (create a new VM, load the compiler classes and so on).
Ant only invokes javac once, reusing the same VM, thus saving you tons of time.