Its already destroyed. Oracle just don't have the mojo Sun had. Try searching for things on java and you invariably end up with an Oracle landing page that doesn't remember all the knowledge Sun had shared. Check out their wiki now, its bloody pathetic. Check out the old Sun blog site and you would see useless junk. Oracle is the wrong steward for Java and that is never going to change. I bailed out and am now spending my free time working with Nodejs and Mongodb. Alas, its only a matter of time before some heartless and soul-less company like Oracle buys both of them and give them a kiss of death.
I think this is probably one place Stallman would be saying "I told you so" with no great enthusiasm and one place where Adam Smith finds himself with an all mighty hard-on and smug self satisfied grin that will make your skin crawl now that Ole Shylock has his pound of flesh and lo, without a drop of blood being spilled.
Imagine if the Russians had armed and trained Serbia to the point where the Serbs felt they could forcefully re-integrate Kosovo back into their territory. What do you think Nato or the EU forces have done. Pretty much everyone I have read seems to think that the use of force to settle disputes is acceptable. It was wrong of the Georgians to think that they had to resort to violence to get Ossetia back, even more so with Russians "peace keepers" there. It was equally wrong of the Russians to have responded to Georgia with violence. What I hate is this damned moralizing as if one country has rights which are somehow divine to violently intervene to settle differences. All this talk of empires and genocide is the wrong response. So, what stopped Georgia demonstrating to the Ossetians and the Russians, given their democracy and their free markets, that they wouldn't eventually win the argument for the future? An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind said the good Lord. I say none of them deserve to be the guardians of peace and freedom, for such a state for ever defended and expanded at the point of a gun can only accumulates one's nation's quota of bad karma.
The problem is the green house gases the dominant species of this planet has been releasing into the atmosphere. A good place to see its effects is Venus. Does a 2 degree drop in solar activity make that place any milder? The forecasts climatologists are making are stretched out decades into the future. Personally, I feel they have underestimated. The future is going to be far toastier than they predict.
Monopoloy in of itself is not a bad thing. They are nothing more than local maxima (or minima) on a market landscape. I believe, it is a fundamental right of every capitalist to aspire to total market dominance. You cannot have a "free" market on one hand whilst forbidding the emergence of monopoly on the other. Microsoft didn't get taken to court for being a monopoly. They were found guilty of using illegal means to maintain and extend their monolopy not for being one.
Wasn't HDi one of the main bones of contention that caused the schism in the first place? I remember reading Microsoft wanted to enter the consumer software market on the back of HDi should HDDVD have won. Look up the supporters of the HDDVD from a computer industry perspective, you will find that the Wintel camp went with HDDVD.
I would have agreed with you about 10 or 15 years ago. So you tell me where the professional me stop and the personal me start? I pretty much work round the clock for a larg US multinational, where my professional space and my personal space are intertwined like a devil's knot. I think the point is, the network has changed the boundaries between the two spaces, perhaps even eliminated it. Personally, I think CNN should allow all their employees blog or do what ever else they want to do with their own free time. I personally think, this would be a good thing for everyone. The best thing CNN has going for them are their people. These people can be great ambassadors for the company. One only needs to look to http://blogs.sun.com/ to realize how Sun has figured out a way to provide a corporate sponsored blogspace whilst at the same time excersice a degree of implicit control over the content.
Does it seem that Microsoft is leveraging their dominance on the desktop again? Though this feature is only available to their newer versions of Office, it does seem to me that there is a whole reservoir of advertising dollars witing to be tapped by them. I can't wait for the day when I will be entertained and distracted to death by them turing their entire platform into one huge digital billboard. As it is, I have the attention span of a mosquito since the web came to be. On the bright side, perhaps they will give away their whole platform for free and whilst at the same time providing me with imaginative excuses for not having turned in my book report.
E8 is another group with some special properties. The author of the paper is claiming that E8 contains the Standard Model (SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1)), plus the symmetries belonging to gravity. And what are those symmetries belonging to gravity?
It is quite reasonable actually. But then what is reason? Why or for that matter how is the universe reasonable? We all have our poisons, you have your God and I, my equations. Doesn't the book say, 'do no harm?' and its that bit that mightly trouble the believers because Darwin's model is amoral not just a-religious. Am I here because there is some innate good in me or that I deserve to be here? Why are you here and where are you going? What exactly is right and wrong? Can evolution be used as a moral compass? As one who has been a software engineer, I know that beauty and truth is not sufficient in itself to ensure survival. Good things do become extinct. It might sound as if I am a pessimist. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am part of this world as much as the world is part of me. The complexity of the model is a function of the society that develops it. All human societies have had gods but only one civilization birthed us a Darwin. IMO, theology belong in in the early chapters in the history of scientific thought. It is like those helper wheels on your first cycle, crutches, if you will. Helping to make sense of this world and thos around you. We have come a long way since then. But I guess a lot of us still need helper wheels to get around, to make sense of things. Nothing wrong there, nothing unreasonable.
I notice that a lot of folks are busy justifying the x86 platform. I tried really hard to like what apple is trying to do but I can't. I spend a lot of time and energy harping on how good the ppc platform really is compared to x86 to the point where I even dug into the ppc assembly code. I really like the ppc. Maybe I am deluded or delusional but I can't unsay all the good things I said about the ppc, especially the g5 for me to start bitching about it now that Apple wants to part company with it.
I don't believe Apple when they say that intel is technically better or commercially better than the ppc platform. Even a cursory crawl of slashdot's apple archives would show you that the ppc is a viable platform. In the end, I think Apple could not stomach IBM's road map, Apple did not have the balls to go where IBM is going with the next generation of PPC. There is a new war brewing between the old school and IBM's take on where the "future" is, between the console and the desktop. There is life in RISC yet.
So, having backed the PPC for the last four years, I am not going back. I might be wrong but I 'd be damned if I am inconsistent!
Due to Microsoft's monopoly, water actually flows upstream. If you do accept Microsoft being a monopoly, then you have to accept that their developer universe is immeasurably larger than Gnome's. The concequence of this will result in mono developers joining F500 company to work with.Net becacuse Mono lowers the barriers for one to learn.Net.
Given Microsoft's ownership of.Net, they have the power and the pockets to maintain enough variability in the platform to keep Mono continually behind the curve. This is not theoritical,.Net is windows and it will change with each version of Windows. Mono is coplanar with.Net while what is needed is something that is orthogonal. Java is such a thing, Mozilla/XUL is such a thing.
The Spaniard is one smart cookie nonetheless. I just wish he was wise. I mean why cant he take all that testosterone and embrace and extend Mozilla? There a oodles of W3C specs which if implemented with passion and vision would create a platform compelling enough to get developers like myself join the effort. Mono is a divider not a uniter and in the end what divides us will kill us.
"Don't get me wrong, I am not blaming President Bush for all of this." I wailed when George Bush was declared victor. At that point I had decided to stay away from all news till either President Bush was defeated or retired. September changed all that, for about a year I was really behind the President. I was even for the war in Iraq and the war changed everything I felt.
I think this administration has had its pound of flesh. I thought I knew what I was about. Going into the war, I had concluded the war as being just. Now I am not so sure. The President drew first blood, its that bit which is most bothersome. The position that I now hold is that the anxiety about terrorist attackts from Iraq was probably justified but to go to war over one's anxieties is insane. Pre-emption is I think only justified when one is faced with anihilation like Israel was in 1967
None of these sentiments mean that I hate America or Americans. I believe that America is one of the better things that have come history's ways in a long time. Even in the worst of occasions. When you say people, most of these "people" know only the President (plus assorted characters from American TV shows) so when they say they hate America or Americans, most of the time they mean your President. I personally do not hate your President. I think the man has some admirable qualities. But a job is a job, he is President and he has made a mistake which I franky do not think Presidents should make, he went to war for all the wrong reasons. I can say or do what ever I want to since I am just a civilian but Presidents and Prime Ministers do not have that luxury.
Why in God's name should hate speech be forbidden? And to say that "freedom of speech" should be revoked, how exactly are you going to do that, cutting off tongues? My emotions are expressions of myself. Sometimes they use the medium of words. Sometimes those words can be hurtful and down right evil. But words are not the only way I can express hate or anger. To deny speech is to deny human emotions. America and for that matter the rest of the world is just going though a bad patch. It will pass like it always does. Every once in a while history seems to come to a place where it believes ends justifying the means. Believing so has always caused trouble. This time is no different. Plenty of fluids and sleep should take care of this bit of patchiness.
Can code be poetry? There is a secret place where I sometimes find myself, its a magical place. A serene calm comes over me when I am there, the soft purring of my machig, the gentle tapping of my keyboard hardly distracts. There are brief and sublime moments when logic is no longer requires concious effort, it intuitive, and transparent, like breathing, where my instructions to move electons from one gate to another are in harmony. I have often tried to capture these moments, so that I can set them down in words but perhaps rightly, they are like the dreams you have just as you slip into slumber, try to hold on to them and you find yourself awake. I usually find these moments when I can abstract out arbitrary number of classes and substitute an interface, thereby achieving symmetry. I feel the poetry in code comes from some form of symmetry, where you have taken a number of seeming unrelated concepts and constructs and compress them into a singe idea; like einstien's mass energy concervation principle (in itself a supreme example of polymorphism or haiku poetry)
I think the point the poet-programmer is trying to make is that though the set of words are finite, the reality the poet seeks to describe is infinite and ever changing. If code is another way of expressing something about the world we live in, then surely even a lowly, lonely programmer is a poet for there will ever be newer ways of putting words togather to create beuty.
There is just one bit about what you said that was quite puzzling "freedom is freedom for all, not for a few." That should also include freedom to dominate and the freedom to be dominated. Frankly when i first heard of Bugs On Line I felt like that screwed up Daffy in the Black and White days. But on a little more reflection, i came to realize that Bugs on line does not pose a serious threat to your freedoms because BOL does not have an ideology for dominating your life. BOL will be a mosaic of competing interests many of which will be pulling it in a billion different directions. If we have learnt anything from the communists its the simple fact that to be unipolar ideological woldview is boring. The only way BOL can dominate is if it gave us what we want. Personally, BOL does give me the cartoon network and I am eternally greatful for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Its already destroyed. Oracle just don't have the mojo Sun had. Try searching for things on java and you invariably end up with an Oracle landing page that doesn't remember all the knowledge Sun had shared. Check out their wiki now, its bloody pathetic. Check out the old Sun blog site and you would see useless junk. Oracle is the wrong steward for Java and that is never going to change. I bailed out and am now spending my free time working with Nodejs and Mongodb. Alas, its only a matter of time before some heartless and soul-less company like Oracle buys both of them and give them a kiss of death.
I think this is probably one place Stallman would be saying "I told you so" with no great enthusiasm and one place where Adam Smith finds himself with an all mighty hard-on and smug self satisfied grin that will make your skin crawl now that Ole Shylock has his pound of flesh and lo, without a drop of blood being spilled.
Imagine if the Russians had armed and trained Serbia to the point where the Serbs felt they could forcefully re-integrate Kosovo back into their territory. What do you think Nato or the EU forces have done. Pretty much everyone I have read seems to think that the use of force to settle disputes is acceptable. It was wrong of the Georgians to think that they had to resort to violence to get Ossetia back, even more so with Russians "peace keepers" there. It was equally wrong of the Russians to have responded to Georgia with violence. What I hate is this damned moralizing as if one country has rights which are somehow divine to violently intervene to settle differences. All this talk of empires and genocide is the wrong response. So, what stopped Georgia demonstrating to the Ossetians and the Russians, given their democracy and their free markets, that they wouldn't eventually win the argument for the future? An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind said the good Lord. I say none of them deserve to be the guardians of peace and freedom, for such a state for ever defended and expanded at the point of a gun can only accumulates one's nation's quota of bad karma.
The problem is the green house gases the dominant species of this planet has been releasing into the atmosphere. A good place to see its effects is Venus. Does a 2 degree drop in solar activity make that place any milder? The forecasts climatologists are making are stretched out decades into the future. Personally, I feel they have underestimated. The future is going to be far toastier than they predict.
Monopoloy in of itself is not a bad thing. They are nothing more than local maxima (or minima) on a market landscape. I believe, it is a fundamental right of every capitalist to aspire to total market dominance. You cannot have a "free" market on one hand whilst forbidding the emergence of monopoly on the other. Microsoft didn't get taken to court for being a monopoly. They were found guilty of using illegal means to maintain and extend their monolopy not for being one.
Wasn't HDi one of the main bones of contention that caused the schism in the first place? I remember reading Microsoft wanted to enter the consumer software market on the back of HDi should HDDVD have won. Look up the supporters of the HDDVD from a computer industry perspective, you will find that the Wintel camp went with HDDVD.
I would have agreed with you about 10 or 15 years ago. So you tell me where the professional me stop and the personal me start? I pretty much work round the clock for a larg US multinational, where my professional space and my personal space are intertwined like a devil's knot. I think the point is, the network has changed the boundaries between the two spaces, perhaps even eliminated it. Personally, I think CNN should allow all their employees blog or do what ever else they want to do with their own free time. I personally think, this would be a good thing for everyone. The best thing CNN has going for them are their people. These people can be great ambassadors for the company. One only needs to look to http://blogs.sun.com/ to realize how Sun has figured out a way to provide a corporate sponsored blogspace whilst at the same time excersice a degree of implicit control over the content.
Does it seem that Microsoft is leveraging their dominance on the desktop again? Though this feature is only available to their newer versions of Office, it does seem to me that there is a whole reservoir of advertising dollars witing to be tapped by them. I can't wait for the day when I will be entertained and distracted to death by them turing their entire platform into one huge digital billboard. As it is, I have the attention span of a mosquito since the web came to be. On the bright side, perhaps they will give away their whole platform for free and whilst at the same time providing me with imaginative excuses for not having turned in my book report.
Why can't publicly funded surveillance feed be made public in real time?
It is quite reasonable actually. But then what is reason? Why or for that matter how is the universe reasonable? We all have our poisons, you have your God and I, my equations. Doesn't the book say, 'do no harm?' and its that bit that mightly trouble the believers because Darwin's model is amoral not just a-religious. Am I here because there is some innate good in me or that I deserve to be here? Why are you here and where are you going? What exactly is right and wrong? Can evolution be used as a moral compass? As one who has been a software engineer, I know that beauty and truth is not sufficient in itself to ensure survival. Good things do become extinct. It might sound as if I am a pessimist. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am part of this world as much as the world is part of me. The complexity of the model is a function of the society that develops it. All human societies have had gods but only one civilization birthed us a Darwin. IMO, theology belong in in the early chapters in the history of scientific thought. It is like those helper wheels on your first cycle, crutches, if you will. Helping to make sense of this world and thos around you. We have come a long way since then. But I guess a lot of us still need helper wheels to get around, to make sense of things. Nothing wrong there, nothing unreasonable.
I notice that a lot of folks are busy justifying the x86 platform. I tried really hard to like what apple is trying to do but I can't. I spend a lot of time and energy harping on how good the ppc platform really is compared to x86 to the point where I even dug into the ppc assembly code. I really like the ppc. Maybe I am deluded or delusional but I can't unsay all the good things I said about the ppc, especially the g5 for me to start bitching about it now that Apple wants to part company with it.
I don't believe Apple when they say that intel is technically better or commercially better than the ppc platform. Even a cursory crawl of slashdot's apple archives would show you that the ppc is a viable platform. In the end, I think Apple could not stomach IBM's road map, Apple did not have the balls to go where IBM is going with the next generation of PPC. There is a new war brewing between the old school and IBM's take on where the "future" is, between the console and the desktop. There is life in RISC yet.
So, having backed the PPC for the last four years, I am not going back. I might be wrong but I 'd be damned if I am inconsistent!
Due to Microsoft's monopoly, water actually flows upstream. If you do accept Microsoft being a monopoly, then you have to accept that their developer universe is immeasurably larger than Gnome's. The concequence of this will result in mono developers joining F500 company to work with .Net becacuse Mono lowers the barriers for one to learn .Net.
.Net, they have the power and the pockets to maintain enough variability in the platform to keep Mono continually behind the curve. This is not theoritical, .Net is windows and it will change with each version of Windows. Mono is coplanar with .Net while what is needed is something that is orthogonal. Java is such a thing, Mozilla/XUL is such a thing.
Given Microsoft's ownership of
The Spaniard is one smart cookie nonetheless. I just wish he was wise. I mean why cant he take all that testosterone and embrace and extend Mozilla? There a oodles of W3C specs which if implemented with passion and vision would create a platform compelling enough to get developers like myself join the effort. Mono is a divider not a uniter and in the end what divides us will kill us.
"Don't get me wrong, I am not blaming President Bush for all of this."
I wailed when George Bush was declared victor. At that point I had decided to stay away from all news till either President Bush was defeated or retired. September changed all that, for about a year I was really behind the President. I was even for the war in Iraq and the war changed everything I felt.
I think this administration has had its pound of flesh. I thought I knew what I was about. Going into the war, I had concluded the war as being just. Now I am not so sure. The President drew first blood, its that bit which is most bothersome. The position that I now hold is that the anxiety about terrorist attackts from Iraq was probably justified but to go to war over one's anxieties is insane. Pre-emption is I think only justified when one is faced with anihilation like Israel was in 1967
None of these sentiments mean that I hate America or Americans. I believe that America is one of the better things that have come history's ways in a long time. Even in the worst of occasions. When you say people, most of these "people" know only the President (plus assorted characters from American TV shows) so when they say they hate America or Americans, most of the time they mean your President. I personally do not hate your President. I think the man has some admirable qualities. But a job is a job, he is President and he has made a mistake which I franky do not think Presidents should make, he went to war for all the wrong reasons. I can say or do what ever I want to since I am just a civilian but Presidents and Prime Ministers do not have that luxury.
America and for that matter the rest of the world is just going though a bad patch. It will pass like it always does. Every once in a while history seems to come to a place where it believes ends justifying the means. Believing so has always caused trouble. This time is no different. Plenty of fluids and sleep should take care of this bit of patchiness.
I think the point the poet-programmer is trying to make is that though the set of words are finite, the reality the poet seeks to describe is infinite and ever changing. If code is another way of expressing something about the world we live in, then surely even a lowly, lonely programmer is a poet for there will ever be newer ways of putting words togather to create beuty.
There is just one bit about what you said that was quite puzzling "freedom is freedom for all, not for a few." That should also include freedom to dominate and the freedom to be dominated. Frankly when i first heard of Bugs On Line I felt like that screwed up Daffy in the Black and White days. But on a little more reflection, i came to realize that Bugs on line does not pose a serious threat to your freedoms because BOL does not have an ideology for dominating your life. BOL will be a mosaic of competing interests many of which will be pulling it in a billion different directions. If we have learnt anything from the communists its the simple fact that to be unipolar ideological woldview is boring. The only way BOL can dominate is if it gave us what we want. Personally, BOL does give me the cartoon network and I am eternally greatful for that.